Can Lawyers Use Messengers and Chatbots To Convert More Leads

Question

I’m thinking of using a messenger-bot for people who interact with my Facebook page. Do you have any tips for converting leads into clients using a chatbot?

Answer and Advice

I’m a personal injury lawyer. I was actually having a conversation with Seth Price about this today on my podcast talking about chatbots. The technology isn’t quite there yet to replace an actual person.

We have a free chat service that we give to our clients. We also let lawyers use it. It’s a free chat box that goes on your website and it’s monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week but it’s a real person. The only goal that the people running that chat box have is to qualify the lead. We need to make sure that they’re in the correct geographical area, that they’re the right practice area and that they (if it’s a criminal defense case) have been arrested or (if it’s a personal injury case) that they have been injured. Then after they have qualified the lead, their only job is to get their contact information and pass that information off to the lawyer.

You could kind of do that with a chatbot. I guess you could ask, like “what’s your name” and “have you been injured”? I think the AI isn’t there yet.

We’re doing it right now with a diminished value campaign and we’re actually doing it in the form of a quiz but that’s essentially what chatbots are. Chatbots are basically quizzes and depending on the answers, you get a certain output. We’re doing one right now with a diminished value campaign in Indiana. The basic idea is that we’re trying to get these property damage cases. The lawyer doesn’t actually want to handle the property damage cases, but the idea is that there’s probably injury leads in there and he’s correct because we have gotten a few cases out of it.

What happens is they go to this page and it asks were you in a car accident within the last two years? Was the accident your fault? Was the vehicle leased? Do you still have the vehicle? Then they ask if they were injured. Depending on the answers, they are either sent a message that says, “I’m sorry you don’t qualify for diminished value” or they’re sent a free cheatsheet that teaches them how to claim diminished value. If they mentioned that they were injured they are taken to a page that says “You may be entitled to compensation for lost wages, pain and suffering, medical bills and more. Enter your information and an attorney will contact you.”

The outcome of these cases depends on the answers the people provide to the questions. What we don’t want to do is send the attorney all these leads of people that qualify for diminished value but were not injured or even worse don’t qualify for diminished value and we’re not injured and make it so that the attorney has to deal with all those.

That’s one way that we could do it, but I don’t know. Facebook is using a messenger-bot right now. When you try to contact Facebook support they’re using a messenger-bot and it doesn’t work that great. My thinking is that if Facebook can’t get it right with the billions of dollars that they have I’m not going to be able to get it right. I don’t really mess with it yet. I’m going to wait until the technology catches up a little bit before I start using bots. I use bots for my intake stuff, for people that have already bought stuff for me but the leads are too valuable for personal injury lawyers where I wouldn’t risk that with a bot. I would make sure they have a real person handling those.

How To Target Better Law Clients With Facebook Ads

Question:

The people that are responding to my Facebook Ads and booking appointments aren’t great fits for my service. How do I find better leads?

Answer:

I think what that means is you’re just targeting the wrong types of people. I don’t know exactly what type of practice area you have. What you have to do is if you’re running ads and people are booking appointments, but they’re not great fits for your services then it means that your message is wrong somewhere. Reverse engineer your ideal client and almost create like an avatar. Think about what are the specific problems that this specific type of person has.

Also kind of look at the clients that you don’t want and see what makes them different from the ideal clients that you want. Then purposefully avoid them in your marketing and your messaging. For example, let’s say and I’m just going to use myself as an example on this one.

If I’m trying to grow my marketing agency then I’m not going to create marketing materials that say here are four free ways to get your website number one on Google. What does that attract? That attracts people that are not looking to spend money. Instead, I would say something like here is the top four paid directory listings that will skyrocket your law firm’s websites to number one on Google. It’s different because now we’re actually attracting people that are responding to something that from the gate, says they’re going to have to spend money. That’s kind of what the thought process is there.

For example, if you’re a divorce attorney and you’re trying to go after high net worth divorce rather than just divorce. What are the problems that people that are going through a high net worth that a regular person doesn’t have in their divorce? It could be maybe like hidden bank accounts or other problems with assets. Whatever those problems are, start creating content that talks about those specific problems and then you’re going to attract the right types of people. It just sounds like your message is wrong. You’re not attracting the right types of people because you’re not putting the right messaging out there.

Best Way To Determine Google Ads Budget For Lawyers

How To Get More Estate Planning Clients with Facebook Ads

Question:

We just opened a new office in a different city and I’m not getting any new clients or even calls for the office. I sent out emails to surrounding neighborhoods, but I’m not getting anything. I just set up a Facebook marketing campaign and included the new office location. We are a very select niche, estate planning firm focusing on families with minor children. Do you have any suggestions on a Facebook marketing campaign that I can do?

Answer:

If you’re doing Facebook ads for an estate planning firm there are a lot of situations that could happen. Without seeing your actual campaign is kind of hard to tell. I have a couple of questions.

You said you’re not getting calls? Clients or even inquiries for the new office are not calling. Where are you getting calls and clients for the old office? Were they coming from Facebook or is Facebook a brand new strategy that you’re trying when all else has failed?

What I would do is now, if we’re talking about Facebook marketing (and this is my answer to every time I am asked about Facebook ads) because this is the way that Facebook ads really work. This is the way that Facebook ads are effective. You start by running ads that help solve problems that this demographic has.

Estate planning, focusing on families with minor children is a little more difficult because it’s the type of situation where people might not necessarily realize that they need estate planning. They might be under the misconception that estate planning is for like old rich people. The reality is that anyone who owns a house or has kids or has a business or anything like that probably needs an estate plan. What I would start doing, is creating ads that talk about different scenarios where people didn’t realize that they needed an estate plan.

Bring the issues to life by telling stories about different scenarios that people can be in where they need an estate plan. We had a client who did estate planning a little while ago. We told a story about somebody. Her husband had passed away. They had two kids and because of that, she had an issue with ownership of their house. You figure out what all the different issues are and you can kind of tell stories about that. What you can do is start talking about some of the misconceptions of estate planning or what some of the benefits of estate planning are. I’m kind of drawing a blank right now. I cannot remember what we did for that campaign. It worked okay and it got people opting in.

That’s typically where I start. I ask myself, what are the problems that they have? What are the solutions that I can provide to them in this ad? Estate planning is a little bit more than people realize. They may not know they need estate planning. What you want to do is start talking about, start creating content that talks about some of the worst-case scenarios. You could write an ad and I don’t necessarily want to use like scare tactics but you could run an ad that basically talks about like three ways (that you are unaware of) that you could lose your house if your spouse passes away unexpectedly. or something like that. You almost had to basically talk about the consequences of not having the estate plan or what’s going to happen if they pass away and it’s up to the courts to decide.

You can run an ad that asks, “If you were to pass away unexpectedly, do you want to make the decision of what happens to your house, your family, and all of your belongings? Or, do you want the courts to decide?

If you don’t have this one thing, then guess what? The courts get to say what happens to your house, what happens to your money, what happens to your kids, what happens to your car, what happens to your business. You kind of paint a picture like that and say or what you can do is you can you now have us fill out these documents for you and you can have exactly what you want. Hopefully, you never need it. But you just show them these documents and basically this will ensure that everything that you actually want to happen will happen. Your house goes where you want, your kids go where you want, your money goes where you want, your pets go where you want, all that type of stuff.

That’s how I would deal with estate planning for families and minor children you have got to figure out what are the problems they have and then what do they stand to lose and you really want to lead with those.

 

How To Lower Bounce Rate For Your Law Firm’s Website

Question:

What is your experience with bounce rates and what is a more or less, acceptable bounce rate number? I’m sitting somewhere near 70 to 80 percent. Do you have any tricks or hacks you can implement to decrease this?

Answer:

“Bounce” is when somebody goes to your website and then leaves without visiting any other pages. They read your homepage and then they click the back button and go back to Google. That would be considered a bounce. Let’s say they go to your website and then they read the page and then they close the browser. That’s also considered a bounce. Bounces are not always a bad thing.

A lot of people think a bounce rate is going to be a bad thing. It’s not always a bad thing. Let’s say someone named, Google’s personal injury attorney clicks on your website and likes what you have to say. He calls the number at the top of the screen, books a consultation and then closes the browser. Technically that’s considered a bounce even though the outcome was the exact outcome that you’re going for. You’re trying to get people to find you and book a phone call. You can’t just rely on the bounce rate alone. You have to kind of look at the bounce rate into consideration with the totality of these circumstances.

Another thing to look at is if your website overall has a high bounce rate. Next, look and see if some of your blog posts are getting a lot of are getting the majority of the traffic. Blog posts typically will have a higher bounce rate. Just think about how many times you end up reading a blog and then leaving the page without actually going, even if you love the content in the blog how often do you actually then go through and search the rest of the website. It’s probably not that often so if you start looking at individual pages I’d probably pay more attention to the home page bounce rate and the landing page bounce rates also.

I can’t stress this enough bounce rate is not always a horrible thing. Our client’s websites typically have bounce rates anywhere from 50 to 70 percent and these are firms that do pretty well. Once the bounce rate starts getting a little high than 70% then we start kind of taking a look at it and figuring out okay let’s try to get this at least under 70% but for the most part bounce rate. We don’t pay too much attention to bounce rate especially if they’re getting a lot of blog traffic if they’re getting phone calls, all the type of stuff. You kind of have to look at the entire circumstance but as for us, we don’t really freak out until we start getting above 70 and even closer to 80% that’s when we’re kind of like okay, let’s see we can do to dial this back so there’s that.

How To Lower Bounce Rate For Your Law Firm’s Website