Andrew Stickel

Somebody recently contacted me for some advice on how to market a B2B law firm, not a consumer law firm. They’re looking for car dealerships, boat dealerships, RV dealerships, motorcycle dealerships, and they’re trying to get in front of the decision makers of these dealerships. What they do is consumer protection defense, and they defend Lemon Law cases, product liability cases, etc. So, they’re wondering – how do we market this law firm?

Well, it’s actually really easy, and I’m going to show you the exact marketing strategy that I would use for this market. The first thing that I would do is I need to figure out what do the dealers actually want? What is the scenario that they want and what is a small problem that I can help them fix? How can I provide some value upfront? Before asking them for anything, I want to give them some value.

Let’s say there is a line or a document that they could add to the signing process. I actually just bought a car on Sunday, so I know when you buy a car you’ve got to sign your life away. You’ve got five hundred different pages that you have to sign.

Maybe there’s one document that they can sign that will drastically reduce the liability of the dealership, or maybe there’s even a line that they can add to one of their contracts that going to lessen their liability of some sort. Anything that you can think of where you can give them some information that’s going to solve a small problem for them, but they still need a lawyer for the big problem, and you’re going to provide value.

What you’re going to do is you’re going to put this into a PDF document. All you have to do is open up a Word Document and just type it out. You don’t have to have fancy graphics or anything like that. Just create a Word document then save it as a PDF. Now you’ve got a piece of bait that you can then advertise, run ads to, and you’re going to provide value and capture their contact information.

Creating A Facebook Group

The next thing you’re going to do is you’re going to create a Facebook group. What I would do is create a group specific to Georgia auto dealers, car dealers, motorcycle dealers, RV dealers, etc. I would call it “Georgia Car, RV, and Motorcycle Dealers” or “Georgia Car, Boat, RV, and Motorcycle Dealers.” Make it very specific as to who the group is for! Don’t call it “Bill’s Facebook group.” You’ve got to call out who the group is for.

Running Facebook Ads

You’re going to run Facebook Ads to the types of people that are likely to own dealerships. If we’re just looking at car dealerships, you go in Ads Manager and look by job titles like dealership manager, used car sales manager, etc. Anybody that has that as their actual title in their job description is going to be targeted.

We can also search for additional interests. For example. National Automobile Dealers Association, National Independent Automobile Dealers Association, etc. Again, this is just cars. There’s probably interest and job titles like this available for boats, RVs, and motorcycles.

Using A Facebook Pixel

If you set up the Facebook pixel, you can start using custom conversions. Let’s say that these are the only options available and there was none available for boats, RVs, and motorcycles. What you can do is you can start to run ads to these types of people. What you’re going to do is you’re not going to advertise your service, you’re going to advertise the free solution to the small problem that you’re helping them with.

You’re going to run ads that say “Car dealers – did you know that you can reduce your Lemon Law claims potentially by 50% by adding this one simple document to the signing process? Click here to download it at no cost”, and then what happens is they click on the ad, give you their email address, and then you email them the actual document. Now again I don’t exactly what all the copy in this is going to be. I’m just making it up. So, take my actual words here in terms of the copy with a grain of salt, but the strategy is the same.

What Happens After They Download The Cheat Sheet?

Once they download it, they’re going to get to a confirmation page. It’s essentially a thank you page. When they get to the thank you page, it’s going to say “Great! Your guide has been emailed to you. Now join the Georgia RV, auto, motorcycle, and boat dealers Facebook group”, and then they’ll have a button there with the Facebook group.

I have a free template that I can give you that you can use, and all you have to do is plug-and-play your information. You can find it at bit.ly/lawyerlander. All you have to do is enter your email address here. If you already have Click Funnels, just use Click Funnels which is the best software for this.

Now you can start building your email list. Facebook is smart enough that they can look at the people that downloaded this and figure out what they all have in common and the thing that they’re all going to have in common is going to be these interests here. They own a car dealership, they’re a dealership manager or a used car salesman, etc.

Using Lookalike Audiences

Now, there’s a lot of information that Facebook has on these people that we do not have access to. But what you can do is create something called a lookalike audience which is amazing. What that means is you can say to Facebook “Okay. Here is a list of people that have already downloaded this guide. So, these are people that I think are good prospects. Now what I want you to do is go out and find more people that are just like them”, and you’ll be amazed at how well it works!

You can do this based on people that have already downloaded your content, or what you can do if you have a list of clients or if you have a list of people that have contacted you in the past with their email addresses, all you have to do is upload that list of email addresses to Facebook and then select “Create a lookalike audience” from those email addresses, and what happens is Facebook will then match those email addresses with Facebook accounts, and they’ll probably match about fifty of them. You only need about a hundred of this, a hundred email addresses to work. If you have a list of two hundred people or more, then you are good.

What you can do is say “Here’s a list of people that have contacted me or here is a list of my past customers,” and you’re not going to be advertising directly to these people or anything like that. You don’t have to worry about you know, spamming or any you know, anything like that of their email addresses getting out. But what you are doing is you’re giving Facebook a profile of people that are a good customer for you and then they’re saying “Okay, go find more people like that.”

What’s going to happen is you’re going to run your Facebook Ads using these audiences. Now you’ve got a piece of content that you’re running Facebook Ads to, and you’re targeting the Facebook Ads to owners of car dealerships, RV dealerships, boat dealerships, and motorcycle dealerships and more. In short, there is a ton of people out there.

Sending Daily Videos To Your Audience

After that, you start providing high-quality content to your group, and you start emailing the email list every single day. Now the way that you do this is you don’t overthink this. What you do is you pull out your phone and just record a video.  Hit the record button and tell a story that is relevant to solving some sort of problem or any type of frequently asked question, anything that is relevant info.

It doesn’t have to be a long content or hugely thought out. Just think about issues that you deal with day in and day out with dealerships? What are the things that people need to know? What are the questions that car dealers ask you all the time? What are the mistakes that you see them make all the time that opens them up for liability?

If you can record content and share it with your email list and Facebook group, then what will happen is you’ll quickly start to become the authority on legal issues pertaining to auto dealerships in the state of Georgia. You can also start reaching out to different associations.

There are tons of organizations out there! Most of these have events, email lists, etc. What you could start doing is reaching out to these organizations and offering to provide free content to their members, and that can be in the form of speaking, emails, etc.

What you can start doing is you can start sharing this content, sharing these emails and these videos with these organizations and saying “Hey listen, this is totally free content. No strings attached; nothing like that. Just provide this content to your members.”

Establishing Yourself As An Authority

Now, why are we doing this for free? The reason we’re doing this for free is because you’re going to get publicity. You’re going to get known, and people are going to start following you because if you’re talking about things that are relevant to dealers, then you’re going to be speaking to your direct audience and helping them solve small problems which is going to make you the absolute authority. In the videos, you can also mention, “If you’re a dealer in Georgia, be sure to join The Dealer Facebook group where I provide even more information and more tips and just pure value.”

What ends up happening is you have this big list of auto dealers, car dealers, motorcycle dealers, RV dealers, etc. and all of these different types of people start looking at you as the authority. This process is really easy, super-fast, and will absolutely differentiate you from every other attorney out there because I guarantee you none of them are going to be as proactive as this.

A lot of times, people think this sounds like a lot of work, but it’s really not. What it really comes down to is just taking five minutes a day, finding some time that’s convenient for you, pulling out your phone and then recording; and if you want help with the rest of this stuff, let me know. I can point you in the right direction to show you how to set up the landing page and how to set up the Facebook Ads account. All of this is so simple. It’s not difficult at all.

So that’s your strategy. This is what I do for myself. This is the same strategy that I use for lawyers. If I can target lawyers, you can target dealers, car dealers, auto dealers, and RV dealers. You can use this exact same strategy in any industry. It doesn’t have to be auto dealers. This is just an example of how you apply it to an auto dealer.

I’ve been getting a lot of people recently contacting me and asking me how do I get into Google Maps. Let’s take a look at Google Maps for the term Dallas Personal Injury Lawyer. This maps section is really important because a lot of times, people treat this just like the Yellow Pages.

A lot of times, a decent percentage of phone calls are going to go to these three listings right here. Usually, what it comes down to is the rating followed by the number of reviews.

In this instance, because all these firms have similar ratings, it’s going to come down to the number of reviews. However, if you get too many reviews, I have found that it almost seems fake and some people might not like that. That’s important.

How Google Determines Local Rankings

How do you get in these maps? You can see at support.google.com, but you have to prove your local ranking on Google. But how? First is relevance, which means how relevant are you to the topic. Relevance refers to how well a local listing matches what someone is searching for.

For example, if someone searches for car accident lawyer and you’re a DUI attorney, that doesn’t make any sense. But, if someone searches car accident lawyer and you’re a car accident lawyer, then that’s relevance.

There’s a ton of ways to become more relevant, and that’s for another video. You can probably look back on some of my other videos and see exactly how to become relevant for topics.

Mostly, it’s just making sure that you thoroughly cover a subject and you include all of the actual keywords on there, latent semantic indexing words, etc. There’s a website called text tools.net that I use all the time, and I have some tutorial videos on this that show exactly how to use this software. It makes a big difference when you can do this.

What About Distance?

The second thing is distance. I also created a video talking about why Google is treating lawyers like pizzas, and that directly addresses this distance issue. For this example, I will use Dallas, which is a pretty big area. If you’re on the north side of Dallas and you search for Dallas Personal Injury Lawyer, you’re going to get a different set of results than if you’re on the south side of Dallas.

The reason for that is because Google is using searcher proximity or who’s closer to the result, but what it’s doing is it’s returning results that are closer to the searcher. This is stupid because I have a lot of clients, and not a single one has ever told me that, “Oh, yeah. The client hired me because I was closest to them.” It’s just dumb. If you want a pizza, you want the closest pizza place. If you want a lawyer, you want the best lawyer.

Proving Prominence

The third and final thing is prominence, and this is something that refers to business citations, local citations, etc. We recently discovered something very interesting about the citations. We’ve seen reports on this, and then we actually tested this out on our own, and we found this to be true.

In short, prominence means other websites that list your website, that have all of your information. For example, I’m going to show you two different law firms and let you see what the difference is. These are both for the searches Dallas Personal Injury Lawyer. Here’s a guy, his name is Jerry D. Andrews, P.C., and what I’m looking for is his level of prominence.

Prominence, like I said, is citations. Citations are basically business listings. For example, Foursquare, Super Pages, Info Group, Yellow Pages, White Pages, Facebook, City Search, Insider Pages, Yelp, etc. These all are considered citations. The more of them that you have, the more relevant Google thinks you are.

There’s one thing that is more important than the number that you have, and that is the number that Google has indexed for you. What indexed means is when they actually store it in their algorithm.

For example, let me show you this. This is the Moz local search. You can go to Moz local and search your listings. You can also go to Google and search all of your information. What I did is I took Jerry D. Andrews P.C. 3030 Lyndon B. Johnson Fwy, basically his address and his name, and I put him in Google. I want to see how many citations or business listings actually show up in Google when I search for him.

Keep in mind, Jerry D. Andrews P.C. is number two on page 2 for the keyword Dallas Personal Injury Lawyer. He’s not getting phone calls for this keyword, it’s just not happening. What I did is I searched his information, and I see birdeye.com. Manta, super lawyers, local.yahoo, b2byellowpages, lawyers can help, Easy local, merchant circle, global health homes, yellow pages.

He’s only got nine listings on the first page. Let’s look at his Moz local. These are Foursquare, Super Pages, Info Group, none of these were on the first page. Local Lease, Factual, City Search, Insider Pages.

I’m going to do an index search. The way you do that is you just do site: in front of any URL, and that will tell you if the URL is indexed in Google. You see right here, I did cite, and I did the URL. Your search did not match any documents. This page is not indexed.

Here’s another one. SuperPages. Cite. Foursquare and Super Pages are major citations. This one’s not indexed. Here’s Neustar Localeze Sites colon. Not indexed. See Factual Cite colon. Not indexed. These are the major aggregators and they’re not showing up.

When I look at the number one listing in Dallas, and that is the Barber Law Firm. Here, we’re back to page one. Barber law firm. Let’s see. 3102 Maple Avenue, Dallas, Texas. When I look at that same report for the Barber Law Firm. Keep in mind, their stuff is not totally indexed, but they’ve got something that’s indexed, so let’s look at a few up here.

Let’s look at these three. Super Pages. Remember, Super Pages was not indexed for the other guy. Let’s see if it’s indexed for these guys. It is indexed. You see right here, there’s the link right there to the Super Page. Neustar Localeze. This is not indexed. Let’s look at City Search. Remember, City Search was not indexed. I’m not saying everything’s going to be indexed, but this is indexed as well.

When I search the Barber Law Firm and I put their address here, 3102 Maple Avenue, Dallas, Texas 75201. Let’s look at how many citations they have that are actually indexed. Not on what they have, but how many are actually indexed. We’ve got one, two, Yellow Pages, ARP, Super Pages, Super Lawyers, Univision. Here’s their website. We got a few that are on their website, so that’s seven on page one. Here’s some more of their website. FindLaw. HG.org. Yahoo. Now we’re on page three. White Pages. City Search. Better Business Bureau. Top Choice Awards. Top Insurance Companies. LinkedIn. Locality. Manta. Myeasybz. Get Fave. As you can see, there’s so much more prevalence.

They just have so many more listings that are indexed. What we have found is when you create these citations, they typically outsource the work. I know that we don’t do our own citations, we outsource our citations.

What happens is you provide the NAP, which is the name, address, phone number to the company that’s doing the citations, and then they’re going to want your website address, and then they typically want a description of the business.

The description of the business is where I think people run into a lot of problems because if you have the same description on every page, Google doesn’t index every single page because they see it as duplicate content. What we’ve seen is that if you use a different description for every citation and you don’t recycle content in your citations, then you get more pages indexed. When you have more pages indexed, you’re more prominent. When you’re more prominent, you’ll rank higher.

How To Check Your Local Citations

If you’re not ranking very well, try doing this search. Enter your name, address, and phone number, and see what comes up. Also, go to Moz Local and click check my listing. Enter your business information and then just start pooling those listings and see if they’re indexed.

If you’re having trouble ranking, this could be a big reason why. Everyone says build citations, but nobody says to make sure that your citations are indexed. It’s just something really to think about.

We, as a company called Web20 Ranker, to help us with our citations, and their citations get indexed really well. If you need any help, they’re a good company to go with. If you need help, let me know and I can kind of point you in the right direction for the citations.