Jan Roos - The Legal Marketing Fastlane: Your Roadmap to Generating Real Leads in 72 Hours or Less, Even If Youre Small

The Legal Marketing Fastlane:

Your Roadmap to Generating Real Leads in 72 Hours or Less, Even If You're Small

by Jan Roos

Contents

On a cold September night in 2015, a bicyclist named Charles was hit in a tragic hit-and-run accident in Queens. He endured hours of pain and suffering as the drunk driver that hit him fled to Long Island where she was eventually apprehended. The story was covered by New York Daily News, getting information from Charles' sister, Karliz, as she waited to see what happened to her brother in the emergency room. After a three-hour battle, he eventually succumbed to his injuries.

Karliz made a phone call from the hospital that day. It wasn't to Cellino and Barnes, New York's 800-pound gorilla of radio and billboard advertising, nor was it to the network of ambulance drivers and EMTs on payroll for dubious personal injury lawyers in New York. It was my client, Charles Arnold, whose Google ad was in front of Karliz when she searched for a wrongful death lawyer on her iPhone. The click cost $6.43.

Charles Arnold had been practicing the law in New York City for 19 years. A veteran of the insurance industry, he had switched sides to fight for plaintiffs when he struck out to start a practice with his two partners back in 2003.

Since then he had won some impressive cases, including an over $7 million payout for the victims of a midtown crane collapse in 2008. He was constantly networking, establishing contacts and even waking up at 5:30 AM every Thursday for a Business Networking International (BNI) meeting.

Over the years, he had seen marketing channels rise and fall. The yellow pages were the first to gostrong when he started the practice but falling in influence as people turned to the internet to search. Various SEO companies, lead sellers and marketing consultants had approached him over the years. The ones he did let in invariably led to disappointment, and the ones that reached him later in his career simply didn't get through because Charles already knew where that road led.

That all changed when he started using PPC Lead Generation. The proposition was simple: Give it one month, and if it doesn't work out there's no need to continue. There were no contracts like the channels he had tried before, and the investment was modest, unlike traditional media. He expected the results to take at least a month.

To his surprise, he got two leads before lunch on the first day. He couldn't believe this was actually working.

The hit-and-run case ended up settling for $100,000. He has continued with PPC lead generation since then and it has predictably added case flow every month on a modest budget, which he can scale up or down to meet his needs. The results were immediate, and to this day can be turned on or off like a tap when the case docket is full, there is a holiday, or if he wants to go on vacation with his wife. This is the channel that I'm going to teach you to build in this book.

If you have ownership in your firm, you are uniquely privileged. While most Americans are limited to returns of 5-10% (in a good year) with stocks, bonds and mutual funds, you have the opportunity to double your money, or more, by investing in your business. For 90% of small businesses, including law firms, this will happen through marketing.

Like any other class of investment, the risk is proportional to the reward. Any marketing is fundamentally a speculative venture. Despite what salespeople will tell you, there are no guarantees. The combination of your firm's unique benefits, the market you serve and the competitive landscape is unique in history the first time you try a channel. There may very well be gold in them thar hills, but you're going to have to buy some shovels before you find out.

Many marketers (myself included) only wind up with a method that they prefer after digging a lot of holes that don't have gold in them. But we're still going to go into the marketing fundamentals of why PPC lead generation works as a channel, both so you aren't following dogma blindly, and so you are better equipped to deal with other marketing decisions moving forward. The net result of learning these fundamentals is potentially saving yourself years of effort and tens of thousands of dollars on channels that don't work well for law firms.

You don't need an MBA to make a marketing decision, any more than you need two years in trade school to find someone to repair your car. But if you know some of the principles, you'll be able to recognize when someone is trying to repair your transmission when all you needed was an oil change. Yes, you really will learn about a channel that has turned dollars into phone calls within days for practices all over the country and, yes, you'll see the exact steps for how to set it up!

But first, let's get into some definitions.

At this point, you're probably curious how it's possible to have a magical lead machine that can pump out clients on demand. While it's not easy to master, it certainly is simple to get started.

There are three parts to the system: traffic, conversion, and analytics. We're going to dig into these in later chapters, but for now let's examine what it looks like to a customer.

Let's use the example of Karliz from our intro. Upon learning of her brother's death she entered the term 'wrongful death lawyer nyc' into her iPhone using Google.

Here she saw a number of ads. The firms that showed up for that query had a traffic strategy in place. When Karliz clicked on the ad, Charles' AdWords account was charged by Google and Karliz became traffic for the firm's website.

After the click, she landed on a special landing page. This page contained information about Charles' practice and successes, and was particularly tailored to wrongful death cases. The information was compelling and the design was simple enough that it was easy for Karliz to call them on the phone. Firms that invest in ensuring that clients that click turn into actual leads have a conversion strategy in place.

Note: Having a conversion strategy is surprisingly rare even among firms with large budgets, w hich is surprising considering how straightforward it is to set one up . We will get into more depth on this, but most failures of PPC are really failures of conversion rate optimization.

The phone number Karliz saw on the landing page was not the number listed in the yellow pages for Charles' law firm; it was one of eight tracking numbers forwarding to the office that were dynamically switched every millisecond to correlate the exact search term with the phone call that was made. Because we were using that system, we knew where the call came from, what device it was on, what keyword was being used, what version of our ad was clicked, and what landing page it came from. These data were used to fine-tune the account to get more cases like this in the future. Firms that focus on tracking and monitoring these data have an analytics strategy.

Seems pretty simple, right? Let's take a look at why this approach has a special place in the marketing world, especially for small and solo law practices.

To date, we've seen PPC lead generation work in most consumer-facing areas of the law. We've generated cases in 72 hours or less for everything from personal injury law to traffic tickets. Here's why:

1. There is a 'bleeding neck' - Sometimes literal in the case of personal injury, people looking for a lawyer are often doing so under duress, and for this reason are more likely to call and sign a retainer quickly.