Douglas Bridges recently, posted in the Lawyer Marketing Facebook Group. He is a patent attorney, but he’s a specialized patent attorney. Basically, what he does is he represents patent owners before they patent trade in appeals boards. It’s obviously a very niche area.

What he’s looking for are other patent attorneys, not consumers. He’s looking for a very niche type of client looking to connect with other lawyers that need to appeal. In short, he’s asking me what the best strategy for his law firm is.

In this situation, I think the social media strategy that I’ve been telling everyone they need to get on is obviously a good strategy for this. This works for everything. It works whether you’re a personal injury, a family law, intellectual property, or a patent appeal specialist.

Creating A Cheat Sheet For Parent Attorneys

Let me demonstrate how it can work for him. Douglas is going to need to create some bait. The bait can be a PDF, a cheat sheet, etc.

The topic should be something that’s going to solve a small problem or give ideas and information to the lawyers that would likely be his client. For example, he could create a PDF entitled “Five Legal Arguments to Consider Before Filing A Patent Appeal” or something like that.

It needs to be really specific but appeal to any attorney that is working on patents. I would even do something along the lines of “X Number of Ways to Ensure That Your Patent Will Hold Up In Case of Appeal” or something like that. Something that’s going to get you in front of lawyers that work on patents.

Creating A Facebook Group

What you’re going to do is you’re going to create a Facebook group. You could call it Patent Lawyers United or Patent Lawyers of America. You want to start creating high-quality content and also build an email list so that you can start sending emails every single day to these lawyers with more information.

What you’re trying to do is create yourself as the authority on patent appeals. It doesn’t have to be technical information at all. It can be stories about different cases that you want or interesting arguments that you’ve used.

What’s going to happen is that patent lawyers and intellectual property lawyers are going to start looking at your information and see you as the authority on patent appeals. They’re going to start contacting you because most of these, from what I understand, are very specialized. What’s going to happen is as they have these types of cases, they’re going to start looking at you. They’re going to start reaching out to you asking for your advice, and then eventually, they’re going to start hiring you. It’s all because you’re creating high-quality content that you can send to them.

Using Facebook Targeting

How do you target patent lawyers? That’s really easy. You run Facebook ads to them. The nice part about Facebook is that everyone is on Facebook and they’ve got a lot of targeting options.

What you can do is create a standard Facebook campaign that targets people on Facebook who have their job title as patent attorney or trademark attorney. You can also choose patent attorney as an interest. This is also people that have shown interest in things that a patent attorney does. We can also see what else Facebook suggests. Typically, I don’t usually look at the suggestions. But sometimes, in cases like this, I do.

You can do corporate lawyers, who probably deal with some patent issues. You can do, United States Patent and Trademark Office because people that are patent attorneys are going to be going to the United States Patent and Trademark Office quite a bit.

As you can see, we’ve got a potential reach of 81,000 people here. You could absolutely really start filtering down and start identifying patent attorneys.

How To Utilize Lookalike Audiences

Another thing you can do if you have a list of current clients or a list of patent attorneys, you can go into Facebook and take those email addresses and upload them as a lookalike audience. Then, Facebook will find more people that are similar to those patent attorneys.

Can This Strategy Work For All Law Firms?

This strategy can work for all practice areas. For example, if you’re a personal injury attorney or a car accident attorney,  it can work for you. If you’re a patent attorney that specializes only in appeals, and you want to reach other patent attorneys, that’s the great part about this is that the richest are in the niches, as they say. If you niche down and you really stay focused, then you can be the absolute expert in your field, whatever that field happens to be.