Digital Marketing

There’s a false belief out there that people, that’s regular consumers and everyday people, hate advertising, and that’s not true. People actually love advertising.

People Love Good Advertising

What people hate is bad advertising. If you don’t believe me, just think about the Super Bowl and how many people watch, but don’t care at all about the game.

The only thing they care about is the ads, and that’s because good ads either entertain or inform. If you have an ad that entertains or informs, people will pay attention to it.  

Ads Need To Be Entertaining, Informative, Or Both

Now, you have to remember people don’t hate attorney ads — people despise attorney ads. As an attorney, it’s going to be that much more difficult and important for you to create ads that are entertaining or informative, preferably both.

The Attorney Ad That Went Viral

Maybe you’ve seen the video ads that’s going around lately with the two attorneys that are smoking weed and telling you to shut the fuck up. This video is entertaining, and it’s also informative.

It’s also an ad that’s been shared nearly 45,000 times. How many cases do you think that this law firm got based on this viral video alone?  

And at the end, there’s no call to action. It does not say call today if you’ve been arrested or call us for a free consultation. All it does is tell you to shut the f**k up. People liked the message; they shared it, and the video went viral.  

What You Can Do To Make Your Own Ads Effective

Now, you don’t have to be outrageous or use bad language in your ads to make them effective. All you have to do is think about what is the most beneficial information for the person that you’re trying to attract with your ad and put that in there.

Follow that school of thought and provide value in your ads. If you lead with value, then people will not even realize that they’re watching an ad. Just think, you could be watching an ad right now and not even know it.

Today, I want to give you a quick tip for your website that can help improve conversions. That means it can improve the number of people that call you and the number of people that fill out your contact form.

Why Free Consultations No Longer Get Results

On many attorney websites, it says at the top of the page or somewhere on else on the website, call today for a free consultation. The problem is that every lawyer in your market is also offering a free consultation. So, there’s nothing making you stand out.

To be totally honest with you, most people kind of associate consultations with sales. They know I’m going to try to sell them something during this free consultation.

It doesn’t have the impact that you want it to have, which is that we’re going to go through your case and tell you all the possible outcomes and figuring out how we’re going to handle this situation for you.

What To Offer Prospective Clients Instead

Lately, what I’ve been telling clients is instead of doing a free consultation, I offer a free strategy session. It’s the exact same thing. You don’t have to change anything, but the wording makes it different. Everyone gets a free consultation with all these other lawyers, but with you, they’re going to get a free strategy session.

How To Present This On Your Website

Here’s the other thing, when you put free strategy session on your website, also put very close to it the following.

Make sure to put this on your site, “During this strategy session, you will get… ” and list three benefits of the strategy session.  

You can mention that they will talk to an attorney, not a caseworker, and you will let them know all of the possible outcomes of your case.

You can also mention that you will create a custom personalized plan for how you’re going to fight the charges or how you’re going to handle the case or how to get your medical bills paid.

If you offer the strategy session and the benefits that they’re actually going to get, make sure to list those out below the strategy session. You’ll get a lot more consultations, and more people will contact you because it’s different.

Why This Tip Works

When you’re listing what they’re going to get, you don’t have to change the consultation whatsoever. You’re just not calling it a consultation anymore.

The question:

Does it matter if we post something on Facebook and Google My Business if it is the same post? 

My answer:

No, I don’t think it matters. We do that a lot for our clients. 

What are Google My Business posts?

Google My Business has these things called posts now. And there are a bunch of different types of posts you can do where you can share products and coupons and all these different things. 

These posts work well

But they’re basically posts that are kind of associated with your business page. And we actually often find that you get more engagement with Google when you do these posts. So we actually do posts for our clients on a regular basis. 

Copying posts from your Facebook page

And a lot of times, we just take a Facebook post that we created and we share it, we just copy and paste it straight from Facebook into the Google post. I’ve never seen any negative consequences of doing this. 

What you should consider doing

If you want to be super paranoid, you probably could do it differently. But we’ve seen good feedback and good interactions. You’re not going to run into duplicate content issues like you might with your website for social posts.

What are the best questions in an ASK campaign to make sure I get helpful information?

What is an ASK Campaign?

In case you’re not familiar with what an ASK campaign is, you’re basically asking people what they want. The idea is that the easiest way to market anything to anyone is just to figure out exactly what they want and then sell them that. And the same is true for legal services.

As A Lawyer, You’re Selling Emotion

And I say this all the time: As a lawyer, your business is law but you’re selling emotion. You’re selling the peace of mind that comes with the resolution of their case. You’re selling the benefit because nobody wants to hire a lawyer. No offense, but nobody wants to hire a lawyer. No one wants to go to trial and no one wants to sue anybody.

What they want is the desired result and the lawyer is the means to get them there. So, a lot of times people will advertise, for example, file for bankruptcy for $249 or whatever.

People Don’t Really Want Bankruptcy

But bankruptcy is not what they want. What they want is to eliminate their debt. They want to buy a house in five years or they want to fix their credit or they want to be able to pay their bills. Or they want to consolidate everything into a payment that they can actually afford or they want the bill collectors to stop calling.

People Don’t Really Want Divorce

With a divorce, maybe they want freedom, maybe they want to make sure they have more time with their spouse maybe they want to make sure that they’re financially taken care of. The divorce itself is not the thing that they want. There’s something else on the other side of whatever the service is that you provide.

What I Do

If you can identify what it is that they want, what their desires are, then it’s a lot easier to sell them stuff. So, I don’t tell lawyers, “Hey I’m going to get your website to number one on Google.” What I do is I say “Hey I’m going to help you get more clients so you’re going to make more money.” Because that’s what they ultimately want.

How To Do An ASK Campaign

So, one of the ways you can figure out what it is that they want is by doing an ASK campaign. An ASK campaign is where you ask them specific questions.

I actually have a copy of my book here. If you don’t have a copy of my book go to freebookforlawyers.com and you can grab it.

But, in here I have the ASK campaign completely laid out, with all the questions. So you’re going to ask them a series of questions, you’re going to try to identify what they want and you’re going to try to identify their fears.

How I Got Started With ASK Campaigns

So, for example, I always start off with “Do you want to learn more about something?” So, let me put this in context. Basically, before I started, about a year ago, I did a thing where I told lawyers I was going to create some content about marketing a law firm and I wanted to ask some questions to make sure that I wasn’t actually leaving anything out.

I want to make sure the resources were as complete as possible, so what I did is, I asked anybody that was interested in receiving a free copy of this training if they wouldn’t mind answering a few questions for me and you can do this with your clients too.

How To Get Started With An ASK Campaign

So, what you can do is you can contact some current clients and past clients. They need to be your ideal clients. Don’t ask your business partner, don’t ask your law firm partner or your spouse or whatever because they’re not your ideal clients. You have to ask your ideal clients.

So, you reach out to them and say, “Hey listen, I’m creating some free resources and I want to make sure that I don’t miss anything. So, would you mind answering a few questions?

“Because I want to basically create this content so that people that are in the same situation you were in before you hired us have some resources and can get some answers. And I want to make sure that these resources are as complete as possible so I want to make sure I don’t miss anything.”

The First Question

So, the first thing I always ask is, “Are you interested in learning more about whatever?” So, for example, if I’m creating something for lawyers about social media, I always ask them are you interested in learning more about social media?

If they’re not interested in that then I don’t even care about their answers because they’re not interested. They’re not my ideal clients. Now, it seems like a very basic thing but I would ask them and you definitely want to ask something like that.

The Next Questions

The next question, which I’m quoting from my book here is, “What is your number one question about whatever?” So, for example, “What was your number one question about divorce?” “What was your number one question about DUI?” “What was your number one question about your injury case?”

The next question is “What was your main goal?” So, I’d ask for example, “What was your main goal regarding your personal injury case or your divorce or your bankruptcy or your real estate deal?” or whatever it is.

And then you ask “What was the number one thing that you want to learn about this thing or what was the number one thing that you wanted to know about this thing?” So, it wasn’t everyone thinking you wanted to learn about divorce or bankruptcy.

Another Key Question

Now, you also want to ask, “What is the number one thing about whatever that you want to avoid at all cost?” And, this is really important, so be sure to ask what’s the number one thing about bankruptcy that you want to avoid at all costs or the number one thing with your DUI that you want to avoid at all cost.

What I Learned

And what you’re going to learn is what they want and what they don’t want. By doing this for myself I learned that all lawyers want more clients, which is pretty obvious, but even though I thought I knew the answer, I still made sure to ask.

And the three biggest fears, the three biggest things that lawyers wanted to avoid is they wanted to avoid losing time and money, and they wanted to avoid getting screwed by a marketing company.

So that’s why pretty much everything I do, even the cover, even my book is called How to get more law firm clients without losing time and money or getting screwed by a marketing company.

What You Can Do

So what you can do is this: You take the answers of your ask campaign and you figure out what do most people want and what’s the thing that most of them want to avoid?

And then I would create what’s called a how-to without statement. So, you say, how to get more law firm clients without losing time, money or getting screwed by a marketing company. It’s pretty simple. And then once you do that, then you can take that content and use it in all of your marketing.

So if you’re a bankruptcy attorney, instead of How to file for bankruptcy you can say, How to eliminate all of your debt and get the bill collectors to stop calling you without losing your house.

Or if you’re a DUI attorney, instead of How to continue driving for DUI clients, you can say, How to continue driving to work even after a DUI to make sure that you don’t lose your job so you don’t lose your house.

That’s basically what you do. You figure out how do they get what they want while avoiding what they’re afraid of and it’s like running downhill from there. It’s so easy when you do that. It’s all about the messaging.

The Question:

I want to run Facebook ads for an ebook for a child custody law firm to get emails.

My Answer:

Is there any targeting I can do aside from age, location? Okay, so correct me if I’m wrong but I think you’re trying to run Facebook ads to promote an ebook for child custody. And you’re just trying to gather email addresses and you want to know what the targeting is.

The Title of The Book

The title of the ebook has to be some really juicy topic, almost clickbait. I hate saying clickbait but it is what it is. You’re trying to get somebody to click on your stuff, so what you need to do is either write on a really good topic and your ad needs to be really good.

How to Target Your Audience

And then you need to figure out what to target. Obviously, you can target age, location, and gender. The other thing you can target on Facebook is whether they have kids. I think you can actually break it down. Do they have a newborn, do they have toddlers and do they have elementary school-age, middle school-age, high school-age, or adult children.

So you can use all those different things. But one of the things that I really like doing is creating a really, really juicy topic that will naturally attract people that are in my demographic. Then I create a custom audience, so what I’ll do is to make sure to use a Facebook pixel.

I’ll use a really good ad, a really good topic to get them on the page, and then the pixel is going to basically start building this custom audience of everyone that went to that page. And then you’ll have this custom audience that basically consists of the people that you want to attract, and then you build a look-alike audience off of that.

What I Would Do

That’s probably how I would do it. It’s always a little difficult to start, just because of the fact that you can’t select child custody issues. There was one thing that we did for a personal injury attorney that was really interesting though.

I didn’t think it was going work, but we tried it and it worked. We just used the interest ‘personal injury attorneys,’ so I wonder if Facebook is always changing. I haven’t looked for a while; I don’t know if they have any interest for divorce or family law attorneys or anything like that, but you might want to check different interests like that.

That’s probably the best way to do it. Have a really, really good blog topic that’s going to attract them and then create a Facebook custom audience with those people and then do a lookalike audience.

I saw something today that made me feel frustrated. Actually, I see this all the time and lawyers are often victims of this, so I wanted to tell you about it.

There is one of the Google guys, like a PR, he puts out a lot of information from Google, and his name is John Mueller. Somebody asked him about a Google partnership search engine optimization company, that’s a company that does search engine optimization, and that has a partnership for search engine optimization with Google.

What’s The Issue With Google “Partnerships”?

There are all these marketing companies out there that will tell you, “Oh, we’re Google certified, we’ve got all these partnerships with Google,” and it’s a lie. There is no such thing as a Google search engine optimization partner, so if any marketing company comes to you and tells you, “Oh yeah, we’ve got this partnership with Google.” They’re lying.

What It Takes To Get That “Certification”

Okay, so maybe they’re not exactly lying, but they’re misleading you. They could have a Google partnership with AdWords, but a Google partner with AdWords is a joke. All you have to do is take this 100-question test, and you can literally Google the answer to every question on the test. It’s a joke.

It’s a marketing gimmick. Do not hire someone based on the fact that they say that they have this special relationship with Google because they do not have a special relationship with Google. They’ve got a certification that everyone has. I used to have it too.

I don’t have it anymore just because it doesn’t mean anything. I didn’t even bother renewing my certification or my Google partner status, just because it’s a joke.

The Truth About Special “Relationships” With Google

If you’re talking to a search engine optimization company and they say, “We have a special relationship with Google that allows us to get better rankings,” or get better links or whatever it is, run as fast as you can the other direction. There’s no such thing.

I already knew there wasn’t, but John Mueller from Google just confirmed that there is no such partnership with Google. There’s my quick little PSA. If anyone is telling you they have a partnership with Google for search engine optimization, they’re lying.