Years ago, you could run an ad in the Yellow Pages, and your phone would ring.
The Yellow Pages—for those too young to remember—was a printed book. It contained an alphabetized list (do you know what that means?) of the names of all of the local businesses. There were advertisements included alongside the listings. You can probably see one in a museum somewhere.
The calls generated by the Yellow Pages weren’t always terrific, but it felt good to know that calls were coming in and things were happening. That was a long time ago.
The Yellow Pages is pretty much dead.
Where Are the Ads?
Internet advertisements like those offered by Google AdWords are today’s equivalent of the Yellow Pages. They’re ubiquitous, and everyone notices them. They make the phone ring.
Unfortunately, advertising on Google isn’t quite as easy as advertising in the Yellow Pages. With the Yellow Pages, you could meet with the salespeople and they’d pretty much take care of things for you. There really wasn’t much to decide, and there weren’t many variables. You decided how big an ad you wanted and what you wanted it to say—pretty simple stuff.
With Google AdWords (and other comparable services), you have more decisions to make. You’ve got to make the decisions about the ads, but you’ve also got to decide which keywords to use (and most good campaigns use thousands). You’ve got to decide how much to bid on each keyword and how to organize the keywords into groups. You aren’t limited to one ad; you can use hundreds. You’ve got to decide where to direct the traffic clicking on your ad, and you’ve got to decide how to deal with it once it arrives. You’ve got to decide when to run the ads, and you have flexibility down to the minute. Of course, you’ve also got to decide where you want to run the ads, and you can drill down neighborhood by neighborhood.
The Biggest Mistake With Online Advertising
There are lots of things to decide, and most of us make a terrible decision right from the start.
Most of us delegate the decision to a sales representative who promises to take care of it all for us. The sales rep promises to make the phone ring and deal with all of the administrative hassles and decisions. That’s usually a big mistake.
Does the phone ring? Usually, yes, it rings. More often than not, however, the callers aren’t the right fit for us. They’re often not very good prospects. More often than not, they’re not the clients we were seeking. Lots of lawyers get so frustrated by the time consumed dealing with crappy calls that they pull the plug on the ads and walk away (or at least they try to walk away but are often stuck in ridiculously long contracts).
Why do things go poorly? It’s usually because the company managing the ads doesn’t understand your market. It doesn’t understand how to avoid the price shoppers and find the folks willing to pay for your effort. It’s not reasonable to expect a marketer to adequately deal with a plumber in the morning, a hotel midday, and a law practice in the afternoon. There’s not enough time for the marketer to put himself or herself into the shoes of your prospective clients and start thinking like they think. It’s just not possible.
How to Make Pay-Per-Click Strategies Work
Pay-per-click ads aren’t going to work if you’re putting a generalist to work on managing your campaign. If you’re going to hand off the management of your pay-per-click ads to the sales representative from one of these big providers (you know who they are since they call you all the time—why don’t they just use pay-per-click ads, huh?), you might as well save your money and head in a different direction. I rarely meet lawyers who are happy with what they’re buying from these vendors.
The lawyers I meet who are getting results from their campaigns have taken the time to learn the systems and are managing the campaigns themselves or using someone internally who gets how your clients think and understands what you need. Pay-per-click just isn’t the Yellow Pages. It’s a much more complicated marketing tactic. It’s not a set-it-and-forget-it undertaking. It requires content, time, energy, attention, and expertise.
Treating online advertising like you treat advertising in a phone book is a recipe for failure. You’ll waste lots of time and money.
