Don't buy ads in shopping carts!
Focus on marketing options that (1) allow cheap experiments, and (2) can be defended.
Early in my practice I bought some terrible ads.
A salesman cold called me and offered to sell me a photo ad in shopping carts. This seemed like a great idea to me. “The customers have to look at my ad while they walk around shopping. Genius!”
Obviously those ads generated zero calls. I did not renew.
I don’t want you to buy ads in shopping carts!
Evaluating Advertising Opportunities
I spoke to a successful criminal defense lawyer this week who does 100-150 new criminal cases per month at his firm. That’s a lot of cases!
Does he need to think about marketing opportunities the same as a solo lawyer? The same as a brand new lawyer with no money to risk on new ad opportunities?
Here’s my proposal. You can evaluate types of ad opportunities by asking two questions:
(1) How much does it cost to experiment and tweak ads? and
(2) Once we find ads that work, how easy is it for competitors to copy our ads?
In other words, “What is the cost to experiment and can I create a moat to protect myself from competition?”
Cost to experiment
The cost of experiments is important because we know that our first ad will be bad. We’ve never tried this type of ad before. We don’t know this particular audience very well.
So we need to be able to try different ads so we can iterate toward a successful and profitable message.
This is where AdWords shines. It’s easy to get an ad up. You can see exact click-through rates and even conversion rates. You can change your ad quickly and easily.
AdWords is a good message research independent of its ability to generate leads
Defensibility
Why spend thousands of dollars testing ads only to have your competitors steal them the next day?
This is one of the big weaknesses of AdWords. Text ads are extremely easy to copy and steal. Image ads are slightly harder. Video ads are the hardest. Generative AI may change all of that, but that’s the current situation.
Different lawyers need different things
If you’re a brand new criminal defense lawyer, you probably want to focus on low-cost options. You don’t have money reserves that you can risk.
If you’ve got 30 lawyers working for you and you need to generate a lot of cases, you care less about low cost. You care more about how defensible a marketing channel is. The fact that awareness ads are expensive is actually attractive to you because the expense is an additional barrier to competition. It’s a moat.
A large practice doesn’t have to forget about referrals, though. A practice with 30 lawyers has at least 30 employees who could be building referral relationships. The firm could also choose to designate a team of 8 lawyers whose only job is to build referral relationships.
I hope my little Advertising Matrix helps you evaluate ad opportunities more intentionally. It won’t tell you whether to send letters or run AdWords because there’s no universal right answer. But it can help you decide what category of ad to focus on depending on what you want to build and what’s important to you.