I spent years obsessing with ‘The Magic Moment’ when an at need prospect decided to pull the trigger in favor of one or another supplier. In particular I worked with law firms to create the Million Dollar ad. When we succeeded it was a beautiful thing, because we were eating everyone else’s lunch, and they usually didn’t know.

Enter Google, the biggest game changer the advertising world has ever seen. They define relevance on the Internet. They are fanatically obsessed with sending people to where they want to go. And, they have recently changed their search criteria to favor local traffic. Only a fraction of law firms are aware of this. And, among those, very few are taking effective advantage of the situation. Smell an opportunity here?

Right now, law firms have a great opportunity to gather up some low hanging fruit. Google has provided every registered business, including law firms, with a free mini local website. And, they will send you traffic if you will bother to fill it out, tell the right people, get reviews and pay attention to it month over month.

There is no way in hell you can ever spend $100,000 on it. Google does not charge you for it. And they are trying to send you clients if you’ll only let them.

So, first check out this image. This is a Google search for personal injury lawyers in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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See all those red pins? Each red pin is a law firm that has not even bothered to fill in their Google Places page. It sits there, unclaimed. See all the letters? From ‘A’ to ‘J’? Those are the players ranked in order of relevance.

This next image is what ‘A’ looks like. In other words it’s the top traffic getter from Google Places. You will notice that there are images and videos and information. There’s a lot more that can be done. But so few law firms are doing anything…that this is truly a situation where the one eyed man is king.

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Now take a look at what an unclaimed Google Places page looks like.

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This is not rocket science. A staff member can get this going in a few minutes. But because it’s free and easy, you might fall into the trap of putting no effort into it. Or, doing the bare minimum, and then forgetting all about it.

What does it take to dominate Google Places? Google won’t let that happen. And every time Google catches someone trying to game the system, they kick them to the curb without hesitation and without apology. But get this—especially if you are investing in SEO to build up your organic search traffic.

The top pins are getting a lot of high quality traffic which readily converts to clients in exactly the same way it used to work in the Yellow Pages.

Should you do this yourself? Yes…as long as you have people who are watching trends and can stay on top of them, and who live and breathe the Internet. If you would like help setting up your Google Places page and sustaining it, give me a call ( 647-707-3315)

Don’t you know by now what a colossal waste that is? They don’t believe a word you say! In my ongoing efforts to educate personal injury lawyers about what is and is not a good ad, I have often shown “before and after” case studies of bad ads and new ads which multiplied response.

The response is always the same, “Huh?” The lawyers cannot identify the effective ad. And when shown an ad which multiplied response, they are in shock, and can’t believe an ad that “looks like that” could beat an ad that looks like their ad (and I might add, everyone else’s ad).

So, let me break it to you. If you want to be different, and if you want to have response that is very different (e.g. bigger)  then you have to be willing to differentiate yourself.

Today, I want to teach you how a consumer looks at your ad. You need to know..heck you deserve to know what they say in their minds when they are looking at your ad. This will help you make sense of a heading where there are fifty pages of ads, and yet somehow the response is split more or less equally year over year.

Let me repeat — before I reveal the three words consumers say when looking at your ad — that it is critically important to have the right objective for your ad. The correct objective is to cause the prospect to call you and nobody else, knowing exactly why they are calling only you.

That’s what the potential client is looking for, but their criteria are fuzzy in their mind. When they find a complete and compelling sales story, they go, “That’s it!” and they call only that one company. The problem with Lawyer Yellow Pages advertising is that there are so few good ads. Much fewer than one per heading. Most cities don’t have a single good Yellow Pages ad in the personal injury lawyer heading. And if there was one, you wouldn’t be able to pick it out.

When you have fifty pages of full page ads and double trucks and they’re all the same, more or less, and not one of them has the objective described above, the ONLY possible explanation is that it is an incomplete sales story. It can not have fulfilled the criteria (fuzzy as they are) of the prospect. And such an ad cannot possibly have been dedicated to the objective I have described.

Since we know now that these fifty pages will be incomplete sales stories…or no sales story at all…the only thing the  prospect can do is glance at the ad, see nothing much of  substance and say to themselves, “Okay, what else?”

And they flip to the next ad. Your directory rep has been working with you for years to make your ad more flipworthy. Sorry to say it, but cast your memory back and see if it isn’t true. You never had the right objective so you could never have the right ad.

Look at your ad again. Pretend you need to hire a  lawyer right away. See if you don’t go, “Okay, what else?” and flip to the next ad.

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Is this a good investment? Can I afford to bail and let my competitor have my spot? Is there something better I  could be doing with all this money? How many cases do I need to catch to justify this expense? How much time and bother do we go through to kiss all these frogs hoping for a prince or two?

First of all, you should know that it’s not likely that any of your competitors is getting much more response than you. Not because your ad is good, but because if you’ve been taking advice from your directory rep about your ad, it sucks like all the other ads.

The very design of the Yellow Pages directories practically guarantees mediocre response for everyone. The quick and dirty way to determine if anyone might be cleaning up is to count how many pages there are as big as your ad. If you are a double truck and there are ten double trucks, then you’re in a very competitive market. If you are one of five or ten top advertisers, simply take the number of calls you receive on average per month (please tell me you are tracking your response!) and multiply it by the number of major competitors there are. Now you have your number. If your ad is pretty much the same as all the others, then you know more or less how your competitors are faring.

They may be better at answering the phone. They may be not as good as you. If you have a weak receptionist, you are leaking cases. But, if any of your competitors’ ads is vastly different than all the others, you may need to put some thought in how to counter what they are doing, if  you decide to stay in the directory for one more year.

To further compound your misery, take it as a given that the Yellow Pages will all but disappear. Twenty five year olds use Google. You know it. At best, the Yellow Pages directories are a shrinking rump of marketing. So, if you are taking only your share and nothing more, your ad sucks. The Yellow Pages is not a cooperative venture. It’s a trench war and you’ve allowed yourself to be disarmed by a directory rep who worked like blazes to ensure that your ad was like everyone else’s. Check back here in a day or two for a little known secret: the three words you must know to understand the mindset of your prospect and how they use the Yellow Pages.

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How to create and effective marketing campaign

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Before you play this podcast, make sure you already have your pen and paper ready, this surely is a marketing crash course!

One minute marketing tips!

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It’s work that requires rigor, and a degree of mental acuity.

There must be something perpetually niggling you about your Yellow Pages program, whether you are running a double truck or something more modest. Your logical mind is in a perpetual collision course with your gut, because unless you are totally different from every other personal injury law firm, your advertising "program" makes no sense.

In fact it makes the opposite of sense. How do I know this? Well, having consulted with personal injury law firms all over the US and Canada, I’ve seen a lot. And I’ve spoken to the lawyers.

There is a contradiction at the core of your Yellow Pages advertising program. There are two competing thoughts, and they cannot live together in harmony. One of them has to go. You decide which.

The first thought is: We want to stand out. We want to be unique. We are willing to be different.

The second thought is: Let’s see what everyone else is doing. Let’s poach that element from this guy and let’s poach this element from that guy. Let’s take all the good stuff from all the other personal injury lawyer’s ads and our ad will be really powerful!

Can you see how the second thought undercuts and destroys your good hopes expressed in the first thought.

So, which will it be? Will you be unique or a copy cat. You can’t be both.

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There is a completely different and much more effective way for personal injury law firms to advertise in the Yellow Pages. You can take a double truck and fill it with bullet points and agonize about how much bold and how big the type. Or you can get strategic.

Do you even know what that means…in the context of communicating value?

Advertising in the Yellow Pages is a risky business as response plummets year over year. If you are not new to the game, you know it’s a medium that is being eaten away by the Internet. One of the big questions is, “When to abandon ship?”

Another question is also compelling: “If everyone is bailing, can I dominate the rump and be profitable?”

Here is a key distinction to keep in mind that will drive your Yellow Pages program, whether you are a double truck advertiser or one of those more modest personal injury firms who run a half page ad or smaller.

Think about a directory with 50 pages of lawyer ads every year. Have you ever thought how absurd that is? How completely illogical? If there were effective ads, wouldn’t they put the others out of business within a year or two?

Now think of your advertising strategy. How is it different from your competitors? What is in your ad that would make a person in need of a lawyer say, “I’ve got to call these guys and nobody else?”

That’s the correct objective. If your objective up to this point has been, “To make the phone ring”, then think again. Make your objective to have a person who is looking for a great lawyer to see your ad, read it and say, “I will call these guys and nobody else.”

How can you make an ad like that? Keep on coming back to this space. And read some earlier posts. There is much much more to share.

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(WARNING: What I’m about to tell you is so powerful  you could blink and miss it. If nothing else, read this story closely because it reveals a principle that you will not find written about or discussed anywhere else.

I personally have considerable experience developing referral programs for many different kinds of businesses including law firms.

I have been engaged to speak to groups of entrepreneurs about various high-leverage marketing strategies — including referrals. I’ve also published a lot of information on the subject.

You are about to learn the thing that none of the other marketing wizards has ever talked about. It’s something we discovered accidentally at Larry Levin’s firm, Shor & Levin  in Philadelphia.

Check them out here: http://www.bulldoglawyers.com or here:

It started innocuously enough. We invited what we call their “Ambassador Class”  of clients to come in for a day of interviews. My objective was to get deep into their skulls and extract a lexicon based on their language patterns that would then be used in all their ads and web text. I also thought it would be a great thing if they received some acknowledgment and thanks for being such great clients.

Remember, these people selected were top referrers. They had personally achieved great outcomes through Larry and his partner’s legal work on their behalf and had each referred multiple cases.

The day was quite moving and it was also quite touching. Each of the partners came and greeted their Ambassadors.

They were served an excellent buffet lunch. I interviewed each with great care. And I conducted a round table discussion — which was recorded. Their opportunity to register their perceptions and concerns and opinions and feelings in a formal way seemed to be much appreciated. Now, keep in mind that if Larry’s firm never received another referral from any one of these Ambassadors they would have been more than happy because each Ambassador was an extraordinary referrer.

But, what happened took us all by surprise.

In the month or so after the Ambassador event, Larry’s firm received an amazing surge in referrals from these folks. We thought they were tapped out. They thought they were tapped out. But each Ambassador found a “fifth gear”  that nobody had any idea existed.

Let’s examine this for a second.

Clients who had done “all the referring they could possibly do and much more than anyone could dare to expect” delivered a significant surge of new referrals shortly after being nurtured in that particular way.

Do you see the implications for your firm? Are you grasping the underlying principle at work?

Until the Ambassador event, each Ambassador delivered a referral every time they noticed an opportunity. At their stage in their Journey to Justice they had become champions of a great and caring law firm. But even with all the love they felt for the law firm, there was a limit to what they noticed.

And noticing is very much the point.

After being acknowledged and feeling a deepened rapport, they suddenly noticed more opportunities than ever before! Another way to say this is that there are more levels of bonding you may not have explored that open up new possibilities for referrals.

So, the hidden principle of referrals is that a person’s ability to refer is directly proportionate to A) the quality of the relationship,  B) the quality of the rapport, and, the kicker: C) the current intensity and the depth of the feeling of bonding.

This will dictate how many opportunities they will notice and their level of motivation as they reach out to others in need with their passionate recommendation.

So, if you can create a bond with your clients and nurture it, stoke it and keep it hot, your Ambassadors will not only refer in the short term – soon after their case is settled – but they might just take on the identity of Champion. The implications of this phenomenon are profound.

To receive a more in-depth tactical overview of the nurturing process, contact me: moistlotus[at]gmail.com or by phone (647) 707-3315.

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Killer Strategy #2: Understand their “Journey to Justice

Calling your clients is a powerful way to get them bragging to their friends about the amazing lawyer they are working with. In the long term, to understand the whys and wherefores of client referrals, it is necessary to consider what we call the “Journey to Justice” .

Every case goes through a predictable set of stages. If you want to achieve maximum referrability, manage the client through the stages.

The first stage is the injury in which the person has a traumatic interruption of their life which affects their circumstances, their emotional well-being, their relationships, their finances and their sense of hope for the future. It also affects their identity. This is something you might want to seriously meditate upon the change in identity affecting your client.

The client’s sense of “who I am”  goes, in some cases, from “ I’m in control of my life, I’m a free agent, master of my destiny, nobody can stop me, nobody can touch me” , to “ I’m vulnerable, I’m a victim, I’m scared, I don’t know if I have enough money, I don’t know if I can take care of my family, I don’t know what the future holds, HELP!

That’s stage one in the Journey to Justice.

Stage two is the runaround stage where the insurance company denies benefits or won’t return calls, or says the client has no claim, or the company doctor tells the client to go back to work. That’s when the person realizes that their injury may not be their biggest problem. Now they know they need a lawyer.

Stage three is finding a lawyer to talk to. Some people are connected. They just call their accountant and get a ood referral. Or perhaps they have a lawyer in the family who can refer it on to somebody else. Those who are ot connected tend to look at television or billboard ads, websites, yellow pages.

Stage four is choosing a lawyer. Most people sign up with the first lawyer they meet. As a rule, any lawyer who is successful is very good at ”closing the deal”. Most people are not able to withstand the personal power of a really good trial attorney who can determine the facts of their case, while being reassuring and confident. The next stage (stage five) is the actual conduct of the case and this is where future referrability is forged or not.

It’s in the back and forth communication and in the relationship between client and lawyer that the highest degree of appreciation and respect in the mind of the client can be built. Even if you do a superb job legally -  if you do not communicate well with the client during this phase you are never going to get as many or as good referrals as you otherwise would have.

Stage six is the resolution in which a verdict is reached or a negotiated settlement with the insurance company.

Stage seven is the aftermath – which is the rest of their life, but usually is limited to a year or two after the case is resolved.

In stage seven a person is in the process of transforming from a victim back to their own self. And, linked in their mind to their victimhood is the fact that a lawyer on a white charger came and saved them from disaster. If they have a good relationship with that lawyer they are very much disposed to telling other people and to giving referrals.

Their identity could shift from victim of injustice to champion of a bringer of justice. But, if they don’t have a good relationship with the lawyer – even if the settlement was wonderful and beyond their wildest expectations – they will not refer.

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The result you are seeking from your yellow pages ad is a perfectly qualified person calling you and only you, knowing that you are offering  exactly what they are looking for. Sounds easy, but  many law firms investing hundreds of thousands of  dollars get this wrong year after year.

Here are your ten tips. Look at your ad and see if you are doing it right.

1. Visual Sweet Spot. Do you know where the eye enters an ad?

Usually the top left corner. So, make sure that you don’t have your most powerful visual elements all over the place. Your two biggest opportunities to compel your prospect are your headline and a photo. Consider the placement of the photo so it doesn’t compete with the headline…which is hands down your most important element.

2. Check the Headline…is it written from the point of view of your perfect client? Does it offer a benefit they want? Will it spark an emotion in them that triggers action? Tip: top copy writers spend more time on the headline than any other element. And, they (we) often spend more time on the headline than all the other elements combined. It’s that important.

3. Check out WHO you are talking to.

Are you currying favor with people who don’t count? (A lot of lawyers put a lot of effort into creating ads that please their partners and wives and secretaries, oh, and of course their Yellow Pages rep. But none of these opinions matter. The only vote that counts is your perfect client. Is your ad designed to connect with their current state of mind?)

4. Are you running a Chinese Menu ad?

Or, are you telling a  complete and concise sales story? Will the person who consumes your ad immediately know who you are, what is unique about you and what they want to do about it? Many law firms run ads which are filled to the brim with every type of case they hope to attract..like the Chinese restaurant listing hundreds of dishes. This is not effective!

5. Do you try to EMPHASIZE EVERYTHING?

Many advertisers — especially personal injury law firms  –  fall into the trap of filling up a page or two with multiple messages in different size boldface fonts.  Think about it for a second.  If you try to emphasize twenty seven things, you emphasize nothing.

I know it’s tempting, and your directory rep doesn’t help, but you can’t say, “Oh, and put this in bold, and that in bold and underline that…”, and expect your ad to work.

And then when you get the next proof…you can’t say,  “Just make that bigger and this bigger and can you make this bigger too?”. This is the opposite of a cogent strategy.

6. Do you think yelling your phone number will make anyone call?

If your phone number is the biggest message in your ad, you are missing the boat. The number doesn’t matter at all until the prospect perceives unique value in what you are offering.  And, as soon as they perceive unique value then it doesn’t matter how small the number is. As long as it’s there, they will find it and call YOU.

7. Do you communicate dimensionally as a way of differentiating your firm?

Too many times, personal injury law firm double trucks ads are full of the same content from every other personal injury double truck ad. There is so much poaching going on that the ads are virtually interchangeable.

If all the ads say, “Free Consultation”, do you think, for instance, that you can put some meat on the bones of what that might mean for the prospect?  If ten firms are saying, “Free Consultation”, maybe you can say, “Here’s what you get when you come to our office for your no obligation, no cost consultation…” Then you can go on to describe it in great detail.

This will have them visualizing being in your office, talking to the compassionate and understanding (and very different) firm described in this ad. That’s an example of adding dimension to your message. Find several ways.

8. Are you trying to TELL them things, hoping they will believe you?

The number one rule of yellow pages and every other form of advertising is that people don’t believe what you say even when it’s true. The second rule of advertising is that people believe what they conclude in the comfort of their own minds even when it’s not true. So, don’t be thinking you can tell people you’re the best and have them believe it. Look over your ad and take out any attempt to TELL.

9. Check each item in your ad and see if it passes the “Who Cares?” test?

In other words if your headline is your own name…you don’t pass the Who Cares test. If your headline is “We Care!”, you do NOT pass the Who Cares test. If you think it’s important to say, “Quality and Tradition” or “Compassionate and Competent”, forgive me for breaking your bubble, but Who Cares? Remove all copy and concepts and visuals that don’t pass the Who Cares test.

10. Captions Pull Readers. Readers Become Responders

Do you have a caption under the photo? Does it state the obvious or does it promote an important benefit? Almost everyone reads the caption, so make the most of the opportunity.

Follow these tips and your ad response will increase dramatically. For personal injury law firms, if you would like to receive a free critique of your ad with recommendations for improvement, send it to moistlotus (at) gmail.com with ‘YP Critique’ as the subject line.

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