Easier Way To Create Law Firm Business Listings Transcript

Question

I do not want to manually create profiles for each of the citation sites for attorneys that you mentioned. Do you recommend a service to do this?  Basically what this is talking about? Is business listing citations for attorneys and basically business listings are important because they help increase the prominence of your law firm online? One of the three main ranking factors for Google Maps is that prominence, how prominent is your law firm?

Answer: Andy Stickel

For those of you who are unsure of what the question is related to, let me explain. Anyone that went to heylawyers.com and picked up my twenty-four part video series that teaches you how to get your law firm ranked in the Google Maps, found an add-on with some cheat sheets that basically show all of the profiles that that lawyer can sign up for. Some are free, some are paid, but they’re all pretty important. This will increase your prominence because a lot of times, people just don’t know what website they should sign up for.

What this person is asking is, if instead of manually building these – if you don’t want to manually build all these listings because it’s kind of a pain in the ass to do, is there a service that will do it for you? There are a few services that do this. One is White Spark. You go to Whitespark, CA. I believe they have a citation building service. Brightlocal does local citations, I believe. Another thing you could probably do is go on Fiverr and find somebody that has experience building citations. Then you could actually specify which citations you want them to build for you.

One tip: Make sure you set up an email address that is at your domain. If your domain is  lawfirm.com make sure to set up an email address that’s something like marketing@lawfirm.com or info@lawfirm.com instead of like a Gmail account. It is a lot easier, especially when you have people that are not associated with the firm that is building citations for you. It is a lot easier when they have an @your domain.com email address. White Spark, Brightlocal, Web 2.0 Ranker, might do it as well. I don’t know if they do or not and they have a lot of citation building services but I don’t know if you can specify which ones. Or, check out Fiverr. See if you can find somebody there that can do it for you. That’s what I would do.

What To Tweak To Make Your Law Firm’s Facebook Ads Better

Question:

What is the most important thing to tweak on my Facebook ads when trying to make them more successful?

Normal

When I run my Facebook ads I really pay attention to a few things. First of all, if I’m doing an image then I will play around with the contrast and the brightness of the image. Sometimes I’ll also change the size of the image so you can make it like 16:9 or you can make it square you can make it like 4 by 3 or 3 by 4 or something like that. Facebook gives you all these options in the customization where with one click you can resize things but the most important parts of a Facebook ad are going to be the first line of the actual copy. That’s actually really it’s not technically the headline but it’s really is the headline of the ad. That first line of the copy.

Whenever I’m running an ad I always call out that the person that I’m trying to attract. So, my stuff always starts with something like, hey lawyers or hey law firm owners, or criminal defense lawyers always make this mistake! You always want to call out the people that you’re targeting. You would say “Fathers going through a divorce, make these three mistakes every single time.” or “People in debt up to their eyeballs need to read these three tips or this white paper or whatever.” That’s one thing to put on the first line and I’ll test a couple different one of those to see what actually gets the reaction.

I also test the actual Facebook headline and that’s the thing that on the ad it goes below the image or below the video and it’s in the box next to the button. I typically do two or three different headlines there. I’ll test the button, sometimes as a sign-up, sometimes a learn-more, sometimes a watch-now. If it’s an image you can actually even get rid of the button altogether. With a video, you still have to have a button but sometimes I’ll even try it without the button. I test that. If it’s a video I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of my videos. Typically we will have a red bar at the top and the bottom. We will say hey lawyers or hey law firm owners or do you need more law firm clients like different things like that so I’ll test those types of things out. I don’t test that so much anymore just because I’ve never found anything to work better than “hey lawyers” and I’ve been doing this testing for two years. That’s one thing that I don’t really test that much anymore, but unless you’re targeting lawyers you don’t know what’s going to work so you can definitely test that as well in the video.

That is typically what I test. I’ll test the first line which I call the pattern interrupt. I’ll test the headline. I’ll test the button. I’ll change the contrast of the image. I’ll change the image size. There’s a lot of stuff you can do that you can change on Facebook that all kinds of collectively can work pretty well. Then what you’ll find is you’ll find one variation works really well and the others don’t work so well and then you just kind of keep leaning towards that and your ads just continue getting better and getting better because you now know kind of what works and what doesn’t work.

The Best Ways To Measure SEO Results for Lawyers

Question:

What’s the best way to measure results from SEO? Is it page rank, traffic or what?

Answer:

Page rank is actually something that’s a pretty old term. Google started hiding page rank a long time ago. So, you actually can’t find out the page rank of a website anymore. But honestly, for my clients, the way that we judge if it is number one is phone calls. Because, if you have a million hits on your website but nobody’s calling you, and nobody has picked up the phone and booking a consultation, then it really doesn’t matter. Traffic and rankings are a good indicator that things are working but at the end of the day, it is all about phone calls. That’s how we judge all the campaigns for our clients.

Are Facebook Ads Worth The Money For Lawyers?

Are Facebook Ads worth the money? Yes, Facebook Ads are definitely worth the money but you have to remember, Facebook Ads are a tool. They are like any other tool. I mean, a hammer is a tool, for example. You could build something that looks like a two-year-old built it or you could build a beautiful house. It’s the same thing. It is a tool, no more and no less. If you know how to use the tool, the tool being Facebook Ads and if you know how to you know if you know how to target the right people and you know how to get the right message in front of them, then it works really well. If you don’t know what you’re doing, if you create crappy ads and you don’t know how to actually target people properly, then it’s not going to work at all. Teaching you how to do all of those things is a pretty big job.

I actually have an hour-long training video presentation that addresses this very subject. Just go to lawyermasterclass.com and that will teach you how I use Facebook Ads, how you target, how you do all the things to make Facebook Ads actually work for you. The video teaches you how to use the tool. It is that simple. Learn to use the hammer and you can take full advantage of it. Because it’s funny, I hear so many people say “Oh, Facebook ads just do not work”. No, it’s like, Facebook Ads work, you just don’t know how to work the ads so go to lawyermasterclass.com and that will show you, it’s an hour-long presentation. It’ll teach you how to actually run a Facebook campaign that actually works and actually gets clients for you.

Can QR Codes Help Lawyers Get More Leads From Ads?

How To Determine Your Law Firm’s Marketing Budget Transcript

Question:

Is there a certain percentage of my revenue I should spend on marketing? What’s the best rule when starting to market my criminal defense firm?

Answer: Andy Stickel

I don’t have a specific percentage of my revenue that I spend on marketing. I look at marketing as an investment rather than an expense. What I always tell lawyers is this. The biggest mistake most people make is they do not figure out their numbers correctly. If you can figure out your numbers correctly, then you can consider your marketing as an investment in your business.

Let’s say you’re running a Facebook ad. You spend a thousand dollars per ad. From that thousand dollars, we got 25 leads which turned into two cases, (two clients). What does that tell us? That tells us that it costs $40 to get a lead and it costs $500 to get a case.

The numbers are not going to always be this clean. But, as you spend more and more time running ads You will get a more clear understanding of your numbers. Then you will start to understand how much it costs to get a lead and how much it costs to get a case.

Once you know how much money it costs you to get a case, you will have to decide how many cases you want to go after per month. If your cases cost an average of $500 per month to get, and you want to land 10 new cases per month, you will need to budget around $5000 this month to get those cases.

It is difficult. At the beginning of your marketing strategy, you are really going to be doing some testing. Just like with everything you do, in the beginning, you should be about providing value and trying to start conversations with people.

I would focus on creating content that people who just got a DUI would find extremely valuable and answers all the questions that they have. For example, how do I avoid losing my license? You might create a video about a hardship license, or create a video about the DMV hearings if that’s something that happens in your state. I know in Florida, you have 10 days to request a DMV hearing. Maybe create a video that talks about all the different ways that your law firm uses to get DUI cases thrown out or pled down to lesser charges. All of these different things that people are interested in like how do you protect someone’s reputation if they got a DUI. If you got a DUI, are you going to go to jail? These are the things people are thinking about and worried about. If you run these types of ads (as engagement ads) and then you start using Facebook’s tools to create custom audiences and basically go into Facebook’s audience section. Later you can use the list.

What you do is go into Facebook’s audience section and pull up everybody that watched a percentage of this video. Let’s say 25% of this video and add them to the list, to show all your future videos. Because, when people are watching your new videos they are a warm audience and there is a good chance that they got a DUI or they have some sort of reason that they’re watching. They are interested in your content. In the beginning, you are going to be spending a little bit more money just to kind of warm up the audience and to get your data.

Just understand that you’re going to have to spend a little bit more, in the beginning, to get to that point where you’re not worrying about what percentage of your revenue you’re spending.

But, you are more focused on how much does it cost me per lead, how much does it cost me per phone call, how much does it cost me per case? Is there a certain percentage of your revenue you should be spending on marketing? I don’t know the answer. That’s because I don’t know what your revenue is. If your revenue is $5,000 dollars then – I don’t know versus you know if your revenue is $100,000. I guess you’re just starting so you’re not doing a hundred dollars but I mean you really got to figure out what you can afford.

Another thing you can do is you can do a lot of stuff that doesn’t cost a lot of money or that’s free. You can create content. I call it the PSA style content right where you create content on your personal profile that does not feel like ads that basically feels like a PSA.

Intro, Criminal Defense Attorney Mike

If you’re a criminal defense attorney say hey everybody this is a Mike.

You guys know I’m a criminal defense attorney. I want to talk to you about something that I think is absolutely ridiculous. It’s happening to a lot of my clients right now. What’s happening is, the police are starting to set these DUI checkpoints up and I’m not advocating drinking and driving but what’s happening is they’re actually tricking people into. You basically provide some sort of information like some sort of really valuable information where you could say look if this ever happens to you make sure to know your rights. Know what your right is and know that you don’t have to do this and you don’t have to take the breath test or whatever it is.

Basically, what you’re trying to do is you’re just trying to put information out there and what will happen is if the information is valuable enough, then your friends will actually share the content because it’s actually useful information. Doing that you’ll get a lot of reach and you’ll probably start getting people that will reach out to you saying hey, I’m your cousin’s next-door neighbor. Somebody shared it and you’ll start getting reached that way. Then you can also take those videos and you can run those as engagement ads also. There are a lot of different ways you can advertise. I actually have a couple videos on YouTube about that. Ways you can advertise that don’t actually involve a lot of money or any money at all while you’re getting started. You can start kind of building up some cases and building up some bankroll so that’s kind of what I would do there.