Digital Marketing

About a week ago, my wife called me and said, hey, we need a water softener because her skin is very dry. I went to Google, and I found a lot of different companies. And here we are, one week later, and the water softener is being installed right now.

The Process Of Making A Buying Decision

This is a $7,000 product, and I wanted to document how I made my buying decision. The reason that I’m filming this video is that I want to show you how people think when they’re faced with a decision where they’re going to spend a lot of money.

They’re not exactly sure who to turn to, so they’re just going to Google. They don’t know one company from another. I ended up going with Culligan, but Culligan was not my first choice. But, I want to show you the actual search results that led me to have Culligan install my water softener.

The Google Search Process

When I first did my search, I did a search for water softener. Because I’m located in Lakeland, this brought up companies that were close to me.

The first page results included Atlantic Filter of Polk County. They had 60 reviews and 3.1 stars. They were not going to get a phone call from me, not for a product that’s expensive. I kind of had an idea of how much it was going to be, but I didn’t know it exactly. But, 3.1 is automatically a disqualifier.

Reviews Make A Big Difference

The second one I checked out was a Kinetico. These guys looked pretty good. I saw they have 4.6 stars based on 25 reviews. I started reading their reviews, and I scrolled down, and then something else caught my eye…

How I Found The Winner

I looked at a company in Tampa with 284 reviews. Now, these guys are not on the first page of Google, but they’ve got 284 reviews, and that made me click over to them. I started looking at their reviews, I read the reviews, I called them, and they got the purchase.

By the way, I did this completely organically. I wasn’t trying to film a video. I wasn’t even really thinking about any of this. Basically, this is just the natural progression of how my search went.

The Highest Number Of Good Reviews Wins

What happened was that my almost $7,000 worth of business went to a company that was not on the first page of Google when I searched for a water softener. It also was not the closest one to me. In fact, I was actually looking at another one, and the only thing that changed my decision was that they had 284 reviews versus the 25 reviews of the other company.

I didn’t know who Kinetico was, I’ve heard of Culligan, but I don’t really know anything about them. It could have been the other way round, but it was the number of good reviews that made the difference.
The lesson for lawyers…

This is why I tell lawyers all the time.., you’ve got to get not only a lot of reviews, but you’ve got to get the most reviews in your market. This is so important because people when they don’t know who you are, will go with the most amount of good reviews.

If they knew who you were, they would search for you by name, but they don’t know who you are. What they do is they search for a personal injury lawyer, estate planning attorney, bankruptcy attorney, or DUI lawyer, and then, they look at what other people have to say.

How To Win More Business As A Lawyer

The lawyers that have the highest number of good reviews typically will get the phone call even in a situation where they’re not number one. They’ll get the call even when they’re not on the first page, and you are. There’s a good chance that they are going to get phone calls. Just keep that in mind.

I just wanted to show you that this is what happened when I was searching for a service, and I figured it was an excellent example to show how reviews are a pivotal part in today’s marketing world.

Here’s a quick tip about how to increase your conversion optimization. In fact, you’re probably indirectly increasing your actual rankings as well.

When more people engage with your Google listing, then what ends up happening is that your rankings increase as well, because that’s how Google and RankBrain work.

Why You Should Reply To Your Reviews

You may put a lot of time and effort into getting reviews. But, what I’ve noticed is that a lot of lawyers don’t reply to the reviews to say thank you for leaving a high-quality review. So, I’m going to show you real quick how to do that.

How To Properly Reply To Your Reviews

You can access all of your reviews on one screen, and reply to them all at once. First, go to google.com/places. Once you’re there, click on the listing, i.e., the name, and then on the left side, you’re going to see “reviews.”

All you have to do is click on “reviews.” Now, you’ll see all your reviews, and there’s even “replied” and “haven’t replied.” You can even sort by that.

Then, all you have to do is click reply, type your reply, and then hit reply. You can even go down the entire list and knock out all of your replies to your reviews. It would be even better if you can write one or two sentences in reply to each review.

A Bonus Benefit To Reply To Reviews

This practice also protects you from getting reviews filtered by Google. It doesn’t happen very often, and it’s not as bad as on Yelp.

But, every once in a while, Google will filter reviews that it doesn’t think are legitimate. We have found that when you reply to reviews, there’s less of a chance of them getting filtered.

Today, I want to talk to you about something that is super cool. It’s the amazing power of social media. Sometimes, my videos are a little more theoretical and philosophical.

But, this is an actual video where I want to tell you a story about how we used social media to get my client some cases immediately. If you use social media in this way, you can really do a lot of damage and outsmart your competition.

The Incident That Started It All

But, this is an actual video where I want to tell you a story about how we used social media to get my client some cases immediately. If you use social media in this way, you can really do a lot of damage and outsmart your competition.

About two years ago, there were two train crashes. One was in Long Island, New York, and I believe the other one was in Brooklyn, New York.

I remember I was sitting in my office at nine o’clock in the morning, and my phone rang. It was my client, a personal injury attorney up in Manhattan. He was panicked because there was a train crash.

He said, “we’ve got to figure out how to get into this area and do search engine optimization to get some of these victims to hire us.” He was thinking let’s do some SEO. Of course, that’s not going to work.

Why SEO Won’t Work

You can’t have an event that’s unfolding and immediately think that you’re going to outrank all the news articles that are popping up. It’s just not going to happen. In New York, there are major publications like CNN, NBC News, and MSNBC that are covering it, and you’re not going to outrank them.

You’re also not going to outrank the local affiliate stations or the New York Post and the New York Times. So what do you do? How do you get in front of the types of people that you know might be likely to hire you for some of these cases?

What We Did instead

So here’s what we did. I told him that I need you to pull out your phone and I need you to quickly record a video, giving your opinion about the crash. I don’t know how much you know about these crashes, but apparently, there’s some sort of braking system that is federally mandated to be on all of the trains nationwide.

Apparently, it wasn’t on either of these trains. The two times this happened, we talked about is how this train crash should have never occurred because the train should have had this automatic braking system.

When it approaches a curve, it was going too fast. The system would have automatically slowed the train down. It didn’t have that, and that’s what caused the crash.  

The Targeted Facebook Ad

I told him to give me videos on the crash, but not to make it a sales pitch. Instead, give your opinion and talk about maybe some of the other train crashes that you’ve been involved in.

He gave his opinion on the crash, then his credibility, and sent me the video. We spent about $1,000, went to Facebook, and dropped a pin.

On Facebook, there’s a section when you do your targeting that says people that have been in this location. I went to Facebook and found the exact location of the crash. I also selected people that have been in this location within the last seven days.

Anyone that’s been at that location within the last seven days is now going to see that ad. Especially if they’re playing on their phones, and usually when there’s some event, people are on their phones. They’re taking pictures, they’re tweeting about it, and they’re posting on Facebook.

What we did is we served the ads only to people that were in that location within the last seven days, which means everyone that was in that train crash. Anyone that went to that location who had a family member or a friend or anyone that was in the train crash would also see that ad for the next seven days.

It was an ad, but it was technically not an ad. It was a video talking about his opinion on the train crash. What ended up happening was we spent about $1000. We did it for one day, and he got a few cases out of it.

Why It Worked

It worked because we were able to create content very quickly. We didn’t have to write a blog post or have a full production team. We didn’t have anything like that. He literally just pulled out his phone, recorded a video, sent it to me, uploaded it to Facebook, created an ad, and hit run.

What You Can Do

That’s the power of social media and how amazing it is right now. You can take advantage of unfolding news events as they’re happening with things like that. If there’s a train crash, a big car pileup, or whatever it is, pull out your phone, record your opinion on it, throw a couple of hundred dollars at it and blanket the area everywhere.

You need to target everyone that’s been in that area within the last seven days. You’ll probably get some people that have been affected by whatever’s happening, and maybe even some cases out of it.

This guy got a lot of phone calls and a few cases, so you’ll at least get some, phone calls and some opportunities to close some people.

I’ve also done this with other clients before that have called me in a panic when things like this occur. I tell them that we need to take advantage of this and give them the same strategy every single time.

Some of them have done it and gotten cases, whereas some just haven’t done it for whatever reason. What that tells me is that there are a lot of people out there that will not take advantage of this type of exposure, even though it’s so easy. Just pull out your phone, give your opinion, and run the ad.

That’s all you have to do. I hope that it’ll give you some inspiration, where you can put yourself right in front of the current event and get clients that way.

I was talking to a client today, and they were saying that they were getting a lot of phone calls, but most of the callers were broke. They said they didn’t have any money. So, what I told that client is that there’s a very simple way to handle this and the first thing you have to do is you have to change your mindset.

Stop Believing Them

You have to understand that nobody wants to spend money, but nobody expects to call a lawyer and expects that lawyer to work for free either. You have to accept that people do have money. Even if they tell you they don’t, they’re lying. They have loans, they have personal credit cards, and they have family members that can lend them money if necessary.

That’s kind of the first thing you have to do. You have to stop believing people when they tell you that they have no money. And the very simple solution and the very simple response to the ‘I have no money’ objection is, “Well, isn’t that why you’re here in the first place?”

How To Convince Them It’s In Their Best Interest To Come Up With The Money

For example, if they have a DUI, then you could say, “Well, you don’t have any money, but how do you plan to make money if you don’t have a car, if you can’t drive to work? How do you plan to make money if you lose your job because you get convicted of a DUI?”

If it’s a family law attorney or a family law client, you could say, “Well, how do you plan to keep all this money that you supposedly don’t have and how do you plan to have money in the future if you don’t hire a lawyer to make sure that you’re not paying way too much money in child support? You can also say, “how do you plan to ensure that you’re actually getting the child support that you need and the child support that you deserve if you don’t hire a lawyer?”

You’re simply not going to achieve that result in the future. So it’s much cheaper now whether it’s a DUI or a criminal defense charge or a bankruptcy. You can even say, “Hey listen, how do you plan to buy a house and fix your credit in the future if you don’t hire a lawyer now to take care of all this debt and get you on the right path and go through the bankruptcy process or go through the credit repair process?” or whatever it happens to be.

What you have to do is you have to take the objection “I don’t have any money” and turn that into “Well, if you want to have money in the future, then you need to find the money, so that you could hire a lawyer now.”

This works well when you kind of use this mindset. It helps people realize, “oh yeah, I kind of do need to hire a lawyer now because I’m going to save a lot more money in the future.” And again, nobody wants to spend money. Everybody hates parting with their money. Even I hate parting with my money.

An Interesting Psychological Trick

Another thing that’s kind of an interesting psychological trick that you can use, and I do this on presentations. Immediately after I drop the price, I throw my best testimonial that I have in there.

What you could do is when you tell them the price, you could say “this will cost you about $3,000 for my firm to represent you” and then throw in a story about a client that you helped. You could say something like “well, it will probably cost about $3,000 for my friend to represent you.”

How To Use Examples And Testimonials

You can also say, “We have a lot of experience with cases like this. In fact, just recently, we went to the DMV hearing for a client who was kind of in the same scenario as you and these were the results that we got for him. Obviously, I’m not saying it’s going to happen for you but you know, these are different things that we’ve achieved for clients in the past. “

If you can figure out some way to drop some sort of positive experience or testimonial, that’ll help. I obviously can’t just pull out your phone and say, here’s a testimonial from a client but basically, if you can do something that justifies that price immediately after you tell them the price, you’re going to have a lot of success.

That’s what we do in presentations all the time. We call it a price drop — whenever there’s a price drop, you always follow it with an immediate success story because people hate parting with their money. Just a quick tip, it’s a common complaint that we get a lot of people saying, nobody has any money.

Well, your services are not cheap, with the exception of personal injury since its contingency based. If you’re a criminal defense lawyer, bankruptcy lawyer, these are expensive services and a lot of times, they’re unexpected expenses as well.

People do not want to spend money, and they might not necessarily have the money, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get the money. So keep that mindset and go ahead and get those clients.

I want to show you something that really demonstrates the challenge that you have with local search engine optimization. Google bases the Maps Pack, which are the maps that pop up when you do a Google search, on where the searcher is actually searching from. I want to show you a perfect example of how your ranking can vary, depending on where someone searches from.

I found this really cool tool called Local Falcon. What’s cool about it is you can put a business in, and it’ll tell you exactly where they rank depending on where you search. I found a random criminal defense lawyer, Mark A. Joseph, PA. He’s a criminal defense lawyer in Tampa. He’s, actually in Temple Terrace, but I want to use him as an example.

Using Local Falcon To Find Your Local Rankings

We’re going to enter his information in there. You can see he’s located right in this particular area. This tool is going to search from different locations, all within one kilometer apart from each other. But you can see how he ranks depending on where you search from.

You can see in the middle, he’s getting good, and now when we get a little farther away from where he’s located, he’s ranking #5, #4, #4, #6, #5, #6. You can see he’s located right here, and he’s all green. He’s #1, #1, #2. Basically, the farther away he is, his rankings drop, which is a very good indication of how things are going with Google.

Right around the center, he’s holding strong, but you can see on the outskirts, he starts dropping a little bit. You can see how searcher location and searcher proximity have a direct impact on your actual rankings.

I’d be very interested to know if there are more attorneys focused in these areas over here, just because of the fact that he’s #3 here, but he’s #9 further away. This is the type of fluctuation that you get when you’re dealing with Google.

Try This Tool Today!

If you want to try this tool, it’s called LocalFalcon.com. I think you can do a 3×3 map for free. It gives you a good indication of where you’re ranking and, where you’re showing up, and where you’re not showing up.

Increasing Your Location Relevance

One thing that we found works for increasing the relevancy of your location and showing up for more locations is if you get links from local organizations.

I put out a video a little while ago talking about how to get links from local sports organizations, like youth baseball, soccer, basketball, football, etc. You can get those organizations to link to you by contacting them and making a donation and then showing up in the sponsorship section of their website.

The other thing that I’ve heard works, that I’ve been testing, and we don’t have definitive data on this yet, but I’ve been hearing some information about putting a keyword in your actual business name for your Google My Business Listing.

I know technically you’re not supposed to do this, but we’ve been seeing it working well for a lot of different people. Google says not to do it, but they’re still rewarding the businesses that are doing it.

That’s something else that I have heard increases your radius and kind of removes a little bit of the proximity to the searcher effect on your listing.