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 go.
If you're not leveraging social media to connect with your potential clients and build your brand, you're missing out on a massive opportunity. Social media is sticky. How many times have you opened up Instagram out of habit and spend 30 minutes just scrolling, or an hour, or maybe two? Okay, well, if you haven't, I have, and so have potential clients. You could have the best ads in the world, but if no one sees them, then it doesn't matter.
You need to go to where your clients already are, and that's social media. By creating engaging, informative content on these platforms, you can reach a wider audience, showcase your expertise and build trust with potential clients. Today's guest, Jen Gore, has built her law firm, Atlanta Personal Injury Law Group, into one of the fastest growing firms in the country, securing a place on the Inc. 5000 3 years in a row. And social media has been a key driver of that success. She's mastered the art of identifying her target demographic and tailoring her content to their interests and pain points. Get ahead of the competition with highlights from the goat of social media, Jen Gore. To hear Jen live at PIMCon, secure your spot at pimcon.org. Use code P-I-M-J-E-N for $200 off your ticket. That's PIMJEN for $200 off your ticket, let the gold medal moments begin.
Jennifer Gore-Cuthbert:
You have to constantly evolve, and I think that's what makes it kind of tricky. And even we were talking about our content we were filming in January. We're like, "Oh, that's so outdated now. We hate it." And getting comfortable on camera was a big thing. I think a lot of people are uncomfortable on camera, and I feel like you get over that when you just, we've been doing this thing called Shock and Awe, which is we're doing two reels a day since January, which is a lot of content. And I think you're seeing the transition from old marketing where you did one branding video, or you did one major piece of content and that was good enough. But in the distracted world that we live in, what you need is a lot of little short content because people are looking in that feed every day.
That's where the attention is. That's what Gary Vee has been saying for years, is the asset, is the attention. And people don't have the attention span, honestly, to watch like five 20-minute videos. You need to hit them frequently with something that they will be able to watch quick, and that is a big mindset shift to creating that amount of content and being creative. You have to be a kind of creative. You have to think of new things. You have to put your spin on other ideas that are out there. You also have to put yourself out there because I swear the cringiest ones or the ones that you're like, "Nobody is going to like this at all. This is silly." are the ones that take off or the one you think is going to do great. It's horrible. But, as a marketer, when people put up TV ads years ago, you didn't really have feedback. You didn't know, well, nobody liked this. So I tell all of my friends in the masterminds, you're just now able to get data that you couldn't before.
Chris Dreyer:
I think that's one of the strongest things about social is you have a direct line to the consumer versus TV. They're going to tell you, they will troll the comment bar. They will tell you if they liked something or if they think it's funny. I always fight with my social team too, because I've got that Cardone, Gary Vaynerchuk mentality of I want to do 10x more. And, ear muffs, Michael Mogill, if you're listening and hitting and seeing some of my competitors, we do track against the amount, the quantitative actions that we take versus them to make sure that we're doing more than them. And so, I think it is quantitative and qualitative to get in that rhythm, to do two a day. Is it like you and a couple of team members? A brainstorming session in the morning? How does that process work?
Jennifer Gore-Cuthbert:
We have a marketing team that is scrolling through TikTok, looking at what's trending, coming up with ideas, saving ideas, and then we put our own spin on it. We do different stuff, like what we've been doing is some legal stuff and then some more fun stuff. So it's kind of a mix. And the reason we're doing that is because we're also running Facebook ads, and so a lot of our ads are more serious. We don't do as many of the sillier ones as ads, but we run Facebook ads against our list. And so that's very powerful and effective. If you have a list, and you have someone who's really good at Facebook ads, that's something I learned at a conference that we went to.
So we're creating content for YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and we have an in-house videographer who shoots all our content, edits all of our content, and creates different things you have to do for the different platforms. You have to format them all very differently. And so that's been an evolution, just trying to shoot all that. We usually batch shoot, so I'll shoot for five hours one day for a week or two, and I have to bring multiple outfits. I have to look different in all the videos. It's a lot of commitment. I know a lot of people just don't have that bandwidth, but if you're going to do it, I mean, it's easier to batch it than to do it every day.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, there's so much there about the teams. You have a team that's helping you. You've got your mapping out, your editorial calendar and your notes, and so there's a lot of strategy. You got your videographer making sure the quality and the different platforms are there. I do think what you said about Facebook and hitting the list is grossly neglected by PI attorneys because you can't retarget on Google Ads and ad roll in some of these retargeting platforms with the same effectiveness that you can on Facebook. So I think that's super effective. I guess you're building this giant content library. I saw when I was looking at, you've got stuff on how to avoid getting a speeding ticket, and you've got some just practical lawyer stuff. When people think of lawyers, they think of the speeding ticket, right? I think that's really exciting that you do both, so you hit the broad audience, and then you hit the really PI specific stuff too.
Jennifer Gore-Cuthbert:
Well, what's been annoying as a lawyer and the evolution of our journey has been, unfortunately, or fortunately, a lot of people don't actually care about hearing about legal content on social. And I don't know if you've ever, I mean, you're doing a lot of marketing content, but it's not an interest. Law is not technically an interest you see someone put as their hobby or their interest. So if we were in the fitness industry or the beauty industry, there's people that follow that because that's actually their interest. It's pretty rare that someone's like, "Oh, interests, personal injury," unless they're kind of dealing with something.
So I've seen this with a lot of my friends who are doing TikTok. You have to create other content to see what sticks and what works, and people know you're a law firm, but you could be creating content around other topics, and that's where you have to get out of your comfort zone, because initially I was like, "I'm only making legal content." And then you're like, "Okay. But people don't really care about that."
Chris Dreyer:
Right.
Jennifer Gore-Cuthbert:
So some of my friends make videos about their outfit of the day or their food, what they eat for lunch, and these videos get hundreds of thousands of views, and I can't actually give you a real good reason for why, but they know the person's a lawyer.
Chris Dreyer:
Because I'm near St. Louis, I think of Brown & Crouppen. Right? They have their show of three lawyers eating sandwiches. I'm like, "Okay." And they just talk about the food they're eating, but the name is just three lawyers, but it's not, "What are the steps I need to take after a car accident?" You can have some of those in the middle of the funnel, someone's already interested, but I think you do need those top of funnel. You need to drive awareness that you even exist and that you can help them if they do happen to have an accident.
Jennifer Gore-Cuthbert:
Yeah. And I think that's the mistake that you're seeing a lot of people on social, especially when they first jump in, is they're making purely legal videos that get one view. And they're heavy, they're not interesting. So how can you engage people in other avenues and then remind them that you do personal injury law?
Chris Dreyer:
When thinking about who should be in the videos, you can't argue with data.
Jennifer Gore-Cuthbert:
When you look at the data, which we love data, the people that historically have somebody as the face of the brand, the brand does better. I've seen some people try to have their assistant be the face or whatever, but I do think that poses some vulnerabilities for your brand, because if you make somebody who's not a vested partner or owner of the brand the face, they could leave. At the same time, we do have a trade name, so I'm trying to position the firm in a way where it's not just all about me. We do involve the staff in a ton of the content that we do, but I still do think that, for some reason, the human mind likes to attribute a person with a brand.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I think so. And I think also those referral opportunities and being known commodity within the industry for your peers, I would imagine, for the B2B play, that would be very important. Maybe the B2C, they could recognize the firm name.
Jennifer Gore-Cuthbert:
One of my concerns initially in making myself the face, because there was a little bit of time where I really resisted doing that, especially when I first changed the name of the firm to Atlanta Personal Injury. I was concerned that the clients would only want to work with me. But in all of the friends and mentors and colleagues that I have that have massive firms, I really have never seen it to be an issue. I think that if you have amazing lawyers that work at your law firm who are really specialists in all the different things that they do, the client really understands that the owner may be involved in some aspects of the case, but there are other lawyers that are very competent working there. So I think if anyone has that concern, I haven't seen that personally be an issue.
Chris Dreyer:
That wraps up this Gold Medal Moment featuring the GOAT of social media, Jen Gore. Visit pimcon.org to go from good to GOAT and join me and Jen live in Scottsdale September 15th through 17th, where we will 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 path 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 the code PIMJEN.
