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.
All right, let's talk about the marketing funnel. This is a concept that every law firm needs to understand if they want to attract clients and grow their business. Picture a funnel wide open at the top and narrow at the bottom. At the top of the funnel, you get a whole bunch of potential clients who are just starting to explore their options. They might be searching online for answers to their legal questions, or they might be asking friends and family for recommendations.
As they move down the funnel, some of those potential clients will start to engage with your firm. They might visit your website or follow you on social media. At this point. They're starting to get to know you and what you're all about. Further down the funnel, some of those engaged prospects will take the next step and reach out to your firm. They might fill out a contact form, call your office, or chat with a bot. These are your leads and they're getting closer to becoming signed clients. Finally, at the bottom of the funnel, you've got your clients. These are the people who've hired you and you represent them, and they're the ones who are generating revenue for your firm. The obvious goal here is the conversion, which is the bottom of the funnel, but it starts with awareness way at the top. Top of funnel marketing is all about awareness. And when you do it right, it can be an absolute game changer for attracting high value cases and building a strong brand that stands out in a crowded market.
Today we revisit a conversation with someone who knows it the best, James Helm, CEO of Top Dog Law. In just five short years, James has taken his firm from a local player to a nationwide powerhouse, building thousands of calls every single month. His success has been so explosive that he recently opened an in-house intake department and is adding a minimum of 10 new staff members each month just to keep up with this massive demand. And a big part of his success comes down to his incredible skills of top of funnel marketing. James understands how to create content that resonates with potential clients. Stand out from the competition with highlights from the GOAT of top of funnel marketing, James Helm. To hear James live at PIMCon, secure your spot at pimcon.org. Use the code P-I-M-J-A-M-E-S or PIMJAMES for $200 off your ticket. Let the gold medal moments begin.
James Helm:
I think that the big cases come through brand. Now when we go into a partnership with a law firm, we're advertising through the Top Dog brand, and so we're using a brand to get those cases and traditional media, that's top of mind awareness, buses, billboards, radio, TV. That generates this brand that when an accident happens, they're not looking on Google, they're not sitting around on social media a month and a half after the accident clicking on an ad about making X dollars on a car accident. Those big, big cases, them and their immediate family knows they need a lawyer, and often it's the lawyer that they remember from the mass advertising that gets those calls.
And then those mass advertisers will sometimes, and I would say almost usually then refer that case to the catastrophic trial firm that specializes in it. I think there's truth in the type of marketing you are doing has an impact on whether or not you're getting the seven or eight figure cases, but it's not that those cases don't go to advertisers, it's that they often go to the big brands that either that person, a friend, a family member knows, and then those brands either do the cases in-house or for us, we have the luxury of working with those top tier trial firms and really maximizing the value of the case, which let's be honest, is the best thing for the client.
Because there are some perverse incentives here where a mass advertiser might say, "Hey, we can take this case that's worth 15 million. We can do it in-house for 8 million, and we can make a bigger fee than if we refer it." And check my math there, I don't do public math, but some version of that. Where instead for us, we're going to refer it, we're going to refer it to the law firm that's going to maximize the value of the case, and in turn, that's going to put a lot more money in the client's pocket.
Chris Dreyer:
It's just a numbers game too. You get those asynchronous bets, they come in eventually with volume. So you're in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Philly, everyone talks about how good Georgia and the Atlanta market is. Besides just the competition, how do you look at these different markets and approach them from, "Hey, I'm going to invest capital here." How do you think about the market selection?
James Helm:
Like a lot of things, I've just learned from trial and error. I wish I would've been more strategic from day one, but our first market we went into after our early success in Philadelphia was Baltimore, because Maryland is an hour and a half away from Philadelphia. I was already getting some spillover calls from Baltimore, so it was like, hey, why don't we be more proactive of trying to see what's going on in Baltimore? And I'll be honest, I was attracted by there not being very many mass advertisers there. And what I had to learn the hard way was the reason there were not a lot of mass advertisers there was because the case were bad. I mean, the case values, the average settlement results in gross attorney's fees of 3,000 to $5,000, which is a ecosystem problem.
And it wasn't just one partner we worked with there, we actually went through four and we saw very consistent data regarding the settlement values. And when the adjusters are used to paying a certain amount, the treatment ecosystem isn't there in terms of working up the cases. It becomes very, very challenging to get those high average settlement fees. But then you look at a state like Georgia or Florida where the ecosystem is really developed, the insurance adjusters are used to paying policy limits. And you can take a case in Georgia and if there's a $25,000 policy, which is the minimum policy there, there's a good chance you're getting that policy within six months if a client has some injuries. And that's why there are eight to 10 firms spending $10 million or more in Georgia. And so what I've had to learn the hard way, which is sort of counterintuitive, is usually if there is a lot of mass advertising there, it's probably a good sign that it's a lucrative market and to not necessarily run away from those markets, but instead lean into it.
But obviously it's a balance. You want to know which markets can you be successful in versus which markets is there a lot of competition versus which markets are the values high? And what I think is funny is a lot of times people try to apply the same reasoning to every market. So a law firm that runs a pre-suit model in Georgia or Florida would not be successful running that same pre-suit model in Pennsylvania or New York or New Jersey or Michigan. Why? Because there's tort thresholds. If you can't litigate the cases, you're not going to be able to win in those markets with the tort threshold because too high of a percentage of the cases are going to need to go to suit, and you're just not going to be built that way. And so I think it's important in masterminds and events, when we talk about the markets to really understand that all the personal injury markets are very different. And that's based on the laws, that's based on the ecosystem of treatment providers. It's based on a lot of factors.
Chris Dreyer:
That is so different. I was thinking about myself, I'm in the agency space, they always tell you, find the smallest niche. And I'm thinking, look, I'm not going to make a bunch of money in basket weaving niche. It's like, the legal's got money. I know it's a bloodbath of competition, but there's a reason for that. So then it kind of leans into that in the same capacity for you. It's like, there's a ton of competition in Georgia for a reason. It's worth going into that market. And if there's not a lot of competition, I don't know, maybe it is kind of a race to the bottom scenario. Not to say that efficiencies and all these things can help with profit margins and different types of arbitrage, international labor things driving down your cost to make money.
James Helm:
Well, you probably see it in SEO. Some markets, you can generate cases for your clients at X dollars and in some markets it might be double that cost or triple that cost. Now, here's the interesting thing, even if it's double the cost to acquire a case, it doesn't mean it's less profitable because the cases could be worth double or more in that market.
Chris Dreyer:
Absolutely. When we're looking at, just from a Google Ads perspective, something like Florida, you're targeting below 4K, or California 6K, but then other states it's like, hey, you can't originate some cases through Google Ads for $1,000. The value may not be as high. So all different strategies there. The other thing too is here's this thing I see is you've got firms that maybe don't have the capital and want to kind of be this national type firm, and they don't really have the strategy to go into it, and they're actually doing quite well in their main market. How do you look at diminishing returns? So you've got ATL, Chicago, New York, Philly, all these different markets. How do you look at a market and say, my dollar... Is it just purely the data? You've got the data nailed down and it's like, hey, I'm increasing my advertising, but look, my cases aren't really increasing, so I move it to a different market. How do you think about diminishing returns when you have multiple markets to select from?
James Helm:
I think the first thing about diminishing returns is looking at your original market or your home market. I know we've seen this where we've spent several million dollars in Philadelphia and we keep increasing. And the reason why is because that's our home market. That's our home field. Go Eagles. Hopefully we'll win the Super Bowl this year, but it's like I want to always be that force in Philadelphia, but I'd be lying to myself if I didn't also know that every additional advertising dollar doesn't go as far. Eventually, you put in more and more money, but you're not getting cases at the same rate as you were before. And so you can either continue to increase and try to find new innovative advertising strategies within your market, or you can do what we did and we can look at some new markets and the potential of new markets.
Now, the way I like to look at new markets, and if you're familiar with Facebook ads, you'll probably resonate with this is the best people at Facebook advertising do tons of split testing. You put up an ad, you use six different captions or calls to action, and then you put a small amount of money towards each one and you figure out where your winners are. And we've tried to do that obviously on a little bit of a larger scale, but with the markets so that we test out markets and we can look at a new market as an experiment and maybe we're in that market and we're putting up $50,000 and our partner's putting up $50,000, and we can evaluate the data in terms of, well, how many leads are we getting for this? What's our cost per acquisition? If our partner has financial data on what those cases might be worth to them, we can use that to evaluate it.
And then with that data, with the cost per lead, cost per acquisition, duration, so time on desk, fall off rate and average case value, you can start to see the picture even before the cases start to settle of what are your unit economics going to look like in that market? Then you can compare that to other markets. And so for us, we're heavily invested in Chicago and part of the reason why is our brand is just doing really well there. People are resonating with our brand, they're resonating with our marketing, they're resonating with our messaging. We're seeing that in our cost per lead. We're seeing that in our cost per acquisition. And so we're like, hey, out of a couple of markets, we tested, this seems to be going pretty well. Why don't we keep putting more and more money into the winners and either not put any more money or even pull the losers.
Chris Dreyer:
When it comes to advertising channels, James emphasizes creativity over budget. He shares how producing viral billboards and representing an influencer artist early on allowed Top Dog Law to build brand awareness and stand out.
James Helm:
So we got our start on social media, and I feel really fortunate that our social media stuff worked because I was broke. I didn't have any money. I was 28 years old, I didn't grow up in a house that had a lot of money. I took $187,000, which was from sales commissions selling pay per click and SEO to lawyers, funny enough, and I basically took that in a combination of debt and started my law firm. And so with that kind of a budget, when you got to get office space and your initial staff, it doesn't go very far. And so we use social media and I still think this is a good strategy, whether it's Instagram or TikTok or whatever, and as well as your personal network, everybody has a personal network. Everybody has their friends, their family kids. They went to college with their hometown buddies. We hung up flyers on telephone poles.
All the beginning cases were all free or close to free. They didn't cost any money. And I think still today we could run a really profitable operation in my home city, which is Philadelphia, but wherever you're a lawyer, your home city, just doing that and just not really having much of an advertising expense. The problem is the scalability as well as the predictability of new clients obviously isn't as strong as when you move into advertising. And so for us, we got into paid social media and then after paid social media ads, we got into radio and billboards and buses and all the things to kind of be top of mind in that market. So we're doing SEO, we're doing all these different mediums. Well, how do you try to determine where leads are coming from so you can measure your marketing efficiency per channel?
And Chris Collins, who's on our team has really helped me build out UTM parameters. I'm good at the big ideas, I'm less skilled at the details, and you got to hire people around you that are good at the things you're not good at. And he really helped us dial in our attribution across our different channels so that you can see our winners. But I do also use instinct as well. I'll give you an example, is billboards. When we try to measure our return on investment from billboards, the ROI, the cost per case is terrible. I mean, it's five grand or something, maybe even more than that. And I keep buying them. And the reason why I keep buying them is because I just think there's a lot of our word of mouth referrals. Our referrals from friends and family, maybe even people that are marking other channels, so radio or social on how they heard of us, they're also seeing our billboards.
And that brand presence in the market I don't think is an ego thing. I know a lot of people think it's like an ego thing or think about... I think it's a top of mind awareness strategy. And I think that money is well spent. Now, obviously you need to know how to negotiate good deals with the different billboard companies in your market. I mean, if you don't know what you're doing, they're going to fleece you for three times the rate that I'm paying or somebody who buys a ton of them pay.
So you really have to understand, traditional media is a lot more about negotiation than digital media. Digital media, you plug your card into Google or Facebook and they just whack you with transactions every $900 or whatever. But when you buy traditional media, you really have to learn how that works. And it's still very relationship driven and negotiation driven. And so I believe in investing in traditional media, again, even if the CPAs are higher, or even if we can't even see our return as profitable on the billboards, I'm still doing it because instinctually, I just believe that it's a good strategy.
Chris Dreyer:
You and Ted Turner would get along really well since you mentioned that. So a couple questions here, follow up on that. The first one is thinking about the short-term versus longterm orientation. When you choose a channel, how long do you give, say, radio or TV or billboards to work? What type of times brand? I work with some clients they're like, "Oh, we shut off our TV." And I'm like, "What?" After three months, you need to give it a lot more time. I heard Kyle Backus' put that money aside and don't think about it for a year. When you're looking at these different... And I know, look, there's this direct response versus brand, which by the way, I think is way overused. I think it's just in general attention arbitrage. How do you think about how long to invest in a certain type of channel? Like you just said, hey, I'm doing billboards. I don't know, 5K, I'm going to keep adding.
James Helm:
I think one thing that not a lot of lawyers think of, and if you got a pen and pencil or you're driving in the car, this might be the one thing you want to write down is your creative matters just as much or more than the media channel. And so instead of saying, oh, I'm going to shut off radio, it doesn't work, or I'm going to shut off TV, it doesn't work. Maybe your commercial just sucks. And unless you've gone through a dozen iterations of TV commercials and measured how they perform against each other, I think you're making a bad decision by saying the channel doesn't work. Obviously it's working for some law firms, I mean, legal category is a huge spender. We're not doing that if it's unprofitable. We're doing it because it works. So I think a lot of times people are quick to pull the plug on the channel when it's really that the creative doesn't work.
And we've learned this more than anything with social media ads on Facebook or on Instagram. I run tons of ads and some of them do terrible. And I'm not in my head going, "I'm never going to run Facebook ads again." I'm going to say, "Something was wrong with this ad." It was either the targeting was off or it was either the messaging was off, it was some part of it was not hitting. And if you iterate and iterate and iterate and iterate enough, you'll find a winner. And the good part is once you have your winner, you can just scale that thing. All the work gets done to find the winner. And once you have that winning ad, you can let it ride for years.
Chris Dreyer:
That wraps up this gold medal moment featuring the GOAT of top of funnel marketing, James Helm. Visit pimcon.org to go from good to go and join me and James 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 dot 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-J-A-M-E-S or PIMJAMES.
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.
All right, let's talk about the marketing funnel. This is a concept that every law firm needs to understand if they want to attract clients and grow their business. Picture a funnel wide open at the top and narrow at the bottom. At the top of the funnel, you get a whole bunch of potential clients who are just starting to explore their options. They might be searching online for answers to their legal questions, or they might be asking friends and family for recommendations.
As they move down the funnel, some of those potential clients will start to engage with your firm. They might visit your website or follow you on social media. At this point. They're starting to get to know you and what you're all about. Further down the funnel, some of those engaged prospects will take the next step and reach out to your firm. They might fill out a contact form, call your office, or chat with a bot. These are your leads and they're getting closer to becoming signed clients. Finally, at the bottom of the funnel, you've got your clients. These are the people who've hired you and you represent them, and they're the ones who are generating revenue for your firm. The obvious goal here is the conversion, which is the bottom of the funnel, but it starts with awareness way at the top. Top of funnel marketing is all about awareness. And when you do it right, it can be an absolute game changer for attracting high value cases and building a strong brand that stands out in a crowded market.
Today we revisit a conversation with someone who knows it the best, James Helm, CEO of Top Dog Law. In just five short years, James has taken his firm from a local player to a nationwide powerhouse, building thousands of calls every single month. His success has been so explosive that he recently opened an in-house intake department and is adding a minimum of 10 new staff members each month just to keep up with this massive demand. And a big part of his success comes down to his incredible skills of top of funnel marketing. James understands how to create content that resonates with potential clients. Stand out from the competition with highlights from the GOAT of top of funnel marketing, James Helm. To hear James live at PIMCon, secure your spot at pimcon.org. Use the code P-I-M-J-A-M-E-S or PIMJAMES for $200 off your ticket. Let the gold medal moments begin.
James Helm:
I think that the big cases come through brand. Now when we go into a partnership with a law firm, we're advertising through the Top Dog brand, and so we're using a brand to get those cases and traditional media, that's top of mind awareness, buses, billboards, radio, TV. That generates this brand that when an accident happens, they're not looking on Google, they're not sitting around on social media a month and a half after the accident clicking on an ad about making X dollars on a car accident. Those big, big cases, them and their immediate family knows they need a lawyer, and often it's the lawyer that they remember from the mass advertising that gets those calls.
And then those mass advertisers will sometimes, and I would say almost usually then refer that case to the catastrophic trial firm that specializes in it. I think there's truth in the type of marketing you are doing has an impact on whether or not you're getting the seven or eight figure cases, but it's not that those cases don't go to advertisers, it's that they often go to the big brands that either that person, a friend, a family member knows, and then those brands either do the cases in-house or for us, we have the luxury of working with those top tier trial firms and really maximizing the value of the case, which let's be honest, is the best thing for the client.
Because there are some perverse incentives here where a mass advertiser might say, "Hey, we can take this case that's worth 15 million. We can do it in-house for 8 million, and we can make a bigger fee than if we refer it." And check my math there, I don't do public math, but some version of that. Where instead for us, we're going to refer it, we're going to refer it to the law firm that's going to maximize the value of the case, and in turn, that's going to put a lot more money in the client's pocket.
Chris Dreyer:
It's just a numbers game too. You get those asynchronous bets, they come in eventually with volume. So you're in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Philly, everyone talks about how good Georgia and the Atlanta market is. Besides just the competition, how do you look at these different markets and approach them from, "Hey, I'm going to invest capital here." How do you think about the market selection?
James Helm:
Like a lot of things, I've just learned from trial and error. I wish I would've been more strategic from day one, but our first market we went into after our early success in Philadelphia was Baltimore, because Maryland is an hour and a half away from Philadelphia. I was already getting some spillover calls from Baltimore, so it was like, hey, why don't we be more proactive of trying to see what's going on in Baltimore? And I'll be honest, I was attracted by there not being very many mass advertisers there. And what I had to learn the hard way was the reason there were not a lot of mass advertisers there was because the case were bad. I mean, the case values, the average settlement results in gross attorney's fees of 3,000 to $5,000, which is a ecosystem problem.
And it wasn't just one partner we worked with there, we actually went through four and we saw very consistent data regarding the settlement values. And when the adjusters are used to paying a certain amount, the treatment ecosystem isn't there in terms of working up the cases. It becomes very, very challenging to get those high average settlement fees. But then you look at a state like Georgia or Florida where the ecosystem is really developed, the insurance adjusters are used to paying policy limits. And you can take a case in Georgia and if there's a $25,000 policy, which is the minimum policy there, there's a good chance you're getting that policy within six months if a client has some injuries. And that's why there are eight to 10 firms spending $10 million or more in Georgia. And so what I've had to learn the hard way, which is sort of counterintuitive, is usually if there is a lot of mass advertising there, it's probably a good sign that it's a lucrative market and to not necessarily run away from those markets, but instead lean into it.
But obviously it's a balance. You want to know which markets can you be successful in versus which markets is there a lot of competition versus which markets are the values high? And what I think is funny is a lot of times people try to apply the same reasoning to every market. So a law firm that runs a pre-suit model in Georgia or Florida would not be successful running that same pre-suit model in Pennsylvania or New York or New Jersey or Michigan. Why? Because there's tort thresholds. If you can't litigate the cases, you're not going to be able to win in those markets with the tort threshold because too high of a percentage of the cases are going to need to go to suit, and you're just not going to be built that way. And so I think it's important in masterminds and events, when we talk about the markets to really understand that all the personal injury markets are very different. And that's based on the laws, that's based on the ecosystem of treatment providers. It's based on a lot of factors.
Chris Dreyer:
That is so different. I was thinking about myself, I'm in the agency space, they always tell you, find the smallest niche. And I'm thinking, look, I'm not going to make a bunch of money in basket weaving niche. It's like, the legal's got money. I know it's a bloodbath of competition, but there's a reason for that. So then it kind of leans into that in the same capacity for you. It's like, there's a ton of competition in Georgia for a reason. It's worth going into that market. And if there's not a lot of competition, I don't know, maybe it is kind of a race to the bottom scenario. Not to say that efficiencies and all these things can help with profit margins and different types of arbitrage, international labor things driving down your cost to make money.
James Helm:
Well, you probably see it in SEO. Some markets, you can generate cases for your clients at X dollars and in some markets it might be double that cost or triple that cost. Now, here's the interesting thing, even if it's double the cost to acquire a case, it doesn't mean it's less profitable because the cases could be worth double or more in that market.
Chris Dreyer:
Absolutely. When we're looking at, just from a Google Ads perspective, something like Florida, you're targeting below 4K, or California 6K, but then other states it's like, hey, you can't originate some cases through Google Ads for $1,000. The value may not be as high. So all different strategies there. The other thing too is here's this thing I see is you've got firms that maybe don't have the capital and want to kind of be this national type firm, and they don't really have the strategy to go into it, and they're actually doing quite well in their main market. How do you look at diminishing returns? So you've got ATL, Chicago, New York, Philly, all these different markets. How do you look at a market and say, my dollar... Is it just purely the data? You've got the data nailed down and it's like, hey, I'm increasing my advertising, but look, my cases aren't really increasing, so I move it to a different market. How do you think about diminishing returns when you have multiple markets to select from?
James Helm:
I think the first thing about diminishing returns is looking at your original market or your home market. I know we've seen this where we've spent several million dollars in Philadelphia and we keep increasing. And the reason why is because that's our home market. That's our home field. Go Eagles. Hopefully we'll win the Super Bowl this year, but it's like I want to always be that force in Philadelphia, but I'd be lying to myself if I didn't also know that every additional advertising dollar doesn't go as far. Eventually, you put in more and more money, but you're not getting cases at the same rate as you were before. And so you can either continue to increase and try to find new innovative advertising strategies within your market, or you can do what we did and we can look at some new markets and the potential of new markets.
Now, the way I like to look at new markets, and if you're familiar with Facebook ads, you'll probably resonate with this is the best people at Facebook advertising do tons of split testing. You put up an ad, you use six different captions or calls to action, and then you put a small amount of money towards each one and you figure out where your winners are. And we've tried to do that obviously on a little bit of a larger scale, but with the markets so that we test out markets and we can look at a new market as an experiment and maybe we're in that market and we're putting up $50,000 and our partner's putting up $50,000, and we can evaluate the data in terms of, well, how many leads are we getting for this? What's our cost per acquisition? If our partner has financial data on what those cases might be worth to them, we can use that to evaluate it.
And then with that data, with the cost per lead, cost per acquisition, duration, so time on desk, fall off rate and average case value, you can start to see the picture even before the cases start to settle of what are your unit economics going to look like in that market? Then you can compare that to other markets. And so for us, we're heavily invested in Chicago and part of the reason why is our brand is just doing really well there. People are resonating with our brand, they're resonating with our marketing, they're resonating with our messaging. We're seeing that in our cost per lead. We're seeing that in our cost per acquisition. And so we're like, hey, out of a couple of markets, we tested, this seems to be going pretty well. Why don't we keep putting more and more money into the winners and either not put any more money or even pull the losers.
Chris Dreyer:
When it comes to advertising channels, James emphasizes creativity over budget. He shares how producing viral billboards and representing an influencer artist early on allowed Top Dog Law to build brand awareness and stand out.
James Helm:
So we got our start on social media, and I feel really fortunate that our social media stuff worked because I was broke. I didn't have any money. I was 28 years old, I didn't grow up in a house that had a lot of money. I took $187,000, which was from sales commissions selling pay per click and SEO to lawyers, funny enough, and I basically took that in a combination of debt and started my law firm. And so with that kind of a budget, when you got to get office space and your initial staff, it doesn't go very far. And so we use social media and I still think this is a good strategy, whether it's Instagram or TikTok or whatever, and as well as your personal network, everybody has a personal network. Everybody has their friends, their family kids. They went to college with their hometown buddies. We hung up flyers on telephone poles.
All the beginning cases were all free or close to free. They didn't cost any money. And I think still today we could run a really profitable operation in my home city, which is Philadelphia, but wherever you're a lawyer, your home city, just doing that and just not really having much of an advertising expense. The problem is the scalability as well as the predictability of new clients obviously isn't as strong as when you move into advertising. And so for us, we got into paid social media and then after paid social media ads, we got into radio and billboards and buses and all the things to kind of be top of mind in that market. So we're doing SEO, we're doing all these different mediums. Well, how do you try to determine where leads are coming from so you can measure your marketing efficiency per channel?
And Chris Collins, who's on our team has really helped me build out UTM parameters. I'm good at the big ideas, I'm less skilled at the details, and you got to hire people around you that are good at the things you're not good at. And he really helped us dial in our attribution across our different channels so that you can see our winners. But I do also use instinct as well. I'll give you an example, is billboards. When we try to measure our return on investment from billboards, the ROI, the cost per case is terrible. I mean, it's five grand or something, maybe even more than that. And I keep buying them. And the reason why I keep buying them is because I just think there's a lot of our word of mouth referrals. Our referrals from friends and family, maybe even people that are marking other channels, so radio or social on how they heard of us, they're also seeing our billboards.
And that brand presence in the market I don't think is an ego thing. I know a lot of people think it's like an ego thing or think about... I think it's a top of mind awareness strategy. And I think that money is well spent. Now, obviously you need to know how to negotiate good deals with the different billboard companies in your market. I mean, if you don't know what you're doing, they're going to fleece you for three times the rate that I'm paying or somebody who buys a ton of them pay.
So you really have to understand, traditional media is a lot more about negotiation than digital media. Digital media, you plug your card into Google or Facebook and they just whack you with transactions every $900 or whatever. But when you buy traditional media, you really have to learn how that works. And it's still very relationship driven and negotiation driven. And so I believe in investing in traditional media, again, even if the CPAs are higher, or even if we can't even see our return as profitable on the billboards, I'm still doing it because instinctually, I just believe that it's a good strategy.
Chris Dreyer:
You and Ted Turner would get along really well since you mentioned that. So a couple questions here, follow up on that. The first one is thinking about the short-term versus longterm orientation. When you choose a channel, how long do you give, say, radio or TV or billboards to work? What type of times brand? I work with some clients they're like, "Oh, we shut off our TV." And I'm like, "What?" After three months, you need to give it a lot more time. I heard Kyle Backus' put that money aside and don't think about it for a year. When you're looking at these different... And I know, look, there's this direct response versus brand, which by the way, I think is way overused. I think it's just in general attention arbitrage. How do you think about how long to invest in a certain type of channel? Like you just said, hey, I'm doing billboards. I don't know, 5K, I'm going to keep adding.
James Helm:
I think one thing that not a lot of lawyers think of, and if you got a pen and pencil or you're driving in the car, this might be the one thing you want to write down is your creative matters just as much or more than the media channel. And so instead of saying, oh, I'm going to shut off radio, it doesn't work, or I'm going to shut off TV, it doesn't work. Maybe your commercial just sucks. And unless you've gone through a dozen iterations of TV commercials and measured how they perform against each other, I think you're making a bad decision by saying the channel doesn't work. Obviously it's working for some law firms, I mean, legal category is a huge spender. We're not doing that if it's unprofitable. We're doing it because it works. So I think a lot of times people are quick to pull the plug on the channel when it's really that the creative doesn't work.
And we've learned this more than anything with social media ads on Facebook or on Instagram. I run tons of ads and some of them do terrible. And I'm not in my head going, "I'm never going to run Facebook ads again." I'm going to say, "Something was wrong with this ad." It was either the targeting was off or it was either the messaging was off, it was some part of it was not hitting. And if you iterate and iterate and iterate and iterate enough, you'll find a winner. And the good part is once you have your winner, you can just scale that thing. All the work gets done to find the winner. And once you have that winning ad, you can let it ride for years.
Chris Dreyer:
That wraps up this gold medal moment featuring the GOAT of top of funnel marketing, James Helm. Visit pimcon.org to go from good to go and join me and James 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 dot 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-J-A-M-E-S or PIMJAMES.
