Digital Marketing

What Is A Live Chat Box?

We provide all of our clients with a live chat box that’s staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week by a real person. The script that the operators use is based on questions that we ask our clients, like what kind of practice areas do you want? Where do you take cases? Different things like that.

How Does A Live Chat Box Help You Get Leads?

There’s another cool thing about this chat box that a lot of chat services don’t offer. We can put a lead through to our client’s office in real time. This is awesome, and it increases the conversion rates, because a lot of times somebody may not want to pick up the phone.

They’ll be on the website, and they’ll have questions. But, they won’t necessarily take the time to pick up the phone, dial the number, and sit there. When they’re chatting with an operator, which a lot of people will do, the operator can say, would you like me to put you through to the office in real time?

And the person says yes. All they have to do is provide their phone number, and then our client’s phone rings and there’s a robot voice. It says you’re getting a lead from your website and it’s called a whisper.

After that, there’s a two-second pause, and then the system dials the lead’s number. Then, the lead’s phone rings just as if our client had called them.

A Live Chat Box Is Completely Free To Our Clients

Of course, the whole thing is automated. Now, I’m not just bragging about how great our client service is. We offer this service to any lawyer who wants it completely free.

I thought that I had made a video about this before, but apparently, I hadn’t, because I noticed that not a lot of people signed up for the chat box. I wasn’t sure why because it’s completely free.

There are a lot of companies out there that will charge a $200 setup fee and then $35 per lead. But, we don’t do that. What we do is we charge no setup fee and then if there’s a lead, then you just pay $10 per lead. Now, if there’s no lead, for example, if you go a month or two months or five months without any leads on your website, then you don’t owe any money.

You Only Pay For “Good” Leads

You only get billed for what you use. Now you may be wondering what constitutes a lead? Well, when you sign up for the chat box, you’re going to answer a bunch of questions. What type of cases do you want? What geographical locations do you want these cases in?

If you’re a divorce lawyer in Boston, you’re only going to get leads that are in the practice areas that you specify. So, if you get a car accident in Austin, our operators are pretty good, and that wouldn’t get through anyway.

But if it did for some reason, if you get something that’s irrelevant to you, you’re not going to get charged. The other thing is that you get charged for leads only if we get either a telephone number or an email address from the actual lead. If you have no way to contact them, then it’s not an actual lead.

How To Request A Free Live Chat Box

If you’re interested in this tool that helps increase your conversions, all you have to do is go to chat.socialfirestarter.com. Complete the form, and we’ll reach out to you to get it set up on your website. Again, it’s free.

The only thing you’ll ever pay for is $10 per lead. And that’s for strong leads only. A valid lead is a lead that is in your geographical area, in your practice area, and we get either the email address or the phone number.

Get Real-Time Calls To Your Office

We can even put calls through to your office in real time during your office hours. If you only want to take calls 9 to 5, that’s fine. We can instruct the operators not to put leads through after 5:00 PM. There’s no additional charge for that.

We do this just because it increases conversion rates. We don’t make a lot of money on this. It’s just a white label product that we offer to our clients. It increases conversions, and I’m always about offering value to other lawyers. If you’re interested, sign up at chat.socialfirestarter.com

A client called me yesterday and was pretty frantic because when he Googled his name, another ad for another attorney popped up above him. He’s not running pay per click ads, but this other law firm is using his law firm’s name as one of the keywords to trigger an ad on social media.

My client’s a pretty prominent attorney in New York City. I’m not going to tell you his name, but he’s very well-known.

What Can Be Done When This Happens To You?

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot you can do about it. You can obviously bid higher on your own name. If you’re sending people to your website, you’re using your name, and your name appears on the website, then in theory, the way that Google AdWords works, you should outrank them.

That’s because your quality scores should be much higher because you are more relevant to the search term, be it your name, the law firm’s name, or whatever the brand name happens to be that they are targeting.

But can you stop them? No, not really. I’ve seen many cases, typically not necessarily for attorneys, but a lot of times for products. I know there are a lot of lawsuits happening right now over this exact thing, including one law firm bidding on another law firm’s name.

Should You Be Worried?

Here are a couple of things to think about. First of all, if someone is searching for your law firm’s name, there’s a good chance that they’re actually looking for you.

I always tell my clients, don’t worry too much about it because unless you are a huge attorney, like for example Morgan and Morgan, which are a huge law firm on the East Coast of the US, it would make sense to target Morgan and Morgan or forthepeople.com (their slogan).

It would make sense that you could target someone who’s searching for John Morgan or Morgan and Morgan or for the people with your brand. Still, the only reason that that makes sense to me is because of the sheer volume of people that are searching for those attorneys by name.

They spent so much money on advertising that it makes sense that someone is searching for them because they’re looking for a personal injury attorney and trying to find their information.

But again, most law firms don’t have to worry about this. If someone is searching for your name, it’s likely because they’re looking for you. Another ad for another attorney is not going to make a difference.

So, What Can Happen?

Another marketer commented that their client was bidding on another attorney’s name, and most of the calls that they got were people thinking that they were calling the other attorney and it was a lot of, oh, sorry, the wrong number, and then they hung up.

If someone’s bidding on your name, there’s not a lot you can do about it, but you can rest assured that they’re probably not going to be getting much out of it.

Going For A Comparison

Now in the instance of Morgan and Morgan, how can you use that for your benefit if you wanted to do that? Instead of just running a blanket ad, you could target someone and say how we compare to Morgan and Morgan, or before hiring Morgan and Morgan, read this article, and it can be a comparison.

I know of different products and services that have done this, like big brands. For example, if someone’s searching for Coke, Pepsi could run an ad and say, before you drink Coke, make sure that you read this article that shows that Pepsi wins all taste tests.

I’m just making this up off the top of my head. But there are a lot of instances where that’s happened. As long as you’re not pretending to be the brand, you can call on another brand, and you can say, “hey, before you hire Morgan and Morgan, check us out” or “here’s why you should hire us instead of Morgan and Morgan.”  

From different lawsuits that happened in the past, I believe that it’s been ruled or upheld that that type of advertising is okay. Now again, I’m not a lawyer. Don’t take my advice as the final word, but that’s the idea here.

What If You Call Google?

If you call Google, they won’t do anything about it. We had a client not too long ago where somebody was running paid traffic to their website, and I have no idea why they were doing that or who they were. To this day, we still don’t know why it happened or who was doing it.

We called Google first to try to figure out who was doing it, and second to try to make it stop. This is because what they were doing is running ads to our client’s website for pro bono legal work.

When someone searched for a free attorney, they were putting our client’s information up, and people were clicking it. They were thinking that they were going to get a free attorney. They were wasting all of our client’s time with people that thought that he was going to represent them for free.

He reached out and said, “You’ve got to get this to stop.” I called Google, and I argued with them for hours, and they wouldn’t turn it off. It’s difficult to make Google do anything. Just don’t stress about it too much if somebody is bidding on your brand name.

Unless you’re Morgan and Morgan, then maybe you need to think about it a little bit more. But for the most part, for 99.99% of attorneys out there, it doesn’t matter. People are probably wasting their money when they’re bidding on your name.

The Self-Liquidating Offer

In short, a self-liquidating offer is designed to get the attention of potential clients using email opt-ins, purchase offers or other similar draws. It becomes self-liquidating at the point when the cost of advertising is offset completely. One way to accomplish this is by offering a free product to potential clients.

They pay the shipping costs and receive the product with a money back guarantee, creating a low-risk for the client and a great opportunity for them to rethink their marketing efforts. This is the type of offer most firms agree offers the best opportunities for attracting new clients.

Using Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are a great way to draw potential clients. The intricacies of targeting the right audience are already addressed in Facebook’s own algorithms. Your ads target a local audience and using a third party, such as Click Funnels, to manage the campaign, you can quickly and efficiently create a self-liquidating offer that will cover your Facebook ads and the third-party campaign management. Here’s how that works:

Determine what it is you want to offer potential clients.

Let’s say you’re an estate planning attorney and many of your clients have questioned the benefits and less-than-ideal scenarios of changing the estate tax exemption and what it might mean for their own estate planning efforts. Many questions you typically hear might focus around the confusion of having assets in more than one state or if the life insurance policy purchased years earlier to offset some of the taxes is still enough to serve its purpose.

Once you have it outlined, address all of those concerns, provide a few scenarios that a client might commonly find themselves facing and then provide your expertise on how to make the most of the new estate planning laws. You might want to discuss the possible pitfalls, and you’ll want to discuss how a quick review can help ensure their estate planning is current and will benefit their heirs when the time comes.

All of this information, whether it’s a video or audio recording, maybe a quick worksheet or other benefits, is placed on a USB or thumb drive that you offer for free.

The $10 Investment

The clients happily pay the $9.95 shipping offer because first, it’s going to answer their questions, second, it’s an affordable way to get to the heart of the matter before they contact you to make the changes and third, they know there’s a money back guarantee -and they get to keep the thumb drive.

You cover the costs of the thumb drive, your Click Funnels campaign (which you can successfully create for less than $100), as well as the costs of the Facebook ads. You’ve now created a powerful marketing opportunity for your firm and the best part? It hasn’t cost you a single penny.

Breaking Even and Building Trust

Remember, this is something that you’re not aiming to launch for a profit; you want to break even and build trust, which will then gets the phones ringing.

I had a client that I was talking to, and they were really struggling getting reviews. This is a common thing with a lot of different law firms, especially family law, criminal defense, and other practice areas where you don’t necessarily want to air out your dirty business.

Nobody wants to thank their criminal defense attorney for getting those pesky child porn charges dropped. Sometimes it’s very difficult to get people that want to actually leave you reviews.

One tip that we give our clients all the time is that the reviews that you get do not necessarily have to be client reviews. What I mean by that is you can have a friend, a family member, a next-door neighbor, anybody that can vouch for your character.

Trading Reviews With Other Attorneys

What you can do is you can have them go on your Google listing and say, “If I were ever arrested for DUI, John Smith is the guy I would want to hire. He’s knowledgeable, he knows the law, he cares about his clients.” You can even get another attorney to do it. What I always tell my clients is, trade reviews with other attorneys. They could say, “My name is Mike Smith, and as a family law attorney, I know that Bill Johnson is extremely knowledgeable on the law. I know that he handles himself very well in the courtroom. I know that he cares about his clients and if I was ever arrested, he’s the first guy I would call.”

You don’t necessarily have to have actual client reviews, but you can have people that vouch for your character, that talk about how knowledgeable you are, how much you care about the law, how much you care about your clients, how good of a job you do, and how long you’ve been an attorney. All that good stuff. For example, “I’ve known John Smith for 15 years. He’s dedicated to his work. He’s dedicated to his clients, and he will not let you down.”

Anything like that is a great source of review. It all counts.  When you’re not able to get clients to leave you reviews, it doesn’t mean that you can’t have reviews. You have to have reviews somewhere.

I’m going to show you how you can share an ad with a marketing company or somebody you’re trying to share an ad with for feedback. A lot of times people don’t know how to share ads, so I thought I’d show you exactly how to do it in a really easy way.

We’re in Ads Manager right now at business.facebook.com. You’re going to click on the campaign that has the ad in it, then click on the ad set, and then you’re going to open up one of the ads.

We’ll just hit edit. Now, you can only do this after the ad has been published and this doesn’t work until the ad has been published.

What you’re going to do is now look at the ad preview. You’re going to click this button right here, and then you’re going to see post, Facebook post with comments.

What’s cool about this is that you get a URL. So now, you can take this URL, send it to anybody, and it will go directly to the post.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to look at two ads and discuss why they’re not getting great results. I want to show you what you should be doing instead and what you can do.

The first is a video. The text is “Stop scrolling. Our attorney Charles Grimes wants to tell you a secret. Well, seven secrets. Learn the seven secrets insurance companies don’t want you to know and find out how to maximize your recovery when dealing with the insurance adjuster.”

There’s a video with this gentleman talking right here in front of a painting, in front of what looks like a conference room. “Learn the seven secrets insurance companies don’t want you to know. Don’t let the insurance adjust it for you.” The other one, “Do you need to speak with a personal injury attorney? Before the insurance company harasses you, find out how to ensure you will be fairly compensated and taken care of. Speak with an attorney, blah blah blah.”

Here’s the problem with both of these. There’s no pattern interrupt. When I look at this one, “Stop scrolling. Our attorney Charles Grimes wants to tell you a secret. Well, seven secrets.” I guess maybe you’re invoking curiosity there, but there’s just nothing there that says, “Hey. Have you been in a car accident? You need to talk to a lawyer.” I’m assuming it’s car accidents, but it doesn’t say anything about car accidents.

What Do I Do In My Ads?

What you need to do is make it a lot more apparent about what you’re actually doing. Let me show you mine. This is an ad that I’m running and it works really well. I’m going to show you the elements that I have going in this ad and why it works so well.

You see the top here? “Hey Lawyers!?” I’m advertising to lawyers and this whole thing is trying to get people to download my cheat sheet, “The three secrets to getting more law clients from social media.” Everything in this ad is deliberate and it has a purpose, and I’m going to go over all that.

Pattern Interrupt

The first thing, right away, “Hey Lawyers.” It’s in a big, red box. Anyone that’s scrolling through their newsfeed is going to stop and see that. The other thing, look at the color of the video. You see how the color’s kind of contrasty? It’s got an interesting background. There’s some red back here and a light here. I’m a little saturated in the middle. That’s something that makes this pop out.

Right off the beginning, I’ve got a pattern interrupt. What a pattern interrupt is when somebody’s scrolling through their news feed and they’re scrolling, you’ve got to get their attention. The bottom line is that, especially on the phone and wherever you’re looking at this, you’ve got to have something that gets their attention.

When you look at this, this video right here is not going to get their attention. No offense. I’m sure Charles Grimes is a nice guy, but he looks like a stuffy attorney in a stuffy attorney’s office. There’s nothing about this… “Our attorney, Charles Grimes, wants to tell you a secret. Well, seven secrets.” Okay, that’s fine.

The headline, “Learn the seven secrets insurance companies don’t want you to know.” What insurance companies? Homeowners insurance companies? Are you talking about my car insurance companies? I don’t know what kind of insurance company. My health insurance? But, it’s not calling out a problem.

Using An Opportunity Switch

Look at my ad again. Look at the texture. “Most lawyers struggle to get leads using social media because they have a very old, but common method that almost everyone uses. What I’m trying to do here is what’s called an opportunity switch. What I talk about is here’s the old way. Most lawyers, they’re using an old method. What if I told you there’s a new way that allows you to get better leads at a better cost. “

I don’t know that you can do that with personal injury because personal injury’s a little more tricky, but there’s different things you can do. What you could do is something that says, “Injured in a car accident?” or even just “Car accident?” This gets their attention and before you do anything, you’ve got to get their attention.

An ad that I run that is pretty interesting is an ad that says, “Most people don’t realize that…” Or I’ll say something like, “Did you know that a recent study found that when you have an injury attorney help you with your car accident claim, you get a settlement that’s 2.5 times larger than if you didn’t have one?” And then I put in there a text, “Who’s been in a car accident?” or “Tag someone who’s been in a car accident.” or “Tag someone who needs an attorney” or something that’s a little more enticing.

“Seven secrets the insurance companies don’t want you to know” is fine, but what I would do is say something like, “Did you know that after a car accident, the insurance adjuster will often try to call you as soon as possible to get a statement from you and will pretend to be your friend, but they’re really not. They’re trying to act quickly to save money. Learn this tip and six more sneaky ways the insurance companies will try to trick you following a car accident.” You want to keep their interest a little bit.

There’s got to be a pattern and it’s got to be interesting. You have to remember, when they go to Facebook, they’re looking at cat videos, pictures of their friends, their family, etc. They’re not here to see what attorney Charles Grimes has to tell. They don’t care, unless they know how it affects them.

If they’ve been in a car accident and there’s something that grabs their attention because of this car accident and then there’s a video there that is talking about something that’s related to a car accident, and it says, “Did you know that a car insurance company is going to trick you,” that’s something that will get their attention because it relates to them.

That’s kind of the whole problem with this ad. There’s no pattern interrupt. It’s not descriptive enough.

In the past, we’ve done things like, “Three ways the insurance company tries to blame all motorcycle accidents on the rider,” whether it was their fault or not. Something like that is much more descriptive, as well as more appealing, which is the biggest thing.

I think if you just make that change, you’re going to see a huge change in your performance in the ads. That’s the same thing here. The copy here is a little better because at least you’ve got some cool video. If you listen to the audio, it’s very generic. It’s just an ad. You don’t want an ad. You want something that is actually going to entice them with content.

I’m not sure if you bought my Facebook marketing guide, and I’m not trying to sell my guide here, but my guide talks all about content marketing, which works well.

There’s a saying, even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while. These types of ads just don’t work very well. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and find one, but we’ve had that happen before when we used to run these type of ads. When you do the content marketing, it works way better.

Using How To Without Statements

Let me talk about your landing page. You do Learn More, and it takes you to this landing page. I like that you’re going to a landing page. “Discover what you need to know when dealing with the insurance company.” Here’s another tip. I would do a “How To Without” statement for this entire thing. I do that quite frequently now.

If you look at my sheet here, it is “Three secrets to getting more law clients from social media.” If you can see this thumbnail right here, it’s the three secrets to getting more law clients from social media without getting screwed by a marketing company.

That’s following the How To format, it just doesn’t have “how” at the beginning. What that format is How To and then insert the thing that they want, and then Without, and then insert the thing that they fear.

This is the three secrets, but then the thing that they want is more law clients from social media. I know that because I know my clients. I know what a lot of clients are wanting and getting screwed by a marketing company is the thing that they fear.

I have another version of this that the without is without losing time and money. That’s another thing that lawyers don’t want. How do we apply this to personal injury? What you could do is you could do “How to get your medical bills covered following a motorcycle accident without getting ripped off  by the insurance company” or “How to make sure that you get all the money owed to you following a car accident without a big battle with the insurance company.”

You can play around with that format and make it work because it’s enticing. You’re showing them how to do the thing they want without the thing that they fear.

With a bankruptcy attorney, you can do “How to file bankruptcy without losing your house.” A Family law attorney could do “How to get divorced without alienating your kids.” If you’re targeting men, for example, you could do “How fathers can get divorced and get equal custody of their children.”

I say this to attorneys all the time. You need to stop thinking like an attorney and start thinking like a consumer. Put yourself in the shoes of the person who’s going to be looking for you and see if they can figure out what it is. Show this landing page to somebody that has no idea what it is, no idea what the purpose of this is, and ask them if they can figure out. What is the content? When I click yes, show me the secrets, when I do this, and I enter my email address, what am I going to do.

What is the topic here? Find out the secrets the insurance companies don’t want you to know. What insurance company? Car insurance? Is this how to get your premiums lower?

Make It Stupid Simple

It’s got to be stupid simple, that’s the whole thing. I have a client who, it’s a coaching client of mine. His videos were very complicated, and he even told me, “My sister watches some of my videos and didn’t have any idea what I was talking about.”

I said, “There’s a good indication right there, and I’m calling you out on this…Look. You need to record a set of videos. Don’t tell your sister at all what these videos are about. Send her the video and ask you to give you a summary of each video. If she can’t figure it out, then it’s too complicated.”

That’s the same thing you should do. You should send your ad, your landing page, etc. to someone who is just an average person, who doesn’t know what this is and see if they can figure it out because sometimes you get so blinded.

“Find out the secrets insurance companies don’t want you to know.” You know in your head that you’re talking about the car insurance company. You’re talking about following a car accident. Looking at this, I have no idea. I’m assuming that’s what it is. There’s no reason that I’m going to enter my information.

First of all, I’m probably not going to end up even clicking on this page. But then if I do, it needs to be so enticing that I’m going to give you my email address and commit to getting whatever is here. That’s why this works so well because on this page right here, I’ve captured their attention. I’ve captured their interest because we’re talking about here is the old way of doing something, here is the new way of doing something. Download this guide for the new way of doing something.

When they get there, three secrets to getting more law clients from social media, that’s what they want. They want more law clients, and they want to do it through social media. And then they get here, three secrets to getting more law clients on social media. That’s exactly what they want. They know what they’re going to get. They’re going to get some sort of guide that’s going to teach them how to get more law clients on social media.

This right here, I’m not sure what I’m going to get, and I’m not sure what the point of it is. To come through here, even more, they don’t know exactly what it is. It’s got to be more descriptive. That’s just my whole thing. If you change this from “Learn the seven secrets the insurance companies don’t want you to know” you can even change this to “seven secrets car insurance companies don’t want drivers to know following an accident,” or something similar. Just remember you can’t say “no” or “you.”

As for the video, I would probably figure out a way to do a different video.  If you go to my YouTube channel, there’s a video called, the Eight essential elements of a law firm Facebook ad. This breaks down every piece of the ad that I showed you that I created.

I highly recommend you go through and watch that video and then film another video. Doing that, you’ll realize that there’s a lot of elements. Everything in here, including every word, serves a purpose. I want you to understand you’ll have a lot more luck.