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In this episode, Jim & Tyson interview Andrew Stickel, owner of Social Firestarter, a marketing agency that works primarily with lawyers. Listen as they discuss different ways to market your law firm and how to differentiate from other law firms.

Topics:

• • Andrew’s presentation
    • The beginnings of his digital marketing agency for lawyers
    • Wanted to start a new company that actually made a difference for lawyers
    • Had a lot of lawyer contacts
  • The value of niching down and just specializing on working with lawyers
    • You get really good on 1 area: “Jack of all trades, master of none”
    • “All of our clients benefit from all our other clients”
  • Marketing for lawyers vs other professional services
    • Most businesses in the world can create offers that are obvious: “2×1”
    • You got to position yourself to be perceived as the expert
    • Lawyers who advertise like crazy get more clients that good lawyers
    • Be different from every other lawyer out there
    • De-commoditize yourself
  • Get perceived as an expert
    • Becoming an expert in law firm marketing
    • Provide a ton of value for lawyers
    • Went on camera and talk about topics that lawyers would find interesting about how to market a law firm

• Marketing to law firms

• • • Social media
    • Questions people have, most common problems
    • Content to help people solve small problems
    • Become the authority
  • Ways to differentiate your law firm
    • Facebook ads
    • Target the exact kind of people you are looking for
    • Facebook pixel
    • Solution style ads, answers to questions
    • Getting granular
  • The next level of marketing
    • Don’t get in your head, just do it
    • Educate yourself on how things work; facebook ads, groups, pages, etc.
    • Free training that shows this branding strategy at https://lawyermasterclass.com/webinar-registration
  • People should stop doing immediately
    • Relying on 1 source of leads
    • SEO is getting more competitive
    • Start doing what other people aren’t doing
  • Best lawyers are the ones who are open to trying new things and understand that marketing is always evolving
  • The future:

• It’s all about value

• • Mailing lists
  • Instagram
• The difference between high production videos vs iphone videos
  • Done is better than perfect

Jim’s hack: Open new Google doc files just typing in docs.new in your browser. Also slides.new or sheets.new

Andrew’s hack: A facebook hack: If you are running facebook ads, if you are a personal injury attorney or a criminal defense attorney, when targeting people, select an actual physical location. For example if you are a personal injury attorney, type in all the hospitals in the area that you serve.

Tyson’s tip: Go to Andy’s Youtube channel. Look at how he names his videos. Look at the art in the videos. Pretty incredible.

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Transcripts: How to Market Your Law Firm Providing Value ft. Andrew Stickel 

Andrew Stickel
What you need to do as an attorney, is you need to start doing what other people aren’t doing. You know, I mean, that’s kind of the whole thing. Like, you know, a lot of lawyers, they say they’re different. They say they’re a different type of law firm. They say they’re the best will prove it. You know, go out and give value, prove you’re the best. And then people will hire you.

Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm, the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your phone. Welcome to the show.

Jim Hacking
Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking. I’m facing matrix. What’s up, Jimmy? Oh, Jason, we had a good weekend. The building was paving the asphalt parking lot. So we decided to close the office on Saturday. So I actually had two days off and so I’m feeling good.

Tyson Mutrux
I was on the Bourbon Trail and Kentucky sipping on Bourbon hanging out. So I had a nice, enjoyable weekend. It’s, you know, those weekend trips. They’re they’re pretty exhausting, because you sort of Rush everything among us. And we drove instead of flying and so, but it was a fun weekend.

Jim Hacking
A lot of fun. That’s great. That’s good to hear.

Tyson Mutrux
All right. So we’ve got a guest today. And so I want to introduce them. I think people are going to get a lot out of this episode. I think if you check out Andy’s YouTube channel, you’re gonna get a lot out of it. I think you’re gonna learn a lot just by watching his videos. But our guest today is Andrew stickle. At red. Tell me if I’m wrong about this. I’m pretty sure you own social Firestarter. But you’ve been working with lawyers for about the last six years almost exclusively. You’ve been marketing for 16 years. Andy, welcome to the show.

Andrew Stickel
Thanks. Thanks. Yeah, no, that’s absolutely correct. I own a marketing agency called Social Firestarter. And we work primarily with lawyers. And it’s funny, we didn’t actually start out that way, we started out just kind of as a general agency, and my partner used to be National Sales Director for one of the major lawyer marketing companies out there, I’m not gonna say who they are. They were one of the large national ones that everyone gets phone calls from all the time. And she had a moral epiphany and was like, I can’t do this anymore. And wanted to work for a company or one of the, you know, start a new company that actually made a difference for lawyers. And her and I teamed up and we just kind of started doing marketing in general, but she had all these lawyer contacts, and then, you know, one law firm client turned into five, and then that turned to 10. And all of a sudden, we’re marketing lawyers. That’s how I kind of got into it, but I’ve gotten really good at it.

Jim Hacking
And you talked about the value of niching down and just specializing on working with lawyers, how has that changed you as a marketer and helped your business?

Andrew Stickel
Well, the important part is that you get really good at one area, they always say Jack of all trades, master of none. But for me, it’s like, you know, if I work with, you know, a restaurant and a law firm, and a doctor and you know, a brewery and all these different things, it’s kind of like, you kind of get okay at marketing everything. But once you really specialize in something, then you get to know the niche inside and out. And you know, it actually becomes a lot of times repeatable works typically, for a law firm in LA will usually work for one in Baltimore. Now, search engine optimization is a little different. But in terms of just general marketing, and ideas and things like that. So what it allows us to do is everything that we do is essentially a case study, and all of our clients benefit from all our other clients, which is pretty cool. And I mean, lawyers are the same way. You know, I mean, I talked to lawyers all the time. And, you know, the clients that I have, that I feel do the best are the ones that only do family law, or only do personal injury, it’s you know, when when we have the ones that do employment and family and personal injury and you know, a little bit of estate planning, it’s kind of a they kind of get mashed up a little bit and they do a good job, but I don’t feel that they typically have as much success as the ones that focus on one specific area. Now obviously, that’s a generalized statement. There’s there’s exceptions to every rule, but that’s kind of the benefit for me is that I’m able to kind of, you know, get really good at marketing lawyers as opposed to being pretty good or being okay marketing lawyers and okay at marketing breweries and okay, at marketing this okay, marketing that.

Tyson Mutrux
Andy, can you tell us a little bit about how is it different marketing for lawyers, as opposed to say, an accountant or a doctor and things like that? Sure.

Andrew Stickel
Well, professional services are a little different. And I wouldn’t even equate it to an accountant, although accountants can typically. I mean, if you’re just starting out as an accountant, you can, you know, you can do your $99 tax return as kind of an entry to a value ladder or something like that. But lawyers are a little different because and I always say lawyers are different than restaurants and gyms and different things like that, because most businesses in the world can create offers that are obvious. So if you’re a gym you can do you know one week free membership or one month free membership if you’re a restaurant You can do a free coupon for a free appetizer or something like that. But lawyers can’t really do that, you know, you can’t do by one DUI get one DUI free. So you’ve got to, you got to position yourself to really be perceived as the expert out of the gate. Because things happening with lawyers that I see a lot where I talk to a lot of lawyers, and they kind of think that being the best lawyer means that they’re gonna get all the cases. And that’s not usually the case. So they kind of try to rely on that as their market. And they try to be, you know, rely on being a good lawyer. And they assume that, you know, because I’m a good lawyer words are going to travel, I’m going to get all these word of mouth cases, and they will get word of mouth cases, but they don’t get as much as many cases I feel as as the ones that advertise like crazy. And that’s because there’s no correlation with being good at your thing and getting paid for it. But there’s a direct correlation with being good at marketing your thing and getting paid for it. So the question comes down to how do you market a law firm, if you can’t do all of those, you know, calm gimmicks, you can’t do a buy one, you know, 50% off your next divorce or something like that. So and actually, a lot of, you know, personal injury attorneys, there’s a lot of contingency work. So that’s not even the type of thing where you can, you can do any sort of offer, even if you wanted to do something gimmicky, you know. So you’ve got to really position yourself to be different than every other guy. And what’s hap, or every other attorney out there. Because what happens is a lot of these attorneys turn into commodities where they just want to talk about their experience, or sometimes it just comes down to straight price. You know, there’s a lot of attorneys out there that I talked to that they charged $5,000 for a DUI, and they do great work, but they’re getting undercut by a lot of other attorneys that are charging $1,000 for a DUI or $2,000 for a DUI. So the thing that I tell my clients is, you’ve got to take price out of the equation, you’ve got to D commoditize. yourself. And that’s one of the things that it really makes marketing an attorney or a law firm, different than another type of business. Because to have really true success, you’ve got to figure out a way to D commoditize. yourself. And that’s that’s really what I focus on with with with my clients, I tried to do that as best as possible. And to

Jim Hacking
use the phrase when you were talking there many of you about trying to get perceived as an expert right out of the gate. And I thought that that piqued my interest. And I think that’s something that that lawyers really need to focus on. Talk a little bit about that, if you could.

Andrew Stickel
Sure. So what I do is I teach my clients and really, basically what this is, is this is a strategy that I wanted to try out. So I tried it for myself. And what I tried to do is I set myself out to become an expert on law firm marketing. And the theory was, is that if I provide a ton of value to lawyers, then lawyers are going to start reaching out to me and asking me about marketing services. Because there’s one thing that I’ve learned as a marketer, it’s that lawyers are inundated with sales calls from marketers, so they don’t really like marketers. So what I set out to do was be different, because again, like I said, for my clients, and for law firms, I look at what the competition is doing. And it’s like you can kind of do what everyone else is doing and compete with them. And even if you’re, you know, even if you execute flawlessly, you’re still competing with every other law firm in your market. And I’m talking about things like search engine optimization, and pay per click and things like that. Or you can look at what no one else is doing, or very few are doing. And even if your execution is flawed, you’re only competing, you know, with maybe two, maybe one or two other firms in your market. A lot of times you’re not competing with anyone. So what I tried to do for myself as I tried to make lawyers perceive me as the expert, the way I did that is I just put value out there. All I did is I went on camera, and I just talked about topics that lawyers would find interesting and find valuable about how to market a law firm. And what happened was lawyers started following me and they started asking me questions, and they started finding my content. And then they started asking me about doing marketing for them. So what happened was I took a group of people who are kind of kind of been alienated because they’ve been burned by marketers so many times. And I made them trust me, and I made them actually reach out to me. And it’s funny to a lot of lawyers, actually, because my agency is actually full. I’m actually not taking clients right now. But I’ll have lawyers reach out to me. And they’ll actually try to sell themselves to me about why I should work with their law firm. It’s such a strange role reversal, because for years, it was always, oh, I need to convince you why you need to hire me to do marketing for the law firm. So I took that principle and I figured if I can make it work where lawyers want me to want to hire me, then I can make it work for lawyers. Because, you know, I think it’s much more difficult to market to lawyers than it is to market the people that need legal services. So that was the strategy there. But then what lawyers can do is they can take that exact same strategy and use it and it works. And it works because I do it for my clients. I know it works. But what happens is, you know, so So let’s say you’re a divorce attorney and you’re trying to get more divorce. squints. You know, typically what people do is they try to do search engine optimization, or they do pay per click, or they turn to social media. But the problem with social media is that a lot of times, lawyers don’t do social media, right? What they do is they’ll put these ads out that just say, Are these posts out that just say, you know, if you have questions about your divorce, call me today for a free consultation. And what you should really be doing is thinking about, what are all the questions that every time someone comes in with the divorce, there’s going to be five or 10 questions that you pretty much know they’re going to ask. And every lawyer knows that the most typical problems that people face the most common questions, different things like that, what you should do is you should start creating content that answers those questions that helps people solve problems. So for example, if you’re a bankruptcy attorney, anyone that’s filing for bankruptcy, probably has bill collectors calling them they’re probably losing sleep at night, they probably have all kinds of weight on their shoulder. So if you can create content that helps them solve small problems, then they’ll hire you for the big problem for the bankruptcy, for example. So for bankruptcy, what you could do is you could create a guide, you know, three ways to make bill collectors stop calling you, you know, just something small like that. And then think about, you know, what are some of the other problems that people have with bankruptcy? And what are some of the things that they actually want, because a lot of times, you know, what someone wants, you know, with a bankruptcy, for example, is, you know, they don’t necessarily like bankruptcy is kind of the means to the end, but it’s not the end that they want, what they want, is they want maybe to buy a house, or they want peace of mind, or they want to just basically get into payments that they can they can afford, right? So a lot of times, what happens is, people will sell the bankruptcy, and they’ll create content around bankruptcy, but they don’t create content, they don’t provide value around the solution about what the people actually want, you know, so that’s typically the way you provide value. If you’re a divorce lawyer, maybe you’re targeting fathers, who are afraid that they’re going to lose time with their kids, because that’s kind of like a common misconception that, because you’re a male, the courts will favor mothers. And as far as I know, that’s not that’s not accurate. But a lot of people still think that, you know, so what you could do is you could create content that talks about, here’s how you can make sure that you still get as much time as you want with your kids, you know, after you get a divorce, you know, so if you if you provide value, and provide solutions, then that’s the way that you d commoditize. yourself, like I said before, because once you provide value, then you become the authority. And once you’re the authority, they’re not going to see you as the authority and then call another lawyer, you know, that’s not how it works. They see you as the authority, you’re the one that got them all the information, give them all the information. So you’re the one they want to hire. Does that make sense? Kind of how that whole process works?

Tyson Mutrux
Sure, that makes perfect sense. So Andy, sort of teased the topic of the day, which is waste differentiate your law firm, I guess, where should people start? I mean, I’m surely it’s not all just content, or maybe there’s all content. But where should lawyers start whenever they’re trying to differentiate themselves?

Andrew Stickel
Well, what I do, what I recommend my clients do, is they start with Facebook ads. And the reason that I recommend Facebook ads is because the barrier to entry is so low, it’s so cheap to get in there. And you can target the exact type of people that you’re looking for. It’s pretty amazing. Facebook ads, like, I mean, if you put the Facebook pixel on your website, then what you can do is you can tell Facebook, to find more people, like the people that have been on your website. So for example, if you have a personal injury website, and it’s all about car accidents, then what you can do is you can put that pixel on there, and you can say, okay, Facebook, these are the people that have been on my website, what you need to do is you need to go out and find more people, like the people that have been on my website, and it actually works. It’s pretty crazy. But then what you do instead of just running ads saying, Hey, have you been in a car accident? Call me today? Because, you know, on Facebook, people have a blind spot to ADS, unless they’re really, you know, unless they have what’s called a pattern interrupt. I call it a pattern. Actually, a lot of people call it a pattern interrupt, but basically, it’s something that gets your attention. And just the standard Personal Injury Lawyer ad doesn’t work or the standard, you know, family law ad or whatever it is. But if you can run content to those types of people. So what I would say is you you put the Facebook pixel on your website, you tell Facebook, we’re going to run ads to these types of people that have come to my website and the ads that you’re going to run our solution style ads, or answers to questions. So for example, if you have a personal injury law firm, and you’re going to run ads to people that are similar to people who have been to your website, you can run a you can create a video maybe it’s like four tricks the insurance company uses to deny your car accident claim, you know, or you know three Things to do immediately following a car accident, you know, different things like that, where the people that are your potential clients are going to be really interested in those types of content, you know, because you’re actually providing value you’re trying to say maybe you know, if it’s a divorce page, you could say three things to never do. Even if you haven’t filed for divorce yet, or something like that just to provide, you know, just to provide kind of that, that thought process there. And then what you’re doing is you’re showing content, that people that have been on your website, or people that are likely people that have been on your website, are likely going to be interested in. And then you can get a little bit more complicated also, if you want, but typically, you just run ads like that to those types of people, that’ll work really well because you’re providing value, and people will start seeing you. But if you want to get even more granular, what you can do is you can tell Facebook, okay, now anyone that watched 25% of this first video, I want to show them the second video, and then anyone that watched 20% of 25% of the second video, you can show them a third video. And it’s all basically just making sure that they’re just seeing your content and your value over and over and over again. And it’s a really cool strategy. And you can get started with like five or 10 bucks a day, you don’t have to spend, you know, I mean, PPC, you know, construction accidents in New York City are $250 A click at some point, just ridiculous. And it’s because you’re competing with every other construction accident attorney. But if you’re if you’re a construction accident attorneys trying to get construction action cases, and you put videos out that are targeting construction workers that talk about here are four ways to stay safe on a job site, here are three things your employer is not telling you about worksite, safety, you know, different things like that, that construction workers would be interested in, then you can use Facebook really effectively, and really cheap. And that’s what I tell people, you know, if you want to get started, the best way to do it, is that exact strategy right there using Facebook in providing value.

Jim Hacking
What percentage of the people that you meet with? Is this all sort of new to because I think a lot of our listeners are sort of get this approach, they sort of understand, you know, sort of leading with value and giving content away? And what percentage of people do you think, do you have to explain it to and then for the people that do get it? What would be your sort of next level of

Andrew Stickel
attack? Well, I think that everyone, pretty much I won’t say everyone, but most of the people that I talked to agree with the strategy, the problem that a lot of people have is they get in their own head. So a lot of people think, Okay, I’m gonna do this, but I don’t like the way I look, or I don’t have a high an expensive camera, or I’m not great at talking on camera, or different things like that, you know, so everyone kind of gets that this is a really good strategy. But what a lot of people don’t really no is what the best way to execute the strategy, or they have this false belief that they can’t execute it, or that it takes a lot of time. So a lot of times what I’m having to explain to people, not necessarily the strategy itself, I’m gonna kind of go over the strategy, but to really teach people that it’s not hard to do it only take like, for me, it only takes me five minutes a day, and I put out content almost every single day. But the way to kind of jump into this strategy, and you know, is really kind of to educate yourself on, you know, how Facebook Ads work, how Facebook groups work, different things like I have a guy that I do marketing for he’s a, he’s a personal injury attorney in Atlanta, and we started a group targeting motorcycle riders. And within 11 days, he got his first motorcycle accident case, I actually had to get the case, it was a lead that turned out to be a good case. And he actually didn’t get the case because of a few things. But but within eight weeks, he got his first wrongful death case, you know, from from a Facebook group where we spend, I think we spend 20 $30 a day on ads, just providing value and getting people into the group, you know. So the best way to do it is really to educate yourself on how Facebook advertising works. And the reason I say educate yourself instead of hiring a Facebook marketing agency is because Facebook ads are really not that difficult. Even for people that aren’t tech savvy, they’re not difficult if you have something that shows you how to do it. And I actually have a couple courses that I’ve done. But I do a completely free training, it’s a it’s an hour long web class at lawyer masterclass.com We’re actually show the exact strategy that shows exactly how to do this exact branding strategy, you know, and you so you can you can learn how to do it there. Or you can or there’s a lot of other places online where you can learn about how to run Facebook ads. But you know, there’s this problem with marketing a lot of times and lawyers where lawyers don’t necessarily know what’s going on with their marketing and they don’t understand how marketing works and how some of these things work. And that’s why I think they’ve been burned for so long. So that’s part of the reason why I’m also teaching a lot of lawyers, a lot of things also as I’m trying to teach them how to, you know what you need to be looking for in a marketing agency and in the Facebook advertising agency and the proper structure of a Facebook advertising campaign. So that if you do hire a marketing company, you can at least understand what’s happening and you can know if you’re if it’s being done correctly, but that would be The best way to kind of jump in is kind of educate yourself and also go to the lawyer masterclass.com. And like I said, it’s an hour long class that shows this exact strategy is completely free.

Tyson Mutrux
Maybe I mean, you see marketing every single day, and I’m sure you see a lot of good things, a lot of bad things, both from lawyers and from marketing agencies, what are some of the things you see that people should stop doing immediately?

Andrew Stickel
Stop doing immediately, I think that relying on one source of leads, is the thing that people need to stop doing immediately. So the difficult part is, lawyers have been kind of always been reluctant to jump on to the next thing, you know, so, a long time ago, lawyers can even advertise. And then they started jumping into the phonebook and phonebook work really, really well for a long time. And then these things called websites came along. And some lawyers made the jump into websites. And others kind of were like, No, I’m just gonna stick with the website, he had to actually convince lawyers to actually get a website, which sounds kind of crazy now. And then websites really started taking off, the internet started taking off, and people started using Google instead of yellow pages. And then every lawyer jumped into a website. But by that point, a lot of law firms had already really jumped in and been doing really well online. And I think that social is the next thing that’s, that’s really undervalued that that, that lawyers are just not using. But the bigger problem is that Google is getting more and more competitive. You know, I mean, Google of business, they’re not here to give you free leads, they’re here to make money. You know, so search engine optimization is getting more competitive search engine optimization is changing all the time. You know, there was, I mean, in the last 12 weeks, there have been something like seven or eight updates, like major updates, it’s just been crazy. And, you know, my clients are feeling and we’re feeling as an agency where we see all these things are happening. And, you know, you’ve got to scramble to adjust. And it’s not going to stop, because Google is, you know, getting smarter. RankBrain, which is the, the engine that they’re using to rank websites is getting smarter, they’re getting better at their ads optimizations. So a lot of lawyers are relying on search engine optimization right now as their sole source of leads. And I don’t think the search engine optimization is dead, and I don’t think it’ll ever be dead. But I think it’s going to get more competitive. And it’s going to, I think, I think SEO organic clicks, are going to be getting less and less. So what you need to do as an attorney, is you need to start doing what other people aren’t doing. You know, I mean, that’s kind of the whole thing. Like, you know, a lot of lawyers, they say they’re different, they say they’re a different type of law firm, they say they’re the best will prove it, you know, go out and give value, prove you’re the best. And then people will hire you know, and I think that that’s kind of the biggest thing that a lot of lawyers need to stop doing, is they just stop relying on just one source of lead generation, and also stop advertising the exact same places that everyone else is advertising, try to do something else, something different, and it’ll be so much easier for him.

Jim Hacking
And he tell us, what are your favorite kind of lawyers to work with?

Andrew Stickel
My favorite kind of lawyers to work with are the ones that I want to say ambitious, very, you know, I’m a go getter, I get up at 5am Every day, and I’m ready to, you know, kind of try out new things. And I’m adventurous with new marketing strategies. And I know that not everything I do is going to work. But I know that if I try 10 things, you know, maybe three are going to work and one’s going to be a home run. So my favorite type of lawyers are the ones that understand that, you know, marketing, in general is always evolving. What I do today for search engine optimization is not what I did a year ago for search engine optimization. And what I did a year ago is not what I did two years ago. And same thing with social media, social media evolves as we get new tools, and as new things come out. So I love working with lawyers, that I can say, hey, I’ve got an idea. I want to you know, try this thing. And they say, let’s do it, you know, the ones that I really like working with, because those are the ones that ultimately are going to be the most successful because they’re willing to kind of, you know, taste the fruit, I guess. It may be poisonous, or it might might lead to a goldmine. You know, Andy,

Tyson Mutrux
I’m gonna ask you to predict the future. And I want you to tell us in the next one to three years, something we should start focusing on that most people aren’t focusing on today.

Andrew Stickel
Again, value, it’s all about value, you know, if you can dominate YouTube, just with with general questions, if you can get people on your email list, and that’s another thing that I didn’t even talk about. But that’s one of the most important things you can do is if you can start building an email list, because, you know, right now Facebook is where a lot of people are. But Instagram is getting really big. I think Instagram is going to take over Facebook very soon. I don’t even know how many billions of active users each one of those platforms has, but that’s where people are, you know, so if you can establish yourself as the authority and start providing value and just start creating content. And the cool thing about creating content also is that if you create a video today, it’s not like a telephone There’s an ad, or the ad runs once, and whoever saw it, saw it, and then it’s gone forever, right? When we create content on YouTube, what happens is, it goes on YouTube, and it stays on YouTube. So I have videos that I created a year ago, that are still, you know, bringing me leads for various things for my agency. If you look and say, Okay, I need to create 100 videos, or I need to create 200 videos, that seems like a daunting task, right? But if you say I’m going to create a video every single day, and I’m just going to do it, all I’m going to do is I’m going to pull up my cell phone, and I’m going to record a video I’m going to talk about, you know, one issue that I saw that came up today and how I’m going to talk about what the issue was, what the lessons that I’ve learned, and what the viewer can learn and how they can benefit from it. You know, by the end of a month, you’re gonna have 20 or 30 videos, by the end of a quarter, you’re gonna have, you know, anywhere from like, 40 to 60 videos, I mean, it really starts to add up. So that’s what I would start doing is just start, start creating content, it doesn’t have to be these long, epic videos, it can be just on individual subjects. Hey, today, I’m going to talk to you about why you should never post about your settlement on social media. Just talk about, you know, tell a story about a client that had to give a settlement check back then had to be real client. But that’s what I would say is that in the future value is going to be king. Because, you know, Google is even getting smarter, where you know, RankBrain is figuring out searcher intent, you know, so it’s not all about keywords anymore keywords a part of it. But it’s also about when when someone gets to the website, are they finding what they need? Is your content valuable? You know, so all that it’s all about just providing as much value as possible. And social media, I mean, it’s the barrier to entry for social media is much higher than it is for search engine optimization, because it involves a little bit of effort on the attorneys parts, and the attorneys that are willing to put that effort in. And it’s not a lot of effort is 510 minutes a day. It’s not it’s not a lot. I mean, I was telling me the other day, I was like, Look, you went to law school, and you studied for and passed the bar, don’t tell me you can’t take five minutes a day and record a video. You know, like, it’s, it’s so simple, you know, but the lawyers that are willing to take that five minutes a day and do it, those are the ones that are ultimately going to be successful. So it’s really to every attorneys advantage, that most attorneys aren’t going to do it. Because the ones that are going to do it, you’re only competing with maybe one or two in your market. If you’re even competing with that many in most markets that I have clients in right now. My clients are the only ones doing it. So that’s it’s probably gonna change eventually. But that’s my advice is just provide content and provide value. All right,

Jim Hacking
so, Andy, for my last question, or I liked that point you raised and I think it’s a good one about doing the daily videos, talk a little bit about the difference between sort of high production value videos and sort of doing them with your iPhone. I think that the day and age that we’re in now that people are looking much more for the authenticity as opposed to the slickly produced media,

Andrew Stickel
what I found is that, and this is kind of my life motto is done is better than perfect. Because I was at a conference two weeks ago, and the Harmon brothers were there, those are the guys that made the Squatty Potty commercial, and the PooPourri commercial, like a bunch of those commercials that went online and got, you know, hundreds of millions of views. And what they were saying it was really interesting is that when you watch a sporting event, like, you know, soccer game, or football game, or whatever it is, there’s always a definitive end, you know, there’s always a, you know, the clock, hit zero in the fourth quarter, and the game is over, that’s the end. But when you’re creating stuff, there’s never really an end, you know, you can always kind of try to say, Oh, well, you know, it was good, but you know, the content wasn’t as good as I wanted to be, or the lighting isn’t perfect, or you know, then you’d keep tweaking with things and say, I like that tape, but I’m going to do another one. And what I’ve learned is that if I always do that, then I would never be I would never get anything done, you know, so you’ve got to get you got to understand that Done is better than perfect. And if you have a video that’s talking about something that is really important to a viewer, but the lighting isn’t 100% Perfect and a shot on your iPhone, that’s way better than all the other attorneys out there who don’t have anything, you know, so, and not only that, but you know, you’ve got to understand, like, I understand that lawyers don’t have an hour to sit down and, and create these these long, you know, set up perfect lighting and hire a camera crew and all that type of stuff. And it’s gotta be convenient, because if it’s not convenient, it’s not gonna get done either. So what I have found in my personal stuff is that the more authentic and the more real the videos are, the more people can relate to you because people are not perfect. So you should stop trying to be perfect in your videos. You know, I mean, it’s like everyone has character flaws and the character flaws are kind of what unite people. I had a video where I was recording it and my dog started barking in the background. And it’s funny because the comments, a lot of people started talking about hey, what kind of dog do you have? And it was interesting because the dog barking in the back Crown was able to get more engagement than some of my other videos. And what ended up happening was, it got more reach. And therefore more people saw the video and they got the message out. So that’s actually one of my better performing videos. And there’s a dog barking in the background, you know. So it’s also the type of thing where I talked to a lot of lawyers and like, well, I don’t want to I don’t wear a suit every day of the office. And I don’t want to have to get on camera in a suit. Well, don’t get on camera in a suit. When I first started, I used to always worry about because I actually I have a home office, a lot of times I just work in shorts and a T shirt because I live in Florida, it’s hot. And I don’t feel like getting dressed up if I’m working from home. So I would go and I put a nice shirt on and all that kind of stuff. And then one day, actually, I did three videos in one day. And I was wearing a t shirt and all three videos just because I forgot to change my shirt. And I realized that nobody cared the engagement didn’t drop the comments about how great the content was didn’t didn’t drop, you know. So it’s like a lot of the stuff that’s preventing people from doing things is all in their head, it’s like anything you do is going to be better than the person that’s not doing anything at all, you know. So authenticity is good character flaws actually are to your benefit. Nobody can relate to perfect people. And honestly, you know what, you’ve got an iPhone, most people have iPhones or Android phones, my iPhone shoots in 4k, you know, that’s all you need. And the microphone is pretty good, too. The only thing I would say is, maybe go on Amazon, and spend 10 bucks and get a tripod, just so that you’re not holding it around and make sure to hold it sideways. Unless you’re doing Facebook Live, then then you won’t hold it vertical. But if you suffer YouTube doing stuff to stand on your email list, make sure to hold it sideways, because it always looks a lot better. But yeah, I mean, really, it’s like, at some point, you just, you know, it’s like that cliche, saying the first step and getting started is just the start.

Tyson Mutrux
Like, it’s really not that complicated. And most of the false beliefs and fears that people have are in their own head. And most people don’t care. You know, this is excellent stuff, Andy. Alright, so we’re gonna wrap it up, because we want to make sure that we are respectful of your time. Before I do, I want to remind everyone to go to the Facebook group, engage with us there, there’s a lot going on a lot of activity. So check it out. And then also, if you don’t mind, take a couple minutes now and go give us a five star review. If you’re enjoying this podcast, it really does mean a lot to us. If you still do that. That’d be great. Jimmy, what is your hack of the week?

Jim Hacking
So my long term paralegal now office manager came in my office the other day to tell me a little hack that I sort of like and so you know, we use we’re big users of Google Docs in our office. And she told me that if you go into your Chrome browser and just type in Docs dot new, it opens up a brand new Google Doc, if you do slides that new, it opens up a new slide or sheets that new. So it’s just a real quick way to get started on a new document.

Tyson Mutrux
I thought it was pretty slick. That’s actually pretty cool. So you do that in the browser.

Jim Hacking
Guy, you just type it in, like where it would say www.google.com You just type in Docs dot new or slides that new or sheets dot new or whatever. And then it just opens it up.

Tyson Mutrux
That is stupid. Simple. That is fantastic. All right, Andy. So we always ask our guests to give one tip or one hack for the week. So do you have one for

Andrew Stickel
us? Yes. Okay, I got a cool tip here for if you’re running Facebook ads, if you’re a personal injury attorney and a or a criminal defense attorney, this will work for you. What I do for these types of attorneys is where you’re targeting people, you can select an actual physical location. So if you’re a personal injury attorney, what I do is I get the address of all the hospitals in the areas that they’ll serve. And what I’ll do is I’ll put a drop a pin in the Facebook ads console that basically says anyone that has been within one mile of this location, the actual hospital, show them ads for, you know, car accidents, or something like that. And we’re actually, you know, if we’re trying to get car accident cases, if it’s a criminal offence lawyer, or like a DUI lawyer or something like that, I’ll drop a pin on the jail. And I’ll say anyone that’s been at this location within the last week, show them ads for criminal offense, or DUI and things like that. Because you can’t really Facebook you can’t sort by people that have been in a car accident or people that have been arrested, but for DUI, but everyone that gets a DUI goes to jail, and most of the time they’re their phones going with them. So they’ll all be in that concentrated area. So that’s that’s a Facebook hack. That works really well.

Tyson Mutrux
That’s brilliant. Love it. My tip of the week actually has to do with you, Andy, I’m actually going to tell her button to go to his YouTube channel. It’s called lawyer marketing with Andrew Stegall, and just look at how he names his videos and how catchy they are and how just look at the art on the videos. It’ll give you some really good tips on how you should do your videos. Obviously, don’t steal them. Don’t steal his idea, but the titles of your videos are just amazing. So kudos to you go. Go check that out. Lawyer marketing with Andrew stickle. So, Andy, thank you so much for coming on. It’s been really great.