Liel Levy

It’s all about how can you remove friction? How can you remove roadblocks? How can you make things seamless for them integrate into the way that they want to communicate with you in the most efficient way.

Chris Dreyer

To win the Hispanic market, personal injury firms must build a relevant brand that reflects and understands the community.

Liel Levy

And it goes beyond just the language side of things. You also need to understand how these demographic groups communicate and prefer to interact with your law firm. .Being aware of all of those nuances and adjusting and adapting your client experience to make it easy for them to interact with your law firm are going to be critical and essential, but it all starts with the law firm, the talent, the people behind the firm,

Chris Dreyer

You’re listening to Personal Injury Mastermind, where we give you the tools you need to take your personal injury practice to the next level. The Hispanic market is growing and to tap into it personal injury firms need expert guidance, Liel Levy, the self-proclaimed bilingual Sherlock Holmes of the digital marketing world is co-founder of Nanato Media. The Austin-based bilingual marketing agency has helped over 50 law firms connect with clients in the Latino market and has managed over $15 million of ad spend. On today’s episode, we dive deep into building customer experiences with Spanish speakers going beyond language and best practices for breaking into this rich market. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder, and CEO of Rankings.io. We help elite personal injury attorneys dominate first page rankings with search engine optimization. Being at the forefront of marketing is all about understanding people. So let’s get to know our guests. Here’s Liel Levy co-founder of Nanato Media.

Liel Levy

To really tell you the story of how it all started to me for me, I really have to back track, when I was a child, I was born and raised in Mexico City, but when I was growing up, I was come here to the United States and spend my summers in LA. Really observing how my uncle went from cashing checks for his spiny workers at the gas station. To building one of the country’s largest legal brands with a focus on personal injury and workers’ compensation for Latinos in Los Angeles, primarily. And then he grew to other markets like New York and Chicago. And so I got involved very early on as a family business. You come and you help. So the first things I was doing was handing balloons that community outreach events, fiestas , and places where we would find potential clients. And then as a teenager, I did a lot of intake work. And eventually as an adult, I got involved into the business development side of things. So I really grew marketing to Latinos in the United States, endangered in the personal injury and workers’ compensation space.

Chris Dreyer

So you have a ton of experience that dog food. So you’ve been doing this a long time, what’s the story . Behind the Nanato and your company and how did that come about?

Liel Levy

My uncle’s company to lead generation companies, joint advertising. And so what I realized right around 2017, Was that both lawyers, doctors, people who are marketing businesses that are marketing to that, that are, in the personal injury space and trying to generate clients from the Hispanic market, the they’re fine buying leads. From advertisers like amongst others. But the reality is that many of them are also very interested in starting marketing for themselves. And so we just identify there that there is some massive opportunity to. Particularly lawyers who are trying to build our brand with a Hispanic market, but they don’t necessarily have the resources in-house or the knowledge to do it by themselves. And so we felt that there is a good opportunity here to help get more Latinos or. And taken care of by amazing law firms that are trying to connect with them. They’re just having to find a way of doing it properly. And so that’s how we establish Nanato Media in late 2018. And it’s been an exciting journey. Over the past few years, we’ve been able to help over 50 law firms now really become the go-to law firm for Latinos. Across all the united States.

Chris Dreyer

I’ve been doing internet marketing for 15 plus years, but this is a segment that, that is largely untouched for me. So it’s fantastic to have an expert such as yourself on this podcast.

Liel Levy

As I said, it’s my real pleasure to be here. And we really believe in trying to educate as much as possible. The. Legal industry in the importance of having a brand that is relevant to the Hispanic market. Not just as a marketing strategy, not just as a way of generating cases today. This is really a long-term longevity, a legacy strategy. And so we are very passionate about it.

Chris Dreyer

Super smart. Love it. On your website, you set, you call personal injury. Lead-generation in English and Spanish, your favorite child of visual marketing hyperbole aside. Can you share with me why this lights you up and why you get excited to talk about it?

Liel Levy

The whole . Digital space in advertising has really opened up a door for law firms to really be able to connect with people that need their help right now at this moment in a very easy manner. And so we believe law firms need to leverage that. And one thing that we encounter a lot is because the digital space has become so expensive. People get overwhelmed. They don’t know what to do. And many times they’re like facing the decision on, should I go the SEO or the PPC route, or should I go the social media route? And it’s, it can be daunting if you don’t have a lot of experience how to choose, how to decide. we recently published a book called Beyond Sey Habla Espanol : How Lawyers Win the Hispanic Market market and we are advocating, there are a lot that are paper click. The search network particularly is a. great place to keep things started. One mistake lawyers make, oftentimes it’s just wanting to park there forever and ever, and just make that the source of leads that they’re going to be getting cases from. And that’s not really sustainable in the long run, but it’s a great way to jumpstart things. And then from then on start diversifying and entering other spaces. And so we’re super passionate about helping law firms set up that first step and start engaging in acquiring cases from Latinos in our communities. That’s fantastic. according to the last census, I read that Hispanics represent 20% of the U S population and that’s only growing. I think one of the things that individual. Maybe we take for granted or they don’t quite understand is it’s just the very first experience. how can law firms set up a customer experience for Spanish speaking clients that allow them to thrive?

Liel Levy

Really the baseline we always say start by actually embracing latinidad that make your law firm reflective of what your community. looks like and so if you’re in a market where, you have 30, 40% of the population being Latinos, like big markets in Texas California, Miami many parts in New York ride and on the east coast then definitely make sure that you already integrating Latinos into your organization. And at all levels, right? I know it’s not very easy right now to find lawyers that are fluent in Spanish, but they’re out there. And so by actually making your law firm as a whole more appealing to Latinos it’s going to just work both ways. So we’re going to attract the talent that then the actual potential clients. And so that is important. And now we don’t think necessarily the lawyer or the managing partner needs to be Latino to succeed in the Hispanic market. Not at all. We work with a lot of law firms, but they don’t have any of the lawyers be Spanish speakers, but it certainly helped. Now it’s all about really tailoring client experience where your Spanish speaking clients can come to the law firm. And get taken care of without language being roadblock. So how do you take care of that? By having bilingual staff, Spanish speakers that actually speak Spanish fluently handling the intake, being present when they are around at the office, when they come and signing documents, needless to say read contracts, those needs to be in Spanish and such. And it goes beyond just the language side of things. You also need to understand how these demographic groups communicate and prefer to interact with your law firm. Many still even past COVID to meet in person at offices, that’s just the way they are. So the whole idea of virtual consultations and such may not necessarily resonate very well with some segments within the Hispanic market. The other thing to keep in mind is that you’re a hundred percent mobile. The Spanish speaking market is a hundred percent mobile everything that they do it through their mobile device. And many of them, they are not using our emails at all for almost anything. And so when you’re trying to send them a DocuSign to get them to sign the, the agreement, the contract that may not necessarily be the best way of getting them to do it. You may be better off by saying it’s through text message. Or. Being able to communicate with them via WhatsApp, which they use a lot. So being aware of all of those nuances and adjusting and adapting your client experience to make it easy for them to interact with your law firm are going to be critical and essential, but it all starts with the, the law firm the talent, the people behind the firm,

Chris Dreyer

and one of the, one of the things that I think combines all those nuances is trust. it makes me think of Alex Hermosee’s book when it talks about, the value exchange of what makes a good offer it’s decreased effort and sacrifice the easier you can make it for your consumer the better. Translated documents sending it via text, all these little nuances that have the method in which they like to be communicated. I tell our staff. When we’re doing our monthly reports, we’re like, how do they want them? Do they want to do them live or do they want a video? Do they want a written document? Do they want to get super technical? I think knowing those nuances really helps communicate in the most effective manner.

Liel Levy

A hundred percent. It’s all about how can you remove friction? How can you remove roadblocks? How can you make things seamless for them integrate into the way that they want to communicate with you in the most efficient way. And so it, and it’s never ending, right? You’re constantly need to adapt and evolve and learn more and keep your ear to the ground as to, what’s happening with the with new trends and keep up with those.

Chris Dreyer

Understanding the nuances of the Hispanic community is essential to a winning strategy. Language may seem straightforward, but simply plugging existing assets in the Google translate will do your firm a great disservice.

Liel Levy

May seem very easy to add on a plug-in to your website and just boom automatically translates everything, but just on the very very baseline of SEO, you’re still don’t have content in spatch right. By having a plugin that it’s translating your content from English to Spanish. You’re not saying sending any signals to Google. Hey here, there’s good quality content in Spanish that leaves here. So feel free to rank me because people, if they wish they can read it in Spanish, you can translate a page into Spanish or any other language. If you’re using Chrome browser without necessarily even having to have a in there. And so basically that’s what you’re doing to your site. So you’re not making it discoverable for Spanish speakers. Number one now, number two, which is probably the one that you should be even of more importance to you is that by translating, making a literal translation of your content from English to Spanish, you’re not providing a good user experience to your users. Here’s what. English and Spanish or different languages. You don’t articulate, you don’t construct phrases or explaining things in the same way. You only use the same expressions and Google is a robot, right? It’s not gonna make a great interpretation of what you’re writing every single time. And so what’s going to happen is that you’re going to end up confusing the user potentially. Getting them to bounce out. And so even if you are translating the content and then publishing it in the website as translated Spanish content, it’s not gonna be great.

Chris Dreyer

So some marketing specialists will say separate, separate it, have two different sites. You’re speaking to two different audiences, right? Two different avatars. Others will say combine it, and incorporate different navigational points to get the information you’re using Where do you stand on this? Because I have class. Where they’ll have a Spanish website and then they’ll have the English website, what’s your thoughts on that?

Liel Levy

I think there’s a little bit more technical factors that should guide that decision and it would be important to keep in mind how much authority they’ve already established on the English side, because we want to leverage that. if you have a website that has already over a thousand backlinks for domains referring to it, you have a high authority domain rating and the website is good. It was well constructed. Then why the hell would you go. Start something from scratch. You want to a hundred percent leverage that, and there’s a lot of ways that you can make trans transform a website into a bilingual website. And you don’t necessarily have to recreate the entire website in Spanish. You can certainly add a folder. That’s gonna have your Spanish content. And then allow users to jump between English and Spanish pages in a rather seamless way through, designing the user experience on the site. So I don’t necessarily think that you need to take the route of building in a new brand entirely to be relevant to by market. Now, I will say that it’s not necessarily a bonkers idea. It could actually be good. We’re now starting to work with several clients very well and established all from senior markets, but for the Englishspeaking space, now they want to create a different brand. It’s typically catering to the Spanish speaking market that is led by a Latino lawyer. And so in that case, they want to start something, when you brand basically from scratch. And then that makes a lot of sense, right? At that point, you definitely going to want to create a new site. You want to create a new brand and make it very relevant to the Spanish speaking market. But I don’t think there’s only one route that you can find success. You can go either or, and still be effective. What are your thoughts?

Chris Dreyer

I like the unified single brand because of the authority. If SEO is one of your main strategies and channels, you have all these backlinks, you start a new website. You’re starting from scratch. You got no momentum, no leverage know, but it I’ve seen it work. Both ways, Morgan and Morgan, right? Is that the powerhouse in the PI space? They have, I believe they have abogados.com and that’s completely separate, which begs the question. Why didn’t he incorporate it into for the people.com, which has God knows how many links, 6,007,000 referring domains and leverage that authority.

Liel Levy

Yeah, a hundred percent and I will go, abogados.com can potentially be doing much better than they’re currently are. I think, that’s. Decision that, they’ve been one of the first major law firms in the space that started marketing digitally to the Hispanic market. And I just think that their strategy in Spanish has not really kept up with their, with what they’ve done in the English space. And the other thing with Morgan and Morgan, particularly in speaking is that they’re all about trying out things, they’re really experimenting and they’re not. Settling into a one way of doing things. I’ll give them credit for that, but I certainly see a big opportunity of being able to be more, more prominent when it comes down to their Spanish brand presence, a hundred percent

Chris Dreyer

I was listening to a different podcast where he was talking about bullets before bombs experiment in this different areas and then drop the bomb for your marketing channels. And that’s just the kind of way that he rolls in. And I appreciate it, the the line mentality. this is where I’ve seen a lot of value, particularly for PI. . Let’s talk about paid pay-per-click. Paid is tough for PI, especially if you’re going over those very commercial high intent phrases, car accident word could cost $300 to $500 a click, right? Very hard to cut through a market. Now there are other phrases, get by truck, hit by motorcycle, things like this, that where you can get around those, the super high costs. And there are some strategies for targeting insurance companies and things like that. What I’ve seen. And I would like to get your feedback on this. I’ve seen tremendously less cost in the Spanish pay-per-click campaigns, which can lead to much better ROI because they’re great clients. It’s just, it’s a different type of strategy. And I’d really like to hear your overall thoughts on this and some best practices.

Liel Levy

Yes, totally. The beauty about pay per click in the search network is that you can really the bottom of the funnel, right? People who are, have already decided that they want to hire a lawyer and they want to talk to a lawyer right now. And the great thing about doing it in Spanish is that in certain markets, you’re going to find tremendous value on keywords that in English, they would cost you a fortune, just like you’ve said $250 to $300. A click could potentially be going in for a fraction of 50 or $60 in Spanish. And you potentially are not going to see or face as much competition on the search results page. Because right now Google started to actually. Ads that are in English for Spanish search terms, which obviously is terrible for users. And so if you actually have a good well-crafted ad that he’s in Spanish, you’re definitely going to stand out quite significantly. And your click through rate is going to be a really good, and that’s going to give you a great quality score and your quality score is going to drop your cost per click. So there is definitely a lot of opportunities there now. The reason why it’s also works tremendously well with a Spanish speaking market. And that’s because the Spanish speakers that use Google, which by the way, Google is favored by 90% of the U S Hispanics as their search engine of choice. There are 20% more likely to interact with apps than any other demographic. And is, this is a study published by Google back in 2017. And so their intent and their consideration of that is much greater. So they’re going to very likely. Select something there on the top of the page. And the other thing that is wonderful about the Spanish speaking market, particularly for personal injury lawyers is that their preferred method of conversion is going to be phone calls. And that’s, the end goal of a law firm is to get that client on the phone so they can do the initial screening and potentially sign the client. Right there and then, or schedule an appointment or whatever is the next step, since they’ve you representative to meet them at their house or their hospital or whatever that is. So I think those factors are the ones that really should make you consider Spanish paper clique as a very viable strategy to generate and increase your case load.

Chris Dreyer

And one other interesting thing is you could do the mobile call only since they’re more likely to use mobile. So there’s some different, the catering to the preferred conversion point . That they like to use. And I think that’s really interesting, taking it back on the SEO side. One of the things I wanted to mention earlier before we looping it, looping us back is on the SEO side. One of the reasons why I like the unified site is because SEO functions typically as a library where when you need something, you type in the query and you’re directed internally to that page. If it’s set up an optimized properly. It’s not a situation where there are going to navigate every single time from the homepage and then have to go throughout multiple pages to find what they’re looking at is because they’re pulling the book from the shelves, so to speak, as opposed to a show it’s a library of resources.

Liel Levy

Yeah, a hundred percent. We feel that pay per on the search networks awake is a great way of getting started. But we also recommend that after they’ve got some traction they have more experience with a Hispanic market. They’re more confident in their digital strategy there reinvest that into an SEO strategy. So they can also be discoverable, organically and leveraged from what you’ve just mentioned now. Because it is, even though they respond better to ads, there are still a significant portion of the traffic. That’s going to go towards the organic search results and the local.

Chris Dreyer

I love it. And let’s talk, let’s stay on the page, back to the paid do you guys do anything like OTT or geo-fencing or any other those paid types of strategies or is it primarily Google and Google? It has tremendous ROI?

Liel Levy

Yeah. So Google is great. We’re really like using Google, but we also like leveraging other networks within Google ads, search us YouTube and display network, primarily for creating campaigns that are also targeting based on behavior, but are more like targeting users that are top to mid funnel. We believe social media. It’s a very powerful place to be able to brand. Latinos can spend up to three hours a day seeing platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Having a presence there, it’s going to be a critical for building the brand for educating your market, which is another very important component that law firms who are really looking here about positioning as their go-to law firm for Latinos in their market. They need to assume they really need to educate the law firm, be more pro their potential clients, be more proactive about their marketing, not just be, searching always on the bottom of the funnel. So we, we certainly think that social media is a great place for doing that. And we’ve become as an agency over the past year, few years, more holistic we’ve started initiated, focusing a lot on digital, primarily paid. Now we’ve grown to offer services such as SEO in Spanish and obviously social media advertising. And we’re also helping law firms, with creatives for radio and for tv . All the way down to creating jingles and taglines and things that are really going to give them a whole suite of assets for law firms to have a brand that their local Hispanic market is gonna love..

Chris Dreyer

With so many options to create successful marketing strategy. I wanted to know what process looks like for new firms wanting to work with the Nanato.

Liel Levy

We started three, four years ago providing our services to law firms open, right before that we were working as an in-house team. We come from the organizational mindset. And so that shift took some time and. Piss and error adjustment. And, the first thing that we wanted it to do is to like bombard our potential leads with a lot of information and such. And that kind of worked, but what we ended up recognizing is that before we actually try to get them to convince them into a particular strategy. The best that we can do for them is to actually help them see the big picture in their market and where they are currently situated. And so that’s where any single potential partnership we’ll start. We’ll do what we call the Latin X strategy session. Which is two sessions. The first one where we discussed basically what are their goals, their objectives, where they are try to dig deep into what’s their ideal cost per acquisition, who do they think are their competitors in this Spanish marketing space. And also try to understand what are they doing in terms of marketing in general, outside of. Hispanic market. And then we work into doing some thorough research into the market, their competitors its search volumes where they’re currently located and such, and then present back to them, like the big picture. All right. So here’s where you are. Here’s what I’m working here. There could be some opportunities and here is what’s happening in your market right now. Here’s your competitors. Here’s what you’re doing. Great. Here’s what they’re not doing great. Or they’re not leveraging. And though, if we were you, we would recommend you to consider a decent that strategy because that’s going to put you in front of the low fruit faster, which is where you want to be. Why do you want to over-complicate into trying to get things that are on the top of the tree, where you can have things that are at our rent at an iron slant. And by the end of that strategy, they know how to prioritize and make decisions about what they should do next. These, they want to partner with us to help them with some oral. Fantastic. We can talk about it at that point. But we w our first goal here is to generate that awareness and give them, put them in a position where they can make good decisions. And oftentimes we end up on a partnership and we end up doing some of that strategy that we’ve recommended for them or the entire strategy. Sometimes they go for it on their own and you know what? That’s great. We’re happy to see that, and we’re happy to help them along the way, whenever they need help.

Chris Dreyer

I’ll tell you. So it sounds like a very similar, like a SWOT analysis to your specialization, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. And the thing that I like about it is, We’re all talking about time here, time is experience and, if they want to work with an expert, they work with you. But I like that you have this diagnosis, you do this evaluation. And if they do have a plan, if they want to try to execute it on themselves, which is great. what’s next for Nanato Media?

Liel Levy

Absolutely Chris. And I will answer that, but first I want to also address those market curious in listening to the podcast because I, just like I am I listened to your podcast and I’m not a lawyer. Here’s another thing to consider, right? Why do we do this? Lack of next strategy session also is because it also helps us pre-qualify clients. How serious is the prospect about getting into the Hispanic market? Because if they’re not serious enough to get into a strategy session and invest in it, because it’s not free, it costs money then probably they’re not quite ready for it. And they’re probably not worth our time. And, we’ve created all the resources, like the book that were recently published in such for people that have not necessarily got to that point where they want to try to do things on their own. And that’s great. But when it comes down to a potential partnership with our agency, we want to make sure that it just the law firms are qualifying who they’re going to be working with. The agencies basically doing the same. So just, giving a little bit of encouragement for agency owners out there that are also trying to find and get new clients, sometimes being a little bit more discerning as to whom you end up working with can be a good call, a good thing to do what do you think?

Chris Dreyer

I 1000% agree, prescription without diagnosis is malpractice and anyone that says that they’ll do a free audit. Guess what? The audits probably garbage because they’re just not spending enough time or they’re automating it. You. If you want to work with the best you have to invest, you have to be willing to invest in and I couldn’t agree more.

Liel Levy

Yeah. Now let me answer your question. What’s next for an Nanato Media for an Nanato Media we’re just getting started and our goal is to continue helping law firms generate and create brands, right? What’s been beautiful about this journey that we’ve been so far is that we’re seeing our clients grow. And that’s the reason why we’ve had to expand to new services, right? Because many of our clients started with paper, click with a basic, and then, now had the SEO needs. So they had a partner could help them with. And so we ha we start, we needed to start doing SEO services. Now they’re feeling very confident to take their strategy offline and they need radio assets and they need TV spots. And so we’re doing radio and TV spots with them. Why? Because we also have the experience of having done this previously for a bigger organization. And what’s next is to continue helping law firms diversified becoming omni-channel and, Education is a space that, we’re focusing in and I don’t necessarily know yet in which form or shape whether it’s going to be through a mastermind, whether it’s going to be through a conference or such, but certainly something that we are entertaining because we know there is big group of like-minded attorneys that are interesting in getting better and learning from the best when it comes down to Hispanic marketing. And so we definitely want to be there leading that leading that conversation.

Chris Dreyer

A, bilingual strategy is a legacy strategy. Here’s some essential building blocks to get you started: Hire Spanish speakers at every level of your firm. Build mobile first campaigns that leverage heavily trafficked platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook. Create a bilingual website anchored in existing authority. Above all, keep your ear to the ground and adapt. I’d like to thank Liel Levy from Nanato Media for sharing his story with us. And I hope you gain some valuable insights from the conversation. You’ve been listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m Chris Dreyer. If you liked this episode, leave us a review. We’d love to hear from our listeners. I’ll catch you on next week’s PIMM with another incredible guest and all the strategies you need to master personal injury marketing.