As you may know, I’m a pretty big fan of adwords. It’s been the backbone of what my agency has done for law firms since its inception and I literally wrote the book on using adwords for law firms. So what I’m about to share comes from an informed adwords user that has been getting the most out of the platform.
It’s time for (certain) law firms to look into paid social advertising, specifically facebook ads.
In 2013, before I had focused on adwords for attorneys, I was running facebook campaigns for my own companies as well as clients that weren’t a fit for adwords. Our successful campaigns were successful on a level that adwords could never compare to. When we’re talking about clicks in the range of 50 cents instead of 50 dollars in some instances, it’s easy to see why. Cost per lead is likely to start lower and, due to facebook’s machine learning algorithms, will often continue to get lower as facebook ‘learns’ which people to show the ads to.
All the results a channel can promise are completely irrelevant if the channel isn’t a fit for a market. And until recently that’s what we had thought about legal on facebook. Search traffic (the kind you get from Adwords and SEO) is intent driven and biased towards a reactive sale. An external event happens (death of a loved one, need for a divorce, an accident) which prompts someone to find an attorney.
No one is going to google ‘personal injury lawyer chicago’ until they get in a car accident, but if they do there’s an opportunity to convince a highly motivated prospect to reach out and call with the right strategy and close a retainer.
Facebook on the other hand lends itself to proactive services. Getting the right offer in front of someone can convince them to get started.
A common saying in the advertising world is ‘google is where people go to make decisions, facebook is where people go to avoid making decisions’. The mindset of someone browsing through their newsfeed is more similar to a person watching TV, casually seeing content and clicking through on things they find interesting. It takes more than a text ad matching the search (like adwords) to compel someone away from a litany of cat and baby photos but advertisers are making it happen to the tune of just under $40 billion last year. And that’s just what facebook charged. Successful advertisers (including some of our campaigns) have seen 10-100X returns on investment on the leads generated.
And now it’s time for attorneys to get a piece of the action.
For the most part, nothing has changed about the majority of law being reactive, event driven sales. Practice areas like personal injury, probate and criminal will always be event driven markets and I don’t see that changing anytime soon (barring some sort of Minority Report style advances in precognition). But there’s one major practice area that’s primarily proactive: Trust and Estate law.
Compared to the total market of criminal law prospects that’s refreshed at your local precinct every day, the market for people who need a will consists of anyone that can fog a mirror above the age of 18. Not everyone may know they need a will or have the desire to, but that’s the job of a marketer to convince them of that. And what happens when that code is cracked can be astounding.
Now for some inside baseball:
We’ve been generating leads for trust and estate firms on adwords for years in markets ranging from NYC to rural Texas. Our cost per consultation on wills with one of the best conversion rates in the country falls between $50-70.
That number for facebook on a mature campaign? $15
Putting that into numbers, your $2000 ad budget goes from 40 client opportunities to over 130. And due to the nature of facebook advertising, these are often MORE qualified because we’re using educational content to get them to the point of a consultation, positioning the attorney as an expert and trusted advisor before they even speak with a prospect.
Even assuming a simple, $1000 will (which many firms charge more from and smart firms will be able to upsell into a trust or estate plan), there’s plenty of margin to close $20,000 in case files for a 10X return.
Compare that to a 3-5X return on adwords for a T/E firm with process dialed in. It’s not surprising considering the cost per click and competition. But for proactive sales, we can choose what ladder we want to climb.
You may not be getting excited about writing 20 simple wills next month but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. In the marketing world this is referred to as a ‘front end sale’ – something low risk that gets a client in the door and opens to new opportunities once the service is experienced. Even with avvo and yelp dominating search results, most people will stick with a firm they have experience with over rolling the dice on a new one, even if the service is bad (according to a recent interview with Gary Falkowitz).
So in addition to the potential for 10X ROI in month one, you now have a client who will reach out when they have a parent pass away and need probate administration, get injured on the job, or have someone they know getting a divorce. While obviously beneficial to firms running these practice areas, even solo practitioners focused on trust and estate law can take advantage of cases to refer out for co-counsel or to develop real relationship capital with potential referral partners in these fields.
The potential for making money while developing a client base is very real. That’s not to mention the hundreds of emails that don’t convert (typically 3-4x the amount of consultations. In our experience it’s very rare to find attorneys with mailing lists north of 500-1000, programs like this are regularly adding 200-400 emails to the attorney’s mailing list per month.
Like any marketing strategy, the potential here is great because of lack of competition. The firms that are going to take advantage of this today are going to get higher returns than the ones taking advantage of this years or even months from now. Whether you’re seeing your results on adwords go down or need a new channel to add clients, this is definitely something for all trust and estate practices looking to grow should be considering.
Ready to take the next step? Schedule an appointment on our website today and we’ll see whether this can work for your practice.
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