Andrew Stickel

Somebody asked me this: “I keep getting pitched by private vendors who are selling leads. Why would anyone buy leads as opposed to getting them from PPC?”

Well, I don’t know. I mean, there are definitely some vendors that are decent at selling leads. The problem with buying leads is that often a vendor comes to you and says, “Hey, we’ll sell you some personal injury leads in Denver” or wherever you happen to be, maybe in Boston.

The Problem With Buying Leads…

And the problem is that they sell them to you and they also sell them to three or four other attorneys as well. So it becomes a race of who’s the first person to get to the lead. And then, on top of that, you can also annoy the leads because all these different attorneys are contacting them.

Many years ago, I filled out an application to see if I qualified for a mortgage. And for the next three weeks I was getting phone calls left and right for all of these different mortgages from all these different lenders. It really got to the point where I didn’t answer any of them because I was so annoyed by the entire process.

Buying Leads Vs. Getting Leads Through PPC

I’ve also heard the leads are not necessarily as high quality as they should be or as they would be if you did PPC. So the reason why anyone would buy leads as opposed to getting them from PPC is that it’s easier. I mean, honestly, that’s really what it comes down to.

With PPC, you’ve got to put in some work and you’ve got to test ads, you’ve got to build landing pages, you’ve got to do all this stuff. And someone may not really know what they’re doing. The Google AdWords dashboard can look like the dashboard of a fighter jet. So that would be why some lawyers buy leads.

Then again, I don’t really know too many lead vendors that do a really good job. I might have a partnership soon with a lead vendor though that does some really interesting and unique stuff and might be able to sell some leads that way.

Are Attorneys Even Permitted To Buy Leads?

The question also asked, I didn’t think attorneys were permitted to just buy the leads and solicit them. How do these companies even exist? I don’t know, to be honest with you. I’m not really in the lead generation business. I don’t really sell leads, so I don’t know what all the rules are.  But I would definitely check with your local bar association.

You Can Also Find Your Own Leads

There are also ways you can find your own leads. For example, if you go to Instagram and you search hash tag rear-ended, you can find people that have been rear-ended, or rather that have had their cars rear-ended.

And the lead generation company could reach out to them and say, Hey, I saw you got rear-ended. Would you like me to put you in touch with an attorney? And then if they say, Sure, and they give you their contact information. You can buy that lead and contact them.

Is that against the rules or not? I really don’t know. You’d have to figure out where they’re getting the leads from and all that type of stuff. You’d have to talk to the Bar Association. I would definitely look into where the leads are coming from. Especially if you’re going to buy leads.

I just got a question asking which answering service I would recommend. I definitely recommend that all law firms have an answering service. This person says “I’m sick of calls going to our front desk. She gets the info wrong and is gone nights and weekends.”

Why Your Phone Calls Should Never Go To Voicemail

That brings up a really good point. Your phone calls should never go to voicemail. You’ve got to remember, if someone calls a lawyer, for the most part it’s an emergency situation. They got into a car accident, they got arrested, a loved one got arrested, they were just served divorce papers, or they’re worried they’re going to get foreclosed on.

People don’t want to leave voice messages. If your toilet was overflowing and you call a plumber and get voicemail, are you going to leave a voicemail or are you going to hang up and call the next plumber? It’s very important that you have an answering service answering your calls 24/7.

The Answering Services We Recommend

We use two. I’m not affiliated with either of these but for our clients, we use Voice Nation and we’ve used Answer First. Both of them are pretty good. You do have to secret shop every once in a while just to make sure that everything’s good. I definitely recommend those two companies.

There are probably other ones that are good as well. I’m not saying these are better than others. I just know that we’ve used these two and had good results. Voice Nation and Answer First. Never let your phone calls go to voice mail. That’s something that’s really important.

What To Do If A Call Goes To Voicemail Anyway

Here’s a tip though. Every once in a while, the stars will align and a call will go to voicemail. If the answering service is completely full or if there’s some sort of screw-up with the connection, there still is a chance a call can go to voicemail.

Make Your Voicemail Say This…

What we tell all of our clients to do is this: basically make your voicemail say the following: “Hi. This is Attorney John Smith. We’re not able to take your call right now but we do want to talk to you. If you leave a message with your name, your phone number, and what you’re calling about on this line, we will call you back within 15 minutes.”

Obviously, you’re not going to be able to return every phone call within 15 minutes, but that is your best chance of getting somebody to actually leave their contact information.

I’m not saying it works 100% of the time but your chances are much improved if you actually give somebody some time frame, something to expect, for example, “Leave your number. We check this line regularly. It gets delivered right to my cellphone. Leave your number and I’ll call you back within 15 minutes.”

That might pause their search for a little bit. Obviously if it takes longer than that, you can apologize profusely. But you would have never gotten the lead anyway if they had just hung up, so you might as well say that and try to get them to leave their number.  

Starting a Facebook Group is tough. At first, there’s no one in there to interact with. Learn how to attract new members to your Facebook group.

How I Grew My Facebook Group

When we first started, it was me, my business partner, and my mom in the group. That was pretty much it. AND I was putting up content.

To grow the group, I went on the principle that people are silently begging to be lead. What that means is that you have to tell people what to do.

What I started doing is I created a cheat sheet that a lot of people in here have probably downloaded. It’s called “Three Secrets to Getting More Law Firm Clients.”

Then, I ran ads to the cheat sheet. I didn’t run ads for myself, I didn’t run ads for the group, I ran ads for the cheat sheet. The ad said, “I created this free cheat sheet to show you three secrets to getting to law clients using social media.”

What happens is when they click it, they enter their email address, and that gets added to my email list. On the landing page, it says, “The cheat sheet’s been emailed to you. Now, your next step is to join the Official Lawyer Marketing Facebook Group.” There’s a button right there that they click and it takes them right to the join button.

I grew my group for a long time just using that cheat sheet with the sign-up button. About 50-75% of people that downloaded my cheat sheet joined the Facebook group.

I simply told them to join the Facebook group. That’s how you do it. It’s not that hard.

What Happens When You Get Engagement In Your Group

Once you start getting engagement, then Facebook will start showing your group to some more people. That’s one of the reasons that I do these live Q&A’s because we get a lot of engagement. A lot of people watch and a lot of people comment.

What happens is that Facebook will now look at the people that are in the group and then it’ll say “Okay, here are all these people. What do they all have in common? They’re lawyers. Here’s a whole other group of lawyers that had the same thing in common.”

Facebook’s algorithm is smart enough to figure out if you have something in common with the people that are in the group, then it’s going to show them to more lawyers, and now I’m getting free people in the group.

More Advantages Of My “Cheat Sheet” Method

If you don’t have people in the group, it’s hard to get started. I did it with paid ads. I didn’t just do paid ads to grow the group, I did pay ads to get people my cheat sheet, which gets them on my email list, and then it also gets them into the group.

In my email list, I’m also pushing them to YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and everywhere else. That’s how you do it.

Although you don’t have to do it that way. Obviously, most Facebook groups started with just one person, and they just grow organically.

There are other ways to do it as well. I cover a lot of these things in my course. If you want to do it quickly, that’s exactly how I did it.

What’s the best Facebook ads strategy? Here is the way we do it and it works really well. It’s based on creating content. First, it has to have a really good hook.

A good hook (click bait)

A hook is almost like, I hate saying click bait, but that’s what it is. It’s click bait. “In this video I’m going to show you five ways the insurance companies screw car accident victims every single day.”

Or “I’m going to show you three tricks that the car insurance companies use to trick you into getting paid less or signing away all your rights for a car accident.” Something like that, something that’s going to provide value.

Another thing you could do is you could talk about fact that the amount of money that you get if you have an accident and work with a lawyer is significantly more than if you try to handle your case without a lawyer.

This means, that even after the attorney’s fees, you would get a significantly larger settlement or verdict. So, you could create a video or you create some sort of cheat sheet. And I’ve actually been using Facebook lead ads quite a bit and it’s been working really well.

We have this software called Lead AL [[[????]]] that we use. We tie it into a Facebook lead ad. And then, as soon as you get an opt-in, as soon as someone fills out the information, it pops up right on your cell phone.

The hook – story – offer video

But it all starts with the video. So what you do is you follow the hook, story, offer format. So you say, “Here are three strategies that the car insurance companies use to trick car accident victims every single day.” And then you say, “My name is John Smith. I’m a personal injury attorney in Houston and we recently had a client who had this happen to him.”

And then you go into an entire story where you talk about how he got into a car accident, he got rear-ended on the highway and his car was totaled. The car behind him, the person who hit him their car was totaled also. And within 20 minutes, the car insurance company had somebody out there asking John questions.

The party who hit him had somebody out there on the scene, asking him questions, trying to take a statement, asking him to sign things, taking pictures of his car. They were also taking pictures of him walking around, trying to prove that he wasn’t injured.

And you know, John’s not an attorney. He didn’t know what was going on. Then you say, luckily he contacted us and we were able to do x, y, and z. And we had this sort of result.

How to make the offer

Now, if you were in a car accident and even if the car insurance company hasn’t contacted you yet, you still need to talk to an attorney just to make sure that your rights are protected and that you’re not going to be tricked because you got to remember insurance companies do not make money by paying out claims. They make money by collecting deductibles and paying as few claims as possible.

So if you were in a car accident, what you can do right now is click the link included with this video, enter your information and I will contact you personally and give you a free strategy session.

Now, during this strategy session, what I’ll do for you is I’ll take a look at your insurance. I’ll take a look at the accident. I’ll ask you some questions, and I’ll tell you completely free what it is that you should do, and what your next steps should be. I’ll give you a custom strategy and if I can help you, I will absolutely help you for free.

And if I can’t help you, I will point you in the right direction and show you where to go. So just click the link included with this video and I’ll give you a call a couple of minutes afterward.

How you should do it

And what you’re doing there is you’re using that hook story offer. So the hook is the big headline. The story is a story about a client and it doesn’t have to be a real story. It can be a fake story. It can be a made-up story. It can be an embellished story, or it can be a story that happened to somebody else. It doesn’t matter what it is.

Why call it a strategy session?

And then the offer is going to be a free strategy session. Now I said a strategy session instead of a consultation, it is a consultation, but you’re going to call it a strategy session because strategy session does not feel like a Maury Povich commercial.

Everyone assumes that consultation is sales. And strategy session feels a lot more like you’re helping somebody. I always tell my clients, when you film videos, talk to the people in the videos like you would talk to your best friend. If your best friend got into a car accident or was going through a divorce or was arrested for DUI, you wouldn’t say, Bill called me on Friday for a free consultation.

Talk to him like you would talk to your best friend

You say, give me a call, and send me over your stuff. I’ll take a look and I’ll point you in the right direction. or I’ll see if I can help you. And that’s basically what it is. And pointing them in the right direction might be, you need to hire my firm.

You know, so that’s the strategy. And we do that and we get tons of leads using that type of strategy.

How to get the correct phone number

And here’s a hack to make sure that you actually get the right contact information from the lead ad. You can also say, enter your information. We’ll also send you a free guide or some sort of free cheat sheet. And you say, we’ll text it to you.

So that’s how you make sure you get the right phone number. You say, what number should we text this to? I don’t know why people would fill out a form and give the wrong information. But that happens sometimes. It doesn’t make any sense to me. The only thing I can think of is that it’s automatically populated from Facebook and that’s why that happens.

Someone was asking me about the best tools for keyword research. The question is whether we’re talking about Adwords or search engine optimization.
When we’re talking about Adwords, I typically use broad match modifiers. I think about what related terms can you target that will not be as competitive, but that people would still be looking for.

The “DUI In San Diego” Example

Here’s a perfect example. We did a campaign in San Diego for a DUI attorney, and the cost of each click was absurd: it was almost $200 a click at that point. What we found out is that people are also searching for related items, like “San Diego DUI attorney” or “San Diego DWI attorney.”

They were also searching for “DWI” or “drunk driving lawyer,” different things like that. We found that those search terms were searched pretty heavily, but collectively they weren’t searched as much as things that were related, i.e., something like “San Diego DUI penalties” or “California DUI penalties.”

You can target California and then limit your search to the San Diego area since that’s likely the area where people have been arrested.

For example, if I was arrested in Florida, I’m not going to search “Lakeland DUI penalties” even though I live in Lakeland. I’m going to search for “Florida DUI penalties.”

Other Search Terms

Another thing to search for is statutes. I learned this when I got a speeding ticket about 10 or 12 years ago when I used to work at a law firm.

Before I got into marketing, I was planning to go to law school. I worked at the US Attorney’s office and a private firm. One thing we always did was we always Googled the statutes. So, when I got the speeding ticket, I thought, let me Google this statute and see what this ticket is actually for.

I Googled it and discovered that they gave me a ticket for driving a school bus faster than 55 miles per hour. I was obviously not driving a school bus, so I took it to court, and I beat it.

Later, I started thinking, I bet I’m not the only one who searches the statutes. When you get arrested for a DUI, you’re panicked and think you’re going to lose your license and maybe your job, your money, and your house.
Or perhaps you don’t even have a job. You’re just freaking out, so you start Googling everything. It’s like when you have a weird spot on your face, and you start going to Web MD. The same thing happens with a traffic ticket or a DUI.

What we found is that people were Googling the statutes that they were being arrested for. So, we ran an Adwords campaign targeting those statutes and were able to get clicks for about $5 a click when people are paying $150 or $200 a click for “San Diego DUI lawyer.”

I think about the related stuff that people might be searching for. They may not necessarily be the exact match, but that’s what I would do. You can also search for the kinds of questions that people are asking.

More Great Keyword Resources

I love the website answerthepublic.com. You can search DUI for example, and it gives you all the questions related to DUI that come back in Google autosuggest. You just have to play around with it. I would go there and check out the questions that people are asking about DUI.

Then in Google, there’s going to be a section that says “people also ask.” At the bottom, it is going to say related searches. Those are gold because that’s Google telling you these are searches that people enter.
When people are looking for a DUI attorney, I would start there. I’d go to Google, and I’d start thinking outside the box, like what are some of the questions and concerns that people typically have.

I would also use AnswerThePublic.com, and you could also use keyword.io. In addition, I have a tool called AttorneyKeywords.com that we’re working on that’s in Beta at the moment. If you go there right now, you can sign up for 20 bucks a month, and there’s a ton of tools in there that you can use.