Building Success in Legal PPC: Insights on Entrepreneurial Challenges and Digital Strategies

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show, E-Coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. And today we have Anthony Higman, who is the founder and CEO at Adsquire with us. Hey, Anthony.

Hey, Ranamy. How are you doing? Thanks for having me.

Lovely. And then before we move very forward, let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Why don’t you talk us through your journey? How did you start your career and then how you ended up in this entrepreneurial side of things? How did you start your own agency and how is it going? What do you guys specialize in? And we take it off from there.

Absolutely. Yeah, so my journey is a little unique. In 2008, I graduated from college with a degree in journalism. I was looking for a newspaper or a magazine gig, and it was the beginning of the recession, and all the newspapers were trying to make that bridge from print to digital. So all the newspaper jobs I was applying to, they were all going bankrupt. I actually took a job in the mail room of a really big law firm in Centre City, Philadelphia, and that’s where I started. I was a mail room guy in a big personal injury, medical malpractice law firm. I was there for about two years in the mail room, delivering mail, doing hand deliveries. I was always looking for avenues to get out of the mail room. I was networking a lot with all the lawyers in the skyscraper building and took on a couple of positions in the law firm that eventually ended up running all over their Google Ads, and they spent a lot of money every month. I was forced to learn very quickly everything I could about Google Ads for lawyers. Then I ended up running their campaigns for about four years.

After that, I went to a different legal marketing agency, and I was director of PPC and SEO at organization. I hired and trained a team of 10 there and got them to 1.2 million in annual revenue. Then I started Adquire about three years ago, and it is going really good. Like I said before, we focus really on PPC for lawyers.

It is a gradual progression. You started working with a law firm, and then you focused on doing marketing for them, right? If I were to put it that way. Yes, sir. And then building a new agency, there’s no easy feet. We know the challenges. Initial days to keep the lights on and those first round of fires that you do, the first team that you can, the first onboarding that you do. And then you go from there, handling finances, and the support functions. It is not easy, right? What are some of the biggest hurdles you encountered while launching at Square? And how did you overcome that?

Sure. Yes. Everything that you mentioned is obviously an obstacle. We Started with nothing, basically. I had $10,000, and I resigned from my job at the other agency. And it was like a burn the ships. I have three months to live and create at and have it do well. In those first couple of months, I focused a lot on differentiating ourselves, branding, and then obviously getting clients, which was most of those first three months. We started off small. We had one client to start, and then little by little, it’s just grown with sales. Then obviously, challenges with building a team. We like to start with fresh slates, basically, and train them up. It’s just been my experience is legal PPC is a unique animal, and e-commerce experience and a ton of PPC experience doesn’t necessarily relate. I find building and hiring fresh slates and then teaching them our methods has been the key to our success and then just our experience.

Absolutely. Then PPC can be tricky. We were talking about it earlier as well. What are some of the common mistakes that you have seen legal professionals or these law firms make when managing their own PPC campaigns? You would come across a lot of messed up campaigns, right?

Yes, all the time. We do audits, and I would say there’s There’s a handful of common mistakes that we see every time, and you probably are aware of these as well. It’s a got walked through Google settings to enable, which again, we’re not all bad. I’m not like, A hundred % anti-Google. But when you set up a campaign, Google walks you through the settings that they want you to enable. And a lot of times that can waste budgets in niche down articles. So one of the biggest ones is search partners. They have search partners on, which again, isn’t necessarily bad. But in legal, we found that it tends to waste budgets, and it can be up to 40 % of your monthly budget. So that’s probably the biggest one is turn off search partners because you want people going to Google and looking for a personal individual or whatever lawyer they’re looking for. You want most of your budgets to go to that. Then again, it’s mostly location settings being maybe too big or off or the advanced location settings being in and interested in. These are all things that can really waste a lawyer’s budget.

And then the other one, which is newish, is having display on in a search campaign. That setting can also just blow through budgets because Google will spend that money instead of having it in its own campaign.

Absolutely. And then coming from the agency side of things, how difficult was it to build a team? And when did you actually, what was that point when you decided, now I need to make some hires and build a team?

Sure. I knew right away that was what was going to make us successful was having an in-house team, obviously, from my experience, because I had been there in another agency and had built that team up. And I learned a lot of mistakes in that role with hiring because we hired a lot of really looked good on paper people with tons of experience. But then when they got in and needed to do just legal advertising, there was a lot of gaps there and people who had hard habits to break. So I knew that a team was really important. I knew that I wanted to have a team in-house and mostly working in the office together. And so from inception, I knew that was going to be really important. Over three years, we’ve scaled that little by little, and we just hired a new guy who’s going to start in two weeks, and then we’re continuing to hire. Our thing is I don’t want account managers to have more than 15 accounts. It’s really focused. We’re very high touch. We talk to our clients frequently, and I want that as a selling point is that we’re high touch.

We’re not overloading people with accounts. I think it’s really important. So, yeah, that’s a progression.

All right. And from a strategic standpoint, Anthony, at some point, you to venture out of the legal space, or you just want to be in this particular niche and then expand as much as possible?

Yep, just lawyers. Like I said, it’s all my experience is legal. Really, I just want to focus on lawyers. We get a lot of weird outreach and sales opportunities for other verticals, and I have to say no to them and try to refer them to people, which Which is interesting. But yeah, I really just wanted to be a lawyer. Our goal is to have 100 clients throughout the United States.

Lovely. And then talking about lawyers, personal branding has becoming so increasingly important these days for lawyers. How can they leverage digital marketing to build a strong reputation online?

Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny, you niche down to have less competition. At least in our vertical as an agency, you niche down to have less competition. But there’s thousands of agencies that do PPC for lawyers. Then from a lawyer’s perspective, there’s so many lawyers out there in each geographical area. Something that’s made that even more obvious is the introduction of local services ads. I’m not familiar with these. What that does is it gives all lawyers, they could be a divorce lawyer or a criminal lawyer, it gives them all the ability to dip their toe into personal injury because they can go, Oh, yeah, let me just turn on the personal injury vertical. In some of these geos, there can be like 400 law firms in personal injury, local service ads. So yes, differentiating yourself and creating a brand is right now probably more important than ever. And with what Google is doing is moving more towards that as they put more ads on the into all of their other products. So yeah, building a brand is really important. We work with a lot of brands that do a lot, who spend a lot on Google, but then they’re also putting money into other avenues like billboards, TV, radio, OTT.

So we think all of those things are important. We’re also focused on OTT, but mainly through Google, like TV and now they just did Google TV. So we like to present those options to our advertisers because we feel We found a lot of cool strategies that are really cheap where they can brand in their geographical area and get more of that presence beyond just Google search. I do think that’s important from a differentiation standpoint.

Even law firms, referrals are also very important, Anthony, right? What do you think? And then is there a specific strategy to approach your interesting clients who had a good experience with you and pitch them for referrals? What is your take on it in general?

This goes back to even niching down, you have a ton of competitors. We will refer people for SEO and some other stuff if we don’t think it’s something that we have the capacity to do. But it’s brutal and it’s a very aggressive environment. There are so many competitors who are pitching lawyers all day, every day, and there’s weird things in that not everybody understands. Yes, we will refer people to other people who we think can help them, but there’s a lot of scams in legal marketing, which really surprised me. It’s one of the things that I didn’t think. I knew there was a lot of scams in marketing, but specifically legal marketing. I think it’s because obviously, lawyers spend a lot on advertising until all of these sketchy characters come out. All of our clients that we work with, something that’s interesting, will send us the scam and sales outreach that they get, which is astonishing how much did they get. And as a business owner, I’m sure you get a million emails that are weird marketing scam emails, which is cool. I think they’ll send them to us and go, Hey, what do you think about this?

And I actually, at first, didn’t like that, but now I like it because they trust us enough to send us these and ask us what our take is on it. And we’ll always tell them, Hey, this is a scam. This is why. But it’s something that’s built trust. So all of our clients will send us their scam emails and say, Hey, what do you think about this? We will refer to trust of partners, which have a few up.

Lovely. And coming to your future ventures, Anthony, are there any exciting projects you’re working on? Or right now, you just focused on scaling up the agencies. What does the future be all for Anthony Higman?

Sure. So last year, I was named one of the top 50 PPC experts worldwide, which was super cool.

Congratulations. Thank you very much.

And then the other things… So this is an important thing I wanted to mention is PPC and Google, specifically, are always changing. Obviously, you’re aware of this. As a team, we spend about 30% of our time looking at Google search results pages to see what’s changing. And I think that’s a differentiator for us, too, is you can really get lost in platform, looking at different metrics and PPC and Google Ads, and then see something like click through rate, go through the roof or something like that. If you’re looking at it just from a platform perspective, you can get lost. We spend 30% of our time looking at the actual search results pages, and that allows us to see what Google is changing that might not be obvious in platform. That’s something that’s gotten us a lot of press because we’ll find the new thing that nobody’s talked about yet. Also local services ads. When they came out, I was at the agency that I was at before where I was the PPC director, and it was disruptive. But then at Adwire, I’ve made it a goal to make ourselves experts in local services ads, and we’ve pretty much found any new thing that’s come out about local services ads in the last three years.

That’s a differentiator for us. We have about 20 different articles in search publications about local services ads. I’m also giving a speech on PPC Hero conference in San Diego in November. We’re really focusing on LSA because they’re putting it in more and more spots. They just added it to Maps app on iOS, and then they also just put it in the local business finder. So again, they’re really cramming LSA into every possible nook and cranny that they can. So we’re really trying to stay on top of that as we grow because it’s going to be a more important piece of the puzzle, and it works in unison with LSA. So that’s our main service offering is a PPC-LSA mix because both are really…

Lovely. And then finally, for our listeners to Anthony, if you could offer one piece of advice to the aspiring legal marketing professionals, what would it be?

One piece of advice for aspiring marketing professionals? Absolutely. I would say always be curious is my number one tip is when you see something, say, Why is that like that? And then go the 5 or 10 layers deep that you need to completely understand it, and then keep doing that. That would be my number one piece of advice.

Lovely. Great, Anthony. So thank you so much, Anthony. It has been a lovely conversation. Once again, thank you for taking your time to do this with us. Really appreciate it. Yes. Cheers, man.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.