“What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.”
Jeff Bezos (1964) founder of Amazon.com and worth over $100 billion.
“Advertising doesn’t work.”
“You’re right,” I replied.
“So there’s no point in me doing it,” the attorney continues.
“You’re absolutely right,” I replied.
The attorney stares at me a moment with a confused look on his face and says, “But isn’t that what you do for attorneys?”
“Yes, it is a big part of what I do.”
I was sitting at a restaurant in Scottsdale Arizona with a criminal lawyer. He made his views to me abundantly clear. He’s tried several different marketing firms and he’s got nothing from it. According to him it is all a waste of time.
He was taken aback with my answers. I agreed with everything he said, because he spoke the truth.
At first, he thought I was about to confess to something he was suspecting all along. He thought that marketing firms promise the world and don’t deliver. He believed that they are there to make a quick buck, and send you packing when things don’t work out.
He started telling me a story of how he hired one of the biggest Google advertising firms in the country. They had over 50,000 clients, their price was reasonable, and to top it off they won prizes from the Chamber of Commerce for being one of the fastest growing medium sized companies in America.
Yet, once he paid them he felt like they wasted his money. He spent $1,000 per month and got nothing from it.
What’s the point? His solution was to keep relying on referrals and organic Google searches for his leads.
So, he sat there. Waiting for me to make a confession. Waiting for me to reveal the scam. Waiting in anticipation to be vindicated.
After all, I have just agreed with everything he said. What could my answer possibly be, other than it is all a “big scam”?
Instead of going head to head with him, and explaining to him about problem first advertising, how law firms were different from other businesses, and if you pay peanuts you get monkeys.
I decided to pull out a little booklet. In this booklet I had dozens and dozens of comments from attorneys. For example, here’s one from a guy called Jason B:
“David is probably the most important connection I have made in the last 10 years. He has become the guru on the mountaintop for all of our legal marketing needs. His understanding of attraction marketing using the crocodile brain and mass marketing system have proven to deliver amazing results. He has been able to help us create better sales processes, attract better clients and grow our legal financing platform by leaps and bounds. David is like a college professor that can take complex subjects and simplify them in a way anyone could understand. 10/10 would recommend if you are looking for more clients, who are ready to hire you before they ever meet you.”
Here is another one from an attorney named Zaid:
“Very knowledgeable on marketing. They actually take a different approach to marketing rather then the same old approach by other companies. They actually focus on the psychology of the consumer rather than throwing template adds out on the web that make you look the same as everyone else.”
And the list went on and on. All of them attorneys who were killing it advertising on the very same platform he believed would never work.
He then came across this review from a PI attorney called Don:
“As a PI attorney you know I get marketed to all the time and unfortunately over the years I never found that elite marketing expert that really knows exactly how to market and grow my law practice. Fortunately, that all changed the day I met David and started working with Big Mouth Marketing. From the beginning David was very patient and It was clear that he was laser focused on my best interest, a refreshing change from others that just wanted to sell me something! He took the time to learn about my practice in great detail. It was abundantly clear from day one that his goal was to help grow my practice. Any attorney that is ready to grow their practice owes it to themselves to have a conversation with a true marketing expert and a gracious genuine man.”
When he read these reviews from other attorneys he became even more confused.
Why would I agree that advertising didn’t work, and then show him all of these comments? Was I simply playing him in some way?
The answer is no. I wasn’t playing him. I do agree that advertising doesn’t work for the vast majority of attorneys.
Why?
Well, straight up advertising on Google or any other platform is a waste of time and money. Without testing market specific messaging, ads, and landing pages it is useless.
And even then, you need other systems in place, like Passive Return Agents, to bring the average cost down and cement your authority in the prospect’s mind (more on them in a minute).
But by far, one of the biggest reasons advertising doesn’t work for attorneys is because their ads are vague, and do not talk about the prospects problem.
We’ve covered this in the previous article when it comes to landing pages and webpages.
#1. Let me show you how attorneys are wasting their advertising budgets.
A quick note before I get started. If you find yourself reading this article and your firm’s name appears as a bad example of advertising. Know that I am not trying to insult you or belittle your efforts.
There is no way for you to know exactly what works and what doesn’t. In my lifetime I have spent multiple millions buying ads. It is my obsession to find out how to best grow law firms. It is my full-time job. Just like it is yours to study and practice being an attorney for all those years, it is my job to figure out how to grow your law practice.
Ok, so with that out of the way, at the risk of offending someone, here is an example of a bad ad:
By looking at this ad, can you guess what the Google search term is?
Most probably not. Let’s try and figure it out together.
The headline, the URL, and the description give nothing away. It doesn’t talk about the problem the prospect is facing. There is no way for us to know what on earth they are advertising.
Imagine coming across an ad that advertises water:
We have water. Lots of water. Enjoy water.
We’ve been handling water for 25+ years. We are trusted by people who also love water. Come and experience water.
Do you know what they are promoting?
Is it a water park? A store that sells water? Or a water utility company? Or perhaps it is a PADI diving center?
Just like the water industry, the legal industry is vast, and people are confused. You need to speak directly to them.
So, from this ad, let’s try and figure out what I typed into Google to get this served to me.
The only clue we have is at the bottom in a section we call “Google extensions”.
From this you may assume I searched either for anestate planning, PI, family, bankruptcy, or real estate, attorney.
If you assumed it was one of these areas of law, you would be wrong.
Here is screenshot from the search:
#2. How attorneys can advertise to get more clicks, more leads, and more clients
As someone who is looking for a DUI attorney, who do you think I would choose?
The first ad isn’t perfect, but at least it mentions the word ‘DUI’. If you had a bad back and needed surgery. Would you hire the back surgeon, or the doctor that says they help with headaches, coughs, and general illnesses?
You can actually buy the advertising data these firms are using. And I can see that the top law firm, that is specific to DUI, spends three times more on adverting than the bottom firm with the vague ad.
It isn’t because they have more money to burn, or that they simply feel generous to Google. It is because they are getting more leads and clients. Therefore, they can spend more on marketing.
The top three DUI advertisers in the U.S. are:
- DrunkDrivingLawyers.com – $90,000 per month
- DUI.com – $58,600 per month
- DUIAttorneyGroupo.com – $65,000 per month
Let’s take a look at some of their ads.
Do you notice how specific that ad is?
It asks a question that the prospect immediately says “yes!” to.
Arrested for a DUI in CA? – DUI.com
Remember to be as specific as possible for the keywords being typed into the search bar.
Here are some more ads they are running:
Las Vegas DUI Attorney
Want your DUI Dismissed?? Call Now
Save your License. Free Visit
Best DUI Lawyer Philadelphia
Don’t Let a DUI Ruin Your Life
Call Now to Save Your License
St Petersburg DUI Arrest?
You Only Have 10 Days to Fight a DUI Offense!
Call Us to Avoid Jail
Are you starting to notice the ‘problem first’ approach here? Every single ad talks about the specific problem they are facing in the city or town they are facing them.
When you hire a firm that deals with 50,000 businesses from all walks of life they won’t be doing this. They simply don’t have the man power for this kind of in-depth analysis and testing.
They charge too little. It is the equivalent of going to Rocket Lawyer for a $50 contract template vs getting an actual experienced attorney to help you one-on-one for thousands of dollars.
#3. How to legally steal strategies from the most profitable attorney advertisers in America
This reminds me of a video I saw a few years back. A female Cheetah was stalking her prey in Tanzania. She had two cubs with her and called them over so that they can observe how she hunted.
She was careful and calculated. The two cubs were rather large and helped the mother to take down an impala.
They tried to choke out the impala, but it was too big and strong.
After a few seconds the impala broke loose and swung its horns. One of the Cheetahs got critically injured and couldn’t chase after it. The other two chased, but quickly realized it was useless.
Months later the surviving Cheetahs were about to make the same mistake as their mother.
Just before they started chasing another adult impala, the other one growled and stopped the chase in its tracks.
They learned from their previous mistake, and instead, picked out a newborn baby. It was easier prey, and they didn’t need to risk their lives.
You don’t only have to learn from your mistakes, you can just as easily learn from someone else’s, like these Cheetahs.
Although a Cheetah is the fastest animal in the wild, has incredible eyesight, and ferocious instinct, they can still learn from the mistakes of others.
Just because I have overseen millions in ad spend, generated well over 1.5 million leads, ran 100,000+ adverts, and conducted 5,000 marketing tests, doesn’t mean I can’t keep learning from the mistakes of others.
That’s why I constantly buy data, and lots of it.
I can peak under the hood of some of the biggest advertisers in the industry.
Picture this.
Pretend you are a huge PI firm. You have been spending $300,000 per month on advertising for 7 years.
You’ve got a big fat budget and you can afford to make mistakes.
So, you test out different platforms, keywords, and you continually tweak your ads to get you the best possible results.
You’ve run over 500,000 variations using computer simulations and experiments.
You’d feel on top of the world as all the hot PI leads come knocking on your door every day.
You know exactly what works and what doesn’t. No guesswork.
What if I told you it is possible for you have that data?
For example, here are 3 of the biggest PI Google advertisers in the country:
- AccidentAttorney.com ($97k per month)
- Lawyers.com ($123k per month)
- InjuryHelpLine.com ($257k per month)
They are currently bidding on 131,946 different search terms in Google.
However, if you overlap all of their phrases, and see which ones they have in common, you’ll see this:
In all of their tests, we know that Americans type in 23,614 core searches when it comes to PI cases.
These search terms are so profitable that all the biggest advertisers are bidding on them.
Also, AccidentAttorneys.com have tested a total of 60,888 different ads. We can take a peak where they’ve spent the most money. This’ll tell us how successful these ads are.
For example, they spend a huge amount on the keyword “Auto accident lawyer”.
In the last few months they have tested hundreds of variations. The most successful were these three:
Ad #1:
Ad #2:
Ad #3:
It turns out that by adding (Recommended) in the ad increased the click through rate and lowered the advertising costs. I just saved myself months, or possibly years, of work by making use of the biggest advertiser’s data.
Let’s take a look at another experiment that the biggest DUI advertisers in the country did, and what they settled on.
Here’s a recent experiment DrunkDrivingLawyers.com ran.
Their biggest keyword they target is “DUI Defense”.
Ad #1:
Ad #2:
Ad #3:
Ad #2 was the winner.
We have access to all 18,382 of their ads. So, we can compare and see which ones work and which ones don’t.
Then we compile that with our data and get results that are unheard of in the industry.
By the way, this is one advertiser out of thousands we have data on. Companies that use data will get much better results than those that ignore it.
A while ago I wrote an article, stating that things are about to change.
I told you that things will change so rapidly that only the super attorneys will survive. Using data like this, and having access to thousands of experiments, is another small glimpse into that future.
Super attorneys will hire companies that make sure of all the technologies available to them. Lagging attorneys will continue to rely on word of mouth until their time runs out.
A recent study commissioned by Microsoft has quantified the difference between data leaders and the so-called ‘laggards’ who are less mature in their use of data.
The average S&P500 company that uses data effectively makes $100m more per year.
The same is true of smaller businesses like law firms. Their average gross profit margin on goods and services are 18% greater than the laggards.
So, back to the attorney I was talking to at the beginning of this article. He told me that advertising doesn’t work, and I agreed with him. For the vast majority of attorneys advertising doesn’t work.
For advertising to work you need to be a pro (or hire a pro). You need to test thousands of variations every single month. You need to analyze the thousands of variations all the competition test every month. You need data scientists to make sure everything is statistically valid.
And then finally, you need to record every single outcome to know how many cases came from each experiment.
As you can see, the top advertisers in the industry are using these very same methods to churn out huge results.
Richard F. one of our attorney clients had this to say:
“Big Mouth gets it! We have been through a number of companies big on promises with zero results. Big Mouth Marketing understands the legal space and will deliver results to your firm.”
If you would like us to run your advertising for you, schedule a 1-1 appointment with us here.
Or maybe you need some more reassurance.
Well, simply go to this page right here and you will see hundreds of reviews about our services from attorneys like you.
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