Andrew Stickel

An attorney recently asked me the best budget is for building a lookalike audience for his law firm on Facebook. There are a couple of factors at play here, so let’s take a look.
What is a lookalike audience?

What’s The Best Budget For Building a Lookalike Audience For Your Law Firm on Facebook?

Let’s say you are running (or have run) a cheat sheet. Maybe you are offering a free guide for something. You can set up the Facebook Pixel to track the people that have already downloaded and opted into the cheat sheet, and then, after a certain number of conversions or a certain number of opted in and downloaded your free cheat sheet you can create what they call a “lookalike audience.” A lookalike audience is basically where Facebook looks at the people that have downloaded and says: “What do they all have in common?” and then it goes and it finds more people that are like them. I believe you can technically do this after one conversion, but really, you need a few hundred conversions for it really to work effectively. So, how do you do that?

Steps

Before you assign a budget to any project you have to identify the steps involved and determine how much the steps will cost to run efficiently. Sometimes it is wise to start with a low budget and to increase it once you know that you are on the right track.

● Get an ad that works,
○ Use an ad and measure it. You need an ad that works. That means it gets conversions. You can start with a low budget. I usually start with a $30-$40 dollar a day budget. Run the ads and see what your conversion rate is. When you see them growing, you have a good number of conversions getting in on your cheat sheet or guide offer. Test your ads. Run them until you get the conversions.

● Determine your costs
○ I’ll run the ads and I’ll see what my conversions are and depending on what it is, I’ll see what the cost is. If it’s just a cheat sheet download, if I can get like five-dollar opt-ins or less, so people that download — you know, people who convert at less than $5

Building your conversion numbers

At this point, you have your plan of action in place and it is time to start scaling up your ads. The goal is to get 100, 200, 300 conversions. This is absolutely within your immediate reach. However, it will cost you. Say it is costing you (or it will cost you) $5.00 per download now and you want to get to 200 downloads before you create your lookalike audience, this means you will spend $1,000.

At what pace?

How you choose to spend the $1,000 is up to you. You can run your ads for ten days at $100 per day or one-hundred days at $10 dollars per day. It is up to you how you want your numbers to work for you.

I am not a patient man. When I have my numbers in my mind, I want to move fast and get my data. That is the way I work. There are times that I will just spend $500 just to get the data in order to see if my data is going to work and what happens. If my goal is to get 1000 people on my homepage, I want to get them there just to see what is going to happen. I do not want to pace myself. I want to go all-in and get ready to make my move now.

You may be a person who paces himself. You are willing to wait for your numbers. You will invest slowly and patiently watch your numbers climb. You will be okay with waiting to get your conversions. This is your call. However, I urge you not to move too slowly. If you want to build a lookalike audience, the wait could cost you. Your ad can begin to look like old news to some of your early people. By the time you get to the next phase, you may have lost some of your people.

Once you get some ads that work, kick them up a bit and you will get the results you are looking for.

Question: I am a criminal defense attorney but I think that’s too big of a niche for a Facebook group. Should I specialize and make the page only for DUI or drug defense?

Advocate for community crime watch
In most cases, the answer is yes. But, there are many different ways that you can interpret this. Breaking it down is the best way to help you reach the people you want to reach.

For example, I live in Lakeland, Florida. There is a Facebook group called “863 Crime Watch” and it is essentially a neighborhood watch group and whenever there’s any crime or any car accident or anything unusual happing in the neighborhood, Facebook is where they go. People go in there and post about it and keep the community actively communicating or “working.” If this group was started by a criminal defense attorney or a personal injury attorney, they would absolutely be crushing it right now because everything that happens goes in there and people are just having all kinds of conversations about it. So, it’s a perfect way for you to inject yourself into the conversation.

Addiction is a real thing
So many crimes are the result of addiction to drugs and/or alcohol. If I were a criminal defense attorney, this is where I would go. I would create a Facebook group that is targeting family members of people who have addictions and it’s going to be “family members of those with addiction” support group. The reason for the family target is because most people believe, and I agree, that drugs and alcohol are behind most of the crimes we see.

You can be on there as an advocate, You are saying, “This is a cycle that needs to be broken. They need rehab, not jail.” You are speaking to the family members and they are getting all this great information from you. Then, when their loved one gets arrested or gets a DUI or whatever it is, they are going to contact you. You are a lawyer who has been giving them all the information. They have a certain level of trust with you.

DUI Checkpoint group
Another thing you could do is a local DUI checkpoint group. Recently, Naples, Florida had DUI checkpoints. I do not drink and drive, I barely drink and my wife has never even had a sip of alcohol. So, I have no interest whatsoever in joining. DUI checkpoint group and figuring out where the local DUI checkpoints are because I just don’t care. It doesn’t affect me. But somebody that is interested in that is likely somebody that drinks and drives. So, it would be nice to have a group full of those people collected in one place that all look at you as the authority.
The 2nd Amendment
I have some clients on my coaching programs that are using Facebook groups to posts second amendment type posts that are getting good results. They are helping and posting about second amendment rights. Of course, I cannot get into detail because I do not want to break their trust.

Just think about some of the problems. Think of college students. Sometimes college students make stupid mistakes. Sometimes the average citizen in Tennessee or the average student at an affluent college just makes a mistake and gets arrested and they do not know where to turn. You can get a lot of mileage out of standing up for their second amendment rights.

Mom and dad are probably going to foot the bill to help their college student walk away from a careless mistake. There are probably 20 different ways to work this if a criminal defense lawyer puts his mind to it. So, yes. This is the way I would do this.

The Best Budget For Targeting Local Law Firm Clients By Location

The Question:

What is a reasonable rate for a copywriter? Five cents a word, ten cents a word, what?

Honestly, it depends. I have said many times that I get my writers from a Facebook job board. It’s a Facebook group called the Cult of Copy Job Board, and I typically pay writers anywhere from…

Different Tiers of Writers

We have different tiers of writers. We have blog writers; we have content writers who do search engine optimization for us. We have writers that will just do third-party content. For example, if we’re building out social media platforms, or if we’re building a blogger page for one of our clients that is more for search engine optimization than anything else, then we will typically use lower tier writers.

What We Pay Writers

We pay our writers anywhere from probably three cents a word up to 20 or 30 cents a word for our top writers. I would rather pay more for quality.

I don’t have a problem with paying more for people that do a good job. There are a lot of people out there who say they’re writers. They want to be writers but they just absolutely suck at writing.

Why We Pay Good Writers More

So if you can get a good writer, it’s worth it to pay them a little bit more. That’s because the content that they write will live on for a while. It’s not like a Google ad where it runs one time and it’s gone and nobody else sees it again.

How often do you change your website content? It might be on your website for the next 5 years, so it’s worth paying a little bit more to get a good writer that’s actually going to do a good job.