Digital Marketing

I recently received a question in the Lawyer Marketing Facebook group. If you’re not part of the group, head to Facebook and search Lawyer Marketing. There’s tons of great stuff in this group, and it’s totally free.

Here is the question I received, “I have access to a list of names and mail addresses. I want to target them in Facebook ads. Can I upload their names and addresses or cities into Facebook? What is the best way to target these folks with my ad?”

No, you cannot upload using just their names and mailing addresses. You can do this with email addresses, but not mailing addresses. If you had email addresses, then you can do some pretty cool stuff with Facebook ads. Although that’s not what you asked for, I’m going to give you a demo of that anyway because unfortunately, the simple answer to this question is no.

Let’s say you have a list, and I believe you’ll need at least a hundred email addresses to make this work. The first step is to put your email addresses in a .csv file or .txt file. For simplicity, we’ll call this “test email list” and save it to the computer. Now, what we’re going to do is we’re going to go to our Facebook Ad account. This is accessible via business.facebook.com or from the Ads Manager, it just depends on how you have your account set up. I have a business account, but the process is going to be exactly the same.

What you’re going to do is you’re going to click on this hamburger menu up here, and you’re going to click All Tools. I’m already in the asset library, but under assets, there’s going to be audiences right here, which you will click.

What Is A Custom Audience?

In this section, you can see all of your custom audiences. Why do you want to custom audience? There are a few reasons. The first reason is that you can upload a list of clients or a list of prospects and, say, you want to run ads directly to those people, as long as you have a hundred of them, you can do that. Another thing you can do if you want to run ads but you want to make sure that your clients and your prospects that have already contacted you don’t see those ads, so you’re not wasting money, you can also exclude them in creating a custom audience.

What Is A Lookalike Audience?

The cool part about custom audiences is the ability to create lookalike audiences. I’m going to show you how to do that as well. Let’s say you upload a list of 1,000 email addresses. What Facebook does is they go through that list, and they match every single one of those email addresses to a Facebook profile. They’re probably not going to match all of them, but probably about 50%. What they’re going to do is match those profiles and figure out what all of these people have in common. Then, they’re going to go out and find 2.1 million people in the entire country that have the same thing in common as the people that match Facebook accounts from your email list. It’s a pretty powerful tool.

You can take that lookalike audience of 2.1 million people from around the country, and narrow it down to your market. If you’re in Atlanta, for example, you might create a look-a-like audience of 2.1 million people. Then, when you narrow it down through targeting on your ad manager, you might end up with 25,000-50,000 people that you’re targeting. Those are 25,000-50,000 people that have a lot in common with people that have already hired you, or people that have contacted you about hiring you.

What you’re going to do is click All Tools, then click Audiences. From there, you will click Create Audience and then you’re going to click Custom Audience. There’s a couple of things you can do. You can choose customer file, website traffic, engagement, or customer file, which is what I typically use. One thing you should not choose is App Activity because you won’t need it. Also, you can put a Facebook pixel for tracking conversions.

What we’re going to do is choose Customer File and this is where you add customers from your file, or you can copy and paste the email addresses.  You must select the data source, which is from customers and partners. Now, we can click the next button.

What you can do is use their name, phone number, etc. to map it. You can hit upload and create, and that’s going to create this file, so once you upload it, then you have your audience. This can typically take about an hour, possibly longer to update the audience.

Once it’s finished, you can create the lookalike audience. This example audience is anyone that’s engaged with one of my Facebook posts in the last 365 days. You’re going to put a check mark there, then click actions, and then click create lookalike. You have your source, and then you want to set your location.

If you give this a couple of hours, this will update and you will have 2.1 million people that look exactly like this audience right here. Based on that, you can then target these audiences, when you run your ad. This is something that’s really cool to do. So, I suggest that you try it out if you have an existing email list.

Do Not Buy Email Lists

One thing I’d like to mention is not to buy an email list for this purpose because Facebook’s trying to crack down on this. I have heard of people getting ad accounts shut down because they’re uploading emails that they didn’t obtain legally. I think that Facebook has gotten every email list that you can buy and then put them on file. If your email audience consists of 95% of the same people that are on these lists, I think they cancel your ad account. Don’t quote me on that, but I have heard of some accounts that have been shut down because of this very reason.

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.

At my company, we had an internal meeting today. We were talking about what are the best ways that we can make our websites and our clients’ websites as useful as possible and one of the things that gets overlooked is the actual user experience.

You can have your page perfect in terms of inbound links, SEO, etc., but at the end of the day, one of the things that everyone’s looking for is searcher satisfaction.

When someone goes to your website, do they find all the information they need? Do all of their questions get answered? Is the content easy to digest? Is it easy for them to read?

How To Find Info That Users Want And Need

One of the big things that you can look at is what are people actually looking for? And one thing that we found is that if you can make content that’s extremely useful and actually answers the questions that people are looking for, then you’re going to do better because Google is smart.

Let’s say someone searches “DUI penalties”, and they go to the first result and they click the ‘back’ button, and then they go to the second result and they click the ‘back’ button and then they go to the third result…and they stay on that page for a long time before coming back, or they come back, or they don’t even come back, then Google is kind of going to think “Okay, well that third result is probably a better result for the searcher.” They’re going to bump that one up.

That’s why user experience is really important. This is how you can do that even with just something simple like “DUI.” I want to show you how you can figure out exactly what people are searching for. I’m going to search “DUI” and what a lot of people don’t realize, is that if you scroll to the bottom, you’re going to see searches related to DUI, and you can click on these.

The two main things that are showing up here are “DUI consequences” and “DUI penalties.” Let’s look at DUI consequences and let’s also look at DUI penalties. As you can see right here. “What is the punishment for first time DUI?”, “What is the punishment for second DUI?” “What is a punishment for a DUI?” “What is the penalty for drunk driving first offense?”

Then down the bottom here, we’ve got more stuff. “DUI consequences California,” “First DUI consequences,” “DUI consequences” — you can certainly see a pattern here, and these would be really great topics. Here’s the other thing – “DUI penalties.” “What’s the punishment for second DUI?” “What’s the punishment for first DUI?”

How To Take This Info And Implement It Into Your Content

What you can do is start going through here and figuring out what people are searching for and start to identify content that you can create that would be useful for the searcher. If you look at all this content…you can do this with anything.  For example, if you search “DUI breathalyzer test,” and see what people are looking for, the following questions will show up:

How long does it take to pass a breathalyzer? What happens if someone refuses a breathalyzer? What is a DUI refusal charge? What is a normal breathalyzer reading?

If you type these keywords, you can start seeing what people are actually searching for. These aren’t things that Google is making up. This is stuff that people are actually searching for. Before you write anything, you should go check the related searches and see what people are actually searching for and then, answer those questions.

You need to make your content as useful as possible and make sure that when someone goes to your page, they’re going to get all their questions answered. If you sit down and you think about what are all the questions that someone who has a DUI – that’s related to this topic – what would be the most useful information to them? If you can answer those questions, then you’re just naturally going to rank higher because people are going to find your website and Google is going to rank you higher because they’re seeing that people are having a better user experience.

A lot of attorneys are relying on Google and SEO. What I am advising all my clients is that SEO is by no means dead. It’s not that you can’t SEO, but what’s going to end up happening is SEO is getting more difficult. Google is trying to monetize as much as they can.

As you can see, this is what’s happening with the plumbers right now in San Francisco. Google is testing this out in their own backyard, and they’ve been doing this for a while. Actually, if you want to see what’s Google’s working on, you can usually search for plumbers in San Francisco.

For some reason, that is the niche that they’ve taken on. If you look up “Plumbers San Francisco.”  At the very top, they’ve got this Google Guarantee. Now, these are all ads. But, look at this. They’ve got Google Guarantee, they’ve got their stars, etc. Below that, you’ve got three more ads.

The Evolution Of Ads On Google

If you think about the evolution of how ads used to be, there used to be three ads at the top, and there was a lot of ads on the side. Then, they got rid of the ads on the side, and they added four on the top. Now, they went back to three right here. Now, you’ve actually got six ads above the fold.

Now, look at this. What’s happening here? Basically, above the fold, you’ve got six ads, you’ve got one organic listing right here. Mr. Ruder Plumbing of San Francisco, who is also right here.

If you keep going down, you see you’ve got the ads. The other thing is that a lot of times, you’re also going to start seeing an ad at the top of this list as well.

It gets even worse. Now, you come down, and the first two listings are Yelp. I’m sure you see that a lot.  Yelp, Justia,  FindLaw,  all these big names and brands are ranking high in the organic listings. What you need is to be ranking here.

Why Does Google Optimize Their Search Pages?

The problem is there’s so much stuff, and you have to remember, Google is constantly optimizing. They’ve got billions of clicks, so they know that having Google Guaranteed in this font, in all capital letters next to a green check performs better than a red check with Google Guaranteed in lowercase letters, in a different type of font.

They can test all this stuff, and they optimize this to perfection. That’s what you see here in this green ad. It’s green letters in a green box, and it blends in there. This used to be yellow for a long time, and it said ad and sponsored.

What’s happening is Google does all these tests, and they figure out what increases the clickthrough rates. What do you do about this?

The first thing you do is you can keep doing SEO. I’m not saying give up SEO. I’m not telling you or my clients to give up on SEO because SEO will always be around. For Google to have these paid listings, they have to have organic listings. But, the clicks are getting harder and harder.

If you’re the absolute number one organic position on this page, that’s this guy right here. What are the odds? A lot of people bypass the ads, but there’s a lot of people that don’t bypass the ads. What ends up happening is even though you’re the absolute number one organic on the page, you’re going to start getting fewer and fewer clicks because they’re doing such a good job optimizing up here.

Can Social Media Help?

How do you take this back? Social media is the way. I’ve been saying that you need to figure out how to do social media. I’ve already figured out how to do social media for lawyers. In the coming weeks and months, you’re going to be getting a lot of content from me. I’ve already given you some content about social media, but I’m really going to be cranking up the social media content in terms of how can you use social media for your law firm.

Have you seen this in any other areas? I know it’s in San Francisco. I have not seen it in any other markets, but I do know that they’re starting to roll it out in a lot of different places. There’s the talk of it.

Do you think that SEO is going to go away? Are you focusing on SEO? Do you think it’s time to jump in to social media yet? Do you think it’s time to jump into something else?

I want to show a website that I think is helpful for online marketing. It’s a website called Copyscape, and it checks your website and scans the internet for plagiarism.

Plagiarism could be people that copied your work, or it could be if your internet marketing company copied somebody else’s website. Another example of plagiarism is if you’re like a client that we have who used to have FindLaw, they would take the same website content and use it across all of their FindLaw websites.

How To Use Copyscape

I’m going to show you how we check for plagiarized content, and I want to show you some examples of where plagiarism occurs. We use this website called Copyscape, which is cheap.  You have to buy credits, and I believe its five cents per search.

What you need to do is go to Copyscape and log in. I think there’s also a free version where you can search, and I believe the free search will pull up copies, but I recommend you spend the minimum which is $10 on PayPal.

For my company, we use the premium search. So, here’s an example.  Dixon and Pope, P.A. is in Kansas City and they were one of the websites that we’ve found that our client had a lot of duplicate content from their website. When I ran Dixon and Pope’s website through Copyscape, I found that there’s a lot of other websites that have content that matches theirs. So, I want to show you what that looks like.

If you’re going to run a batch search, what’s cool about this is you enter your website URL, and it will populate everything. What you’re going to do is go to premium and then, batch search. You add all the URLs you want to search and then after the search is done, Copyscape is going to go and look at every link on this page and find all the other pages on your website. Once it’s finished, you end up with a detailed report.

This report will have every URL on the website and how many matches on the internet were found of content on this URL. Green is the best and the higher word count percentage that’s found, the darker red it gets.

Why Is Duplicate Content A Problem?

If we look at this report, there’s lots of duplicate content. Why is duplicate content a problem? There’s an algorithm that Google uses called the Panda algorithm. The Panda algorithm examines the overall quality of your website and the quality of the content of your website. So, if you have pages that have a lot of duplicate content, that can hurt your Panda score.

The problem with the Panda score is that it is part of the live Google algorithm and part of your rankings, which could cause some issues there. You won’t necessarily get a penalty, but the problem is that Google doesn’t necessarily want to show two of the same pieces of content.

If I click on the slip and fall page, the same content is found on other pages, with some of that same content found on davidamallesq.com, then tedlion.com, helmslaw.com, and libbylaw.com

What will happen is Google will not necessarily show all of these on the search results. You won’t get as much visibility because Google thinks there are other pages out there that have this exact content. Why would we show the same content multiple times?

We’re going to look at davidamallesquire.com, and what’s nice about Copyscape is you can see the page below has 262 words matching 33% of the page as highlighted below. Everything that’s highlighted is duplicated. So, let’s see source page.

Just look at the first sentence here, “Property owners have a duty to properly manage, supervise and operate their property to minimize unnecessary risk of harm to others.” Now, let’s go back to the found page. “Property owners have a duty to properly managed, supervise, operate their property.” It’s the exact same thing. This is a problem, and I’ve seen this with FindLaw websites over and over again.

As you get further down the list, there’s less plagiarized content, but it can be copywriters that are working for the same company, that are just basically recycling content. It can be people that just copy your website. It can be bots that are scraping your website. There’s a lot of different ways that this can happen. So, I want to make people aware of this, especially if you have a FindLaw website.

Hopefully, this has shed some light on the topic of plagiarism for you. Take a look at Copyscape, run your page through Copyscape, and let me know if you find any duplicate content.

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.