Digital Marketing

What is the nicest way to request that someone write a review for your services on Yelp? Yelp is a tricky one because Yelp doesn’t technically want you to ask for reviews.

 

Here’s a Question I Was Asked:

I have slider images on my website. Is that fatal?

My Answer:

I actually just did a video about sliders two days ago. Just in case you don’t know what a slider is… it’s usually but not always on the homepage. In a slider, the picture slides in and then the text will fade in really slowly. And then the picture slides to the right and another picture slide in plus more text fades in as well.

They look really, really nice. But they will absolutely kill your conversions. I call them conversion killers because we have seen it on many occasions. In fact, we actually had a perfect example:

A Case Study

We have a criminal defense attorney in Long Island, New York. And, we took over his website and we were looking at his numbers. He was getting a lot of traffic to his website. We couldn’t figure out why the phone wasn’t ringing.

We have call tracking, so we can see that he’s actually not getting phone calls, but we also see all this organic traffic going to his website. And this is after we got him to number one for Long Island criminal defense attorney. But they just weren’t called. The website wasn’t converting.

Now, this was six or seven years ago. This was the first client that we ever had. And he’s still a client today.

Basically, I read an article that sliders absolutely destroy conversion rates. So we switched it out for a static image and I mean, it was a light bulb moment. The calls just started coming in and started coming in and really haven’t stopped for almost seven years now.

Why Web Sliders Don’t Work

Stupid things like that can make a big difference. So get rid of the website slider. It’s like people have such ADD nowadays, they get so much thrown at them in the on-demand world that we live in. You’ve got maybe three seconds to get someone’s attention. Otherwise, they’re on to something else.

You know that you’ve got an attention issue and you’re basically moving images around in front of somebody who’s really not paying attention anyway. It’s just not a good idea. And once you get rid of it, it works way better.

Check It Out Yourself

Next time you on a website where there’s a slider, look at the website and then, a couple of minutes afterward, think of what the text said or what the message was in the slider. You probably won’t be able to do it. And that’s the same thing your clients are doing. They go to your website, and if you have a slider, they’re not paying attention to your message or your call to action. Get rid of it. Use a static image. That’s my answer.

Here’s The Question:

How important is the thumbnail on your recommended daily videos? It takes a lot of time to create them.

My Answer:

As pretty much everyone who follows me knows, I recommend that you create a lot of daily content, particularly videos, and different things like that. And one thing that I like doing is repurposing all that content. I like putting it on YouTube, I like putting it in my emails, and I like putting it in a lot of different places.

Why Video Thumbnails Are Important

The video thumbnail is important because the thumbnail is something that really captures people’s attention. And it’s visual, so if you have a really contrasty, eye-catching thumbnail, you can get a lot of attention.

Video Thumbnails Increase Views

It can definitely increase the number of views that your video gets on YouTube. And if you put it in your emails as I do… If you’re on my email list, you know that you get an email from me every day and in the email is a thumbnail of a video that makes you want to click on it and then it takes you to watch the video. So, the thumbnail is very important. I highly recommend it.

How To Make Video Thumbnails

You don’t have to do it all yourself, I’m not a graphic designer. I don’t do it myself. I actually have a graphic designer on staff that does mine for me. But, you can go to Fiverr.com and you can find graphic designers.

There was actually one that was recommended to me who does… I don’t know what his prices are, but it’s like 10 thumbnails for like 40 bucks or something like that, and it works really well. I highly recommend it just because of the fact that it does increase conversions. It increases people looking at your content.

How To Get People To Click Through To Your Videos

And also, when people are reading your emails, it increases the likelihood that they’re going to click through. Don’t just put a link in your email. Use an image that looks like it’s a video player – I always make sure that I have a play button on there.

What You Should Do

I have a video on my YouTube channel that teaches you how to make these graphics yourself using Canva, and it’s pretty easy. But it also is time-consuming, especially if you do a lot of videos as I do. So you can go to Fiverr and get thumbnails made for around 5 bucks, or if you buy them in bulk, you can get them even cheaper.

So thumbnails are definitely very important. Just don’t do the work yourself but hire people to do it for you.

OR:

The Most Effective Marketing Strategies for Business Attorneys

The most effective marketing strategy for a business attorney is to join different business Facebook groups and provide value.

There are a lot of different Facebook groups. For example, there are a lot of local business groups. Of course, it depends on what type of business you’re talking about. If you’re talking about local businesses, there are a lot of, of local groups.

I’m in Lakeland, Florida, and I know there’s a Lakeland entrepreneurs group and groups for Lakeland startups and Lakeland restaurant owners and so on.

Join Facebook and Local Groups and Provide Value

I don’t know if you’re going statewide or if you’re going citywide, but what you can do is start joining these groups. And then, the first thing you do is to start to provide value. You can do that in the form of creating videos on different topics. Just tell stories about things that have either happened to you or your clients in the past or that you just heard from other attorneys about their clients.

You can say, here’s why all businesses need to protect their intellectual property. And you can tell a story about somebody who ended up losing their trademark because they didn’t protect it.

Angela’s Approach

There’s a girl named Angela [last name?] who does some really cool stuff with trademarks. She’ll walk around Sam’s Club. I actually met her last weekend at Funnel Hacking Live and we were talking about some of the videos that she does. And she told me about when she went to Sam’s Club and saw that they had this big blue egg. It was a grill, the big blue egg, which was similar to the big green egg.

So she basically created a video and talked about how the big green egg owned the trademark for the big blue egg also even though it’s in direct competition. So there’s a lot of cool stuff that you can talk about like that. So just go in the group and just start providing value and real-life examples of how you’ve helped people. Just share different pieces of information. It is the same stuff that I do.

I’m B2B. I know what lawyers want to hear about. They want different tips about how to market their law firm. And I just go in and provide those tips.

Facebook Searches

Now there’s another thing you can do, which is really cool. You can search in any of these Facebook groups for past comments. So you can search for the word contract or the word agreement or whatever it is, trademark or copyright, anything like that. And you can go in and you can go comment on past stuff as well.

The best thing is to just go into these business groups and to provide value.

What About Google?

What about ranking on the first page of Google for Lakeland or whatever business attorney? That’s not that difficult. But the problem is the search volume isn’t necessarily there. So using social media is probably the best way to do it.

A lot of old school stuff works for business as well, not just social media, but if I was going to use social media, that’s how I do it for business attorneys. It’s the easiest way and no one’s doing it. There’s no competition.

The luxury that you have is that most of your competition is lazy. So if you can take advantage of the fact that the competition is lazy and not be lazy yourself, then you’ll just scoop up all those clients. It’s really quite simple.

The Question:

Do you or your team do all of our social (Facebook, YouTube, etc.) placements and uploads if an attorney sends you guys the video content?

The Answer:

About Our Done-For-You Service

So you’re asking if we have a “done for you” service where if you send us the video, we basically take care of everything else. Yes, we do have a service like that, but we are very, very picky about who we take on as clients.

Why We Are So Picky

The reason for that is that a lot of times clients commit to doing this. It’s a lot of work for us up front to build the Facebook group, and build the YouTube channels and all that type of stuff.

And a lot of times, we find that lawyers don’t necessarily follow through and it ends up us having to babysit them. And I’m not really in the business of babysitting. I’m not in the business of emailing lawyers over and over again saying, “Hey give me that video. Hey, give me that video. Hey, give me that video.”

What You Can Do If You’re Interested

So, if you’re interested in doing something like that, I would say book a call with me so we can talk about what you want to do. And to do that, go to call.andrewstickel.com and there’s a survey that you can fill out to book an actual phone call with me.

Because of the problems we’ve had, we’re very, very, very picky about who we take on as those clients. We started taking on everyone that asked us to do that and we’re realizing that it’s not working out as well as we had hoped it would.

That’s because a lot of the lawyers that we’ve worked with just aren’t getting us the videos. And then there’s this awkward, “Well, it’s not working.” And we have to tell them, “Well, you’re not doing the work.”

Social Media Marketing for Law Firms in Rural Areas

Here’s another question I just got: “How does your system work for firms in more rural areas? I’m spending a small fortune on AdWords and we’d love to quit writing them checks every month.”

The Benefits Of Needing To Reach Fewer People

Actually, small, rural areas work better because you have fewer people to reach. If you have a thousand people and you’re trying to make yourself the authority on a particular subject, it doesn’t cost nearly as much money to reach a thousand people over and over again as it would to reach millions.

Marketing In Rural Areas Is Easier And Cheaper

If you’re in New York City and you’re trying to reach a city of 3.4 million, it will cost a lot more money to do that. So rural areas are actually a lot easier and it would be a lot cheaper because there are fewer people. I don’t know what your practice area is. But I think that being in a small area would be a lot easier.

There are fewer people so you need to spend less on ads. It’s also easy to get people into the group if you’re doing a Facebook group. It’s good.