I’ve often referred to legal as the Super Bowl of digital marketing. It’s the highest competition, highest cost per click, it always has been and always will be. So when I was casually browsing stats on the ride back to NYC, I connected some dots with a recent renaissance that’s been going on with some of our clients at CaseFuel.

We recently switched out call tracking provider to JuvoLeads which has given us more insight than ever before. Where we used to have call data, we now have actual signed case data. Our clients have been growing faster than ever, and while I staring at Pat Patriot I figured out why.

The Patriots Principle

If you ask your average person on the street why the Patriots have been the team to beat in football since 2001, the answer will probably be Tom Brady.

Recent memory will probably cement his status as the GOAT. Pop culture has a short memory. New England lifers will have a hard time forgetting the 10 years between wins in SuperBowl XXXIX and XLIX. And they probably will never forget the historic upset against the Giants and not getting to avenge the loss 4 years later.

The GOAT was there for all those seasons. Yet despite the skill, courage and clutch plays he couldn’t carry the team to victory for those 10 years.

So that’s a mark against the great man theory.

What really came together together for the last Patriots run? The wide receiver corps. The Pats got another rockstar in Rob Gronkowski (also considered one of the best to play the game) but it wasn’t until it got rounded out with players like Julian Edelman that the loop was closed. Great passes turned into great catches, touchdowns, points and games. And that’s when they went on to win 4 of the last 5 superbowls.

Which leads us to what I’m calling the Patriots Principle:

To consistently succeed at the top level, you need top talent at all positions. Not even “Greatest of All Time” talent can make up for a weak link elsewhere

Bringing it back to legal marketing

You might be thinking “duh, that’s obvious Jan”. But when I saw the results of getting our own ‘wide receiver corps’ I realized we had been in violation of that principle until this year.

Our team ended up coming in the form of an intake service ran by a former nationwide bankruptcy firm marketing leader (an offensive coordinator, if that doesn’t stretch the metaphor too far). When we ended up plugging in leads we were generating online into an intake team with proven scripts, clients started closing cases right away – on day 1 in several instances. We haven’t lost a client using this system yet and several of these have doubled or tripled volume since getting started.

Where we (and other agencies) have been getting it wrong

No one is immune to man with a hammer syndrome. Running an agency the answer to any growth related problem was more, cheaper or better leads. But this is in direct violation of the Patriots Principle.

New England wouldn’t have broken out of that drought if Tom Brady had spent twice as much time in practice. The team to catch the ball wasn’t there to the level it had to be.

Yet – the approach the agency model is takes proposes to do just that. Pay our team to be your Tom Brady and rifle you leads in high volume with a perfect spiral we’ve been honing throughout the years.

Even if it’s true – and after hundreds of audits I can tell you the real Tom Brady’s are few and far between – it’s not going to overcome bad systems. And after having lost more clients than any marketer would have the sense to admit I can tell you that top level intake is even more rare.

What we’re doing about it

After seeing how much success our clients are having with this in place, I shudder at the thought of how things could have been different if this got solved earlier. In short (full article on this forthcoming) we’re no longer starting engagements without getting the ‘receiver corps’ in place for a client.

To that end – I made a totally free masterclass for anyone interested in getting intake handled for your firm. Click the link here if you’re interested: https://contact.casefuel.com/double-your-case-files/

Also – for bankruptcy firms who are looking for a completely done-for-you process with the people and teams in this story, we’re accepting applications while geographies last here: https://contact.casefuel.com/bk-li/

The post What the Patriots can teach you about scaling legal marketing appeared first on CaseFuel.

Sounds awesome right? How many 25% boosts could be hiding right under your nose? I’m practically planning my next vacation already!

Don’t get me wrong, these are real results and often come from smart, well respected experts. They’re intellectually rigorous and would pass muster even from a PhD in Statistics.

The problem is, it probably doesn’t apply to anything you’re trying to do with your law firm’s marketing. And you could be wasting money, delaying your results or worse if you think they do.

Data Dogmatism

The word data gets thrown around a lot in marketing these days. We’re in the age of machine learning and Don Draper has been thrown out in favor of a server farm in Mountain View.

Data are objective and objective is undeniable. It makes about as much sense to argue against the numbers as it does to argue that the sun rises in the west. So we stopped having the spirited discussions over what creative would play out better in the market in favor of running them both and seeing what people went for.

Largely I think the practice of marketing is better off for it. Data driven is objective and that works. Except when it doesn’t.

Company X who could afford the Stanford trained statistician and the $5000/month split testing software is working in a totally different world than your law firm unless your last name happens to be Morgan, Cellino or Barnes.

You both have data, but only the biggest guys have statistical significance.

The ugly truth about statistical significance for law firms

If you’ve taken a course in statistics or can calculate poker odds in your head, skip this section. Otherwise hang on for a bit.

Let’s say you have a coin. We all know the chances of heads or tails is 50/50. You flip that coin twice and it lands heads both times. By the data, coins land on heads 100% of the time.

Now that’s an objective fact but we know it’s not representative of the true likelihood.

If the coin was thrown 10 times it’s more likely that it would be 5, and it’s even more likely if it was thrown 100 times that it would be 50, and so on. A million coin tosses would be pretty darn close to 500 thousand heads. Over large numbers, the true likelihood of something overcomes randomness, which dominates at small numbers.

Here’s the problem: most law firm marketing projects are closer to 2 coin tosses than 1 million by almost any measure you slice it.

Let’s play with some numbers

Let’s take the solo practice that’s spending $500 per month on adwords. In most practice areas this would get you about 50 clicks and if you’re really hot with conversion rate optimization about 10 client opportunities.

They try out their red button green button test and get 6 conversions for red vs. 4 for green. What a win! That’s 50% where those dopes in the article only got 25%! Or is it?

Running a chi-square test (check this calculator out here)

We find out that it’s not. Not only that but there’s a 48% likelihood that this outcome was pure chance.

Let’s say it’s a mid size firm spending $5000 and add a zero to all of those.

here’s still a 2.53% chance this was attributable to randomness but that’s a level most marketers including myself can live with.

How this could be losing your firm money

There’s no crime in not having statistically significant data. The problem comes in making marketing decisions as if the data were significant.

The first way this can go sideways is making decisions that aren’t backed up. If you pick a winner based on statistically non-significant data, you’re running the risk that the lower performing variation is winning – leaving your conversion rate, click through rates or anything the test was on underperforming for as long as you keep it, maybe even years!

This can be compounded by the second and more insidious issue – taking an incremental approach to your marketing decisions.

Large data sets afford the ability to be incremental. With tens of thousands of trials, you can run a red/green button test and get statistically significant lifts. There’s an allure in the data driven approach of almost letting machine learning take over the decision making process for you. Just plug in elements and let the machine chop away bit by bit as your conversion rate keeps going up.

The problem with that is letting go of ability to go for the big changes. Incremental changes require a lot less courage and after getting used to that approach you might lose your ability to taking a creative leap with big potential rewards.

Small changes make small results. Where you end up seeing big changes are (not surprisingly) on big things like overhauling a site design, changing up an offer or switching up creative from end to end.

Making data driven decisions on a smaller budget

Change the parameters you’re working with.

For example, that solo might have a tough time optimizing a “low funnel” data set like leads because there are fewer of them, but may be able to target a “high funnel” data set like clicks because there are more of them.

For example – same solo firm looking at the 1000 impressions needed to get those 50 clicks, assuming one ad moved from 1.5% click through rate to 3.5%.

Now we’re talking. But there’s something built into those test results that’s worth mentioning.

Quick note – the way significance is calculated, the difference has to be larger with smaller data sets. 1.5% to 3.5% conversion rate is over a 100% difference, which leads to our next point…

Make bigger changes

From a practical perspective this is how we rank the largest potential impacts at Casefuel (examples in parentheses)

1.     Channel (Adwords/call now > facebook/download/SMS marketing)
2.     Offer (Start rebuilding credit today vs. Start for $0 down)
3.     Headline (We fight for men’s rights vs. Trusted Boston Family Law Attorney)
4.     Demographics and geography (City vs. Statewide)
5.     Landing page template (Single column vs. 2 column)
6.     Above the fold landing page elements (Header image)
7.     Minor elements (colors, fonts, body text)

As you notice, we aren’t testing button colors until we’ve gotten juice out of bigger levers. It’s hard to come up with ways to switch your offer, new headlines or creative ways to target new people.

Run longer tests

It’s not about spend per month, it’s about total trials for a split test. You might not be able to run a new test every week if you’re a smaller budget, but you might be able to run one and get statistically significant results every month or quarter.

Defeating Dogma and getting real results

Ironically, the statistics PhDs actually have an easier job when it comes to split test suggestions because with the amount of data they’re working with, you don’t need a huge shift!

It takes creativity to make big changes and guts to accept what’s possible if your results end up being worse than what you started – which will happen – you have dust yourself off and try again. But frankly – with the budgets most law firms are working with that’s the only way to play.

Don’t be blinded by the science. In the best case scenario the data dogma approach can enable lazy thinking when it comes to split tests, at worst it’s being used like a swinging pocket watch to separate hard working law firms from their money.

For more information on topics like this – make sure to check out the Law Firm Growth Podcast

The post Don’t split test that: Data dogma and how it could be sabotaging your law firm marketing appeared first on CaseFuel.

Now I’m well aware the world doesn’t need another article explaining why your crazy cousin is going to camp out for the next iPhone. But after having breakaway success with new marketing channels for legal clients, I believe I’ve found an important relationship to the world of marketing that explains a lot of the results we’ve been seeing.

With tech becoming a bigger part of life every year it’s also crossed over into mainstream discussion as well. In short – the model describes how new products enter the market place; starting from only being attractive to the vanguard of technology, gaining traction among those slightly less crazy, reaching mass appeal and finally dying off. Here’s a visual representation.

Now let’s turn this into a strategic planning tool with the addition of ROI by phase of adoption is in red.

The reasoning behind this is pretty simple. If we imagine all of the attention in a marketing channel as a pie, the slices get smaller every time another advertiser jumps in. Since advertising channels tend to formally or informally work on an auction basis, the price for acquiring one ‘slice’ goes up as time goes on. So as people adopt a marketing channel, the potential ROI goes down.

Think about the first attorney to place an ad in the yellow pages in your town. Or the first person to buy ads or rank on the top of google. They were making money hand over fist, right? How are those returns today? A lot less impressive. Still positive for the most part, but not what they used to be.

Where this gets interesting is what to do with this information. If you can understand this, you can potentially de-stress your marketing investments or make a lot more depending on where you are.

1. Every person reading this is at a stage of this curve.

Sky-high ROIs are not for everyone because they come with sky-high risks. Like any kind of investing, risk and return are inversely related. The guy who was laughing all the way to the bank after placing the first google ad for a personal injury lawyer very well could have taken an absolute bath making a media buy on the back of jetskis the prior week. The true innovators are at the biggest risk of going to zero on any given investment. It takes guts, but to the victor go the spoils.

2. Every marketing channel is on a stage of the curve.

For example, we cut our teeth advertising for attorneys on google adwords starting in 2012. At the time, it was most likely in the early majority stage and today in 2019 we’ve seen it cross over through late majority and arguably into the laggard stage. Over the last few years we’ve seen cost per click (and transitively, cost per leads and cost per signed case) go up, and return on investment go down. 

To contrast – we’re currently seeing great returns in facebook advertising for personal injury lawyers right now, which I would categorize as early adopter in 2019. People who get in now are going to be making a better return than people who get in as the market opens to the early majority. 

3. In most cases – you should match your personal tendencies with the marketing channels you’re considering.

Everyone has a level of comfort with the risk they’re willing to take which is fundamentally what determines what stage you’ll adopt something at. When a prospective client is asking for 3 references before they can jump on the phone, I know that person is naturally in the late majority or a laggard. When I get off a phone with a prospect who’s writing a check and begging to get started yesterday, they’re a natural innovator or early adopter. 

Late majority types will be extremely uncomfortable with innovation type channels. They’ll expect steady results and if things don’t get knocked out of the park first try, they’ll have a hard time finding the stomach to continue with an innovation channel. Innovation types will be extremely bored with late majority type channels. They’ll expect gangbuster results and be put off if what they’re doing is already being used by their competitors. There’s nothing wrong with being either as long as expectations are set. In most cases you can’t have your cake and eat it too (super high ROI for late majority or steady, consistent results for innovator channels). 

4. It’s possible to get the best of both worlds with a portfolio approach.

The one case in which you can have your cake and eat it too. Much like a sound financial strategy allocates investment into steady, low yield investments like bonds and risky, high yield investments like stocks, a good marketing plan can take a portfolio approach. Some of the best results we’ve had with innovative channels have been with firms that have ‘bread and butter’ results that they can count on every month like SEO and PPC. Shifting part of their budget over to a potentially higher yield channel is a win-win when it doesn’t break the bank.

What’s next?

If you’re like most of our clients, you probably don’t have to wait long for marketers of all stripes to present you potential opportunities by phone, email or carrier pigeon. If you’re looking to expand your practice, consider what type of adopter you are and where that matches up with the solution that’s being proposed.

Or, if you want to save yourself some time, book a time with our team at casefuel.com. We’re actively using channels at all stages of the marketing curve and have the real world results to let you know what to expect from each.

The post The Marketing Innovator’s Dilemma appeared first on CaseFuel.

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.

The post Beyond Adwords: 10X ROI and Beyond for Trust and Estate Law Using Paid Social appeared first on CaseFuel.

But some practice owners want more.

Whether it’s for lifestyle reasons, the rewarding work of building a team and providing for them, or to have a sellable practice that you can retire on, some law firm owners decide that running a solo practice isn’t for them.

If this is your goal, you’ve got your work cut out for you.

Many people know the hard numbers that 9/10 small businesses (law firms included) will fail. Recent research points to this number being closer to 5/10, but the fact remains that it’s an accomplishment merely to stay in business.

A lesser known fact to the aspiring mogul is that a vanishingly small amount of small businesses make it past the seven figure mark. According to research, less than 5% of businesses ever reach this point.

At CaseFuel, we’ve spoken to literally hundreds of law firm owners ranging from solos starting out to massively successful firms. We’ve even been lucky enough to work with some of these and be a key driver for practice growth.

Success leaves clues, and after speaking to enough practice owners we’ve found the following commonalities among practice owners that reached the promised land of 7 figure annual revenues. Let’s get started

1. Know your numbers

Focusing on objective measures to your business is one of those truisms that’s trotted out by many but implemented by few. Sure, we all check bank account balances and see a profit and loss sheet at least once a year when we file taxes, but the firms that grow know a lot more than that.

Let’s start with goal setting – what does running a million dollar practice really look like?

Taking $1,000,000 and dividing it into 12 months gives us the delightfully abstract figure of $83,333.33. If your goal is to hit seven figures and your monthly billings last year weren’t there, you’ve got some work to do.

Going a step deeper, fast growing firms are able to easily convert this into case files required by getting their average case value. Let’s say you run a family law practice and made $30,000 last month on 6 new cases. Doing some quick napkin math we arrive at an average case value of $5,000.

If 7 figures is the goal, you now have the much more tangible figure of 11 cases (($83,333.33-30,000)/5000, rounded up) to hit for that seven figure monthly run rate.

How many of these can you expect from referrals next month? What events do you have planned and how have they performed historically? What cases are you getting from your website? These are the questions top firms are asking themselves to get a clear picture of where to focus their attention when they hear the alarm tomorrow morning.

This may sound simple to the point of uselessness but the reality is putting tangible figures creates clarity. This in turn reduces paralysis, the main factor keeping most practices stuck, which is easy to run into when looking at a huge, seemingly insurmountable goal like adding hundreds of thousands in revenue to your practice.

By breaking things down into manageable chunks, you’re setting yourself up for incremental gains that will result in real money in your checking account regardless of whether you make seven figures this year or not. And that’s worth investing time into.

2. Focus on predictable and scalable channels

A corollary to knowing your numbers is working with channels in which numbers are knowable. This introduces a challenge for law firms in particular because of the overwhelming dependence on referrals when starting out.

Referrals are great. Having a potential client come to you from a previous client or colleague will make for the easiest case files you’ll ever post because you come recommended. There’s no need to qualify yourself as the right attorney for the job because the alternative of finding an attorney on your own is scary to the average Joe.

But tell me, how many referrals are you going to get in the next month?

Not a single business owner in the law or otherwise is going to be able to answer that question. Referrals are reactive in nature and you can’t predict who is going to need a divorce, get hit by a car or have a loved one’s estate to settle in the world of your referral partners.

Moreover, the effort to sustain referrals as a channel plants the seeds of its own destruction. Staying top of mind is absolutely key for referrals, and when you’re working cases you start missing BNI meetings and state bar happy hours which will lead to your referrals drying up.

This is fine for the firm that’s content to be solo indefinitely. But if you want your firm to be posting more business this month than last, you need something predictable.

In our world of search engine marketing, we can easily look up the number of people searching for ‘divorce lawyer + CITY’ in a given month, usually numbering in the thousands. But it could also be hosting workshops, doing lunch and learns with captive audiences (like retirement homes for elder law attorneys) or getting a budget together on a platform like avvo.

Once you get a scalable channel locked in, it’s a matter of how much you want to keep investing to keep the leads coming in. Going back to the last point, you should have a cost per case file for any predictable channel you have for a decent amount of time. When you come across a whale of a case, you can choose where to invest that money to get the highest return if growth is your goal.

What’s more – getting these channels in place actually INCREASES your referrals by the virtue of clients coming in with a completely new network of their own. After some time you can be getting more referrals than you thought possible without having to wake up at 5AM to take a train into the city for your local breakfast event.

3. Owning intake

I recently did a fascinating interview with the owner of Intake Conversion Experts, Gary Falkowitz on our podcast. After working with law firms all over the country he’s come to the conclusion that firms are leaving millions of dollars of cases on the table by not focusing on intake.

In one instance, his company was able to help a firm post 200 new case files from leads that hadn’t been contacted in over 9 months. To think that this was accomplished on the coldest of cold cases paints a frightening picture of what could be possible for following up on people that may have not received a timely call back or follow up after an initial consultation.

With the amount of money being made on legal services, it’s possible to turn a profit with considerable slack in the follow up process. An interesting fact from the business world at large is that the top compensated person aside from the CEO in most cases is the person handling sales. In law firms, the person handling sales is typically the lowest compensated person working at the front desk.

While we have worked with some fantastic front office people and services, there are certainly those out there that are losing out on potential case files due to manner on the phone, slow time to call back missed calls or lack of follow up on ‘maybes’ and appointments set.

Putting this into numbers, we’ve seen firms with the best intake booking 20% of inbound leads from the internet into case files. Going to this from a strong average of 10% will result in twice as many case files posted with no change in existing spend or marketing activity.

Does your firm have 20 minutes a day to pick up another case file per week?

If you’re committed to growing a practice, the answer is probably yes. Looking at your calendar it might seem like a no brainer but in practice this can be a challenging and emotionally taxing ordeal.

4. Committing to success

Let’s be honest, calling back a missed number or following up with someone who said ‘not right now’ is going to be a less pleasant conversation than calling back a hot referral. This is one of the major reasons firms trying out new marketing channels slide back to networking after a few months.

The worst case scenario of a result like this is walking away thinking ‘marketing doesn’t work’. These firms get back on the networking treadmill and stay on flat or modest growth until they decide to take another shot.

But for the reasons we’ve outlined before, it’s almost impossible to predictably grow like this. If you’re committed to growing, you need to commit to ownership of the results you’re getting from new channels. In almost every city and practice area in the country, there are people posting case files from these channels, so the onus falls on you if they’re getting results where you aren’t.

Commitment is the difference between the client of ours that has been posting multiple high value personal injury cases per month for the last 3 years and the one the next town over that insisted that online marketing was impossible to build a business on after 2 months. Both of them were getting similar lead volumes and levels of qualification. The first was focusing on the 20% that closed, treated every case as a potential opportunity and did their best to follow up; the second was focused on the 80% that didn’t, took their negative expectations into their calls and didn’t post a single case.

The reality is we’re living in a time where law practices are abundant. Another gem from Gary Falkowitz is assuming that the client calling you cold spoke to an attorney before you and will speak to an attorney after you. This holds whether the client is coming from google, avvo or recommendations from your local bar.

This doesn’t mean you should give up, it means there’s even more business for the firm that can separate themselves from the pack with attention to clients and diligent follow up.

—

So there you have it. If you’re committed to growing and can internalize these practices, you’re well on your way to having the tools you need to grow your firm. Regardless of what channels you go with, these are the keys that will keep your eye on the ball and provide metrics to move forward.

If you’re interested on the process we use to generate case files for growing practices all over the country, feel free to drop a line over at casefuel.com

For more information like this, check out our podcast for interviews with top experts in your ear buds every week.

The post 4 Key Factors of Law Firms Who Grew past Seven Figures appeared first on CaseFuel.

The first: “We tried google adwords and it doesn’t work”

Since the platform came out around 2000, law firms have given google adwords a try and lost money by the click.

Yet, if you google the word “lawyer” in your city and see someone’s name come up, there is a good chance it’s working for them. There’s no contract involved, which means anyone can turn it off at any time if it isn’t delivering the goods.

So does adwords not work? Or is something else at play?

There is a lot of pressure to figure out platforms like google on your own. But it’s an extremely complex system that even full-time advertisers with years of experience learn new things about every day.

There are a million ways to die. If you can figure out how to avoid them, you can get access to a profitable channel that works to deliver you leads 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If you figure it out, you can be the subject of the second thing you hear lawyers say

“Yeah, firm XYZ is doing well, but you know they get all their cases from adwords…”

There are free ways to get more than double the ‘real estate’ on your google ads, and most lawyers don’t take advantage of them.

Case in point – using ad extensions.

Take a look at these two ads:

Same keyword, similar ad copy, but a completely different impression based on the extensions they are using. I would bet dollars to donuts that ad #2 is getting twice the clicks that ad #1 is.

First, ad number 2 is just plain bigger. It’s more likely to catch a browser’s eye.

Second, it provides more information. If I’m in Savannah, I know it’s a short drive over to Commercial Court where I can see these guys to take my case. Ad #1 could be in Atlanta, Macon or who knows where else.

Third, it provides a much better impression. With all of the detail and links, doesn’t it look like ad #2 has their ‘stuff’ together more? I want a thorough attorney if I’m going to be trusting them with my case.

Finally, it has the all important phone number! It’s possible that this ad is getting phone calls without even paying for clicks. Talk about a deal.

All of this for the grand total of zero dollars. These ad extensions are free to whoever knows how to use them, and they help you win over competition that doesn’t.

Like what you’re reading? There’s more where that came from

Follow me on linkedin for more information on how to get your practice generating leads – without breaking the bank.

The post This Simple Tweak Could Save Your Law Firm Thousands On Your Adwords Budget appeared first on CaseFuel.