Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Gold Medal Moments on Personal Injury Mastermind. This is a special miniseries that highlights my favorite lessons from former PIM guests. Each of these trailblazers and thought leaders will speak live at the inaugural PIMCon, the Personal Injury Mastermind Conference. Trust me, you don't want to miss them live. I'm your host, Chris Dreyer. Over the next few weeks, we'll be sharing can't-miss insights and bite-sized pieces to help get your firm from good to GOAT. Brand recognition takes real work. You need to understand your audience, create engaging content that is uniquely you. Recognition is just a start. In today's competitive legal landscape, a personal injury firm needs a brand that is truly loved by its audience. After all, when someone is going through a difficult time and needs legal help, they're more likely to turn to a firm they know, like, and trust. Ed Herman is the GOAT of brand love. To hear Ed live at PIMCon, secure your spot at pimcon.org. Use code P-I-M-E-D for $200 off your ticket. Let the Gold Medal Moments begin.
Ed Herman:
You got to think about what the goal of each type of marketing is. If people sit there and believe that the goal of marketing is solely the end result, how many cases did you get from it? If that's what people were using as the only measure, first of all, it's almost impossible to do a complete attribution of that, but if that were really the case, nobody would ever do something like billboard. If you were just looking at how many of your clients or customers said, I signed up with you because I saw your billboard, it would never justify its expense. And yet, if you measure it by how many of your clients were familiar with your billboards, how many of them had been exposed to your billboards, were aware of your billboards. It's an awareness play. It's this whole idea of a person needs to be touched by you a certain number of times before you're kind of cemented into the top of their mind.
We just had some brand research done, and when they're doing brand research, they'll do something called unaided recall, and then they'll do something called aided recall. Unaided recall would be something like this. They ask a group of people, say from St. Louis or Kansas City without any prompting, they'll say, "Make a list of all of the law firms that you can think of off the top of your head." Okay. That's unaided recall. And some of them will write down Brown & Crouppen. I can tell you that 100% of them in four different focus groups done wrote down Brown & Crouppen.
Then aided recall is when they'll give you a list of firms and they'll say, "Mark, off whichever of these firms you've ever heard of." And obviously if we're 100% unaided, we're 100% aided, but you could also see our competition will take a jump. Their name is not right on the top of your head, but if you prompt them and say, "Well, have you ever heard of so-and-so?" Just, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard of so-and-so." And those are the kind of things you have to do to measure the effectiveness of your branding campaigns.
Chris Dreyer:
That's an excellent way to measure the success of the campaign, and it's more than that too. It's looking at just all the branding issues, the traditional marketing type tactics too.
Ed Herman:
Right. Well, and especially in personal injury law. Consider this at any given moment, a tiny, tiny percentage of the population that you're paying to put your marketing in front of actually needs your services at that time. If you're McDonald's and you want to push Quarter Pounders, you can put up billboards with delicious looking Quarter Pounders. You can have commercials featuring the Quarter Pounder, and then you could look right at your sales of Quarter Pounders, did my sales of Quarter Pounders go up? And you could get an immediate answer as to whether things worked, but in personal injury law, you could have a large population of people out there. They know you, they love you. In their mind, they've already committed to the idea that if I ever need a lawyer, this is who I'm calling. But if those people never need a lawyer, you never find out just how effective your marketing truly was.
So if you know that better than 99% of your audience doesn't need you today, you got to ask yourself what's the right message for them? You can tell them, we're going to get you justice, we're going to get you money. But I don't know that that message resonates with people who don't have an existing case. Those are good messages for people who were just in an accident. That's maybe what they need to hear because they're dealing with it right now. But what message does everybody else need to hear? And in my opinion, the message that I like everybody else to have is, I like these guys. I think they're smart. I think they're funny. I think they're likable, approachable, competent. That's all you can do with a person that doesn't need you today.
Chris Dreyer:
So our audience is primarily personal injury attorneys, and there's a personal injury attorney that wants to create a new YouTube series, and everyone's doing these FAQ videos. Not that they don't have a place. They do have a place for those individuals that have that intent. So is it more about your unique strengths and finding that, your own niche to create it?
Ed Herman:
Yeah. We've worked with because Coolfire does our production, and I work closely with Coolfire on every phase of our videos. I sit in, I do the editing with their editors, I work with it, and we actually have worked with other firms to find their voice, their digital voice, and it really boils down to somebody, it doesn't necessarily have to be the owner of the firm, but it's somebody at the firm who can be genuine and who has an area of interest that they can be truly enthusiastic about. That's why we did 3 Lawyers Eating Sandwiches, because we knew, first of all, people love watching food. People take pictures of their food, they talk about it, they post. You get water cooler talk about The Great British Baking Show or Nailed It!, so you can just binge that all day.
And so we looked at that and said, you know what? We could a lot with a show like 3 Lawyers Eating Sandwiches and not just for our business. We can help out businesses that we care about, mom and pops that we care about that are doing something really great on bread. We go in there and we're authentic. Again, we have no script. We eat lunch together every day, whether they're filming it or not, at least before the quarantine. What we tried to do there was be ourselves and be passionate about the food and our city. Those things come out. People watch those shows. I mean, they've got 9 million views so far for that series. And for those restaurants, it's been a wonder because every place that we feature gets a huge jump in business and they're very appreciative.
And I think for other firms, that's my point, is look at your community, look at what makes you special. Look at your habits. Think about the stuff that people said to you that you do it a little differently than everyone else. But whatever it is, whether it's golf tips, whether it's a cool collection that you have that means something to you, whether it's that you like to cook, whatever your thing is, I promise you, if you're authentic and enthusiastic, people will want to watch it.
Chris Dreyer:
I love that. I love the aspect of getting the community involved too, because that restaurant will want to share the video. They'll want to engage too. They'll want to have their servers, their cooks engage and comment and like.
Ed Herman:
Right. They'll engage. And you can get your stuff shared to a really wide audience at no cost, but you can't create something that you think, well, this is great. It's going to go viral and it's going to get all these views for no money. You shouldn't think if I do it right, the internet's going to give me a bunch of free stuff. That's not how you should look at marketing on the internet. Marketing on the internet, you should look at it like any of your other marketing. How much money do I have to put behind this to get so many eyeballs to watch my content? And then what you really want to do is you don't want to judge your content simply by views, because if you put enough money behind it and keep it in front of the public, you're going to get views.
What you want to judge it by is how people react and engage with it. How many people reacted on Facebook, how many people commented, how many people shared? So you want to be on the phone. That's where you want to be, and you want them to watch your content for as long as possible. So with YouTube for example, you get great metrics that they give you. How many people chose to watch your video? How long was the average duration that they watched for? How many people made it through the first 25%, the first 50%, the first 75%? That's when you really learn about what's working. What are people looking for, how comfortable are they and how many people will watch something to the end? Don't save your most important information for the end. Really teaches you, you got to hook people at the beginning, catch them with a good laugh or two in the first 15 seconds and you'll see that the percentage of them that hang on longer, it's a lot higher, and then you get to see the total minutes.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's talk about some mistakes you've learned or pitfalls when you jumped into YouTube marketing. Is there some things that you said, oh man, that was a mistake. I'm not going to do that again. What are some takeaways there?
Ed Herman:
Keep a close eye on what your cost per view is, because it can vary quite a bit with YouTube and you need somebody who's going to be looking at that all the time. You obviously want to keep the cost as low as possible. You want to make sure that you're always targeting regionally. You're better off really hyper focusing your whatever dollars you put behind, just like you would on television or on billboards. You don't go buying a billboard in some other city just because it has a huge population and a lot of people are going to see it. Who cares if some people in Los Angeles see your billboards? You don't practice there. So you want to really keep it tight. You want to really promote it so that the eyeballs you're getting are as close to the demographic that might actually hire you. And the first step of that is by doing it regionally and then drill down as far as they'll let you do it on YouTube.
People say, "Well, do I want to keep going after more of what I already have or do I want to branch out into some other pond and start expanding to a group of people that have never traditionally hired people like us, but maybe they will?" And my best advice on that is saturate amongst the people that will actually hire you. You're never going to have a big enough market share, most likely to get all of that anyway. The most important thing, and I know this, there's not even a question, is you have to turn all of your clients into a strong, loyal group of advocates for your firm. The most valuable commodity you have are the people that are currently using you and the people that have used you in the past.
So that means you have to do a great job with their case, you have to care about them, you have to give amazing client service, and you have to keep that relationship going. Never let them out of your circle. That means that you should be, while you're younger and smaller, and you can do this a little bit more easily, you have to be maintaining a relationship with everybody who's come in and not just the people you helped, even the people that just called you. Think about this. I've talked to many firms about this. There are a couple of big challenges as to why a person will never become a client of yours. Okay. Maybe it's they've never heard of you. So how can they become a client? Or maybe it's they've heard of you, but they would never hire you. Maybe they already know a lawyer and they'd never hire you. They wouldn't even consider it. Anybody who calls your office is already over those two hurdles.
They have heard of you, they would use you. Think about the value of knowing those two bits of information. You say, well, my God, for this person who called, I already have checked the first two big boxes. The only box that was left was that for whatever reason on that call, they didn't have a matter that I could help them with, but everything else I had. That's gold to know that. That means that every person who calls your office or interacts with you, you need to figure out how you're going to maintain a relationship with them even if you turn them down. There's different ways of turning people down. I turn people down all the time, but I explain to them the analysis and why they don't want to go down that road. And they're very grateful that I save them the heartache of pursuing a matter that may not have ended favorably.
And then they trust me because they know I didn't make any money from that. I always tell them, I said, "Listen, I make money if you have a claim. I have every incentive in the world if you have a valid claim to pursue it for you. And here I am telling you that I don't know that this is going to be worth your effort, and here's why." Those people will trust me for life.
Chris Dreyer:
That wraps up this Gold Medal Moment featuring the GOAT, a brand love Ed Herman. Visit pimcon.org to go from good to GOAT and join me and Ed live in Scottsdale September 15th through 17th, where we'll conquer personal injury marketing, network with industry titans, celebrate excellence, and become the greatest of all time in personal injury law. Tickets are limited. So secure your all access pass today. Just head to pimcon.org. That's P-I-M-C-O-N. O-R-G. I'm Chris Dreyer. Thanks for listening to these Gold Medal Moments, and I hope to see you in the winner's circle at PIMCon. For $200 off use code P-I-M-E-D.
