James Helm:
You have to win your followers. You have to win your engagement. The way you do that is by going above and beyond representing your brand in a unique way.
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. The legal marketing company the best firms hire when they want the rankings, traffic and cases other law firm marketing agencies can't deliver.
Each week, you get insights and wisdom from some of the best in the industry. Speaking of the best, I've got some exciting news to share with you. This September at PIMCon in Scottsdale, Arizona, we'll be joined by none other than my favorite comedian, David Spade. You know him from classic movies like Tommy Boy and Joe Dirt, and of course, his unforgettable run on Saturday Night Live. It's going to be a blast having him with us. So say bye-bye to FOMO and get your ticket to PIMCon now. All right, let's dive in.
I'm so excited to have James Helm on the show today. This marks his third time on the show, a first in PIM history, and there's a good reason why. The owner of TopDog Law is in the trenches day in and day out, testing, iterating and relentlessly optimizing his approach. And man, does he have the results to show for it. In just a few years, James has grown TopDog Law from a Philadelphia upstart into a national leader in legal advertising, spending over eight figures and building thousands of calls.
Today, we cover everything you need to understand the state of marketing in personal injury. We get into TV advertising and the million dollar question, "Is it still delivering the ROI it used to?" The power of social media and the pitfalls of outsourcing to an agency that just doesn't get your vibe. The untapped potential of Google Ads and why so many firms are sleeping on this gold mine. And of course, we'll discuss this hot new kid on the block, OTT, and whether those juicy but sky-high CPMs are worth the squeeze. We've got a lot to cover today, so let's go.
James Helm:
I think in 2024 things are really changing in personal injury from a landscape perspective. It'll be cool to kind of dig into where we think the market's going and what's changing.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I love all of that. I kind of wanted to start with some data. Let's just put the data, the nerd hat on. You know I subscribe to Nielsen and Vivvix, and I kind of download it. They track $2 billion worth of advertising spend in the PI space. I just wanted to share with you the top four, just to get your thoughts on that to start. Number one, Spot TV is still at 800 million. It's the most spend for personal injury attorneys. Number two is outdoor at 262 million. Number three is Google, proud of my people, 190 million. Number four, local radio, right under 180 million. And then there's this super odd outlier with Rubenstein. Yeah, we got you Rubenstein, spending 96 million on a mobile app. What's your thoughts on those, on the big players? Any surprises there?
James Helm:
I think if you look at the trend of television, since lawyers started advertising on television, it's just been up and to the right. So when I look at Kantar or Vivvix or any of these things, what I'm kind of waiting to see is when is the spend on television, from a personal injury lawyer perspective, actually going to decrease? And is the fact that it continues to go up and to the right indicative of it's working, or is it indicative of it's the channel that used to work and lawyers continue to put more and more money into it? I think for us, personally, we really dug into whether TV would make sense. Obviously, you wish you would've went on TV in 1990, 1995, 1997 when you were cleaning up, but the reality is we just got the budget in the last couple years where that sort of an investment would make sense.
It's been really challenging to make a decision one way or the other on, "Hey, do you want to take a seven figure budget and put it on TV?" Because when you look at the actual media buyer, whether that's an agency or whoever else, when you look at the cost of production, which is like 40 or $80,000 to just make a commercial, and then you look at what you have to spend monthly on television to be in the top five in a given market, or top seven in a given market, you're talking about a seven-figure commitment without any data to know, "Are the cases going to be a couple thousand? Are they going to be more than a couple thousand? Are they going to be the highest cost per acquisition I have across any platform or is this a doable solution that's going to scale?"
Chris Dreyer:
I can tell you from my perspective, I work with close to 120 PI firms, some of the biggest in the state, and what I hear from them almost every meeting is, "We're not getting as much out of TV. Where can we invest? How can we do more on Google or other areas?" All the time. At least from my side, I've never heard, like, "Oh, TV's crushed and we're going to go put another 20 40%." I haven't heard it. I'm not saying that there aren't those circumstances. Maybe you're targeting the boomers. You're hitting the Better Call Saul style on the nursing home cases, maybe. But at least for me, it's just super surprising that so much money is still allocated there.
James Helm:
I think if you were somebody who got into television ... I mean, you look at, obviously, the Morgan & Morgan spend, that's five X everybody else's advertising spend. Maybe even more than that. When you look into somebody like that who's been on television a long time, who knows their cost per case in a market that they've been in 10 years, or another lawyer that started advertising on television and was one of the first advertisers on television in that market, it probably makes sense for them to continue investing on television for as long as those cases are coming in at the same rate. If it's working, I don't think there's any situation why you would say to stop.
Now, I listened to a couple of podcast episodes ago where you had somebody on who said, hey, they saw their money spending on TV not going as far. Meaning, the monthly budget they were putting into TV was resulting in fewer and fewer cases. And if that's the case, or you're somebody who's never tried TV before, it makes it a lot harder to say, "Hey, I want to pull that lever."
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. I think that was Angel Reyes. He's talking big spends. Angel, if you're listening, thank you for the transparency. I got a lot of compliments from that episode because you actually shared real numbers. Morgan's spending 110 to 120 million, according to this data, on Spot TV. The next highest law firm, there is that legion company in between, but the next highest law firm's Thomas J. Henry at 23 million. So you're pretty dead on, it's five to six X what everyone else is. Still, Thomas J. Henry's almost cranking out $2 million a month on Spot TV, not talking about syndication or other areas. It's just surprising to me because of how much the audience has declined, at least the younger individuals using apps and streaming, and those other channels.
James Helm:
When you think about fundamentally what advertising is, advertising is having people who don't know you, know you. There's different ways to get that sort of attention. Obviously the way that it's worked with television in the past is you had tons of viewers, you were one of the first lawyers doing TV. You probably had the highest frequency. And then you used some creative concepts like standing on a truck or a jingle at the end of your commercial or a sponsorship of a local sports team. Some way to try to make your brand creative commercial stand out.
I think what becomes hard is when now at a commercial break, a lot of the other advertising categories have pulled their spend from TV. You are seeing multiple lawyer advertisements at the same commercial break. A lot of them are looking pretty similar. The cost per view, like the CPM, cost per impression is getting higher and higher. It's not as appealing for getting your message out or getting your brand known as it might've been.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I agree. We've talked a lot about this. I just went to Vegas not too long ago. Look, I don't watch regular TV unless it's like a sporting event. But here I am, I go to Vegas, I'm eating breakfast, I look at the TV, first I get hit by a Morgan ad, then I get hit by a Naqvi ad. I'm like, "Okay, well, they reached me. I normally don't watch it but they got me." So as much as I say I watched streaming and all these other things, I still saw their ads when I was in Vegas.
James Helm:
Yeah. Look, if you're one of the biggest advertisers in a market, and this is where we're seeing at TopDog with some of the markets we're in, is you just want to be on everything. That's where it's hard, is you want to reach folks that you're not reaching. For us, we're kind of coming at it from the other perspective where we're saying, "We're an Instagram organic brand, so how do we then begin to reach consumers that aren't on Instagram?" Well, billboards, radio, buses, maybe TV. That's a different audience, or folks that are not seeing us on their social media account.
I think that most law firm owners who are listening come at it from the opposite perspective, if they're advertisers. They traditionally came from billboards, radio, television, and now they're figuring out, "How do I reach that younger audience that may not be consuming their content on those platforms?" I think trying to solve that problem for the majority of personal injury law firms out there is the real needle mover so that they can evolve their marketing strategy as the world around them is evolving.
Chris Dreyer:
I think that's dead on, and that reinforces ... The conversations I'm having with those individuals are to reach the younger audience, which you started in reverse, right? You're hitting the social media. You really have an effective strategy.
James Helm:
Well, let's call a spade a spade. I'm not some grand strategist. I was 25 years old. I had the benefit of being social media native. I was broke. I didn't have any money to do the traditional forms of advertising. It wasn't like I had some grand plan of advertising on the channels that other lawyers won't. It was really, when you're starting a law firm, which some other listeners out here might be, you don't have the kind of money to compete in some of these traditional channels. So social media is free. If you can build your brand or your presence, you can get attention through social media, that's a whole avenue of getting your message out there that you can do when you don't have any other option.
Chris Dreyer:
All right, let's talk about social media for a minute. I've got some pretty strong opinions on this, but I wanted to run them by James to get his takes since he's deep into the trenches actually executing on this stuff day in and day out. Here's my stance. When it comes to social media for PI firms, you can't just outsource it and expect killer results. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there are some unicorn agencies out there that are truly capable of capturing a unique voice and style of another firm. But in my experience, if you want your social presence to really pop, you got to go all in. We're talking a serious commitment. You need a high quality video production, consistency in posting, and willingness to learn the ropes of grasping compelling hooks and any techniques that grab attention.
Look, at my agency, we specialize in SEO. We get asked all the time, "Hey, can you guys handle our social media too?" Nine times out of 10 our answer is a firm no. Why? Because so much of what we see out there in a social media space is just noise. Posts that don't add value, that don't engage the audience in a meaningful way. But James is testing social day in and day out. He shares his take on the in-house versus outsourced debate for social media.
James Helm:
I think when lawyers, and other professional categories, too, it's not just lawyers, so doctors, dentists, lawyers, they realized at some point, "Hey, we need to promote our business on social media." So the logical thing to do was to find a social media agency. Or maybe even you're hiring somebody internally, but you're hiring a student fresh out of college and you're saying, "Hey, manage our social media."
The problem with that approach is you end up putting up a bunch of content that's like, "Happy Memorial Day from blah blah blah law firm," or a graphic about what to do after an accident. The content that an agency or a internal marketing employee can do for you without your involvement is mediocre. It's almost not even worth doing if you're not going to put the effort into it. You compare that to something like Google Ads or television where it's like the owner can have moderate, once-in-a-while involvement but generally be completely hands off, and that type of advertising runs in the background. So I think younger people, native social media people like me have such an advantage in building out our business's social media because we can drive that strategy and be creative about creating content in a way that you can't really delegate to an outside agency or an employee.
Chris Dreyer:
I agree with that. Let me stereotype. Let's say you're a firm that's been around for a while, you invested heavy in TV. Maybe you don't have the energy to do social media because it's a lot of energy, a big commitment. You mentioned like, hey, you bring it into house, it's kind of hit or miss. Do you partner with influencers? Do you hire ... there's some social media agencies like Obvious.ly that will connect you with influencers that already have two million followers. There's the risk of their reputation and what dumb stuff they want to do, that they're going to do, but what's the solution here? Or is it just you just do paid social? Is that the answer?
James Helm:
I think there's a number of approaches you can take, if you're a law firm that either doesn't have experience advertising, or doesn't have the bandwidth, or want to personally start making content videos. Either doesn't have the time or the interest in doing that.
One thing you could do is you could do what you're saying and you could try to get really talented people to represent your brand. I think in the example I just gave about hiring a marketing person out of college, you are much better off hiring a creator or someone that can create actual engaging content for your brand, as opposed to somebody who's doing a social media management. Because the whole value is making the content engaging. You have to win your followers. You have to win your engagement. The way you do that is by going above and beyond representing your brand in a unique way. So that's one option is to say, "Hey, we're going to partner with a creator," or, "We're going to sponsor a show." Something along those lines that you allow them to create the content for you.
Another way is you say, "Hey, I'm going to just work with another law firm that does." For us, for example, we have a bunch of traditional media advertisers that say, "Hey, TopDog, we don't care how you're getting us our cases, we just care what the cases cost and what percentage we have to pay you, and we'll go do all the creative aspect of getting the leads." And then just let them view the math. That's kind of the done-for-you approach.
I think the other thing you could do is, and this is probably a little bit more controversial, or you could argue the other side of it, is you could just punt on social media entirely. I see so many lawyers, Chris, that waste their time.
Chris Dreyer:
Yes.
James Helm:
They just create videos. It's like, "I know you think you should have a social media brand, but do you know how much better you would be off just sending out personal handwritten notes in the mail to your clients asking for referrals, or writing up an email that has a recipe for your clients that will go ... they'll like getting every month and they'll share with each other?" There's other ways to do creative marketing that's non-social media. Trying to copy what you see other people doing on social media, if you really don't know how to do it, it can take up a lot of hours, and it might not just be as effective as some of those old school, boots-on-the-ground marketing strategies that have worked for a hundred years.
Chris Dreyer:
I wish I could ring a bell because there is just so much of that on social. They're posting every single day and they got 200 followers. There's no distribution and organic. If you don't have the engagement, it's not going to show to the feed. It's a terrible waste of time unless you really commit or partner with the right individual that can get you that visibility.
James Helm:
I mean, you just think about it as, what's your time worth? You know?
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah.
James Helm:
If you're spending 10 hours a week, maybe five hours a week doing social media content and you can clearly attribute one case or two cases to social media, I think you got to take a hard look and say, "Am I doing this just because other people are doing this or am I doing this because I think it's a good way to promote my business?" If the answer is you're doing this because other people are doing this, I think you got to reevaluate that and come up with some of your own strategies that ...
I have a buddy who's super into cars, super into car shows, and he just goes to all car shows. He loves it, he talks to people about their cars, and he's the lawyer at the car shows. It's like, if he's going to spend five hours a week, "Is it better for you to sit in front of a computer and make videos that's like, 'Three steps after a car accident,' that nobody's watching, or is it better to go hang out at the car show, which you would like doing anyway, and be the lawyer that goes to the car shows, and bring in cases through that?"
Chris Dreyer:
1,000% agree. There's firms that have different approaches. I think in Brown & Crouppen, right around me in St. Louis, they have the three lawyers eating sandwiches. They go around to local St. Louis. They eat at these restaurants. They're funny. Ed Herman and the guys, Terry Crouppen. They talk about, "Where are the good places to eat?" They've become a known quantity in the community, as opposed to, "Here are the steps you need to take after a car accident." Come on. It's just not going to reach anyone.
I want to segue to just old reliable outdoor advertising. What's your thoughts on billboards? I was looking at Lamar today to see what their pricing was. What's your thoughts?
James Helm:
One little hack for anybody listening who's trying to negotiate billboards for the first time, don't pay the rate. It's negotiable. I think that's the thing about traditional media that's so different, and actually kind of counterintuitive for millennials like me that are used to just putting their credit card into Google or Facebook. What these companies are saying the price per billboard is, is not what you should be paying. You can probably get three times off the deal of the rate card, especially if you buy those billboards in bulk. That's my first comment just for anybody who's getting into outdoor for the first time, is it's all negotiation, it's all relationships. It's very different than when you buy on digital and you just put in your credit card.
The second thing is we do a ton of outdoor. I think when we started doing outdoor ... Outdoor is actually our second marketing channel after social media. I think that people were really surprised because I think that there's this stigma or idea about a lawyer on a billboard, and, "What a bad way to spend marketing dollars." I actually disagree with that. I think the downside of outdoor advertising is obvious, and it's attribution. It becomes very hard to say, "Okay, because somebody saw that billboard, I got X number of cases." It's really a top-of-mind brand lift.
But the way we try to use it is in the markets where we're already doing very well. So we're not going into a new market and saying, "Hey, our strategy in Philadelphia is we're just going to do billboards and we're going to do nothing else." I think that's pretty dumb. But I think if you're at a point where you're doing TV or you're doing radio or you're doing social media, you're doing these other things, and then you say, "Hey, I'm going to also put in a little outdoor advertising to make my brand memorable," that's, I think, a good strategy.
Now, the problem is, is it's all instinct. You have to believe that it's working more so that you can prove with evidence that it's working. Who knows? I could be totally wrong about that. But my instinct is if you can stay top of mind ... Say you're a social media person who's built a big following on social media, you have your core people on social media. Well, there's something that triggers in people's brains where they then see that social media personality or brand actually in the real world. It's almost this layer of credibility, of like, "Holy crap, this person has a billboard." That's how I've experienced it. I get it all the time, is people sending me photos of the billboard, sharing, tagging us. So I really think outdoor is a good place to spend your money if you've already established a brand in the market.
Chris Dreyer:
I agree with all those points. It's funny, I was driving into St. Louis and you've got, like I said, Brown & Crouppen, you got Morgan & Morgan, you got Schultz Myers, you got Onder. My wife's like ... looks up at the billboard, I can't even remember who the individual was, and she's like, "Oh, he must be legit." My head snapped to the right, like, "What?" But she's not in this space like us. It is, it can act as social proof, like, "Oh, they're legit, they're on the billboard. They're legit, they're on TV."
James Helm:
Yeah. It's funny, I remember I had one person, we were going out to dinner, and they weren't super sophisticated in advertising. He said something along the lines of like, "Well, you spend millions of dollars per year on billboards." I remember just thinking like, "Huh." Well, now we actually do spend millions of dollars a year on billboards, but at the time we did not. It was just the value of the billboards in his head compared to what they were actually costing us, that was what I found interesting. It's like people put this premium on billboards and outdoor advertising more than it actually costs to do. That degree of credibility in my opinion is worth something. Now, if you're in a market ... Look at Atlanta, if you're in a market where every lawyer has a billboard, obviously that's a little less attractive. I mean, you're just the next lawyer in a line of billboards. So I think there is some degree of looking at your market specifically and figuring out, "How are other people advertising?" And, "What can I do to separate my brand?"
Chris Dreyer:
We got the big asterisk next to Rubenstein spending $96 million on a mobile app, on CBS, on the phone. Is this a reporting error for Kantar? Have you seen anyone crush the mobile app side? It's just such a big number. It jumped on the number two spend in the nation.
James Helm:
Wow. I saw it because you pointed it out to me. I'm not sure I would've caught it. But looking at it, I think it has to be an error. Because if there's an app that you could spend $85 million of legal advertising effectively, you would think TopDog would know about it, right?
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah.
James Helm:
That's right up my lane. I think people are going to start trying now, not to $85 million, but I think there are opportunities outside of some of these traditional channels. Talk about OTT, talk about YouTube, talk about app ads, talk about Reddit. I think lawyers are going to get outside of the traditional comfort zone of legal advertising and spending in some of these new platforms, but $85 million, come on, that's a lot of money.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's talk about OTT next. Streaming services like Hulu, Roku, they're gaining popularity. I know a bunch of PI firms that are crushing it with traditional TV, are thinking about making the jump. But I got to tell you, the stories I'm hearing, they're giving me pause. Firms are throwing around eight-figure testing budgets. At the end of the day, they're scratching their heads. When we audited some of our clients, OTT spending was like pulling teeth. When we finally got around to it, many of them were using third-party agencies and they weren't being very transparent on the CPMs, the cost per thousand. Those CPMs were through the roof. Look, they were 40, 50, even $70, which is shocking when TV and radio get less than $10 CPMs. Some just extremely low, even down to $2 CPMs. I wanted to know if this is just the cost of playing ball in the OTT space because it's so fragmented, or is there a scenario where you can get a CPM below $30? James explains how to use OTT effectively.
James Helm:
I think when you look at OTT, you can bucket it into the hyper-targeting category, which is great for some businesses. If you want to sell a particular e-commerce product, or you have some type of targeting that's not just based on genre but it's based on interest buckets, you want to target women over 50 years old who come from household income levels above X that love Lululemon, and you only want to show ads to those folks, something like OTT is great because you don't waste money targeting people outside of that demographic that would never be interested in your boujee yoga pants. Whatever you're selling, right?
The problem is just for our industry, we want mass distribution cheap. So it's not aligned with the positives of OTT. In fact, the downsides of OTT conflict with our interests, which is high CPMs. I mean, if you're on television now getting a CPM of four, five, six bucks, and then you're looking at a comparison on OTT of $40, that means you're reaching one consumer for every 10 consumers you could have reached in television. So you have to think, "This must be the most targeted, best consumer pool for this to possibly be worth me making that one for 10 trade."
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. I'll tell you this, there's the individuals who say, "Oh, just geofence the trauma centers and the collision centers and stuff like that." Yeah. Look, we're trying that. We're doing some experiments of big spends. It's just, I think the CPMs are the biggest hindrance.
James Helm:
How granular can you get on the actual targeting of OTT? Can I say within a one-mile radius or ...
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah.
James Helm:
That is a benefit over television. Because television, obviously, you're picking by DMA. I don't know if there's some type of exposure case where say there was a factory that was letting off a chemical, an ethylene oxide claim, or something like that, where the targeting could be very relevant for a tour. Something like that could make sense, but how granular can you actually go with the target?
Chris Dreyer:
Really good question. I would say first of all, this is not my expertise. We have a director of OTT that is very fluent in this. From my understanding, you can get by zip code. You can hit the demos, all the different demographics and be very specific. Like you said, it's like a digital strategy on the buy, on the target. It depends a lot on the DSPs and the providers you're using, so things like ... There's Roku or there's The Trade Desk or there's Simplify, all these are ... Because it's so fragmented, you could go direct native to Hulu. They all have different capabilities and different reporting transparency.
I would just say the biggest issue that I've seen is the lack of transparency. At least a lot of times I think the local TV spots that are trying to sell, like, "Oh, you should put a little of this percentage of your portfolio into this channel," and, "Oh, by the way, we're just not going to tell you the CPMs because it's $50." I think that's the biggest issue is just what you can buy in terms of distribution. I want to kind of go on a rant here and just get your opinion on this.
James Helm:
Let's go. Rant away.
Chris Dreyer:
Okay. A lot of people know SEO, there's intent. Someone types in car accident lawyer, there's intent behind the query. They're probably looking for an attorney. We know the challenges of ranking in the Map Pack and organic, and that. There's no question that that's a very strong strategy based upon a tremendous amount of evidence that I have on cases. Not theory, on impressions, attributed cases. My rant is Google Ads. Right now, we have about eight to 10 people spending over six figures a month on Google Ads. I get in these scenarios where, on TV, people are comfortable spending 50, 100,000, a million dollars a month on TV, but when I say 40,000 on Google Ads, it's like their face melts off. They can't understand why Google Ads won't work. I'm like, "Okay, for TV you can spend $50,000 a month and hope and pray to get some cases, but on Google Ads, if you spent $50,000 a month, I can show you your cost per conversion and guaranteed cases." What am I missing here? Why don't people want to do Google Ads? I just don't get it.
James Helm:
It's funny, you measure things in life based on its relative value, where you're conditioned to spend at that price. I don't know if this is elasticity and inelasticity. I was at Penn State my freshman year. I was concerned about what I had going on that night. I was not tuned into economics class, but I really do think things have its relative price. People know going into buying television, "I'm going to pay a lot of money for these TV ads. TV ads are expensive. I'm going to put up the budget. It's going to work." And then you present something to them like Google Ads and they're just not used to spending that amount of money. At least not everybody.
I would say there are some folks who come from the world where they were fishing in a barrel catching cases on Google Ads for 10 years. If they started using Google ads in 2010, 2011, 2012, I would guess that by now they're much more comfortable spending those huge budget amounts. But you take somebody on television who spent 80, 90% of their budget on television, and I think whether it's social or whether it's Google Ads or whether it's something else, to say, "Hey, put this amount of money into that," they don't think about it the same way they do as TV. They think about it as a big investment, a risky investment, a lot of money.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah.
James Helm:
I think it's just relative.
Chris Dreyer:
I had a conversation with a firm, recently. They were spending $200,000+ plus on between excess TV and OTT. I'm like, "Why don't you just put that in Google Ads? I will guarantee you significantly more cases instead of just guessing. They're there."
James Helm:
I think it also comes down to your brand. A lot of folks, and I would put myself in this category, are brand builders. They're trying to build a brand. There's this idea that even if the money that I'm spending on TV isn't leading to a case this month, at least I'm getting that brand lift from people hearing my name in the market. In three months or three years when a loved one has a tragic situation and needs a really reliable accident attorney, they're going to remember me from the years of goodwill I've built promoting my brand. I think that's a fair argument to why you should defer, if everything is equal, why you should defer to investing in marketing strategies that lift a brand, as opposed to unbranded Google Ads or something else that just produces cases.
But here's the problem, they're not equal. If you can do an unbranded strategy where you're not getting any brand lift on your name, but you're getting a case and you're putting up ... I talk this about some of the firms that work with us. They're sacrificing on the dollars that they're spending contributing to the TopDog campaigns. They're taking dollars that could have went to their own brand. But if it would've cost them 5,000 to get a case through their own brand and it's costing them a pro rata of 500 through us, who cares? You can't still do other great things through your brand, a book bag drive, charity, all these other things, right? It's not one or the other. But I think for whatever reason, when people are sinking tons of money into TV, they think they're getting that huge brand lift, and I'm just not sure if they're actually getting it.
Chris Dreyer:
I 1,000% agree. It reminds me in Myspace, maybe I'm just on this rant side right now, James, of the distinction between a marketing agency versus coaching agency. Marketing, it's very objective. Like, "Did the leads come in or not?" And then coaching is like, "Well, I think I learned something. I think I got enough value to pay this coaching fee. I don't want to stop investing in myself. I need to keep doing coaching." But, "Is the coaching you're getting actually leveling up?" You know what I'm saying? I'm not saying that for every coaching provider. There's a lot of great programs. There's a similar dichotomy there on the-
James Helm:
Well, it goes back to the inelastic demand thing, too. It's like, you don't know with coaching what the approximate value is. You can't compare it to anything else, right? So, "Is it worth 2,000? Is it worth 10,000? Is it worth 25,000?" It's all in your head. It's all the value that you are perceiving it to be. There's no way to dial in, "Is it working?" Whereas, with the marketing and with the vendor, and this is why traditionally it's not as sticky, is because you have to fight for your life every month by your actual results.
I think as the law firm owner, there's a lot of value to that accountability that you can have with a vendor or an employee, even, to say, "Hey, we know the one number that you're responsible for." Our company follows EOS. So we run our business on EOS. I know you're on EOS. Just got back from the EOS conference in San Diego. One of the single biggest things I've gotten from a leadership or management perspective is having a scorecard. And telling everybody in our firm, whether they're in marketing, they're one of our call center reps, they're in another seat, "Hey, these are the numbers that you're going to be evaluated on everything." As long as you can create alignment, it becomes really clear of what they need to do to be successful in the firm.
Chris Dreyer:
Amazing. James, this has been incredible. I love your point of view. You're in the weeds. You're doing it. You're investing. You're trying these different strategies. Always growing. For the audience that wants to partner up, to share that funnel with TopDog, how do they get in touch with you? And then just one final, just overarching your thought on the state of PI, just to kind of close it out.
James Helm:
Yeah. We're working with firms across all different practice areas. Everything from torts to medical malpractice to general personal injury. Always best to email me just james.helm@topdoglaw.com. We'd love to see if it's a fit to work together.
In terms of general thoughts on personal injury, it's getting more competitive, Chris. Every single year, getting cases is harder and harder, and the cost per case is going up. So you really need to think through who you're working with, what your strategies are, and not necessarily what's worked for you in the past. I think that there's really going to be two types of law firm owners. There's going to be folks that evolve with some of these trends we've seen with software, with AI, with marketing channels, and then there's going to be other folks that get too rooted in what's worked in the past and don't evolve. I think your show and other shows like yours that keep people up to date on what's going on in the legal industry is how you as the business leader of your firm really keep your practice involved with the trends.
Chris Dreyer:
Wow. What another killer conversation with James. Let's hit the takeaways. One, TV ads. We're seeing massive spending, but is it paying off? James advised, don't just follow the herd. Dig into your numbers and make sure those pricey commercials are actually delivering cases at the cost that makes sense for your firm.
James Helm:
What I'm kind of waiting to see is when is the spend on television from a personal injury lawyer perspective actually going to decrease? And is the fact that it continues to go up and to the right indicative of it's working, or is it indicative of it's the channel that used to work and lawyers continue to put more and more money into it?
Chris Dreyer:
Two, social media. It's a golden opportunity to build your brand, but only if you do it right. Outsourcing your posts to an agency that doesn't get you or just trying to batch everything in one day, it's a recipe for lame generic content that's not going to be followed. You got to put in the time to create stuff that truly connects with your audience, infuse your personality, lean into your passions. That's how you cut through the noise.
James Helm:
You have to win your followers. You have to win your engagement. The way you do that is by going above and beyond representing your brand in a unique way.
Chris Dreyer:
And three, good old Google Ads. Lots of attorneys are still sleeping on this. They're leaving a ton of money on the table. If you can score cases from Google at a tiny fraction of what you're paying for other channels, why wouldn't you crank up the budget? Here's the deal guys, PI is a dogfight right now. The only way to come out on top is by making data-driven decisions. You got to track your metrics, obviously. Question everything and be ready to go all in on what's working. Evolve or die, it's that simple.
James Helm:
If you can do an unbranded strategy where you're not getting any brand lift on your name, but you're getting a case and you're putting up ... I talked this about some of the firms that work with us. They're sacrificing on the dollars that they're spending contributing to the TopDog campaigns. They're taking dollars that could have went to their own brand. But if it would've cost them 5,000 to get a case through their own brand and it's costing them a pro rata of 500 through us, who cares?
Chris Dreyer:
If you want to partner up with James and tap into the magic his team is working on at TopDog, shoot him an email at james.helm@topdoglaw.com. If you got value from this episode, do me a favor, smash that subscribe button and share the knowledge with a fellow PI. I'd sincerely appreciate it. You won't want to miss out on the next episode of Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. All right, everybody, thanks for hanging out. See you next time. I'm out.
