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Andrew Stickel

Can You Use Mailing Address To Target Law Firm Clients on Facebook?

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The Question:

I have a list of names and mailing addresses I want to use for Facebook ad targeting. Can I simply upload the list to Facebook?

You Need Email Addresses For Facebook Targeting

The answer is no. You need email addresses for Facebook targeting. If your list of physical addresses also includes email addresses, then you can do that. You can basically go into Facebook custom audiences and there is a section where you can basically create a customer list.

An Important Question: Where Did You Get The Email Addresses?

Now the other question is, where did you get the email addresses? Hopefully, they’re from your clients or customers or people that have actually opted in.

Do Not Use Purchased Email Lists

If you bought an email list, I would highly suggest you do not use it on Facebook. I’ve heard of people getting their accounts shut down for using bought email lists.

Essentially, I could go out and say, I want to buy an email address of every chiropractor out there. And there are companies that will sell you a list of a hundred thousand chiropractor email addresses.

And then, all I have to do is upload that list of email addresses, and now I’m targeting chiropractors. Well, Facebook obviously doesn’t want you to do this.

How To Use Email Targeting Properly

If you’re going to use emails and email targeting, they want it to be from a list that you generated yourself through your own work. You need to use a list that you actually own. So I have to caution you. Don’t use an email list that you purchased.

How To Create A Lookalike Audience

But if you have an email list of customers, you can definitely use that. If you’re a firm and you have a thousand customer email addresses, you can upload those, create a lookalike audience, and find more people that are just like the people that have already hired you. And Facebook is pretty good. They can usually figure it out.

What If You Only Have Mailing Addresses?

Now if you do not have email addresses, and if all you have is mailing addresses or physical addresses, then I’m pretty sure you’re out of luck.

I don’t think that you can actually use those to create a custom audience or do anything else on Facebook. I could be wrong, but it’s the last that I saw as of today, May 8th, 2019. I don’t believe that you can do that.

Does Your Law Firm Practice in a Small Niche? This Strategy Will Work For You!

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Douglas Bridges recently, posted in the Lawyer Marketing Facebook Group. He is a patent attorney, but he’s a specialized patent attorney. Basically, what he does is he represents patent owners before they patent trade in appeals boards. It’s obviously a very niche area.

What he’s looking for are other patent attorneys, not consumers. He’s looking for a very niche type of client looking to connect with other lawyers that need to appeal. In short, he’s asking me what the best strategy for his law firm is.

In this situation, I think the social media strategy that I’ve been telling everyone they need to get on is obviously a good strategy for this. This works for everything. It works whether you’re a personal injury, a family law, intellectual property, or a patent appeal specialist.

Creating A Cheat Sheet For Parent Attorneys

Let me demonstrate how it can work for him. Douglas is going to need to create some bait. The bait can be a PDF, a cheat sheet, etc.

The topic should be something that’s going to solve a small problem or give ideas and information to the lawyers that would likely be his client. For example, he could create a PDF entitled “Five Legal Arguments to Consider Before Filing A Patent Appeal” or something like that.

It needs to be really specific but appeal to any attorney that is working on patents. I would even do something along the lines of “X Number of Ways to Ensure That Your Patent Will Hold Up In Case of Appeal” or something like that. Something that’s going to get you in front of lawyers that work on patents.

Creating A Facebook Group

What you’re going to do is you’re going to create a Facebook group. You could call it Patent Lawyers United or Patent Lawyers of America. You want to start creating high-quality content and also build an email list so that you can start sending emails every single day to these lawyers with more information.

What you’re trying to do is create yourself as the authority on patent appeals. It doesn’t have to be technical information at all. It can be stories about different cases that you want or interesting arguments that you’ve used.

What’s going to happen is that patent lawyers and intellectual property lawyers are going to start looking at your information and see you as the authority on patent appeals. They’re going to start contacting you because most of these, from what I understand, are very specialized. What’s going to happen is as they have these types of cases, they’re going to start looking at you. They’re going to start reaching out to you asking for your advice, and then eventually, they’re going to start hiring you. It’s all because you’re creating high-quality content that you can send to them.

Using Facebook Targeting

How do you target patent lawyers? That’s really easy. You run Facebook ads to them. The nice part about Facebook is that everyone is on Facebook and they’ve got a lot of targeting options.

What you can do is create a standard Facebook campaign that targets people on Facebook who have their job title as patent attorney or trademark attorney. You can also choose patent attorney as an interest. This is also people that have shown interest in things that a patent attorney does. We can also see what else Facebook suggests. Typically, I don’t usually look at the suggestions. But sometimes, in cases like this, I do.

You can do corporate lawyers, who probably deal with some patent issues. You can do, United States Patent and Trademark Office because people that are patent attorneys are going to be going to the United States Patent and Trademark Office quite a bit.

As you can see, we’ve got a potential reach of 81,000 people here. You could absolutely really start filtering down and start identifying patent attorneys.

How To Utilize Lookalike Audiences

Another thing you can do if you have a list of current clients or a list of patent attorneys, you can go into Facebook and take those email addresses and upload them as a lookalike audience. Then, Facebook will find more people that are similar to those patent attorneys.

Can This Strategy Work For All Law Firms?

This strategy can work for all practice areas. For example, if you’re a personal injury attorney or a car accident attorney,  it can work for you. If you’re a patent attorney that specializes only in appeals, and you want to reach other patent attorneys, that’s the great part about this is that the richest are in the niches, as they say. If you niche down and you really stay focused, then you can be the absolute expert in your field, whatever that field happens to be.

Lawyers Get 3 Types of Traffic – Do You Know Which is Most Important?

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Traffic You Do Not Control

This type of traffic in an online environment might include organic links, meaning a potential client saw your link as part of a search engine’s returns and opted to click the link and visit your site and explore your services. You can’t really control that, and you certainly can’t force someone to click your link. You also can’t control what a competitive firm does for its own clicks, and while you might have the most ethical firm found anywhere, the reality is image is everything and even the most unethical firms get the clients at least sometimes. You do not control that type of traffic.

Traffic You Do Control

This type of traffic includes any pay for click advertising you might have purchased, or you may have opted for with Google AdWords. You can control it to a degree. It’s the old adage: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. You can draw potential clients to your site, but you really need to be able to keep them on your site long enough to convince them you’re the best choice for their legal needs.

Traffic You Own

This type of traffic comes with having potential clients’ email addresses or other ways of contacting them. You might have bought a list of email addresses or created your own email list based on past clients and even traditional methods used to gather that kind of data (giveaways, drawings – anything that requires one to provide information necessary to notify them they have won). It’s data you’ve cultivated, not data that someone else put together, and it’s the type of information you own. Naturally, this is the ideal way to gather this type of data.

Keep in mind this is different than having Facebook likes or followers on Twitter or Instagram. These are social media platforms that first, you don’t own and have no influence – these platforms could fold next week, and you’d have no control. Perhaps most importantly, you can’t control who follows or unfollows your pages.

Knowing the difference between these three types of traffic can be extremely beneficial as you go about planning your next advertising promotion. You can’t control who posts what on Facebook or Twitter -and while you can delete posts that controversial, you always run the risk of others seeing it and reading into any kind of post or tweet a negative connotation. Text that has been carefully written for an email gives you complete control over the way your message is received.

Lawyers: Here’s Proof that Typo’s Aren’t a Big Deal! Stop Trying to Be Perfect – They Actually Help!

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I run a lot of Facebook ads. Chances are a lot of you have probably seen me from my ads. In fact, your first contact with me was probably through a Facebook ad. You might have seen this as a general theme for everything that I do, but I always tell you, done is better than perfect.

I want to show you a perfect example, and I think I’m probably going to get a lot of people that are going to say, “You’re crazy, this doesn’t work” or “I don’t want to do this” but it’s interesting because the numbers don’t lie. What I’m about to tell is true. I’ve seen it many times, and I don’t know how you’re going to feel about it, but it absolutely works.

This is a Facebook ad that I’m running. Now, somebody sent me this, and they highlighted right here because I made a typo. The sentence is, “If you’re like most law firm owners, your always looking for innovative ways to get new clients.” It started working really well. I was getting a lot of conversions and a lot of people opting into my email list on this ad, and then somebody pointed out to me, “Hey, you have a typo in your ad.”

So, I went, and I changed it, and it stopped converting. I’d always heard this theory that conversion—that typos and things like that actually convert better. I’ve also heard if you’re trying to get someone’s attention, make a typo.

Now, that’s kind of a funny thing because you’re a lawyer and you want to have everything perfect. I’m not saying make a huge typo on your website, but it’s kind of interesting that my corrected ad didn’t convert nearly as well. The conversions dropped about 30 percent, and then I changed the ad back to the typo, and the conversions went back to where they were. It’s absolutely crazy.

Is A Typo Considered A Pattern Interrupt?

I’ve seen this in other instances, and I’ve actually intentionally made typos in different things because what happens is it serves as a pattern interrupt.  A pattern interrupt is something that gets your attention.

The reason I have this big red bar that says, “Hey lawyers!” and I’ve got these two X’s right here, and this emoji right here is all pattern interrupt, I’m trying to get someone’s attention. What happens is that when they scan through this, and they see that it’s a typo, it immediately grabs their attention. It almost causes them to pay attention to it more.

What I have found is that first inclination is, “Oh, well they’re going to think you’re an idiot because you don’t know how to type.” And maybe some people will think that, but the numbers don’t lie. The numbers show that more people convert when there’s a typo than when there isn’t a typo.

It goes back to my point that I always say everything done is better than perfect. Don’t worry about getting your marketing100 percent perfect because the reality is that perfect doesn’t work. Real life works, typos work, flaws work, character flaws work, all that type of stuff works.

Numbers Don’t Lie

I think it’s something really interesting that a lot of people don’t believe, but it’s happening to me right now. And, if you don’t believe me, take a look at the numbers here. I’m trying to get people to register for a free webinar that I’m doing. I had three registrations, and then I didn’t have any registrations, and then four, four, two and then I changed the ad and no registrations. Then, I changed it back and four registrations.