Market Smarter: Using Google My Business for Lead Generation with Ronnie Deaver

We all know we need to have some form of lead generation to get clients. But with all the marketing strategies available, it’s not easy to know where to start. Our advice: work smart, not hard. Know what strategy will yield the most results and work from there. Make sure your investments are worth it so your law firm can keep growing.

In this episode, Ronnie Deaver from NoBull Marketing joins us to explain why Google My Business is often overlooked as a marketing strategy and yet yields the most call volume. He shares how reviews are critical to getting business — but not for the reason you might expect. He also demonstrates how marketing agencies like NoBull Marketing bolster lead generation without you personally working on marketing. 

If you want to know more about how to be smart with marketing and get better lead generation using Google My Business, then this episode is for you.

Here are three reasons why you should listen to this episode:

1. Learn about Google My Business and how it boosts lead generation in as little as 3 months of the marketing campaign. 
2. Discover the power of reviews and how they can increase your Google ranking. People are often afraid of bad reviews, but these are inconsequential in the long run. 
3. Find out why consistency matters when you want to stand out in the market and how you can keep showing up in Google search results. 

Resources

• Looking to double your revenue? Book a free 1-1 coaching session at www.profitwithlaw.com/freecoaching. 
• Episode 238 - Understanding the Value of PPC Marketing for Your Firm with Adam Arkfeld
• Connect with Ronnie: No Bull Marketing I Email ([email protected])   
• Who Not How: The Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork by Dan Sullivan 
• BluShark Digital

Episode Highlights

Introducing Ronnie

• Before starting No Bull Marketing, Ronnie had worked on over 200 different lawyer campaigns. 
• He started in digital marketing as early as 19 years old when he found a gig on Craigslist to build a website. 
• Ronnie observed how 60-80% of call inquiries come from Google My Business, no matter the size of the business. 
• While other marketing campaigns can help with generating leads, it’s better to focus on where the majority is. 

Why is Google My Business Important? 

• 10 years ago, Google My Business functioned as a business card online. The platform has now grown to help increase profile views and call volumes. 
• Google My Business has several features to help you boost your ranking on Google. This includes adding photos, questions, and answers, responding to reviews, and adding products and reviews.     
• Ranking high on Google is important because people will usually search on Google first when they have an intention to hire a lawyer. 
• Google My Business now shows up before traditional SEO marketing. 
• Not only do 60-80% of call volumes come from Google My Business, 75% of these calls are from people who didn’t even look at the websites. 

Ronnie: “Put a lot of what I just call grunt work into the profile and do that consistently: Google's gonna reward you and that profile is going to rank higher and higher”

Local Service Ads or Google My Business? 

• Local Service Ads may help you get clients but it doesn’t prevent cases you don’t do. 
• Google My Business has a better volume of opportunities compared to Local Service Ads. This is mainly because most people habitually skip ads. 
• No matter what marketing campaigns you have, people will ultimately land on your Google My Business profile. 

Ronnie: “No matter what you do, whether you're running Google ads or Facebook or billboards, inevitably…they go back to Google.”

How to Use Google My Business 

• You need to balance both your Google My Business profile and its reviews. 
• If a lawyer has bad reviews on its profiles, people who are referred won’t call them. This is why reviews are the main factor for indirect lead generation. 
• The main lead generation will come from people looking for specific lawyers near them. To ensure you’re capturing the market, you need to be in the top 3 of the results.  
• Reviews account for around 35% of your ranking. This considers both the number of reviews and reviews velocity. 
• The other 65% involves improving your profile itself. 

Ronnie: “Reviews are a really big lever. And it's a particularly big lever.”

How to Get More Reviews 

• Reviews should be a core focus of any marketing strategy. This can be both handed off to a marketing agency or done by yourself. 
• Ronnie shares that he creates automatic systems to make this process smoother. 
• One way is using a Google Sheet with client contact information and the system will automatically follow up with them. This has around a 40% conversion rate.
• There are many opportunities to get reviews. They can come from successful cases, consultations, and even seminar attendees. 
• In the full episode, Ronnie shares how he fully automates this system. It's better to build a system into your operations so you can stay consistent. 

Ronnie: “There's a big myth with people that you can only get reviews from paying clients or people that you've recently succeeded in a case. That's not actually true, you can actually get a review from anyone you've given legitimate legal value to.”

How to Approach People for Reviews 

• Review gating is against the terms of services. When you get caught doing this, you can lose reviews. 
• We usually worry so much about bad reviews, but the reality is that people usually don’t bother leaving reviews in the first place. 
• Good reviews can compensate for a few bad reviews. 1 bad review out of 10 would still yield an overall score of around 4.6. 
• As long as you have a review average of 4.0+, you won’t see a decrease in call volume. 
• People also look for bad reviews and how you handle them. If all reviews are positive, people tend to think they’re all fake. 

Ronnie: “In being so fearful about getting reviews, you're massively limiting your own growth, trying to play the defense here is going to make you way less money and way less profitable than trying to play the offense and being able to handle that one negative review.”

How to Handle Negative Reviews 

• You can handle negative reviews by reporting them on Google My Business or responding well to them. 
• Good responses can make negative reviews into a marketing opportunity. 
• Remember, one bad review isn’t that big of an impact. Instead of focusing on the bad review, work to get good reviews that will bury that bad review. 

How Ronnie Helps Clients 

• Ronnie recommends having a strong foundation first with Google My Business, then adding on top of it. 
• Ronnie makes sure that clients can entrust their marketing to him. For him, it’s a failure when he needs input from his clients. 
• Ronnie’s process starts with the two phases of technical on-page SEO and setting up the profile.  
• A common mistake lawyers make is calling themselves a general law firm when they prefer specific practice areas. 
• Google My Business now allows subcategories for products and services. People will use specific key terms when looking for a lawyer, this is why you need to have specific subcategories.   

Moshe: “Attorneys should stick to what they do best and they should hire somebody to do the rest. So it's…who not how. You got to figure out who's gonna do this, not how do I do this.”

How Marketing Agencies Help You Stay Consistent

• Ronnie’s agency also tracks calls.  
• People are always competing in the market so we need to stay consistent. Consistency creates better lead generation, with a 10-50% call volume increase in a a quarter.
• Marketing agencies, like Ronnie’s, help you compete in the market and still be able to focus on your work. 
• Marketing strategies should be about working smart, not hard. Some people put in all the work on their website but generate very few calls as compared to the investment.  

Ronnie: “What does consistency look like? …The battle never really ends, because people are always competing, everyone in your market is trying to win, set and forget is not going to get you there.”

How Important is Location?

• Google My Business’ local ranking covers a 25-mile radius maximum. 
• For lawyers who practice virtually, Ronnie recommends having a physical location. This is because Google cracks down on businesses without a location. 
• It can be as simple as leasing an office one day out of a month or with a non-competing professional. Ronnie recommends picking your location wisely.   
• For those who want a nationwide reach, Ronnie recommends picking three major cities as their location. 
• However, you need to make sure that you can handle the workload increase that comes with a nationwide reach. 

How Much is it to Hire Marketing Agencies? 

• Ronnie shares that his base campaigns start at $1,500 a month, but he often starts people on a $2,497 per month campaign to ensure they can close cases. 
• He also has a guarantee that if they fail to yield profits, they will work for free three months after the campaign, and if they still fail, they will refund the money. 

Ronnie’s Advice

• Understanding how to use reviews is critical for lead generation.
• Be more aggressive in getting reviews.
• Always play offense — people on the defense receive significantly less business.

Ronnie: “Reviews are way more important than you think. And don't play defense, play offense and realize that at the end of the day, you don't just have to get them from paying clients. You can get them from anyone you've given value to.” 

About Ronnie 

Ronnie Deaver, the founder of NoBull Marketing, has helped over 120 lawyers add an average of 5 new cases and $15,000 in new revenue at an ROI of 350% every single month. He guarantees to dramatically bolster your lead generation; his client campaigns are profitable in 3 months or less or he’ll give you another three months free of charge! 

Before founding NoBull Marketing, Ronnie has worked as Director of Operations at SMB Team, Sponsorship and Program Coordinator at MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge, Marketing Coach at ThriveHive, and Marketing Manager at ICT Asset Recovery. 

If you want to get in touch with Ronnie, send him an email at [email protected] or you can reach out to him through No Bull Marketing.  

Enjoyed this Episode?

If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends!

Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your friends and family so that they can gain more insights about improving their marketing strategies. Lead generation is critical to earning revenue, so it literally pays to find the best ways to do it.

Have any questions? You can contact me through Facebook and LinkedIn. To request a show topic, recommend a guest or ask a question for the show, please send an email to [email protected]. 

For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts.