Chris Dreyer:
Whether you've got a hundred thousand, a million, or $10 million to spend, here's exactly what to do with it.
James Helm:
If I pull up to the city, I fly in, I get into Uber, I open the door, I say, "Hey, if you were in an accident, who would you call?" they should say your name. That should be your goal with $10 million.
Chris Dreyer:
We go level by level, what James actually did at each stage to build a national firm.
James Helm:
When I had the $5K, the first thing I did was I bought leads. Then, I could reinvest in the marketing budget. Since the percent to spend on marketing, we've always been north of 50%, which is more aggressive than anybody, but it's like we had huge aspirational growth goals, and we're willing to not make any profits. I under-indexed on people. If I could have done it again, I probably would've been willing to pay money for a talent earlier.
Chris Dreyer:
This is Personal Injury Mastermind powered by Rankings.io, the agency PI firms trust to turn ad spend into clients. From rising case costs to the Google tax, we get into everything they don't tell you about scaling. Let's get into it.
I just really enjoy these podcasts with James. That's why I have him on so frequently. We've become buddies over the years. I thought we would do this show a little bit different. I thought we could have some fun here and do a segment, "What would you do with a $100K advertising budget, a million dollar budget, and then a $10 million?" But I guess before we get started, for those that don't know who James is and who I am a little bit, maybe your first time tuning in, James, why don't you do a brief intro?
James Helm:
Awesome. I'm excited to be here, Chris. I always have fun on the podcast, and I'm excited for PIMCon coming up this year. Let's go.
Chris Dreyer:
Yes, sir.
James Helm:
My name is James. I'm the founder of Top Dog Law. We are a national injury law firm. At this point, we're advertising in a dozen or so states, went through the whole thing. Right? I started my firm in 2019. I'll get into it. I only had $187,000 to start my firm. I had a $5,000 a month marketing budget. Now, we're spending tens of millions of dollars advertising. I want to use today to walk people through that journey, the different intervals that we had, $100K, a million dollar budget, a $10 million budget, and upwards, and say, "Hey, here's how I thought about advertising at each one of these intervals." Hopefully, no matter which one of those you're at, you can take something away from it.
Chris Dreyer:
I'm going to be speaking from your guys' experience, the clients that I work with. So we work with a couple hundred law firms across the country, varying sizes, and so I get to see what a lot of firms are doing, but maybe not the full picture and how they got there. So it's going to be fun to see how we approach these.
James Helm:
You have unique perspective though, Chris, because you're one of the only people that see a hundred different law firms of the best law firms in America, and you get to see them across CMAs and across sizes. It's like the only experience I have is my own experience, which is certainly valuable, but I think you've seen the things some firms have done well and some firms haven't done well, and so you can give that vantage point.
How to allocate personal injury marketing budgets at the $100K, $1M, and $10M stages of law firm growth
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. I appreciate that. Thank you for that. I think it's going to be fun. Look, we have not talked about this. I have no idea what direction James is going to go on, how to spend this money and how I think about it, so it's going to be a lot of fun. So let's start with the $100,000 annual budget. Another way you could think about it, James, if you want, is like, "Hey, it's close to 10,000 bucks a month." If you had to start a brand new PI firm, you had that a $100K budget, what are you looking to do? How are you thinking about it?
James Helm:
Let me first talk about my own experience, and then I'll talk about maybe what I would do today, because those two things are close, but they're not exactly equal. So I incorporated Top Dog Law in 2018, but really got started marketing in February of 2019. Couldn't quite muster up $10K a month in budget. I had $5K. That was my budget. I had $187,000 when I started my firm. It was $100,000 from sales commissions. I had actually made selling pay-per-click and SEO to lawyers. I had $50,000 that I had borrowed from a loan shark and then 30,000 from credit line money. Right? So I had $187K.
The fatal mistake I made, this is foreshadowing, is I mismanaged that money. I thought that the cases would settle within six to nine months. It ended up being two years. That took me on a whole journey of worrying about not being able to pay the rent and all those sort of things that you know and you're feeling if you're just going through starting a personal injury law firm.
When I had the $5K, the first thing I did was I bought leads. Obviously, you can buy leads, you can buy retainers. I did this in the immediate short-term of like, "Hey, let me test some of these vendors that are selling leads." I think at the time, I would buy 10 leads. Right? I would say, "Okay. I'll buy 10 leads for X dollars per lead," and I ended up doing okay out of those. It wasn't a total ripoff, it also wasn't great, but I got some cases. Those cases produced me revenue, which then I could reinvest in the marketing budget.
I think the thing that I did that was very different though was my first hire, rather than being a paralegal, or a lawyer, or a legal assistant, was a marketing director. Specifically, somebody who had videography experience, and I started creating content. I did the DIY social media game. Social and video was how I got my start. I think in 2019, I was one of the only lawyers doing it. Found fun ways to do skits, rap videos, all types of trends to get attention, and we ended up building a really big Instagram account, which was the original source of how Top Dog Law got leads.
If you look at simply from an ROI perspective, the amount of money I spent creating content versus how many cases I got from my Instagram following through the direct messages, incredible cost per case like in the hundreds of dollars. Probably below hundreds of dollars.
Why I want to segment that from what I would do today is I think 2019 was a slightly different time. I was one of the only lawyers doing social media content. The TV advertisers largely were not on social media at all. There wasn't the same kind of affiliates on social media. People weren't used to seeing a lawyer on social media, particularly a lawyer who was doing fun and engaging content, and so it was very purple cow.
I know you and I have talked about it that... I think a lot of lawyers today create content because they're supposed to. They feel like they're supposed to, but it takes a ton of your personal time. Unless you're going to hit that lightning in a bottle, I did, it's tough. As many people that have created content and have generated big funnels through creating organic content, there's probably 50 people that spend a bunch of time creating videos that never really take off, and so I don't know how you feel, Chris, but I feel like it would be very risky to take that $100K in 2025 and say like, "I'm going to invest it all in a DIY video content strategy."
Chris Dreyer:
There's just more competition. So, for me, what I think about is like, "Look, you need a website. There's some cheaper locations to get a website. It's your foundation." I think Justia, they're pretty affordable. I think they're like 6 to 10 grand, and they'll have it structured correctly. They'll host it. They have some support as opposed to just going maybe crazy with a custom brand and style guy. I mean, you could spend a hundred grand with just a branding company, right, and a logo. So if you're trying to get the most bang out of your buck, I think I would do something like that.
I look at this... I was going the... Look, I made a cheat sheet, right, because I was at $100K. I would buy leads. I would still do what you do. Walker Advertising, I think, has a $5K a month package. Again, it's not going to be maybe the same quality of leads that your brand acquires, but you get at least a handful of leads every month. Maybe you can monetize those.
The other thing that I think about is LSA. If you're willing to just open it wide up and do a lot of categories, I think that's a cheap channel. The other approach is like could you get... I think you get one person. I would probably have it be the doer. I would still have them creating content, doing YouTube, doing TikTok, boots on the ground, grassroots stuff, hustling. That's where I'm at, and maybe network with the big litigating firms that have higher case selection criteria.
James Helm:
Yeah. That's a no-brainer. Actually, the point about buying leads. One thing that happened to me when I first bought those leads is you got the leads, but you also got the cases that came out of those cases. So I had some leads that I bought, and I did a good job. Obviously, those are my first clients. They had my cell phone number. I'm available 24/7. I'm helping them with their son's divorce case. I'm doing above and beyond personal service for these people, and that's how you get them to refer their friends and family.
If I'm taking a hard look in the mirror, I am not hustling like that for personal referrals today. I just don't have the bandwidth. It's like I'm managing my direct reports. So I think you're in a unique position when you have a $100K budget. You're likely speaking to clients yourself at that stage. You're in a prime position to get the friends and family of those folks, to even ask those folks to send you friends and family, and you should be able to take the leads that you buy and then spit it into two or three leads from it.
The other point you made, which is so good, is you can totally get cases from other lawyers with any... You don't need any budget, right? Even the firms that work with us, right? It's a referral fee model. It's not a payment upfront model. So if you're strapped for cash, knock on every lawyer's door and say, "Hey, what can I take? What are your extra cases that I can take? Is there any specific carriers you don't like litigating minimum cases against? Are there slip and fall cases where you're only taking the fracture and the surgery cases? I'll litigate your soft tissue cases," or if you can find a mass advertising firm like us, or Morgan, or somebody like that who's spending tons of money and has a bunch of different partners in every city or state, how can you get on the list of those folks? So I think referrals would be a huge part of any strategy, but specifically, if you don't have a ton of budget for yourself.
Chris Dreyer:
I love every bit of that and the examples. Right? Maybe you're not monetizing those SSDI cases or the rando case, but hey, if you're new, you'll take them, and you'll figure out how to do them. Also, I think all these coaches and mentors talk about niching, and you and I know the benefit of that, right, and focus. But out of the gate, you need revenue. So are you doing some business lit, you doing some wills, or whatever just to make some revenue? I don't know. I think you could be open to that. You got ChatGPT to help, maybe some peers. I don't know. What's your thoughts on that?
James Helm:
I would pass on that. That's my personal opinion. If you're trying to start a PI firm... Look, I know Lerner and Rowe is doing DUI and criminal cases. So there definitely is money in some of these other practice areas, and if you... I know some lawyers, right, who will say, "Okay. We're going to do traffic tickets because then those will lead to our PI clients," and that's been effective as a lead source for folks.
I think the way I looked at the problem was, "Hey, I want to be in personal injury. I want to force myself to find personal injury clients. I don't want to go on a sideways quest of starting to do all these other legal matters to eventually get back to personal injury." I want to put my stake in the ground and say like, "I'm exclusively doing injury, and I'm going to work like heck, and be creative, and hustle until I get injury claims."
Chris Dreyer:
Love it, love it. Love the focus. I sound contrarian or contradicting myself because I got the book Niching Up, and here I am. I'm saying, "Hey, take those DI cases coming." You're saying, "No." So you want to move on? You want to go to-
James Helm:
Let's go to the million dollar budget, the first milli.
Chris Dreyer:
That first milli.
James Helm:
Look, I mean-
Chris Dreyer:
Okay. What you got?
James Helm:
To be spending a milli, I mean, it depends on how aggressive you're growing in marketing, and maybe this is just a good time to hit that, right, because how much of your dollars should you be spending on marketing versus revenue? I've heard in other businesses, besides legal, I think the rule of thumb, 20%. Is that what the general rule of thumb in businesses you should be spending on marketing? I've noticed in legal that the more aggressive firms are spending more than 20%. What have you seen across seeing a wide variety of clients?
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I think you're dead on. So I think it depends. I almost started this exercise out of like, "Who are you? Are you the... you don't want to try cases and you want to be a marketer, or do you want to be a litigator?" because my strategies for that first $100K, it's like maybe I'm doing the podcast tours, speaking at CLEs, and doing the network thing more with my peers versus B2C.
James Helm:
Just the percentage of spend on marketing.
Chris Dreyer:
Oh, percent.
James Helm:
I'll talk about ours. I mean, we've always been north of 50%, which is I think as aggressive or more aggressive than anybody, but it's like we had huge aspirational growth goals, and we're willing to not make any profits. I was a single guy.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah.
Why most law firms underinvest in legal talent while overspending on ineffective advertising channels
James Helm:
I didn't have a family to support. I didn't need cash today. I've always lived by the motto "Never for today, always about tomorrow," and so I've always reinvested money back into growth, and that's, I think, actually, to our own detriment. If I'm being completely transparent, I under-indexed on people, so I was... I saw a very clear return of invest money in marketing, get more cases out, and I think if I could have done it again, I probably would've been willing to pay money for a talent earlier.
One thing I tell folks is like, "You want A-players. You want a COO or a CFO." Those people aren't making 100 grand. They're not making 150 grand. Right? Those people, if you really want them to be an A-player, should be coming from somewhere else where they're making multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, or otherwise, why are they so good? Unless you're grooming them out of college, good players don't make 100 grand in C-level roles. They just don't. They're making a lot more than that.
Chris Dreyer:
I completely agree with that. Back to the percentages thing, and I know where I was going with the B2B versus B2C. I'll say for us, we spend about 30%, so not 50%. Right? So even us, as a marketing agency, we spend 30%, but I would say... Look, if you're going B2C, 20% is the minimum in my opinion. But if you're a litigator, maybe you can go down to 10%, and maybe go a little lower because you're known for getting exceptional values and you can... You're still paying it through the referral fee, so depending upon how you factor that in.
James Helm:
That was the referral fee count, right? Because there's a lot of really successful firms that have zero B2C marketing expense, but you could look at the referral fee as a component of the same thing.
Chris Dreyer:
Right.
James Helm:
But assume, okay, assume you are a B2C firm, you have a $1 million budget. That probably means you're doing $3 to $5 million in revenue, and you start to think about, "Okay. Now, I have a little capital, a million bucks is $80K a month. I can really start to think about where do I want to allocate the dollars?" I know you're an SEO guy first. I think at the million dollar mark, you probably should be investing in having a good site, a site that converts, investing on growing that site, doing probably local map rankings to get that site to show up in at least your specific city, where you live. You're probably doing some local service ads or pay-per-click along with that budget.
I would say maybe that roughly takes up a couple hundred thousand dollars of the budget. You're probably doing some type of lead buying, or if you're not buying leads, you are doing some type of traditional brand marketing that's going to replace it. Obviously, we do tons of outdoor. We do tons of radio. There's TV. There's streaming. You're probably taking a percentage of that million bucks, and granted a million bucks isn't very much when it comes to brand marketing, so there could be an argument with a million bucks to say, "Don't do any brand marketing. Only invest in performance, directly attributable marketing."
I think if it was me and I viewed the million bucks as, "This is my budget today, but I am on a way towards having a much bigger budget," I would probably start to think about branding in that first million bucks. So I think I would do website, SEO, pay-per-click, and LSA, and then I would take some percentage of that budget, and I would start to understand brand marketing and think through at least one brand marketing channel that works for me. You can decide on your own. Is that outdoor? Is that radio? Is that streaming? Is that something different?
Chris Dreyer:
I'm going to go a little bit more granular on some of these. So, for example, yeah, I do think you should do search, and I'm not trying to do everything looks like a nail, whatever that saying is, on the hammer, and that channel is the nail. But I mean, a lot of the tactics that you do for SEO apply to these LLMs from a discovery standpoint, and where the future is heading, you want discovery. So I would definitely do the search. Maybe you're at a $10K to $30K, $10K to $20K a month there, splashed in a little LSA.
Now, here's where it gets a little bit different for me on the Google Ads side. I would do Performance Max. I wouldn't do a search campaign, unless I had a little bit of brand recognition. So I would do the audience signals. So I would layer in the keywords. So P Max. You can do themes. So I would do 50 themes all around car accidents because I would want to go volume. I wouldn't want to try to spend my entire budget trying to do a $30,000 cost to acquire a semi-truck or more, or not even a semi-truck. I mean, just a commercial. I wouldn't want to gamble there, so I would go volume, I would go after car, and I would do Performance Max, but... So, first, I would do the themes, but then I would do the layer on audience signals. This is where everybody goes wrong. Okay?
You can do custom segments in P Max, and you can include URLs that your target prospect visit. So the FindLaw car accident lawyer page, the Avvo motor vehicle accident page. Your competitors in your market, whoever is ranking number one, those need to be the signals, because if you just run a P Max, and you don't do themes, and you don't do signals, it will not work. It will not work. So I would do that. Just know it's not going to be as good as bidding on those bottom of the funnel, but you're going to get more leads.
Here's where I struggle. I think that I would do some grassroots marketing with wearables in the community and try to build my community recognition strategically from an investment standpoint, and this is one... Look, paid social and Meta. Your cost required directly is going to be way too high. I don't see how you're going to get an Allegiant Facebook campaign under $10K, but I think I would still do it, so it's crazy, if I was doing the other things because I think you do get a little bit of brand recognition even though it's legion because you're wrapping a radius around your DMA.
Why paid social media still delivers results for personal injury lawyers—and how to avoid wasting ad spend
James Helm:
That's what we did is the first $100K, I put into the videographer, I put into creating organic content, trying to do viral content through the following that way. Before I did any of the branding stuff, the next thing we did was paid social, and we still spend seven figures a month on paid social. We're a social-first company, so it's a little different than a firm that isn't, but here's the reason... I'll make the argument for paid social and why I generally like it, is because I think you get the benefit of direct attribution with the repetition of television.
People say the phone is the new TV, right? That's been something that for 5 years to 10 years now, we've heard GaryVee and all these people say, "Create content. People aren't watching the television in the living room. They're watching their phone." So I think there's a really strong logic to say when I'm paying for ads on social media, whether it's YouTube, or TikTok, or Facebook, or Instagram, I'm getting the ability for people to directly convert. If I'm doing it right, I'm also getting brand recognition in my market.
So if you want to measure every channel of the performance channel, if that's your mindset, you want to look at dollars into Facebook or Instagram, dollars out, that's fine. But if you're also playing the marathon game, you're getting those eyeballs from people who don't need an emergency service right now, but maybe, especially if your ad is really good, they're learning who you are. They're drawing some type of emotion that's associated with you, and so you're getting the benefit of that brand without the conversion through social media.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. So that's where I'm at. I go on Facebook, and I get hit by these advertisers promising these $1,500 cases through Facebook ads or what have you. The reason that some of these can do that, these legion companies like your Quintessa, Cases On Demand, Case Connect, is because of their TAM. They're spreading out, and they're targeting 40 states, and they've monetized all these markets, and the overflow goes to the other legion providers. They sell them back to them, so they don't have the leakage.
Maybe you could do that if you had a network, but that's how they get those. If you'd just do paid social, particularly Meta, and I have some experience with this, and I've seen it through our clients, and you wrap a 20-mile radius or a DMA, and you come in, your cost to acquire, it is not going to be $2,000. I don't care who these Facebook people are, what they're saying. Even with 200 pieces of creative looking at all the ad inventory, it's not going to be there. James, maybe you could correct me if I'm wrong, but... So I would just say just be cognizant. There's a lot of charlatans for the most part, and even if you do paid social absolutely right, your creative has got to be on point. It's so critical. Any thoughts on that?
James Helm:
Yeah. One thing that's interesting is just the comparison to TV, because as you're saying that, I'm thinking about the argument for TV, right? I think, "Okay. What's the traditional way of tracking television? All right. I'm going to spend $100K a month on television. I'm going to ask people who call my office, 'How did you hear of us?' and the number that say, 'Television.' Then, I'm going to take the total ad spend. I'm going to divide it by the number of signed cases that say, 'Television,' and I'm going to say this is my cost per case."
If you're running that math, I find it unlikely that you're going to come in at a cost-per-case that feels really good through that direct attribution methodology. But if you do it this way, if you say, "Okay. I'm going to commit to doing TV for 3, 4, 5 years." I don't have a ton of experience with cable TV. I'm making an assumption, but I'm saying... I've seen this with other... of our branded channels where I'm saying, "Okay. I'm going to look at my total ad dollar spent," and say, "Philadelphia, my original market." Maybe I'm spending 10 million bucks in Philly, and I say, "Okay. 10 million bucks in Philly generated this many cases," and then I look at my cost-per-case that way, and I'm like, "Oh, that's actually pretty good."
So I think if you solely focus on direct attribution through a Facebook or through a television, you're always going to come to the conclusion, "I got to turn this off." But if you zoom out and you think, "Hey, a lot of these customers, they're getting hit by me 35 times before they convert, and despite asking the question of where they heard of us, I'm really never going to get perfect data on where they actually heard of us, and so I'm going to use a little bit of instinct, and I'm going to say, 'This is what my spend was in this market. This is how many cases I got. This is my cost-per-case.' I know some of these cases, they're probably friends and family, and some of these cases came in through a personal network or whatever else, but I think that my media spend plays a part in them ultimately going with my firm," you're going to come to a different calculation on the success of those channels.
So I would just encourage you. If you're at that $1 million mark and you're starting to invest in your brand, no matter which platform you select, don't get too hung up on the immediate cost-per-case numbers, specifically over the first three to six months because you got to enter this marketing with the mentality, "I'm going to be doing this for 10-plus years. The first six-month direct cost-per-case number is not going to have a big impact on my decision-making here."
Chris Dreyer:
I couldn't agree more, and so I love looking at the blended, the blended CAC, and even the attorney fees, right? A lot of people don't calculate those fall-off rates, those drop rates of... People underestimate their drop rates, right? For whatever reasons, they don't have medical, or they switch attorneys, or whatever. Statutes. Whatever the reason they drop. You would know better than me, but let's just say that you could monetize 80% of the cases that you sign up which... I don't know. Maybe that's high, and you look at a minimum policy of 25 or 30. You're looking at what? 8 grand. If you look at just the 8 grand, that doesn't factor in the bigger cases. So then, it's like, "Well, what's my actual true case value or attorney fee? Is it more $12,000 to $15,000?"
So I think it applies to everything and more so... In the past, when I started in 2012, 2013, and you started several years ago, it's like everything was consolidated. It's like TV, Facebook, search. Now, it's like I don't know how... Maybe you could do a direct channel attribution because there's a handful. But now, there's so many. Even social, you got Facebook, and Insta, and TikTok, and X, and whatever comes next. TV, you got streaming and OTT. So I'm going on a rant there, but I agree with you entirely. I think you got to zoom out. I also think with the systemic marketing too, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on how that plays into this level and how it lowers your CAC. What's your thoughts on the systemic stuff, like the referrals and that compounding reputation?
How TopDog Law tracks cost-per-case across marketing channels—and the benchmarks every PI firm should use
James Helm:
What we saw with our systemic marketing was basically, that as we spent more and more money on our advertising budget, our cost per case went up because each incremental case costs more money than the last case. Let me just zoom out to explain what that means. So say you're a law firm generating 200 cases a month, and you say, "All right. I'm really trying to blow this thing up. I want to get to 400 cases or 500 cases." I don't think you can expect those incremental 300 cases to be at the same cost per case as the first 200.
At least that was our experience is I saw my original cases, and a lot of this had to do probably with organic social media and how we built our systemic marketing in Philadelphia, but it was like those cases were the cheapest cases we're ever going to get. As we've grown, and hit a thousand cases, and gone up from there, it's like every single additional hundred or couple hundred cases costs more and more money because there's a blended factor of you're saying, "Okay. If your first 200 cases cost 1,000 bucks, and your next 300 cases cost 2,000 bucks, and your next 300 cases cost 2,600 bucks, by the time you get to the 800 cases, you're blending the 1,000 plus the 2,000 plus the 2,800 or whatever." Right?
So your overall blended cost per case is then higher, but you're doing more volume. So while you might be making a lower profit per case, you're doing more units through the funnel, so you're making more profit at the end of the day. So that's something we've seen at every level of growth as we've scaled our marketing budget is the next 100 cases have always costed more money than the prior 100 cases. Obviously, you need them to still be profitable in order for it to be worth it to continue to deploy those advertising dollars, but we've never been able to go backwards, right, where it's like, "Okay. Our first 200 cases cost this, and now we just added 300 more cases that passed the cost of our first 200."
Chris Dreyer:
I love every bit of that. So I'm going to give you a couple follow-up questions on this before we move to the fun money, a little bit more money to play with. So sticking still a segment to that million bucks, just briefly, how do you think about the team? Then, also, this one is a little bit longer to answer, market. When do you start to think about, "Maybe I expand the market or expand my TAM?" So staff and then the market.
James Helm:
I think in terms of the staff question first, you can do a lot with a pretty minimum staff if you only have a million bucks. Right? If you say, "Okay. Roughly, each marketing personnel is going to cost me what? 6 grand a month." That's-
Chris Dreyer:
72…
James Helm:
$72K. Right, that's a rough math. You're not probably getting anybody with any kind of deep expertise at that price point, but you're getting somebody who can maybe do some stuff for you. I think if your total monthly budget is $80K, you probably don't want to spend $25K on people. Right? You probably want the money to go towards the actual ad dollars.
This is how I always think about it is, "What is the budget that's actually going to add dollar versus what is the budget that's going to either employees, or agency fees, or whatever?" I still remember when I used to sell pay-per-click is these people that would pay $1,500 agency fee and then spend 2 grand. It's like, "Man, your ratio of capital deployed to fee is so dumb." It's like, "You should be sending 6%, 7%, 8% of your total budget on fee, and the rest needs to be an actual ad spend because that's what's going to generate the customers."
So when I would think about my first $80K, and I know that's hard, right, because you have to at least get basic people that can the thing for you, but I would think about how could I spend $60K of it at least on actual ad spend and less than $20K on agency fees, employees, et cetera so you're actually putting those ad dollars to work.
Chris Dreyer:
I wanted to really highlight and stamp a point that you said. So from my perspective, on the agency perspective, so I'll put that hat back on, it's like I see these agencies that do a 15% PPC management or 20% management fee, and they'll talk about their strategic advantage and all this stuff, but I'm like, "Is the value providing enough?"
Here's where I'm going with that. You got to have really good talent to justify that because you start to incentivize the firm to bring the staff in-house. Right? If you're paying $100K on a Google Ad spend and the provider is charging you 15%, you're looking at 180 grand a year. Now, we're talking like, "Hey, at 180 grand, maybe I can pick up a solid Google Ads person." Right?
So I think that's a constant thing that the agencies have to balance, but the benefit is, is they can fracture attention. Maybe they don't have to give all the resources of it from a labor perspective, and that's how they can charge those cheaper fees. I think some of the agencies that just stick to these archaic 15% with no scale, they're doomed for failure in my opinion. Maybe they'll last for a year or two. Look, I'm going to get some hate on this, but it is what it is. This is how I think.
James Helm:
How about this for fair? I think agency owners may even agree with this, is you got to bake their fee into your cost-per-case. Don't tell me what the cost-per-case is, but then leave out the part that's going to your fee. If I'm paying... My cost per case is 2,500 bucks. That shouldn't just be based on the media spend alone. It should be 2,500 bucks for the media spend. Then, if you're charging me 10 grand for the fee, you need to bake that into the overall total, and then tell me my true cost per case including your fee because that's what I need to compare to my other options of doing it internally or doing it elsewhere.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, or otherwise. Yeah. I mean, you do have to just be a gangster and have the talent and have the true talent that can't justify it, and you just can't get it anywhere else. They have this expertise, and you just can't find it anywhere else, so I would just say-
James Helm:
There is a lot of agencies that do do that, by the way.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah.
James Helm:
We've gone the route of building the internal marketing capabilities, but we're a marketing-first organization, managing marketing people, knowing what to look for in marketing people. It's hard if you're a law firm primarily focused on litigating cases, and so I don't at all think that it's unreasonable to hire an agency at a million dollar a month budget. I probably would do that. We're always testing agencies against our in-house team. Even though we have the in-house team, we always want to see if an agency can outperform us, but I think you just need to compare the agency apples to apples by baking their fee in with the cost-per-case.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, and I want to be clear. I'm not trying to convey that you should bring it all in-house because I think they're... What we're seeing, we're able to provide a fractured-like team. You take SEO where we have content writers, technical SEO, link-building, et cetera. If the firm tried to bring that in-house, that might take the whole million dollar budget versus... So I think in some of those scenarios, that's where it would be worthwhile to work with an agency. I guess what I'm saying is these percentage management fees at scale, they work against the agency, unless they can continue to prove those case values, and they're contributing new intelligence and strategy. But if the data is coast, I think the firm is going to start looking at those fees. All right. So I think we beat that one.
How to benchmark your personal injury marketing spend against the largest national PI firms
James Helm:
Should we get to the $10 million?
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, $10 million, or we could just say a little bit more. We could could say a million dollar a month. $10 million to $12 million a month. Where were you at, and then how do you think about it now?
James Helm:
Yeah. So $10 million is a real budget. I know that you look at the Vivvix data too. So Vivvix is basically a summary of advertising dollars being spent in every market in America. You can break it down by advertiser. You can break it down by channel. You can slice and dice it any way you want. One thing that's interesting, I would say, about the $10 million mark is that tends to be about what the biggest spenders in the market, each market, is spending. Not true in some smaller markets like maybe Ohio or North Carolina. There just aren't advertisers of that size. But if you look at the California, or the Texas, or the Georgia, or the New York, or the... this kind of markets, usually, the biggest group of advertisers is right about at this $10 million month mark.
We did it a little differently. We went wider. This is nature of us working with partner firms, and not entirely being vertically integrated in each market, and wanting to cast that wide net and work with the best co-counsel we can in joint representation agreements. So we got Philly up to, I think, $4 or $5 million before we went into a second market, and then we started building each market up smaller. So spending $2, $3 million in a bunch of different markets.
I would say that's uncommon. The most common way of doing it, particularly folks who spend above 50% of their budget on TV, usually, that $10 million is in one primary DMA. I think the main thing I would articulate at $10 million is you have to get beyond the direct attribution, buying leads stage. That can certainly be a part of your marketing mix, but I think at $10 million, you should have a dominant brand in your market.
I know Angel Reyes, for example, is against brand marketing, thinks brand marketing isn't worthwhile, and so there are people who feel differently. I think as a brand marketer myself, I think $10 million is where you really can segment your brand as the law firm that the random Uber driver in your neighborhood says they would call if they were in an accident. That should be your goal with $10 million. How about that?
If I pull up to the city, I fly in, I get into Uber, I open the door, I say, "Hey, if you were in an accident, who would you call?" they should say your name. What would be the other signals that that would be happening? It would be branded search. Right? You're getting a ton of people that are searching your brand directly. It would be omnipresence. You're not just on television. You're on television, and radio, and billboards, and digital, and pay-per-click. Right? You're using a total omnichannel approach to your marketing. You probably, at $10 million, have a good in-house marketing team led by a senior person making multiple six figures a year. Right? You're not just using a man or woman you just hired right out of school, college that's running your marketing.
At $10 million, you probably have an experienced CMO, head of marketing, director of marketing, and under them, they probably have a couple of support staff that are specialists in various media channels or marketing strategies. You truly have an in-house marketing team. You're probably working with a couple of agencies. You probably have an SEO agency. You probably have a pay-per-click agency. I think at $10 million, you really start to have enough capital in this competitive B2C personal injury advertising space where you can really brand your firm to stand out and be there for the long-term.
How law firms owners can avoid the 'Google Tax,' performance bleed, and other hidden costs of scaling ad budgets
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's definitely omnichannel. You need a major awareness distribution component, and you need a capture component. So you're going to need the search side with a little bit more on the Google Ads side. Maybe you're paying for brand dollars because you are actually putting stuff out to the market. You know?
James Helm:
The good old Google tax.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah.
James Helm:
At $10 million, you're paying the Google tax.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah,
James Helm:
I'll get a little shout-out on that. Nothing I hated more than the Google tax. Chris knows. We've had tons of conversations about this. At $10 million, you're doing enough brand marketing where you're getting people conquesting on your brand, and you're having to bid lots of money on your own brand to protect your brand, but the money is worth it.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. I mean, then the big marketers are spending on Adthena and tracking the people bidding on their brands, and then sending those cease and desist out. I mean, it's just the nature of the game, but you know you've made it when people start bidding on your brand. You're like, "Hey, my brand has value. Instead of someone bidding on car accident lawyer, they're bidding on my name." So that speaks to the brand itself.
I think for me, I'm going to try... I'm putting some of my largest clients, picturing them with what I'm about to say, and what are the commonalities I see? Number one, they all have a brand. All of them. Not one of them is just pure direct response. They all have a brand that are getting the best cost per case. They have the most thriving business. Number two, most of them are spending at least $100,000 a month in Google Ads on that channel alone, at least $100,000. Then, the third component is they are doing one of two typically, but I'm going to say that I haven't seen the third, but I would love to see it. So either they're doing TV or radio, but I think programmatic and streaming is right there. I think that you're choosing one of those three to put a lot of dollars for distribution. That's what I see.
Here's the thing that I don't see, James, across 200 firms. I'm just telling you. Not one of them is crushing it in organic social. They just aren't. I know some people be like, "Oh, I'll get leads on organic social." Okay. First, you're a litigator, and your whole strategy is different than everything we just talked about, and you're advertising to your peers. It's hard to get attention, do the hooks to create the consistent content. I don't see it, so I'd love some pushback there, but yeah. So I see the capture component, the search, Google Ads, $100K, retargeting. Right? High frequency first three days, then trickle off for the next week, and then a major vehicle for distribution, typically TV or radio.
James Helm:
I'm not going to push back too hard. I think that my counter argument if I have a steel man on the other side is we still see huge volumes through our social media profiles directly. I think we're an anomaly. I think also, one thing to just call out in terms of the algorithm change, and I love to study this stuff. I'm such a geek about it, but social media platforms used to be about your social networks, like your friends. Right? So you think about how these platforms work.
The algorithms used to optimize to show you your friends, and the pages you follow, and what they're doing. Now, I don't know if you realize this, but it's all been TikTokified. You're not seeing what your friends are doing. You are only seeing the most viral videos from random people you've never met. This isn't just TikTok. Every other social media platform has adopted that. So what are the second order consequences? Well, the folks like us who have built enormous followings, we're not reaching our followers because they're just seeing viral videos because the algos are TikTokified now, and so you're not getting in front of the people. Even if you put in all this legwork to get them to follow you, you're not getting in front of them anymore.
Now, I would say the advantage you still do have is if they follow you, they know you, and if they follow you, you can retarget them. So you have to have some type of paid social strategy on top of that organic social strategy. So I think the right firm at that $10 million mark probably is doing some type of content and is doing some type of paid social, but it's probably not their focus. Their focus is probably on these other big brand channels that you talked about.
Chris Dreyer:
I agree 1,000%, and I think that typically, what I see is the stale social media posts. The holiday posts aren't going to get it done, right? Maybe there's some value in the social proof like validating a consumer's choice when they saw you on a different channel, but... So James got a little bit of that. Gary Vaynerchuk, Holy Ghost entered his body on the entrance targeting back, but I-
James Helm:
You took a tough stance against social. I'm always going to be, "Back up, my baby." That was how everything began, so I had to at least offer the other side.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's talk about, on a close, like... and we could go a little bit more if you want to riff, but what's the biggest waste of money that PI firms make? What do you think? Where's the waste?
James Helm:
Let me noodle on it. Why don't you get us... Where do you think it is?
Chris Dreyer:
Well, I think originally, I was going to say organic social, and you're killing me. We just countered it. I think if you're-
James Helm:
Dig your feet. Dig your feet in if that's-
Chris Dreyer:
Well, here's my deal-
James Helm:
I wouldn't say it's not a waste of dollars though. It's a waste of time.
Chris Dreyer:
Well-
James Helm:
I could see that argument. It's a waste of time, but it's not a waste of dollars.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. My thought. I guess all these channels, it's the same thing. It's like, "Are you going to commit to being great at the channel?" You can't do SEO if you're not getting reviews, and if any of my clients are listening, that you go check your reviews and you have one or two in the last month, I mean, please for the love of God, just help a brother out. Get some more reviews. Help sell, I say, but it's like... and the same for the creative on radio or TV. So I guess I'm flipping back to your side. If you do commit to organic social, you do the hooks, you do the video production, you understand how to get attention, then it could work.
James Helm:
I think you hit the waste of... I think the waste is the creative. You're going to spend on... Let's take TV as an example. You want to be a top five advertiser in the market. There's some logic to like, "Okay. If you're going to do TV, you might as well go all the way in." What does that look like across different markets? Maybe in a big metro like a... Philly is the fifth ranked city. Like, Philly, Houston, Phoenix, Vegas, those type of markets, you're probably spending at least $5 million on TV to be in that top bucket of law firms/vendors on TV.
Chris, I'm going to take $5 million on TV, and I'm going to create the most boring commercial ever that is background noise that nobody ever remembers because I'm just standing in front of a library saying the same echo chamber stuff that every lawyer says. That to me is a huge waste. You're not standing out at all. If the game is to get attention, why is your commercial so vanilla, so generic?
The same thing goes for a billboard where the only legible thing is "injured," for example. I don't even know what firm that is. I see a billboard that says, "Injured," but I don't know who you are. I'm not dialing that little number in the right-hand corner to figure it out. If you're going to spend money on brand dollars, then make your brand stand for something. Make your brand stand out in some way. Make your brand memorable in some way. Have that theme. Be consistent. Have people feel an emotion when they think of you, good, or bad, or funny, or serious, or scared, or happy. Make somebody feel something when they see your content.
Chris Dreyer:
I think that if I could triple double stamp that, I completely agree. It's also like, "Look at your market, and what are the types of commercials people are doing? Are they doing the aggressive, 'I'm the best attorney?' Can you introduce some humor and be a little different? Can you..." I've talked about Amanda Demanda a lot, and she's embracing the femininity, the pink color, the high heels when the market is mostly male-centered. Every PI attorney practically on the planet is using the color blue, and she stands out. It's memorable. What do you think on the underrated channel? So a final question on this marketing mix. What do you think about an underrated channel today?
James Helm:
I think there's a transition underway from TV to streaming that you hit on. I think there's still a ton of dollars being spent on cable TV. The thing that I've always been waiting for, whether it's streaming, or whether it's paid social, or whether it's something entirely different, when are the TV dollars going to start moving from cable? Because we see the viewership data.
The cord cutting has happened, right? It's already happened. Everybody knows that the cords have been cut. I don't have cable. A lot of people don't have cable, but I think if you look at the data on the amount of money spent on cable, it's still going up by legal advertising. So I think what I want to know is when is that moment where we're finally going to see legal advertising dollars into cable TV fall off, and then what does the redistribution of those dollars look like across other mediums?
Chris Dreyer:
I love every bit of that. Look, I'm the same. I don't have cable. Right? I've got YouTube TV and the Net- the whole suite of them, right? Netflix, Hulu, YouTube TV. They got me on those subscriptions, but that's just the way it is. I think the most underrated, I think, is podcasts personally in my opinion. I mean, look at what happened... and I'm not getting political, but look at the political landscape and the distribution component of these podcasts. The challenge is if you're a single market firm, it's hard to find a podcast that just appeals to Philadelphia, like you said. Right?
James Helm:
Mm.
Chris Dreyer:
But if you're a multi-market practice, the distribution cost is very low, and depending upon how they do their ads, if they're dynamic or static, you could get some in the archives. You get this permanent listener base that go back and listen to old episodes. I mean, we talk shop all the time about founders' podcasts, or this podcast, or that. If they're not changing out the old ads, you get those, and they compound. So not only do you get the immediate distribution from a CPM perspective, you get the past too, so it just drives down the cost. So I don't think that a PI firm is doing podcasts correct- I haven't seen it. I've seen Morgan & Morgan on a couple comedy shows, the YouTube channels, the... Look, I just saw them on the School of Hard Knocks, and I applaud all that, but I haven't seen it from a podcast. So I think that's the underrated channel that someone needs to figure out.
James Helm:
Let's go. Well, I appreciate you having me on. It's always fun to jam out. Is this the third time now? If people want to listen to the past episodes, the first one I think we did was I told my story, and we did a marketing episode. The second one we did, I think my favorite episode. It was the legal intake episode, right? Because-
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah.
James Helm:
Yeah. You talk about where the biggest waste is. It's in the intake department. So I went step by step how we think about running our call center, the different technology you use if folks want to listen to that. Then, this episode is awesome because hopefully, we got to hit every person no matter where you are in your marketing journey. I'm excited to hopefully meet some listeners at PIMCon this year. It'll be fun.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. Absolutely. James is keynote in day two, so super excited about that. James, for our listeners that want to get in touch with Top Dog, get in touch with you, have questions about this, or want to potentially talk about partnerships, how can they get in touch with you?
James Helm:
Anything works. You can send me an email, james.helm@topdoglaw.com. We also have Cameron Cochran, who is our network. She does our business development, sets up our law firm episodes. Submit a form on the website or call the office. We'll get it to the right place. We'll get it over to Cameron. We'll reach out and see if you guys are fit to work with. Obviously, we are in a bunch of different markets and are always looking for new firms.
Chris Dreyer:
Whether you've got $100,000 or $10 million, now you know what actually works. This is Personal Injury Mastermind. Subscribe for more conversations with the people actually building the biggest firms in the game.
