John Assaraf interviews Jacob Sapochnick on using social media for leads

Hey everyone, this is John Assraf and with me is a special friend and just an amazing entrepreneur, Jacob Sapochnik. And he's got a just a world class immigration law firm that works with athletes, with tech companies, with startups, and not only he's got a phenomenal law firm in San Diego, but he has managed to to utilize some off the charts smart social media techniques to be able to drive incredible amounts of leads and revenues to his law firm. And he's one of the few that has really been able to make the transition from being a lawyer to being a business owner that knows how to build a community, to build an enormous lead flow of amazing prospects. And more importantly, he understands the conversion process of turning leads into customers. So Jacob, thank you for doing this and I look forward to having you as a speaker at our upcoming Cloning of Business success event so you can share, you know, how you turned your, I guess, small law firm into a powerhouse here in San Diego. So thanks for doing this Jacob.

Thank you. Thank you for having me on your show on this interview. I'm excited about the event as well.

Awesome. Jacob, maybe we can talk a little bit about why did you choose social media to drive leads and branding and prospects to your business where most law firms are still advertising in yellow pages or putting these billboards up? Why social media?

It's a good question. This is something that I often talk when I go to conferences and I do speak engagements with attorneys and I tell them the simple thing. A law firm is just like any other business. We are a service business. So I could be an accountant, I could be a psychologist. We are a service business. And I realized when I started, and we're talking today, this is actually a 10 year anniversary today for the law firm. And when I started I felt that I'm powerless. I can't compete against all these other businesses. I can't spend 3,000 bucks to be on a yellow page, a small ad. I can't do any of that. So I felt that what's the point of having my own business? Might as well work for somebody else. But I couldn't because deep inside I am an entrepreneur. I like to do things my own way. What I started to do initially before Facebook came out, I started doing blogging. Blogging was my first way to get information out there. And the reason I started doing it is because I realized that by starting a blog, I'm able to connect with other people online and share my information. And I felt that if I can't afford to pay for yellow Pages, I might as well be somewhere online. And blogging was the first thing I've done. And what happened is that when I started doing my blog is that within a few months, I was getting an amazing response. People started asking me questions. I got my first Fox TV interview within six months of starting my law firm. They called me and said, jacob, can you come to the studio? We have questions about citizenship. And I thought they were mixing my name with somebody else. Are you sure you want to talk to me? And they said, how did you find me? And we found you because we read your article on your blog. And I realized that it was the beginning of something very interesting because I didn't spend any money on this. I mean, I just started my blog, 100 Bucks, and then suddenly I'm getting on TV. And even today, if you look at my website, we have so many appearances on tv, on kpbs, on npr. I was on PC magazine two years into my practice, and some of the other attorneys who've been doing this for 30 years, they call me, saying, why are they calling you? You're just out of law school. And I realized that giving away that information using my blog was the first beginning of social media, which is the communication. Now, when Facebook came out, I didn't know what to do with it. I had my personal page, but I realized that Facebook is another way to communicate with other people. So I started giving away free advice. I was giving away just sharing information about our office. We started building a community. And I think the key is community building is the power of small business. And not just small business, any business. If you give away information for free, you become a powerhouse of information, a hub for people to come visit. This is where the power is, because it's marketing that people don't pay for it. It's marketing so useful that people come to you because they feel you're giving so much value that they want to hire you on the spot. And this is really what happened. Once I started using Facebook and YouTube videos to give away concepts and education. People call in the office and says, where do we sign? They didn't argue about the price. And even today, it happens, and we'll talk about it in this chat. But I was alone, sitting in the office the first year, and I started using my blog. I had to hire people within the end of my first year because I couldn't keep up with demand. People wanted to call us and work with us because they thought I became an authority. And that's what blogging and social media allowed me to do today, make myself a brand and an authority.

I love that. And right now, your blog, how many followers do you have on your blog and your podcast and Facebook? So what are some of the results that you've achieved by using a properly thought out and executed social media strategy? Give us some of the numbers so people can understand how this is done.

Well, so basically, we built one of the largest Facebook communities in the world for attorneys. We have about 150,000 fans that come on the page. And what happens? Those are people that come because they feel that we provide value. So, you know, I put inspirational quotes. I put not just legal stuff. And I'll give you an example. We get at least on a daily basis, at least between 7 to 12 leads that we convert from that page alone. And that's huge because this is not something that we spend money on. This is people that come to the page. And then what happens from those direct leads? We also get at least 12 to 15 indirect leads that are referrals from people that come on our page just on Facebook. I'll give an example. We had a case where somebody was following me for about four months, commenting, making questions, and nothing happened. And then one day, I get a referral from an asylum case. It's five people. Each case was about 10,000, $50,000 worth of business just from that one follower that we didn't have to do anything to get them. Just be nice to them and engage.

And these followers, these were attorneys that were following you.

So these are potential clients. We have also attorneys on the page that just see what we do. But these are potential customers. So when I said one of the largest legal communities, it's one of the largest Facebook pages for lawyers. Most lawyers have about 5, 10,000 maybe fans, and they don't do nothing with it.

It's not for lawyers, but no, no, no.

It's for our law firm that has a page for we build our community. And so we convert almost on a daily basis between 7 to 12 leads just on that page.

What's each client worth to you on average?

So I'll tell you. Typically, like I said, the asylum case was on the higher end, so it's about 10,000 per client. But the typical leads that usually people want to do citizenship, maybe they want to do marriage cases anywhere from between 2,000, 2,500 a piece, which is huge because this is like free marketing if you have to pay for yellow pages. Now, from the blogging itself, we have a community of about 25,000 email subscribers that come on the blog, and they get our articles, and those are hot leads because they convert, they send their friends and referrals. But I can tell you that one of the most powerful things that happened from our social media, especially on Twitter, is that I have a lot of reporters that follow me. And I give an example in one of my talks where I was at a wedding and I got a tweet from a reporter, says, jacob, can we interview you tonight? And I said, well, I have the wedding. Well, we'll come to you. So they came to the wedding. It was in La Jolla, and I had to step out. We did the interview 10, 15 minutes, and it was on the 11pm news. Now, because of that news interview, the next day, we got at least two new clients that saw the interview and they saw the value of me coming on the show, that they signed up right away, and just me spending 10 minutes on interviewing somebody. We made about $15,000 from just my willingness to be open with recorders. So these are very important things that are very powerful because you provide value for free. But then you build a community of people that want to hire you almost on a daily basis. You don't have to pay Google Ads to get the client right away. These are people that you nurture over time, and then they keep coming to you. I call this the faucet marketing system, because when I want more clients, we just do. We build a free app, citizenship app, teaching people about the citizenship questions. It's got nothing to do with immigration law per se. I'm just telling them about the test. I'm not teaching people how to prepare for the test. That's not my business. But because I provided a useful tool for them to learn, eventually they'll trust me and they'll come back to me as their attorney because I gave them a free tool. So we call this marketing is so useful that people will actually pay for it. There's a marketer called Jay Baer, and he wrote the book Utility, and he advocates that concept of being so useful that people will come to you pretty much 24 7, because you're so valuable to them. You're not just marketing. You're not trying to sell. And that's the premise of my business.

Yeah. And that's becoming the authority, the expert, the go to individual. You build the trust, the rapport, the integrity, and then they follow you. You also have a great podcast that has got an amazing amount of followers. And you interviewed me for that, and you did a phenomenal job with that. And that's why you've got that great setup in your office. You think you're a broadcaster, not a lawyer. Tell us a bit about your podcast and how well that does.

Right. So one of the things that I. We start talking about building the platform, you know, YouTube and Facebook and blogging. And I tell people that the reason I'm doing this is because if you build yourself a hub and you have all these outlets, the blogging, the Facebook, there's never going to be a shortage of clients because you're always going to be somewhere. You're going to be everywhere. People are going to find you. And the reason I started the podcast, first of all, I did it for two reasons. One reason is because itunes is a huge search engine. If you're not on itunes, you're missing out on 50 million people that are on itunes searching for different things. So that's why I wanted to be on itunes, so people can find me, which is another outfit. But the other reason I like podcasting is because it allows you to create connections with people. I connected with you. We build a relationship. I connected with James Altucher, people like Michael Gerber, the author of the E. Myth. I would never be able to speak with these people if I didn't have a podcast. And in this podcast, I give them an outlet to speak about their business, about what they do. And building relationships using podcasting is a huge tool that business owners should be doing. And I'm talking about that also at your conference. Because podcasting allows people to connect with you on an individual basis, they can listen to you in their. In the years you're able to build followers. People who listen to my show are different than the people who read my blog because they email me and say, jacob, you changed my life. I listened to your show. I was going to close my law firm. But then you give us some tips about motivation that you shouldn't give up or you can do something to change. And I stuck with it, and I did it. I had a former prosecutor that emailed me and said, you know what? I quit my job. I couldn't do it anymore. And I listened to your show and I follow you for the past six months, and. And I use your tips. And now I have a law firm that is working, and that makes me feel so good because I don't know these people, but now I know they're listening to me. So that's what I like about podcasting, because it's such a huge tool. And it's going to get even bigger because people are going to have those things in their cars. Next year cars are going to have those players. You can be driving from work and listening to my podcast or your show to anybody. So if you're not doing podcasts, you're definitely missing the boat. And we'll talk about how they should do it and why they should be doing it. Different tricks.

Love it. So as a result of using social media really, really well, I know the answer to this, but how many lawyers do you have working with you now?

So we have a firm of about 20 people here. So we have about eight full time attorneys. I have about 60 paralegals and we have two people who are working in the east coast and a social media person and another legal person. And we're going to start actually this month we're going to be announcing a partnership with a law firm in Israel that are interested to work with us. Because there's a lot of, as you know, the high tech business, the startups is huge over there. They want to be able to work with an American law firm. They chose us to be their partner. So that's huge. We're going to be pretty much almost doubling in size. What we're doing with these guys, I love that. And if you think about it, John, this is something that there's no way I could have done that if I wasn't able to use the tools. I know people that started with me, many good lawyers. And I'm not saying that we are the best lawyers. In fact, I don't think that we are the best lawyers. I think what we do well. And I tell my staff all the time, you don't have to be the best lawyer. You have to be somebody that cares about the client, passionate. If somebody said we had a case where we failed, we lost the case. You should have seen the client come to my office, hug me and give me flowers, say, jinko, I don't care if you failed, you stayed with me and you care about me today. And that's what they want because they don't want somebody to win their case. They want somebody to care, hold their hand and be compassionate. And to me, this is the new, the future of the legal business. If you don't care about your clients, you're not going to stay in this business.

Totally agree with you. So when people come to the cloning of business success event, what let's say two or three things are you going to make sure they leave there with after you teach them?

Absolutely. So the number one thing that I want to talk about is the Importance of building yourself a platform, a hub in the sense that you can't be in business today without having a platform. The platform is an audience that is yours to communicate. Whether it's an email list that you have that you send them an email every week or every month, whether it's a Facebook community that you want to learn how to build, whether it's a YouTube channel that you want to be reaching, or whether it's basically you spending time on Twitter nurturing relationships with people and doing it in a systematic way. I'm going to be teaching how to do that, because if you don't have a platform these days, you have nothing. There's no way you're going to keep spending your money in advertising when people come to you one day and they forget about you the next day. The only way to succeed in business in 2015 is to build yourself a platform. That's one thing. The second thing we're going to talk about is the funnel of how do we do that? How do we do the funnel? How do we nurture? How do we get the sales converting from that? There's no point to building any of that if you cannot convert into paying clients. Another thing I'm going to be talking about is the value and the importance of marketing that is useful. Why would you be doing marketing from the back door? We call this. So people today are selling. They're selling with ads, with Google Ads, with banner ads, with Facebook ads. What about thinking about doing marketing from the back door? Creating a useful tool about content or video that helps people for no reason, just by helping. If you do this in a systematic way, I can guarantee you that the business is going to triple, quadruple, and explode. You won't have. And that's what happened to us. We have so many clients that come to our office that we have to be selected now because we can't help everybody. And it's because of our being useful. And that's what I talk about, the usefulness market.

I love it. Well, everybody, here's what I can share with you is Jacob is brilliant at what he does, not just as a lawyer and building his law firm, how he takes care of his clients and how he nurtures, you know, prospects by giving is really amazing. And that's really the new, you know, era of marketing, the new era of sales and at the colonial business success. You're going to chance. You're going to have a chance to meet him firsthand and learn exactly what he's doing, how he's doing it. And it'll help you double or triple your income when you apply what he teaches you in addition to the rest of the stuff that we'll teach you. So, Jacob, thank you so much. Always great to you. And I look forward to seeing you very, very shortly.

Absolutely. We'll see you in December. Thank you, John.

Thanks, everyone. Bye. Bye.