Learn what it takes to run a successful inbound marketing campaign in the legal space with insights from Bryan Harris, VP of Sales and Advertising at LegalZoom.
Listen to the Audio Version
Show Notes
- LegalZoom Advertising Team Breakdown: Online, Broadcast, Organic, Testing.
- Metrics: Connectivity, Click to Call Conv. %, Automation, Calls Driven
- Top Performing Legal Vertical: Business Formations
- Use LegalZoom to set up your affiliate business!
- Combination of Brand, Acquisition, Media Channels.
- SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is a major channel for acquiring legal customers.
- Legal zoom is a one-stop shop including: Self Service, Live Chat and Customer Care Center
- Provide information and resources to help them make the best decision.
- Compliance is key! Specific rules for marketing and advertising in the legal space.
- A lot of affiliates don’t know where their traffic is coming from.
- Make sure your callers know why they are calling before they connect with an agent.
- Adam: Build tangible, long-term assets on single campaigns.
- The legal space is in the US alone is massive.
- Business growth and the economy improves (low unemployment, high job growth).
- Challenges: Industry is fragmented and highly localized.
- Verticals: Consumer (Disability, Family, Immigration) and Business(Trademarks, Patents).
- Growth of mobile traffic sources like SMS and Inbound Calls.
- Biggest Opportunity: Directly connecting leads to a customer care center.
- Researching emerging trends and new opportunities.
- Automation to help clients, decrease costs and scale.
About LegalZoom
LegalZoom is a trusted platform of people and technology that gives the world access to consistently high quality legal solutions. As the nation’s leading provider, LegalZoom empowers millions of people to protect what matters most to them.
Whether it’s helping small business owners or families, LegalZoom delivers high touch, high service legal solutions that help customers be more informed and secure in their legal decisions. LegalZoom services customers in the US and the UK and is now over 1,200 employees strong.
Website: https://www.legalzoom.com
About Bryan Harris
VP of Sales and Advertising at LegalZoom.
Email: bharris@legalzoom.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brharris
Episode Transcript
Adam Young:
Welcome to the Pay Per Caller Show. My name is Adam Young, the founder of Ringba. And today, we have a very special guest. His name is Bryan Harris. He's the vice president of sales at LegalZoom. He's been in the lead generation space for legal for over 10 years. LegalZoom was founded in 2001. It's based in Glendale, California and has over 1,000 employees, and is an absolute goliath in the Pay Per Call space. So we're really excited to have Bryan on the show today. Thank you for joining us.
Bryan Harris:
Yeah, absolutely.
Adam Young:
So I'd like to learn a little bit more about LegalZoom and the advertising department over there. Can you give us a high-level overview of how it operates?
Bryan Harris:
Sure. I mean, in terms of marketing and our advertising department, we have a pretty healthy advertising budget upwards of tens of millions of dollars per year. So we have a lot of different functions on the marketing and advertising team, and we basically have them broken up. You've got your online, you've got your broadcast, and then a number of other different avenues that we're always testing and moving into as well as online presence, organic, any information that we can gather in terms of good marketing and advertising so you've got a whole bunch.
Adam Young:
Do all of those different channels have a call component?
Bryan Harris:
Everything is driven into our main campus. Of course, we're trying a number of different things all the time. I would say, "No." In reality, a lot of the people come through and it's a self-service product. You can actually fill out most of the information online and sign up for services just through the portal on site. However, we do have a pretty large sales team. I'm currently sitting in Austin, Texas, which is where our main campus is. The headquarters is located in Glendale, California. We do have right around 175 sales agents and people on the phone pretty much nonstop on all day, every day, helping the customers and people throughout productions.
Adam Young:
And I think that's a good time to mention what we were talking about earlier on our call before we got started was the issue that LegalZoom faced yesterday. And I'd like to preface that this is not something that only LegalZoom faces. Literally, every call center on earth face issues, and they're a very complicated animal to run. But if you don't mind, can we talk a little bit about what happened yesterday and how you guys rectified the issue?
Bryan Harris:
Sure. Yeah. We had a slight hiccup. Operationally, obviously, we're trying to help our sales team and our employees and everyone on the team down here as much as possible. That's done through a lot of automation, and engineering assistance, right. So, unfortunately, sometimes, those don't always play nice. We've had a tech snag that we had run into on my team specifically where we had an issue of one of our servers or DNS settings, which kind of brought everything down momentarily. So we initially had this call set up for yesterday, and unfortunately, I had to deal with [some real business issues]
Adam Young:
And I think that's just the interesting thing about calls and Pay Per Call is the technical integrations and the fact that you're literally herding hundreds of humans to get them on the phone and do a repeatable, non-predictable, almost business process makes it a really challenging environment to operate in. And I think people that come from the marketing space and don't work in the call space specifically, may not be aware of how big of a challenge it actually is to operate a call center at the scale that LegalZoom does.
Bryan Harris:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. There's all sorts of different challenges and a lot of different KPIs and metrics. And look at, from a performance perspective, marketing is really just the beginning and a function of that in which you have a funnel of what you're feeding into but then there's a lot that actually goes into the operations piece of helping people that are looking for whatever product or service it is that you're offering that's being driven from the marketing and advertising.
Adam Young:
Can you tell us more about some of the KPIs that your call center uses to monitor, I'm assuming, everything?
Bryan Harris:
Oh, absolutely. So there's a lot of different metrics that you're going to take a look at from a marketing perspective and component, right. Anytime we have a new channel or partner or whoever it is that is coming in, we're going to track that. So some of the most basic forms are going to be connected to it, right. We're running with Paul's campaign or we're running a platform in terms of generating feeds and then sending those customers through. We want to know what percentage of those people are we getting on the phone and then how are we automating that process, right. Everything needs to go through the [ADTI?] applications program and interface in order for folks to come through automation standpoint in order to connect as soon as possible and sensibly a speed-to-lead system, right. And so you want to look at the metrics on the top level of the funnel to get an idea of what percentage of the people are we connecting with of the people that we're actually connecting with. What percentage are actually interested in our offering? Right? Who's interested in the widget and who are we adding into there to follow up and what is the actual purchase rate and total cost back position from a marketing channel standpoint, right.
That's kind of high-level walking through from what we're putting at the top through to the end process. And again, that's going to be different across the board depending on what that channel is and how the customer was acquired and driven into the business as well as did it match up and was the user experience what it needed to be in order to help that customer come through, right. So again, from a KPI to automation standpoint, you're looking at calls that are being driven in. What are people clicking on, right? And so let's just say Google, for example, is doing a broad search or broad match and showing somebody an ad when they're searching for plumbers when they're actually looking for package attorneys and they're calling into us, right? That's a metric that we're tracking to make sure that we can optimize, again, just a high-level kind of flow through and then a specific example of one thing that we would track and monitor.
Adam Young:
What are the biggest segments that you guys are doing your marketing in today? Which type of legal offers are really the breadwinner for you?
Bryan Harris:
Yeah, absolutely. The same as it's always been and really where we started from the inception of the company. I haven't been here since day one but again that's poor focus. And that is business formations. [inaudible] the fact that one in four businesses in the state of California, about 25% market share, lead last [inaudible]. We started using Google Zoom to Incorporation, LLC, and Docs in order to file their business and get information regarding that up and running [inaudible]. That's the biggest. I would say that's the main driver. And then, our goal-- it says it on the [wall?] down here is to [inaudible] law. And what does that mean? That means make law accessible to everyone that needs help with whatever legal situation it is. One interesting fact is that at least 60% of people who actually need an attorney will not seek one out for one of two reasons. One, they are afraid of the costs. And two, the way the law structure is broken up, it's fragmented so much that unfortunately a lot of the law offices, attorneys who are out there, they just don't have the business operations systems in place to be able to follow up and give a high level of service to the people looking for legal help. Not that they don't want to, again, it's just because the number of attorneys that there are versus the number of people that need an attorney, is so offset that there's not a lot of attorneys who can help them. That's really the biggest issue.
Adam Young:
Wow, that's amazing.
Bryan Harris:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Adam Young:
And so a lot of the people in our space - which is independent marketers or even small businesses - they can use LegalZoom then to do their formations and maybe their initial contracts and really make it very accessible and inexpensive for them to get started.
Bryan Harris:
Absolutely. Yeah, 100%. I mean-- and it's really a one-stop shop to be able to help you all the way through the process. At this point, the company is really taking off. We've listened to our clients and customers and really built products that are going to be able to help them succeed, right. Another interesting fact is that corporations that have franchises 95% of the time succeed, right. Why is that? It's because when a franchisee is starting a business, the franchisor is handing them the playbook and all of the tools and pieces in order to help them be successful, that most people have a very, very difficult time navigating just due to the fact that they don't know a lot about [inaudible] corporation, or filing their taxes, or whether or not they need to have a contract for employment law, the difference between 1099 [inaudible], you name it. But again, the structure is built around the client at this point and so we're here to be a resource to help them be successful.
Adam Young:
So walk me through what a standard advertising funnel looks like with LegalZoom, from a customer's perspective. How do most customers find you? And then what are all the different touch points and ways that you guys reach out, communicate, and then, eventually, monetize these customers?
Bryan Harris:
Sure, absolutely. So there's a number of different methods and ways to do that, right. Again, the advertising and marketing [inaudible] are working on an annual basis [inaudible]. I won't go into the specifics there exactly how much but it's a mix of everything, right? And so you're going for a combination of brand, as well as - pardon me - online acquisition, right. As well as, there's all sorts of different medias and channels. So specifically, what we're going to try and focus on is usually going to be an SEM strategy which, again, I'm sure most people and everyone of these two are going to be watching this program are intimately [inaudible] with, right? We all flow with the numbers, and the data, and the cost per appointment, cost of acquisition and then what we can actually monetize from the perspective of illegitimate [inaudible]. And within space, what I love about it is that there's a million different avenues that you can go depending on your skill set, right. Even with a Google [loan?], there are certain people that are just geniuses and gurus running Google adware whereas they can get a cost of acquisition maybe $15,00 or $20,00 for a specific widget or product. And this person who knows Google can try and go in there and, again, get a $40,00 cost of acquisition. It just comes down to the experience but SEM is obviously a main component driver, it's going to be real good [inaudible] Facebook, Google, [inaudible], Yahoo, [inaudible], LinkedIn, everywhere that we can get, help penetrate that market, will go into advertising and resource of our products.
Adam Young:
So once a customer enters in these funnels that you guys have, why would they call you and speak with a sales person? And then, once they call and speak with a salesperson at LegalZoom, where do those customers end up? How do they get to the attorney's you refer them to? How do they end up at their final destination?
Bryan Harris:
Sure. So again, there's multiple different mediums that they can reach us. And so if they know specifically, exactly what they want, they can come online, they can form the LLC in the business, use as the register [inaudible]. And they don't actually ever have to speak to anyone if they know what they doing and have no questions. And then, again, along the process, a lot of people do you have questions so [inaudible] going through and they may engage us via chat, maybe a phone call. And so we look at the funnel tests and what's coming in and, again, if [inaudible] through, more than likely it's because they didn't get the answer to whatever that question was. And as they go through and then fill out their information on [inaudible] advertisements and come directly to us, we would help walk them through that process explaining [inaudible] advice because no one is an attorney. So that would be the [inaudible] flaw, however, we can [give?] them the definitions and the information and they can make interest. So once they complete that, and they have determined what they think is the best structure for them, we have a network of attorneys that we work with and essentially we can schedule a half-hour consultation, get them in touch with the attorney or firm, make sure that they get the legal questions that they have answered.
We also have access to a contract bank with typical things that are going to come up from the standpoint of running and operating a business, so. That's one of the things now-- specifically, the division that I run is actually more consumer-based and focused where what we're doing is actually generating a response from a consumer and then taking them through a little bit of the [inaudible] operations to explain to them kind of the next steps what would be happening and then connecting them up to the attorney or firm that's in their area. The division I run is called Legals and Vocal. The idea behind that is that we can connect you to an attorney that is local within your area in order to actually give you the legal advice that you need and represent you in court, right. We're not in the business of showing up at your court case if you happen to get a DUI, or you need to file for social security disability, or you need to file for bankruptcy and go to a 341 meeting. We have a network of attorneys for that, so. Again, I mean, that's probably one of the largest ones but on a monthly basis, there's an excess of 30 thousand people that we end up touching from their live standpoint and then transferring them out to the attorney or firm that we work with within the network in the area.
Adam Young:
Do you guys work with Pay Per Caller at LegalZoom Local?
Bryan Harris:
To a degree, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, as long as we can dial in the cost of acquisition equality in terms of who we're working with in the proper channel, whatever it is, absolutely. I mean, our goal is to, again, to help everyone that's looking for legal access and, obviously, there's a business function component that goes with that as well in that we go to acquire them at a cost that's not going to lose us [money?], right. So yes, we absolutely do.
Adam Young:
And what are some challenges that you personally have had when working with affiliates? And a follow-up to that is really like when an affiliate wants to work with you, or LegalZoom, or LegalZoom Local, what are some things they should know about Legal Lead Generation and how to work with such a big company?
Bryan Harris:
Yeah. I mean, absolutely. So a couple different things and challenges. One, from a legal standpoint, again, there are specific rules that go with marketing and advertising in the legal space and those are some challenges and hurdles, Again, we have pretty much a systematic, streamlined processes in order to help educate anyone that we're working with to make sure that we don't run into those issues. So some of the challenges that we've encountered with affiliate marketing is a lot of times the way that clients can be acquired, per se, is going to vary drastically within that funnel, right. I mean, if you're running a Pay Per Call campaign and it's strictly off of Google and you have, let's say, 15 or 20 queuers already dialed in and you're sending those people to us, well, we know that because when they call they say, "Yeah, I'm looking for information on [a bank receipt?]," right. And that's going to be probably the best, right. However, in the affiliate space, a lot of times they don't know where the traffic is coming from, how it's coming from, what they're aggregating, what some people are doing, mass-mailers, some people have specific offerings that are set up on additional offerings, pardon me. And so those have been some of the challenges, right, in that you work with someone and they say, "Hey, everyone's coming here looking for widget A." What happens, in reality, is that they keep trying to connect some of the [big thinkers?] looking for widget A but really he's looking for widget Z, right. He's so far off and he's like, "I have no idea how I got routed to you." Or it's incentivized traffic, you know, "Oh, I filled this thing out. The reason I filled it out is it said, 'Win a free iPad there. Put in your first name, and your last name, your phone number, your email, your ZIP code, and then I'll send [inaudible],'" [it's awful?], right.
So again, there's different challenges that we find with visibility and [site traffic?]. We have the ability to [do?] tests. Also, [inaudible] and make sure that, again, [inaudible] we're not small a operation and that's a benefit to anyone that would ever [inaudible] because you actually get data faster through talking in more real-time to me [inaudible] your business and determine, "Hey, this is actually a great way to channel for us to [inaudible], "Hey, this one actually [inaudible]. So let's just drop that out," versus, "Maybe I'll [inaudible] myself," when you're trying something and you're like, "Hey, this seems good because you know [inaudible] A, B, C, D, E, then you're like, [inaudible] is nothing like what [inaudible]. So that's definitely an added bonus, I would say, in terms of [inaudible].
Adam Young:
Also, the offer is not going anywhere. I know that a lot of smaller affiliate campaigns, when they have issues the offer can disappear, even the company can disappear overnight. When you work with a big company like LegalZoom, maybe the quality control requirements are a little bit more strict but, at the end of the day, it's a long-term opportunity if you do right by LegalZoom because you're not going anywhere. And that means people can build actual, tangible, long-term businesses around even just your campaign, which is really a cool thing.
Bryan Harris:
Yeah, absolutely. And we really invest in any of the partner's companies that we work with. And once the news came out that we recently had a $2 billion valuation and a $500 million minority investment in the company, again, which has come, even in my time here in the last five years. And some of the challenges that we've really faced and overcome but you're absolutely correct, we're not going anywhere. And John Suh, our CEO, says it regularly but I would say that in the legal space overall we definitely touch less than 10% of the opportunity and products that are available to help people. And it's just because the size of the opportunity and space is so large that it's a difficult [inaudible] every day. Here in Austin alone, there's almost 1,000 people. In Glenvale there's a couple hundred, and then we recently expanded to the United Kingdom and have some other plans to expand further beyond. So every day, people are working diligently to move that ball forward and part of that is having good partners, people to work with, in order to help them. But really, the way that I envision it is, again, looking back at what Henry Ford did with the assembly line, right. If one person is just focusing on one task of the chain of events in the assembly line, we're all that much better for it, right? And so we do the same thing with our marketing, our partners, our channels, and we focus on investing in that in order to make it sustainable and scalable.
Adam Young:
What are some of the biggest opportunities in the legal space right now for affiliates that are looking to get into it or expand their businesses?
Bryan Harris:
Sure. So definitely some of the opportunities that we see are one in business growth, get in a good economy such as what we're in right now. Unemployment is at an all-time low and job creation is at an all-time high. So there's definitely, within our core products, massive expansion. And then, on top of that, from the consumer product standpoint, one of the challenges that you face from a marketing and advertising standpoint in the legal space is going to be that it's difficult to [see it?], right. There are no national massive companies that can say, "Hey, here's a $3 million a month advertising budget if you can keep this cost of acquisition in-line," right? Because typically, what you're going to be doing is working with one lawyer from one city who covers a handful of counties with a very limited budget and a very [inaudible] operational staff. So that's something that is extremely challenging. But working with us, what we see in the consumer space is that it's a massively untapped market. And again, not that it's untapped from the perspective of people don't need a service that's back, it's just not being well served from the people that are trying to serve it, right. So consumer products, consumer bankruptcy, security disability, family law, immigration, those are certainly very, very large [inaudible] and areas where we can help people exponentially on top of the work products that we do in terms of businesses, trademarks, copyrights, patents, [inaudible], wills, trusts. Those are products that everybody [inaudible].
And then, the second part of your question [inaudible] kind of the biggest opportunity. Then, again, [inaudible], right. So 15 years ago, the internet was in its boom, per se, and now I would venture to say that [inaudible] is in its [group?], right. Everyone [inaudible]. And then, specifically, SMS, text, and phone calls, right, it's [the greatest experience in the world?] that we can connect somebody up to the automated processing systems and to be [inaudible] and answer your question and help [inaudible] and then convert them [inaudible] chase people down all day and leaving messages and things like that. It [inaudible] time clients helping them [inaudible] services. So it's driven towards more of a [inaudible] ant the [inaudible] platform business. Computers will always have their place [inaudible] as most people or they sit in front of them all day long and specifically researching [inaudible] the vast majority [inaudible] so just [automatically?] [inaudible] generate a call to a customer center, that's the biggest [inaudible].
Adam Young:
And I completely agree with you. I think some people thought Harris and I were crazy when we founded Ringba because they think, "Phone calls, who cares about phone calls?" But in reality, phone calls are the highest, intent thing. You can generate, someone's ready and willing to spend money and they want to talk to another human, get helped by a product, and do the deal right then and there. And so we're seeing a huge amount of growth, as well, in the call space. We think the call space is going to expand majorly all around the world and simply because, like you said, everyone has a cell phone in the palm of their hand and more and more people are coming up in all these countries getting smartphones and they want what's happening in America right now. And so we're going to see a huge proliferation globally of inbound high intense sales for quite some time. So I'm very excited about that opportunity and, of course, very excited that you agree with that opportunity because it says a lot coming from LegalZoom. And I think our listeners should really pay attention to that that the call space is not contracting, it's growing extremely rapidly. And if they're looking for new opportunities, generating phone calls is a really, really great way to build a sustainable, high quality, long-term business as opposed to spinning plates like a lot of marketing campaigns that some people do now. Outside of your day to day, what are some of the projects and initiatives that you're most excited about and working on now?
Bryan Harris:
Outside of the day to day, my projects [inaudible] is I am a total nerd. If I'm not spending time with my friends and family, usually I'm trying to look at what sort of new [tech?] is coming out and just kind of looking at the different opportunities. The biggest one, I think, is AI. And there's some fascinating things that [inaudible] companies [inaudible] Amazon and their AI [inaudible] be able to simulate [inaudible] communication with someone [inaudible]. Yeah, I do that and I won't bore you with the other stuff I do in my spare time [laughter].
Adam Young:
So how are you guys leveraging technology right now to drive your customers? Is there anything interesting that you guys are using to automate your workflows and processes in a call center?
Bryan Harris:
Sure. I mean, we definitely have come a long way. It's funny because we had our [inaudible] today, as we call it, she's our all hands on deck. And basically, we break it out into two sessions. We have our own [inaudible], an amphitheater room that we have at our [inaudible]. Our VP of sales [inaudible] actually gives a presentation there [inaudible] a number of other guys talk about where we were, where we are at, and where we going, and we give out awards for that. But one of the things that they talked about was that when the company was started essentially it picked up [five, literally five?] [inaudible] and you walked over and you were [inaudible], and you were called, right. These days, all of that implementation they got [inaudible] your server backed up [inaudible] able to go into the different department where it needs to go in order to [inaudible] a set of eyes. And so the biggest thing is moving towards automation, right, and being able to service a large number of clients and consumers who are looking for help with their situation, so. Yeah, I mean, there's too many pieces of technology to really touch on but we're always looking at all of them and trying to move the ball forward to help our clients, decrease our costs, to be able to pass those savings down to them and give them the level of service that they need for their situations.
Adam Young:
Awesome. And if our audience is interested in working with LegalZoom, how can they get in touch with you guys? How can they discuss working as an affiliate in your program or on the Pay Per Call side?
Bryan Harris:
Yeah, absolutely. For your audience, specifically, in this interview, they can reach out directly to me and I will try and help steer them internally to the right department. We do have a [business?] development team who works on a lot of different projects and [inaudible] benefits something that's going to fall into my [inaudible] [house?] on the consumer side of the products of bankruptcy, [inaudible], disability, [inaudible] any of these sort of products, they can reach out to me and I will throw my email out there. bharris@legalzoom.com And you can reach me anytime there day or night, right. Like I said, [inaudible] my kids, [inaudible] working [inaudible] any time.
Adam Young:
Love it. Well, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. We really appreciate you making the time. And thank you for walking us through how LegalZoom runs it's [inaudible] program.
Bryan Harris:
Absolutely, appreciate it.
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