379: Expert Engines: Use AdWords Pay-Per-Click to Get More Leads into Your Local Business with Jan Roos

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert Plank Show episode 379, expert engines use AdWords, pay per click to get more leads into your local business. With Jan Rous, Hey everyone, and thanks for listening, and we're talking right now with Jan Rus, and he is an award winning serial entrepreneur, and he's the founder of expert engines.co, and using techniques developed while building national brands in the hyper competitive consumer product space, his company has helped small and solo law firms in the most crowded markets in the US generate hundreds of 1000s in case billings every year. So Jan, glad to

Jan Roos 0:38 be talking to you. Glad to be talking to you. Robert, so we heard a

Robert Plank 0:41 little bit about shit. Can you kind of like, tell us in your own words, kind of who you are and what you and your company are

Jan Roos 0:47 all about? Yeah, okay, that's Let me see. So basically, at the end of the day, I kind of consider myself a marketer, and I came to this through sort of the background that was mentioned a little bit as being a co founder of startup, rather than coming from an agency or one of those other different backgrounds. So what I think separates my approach from what a lot of other people do is that I kind of come from a position of being in my client's shoes. And a lot of the times you're talking about somebody who's running a small law firm or any small business, really, it's, you know, you don't have the ability to take an approach like a Proctor and Gamble or a Coca Cola when it comes to marketing. So, you know, having to have figuring out that stuff for myself. It's basically what I do for clients.

Robert Plank 1:32 Okay? And so you mentioned their law firm. So do you only work with law firms, or, like, what kind of people and what kind of companies do you

Jan Roos 1:39 work with here? So with my company, expert engines, basically, we're focused on using a very specific channel, which is lead generation on Google AdWords, which happens to work really well with law firms, just because people who are looking for those kind of services typically need to retain them as quickly as possible. So in terms of taking an ad budget on AdWords, which is, you know, one of the more expensive channels that you can run, and making an ROI on that. Law firms just happen to be a good fit from that perspective. But technically, we have worked with other branches in that, like, sort of niche of stuff, think people that need things quickly. So that comes to mind. We've done some work for private investigators, garage door companies, plumbing dentists, you know, sorry, medical surgery, that kind of stuff, all

Robert Plank 2:29 right? And so when you're, when you're working with like, you know, like a law firm or a plumber or a dentist, like, is the process pretty much the same? Or do you have to kind of dig deep and figure out their industry? Like, how do those things, how are those things different,

Jan Roos 2:43 right? So, I mean, at the end of the day, the whole process of marketing, my opinion, is it's just about conveying a message to somebody. I kind of think that the the different channels, you know, Google, Facebook, content, social media, whatever you know, those are kind of different. But like, you have to basically figure out how to sell somebody on something. You know, I'm my background, besides doing stuff in marketing, has really been in different sales. And I remember I used to have, one of my first jobs was working for a value added reseller in the IT space. So I sold basically everything and anything under the sun. You know, sometimes you could be trying to position a laptop one day, or, like, you know, a server the other day, or all these different things. But basically that's really not that much different than, you know, positioning a plumber versus an attorney, because basically you have to look at what it is that they offer, how it differentiates, how they're differentiated from their competition in the marketplace, and present that to a client or a potential prospect in a way that will make them select that person as opposed to the other person that's advertising next to them, on on AdWords, something like that. So basically that, that's kind of the process that, you know, it's kind of oversimplifying it a bit. But, you know, getting into just really communicating the right things is at the core of any sort of marketing or sales that somebody does. Okay,

Robert Plank 3:59 cool. That sounds sort of exciting, like you can kind of use your marketing skill, but can also have tons of variety, like one one day to the next, like working on the private investigator client, or, like some other industry, it sounds, sounds like a lot of fun there. And so do you have any kind of interesting case studies or interesting like, you know, stories like that, where you had a client like that, and you kind of saw what they're doing, and you kind of worked your magic, and kind of, I mean, do you have anything like that, like a good sort of before and after

Jan Roos 4:28 story? Yeah, absolutely. One that comes to mind is actually a private investigator. So this, this fellow was, and I was doing almost exclusively legal at the time, but it was sort of a front of a friend who came through, and I was just, yeah, whatever. We'll give it a shot. So basically, this guy ended up, you know, opening his doors in it was June of, I want to say 2016 so he, like, literally starting from scratch. And the whole situation with a lot of private investigators is, for the most part, they're retired law enforcement or military, and a lot of times he's got. Guys are already on pensions and stuff. So this is not really something that a lot of people are looking to ramp up into a million dollar business. That being said, the person that we were working with was, he was very entrepreneurial, and, you know, we were basically saying, okay, look, if you're, if you're willing to take the jump on this, we're willing to help him out. So I started working on some, some favorite click stuff. And I actually had another friend of mine who specializes in SEO was working on that simultaneously. The thing that was awesome is that we were able to get the phone ringing for him within the first few days. And basically through the stuff that I was doing with him on Pay Per Click, he was able to be in the black from the first from the first month, which was awesome. And then basically the cases he was getting from that stuff allowed him to grow his practice to the point where, you know, going from opening his doors in June of 2016 when we got to the point where the SEO is kicking in, in February of 2017 he literally had more cases coming in than he had guys to give the cases to. So he went from a solo practitioner to, you know, somebody who's overburdened with with leads, which is the best situation to have.

Robert Plank 6:00 That's pretty cool, awesome. So, so when you set that up, you said you got the phone ringing within the first couple of days. I mean, what do you do exactly like, set up like a landing page with a phone number and then sent Google AdWords to it? Or what did you set up for him?

Jan Roos 6:13 Right? So, I mean, my process that my company uses to to develop these sort of campaigns is it's similar, but different than most AdWords. So basically, what has to happen in order for somebody to become a client? I always say this when I'm when I'm speaking with prospects, it's extremely easy to spend money on AdWords. It's a bit more challenging to end up getting it back. So for a lawyer or any local service business, that happens when somebody's calling the phone. So basically, in order for that to happen, you have to a show up in the right people. So if you're not showing up for the right terms, just a personal injury lawyer, if you're Personal Injury Lawyer, then you're not going to get a chance to get those people. You have to have an ad that compels somebody to click, and that's the point at which you're going to actually pay Google. So the worst thing you can have is a really compelling ad, and no way to actually capture the phone call. The way that we found to do this best is we actually create a series of landing pages that, I mean, we literally create, like, you know, dozens of dozens of landing pages for some different clients that will match a specific query to what people are talking about. And the contrast with this and the rest of the industry, and this is kind of funny. I mean, the first time I actually got into AdWords, what? Back when I was running that startup, I hired somebody and totally lost my shirt. They ate the budget, lost the retainer, the whole nine. So, but the reason for that, and this is kind of, you know, a function of what comes from Google, is that it's kind of like no looking to solve every single problem with traffic. So it's like, you know, let's say that you're getting, you know, two calls in a $500 ad budget. If you want to say, hey, we need more calls, I'll say, Well, okay, let's up the budget to 1000 they would never say, hey, let's get, you know, the conversion rate up, which would get you more calls on that. So that's basically it. So it's like, you know, we're creating these, these integrated systems. So it's, it's really through the entire funnel of the add the landing page and the analytics. So we're actually using tracking numbers, and all the emails are tracked as well. Because we need to know, you know, our people from, once you have that conversion back and AdWords, there's all kinds of data that you can pull from that, you know, what time of day are these people calling? What geography are these people calling? Are they male? Are they female? What kind of, you know, income are these guys having? So that's, and that's kind of what you optimize around going forward. And personally, we're usually looking to optimize the cost per lead to get it as low as possible. So, you know, like I said, it's like, you know, if we can get 20 leads on $1,000 budget, we want to get 25 the next month. And the thing is that it's this, like, you know, just just writing some of the numbers. I was looking at a study from word stream, who has a huge amount of data on this kind of stuff. So for the legal space, for example, like the top 10% advertisers are getting a conversion rate of about 6% so if we're talking about a personal injury lawyer that's paying $50 a click, that works out to about $1,000 per call, and the clients that we're working with just through, you know, we spend, you know, hundreds of 1000s of dollars in perfecting these kind of systems. We're getting, you know, conversion rate upwards of 20 or 30% so, you know, we're having these, those calls. It would cost 1000 within the legend top advertisers are down to 150 or 200 for most of our clients. Super

Robert Plank 9:15 cool. So, so, yeah, like, whenever I, I see someone, like, set up all that sort of testing and tracking. It always looks like a lot of kind of tedious work to get all the tracking links there and they get all the data there. But, I mean, it sounds like that's very, very well worth it, because there are all kinds of assumptions people seem to make, and then it's always kind of surprising. Like, I know, like whenever I whenever, whenever I remember to set up that kind of testing and tracking, like, I don't do a lot of paper click myself, like my business partner does someone out. But every time I have, like, split tests, or every time I've done some kind of link tracking, I'm always shocked at like, you know, I remove something from a page that I think is important, and the conversion rates go way up, or I put something that I think is obvious or simple in a headline or. Are in the ad copy or something, and and the conversion rates go way up. So do you have any sort of interesting stories like that, of like, when you were having all this data and making these changes, anything that you were kind of surprised by, anything kind of counterintuitive?

Jan Roos 10:12 Yeah, let me try to think, well, this is, this is kind of interesting. A lot of times that we're working on this stuff, it's like kind of, we are split testing different formats and stuff. So some of the templates that we've been using, like for years at this point are actually really not that esthetically pleasing. So we have, for most of our legal clients, this, like, two column format, and we've tested all kinds of super, you know, high design, was being sort of stuff. And every single time this, this kind of ugly two column thing, ends up outperformance. So, you know, we use a lot of a lot of this stuff ends up looking like black text, you know, a lot of repeating of the calls to action and all that kind of stuff. And that ends up, that's how you're getting the 20, 30% conversion rates that we're getting with our legal clients. We actually had a client recently, so he actually was. It's always kind of challenging when you're working with somebody who's who's having a lot of ideas about this stuff. And the thing about marketing is that there's no like actual profession of it, so everyone seems to be entitled to their own opinion. But anyways, this, this, these, these guys were really wanting to use their own landing pages, and they spent a lot of time trying to develop these and they look gorgeous. They look better than the ones we had set up. But you know, it's when we ended up pushing the campaign live. The conversion rate was in the gutter, and we had to turn it back to the original ugly one, and the conversion rates just started going right back up, just as we expected. So, you know, that's that's the thing. A lot of the times, it's not about what's pretty, it's about what works. And you're not going to really know that unless, like you said, you have the Analytics set up. That's pretty

Robert Plank 11:48 funny when that kind of thing happens, when the ugly web page sells better, and maybe sometimes we kind of like, let our own ego get in the way of that, if, if we have a team that spent a lot of time making the template, or we spend a lot of money on the template, and it's like, well, yeah, it looks good to me. It converts well for me as the person who created it, but what matters is if it converts for the person who's actually buying it, right? Yeah,

Jan Roos 12:09 exactly. It's like, you know, it's like, do you want to have a pat on the back when you're showing this to your friend at cocktail parties? Or do you want to have money in your check account the people that are calling you? I know what I'd choose,

Robert Plank 12:19 right? Money sounds like a lot more more fun to me. So some great, great stuff. And like, you know, you don't have to reveal too much of your secret sauce on this. But do you have, do you have clients that come to you? Or like, what's your sort of, sort of process, or like, your strategy of getting new clients? Like, they just find you by word of mouth. Or do you run ads for your own agency to get clients? Or like, what happens there? Yeah,

Jan Roos 12:42 I don't happen to go into that. So this is actually one of the things that's funny. And people ask me this question all the time. They're like, Oh, do you have AdWords for yourself? And the answer is no, and I actually don't accept any clients that do B to B. So in my opinion, AdWords is really and this is a pretty central part of my philosophy, just because, like, the original situation I mentioned, where I got burned on AdWords. There's certain things that don't really work for AdWords. And for that perspective, instead of trying to make it work, you know, trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, I just look for more, you know, round hole or clients instead of and that's, that's kind of why I focused on the niches that I have. So it's kind of a combination. At this point, I'm pretty much doing everything through word of mouth, like we're more or less booked up. So it's, you know, waiting list that kind of thing. But um, back when I was doing more outbound stuff, the kind of things that were working well for us. I'm a huge believer in outbound email right now. So basically, I would be able to, you know, find, find lists of people on, you know, we have virtual assistants building lists and stuff. And there's, there's actually some really cool tools, but again, it's sort of the same marketing message. You know, how can you position the right message in front of the right person? Instead of a click on AdWords, it's going to be an email in the inbox, instead of an ad on, you know, that they click on. It's having a headline that people are going to want to click on, and the conversion message is conversion message is the email instead of the landing page. So it's really just pure numbers at that point, you know, it's like, if, if you have some sort of a sales message that's worth its salt, you can reasonably expect between five and 15% of people to respond. So, you know, you have to come up with how many responses are going to turn into an appointment. And then basically it's just, you know, doing the napkin math in reverse to figure out how many emails need to build to do that, and assuming that you're, you know, staying within the realms of can spam and all that kind of stuff. I think that's probably one of the most effective ways today that you can get in front of people in B to

Robert Plank 14:36 B, super cool. And it's funny how kind of everything old is new again, right? Like sending a bunch of a cold email sounds like a very like late 90s thing, and it seems like it kind of went away for a while, and, like, now it's back again. And so, so you mentioned there that, like, you know, you kind of put some work into making that eat that cold email sort of compelling, and you stay within those can spam loss. But even with all that, do you still run into any, you know, any people like. Hitting the spam button or things like that. Well,

Jan Roos 15:02 this is, this is kind of ironic. So I think last time I did one of these things, I had, so if, if you know about, can spam laws, basically, anything that's related to a mailing list, you have to have something that's, that's law, like, logically opposite. But if you're sending out some sort of a cold email, it's, you know, it's really the equivalent of knocking on someone's door. That's illegal. So I had P I mean, you'll always, if you're gonna be sending the amount of volume that's gonna actually get this to be an effective driver for your business, you're gonna run into people who complained. And this is what I found funny, was that people were complaining about this being spam, and then I was actually showing up on their monthly mailing list, which actually, you know, fits the definition of can spam. And I could technically Sue something, not that I would, but it's really funny, these people who preach and then actually do the exact same thing for themselves,

Robert Plank 15:47 right? And I've kind of seen that happen to me too. Like, I'll just and I'll shoot out just like, a one time email with someone next thing I know, like, I don't know if it was, like, because they manually did it, or I ended up in like, their address book, or whatever the heck happened. And so, so with these emails? So, like, I mean, what sort of the call to action is it to reply to the message or call a phone number? Or, like, what are you trying to lead them to do in these cold emails? Yeah,

Jan Roos 16:10 well, one of the important things, I believe this is marketing sales of any kind, is that you want to make somebody take the, you know, the smallest, most realistic stuff. So it's like, you know, we're not saying, hey, like, this is some awesome program, you know, signing, here's a, you know, here's a proposal. Sign this and pay bill invoice. We're saying, look for all for and this is, this is my personal process to save myself time and also save prospects time. What I'm looking to do from any of those emails is look typically, to to book a good fit call. So there's a lot of reasons that this stuff isn't going to work for people. You know, if somebody has too much, they don't have the capacity in the business. Sometimes there's nothing. I can never tell that just by looking at someone's website, whether they have a good sales process, whether they have a good attitude about these things. So, you know, I usually ask if people what kind of advertising they've done in the past, if they're the kind of person who's exclusively relied on word of mouth, then a lot of the times, it's really tough to be the first source of advertising dollars. And you know, even though, in my opinion, it's one of the best, it's very hard to take somebody across that bridge of being the first dollar that you're spending to get, you know, dollar $5.10, whatever, $10 back. So that's the kind of stuff that I discussed, a good fit call. And then from that point, it's less automated. It's basically just following up to get a presentation call about doing some specific information. And I always like to do sort of an audit of what's available in their market, what their competition is spending. Like, all things equal, it's like, you know, usually I'm showing people five or 10 people in their area, and they all know them as competitors. Well, these guys are spending $15,000 a month. You think they're doing that because they're doing that, because it's losing the money. Like, do you want to get into this or

Robert Plank 17:46 not? And when you do that kind of research on on competitors, like, do you normally notice? Like, is it, I mean, are some of these spaces more competitive than others? But because, like, I imagine that in some of these areas, like, I mean, I mean, in like, you know, plumbers and dentists, like, I imagine that any town, there's probably, like a couple of people who have their marking dialed in, but I imagine that, like a majority of them don't even kind of know what they're doing. Is that sort of on the right track, or is that way off base?

Jan Roos 18:12 No, no, you hit the nail on the head. So basically, the thing is, it's weird, because there's kind of this weird Gulf of of getting appropriate health. So, like, on the one end, you have people who are trying to do this themselves. And, you know, if you're trying to run a law practice or a dental practice and do this stuff in a couple days, like, you know, a couple hours a week, you know, it's the same thing. It's like, I wouldn't, I don't really. It's like, you know, I would rather trust my life savings with an investment advisor than try to, you know, outbid people who are working on Wall Street, 24/7 so I think it's like, you know, there's, there's just not a lot, like, there's on that level, there's not that. And then the same thing to be said to a lot of levels of these in house people, but on the things that, on the other hand, like, you know, these, these local businesses aren't really able to afford the top agency talent that's, that's, you know, out there, and those guys are looking to service the Coca Colas and, you know, probably the Google teams, you know, actually, it's funny enough. I have some friends here in New York that work on Google, totally unrelated stuff. But, you know, they to get a key account in in Google, you have to be, you know, an under armor or something like that. So there's kind of this weird gap in the middle where a lot of the people that are that you're competing against. Are, you know, they're, they're, they're operating on a really diminished capacity. And like, you know, the thing is, it's, you know, I tell I say this all the time. It's like, you know, you can drive a car with three three wheels, but you're not going to get there as fast, and you're not going to spend as much gas as you should. So basically, a lot of times the fact that competition is spending a lot of money in spite of not following best practices is actually a great sign, because you can either spend less and get the same results or spend the same and get way better results. And the other thing too is that, like, as far as competition goes, Google AdWords isn't really a winner take all game, basically because you're only paying for the people that click. Um, there's really nothing lost by having too much competition. And like, you know, the niches that we started out with, like, my first client was doing personal injury law, law in New York City, it was like, literally the most cutthroat competitive. There's people who are spending hundreds of 1000s of dollars, literally per month, that we were batting up against, with clients with smaller budgets of like, you know, three, $4,000 and succeeding, because at the end of the day, it's, you know, it doesn't really matter if you're getting everything in the pond, you know, if you're spending $4,000 and getting $20,000 worth of cases, that's, that's a win for you. And that's all that matters,

Robert Plank 20:32 right? I like that thought process, as long as we're growing the business. And that was kind of what I was hearing earlier, when you were talking about some of those kind of the I think it was with the the Personal Injury Lawyer, with some of those expensive leads like that, you could, like reduce the cost of a phone call from 1000 bucks down to 150 bucks. And some businesses might not want to stomach that. But if you can run the numbers and know that, okay, if I can turn 150 bucks into 2000 bucks or 6000 bucks, then I mean, all day long, it's just a matter of having your numbers, right?

Jan Roos 21:03 Yeah, absolutely, that's the thing. It's like, and a personal injury is actually somewhat of a challenging example for that, because they usually do actually take, you know, months, sometimes years, to close these cases. But you know, we have clients all the time, especially like retainer based areas of law, you know, they'll close, they'll close cases before the month is up, and they'll end up being in the black for month one on the campaign. Then basically, you know, you have a money printing machine, which is awesome. And the other thing too, is that, like, you know, because we've, I mean, most of the things, and, like, a lot of the things that people believe in PPC, it's, it's complete bogus, in my opinion. It's like, you know, people will say, Oh yeah, if you speak to Google, reps will say, Okay, it's gonna take about three months to figure this. Months to figure this stuff out. There's all this, like, this whole kind of thinking out process, but the fact that matters, that we're getting calls for our clients and 72 hours or less, you'll know what the general ROI of the campaign like this is before the end of the first month. And that's just because we figured out what we're doing on the other side of the click, if you're trying to figure this up as you're going along. You know, you could spend six or 12 months trying to figure this stuff out, or you can plug into a system that works and just get the results going like as soon as possible. But that's the thing. It's like, in my opinion, it's like, you know, for and this is I take the exact same approach for my own business. I think all things equal, I try to test channels that will be proven correct or incorrect as quickly as possible before, I like to choose channels that are going to take forever to have some feedback. You know, I wouldn't start like a content marketing campaign, and hope to figure out that, like the leads that were coming in 12 months are all unqualified, right? I could rather spend the cold email campaign and, you know, send out 100 emails and see what comes back, because I know that tomorrow,

Robert Plank 22:41 right? Awesome. Why screw around? So, um, so you mentioned, like you have these different kinds of clients, like you don't work with B to B, and you prefer law firm. So if someone is sort of listening to our conversation today, how would someone know if they're a good fit for you guys and your services Absolutely.

Jan Roos 22:59 So, I mean, generally, these are, these are the criteria that I think makes somebody work with AdWords. So first of all, is a short buying cycle. So if your clients are taking, so I wouldn't take for, say, like, somebody who's, you know, real estate, or, like, you know, auto, auto company or something, because it's like, the decision to buy a house or car takes months, and there's all this consideration takes place. You know, contrast that with something like a personal injury law firm, it's like, you know, when somebody's calling, I mean, the term for this is a bleeding neck problem. And then with personal injury, sometimes there's an actual, literal bleeding neck so it's like, they can't take two weeks to figure out what's happening because they're probably in the back of an ambulance. So if you're the kind of business that people have to make a decision on quickly. It's a much better sign. The other thing is, you want to be in a position where, you know, this is, it's, it's a relatively high ticket item. So the thing about AdWords is, like, even on the on the lower end of things, we're talking about, like two or $3 per click. So you know, if you're getting a, if you're getting, you know, even a 10 or 20% conversion rate, you're usually gonna be looking at like 20 or $30 per phone call. So if you're making, you know, $100 on a phone call, and it costs Any closing one in five people on the phone paying $20 for that phone call, yeah, maybe you're making your money back, but then you're just doing a bunch of work for free. It doesn't make sense. On the other hand, you know, if you know, we have people who are family law attorneys, are paying 25 bucks a phone call, but they're average retainers and 2500 range. So they're paying $100 for a client that's gonna pay 2500 that makes sense. So all things equal, the higher up you know, your your average ticket, so to speak, is the better, I would say probably as a as a minimum, probably something around $500 probably makes sense. And then finally, it's like ideal, but not super necessary, because we have been nationwide, but if you don't have nationwide competition, that's that's probably ideal. The major case for this is stuff like insurance. You. The thing is that you're going to be and the reason for that is like you have these giant nationwide advertisers that are just duking it out with budgets that are in the hundreds of 1000s of millions, and the cost per click on AdWords is determined by an auction. So, you know, you're not going to be able to, you know, then they just bid the clicks up to 2530 bucks a pop. And you know, if you're trying to run a if you're trying to run a campaign as a local person, it's gonna be really tough to get that. And it's just that's unfortunate, because sometimes it's like they just don't have to face the same economics as you. So you could end up paying hundreds of dollars for call. That's not worth that much. What it is

Robert Plank 25:35 to them, right, right? That makes perfect sense. So, so your sort of ideal client here is someone who has a short buying cycle has something that's sort of higher ticket to offset those costs, and then doesn't have that nationwide competition. Because, I mean, they can outspend you all day long. And so if someone is listening to us talking today, and they want to reach out, I know you said you have a waiting list and things like that, but if they want to reach out and get in touch and kind of hear more about you and your services. Where should they go?

Jan Roos 26:02 Yeah, you know what? I'll actually get a custom domain set up for this. So if anyone wants to take a look, I have some resources, and I actually developed a PDF that people can kind of use to determine what it's a sort of an ROI calculator that we actually use internally at expert engines. So I'll have that set up at expert engines.co/plank.

Robert Plank 26:21 All right, super duper. So expert engines.co forward slash plank, you mentioned Under Armor earlier, just spelled, just like the CEO of Under Armor, Kevin Plank, no relation, though. So expert engines.co forward slash P, l, a, n, k, to reach out to yon and his agency and just kind of figure out if you guys are good fit, figure out what he can do for you and his team. And so make sure to go to expert engines.co, forward slash plank, to find out all the information that you need to know. And I want to thank you so much, Mr. Yan for stopping by and dispensing some of this super cool knowledge for us. All

Jan Roos 26:57 right. Thanks. It's a pleasure speaking with you, Robert. We really appreciate

Robert Plank 27:00 you listening to today's episode of the Robert Plank show. Subscribe to us on iTunes and rate and review us at Robert plank.com/itunes you.