How To Get More Estate Planning Clients with Facebook Ads

Question:

We just opened a new office in a different city and I’m not getting any new clients or even calls for the office. I sent out emails to surrounding neighborhoods, but I’m not getting anything. I just set up a Facebook marketing campaign and included the new office location. We are a very select niche, estate planning firm focusing on families with minor children. Do you have any suggestions on a Facebook marketing campaign that I can do?

Answer:

If you’re doing Facebook ads for an estate planning firm there are a lot of situations that could happen. Without seeing your actual campaign is kind of hard to tell. I have a couple of questions.

You said you’re not getting calls? Clients or even inquiries for the new office are not calling. Where are you getting calls and clients for the old office? Were they coming from Facebook or is Facebook a brand new strategy that you’re trying when all else has failed?

What I would do is now, if we’re talking about Facebook marketing (and this is my answer to every time I am asked about Facebook ads) because this is the way that Facebook ads really work. This is the way that Facebook ads are effective. You start by running ads that help solve problems that this demographic has.

Estate planning, focusing on families with minor children is a little more difficult because it’s the type of situation where people might not necessarily realize that they need estate planning. They might be under the misconception that estate planning is for like old rich people. The reality is that anyone who owns a house or has kids or has a business or anything like that probably needs an estate plan. What I would start doing, is creating ads that talk about different scenarios where people didn’t realize that they needed an estate plan.

Bring the issues to life by telling stories about different scenarios that people can be in where they need an estate plan. We had a client who did estate planning a little while ago. We told a story about somebody. Her husband had passed away. They had two kids and because of that, she had an issue with ownership of their house. You figure out what all the different issues are and you can kind of tell stories about that. What you can do is start talking about some of the misconceptions of estate planning or what some of the benefits of estate planning are. I’m kind of drawing a blank right now. I cannot remember what we did for that campaign. It worked okay and it got people opting in.

That’s typically where I start. I ask myself, what are the problems that they have? What are the solutions that I can provide to them in this ad? Estate planning is a little bit more than people realize. They may not know they need estate planning. What you want to do is start talking about, start creating content that talks about some of the worst-case scenarios. You could write an ad and I don’t necessarily want to use like scare tactics but you could run an ad that basically talks about like three ways (that you are unaware of) that you could lose your house if your spouse passes away unexpectedly. or something like that. You almost had to basically talk about the consequences of not having the estate plan or what’s going to happen if they pass away and it’s up to the courts to decide.

You can run an ad that asks, “If you were to pass away unexpectedly, do you want to make the decision of what happens to your house, your family, and all of your belongings? Or, do you want the courts to decide?

If you don’t have this one thing, then guess what? The courts get to say what happens to your house, what happens to your money, what happens to your kids, what happens to your car, what happens to your business. You kind of paint a picture like that and say or what you can do is you can you now have us fill out these documents for you and you can have exactly what you want. Hopefully, you never need it. But you just show them these documents and basically this will ensure that everything that you actually want to happen will happen. Your house goes where you want, your kids go where you want, your money goes where you want, your pets go where you want, all that type of stuff.

That’s how I would deal with estate planning for families and minor children you have got to figure out what are the problems they have and then what do they stand to lose and you really want to lead with those.