Digital Marketing

What’s the best Facebook ads strategy? Here is the way we do it and it works really well. It’s based on creating content. First, it has to have a really good hook.

A good hook (click bait)

A hook is almost like, I hate saying click bait, but that’s what it is. It’s click bait. “In this video I’m going to show you five ways the insurance companies screw car accident victims every single day.”

Or “I’m going to show you three tricks that the car insurance companies use to trick you into getting paid less or signing away all your rights for a car accident.” Something like that, something that’s going to provide value.

Another thing you could do is you could talk about fact that the amount of money that you get if you have an accident and work with a lawyer is significantly more than if you try to handle your case without a lawyer.

This means, that even after the attorney’s fees, you would get a significantly larger settlement or verdict. So, you could create a video or you create some sort of cheat sheet. And I’ve actually been using Facebook lead ads quite a bit and it’s been working really well.

We have this software called Lead AL [[[????]]] that we use. We tie it into a Facebook lead ad. And then, as soon as you get an opt-in, as soon as someone fills out the information, it pops up right on your cell phone.

The hook – story – offer video

But it all starts with the video. So what you do is you follow the hook, story, offer format. So you say, “Here are three strategies that the car insurance companies use to trick car accident victims every single day.” And then you say, “My name is John Smith. I’m a personal injury attorney in Houston and we recently had a client who had this happen to him.”

And then you go into an entire story where you talk about how he got into a car accident, he got rear-ended on the highway and his car was totaled. The car behind him, the person who hit him their car was totaled also. And within 20 minutes, the car insurance company had somebody out there asking John questions.

The party who hit him had somebody out there on the scene, asking him questions, trying to take a statement, asking him to sign things, taking pictures of his car. They were also taking pictures of him walking around, trying to prove that he wasn’t injured.

And you know, John’s not an attorney. He didn’t know what was going on. Then you say, luckily he contacted us and we were able to do x, y, and z. And we had this sort of result.

How to make the offer

Now, if you were in a car accident and even if the car insurance company hasn’t contacted you yet, you still need to talk to an attorney just to make sure that your rights are protected and that you’re not going to be tricked because you got to remember insurance companies do not make money by paying out claims. They make money by collecting deductibles and paying as few claims as possible.

So if you were in a car accident, what you can do right now is click the link included with this video, enter your information and I will contact you personally and give you a free strategy session.

Now, during this strategy session, what I’ll do for you is I’ll take a look at your insurance. I’ll take a look at the accident. I’ll ask you some questions, and I’ll tell you completely free what it is that you should do, and what your next steps should be. I’ll give you a custom strategy and if I can help you, I will absolutely help you for free.

And if I can’t help you, I will point you in the right direction and show you where to go. So just click the link included with this video and I’ll give you a call a couple of minutes afterward.

How you should do it

And what you’re doing there is you’re using that hook story offer. So the hook is the big headline. The story is a story about a client and it doesn’t have to be a real story. It can be a fake story. It can be a made-up story. It can be an embellished story, or it can be a story that happened to somebody else. It doesn’t matter what it is.

Why call it a strategy session?

And then the offer is going to be a free strategy session. Now I said a strategy session instead of a consultation, it is a consultation, but you’re going to call it a strategy session because strategy session does not feel like a Maury Povich commercial.

Everyone assumes that consultation is sales. And strategy session feels a lot more like you’re helping somebody. I always tell my clients, when you film videos, talk to the people in the videos like you would talk to your best friend. If your best friend got into a car accident or was going through a divorce or was arrested for DUI, you wouldn’t say, Bill called me on Friday for a free consultation.

Talk to him like you would talk to your best friend

You say, give me a call, and send me over your stuff. I’ll take a look and I’ll point you in the right direction. or I’ll see if I can help you. And that’s basically what it is. And pointing them in the right direction might be, you need to hire my firm.

You know, so that’s the strategy. And we do that and we get tons of leads using that type of strategy.

How to get the correct phone number

And here’s a hack to make sure that you actually get the right contact information from the lead ad. You can also say, enter your information. We’ll also send you a free guide or some sort of free cheat sheet. And you say, we’ll text it to you.

So that’s how you make sure you get the right phone number. You say, what number should we text this to? I don’t know why people would fill out a form and give the wrong information. But that happens sometimes. It doesn’t make any sense to me. The only thing I can think of is that it’s automatically populated from Facebook and that’s why that happens.

Someone was asking me about the best tools for keyword research. The question is whether we’re talking about Adwords or search engine optimization.
When we’re talking about Adwords, I typically use broad match modifiers. I think about what related terms can you target that will not be as competitive, but that people would still be looking for.

The “DUI In San Diego” Example

Here’s a perfect example. We did a campaign in San Diego for a DUI attorney, and the cost of each click was absurd: it was almost $200 a click at that point. What we found out is that people are also searching for related items, like “San Diego DUI attorney” or “San Diego DWI attorney.”

They were also searching for “DWI” or “drunk driving lawyer,” different things like that. We found that those search terms were searched pretty heavily, but collectively they weren’t searched as much as things that were related, i.e., something like “San Diego DUI penalties” or “California DUI penalties.”

You can target California and then limit your search to the San Diego area since that’s likely the area where people have been arrested.

For example, if I was arrested in Florida, I’m not going to search “Lakeland DUI penalties” even though I live in Lakeland. I’m going to search for “Florida DUI penalties.”

Other Search Terms

Another thing to search for is statutes. I learned this when I got a speeding ticket about 10 or 12 years ago when I used to work at a law firm.

Before I got into marketing, I was planning to go to law school. I worked at the US Attorney’s office and a private firm. One thing we always did was we always Googled the statutes. So, when I got the speeding ticket, I thought, let me Google this statute and see what this ticket is actually for.

I Googled it and discovered that they gave me a ticket for driving a school bus faster than 55 miles per hour. I was obviously not driving a school bus, so I took it to court, and I beat it.

Later, I started thinking, I bet I’m not the only one who searches the statutes. When you get arrested for a DUI, you’re panicked and think you’re going to lose your license and maybe your job, your money, and your house.
Or perhaps you don’t even have a job. You’re just freaking out, so you start Googling everything. It’s like when you have a weird spot on your face, and you start going to Web MD. The same thing happens with a traffic ticket or a DUI.

What we found is that people were Googling the statutes that they were being arrested for. So, we ran an Adwords campaign targeting those statutes and were able to get clicks for about $5 a click when people are paying $150 or $200 a click for “San Diego DUI lawyer.”

I think about the related stuff that people might be searching for. They may not necessarily be the exact match, but that’s what I would do. You can also search for the kinds of questions that people are asking.

More Great Keyword Resources

I love the website answerthepublic.com. You can search DUI for example, and it gives you all the questions related to DUI that come back in Google autosuggest. You just have to play around with it. I would go there and check out the questions that people are asking about DUI.

Then in Google, there’s going to be a section that says “people also ask.” At the bottom, it is going to say related searches. Those are gold because that’s Google telling you these are searches that people enter.
When people are looking for a DUI attorney, I would start there. I’d go to Google, and I’d start thinking outside the box, like what are some of the questions and concerns that people typically have.

I would also use AnswerThePublic.com, and you could also use keyword.io. In addition, I have a tool called AttorneyKeywords.com that we’re working on that’s in Beta at the moment. If you go there right now, you can sign up for 20 bucks a month, and there’s a ton of tools in there that you can use.

You may be wondering what Facebook ads strategy would be best in order to find plaintiffs for employment lawsuits for a particular company with multiple locations. Let me show you exactly how to do that.

Targeting A Company

So, let’s look for Lockheed Martin. It’s a big company that is all over the world. Let’s say you’re trying to target people in Florida. You have three Lockheed Martin locations in Orlando and three in Tampa. These are their locations. Now, we’re going to go to a “new campaign.”

Let’s just go for traffic. We’ll call this LM Test. LM is Lockheed Martin. Now we get to the important part here. We’re going to do a broad ad and we’re going to add these locations.

Getting More Specific

We have the 500 Sand Lake Road location, and we’re going to go to ads. We’re going to include everyone who was recently within one mile of this location in the last seven days. This is as targeted as we can get. Now they have a bunch of locations, so you might have to do this a bunch of times.

I do this with personal injury attorneys all the time when we target hospitals. You just take all of the hospital locations and put them into an audience like this.

Back to Lockheed Martin… now we have basically anyone that’s been within one mile of any of these three addresses in the last seven days. That’s location-based, and that’s how we can narrow it down.

How To Narrow It Down Even Further

Now we can narrow it down further. Right now we’re at 150,000 people. You could run this ad for a few days and in your creative, you’re going to say, “Hey, Lockheed Martin employees…” or, “Employees of Lockheed Martin don’t know this…” You want to do something that’s going to get them to interact with the ad.

How To Get Their Attention

You could run a video ad, which would actually work pretty well. I always tell people to create those red bars at the top. And at the top it’ll say, “Hey, Lockheed Martin employees…”

Basically, you want Lockheed Martin at the very top because even though Facebook is going to tell you that this is the headline right here, this is really the first thing people see. “Lockheed Martin employees need to see this.” Then, you can play around with the “watch more” button, the “sign up” button, or whatever it is.

Creating A Custom Audience

Then, you’ll go into the audiences and create a custom audience. Now, if you have a landing page that you’re directing people to, you’ll just make it a custom audience of people that went to the page and you do that by website traffic. Then, you have to have the pixel on there and then you include people who visited your page.

Videos And Measuring Engagement

You could also do a video. That’s what I do a lot. I create a custom audience based on engagement, then I click the video. I also include people who’ve viewed a certain portion of the video. You’ve got a lot of options. You can do 3 seconds, 10 seconds, 25%, 50%, 75%, 95%.

The deeper you go into this, the more qualified the person is going to be. Somebody who watches three seconds of your video might not be that interested. But if somebody watches 95% of your video, he or she is probably pretty interested.

I like to go to at least 25% of the video and make the videos like three or four minutes long at least. Then, you hit choose videos and then just go in there and choose your videos.

Then confirm “in the last 14 days,” because if somebody saw this video six months ago and hasn’t opted in, they are probably not interested. And then you call this the Lockheed Martin audience and save that.

What To Do Next

In your next ad, you do re-marketing, but you only target people in the Lockheed Martin audience. So, what you’re doing is targeting only the people that watched 25% of this video, and then you’re showing the rest of your content only to this audience.

Here Is The Question:

Can my Law Firm use an automated attendant during working hours, and is dealing with an auto-attendant worse than getting a real person and then being put on hold?

Get Rid Of The Auto-Attendant

Both of these are not good scenarios. Get rid of the auto-attendant. That should not happen, and we proved that with a client about a year ago. We literally changed nothing about his firm, other than the fact that he started having a real person answer the calls and his intake literally doubled over 60 days or so. That pretty much answers that.

Put Yourself In Their Shoes

Just think about it. Put yourself in the shoes of the consumer. Imagine you call your bank and you get that message, “Thank you for calling Chase. Please enter your credit card number. Now, press one for this and press two for that and press three for this… “

How many times do you find yourself just pounding the zero button until you get somebody on the phone? Just because it’s your business and it’s not a bank, that doesn’t make you special.

People don’t want to deal with that. They want to talk to a real person. Especially if it’s a Law Firm where it’s likely an emergency, a personal injury, your DUI, something like that.

If your toilet is overflowing and you’re calling a plumber and the plumber says “Thanks for calling, please hold and listen to our automated message. For this, press one, for this, press two, for this, press three…” you’re going to get frustrated and you’re likely to hang up and call the next plumber.

Your toilet is overflowing, so you need something now. You don’t have the patience to sit down and navigate the entire menu. And half the time these menus aren’t even set up properly. That’s another thing that drives me crazy about a lot of these things.

But first of all, get rid of the auto-attendant. You should never have an auto-attendant.

What About Someone Who’s Putting Them On Hold?

The second question is, “Is an auto attendant better than talking to somebody and putting them on hold?” That depends on how you do it.

A lot of the time, I talk to lawyers, and they’re in these offices where they have an executive suite and one receptionist for the entire floor. Basically, all they do is answer the phone. They say “Law office of Mike Smith,” and the caller says, “Is Mike Smith in?” They say “I’m not sure, let me transfer you,” or they just transfer you to voicemail.

Make Sure You Get Their Contact Information

You need to make sure that they’re at least getting their contact information before transferring them anywhere. And, it’s the type of thing where, whenever I ask for somebody and they say “Please hold” and then it’s just the voicemail, I immediately hang up. Nothing hurts me more than that.

Other people do that as well. What I would do if I were you is this: I would make sure that if they’re going to transfer and put somebody on hold, they should absolutely get the contact information before they do that because people will hang up and they will call the next lawyer.

People Have Zero Patience

I see it happen all the time. People have zero patience. Just think about it. If your toilet is overflowing, the plumber picks up and says please hold, and then you’re just sitting there watching your toilet overflow, you’re going to hang up and call another plumber.

And you’re certainly not going to leave a voicemail and hope that that plumber calls you back. So, you have to make sure that they at least get the contact information. In an ideal world, they’ll never transfer you. They’ll never put you on hold.

Here’s one thing I hate. I have a client, and I’ve been complaining to him about this for four years now. He’s been a client since 2015 and he has a really big law firm, and every time I call, the receptionist picks up the phone and says “Laws blah blah blah, please hold,” and doesn’t even give me a chance to say anything. They just put me on hold right away, and that drives me crazy.

What You Should Do

I don’t know how you handle it. The phone is ringing off the hook. You get a lot of phone calls. I understand that. But you’ve got to bring on more people, you’ve got to get an answering service, or you’ve got to get something.

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes, or in the client’s shoes. Think about what is going through their mind when they call your office. It’s an emergency to them. It may not be an emergency to you, but if it’s an emergency to them, you’ve got to make sure that they’re talking to a real person, and that they feel that you can help them with their problem.

So, I don’t like either of those options. I think it’s got to be answered by somebody that can talk to the caller. An auto-attendant? That’s definitely not a good option. Talking and putting them on hold can be okay as long as you get their contact information. It’s still not the ideal scenario.

What is going to make somebody join a Facebook group? Start by thinking about what your clients are actually interested in.

Consider people who have disputes about overtime. What are they upset about? What do they want and what do they fear? Also, think about what they all have in common.

An Example: Construction Workers

Let’s say you’re in New York City and you go after a specific type of worker, like construction workers. In that case, you want to create a group that’s going to appeal to construction workers.

In the past, we did one that talked about construction workers’ rights. We currently have a client in New York who is doing some work with construction accidents, and we created a group with him called New York Construction Workers United.

How We Attracted People Into The Group

We ran an ad to a cheat sheet which is simply an eBook. We ran the ad in hopes to get injury cases, not any overtime cases.

What we did is said, “New York City Construction Workers Have Rights.” The key point is you have to figure out what prospective clients want.

I go over a lot of this in my book. If you haven’t gotten my book, you should pick up a copy because I go over all this in figuring out what they want and what they don’t want.

We figured out that construction workers, obviously, they want to stay safe and they want to make sure they get paid on time. This is the info to use when creating a cheat sheet.

I would create an ad that’s advertising a cheat sheet. Not advertising yourself, but advertising your cheat sheet that says, “The Construction Workers’ Guide to Ensuring That You Get Paid Every Single Dime That You’re Owed.”

Or it could say, “The Guide to Getting Paid Every Single Dollar That Your Boss Owes You.” When you do that, you offer to let them download the cheat sheet, “Okay, go ahead and download the cheat sheet. It’s been sent to your email and should be in your inbox. Now, join the New York Construction Workers…”

What To Call Your Facebook Group?

What would you call that Facebook group? It should be something that would appeal to construction workers, like Construction Workers Rights. I know there’s a lot of union stuff as well and we ran into that issue a lot with construction workers.

Another Example: Restaurant Workers

You could do the exact same thing with restaurants. You could create a group on Facebook that’s New York City Waiters, New York City Hospitality Staff, New York City Waiters, and Waitresses, or New York City Bartenders, etc. You just need to have something in there that gets everybody that’s in your target demographic in one single place.

What I Did

After this, you need to go in and provide valuable content, just the way I do it. If you reverse engineer what I did, you can see it clearly. I got a group called Lawyer Marketing and I know I’m going to attract lawyers. Then, I create content that’s useful to lawyers, about marketing because it’s on the topic of marketing.

What ends up happening is that every single month, 50 to 75 lawyers reach out to me and say, “Hey, Andy. I love your content. You provide all this value. I want to hire you to do the marketing for my law firm.”

And then I say, “Well, thank you very much. Unfortunately, I’m not taking any clients.” If I were taking clients, then I’d be able to do that. But that’s the idea.

What You Should Do

You need to create a group that’s going to target the demographic. I would just do it in a very broad way: New York City Construction Workers, New York City Waiters or Waitresses, or New York City Hospitality, etc.

You create a group that’s very broad and targets them. Then you create content. Just think about what they would be interested in, and don’t get all lawyer-y on it either. You’re the one that’s going to put content up every day, just like I do.

How To Use Q&A

I’ve done a few Q&A’s. What I do is I download the video afterward. I chop up every single question and answer it, and I create an individual video for each question.

The great thing is that you’re getting questions that people are actually asking. If you become the authority, just like I became the “attractive character,” so to speak, as Russel Brunson calls it, then what ends up happening is that they want to hire you.

Not just any attorney. They want to hire you because you’re the authority. That’s the idea.

A Quick Review

In short, create a broad group, and the way you’ll get them in there is through this cheat sheet. Once you have the group in there, you can then follow up with tons of content, tons of value, every single day.

It took me less than a year before I had to put up a waiting list for my agency because I had too many clients. In fact, it took me only about four months. It was not hard.

You got to remember, I’m targetting lawyers who are just beaten to death by marketing companies. You’re talking about people who are waiters and waitresses or whoever it is that’s owed money. I’m assuming you work on a contingency basis. So, it’s much easier for you than it is for me.