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Andrew Stickel

How To Attract Medical Related Businesses To Your Law Firm Using Facebook Ads

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The Question

I’m a B2B attorney. How can I use social media to attract more clients? My ideal clients are business owners or senior leadership team members of clinics, hospices, home health organizations, nursing homes, standalone ER’s, et cetera, who want to manage their legal risk when taking on new patients.

My Answer

Your ideal clients are basically medical professionals. Not doctors, but basically people that run medical facilities. 

Figure Out Their Biggest Worries

The first thing you need to figure out is what are they concerned about? What keeps them up at night? Because when you figure out what keeps them up at night, you’re going to strike a nerve. 

It might be the same thing for every single one of them, though between a medical clinic, a hospice, a nursing home, or an ER, they may have different issues that they have worries about. 

So you need to figure out the biggest worry that they have. If it’s something that could be tied to a fear of loss, that would be good. Loss of a lot of business, loss of a license — that would be really good. 

Create A Piece Of Bait

Then you create content, a piece of bait. That bait can be video or a cheat sheet. The  cheat sheet is my favorite, and video is my second favorite. 

So you can create a cheat sheet they can download, or you can do a video that talks about “How all nursing homeowners can avoid this one thing.” Or, “Three ways hospice directors can prevent this thing from happening.” 

Whatever they’re worried about, just create that content. The other way you can do it is with a blog post on your website that is pixeled, so you’re creating a list that way. 

Run Targeted Ads

So you create that content and then you advertise the solution to the problem that they have. The way it works is you run ads and you use Facebook targeting and if it’s a hospice, you can target hospices. 

Or there are probably organizations like “National association of hospice” or “National association of hospitals.” Start looking at what the professional associations are. If it’s a very large hospice or a very large hospital like Orlando Health, you might be able to target people that are interested in that, or even have that as their employer. 

But first you need to create some content that is directly solving or directly addressing the issues that keep them up at night, the things that they’re most afraid of. Then you advertise the solutions and put those ads in front of the people.

Aim To Capture Their Email

The reason I like email best is that if you offer a free cheat sheet, the hospice director downloads it and then they get your value. But then, every day, you send them another email, and this all happens automatically. 

This is exactly what I teach all the lawyers in my coaching program how to do: how to basically automate this entire system so that all you do is run a Facebook ad and people get into your world. And then, ten, fifty emails later, they can’t live without you. 

What I Do

It’s literally what I do. Most people in this Facebook group are on my email list and if you’re on my email list, you get an email from me every single day. It all happens automatically. 

I don’t send any of those emails but they’re basically the way that I get people in and my business is business to business as well. My market is attorneys, so I figure out what attorneys want, and what they want to avoid. 

So my cheat sheet that I use for my free bait is, “How to get more law firm clients without losing time and money or getting screwed by a marketing company” because that’s what most attorneys can relate to. 

How It Works

So, they download that, then they get on my email list, and then, somewhere around email 50, 60, 70, they eventually reach out and they say, “Hey, how much does it cost for you to do all my marketing for me?” It works really well. That’s how you do it.

So you just figure out their desires and the things that keep them up at night. Create something that answers that. Don’t advertise yourself. If I would have advertised myself and said, “Hey my name’s Andy, and I can be your search engine optimization,” chances are you probably would not be watching this video right now.

That’s because you would have never clicked on my ad or downloaded my cheat sheet or joined my Facebook group or anything like that. Because you have to remember, nobody’s really interested in hiring a lawyer. They’re interested in the benefit that hiring a lawyer brings. So, that’s the way that I would do it.

Are YouTube Ads Effective for Lawyers?

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Here’s a Question I Was Asked:

I’m thinking of using YouTube ads to market my law firm. What do you think about YouTube ads? Are they effective for lawyers?

My Answer:

I love YouTube ads. I actually don’t do enough YouTube ads for myself and I really need to. The cool thing about YouTube ads is that they have those pre-roll videos. I can’t remember what their exact name is, but they’re the ones where you can skip the ad after five seconds.

What’s Great About Youtube Ads

What’s cool is that you don’t get billed if people are skipping your ads. So if you want to do it just for branding, just get your name in the video in the first five seconds, and you’re basically getting free branded advertising.

Here’s How To Do It

Just say, Hey, I’m DUI Attorney Mike Jones and…  Or, Hey, I’m DUI Attorney Mike Smith. Or, If you’ve been arrested for DUI, you need to pay attention right now.

Why Video Ads Work

Video ads are not that expensive. In fact, I think video ads are pretty cheap. But they’re going to hear your name over and over again. And it works really well.

I think that YouTube ads are very underrated. I like them a lot. I actually need to put out some training on how to do YouTube ads, and I think that’ll be coming. Probably in the next four weeks, I’ll put out some training on YouTube advertising for lawyers.

The Best Screen Recording Software for Lawyers

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What is the best software to record my screen and show me at the same time in my videos?

The Software I Use

I use a software called Screencast-O-Matic. It’s a free software, but there’s also a $99 version, which I have, I think it’s $99 a year. And I don’t remember why it’s $99 a year, but I know I paid for it for some reason.

I use it constantly, and not only the videos. You don’t have to either. You can do it so that you don’t record yourself. You don’t have to show yourself.

Another Use for The Software

But whenever I have instructions for my virtual assistants or even for my regular assistant or anyone else, I always do screencasts.

Another Option

There’s also a Chrome plugin called LOOM. It’s free and you can use it to do that as well. But I use Screencast-O-Matic. But either one will work. It just depends on what you need.

We Fired Yext – This Is Why

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Today, I’m going to answer a question I get over and over and over again. That question is, do you use Yext? Should I use Yext for my law firm’s marketing? In case you don’t know, Yext is a service that allows you to update all of your local business listings on one dashboard.

On the surface, it seems like a great idea. You go to one place, you enter your information one time, and you’re done.  Anyone who’s ever updated business listings can see the benefits of that, and when I say business listings, I mean any directory that your law firm is listed in. It could be Yelp, Yahoo, YP.com, Foursquare, etc.

When we used to use Yext, they allowed you to update all of those listings from one dashboard. There was something like 70 or 80 listings that you would get to update on one dashboard, and on the surface, this seems great and like a huge timesaver.  

However, one day I logged into my Yext account and started clicking around. And I immediately picked up my phone and told them they were fired. 

What I Discovered When I Looked More Closely

When I started looking at the actual listings, I was looking at whether the listings were indexed by Google. The way Google works is that they don’t return the search listings in real time. Instead, they crawl the web. They go on every single web page, and they put the pages that they feel are important in their index.

The index is the database from which the search results come. So, if you search for something and it’s not in Google’s index, then it won’t be returned in the search results. 

What I found was that most of the listings that Yext created were not indexed in Google. What that means is that Google does not see these listings as important enough to store in their search engine. If Google doesn’t think that the listings are important, then they’re not going to count towards your website.

The Reason For Building Citations

The reason that you’re building citations in the first place is twofold. One is so that people can find you, but most of the time people are not going to YP.com to find your business.  You’re not getting a lot of business that way. 

The main reason that my company builds citations or business listings for my clients is because when you’re listed in a lot of different places and have that prominence that Google is looking for, then you will rank higher. 

The Problem With Citations That Don’t Work

Now, the problem is that if your citations don’t index, and if Google doesn’t think your citations are so important that they should store them in their index, then they don’t count, and it’s like they don’t exist.

What I found when I looked at our dashboard was that 90% of the citations that we had created were not getting indexed. Google did not think they were important. So why were we paying a monthly fee? 

We were paying several thousand dollars per month to Yext so that all of our clients could stay up to date. But at the end of the day, it was hurting us more than it helped us. 

What Really Happened With Yext?

After a bit of investigation, we finally figured out why our listings were not getting indexed. So, here’s the problem with Yext. With Yext, you’re able to enter one business description, and that business description gets syndicated across all of your listings.

If you have 80, 90, or 100 listings that all have the same business description, then Google looks at that as duplicate content. There is no penalty for duplicate content. A lot of people think there is, but there isn’t.

What you get instead is that you just don’t get shown. Google doesn’t want to show the same thing over and over again. What it does is it doesn’t index the pages that have the duplicate content. If you have 100 listings with the same business description on it, Google doesn’t think that they’re as important and it doesn’t index them.

What We Do Now

What we do now is create citations manually, and it’s a pain in the ass, it’s a lot of work, but we use unique business descriptions for all of our stuff. Now, there are companies out there that will do this for you.

I’m not going to name any names in this video, but if you want, send me a message, and I’ll point you in the right direction. I’ll get you a recommendation for a company that I trust, the same company that we use for a lot of things and that we partner up with. 

Why I No Longer Recommend Yext

I’m not saying that Yext is cutting corners, but it’s taking the easy way. Rather than updating all of these citations, which is a huge pain, we’re just going to let you enter your information once and then we’ll keep it up. 

The problem with that is that it just doesn’t get you as good of a result. It’s unfortunate. The other problem with Yext was that we were paying thousands of dollars per month because we had a lot of listings, but you do have to pay a monthly fee to Yext. 

And there’s something else, though I’m not sure if this is correct or not, I didn’t check because we immediately went in and changed all of our citations once we fired Yext. 

But I believe once you leave Yext, all your citations revert to what they were before you joined Yext. So, they really have you by the you-know-what. 

At the end of the day, it’s just easier to get it done right the first time. This will really help your local SEO and your bank account.