Chris Dreyer:
EvenUp, the AI-powered platform is on a mission to level the playing field in personal injury cases. Their proprietary Piai, model reduces manual effort and maximizes case outcomes across the entire PI value chain. The claims intelligence platform doesn't just crank out killer demand letters, provides rich business insights, automates workflows, and creates best-in-class documents for injury law firms, plus their team of legal experts gives you the edge to outmaneuver insurance companies. Visit evenuplaw.com to learn more. And when you use the code RANKINGS, you get 25% off your first month of EvenUp.
Jennifer Gore:
You are a lighthouse and your social media presence is the light you spread into the world. Social media is an opportunity magnet.
Chris Dreyer:
This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. At PIMCon, the Personal Injury Mastermind Conference, we heard some incredible insights that I'm excited to share with y'all. One in particular stood out and changed the way we think about social media for law firms. Today, we're moving beyond the linear view of client acquisition to embrace the broader, richer concept of social media as an opportunity magnet.
Yes, building your brand attracts clients, but it also taps into the world of possibilities you might not have imagined, from securing keynote speaking engagements and industry awards to attracting investment opportunities and forging special relationships with partners and with vendors. It's about earning board positions, mentorship roles and so much more. This isn't just about getting likes and followers, it's about making your voice louder and your influence stronger in ways that go beyond usual marketing efforts. This is the power of visibility. It's a force that compounds over time, elevating your voice above the noise and differentiating you from the competition.
Jennifer Gore:
Everyone sees what we're doing here today and they don't remember the struggle. They don't remember the journey we went on to get here. We did a total rebrand.
Chris Dreyer:
That was Jen Gore. You may have seen her iconic green brand across social media. Let's take a moment to recognize the scale of growth she's achieved in the past 11 years. Her firm, Atlanta Personal Injury Law Group, has been named one of Inc. Magazine's fastest-growing law firms for three consecutive years and has now secured a spot on the Inc. 5000 list for the third time. This makes them not just one of the fastest-growing law firms, but one of the fastest-growing private businesses overall. Much of this remarkable growth can be attributed to Jen's award-winning work on social media. She's amassed an impressive following of over 164,000 engaged followers across various platforms. But Jen didn't achieve this success alone and neither should you. Alexa Lavantis, the director of marketing, is joining Jen on stage. Alexa has been instrumental in developing and implementing the firm's innovative social media strategies, helping to propel their digital presence to new heights.
Alexa Lavantis:
Since day one of opening Atlanta Personal Injury Law Group, we've always had a social media presence. We've always known the value of being on all fronts in our marketing channels, but what has really changed is how we have perceived the value of social media and what it brings to our company and our business. In 2021 is really when we started to make the transition. We were posting three times a week. We really felt obligated to be posting and we felt like we had to pull for content just to post. So we were doing a lot of Google reviews, things around the office, legal tips, three things you should do after a car accident, but it was just very static. It wasn't exciting. It wasn't getting any engagement. We would get maybe five likes on a post, get a couple of comments here or there, but it was nothing like what we have built for the firm today.
In 2024, there's a lot of differences here. We've incorporated a lot more video. It's more exciting and it's more creative. So that's the evolution that we changed on the forefront. The next thing that you'll notice is in 2021, I don't see Jen anywhere in any of these graphics or any pictures of her.
Jennifer Gore:
I was hiding at the time.
Alexa Lavantis:
And now in 2024, she's on every line and row. And so the main transition that we made in 2021 is dedicating Jen to the brand in the face of the firm. Previous to that, it was just Atlanta Personal Injury Law Group. We rebranded from the Gore Law Firm to Atlanta Personal Injury Law Group. We were making it all just about the firm, the people that work there, which is a really important aspect. But consumers need to relate to an entity, they need to relate to a person.
Chris Dreyer:
I want to pause here for just a moment because Alexa is touching on something at the cutting edge of digital marketing, becoming an entity. I talked more in-depth about this in episode 281. You can find that listed under resources in the show notes. But briefly, an entity is a singular well-defined concept. In this case, the concept is a person, the entity is Jen Gore. This is also incredibly powerful for SEO because Google uses machine learning and natural language processing. It can identify these entities on a page within written content. Without going too deep on this, entities allow Google to better assess search relevancy, predict positive experience, and reduce the reliance on backlinks. You're miles ahead of the competition if you can get your entity on Wikipedia, but it starts with recognition.
Alexa Lavantis:
We brought Jen into the marketing a lot more and made her more visible to the audience. So with this, we now have a lot more engagement. We have a lot more followers, we have a lot more people reaching out. A lot of things come our way because we've put ourselves out there in such a vulnerable way in some aspects. And it's not easy work to do. We do a static post five days a week and we do at least one video a day. So if you think about it, there's 365 days in the year. We're doing almost 450 videos a year.
Jennifer Gore:
We're talking every holiday, every weekend. Your viewership is higher on holidays and weekends. Because what are people doing on holidays and weekends? They're sitting with their family on their phone. So if you're not doing weekend posts, I highly suggest you measure the results on that. We want to go further in is the development of my personal brand. We separated Jen Gore Lawyer as a brand and Atlanta Personal Injury Law Group as a brand, and we do a lot of content that actually combines the power of both of them. This is how low the bar to compete here is. You just have to not be boring. Because we're lawyers and we can tend to be boring sometimes. 74% of adults are using social media sites every day. 57% of your sales funnel may be accounted for by influences on social media. And we know that people are spending seven to eight hours a day on their phone. So this is a very obvious clear opportunity.
Alexa Lavantis:
If you're looking to get started on social media, start with one. So there's a lot of different platforms and our goal is to always be on all of them. We were one of the first lawyers on TikTok producing content. Facebook has been around the longest. It's one of the longest-standing platforms out there, so there's a lot more users. It's about building brand loyalty. There's a large range of potential audience for you to grab on Facebook itself. Twitter, which is now rebranded to X is another option. That's more for public relations, newsworthy events, and things going on. So we use that to post news for our events and articles that we're doing.
Pinterest is more if you're selling products, so that doesn't really apply here. YouTube is really great and they're in major competition with TikTok right now. So they have a lot of real content that you can put out there to compete with the audience that has moved over to TikTok. So you can do shorts, you can do long form. There's a lot of flexibility there and there's not a lot of lawyers that dedicate time to YouTube, so there's opportunity there. LinkedIn is a great one. We found a lot of success with LinkedIn.
Jennifer Gore:
LinkedIn is one of my favorites. It's underused in the social media world. Lawyers send us cases from all over the country just because they follow us on LinkedIn because it's so easy to target other law firms. And the other magic about LinkedIn is we have so many people that apply to work at our firm because they're following us on LinkedIn. Professionals, lawyers, our managing attorney felt like she knew us. Because there is a small group of people that they're not really on Instagram or Facebook, but they absolutely have LinkedIn. So there's an amazing recruiting aspect to putting your social media on LinkedIn in a bolder way.
Alexa Lavantis:
Yes, and then TikTok is one of the newer platforms that's out there. I think there's a lot of opportunity with anything that's new in the market because they're still figuring out algorithms and how to prioritize videos and all of that. So that's a really great one. And I feel like we get a lot of engagement on our TikTok. So I would say for us, our best platforms are TikTok and Instagram in regards to engagement, comments, and following.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's face it. Being a great lawyer isn't enough. To succeed, you need to generate consistent leads. Personal injury is the most saturated niche. Competition is fierce, and differentiation is everything. When the deck is stacked against you, you need a comprehensive resource to beat the competition. My latest book, Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing is your roadmap to consistent leads and exponential growth. It is a masterclass on marketing for personal injury firms. It's packed with actionable strategies on where to invest your marketing dollars for maximum impact. No more guesswork, no more wasted ad spend, just clear proven methods to transform your firm from good to goat. Grab your copy of Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing on Amazon. Link is in the show notes.
Jennifer Gore:
The reason that I invite you to create a personal brand, it's more liberating. You can talk about things that you might not necessarily talk about in your law firm. People want to know you're a real person. You can talk about your kids, you can talk about if you have a favorite sport, and it makes sense in a personal brand. And the challenge with a legal brand is you want people to know, like, and trust you. But until they have a reason to really follow a law firm, it's not something they normally would just do for interest. Where a lot of people are curious about lawyers.
Think of all the shows on TV dedicated to law firms. Suits. And what happens is that people think you're interesting because you're a lawyer and then they want to see that you're a real person. And we do videos on what I wear. And that gets more engagement than if I do a boring video on the three things to do if you've been in an accident. Not saying we won't do that video because it is informational, but you have to follow the data. Like John Nachazel always says, "What do people want to watch?"
Alexa Lavantis:
If there's Elon Musk and Tesla, most people are following and engaging with Elon Musk more so than the company, but there's a correlation and they link back to each other. So public figure profile, this is something that we did back in 2021 when we were revolutionizing our social media. This is specific to Instagram and it's something that you can implement today. I think that the verified blue checkmark is really important to have for your law firm or your own personal brand. It shows that you are verified. It's pretty simple, but it gives people an understanding of your authority. And also switching your account to a public figure. That is going to give you more engagement, it's going to give you more analytics, and it's going to give you a lot more opportunity to reach more people on that specific platform. When we first started, it was just me and Jen for a couple of years and we saw that there was so much more potential of things that we could do in-house and things that we could bring in-house that's going to 10X our results.
So we started with a marketing assistant. So that's Ansley. And she helps us with a lot of day-to-day operations, content creation, newsletters. And there's definitely a need for someone who can be boots on the ground at the office helping with a lot of things in marketing. When we film podcasts behind-the-scenes filming and she really keeps us organized. We've had a videographer since 2021. She will edit and get it all squared away, put all of the bells and whistles on the videos, and get it over to us so that we can get that posted. And then a marketing coordinator, which is going to be working on more projects. They're going to be assisting the director of marketing with a lot of the branding components, a lot of SEO strategies, paid-per-click advertising, meeting with vendors, holding vendors accountable, and a lot of bigger big-picture projects for the firm and the trajectory of the firm. It takes a village is I think our point.
We've really evolved our filming. It used to be the videographer would show up and we would brainstorm topics on the spot. Now we have a system in place. A filming sheets is prepared the week before filming and is sent to the marketing team and Jen so that we're all on the same page and we can prepare topics ahead of time. So we always like to try to change up locations too. We shoot a lot in the office, but we also like to go out to local areas to show off the community and to also just change of scenery. And we break it down into legal. And then we have added in Jen Gore Lawyer brand, which is the personal brand that we've created for Jen. So we do a lot of business topics and leadership topics, mindset on there. It's just all about being prepared. That's going to help you with a more successful filming day.
Jennifer Gore:
I would say for any of you that don't know where to start, get someone in college who's young, who's on social media, who interacts with social media all the time, and say, "Come up with ideas." The ideas are actually the hardest part. And there's a whole other discussion we're about to get into of what you have to do to be comfortable on camera this much is I started changing my wardrobe. I wear a lot of green as you guys can tell. But because we're always shooting everything and there's always behind-the-scenes stuff being filmed. Our brand is two shades of green, gray, and black. And so I basically just wear greens, grays, blacks, neutrals. You won't really ever see me in pink or purple. Because when you go to put it in a newsletter, when you go to put it on social media, aesthetically, it doesn't match. You're a brand. Make it easy for people to say, "Oh, there's Jen." I literally have people message me, "I'm at Dillard's. I saw a Jen Gore Lawyer dress."
So this is the vulnerable topic. What do you have to do to get comfortable being on camera? Go and get comfortable in your own skin. Because if you're not comfortable in your own skin, every video they shoot, you're going to want to throw it in the trash. Maybe you want to start working out, maybe you want to do something different with your look. You get to create your persona. And it needs to be something you're really comfortable with. And you got to come to the reckoning of this is what you sound like on video and on the phone. That concept of 10,000 hours. Once you see 10,000 hours or videos of yourself, there's a radical acceptance of this is what you look like.
Alexa Lavantis:
We had the pleasure of winning in January at National Trial Lawyers in Miami, best social media in the PI space. This is the whole point of what we're trying to do here is to spread our brand, our awareness to reach people, and not even just potential clients, but potential employees and also referral partners. Here's some of our data. So this is from Q2 of this year. And this is Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram advertising. But you can see just in a quarter, we're reaching millions of people. You have to think of social media as mini billboards and you have a lot more flexibility. You can put up and refresh your ads. And we also retarget from our website.
So there you have the ability with an application to actually pull all of your traffic that goes into your website back into your database and target them with ads. So if people are searching for a personal injury lawyer and they come across our website, they're now going to see our ads all over their social media, and it's just the multiple touch points that's really helped us. And we can attribute cases to these efforts. Geofencing. You can geofence. You can do with pay-per-click advertising. You can do it within Meta and you can geofence areas. We do hospitals, we do busy intersections.
Jennifer Gore:
So I went down in Atlanta and I took videos of me in front of every hospital. Are you in the hospital today? Those videos go straight to the people in the hospital.
Alexa Lavantis:
Yes.
Jennifer Gore:
That catches people's attention.
Alexa Lavantis:
Yes. The other thing is just take your most viral, most popular videos and turn those into ads. We refresh them almost every month because we're producing so much content. But you always want to take what's producing best and widespread it a little bit more. And you can also target ads. So we have specific ads that we target to medical providers. Because Meta has so many different data points and it knows exactly what we do for our professions. It knows who we're following, what pages we like, and we can target attorneys. So if you've ever seen our ads, you're being targeted with our ads and we create specific content for these different groups.
Jennifer Gore:
Social media is a chance for you to be a thought leader in the industry. We are prioritized by a lot of partners that we have that see our voice and understand what we're trying to do. And if you are a thought leader in the industry and you have a loud voice, how do you think that affects every aspect of your law firm? Don't try to replicate someone else's brand. Be your most authentic self. I think that's a theme that's really been shown in this conference. Think so much bigger than just getting a case.
Chris Dreyer:
That wraps up this special episode of Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer. You can learn more about my guests, grab their contact info, and the resources mentioned today in the show notes. While you're there, pick up a copy of my new book, Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing: From Good to GOAT. And if you like what you hear, help a brother out and leave me a five-star review on app. All right, everybody. Thanks for hanging out. See you next time. I'm out.
