In this episode, Jim and Tyson interview Jay Ruane. They will go over his background, his role in his firm and how he managed to grow and improve it, paying special attention to his Adwords experience and strategies. If you want to start using adwords and pay per click or improve your strategy, this episode is for you.
“Start small, figure how it works, and then grow from there.”
Actually, Jay is more of an administrator of the firm than ever before, but he is still in the business, he does some court appearances from time to time.
Jay’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jayruane
Some of the topics:
The importance of content:
“We’re no longer advertising generic terms out there to drive people to information on our website, because people are finding our website organically based on all the content that we have”
A big mistake:
“One of the biggest mistakes people make, especially when it comes to adwords is thinking that more money is going to get them better results. That’s a misunderstanding of how the adwords auction system works.”
“There’s a tendency to wanna have the widest net, but the widest net doesn’t necessarily catch the fish that you want.”
How to build ads:
“We need to get in the mindset of the consumer. And those are the ones that are going to get clicks; the ads that resonate with the people who are facing the problem that needs a lawyer..”
How do you tell if an ad is working?:
“One of the things we like to use ourselves is, we direct the ad to a specific landing page on our website that is more sales oriented than our organic pages.”
Facebook vs Adwords:
“Facebook is great, but you have to have the right approach to facebook. You can’t expect it to give you the same type of results as pay per click because it’s just not built that way and the people aren’t there for that.”
Marquis Jackson’s episode:
http://www.maximumlawyer.com/podcast/legal-hope-pop-up-episode/
Please give us a shout out in the ABA JOURNAL’S ranking of podcasts!
Hacking’s hack: The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Bungay Stanier. how to be a good coach in an office setting!
Jay’s tip: Curate your negative list on Google. Go back and take a list of the 100 top baby names for the last 50 or so years. Male and Female. Because a lot people in this field may hear that their friend got arrested for a DUI. If they are not the person who is looking to hire you don’t want to be advertising to them.
Tyson’s tip: Check out Ryan McKeen’s book: Empower Yourself: A Practical Guide to Connecticut Personal Injury Law.
//
Thanks so much for listening to the show! If you want to know more about this and keep on maximizing your firm, please join our Facebook Group or like us on Facebook and comment!
You can also go to MaximumLawyer.com or, if you’d prefer, email us at: info@maximumlawyer.com
Do you want to get on the show? Shoot us an email or message us!
The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. Partner up, and maximize your firm.
Resources:
- Join the Guild Membership
- Subscribe to the Maximum Lawyer YouTube Channel
- Follow us on Instagram
- Join the Facebook Group
- Follow the Facebook Page
- Follow us on LinkedIn
Transcripts: Using Adwords to Grow Your Law Firm
Jay Ruane
In the last 1718 years, obviously, the web has exploded. And the user themselves have changed in their attitudes. And now it’s more about, you know, how quickly can they get on the phone with you? How quickly can they engage with you, they’re not submitting a form and waiting, you know, 12 hours. So the next morning for someone to call that that, an AdWords is great in industries like mine, where you’ve got a tight timeframe, after somebody would have gotten arrested, where they need information and they need to talk to a lawyer.
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm, the right away. This is the maximum layer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.
Jim Hacking
Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking. And I’m tasting new tricks with Oh Tyson. I did my second Tough Mudder over the weekend, and I’m quite sore and banged up at the moment, I got bruises I got scraped, my arms are really sore. If I have to lift anything over shoulder level. It’s like very painful.
Tyson Mutrux
That’s pretty awesome. I saw your pic on Facebook and second year you’ve done it. Pretty cool. I’ve never done it looks like it’s a lot of fun. Do you have? You’d be great. You
Jim Hacking
should totally do it. Yeah, I mean, the one thing that I’m weak on his upper body stuff, which is probably about three or four of the events, but you would totally do great, especially if you trained a little bit for it. I think you’d really enjoy it.
Tyson Mutrux
You know, it’s funny in one of my favorite things that the army was going through the obstacle courses because I killed it. I just killed the obstacle courses. I think I really would enjoy it. I just gotta get around to doing it. Alright, but let’s keep going with our guests week. I am pretty friggin excited about we’re gonna talk a little bit about AdWords, you want to introduce our guests? Who do you want me to do it?
Jim Hacking
You go for it. Alright, so
Tyson Mutrux
our guest of the week is Jay Ruane. He is a phenomenal attorney. I think well, Jay has a really, really good team as well. So I don’t know, Jay, how much you really practice anymore. I think you practice that a little bit. I know, we had you on the pop up podcast previously talked about with some prior representation. And if I understand correctly, I think you may have sort of you’re kind of running more the firm than you’re actually practicing. Is that right? Yeah, that’s
Jay Ruane
it. You know, I’m sort of more administrator now than than ever before. But I’m still in the business to some extent, I got two court appearances this week, one on Wednesday, one on Thursday. So I’m still out there I still dipping my foot in the pond. But I’m not in court every day as I manage my team of 12 lawyers, soon to be 14. We’re adding two more in the next couple of weeks. So I’m doing more of a mentorship to the younger attorneys and sort of calling plays rather than being on the field.
Jim Hacking
Jay, tell us a little bit about your background where you grew up how you got drawn into the legal field.
Jay Ruane
Okay, so I grew up in Connecticut, with a college out in Scranton, Pennsylvania, moved back home, got a job working in a bar, really had no plan for my life at that point. I had always thought that law was possibly a future for me because my father was a lawyer. He had a small criminal defense practice. At the time. He was first a public defender than an associate at a small firm, then struck out on his own when when I was starting off in college. I came home from college really had no guidance, worked in a bar, worked for a law firm sort of during the day. I had to figure out what I was going to do decided to apply to law school, got into UConn Law School sort of hated it for the first two years I just was dying to get out because everybody who’s actually practiced law knows Law School has nothing to do with the practice of law found my way into the criminal clinic up at UConn my third year, finally made some friends in law school, had a blast and hit the ground running ever since I started off my career as a public defender did that for two and a half years. In a probably a good moment for me. But it was bad at the time I got passed over for a permanent job. So I tendered my notice struck out on my own hung a shingle got an empty desk at my father’s office and started building from there.
Tyson Mutrux
So J your law school experience was very similar to mine. I hated the first year the second year is one of us started to kind of come into my own and I took trial advocacy. And I just loved it. I loved the professor and kind of changed them to Mesa United kind of similar experiences. That was the first year just it just it was just miserable. It was read you read and you don’t really do a whole lot of like activity kind of stuff. It’s definitely really practicing set of things. So you’re headed but we’ll tell them more about your just your role in the firm. So what’s the setup of the firm who’s in your firm? What specifically do you do as running the firm?
Jay Ruane
So my firm I guess you would say that I am co equal partners with my father my son out there who’s at the starting to begin to wind down to his practice. We’ve been partners since 2001. When we opened up our doors together, he left his former partnership. In addition to myself, I have another non equity partner who manages our second location for us. She’s been with me since she got out of law school. She’s actually we’re sort of a family firm, right? Because that’s myself and my father, that started the firm. And our other partner Teresa is my sister’s best friend. She had gone to law school thought she was going to be get a job working for the IRS, came in, couldn’t get the job, I needed a job. And I said, Yeah, let’s bring her in. Man. Teresa has been like a sister to me. And my sister’s best friend is has been with us ever since she started practicing. So she is the lady DUI of our business, we built a whole business around her as being a DUI defense lawyer, in addition to myself handling DUI cases for the last 18 years. Yeah, so I basically run the day to day operations of the firm. I oversee all the marketing, and I have Teresa running the lawyers up in our Wethersfield Connecticut office, which is a suburb of Hartford, the capital, my father runs the lawyers down in the Shelton office. And I handled the administration, the marketing, the strategic decisions, the long term planning the operational side, you know, negotiating with vendors dealing with our landlords. And then I handle a select number of cases every year. And I also am involved with the mentorship of the associates, I tend to hire associates, without a lot of experience people coming out of clerk’s offices or right out of law school. And so we do a lot of hands on training, I feel like that’s a way for me to give back to the legal community is to teach younger lawyers, the tricks of the trade and how to do this thing. That’s a, you know, representing people, you know, we don’t represent corporations, we represent real people with real problems. And that’s something I think is is a problem with the legal profession is because there’s a lot of lawyers who are just sort of hanging a shingle because the job opportunities aren’t there. But there’s a lot of people out there who need lawyers, they might not just be able to afford the costs that go along with hiring a lawyer. So that’s really what I do on a daily basis.
Jim Hacking
Jay, walk us through how your firm has grown, Attorney wise and sort of how did you know when to grow? What were the things that went through your mind? And how did you prepare for taking on more and more attorneys.
Jay Ruane
So my firm really sort of had I had a small footprint, we had four lawyers, myself, my father, Teresa, who was an associate, we had another associate, Sean Barrett, who was with us for the longest time. And then, at the time, that Shawn was who’s with us for law school, during law school and graduating, he had a couple of friends who had interned with us. And they were coming out of law school with no job opportunity here in the state. And in Connecticut, with the lack of a job opportunity was really frustrating a lot of younger lawyers coming into the market. And the way the efficiencies or the inefficiencies of the state court system in Connecticut is something that was was plaguing us as a firm at the time, we were in a situation where courts were really opening, you know, at 9am, judges wouldn’t take the bench until 10, which is our normal practice. And then the courts would recess by one o’clock for the day. So I really had a small three hour window where if we were going to be representing people in court, we needed to have multiple lawyers available to cover those windows in multiple courts. Because it wasn’t becoming possible to handle two or three courts in a day, like it was when I first started practicing it just the delays at the courthouse and the inefficiencies made it so that I needed to have more bodies. And unfortunately, the revenue wasn’t there to do that. So I actually had gone to the state public defender system, they have a system for assigned counsel in conflict cases, I found that they were at a distinct disadvantage. They didn’t have enough lawyers to handle the habeas corpus cases. As you know, from my prior discussion about the marquis Jackson case, we do a lot of post conviction work as part of our practice. So I brokered a deal with the state and said, Hey, look, if you can guarantee me certain number of files every year, I’ll be in a situation where I can I can have associates handle those files in the off hours, and they would be available to me during the morning time. So it was really a business decision, because we had a volume of business, and we just needed more bodies, but I couldn’t afford the bodies that I needed. So I found a way to pay for him by getting a state contract. So I’m in a rather unique situation. And that really accelerated our growth. We went from having four lawyers to having 14 lawyers at our max in about a three year period we grew by leaps and bounds.
Tyson Mutrux
I love it and then if you’ve not heard the marquis Jackson episode was a pop up podcast. Go back and listen to it. I can’t remember when we recorded that Jay, but a few months ago, really, really good episode, so check that out. Alright, so Jay, I’ve been sitting Again, my hands been wanting to ask you this question this entire time, but I didn’t want to jump right into it. So let’s get started with AdWords, we’ve
Jay Ruane
talked a little bit about it, I guess, tell us about the basics of AdWords if you want to get started with AdWords. So let me tell you a little bit about how I stumbled upon it. And it really sort of happened because I was starting to transition and focus my practice on DUI defense, knowing that those were the people arrested for criminal cases that actually had money. And I called up after I, after I branched out on my own left the public defender’s office, I called up the local Yellow Pages company and said, Hey, I want to place an ad in your your phonebook. And they said, Oh, that closed a couple of weeks ago, you’re shut out for the next year. So I really hadn’t had an idea what I was going to do at that point. So my brother who had helped me set up a short little website, we decided to focus our advertising online, because I figured that was the only way I was going to start to get get clients. At that point. Google had rolled out their AdWords platform earlier that year. So in November, I placed my first advertisement using pay per click. And it was for the phrase CT DUI and the clicks cost me five cents. And it had a 10% click through rate, which is unbelievable to think about that, I was able to get a click for five cents, and it had a click through rate of 9.9% on the interface. Once I did that, I started to realize that there was a lot of opportunity online. And I wanted to focus my attention on that, because I figured there weren’t a lot of lawyers online. So I sort of, you know, jumped right in haphazardly, I guess at first, just throwing up keyword combinations and doing a lot of broad Max searches. So I could find myself on the receiving end of phone calls and cliques. And back then, we would have really involved forms on our website. And people would fill out these, you know, 40 Page questionnaires on our on our website. And we found that those were phenomenal leads, because they were the early adopters themselves. They were people that were using the Internet back in 2002, to find information and they had no problem giving up that information. And the speed wasn’t necessarily really, as important to them. In the last 1718 years. Obviously, the web has exploded, and the user themselves have changed in their attitudes. And now it’s more about, you know, how quickly can they get on the phone with you? How quickly can they engage with you, they’re not submitting a form and waiting, you know, 12 hours till the next morning for someone to call them back. And AdWords is great in industries like mine, where you’ve got a tight timeframe, after somebody would have gotten arrested, where they need information, and they need to talk to a lawyer, it may not necessarily be the best for other industries, where people need to contemplate something over a long period of time, you know, the Pay Per Click costs for a divorce lawyer are going to be exceptionally high. And they may not be converting as quickly. So you may be blowing through a large amount of your budget. Whereas on the criminal side, if they have a court date, in the next two or three weeks, you know, you’re gonna get a phone call based off a pay per click ad pretty quickly convert them and get money in the door. So you can fund yourself pretty quickly. If you’re doing pay per click for you know, speeding tickets and DUI defense and criminal offense in general. So I found a lot of success doing that. And of course, over the years, more and more competitors have gotten into the field to compete against me driving up my click cost, et cetera,
Jim Hacking
J What happens after somebody clicks on the Google ad to walk us through the funnel or what happens after that.
Jay Ruane
So we’ve actually started to dial back on our AdWords stuff, because we’re finding that we’re able to really tailor our marketing. So really get the people who are in the position to make a hiring decision. Pretty quickly. We’re no longer advertising generic terms out there to drive people to information on our website, because we’re finding that people are finding our website organically based on all the content that we have. But after somebody clicks, now, we’re actually going to a call only ad and they’re clicking, calling and connecting with our office and talking to somebody anywhere be from 8am to 8pm, seven days a week, we have a live person in the office, able to answer those calls and able to direct them to the information that they need. And then tee them up to talk to one of the lawyers in the office who can go through the process. And we I would say we close probably 94% of our clients on the phone and get them to retain, you know, within the first four days of contact. Jay, what are some of
Jay Ruane
the biggest obstacles? If someone’s gonna jump into it today? They’ve never done it. What are some of the things that are some of the mistakes that people will make that they that you can maybe tell them now so they won’t make them? One of the biggest mistakes? I think people make, especially when it comes to adware is thinking that more money is going to get them better results. And I think that that’s just a misunderstanding of how the ads AdWords auction system works. I mean, what you have to realize is Google is in the business of making money, right? Just like just like any other business that’s out there. So if I’m willing to spend $10, for a click, and then we’ll use that, and for every 100 times, my ad is shown, I get 10 clicks, that’s gonna make Google $100, right. And if you are willing to spend $25, a click, but for every 100 times that show, you only get clicked on twice, you’ve only made Google $50. So Google would rather put me who makes them more money, even though I’m willing to pay less for that click in a better position to get them revenue, that is somebody who’s willing to spend more so in that respect, just because you have a large bank role, doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to be the one who’s going to get the most clicks and get the best position on the search engine results page. So one of the biggest mistakes people have I see when they get involved in pay per click is that they want to throw a lot of money at it right up front. And so they can blow through their budget, by having very broad keywords, not limiting themselves geographically, and those types of things. So what you really want to do is you actually, you know, it goes back to the whole concept, do you want to sort of fulfill a niche, and if you are able to fulfill that niche online, you can have a very high click through rate at a very low cost, you’re gonna make Google money, they’ll be happy with you. But you’re also gonna get very highly targeted and viable client prospects from that interaction. So one of the biggest mistakes I see when I when I have done some assisting other lawyers with building out their AdWords campaign is they say, Well, what if I started 10 grand at it this month? Or what if I, you know, I just settled the case. And I want to spend $15,000, and say, Well, you could blow through that 15 grand, but wouldn’t you rather spend 500, and actually get people that that can actually use you right now, you know, so that’s the that’s the biggest thing, there’s a tendency to want to have the widest net, but the widest net doesn’t necessarily catch the fish that you want.
Jim Hacking
J, what about the content of the ad? You know, what language do you use? What’s the copy? What’s your mindset when you’re sort of drafting a new Google ad?
Jay Ruane
So one of the things that I have found, in all my years of doing this is that 99% of all lawyer advertising is ego based lawyer advertisement, it’s, let me tell you how great I am. Let me tell you about my awards. Let me tell you about the things that matter to me, I have an eight Martindale AV rating, you know what that means to the person on the street who just got arrested? Absolutely nothing. Right, what we need to do is we need to get in the mindset of the consumer, when you’re building out your ads, and those are the ones that are going to get clicks, the people that the ads that resonate with the people who are facing the problem that needs a lawyer. So we’ll run our ads that will talk about, you know, concerned about losing your driver’s license, click here for more information, talk to a lawyer in the next 10 minutes. You know, that’s one of the biggest questions that people have, you know, when am I going to talk to a lawyer, we can set something up right now, putting out there that you’ve got an AV rating, or that you’re the biggest law firm in your county, or that you’ve tried hundreds of cases, what I have found, in my experience, is that the idea of a trial is so frightening to so many clients, that it’s actually one of the least clicks on ads, we actually don’t use that in any of our ads anymore, because clients want to think that, number one, their case is not so complicated, that wouldn’t go to trial or two, that there’s going to be a way to find out because they know trials are risky and expensive. So what we try to do is we try to give them the information that you know, there are ways to resolve these cases, shorter trial, of course, we’re able to go the distance, if that resolves. But we don’t have to necessarily get there on our initial phone call or on our initial intake. You know, we’re not talking about that to them, because we’re not trying to scare them into hiring somebody. We want to give them as much information as possible. I think that’s one of the great things about a good pay per click campaign is that if you have a good pay per click campaign, you might be providing them information on their on your website, that they can spend hours looking at the website, and really getting as as informed as possible. Most people nowadays want to be informed. That’s the that’s one of the problems with car salesmen nowadays, right? Because, you know, 20 years ago, someone would walk into a car dealer, and the guy would have to know a little bit about each car there. Now when I go to buy a car, I’m walking into a dealership, I know everything about the car that I want to buy, and the dealer, the guy who’s trying to sell it, to me has has to know more than me. And that’s almost impossible, that we’re dealing with the same thing with people, you know, who are trying to consume legal services, they’re going out and spending hours. I mean, it’s not unusual for me to have, you know, the client who does want to have a sit down in the office. They’ll come in and they’ll say I read every page of your website, and I printed out 450 pages of this stuff, I have some questions for you. I mean, that happens, you know, those are usually people who want to come in, because they’re going to be sort of a high maintenance client to begin with. But they are consuming the content that you put out there. So you want to not only have a rich pay per click campaign, but you want to have a good organic, you know, content program on your website so that you can engage those people and give them what they’re looking for. Hey,
Tyson Mutrux
where should people start? What’s like, point number one? Where do they go to? Is AdWords Express, you recommend doing the full blown AdWords? What do you wish someone start? Well, I
Jay Ruane
know some lawyers has had a lot of success with AdWords Express, I’ve never used the platform simply because I started long before AdWords Express even existed. And so I’ve never really had any opportunity to use it. But what I know about it is that it’s you know, it’s like training wheels, it walks you through the process, it gets you to have a small footprint on pay per click. And if that’s what you need to get yourself active, I would absolutely go for it, I mean, then Google’s not going to put out a product that’s going to not provide you with some sort of results. And the AdWords Express program is designed to make it as easy as possible for people to start the whole ball rolling. But in my experience, you know, using the AdWords interface, as you get to know and there’s been a learning curve for myself over the years, I’m not a big fan of the new interface that they’ve rolled out. Recently, I like the old classic style, because once I learned something, I don’t want to have to learn a different way to do the same thing. But you know, if you can get involved with anything, start with AdWords Express, if you have a little more experience, and you’re gonna work with AdWords itself, that’s certainly certainly more robust, there’s more options that you can use. Certainly, using negative lists is one of the most important things you can do with any AdWords campaign. Because negatives, you know, that would be my my biggest thing that that everybody should think about is, is curating a negative list so that you are not spending money on people who are never going to hire you. But yeah, AdWords or AdWords Express are both opportunities for you to really sort of take over and establish yourself online, and that that top position, that’s gonna get you the most eyeballs. And, you know, the most opportunity to convert. I mean, think about it this way. Google knows where people look on their page. And that’s where they’re putting ads, you know, so that’s why people click on the number one link, even if it’s paid, or it’s organic, if they’re gonna click on it.
Jim Hacking
Jay, what about, I’m always worried about running Google ads, because I’m worried about just money going down the drain and me not knowing or understanding exactly how it all works. How do you tell when an ad is working or not working? Like what’s your thought process as you’re watching the analytics on a particular ad that you run,
Jay Ruane
so that, you know, click fraud is something that that plagued the system, I think, early on where you know, you would have a competitor who was clicking on your ad, and that was costing you money, one of the things that we like to do ourselves is redirect the ads, to go to a specific landing page on our website, that is a lot more sort of sales oriented than our organic pages that people might find. Because we want to get people who are who are worth spending money for, we want to put ourselves in the best position to convert them as clients, so that they’re in a position to basically fund their own advertising campaign, right. So if we’re paying, you know, $100, for that click, we really want that person to convert. So, you know, when they pay us a fee of $3,500, it sort of covers the cost that it was to market to them. And there are opportunities for you to use tracking numbers through call tracking metrics, or call rail or any one of those services, I use those services for a while, I didn’t find a lot of value in them. Because unfortunately, with us, we’re not selling widgets online, we’re not something where it’s 100% of a digital transaction, there is a lot more possibility for people to get your name. I mean, everyone’s been in a situation where you ask somebody, Oh, how’d you find me? And they say, Oh, I Googled you, and then you’re sitting next to them in the court. And they’re like, Yeah, you know, my friend told me about you, and then I ran your name by somebody else. And so it’s really not an online conversion, they just happen to look for your phone number online. So in that respect, you can never be 100% sure where your people are coming from either online or offline. But I want to be in a situation where we are tracking our cost per conversion online, and our cost per acquisition online, and we try to stay within a certain timeframe where our acquisition costs are, you know, under $300 per client, our cost per lead is in the 150 and under per person. So that’s how we set it up as being a reasonable cost. Given our years of doing this business and and tracking online, and we can see what business rises or our business falls depending on what we’re spending on. On our all of our paid advertising. Either it’s being on on Google
Tyson Mutrux
J, what are your thoughts on companies and I’m not sure if yodel still exists, but companies like yodel that will provide this service for you. So basically, they set up your AdWords account, you give them a certain amount of money to spend, and you throw in some more money to pay them to run the ads. What are your What are your thoughts on those types of companies? Well,
Jay Ruane
I think those companies can provide a resource. But if you’ve made it all the way through law school, you’re pretty smart. And the programs that they have, like AdWords Express, are really sort of set up so that you can do it yourself. And I’m, I’m a cheap sob, right? So if I can say, alright, well, if I’m going to spend $1,000 a month with yodel, and they’ll keep 500 and put 500 into ads. And that’s just an example. I don’t know what their percentages were, I’d rather take the $1,000 and a Friday night, and then have $1,000 going towards the ads, why should I pay somebody else if I can do it myself. And I know, that’s an amazing thing to say, as a lawyer who, you know, cries the situation where I see a person representing themselves per se, but I think it you know, in, in certain situations, it’s better to learn enough about a product so that you can understand it. So when those vendors come in, you can ask them pointed questions. I have been in situations where I’ve outsourced my pay per click for a while. And I’ve had vendors that I’ve that I’ve trusted, that I’ve developed really good relationships with over the years to make sure that I was doing things correctly. And I’ve been in situations where I’ve had a vendor come in, take a look at my pay per click and say, You know what, you’re doing 90% of the stuff, right, I would make these little changes. There’s no point of you hiring me. And then I’ve had other vendors who come in and say, Oh, I have a whole new idea of how to approach something. And some of those, I would say are the kind of vendors that you meet at PubCon, or any of the big marketing expos. I have a really great relationship with Susan Winograd. As a paperclip expert, I met her at a seminar sat down with her, I mean, 15 minutes, she’s like, let’s crack open your AdWords and take a look and see if there’s anything we can do. And so that developed into into a friendship and a great relationship. She’s phenomenal what she does, and I’m not hiring her anymore, I hired her to set me up with some new campaigns. And then I’m on my own to manage them. Every now and then I’ll shoot her an email or a question, she’ll give me her honest opinion, and shoot it back. The problem with these companies that do it I found is that the companies themselves are sending me a salesperson and not necessarily the person who knows what they’re doing. And that’s the same thing with the Google’s AdWords reps. You know, if you have an AdWords campaign, you’ll get a call from somebody saying, I’m your AdWords rep, I haven’t found much success with them. There’s plenty of forums online about people who’ve had bad experiences with them, all they ever seem to really want you to do is spend more money, because I think they’re an outside company. They’re not Google employees. They’re an outside company, whose job it is to increase, increase spend, and not necessarily ask you about your business and how they can spend your money wiser. So I’m always cautious when dealing with outside vendors. I know there are some great ones out there. But I also know that it’s an important metric, as a business owner, for me to have enough knowledge so that I can make strategic business decisions for myself, I’d say I’ve been in situations where I’ve taken my paperclip offline for two or three months, because, you know, we were bleeding money, I couldn’t figure out why. And that’s when I found that, you know, adding the negatives to the keywords, that was a huge, huge help, to really curating my list and making sure I was getting the right type of traffic, and not just spending money wildly.
Jim Hacking
Jay, have you done anything with Facebook ads?
Jay Ruane
Oh, yeah, I’ve done a lot with Facebook ads. In fact, we’re rolling out a whole new campaign for a couple of websites, utilizing Facebook ads, and that the thing that you really have to understand about Facebook and versus say, Google and Bing is that the customer itself is in a different part of the customer lifecycle. You know, Google is great at giving you the client who is ready to buy today. And that’s who I you know, that’s who we focus on in our landing pages and our ad copy, etc. When we’re doing Pay Per Click advertising, right, we’re looking for somebody who’s going to convert in the next seven days in their lifecycle. So even if they don’t convert on day one to talk to us, they’re getting an email drip campaigns, they’re getting daily follow us by either phone message or text message, and that type of thing. But we know, you know, if they don’t convert in the next 10 days, the likelihood of them converting after that is slim, right. Facebook, on the other hand, is a cold audience. I think that’s part of the problem, I think for a lot of lawyers, is that really the only advertisement that lawyers have ever done has been to warm or hot audiences. Right. So you know, back when they first Arizona came out, it was lawyers could place yellow pages that well, no one’s perusing the Yellow Pages for a lawyer on a Saturday night because they’re interested in information. They’re going to the yellow pages when they got to hire a lawyer for something that’s come up. Same thing with go Well, these Pay Per Click ads, they’re Googling for a lawyer, a Connecticut DUI attorney or a Missouri immigration attorney, when they’ve decided they need to make that purchase decision. Facebook, on the other hand, people aren’t going to Facebook for you know, for those types of searches, they may be on Facebook. And the way I sort of, I talk about it when I’m giving presentations on the topic is Facebook is like a cocktail party, right? You know, if I were a DUI lawyer, I wouldn’t bring up the fact that I was a DUI lawyer until the conversation started to turn around, hey, what can I tell you about a DUI that you need to know the Facebook, you need to take these audiences from being cold, to being warm, so you can put out information. And the great thing about Facebook is that as you share more information on your page, you can then target the people that engage with that information, right. So you know, if you put out information, generally in the Denver, Colorado area, about immigration law, you could say, Okay, I’m going to send it to everybody that’s 18 to 65, then take that core audience that have engaged with your content and market to those people or remarket to the people that had been on your website, those are people who are a little bit warmer, right? Those are the people that are interested in your stuff to at least engaged enough with it. And then you take those people who have engaged with it, and you warm them up by giving them more information, or maybe show them some reviews of your stuff, or some results that a client is talking about. And then they see a bit a little bit more, and you’re so you’re taking them from cold to hot on social media, versus taking them from hot to red hot on Google or Bing and pay per click, and that are ready to convert on, you know, at the drop of a hat. So it’s a different approach, you know, and part of the biggest problem for lawyers, if they’re like, Well, I’m going to drop $5,000 on Facebook, and that should get me, you know, X number of clients, because that’s what it worked on Google. Well, it doesn’t work like that on Facebook, because it’s a different type of audience expecting a different type of product. So Facebook is great, but you have to have the right approach to Facebook, you can’t expect it to give you the same type of results as pay per click, because it’s just not built that way. And the people aren’t there for that. There’s a lot of resources out there, you know, my big thing is to is to just start small, see how it works, and then grow from there. Because the great thing about the AdWords Express interface is that you can actually like press a button and transfer over into the, to the bigger interface. So
Jay Ruane
you know, when you’re ready to go, you, you’re ready to step up to the to the big leagues, they make it very simple for you to do that job. We want to be respectful for your time, thank you so much for coming on before we give our tips and our hats of the week. And make sure to remind everyone to go into Facebook group, we’ve got a bunch of new members there. Got a great discussion going on over there. So please check that over there. Then also looking at reviews of other legal podcasts. And there is podcasts out there that have more reviews than us and don’t feel like they should. So if you’re focused this week, please, on giving us a review, we would really, really appreciate it. Give us those five stars, because I think because of the guests that we have in the group we have in the Facebook, this is the best legal podcasts out there. And it has nothing to do with near Jim has everything to do with our listeners and our guests. So please go there and give us five star reviews. Jimmy, what’s your bag of the week.
Jim Hacking
My hack of the week is a book called The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier, it was part of Pat Flynn’s Book of the Month Club. I liked the format of it. And it sort of gives some good tips and advice. There’s sort of seven steps that he has on how to be a good coach in an office setting. I’ve enjoyed it so far. It’s called the Coaching Habit.
Tyson Mutrux
Very cool. All right, Jay, what is your tip or hack of the week.
Jay Ruane
So one of the things that I like to do is really curate my negative list on Google. And one of the things that I’ve been able to do, you know, you’re gonna want to add in cheap, free discount stuff, because you’re not necessarily going to be looking to advertise the people that want something for free, because they wouldn’t, might not ever pay you. But one of the things you can do is go back like I did, and take a list of the top 100 baby names for the last 50 or so years, we did male and female, you sort of take your own name out of it, because a lot of people in my in my field might hear that their friend got arrested for a DUI, or them themselves, Oh, got arrested for DUI, and they’re looking to see if there’s any newspaper coverage. So they might type in, you know, John Smith DUI, well, if they’re just being looky loos and they’re not necessarily being you know, they’re not the person who’s looking for to hire somebody, they’re just looking for gossip. You don’t want to be advertising to them. So what if you what you do is you take all of those first names and you create a negative list out of them being sort of take your own name out of it because if somebody heard about Jay Ruane DUI lawyer, you want them to be able to find you but you can eliminate a lot of bad clicks for when people are searching for gossip and not necessarily searching for a lawyer by eliminating all the first common first names in your Our area so
Tyson Mutrux
that would be my tip of the week. Boom J just save everybody 1000s of dollars. You’re welcome. That’s a really good one. All right, so my tip of the week is to actually check out our boy Ryan McCain’s book. Empower yourself a practical guide to Connecticut personal injury law. If you want to see how to write a book, looking at buying books on Amazon, if you asked me if I didn’t get a copy of this book, that nicer guy, but support him. He’s one of our previous guests, one of our listeners. So check out his book. It’s a really, really cool book. So check it out. Jay, thank you so much for coming on. This has been fantastic.
