Chris Dreyer:
You look around the market, and you see the same two or three firms everywhere. They're on the billboards, they're taking up the map pack, and they seem to be signing all the big cases. What do they know that you don't? Are they just outspending you, or is there a strategy you're completely missing? Today we're doing something a little different.
I sat down with my sales team at Rankings to look at the exact pain points they hear every single day from firm owners who are tired of losing cases to the competition. We gathered the biggest questions, and I'm answering them right here. Today's question is, why do some firms dominate a city while others stay invisible? To answer that, I'll cover everything from winning the map pack and tracking your true campaign success to the hard truth about competing against the big dogs in your market.
This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer. Let's get into it.
So how do some firms dominate a metro and others don't? There are a number of factors. Let's just talk about from a case generation perspective, not an average fee perspective, just from case generation. The biggest thing is most PI attorneys throttle themselves or they aren't willing to deploy enough capital to really saturate and advertise to the consumer base. You'll see in most states, the individuals that did broadcast television early on were the ones that dominated, and because it was cheap distribution.
And there were some early pioneers like Morris Bart in Louisiana that showed and proved that you could deploy a ton of capital and get returns.
We see on the other side, the insurance companies, the State Farm, Geico, et cetera, they deploy billions of dollars. And so many PI attorneys were just afraid to advertise, afraid to really deploy capital. And that starts with the top of funnel distribution is advertising to everyone to build a brand, and not just the injured individuals that are actively seeking an attorney.
So you got some options. Broadcast television still works, but now you got ... it's a little fragmented, and now people are going to streaming, YouTube TV.
Radio is great. It's harder to build. You can't see the individual, you only get one tonality, one medium, right voice. There's a lot of reputation. It's very cheap. I think it's fantastic still today. You see firms like in New York, Cellino and Barnes really built a name for themselves. There's TopDog Law, a younger firm, James we've had on the podcast several times, does a lot of radio.
And then Facebook ads. Facebook ads, in my opinion, is the least saturated. That's where a lot of the lead gen players play. It's because you can start off with a small budget and scale it. The benefit versus TV: TV, you do these video production, these TV productions maybe every quarter. With Facebook ads, you could do several practice areas, a lot of different messaging, a lot of different creative introduce. You could do video, you could do static, and it has the ability to be distributed massively. So most firms that dominate are willing to deploy capital. Even today, many of them are doing TV or radio, and I think Facebook is a big opportunity.
There are some individuals that do grassroots marketing at scale. I think Mike Morse does a good job of this, Gordon McKernan in Louisiana, the Gordon Gives. But really when you're thinking about media deployment, you're thinking about TV, radio, or Facebook ads.
Then there's the capture. So we've worked with the biggest firms in their state, and some of them are fantastic at TV and radio and others, but they had a really difficult time capturing the cases.
And what I mean by that is we worked with one firm that just didn't believe that SEO worked. Well, it's because their review rating was a 4.4. Surprise, consumers do their research before making a hiring decision, and you're not going to rank in the map pack. Just like you wouldn't expect to show up if you're on vacation, you want to eat at a local restaurant, you typed in best restaurant near me. You wouldn't expect to see a low-rated restaurant. You'd expect to see a high-rated restaurant. It's the same for personal injury attorneys. So in order to really thrive and capture, you got to have excellent content, you got to be really cognizant of the client experience and your reputation. And you really need both, the top of funnel distribution and the bottom of the funnel, search engine optimization, generative engine optimization, local SEO to capture all of that intent that you've created.
There's a lot of intent behind the map pack because typically when someone's visiting a law firm as a consumer, they're going to law firm on Google Maps, whether through AI mode or however they find themselves there. They could find themselves through a sponsored ad, on Demand Gen campaign. Now you can have Google Ads that show up in the map pack. There's a lot of intent. Typically, you're not just cruising for driving directions or looking for a firm unless you actually need to hire one.
So first of all, being there, they are very likely to hire an attorney. There's a lot of intent. They're not just browsing, information-seeking, they're in that hiring mode. In order to rank, it's based upon relevance, distance, and prominence. So let's start with relevance. Relevance is your primary category, personal injury attorney. It's the words and phrases that consumers use in your reviews, it is the content on your website, it is all the associations of your firm as an entity around personal injury law and the subareas of law, car accidents, brain injury, what have you, med mal. That's the relevance component.
The distance, it's proximity. Everyone's got a mobile device, and people want convenience, so you're only going to rank in a certain radius. And that's why in other episodes I've recommended, hey, you could be in a city, and instead of opening an office in a separate city, I'd say open it in the same city. Particularly big markets like Houston, where you could have two or three in that one city before you even think about going to another area. So that's distance. Distance impacts local services ads, it affects Yelp ads. They're constrained to a 20-mile radius, and just your conversions are going to drop the further you get away from the consumer. If the consumer wants to come in, you got to make it easy for them. They've got lives. They've got kids that they're taking to school and what have you.
Okay, prominence. Prominence, it means being everywhere externally. It is what are the sites you're listed on? Where are you listed if you're listed on ... Let's stick with the Houston example. If you're trying to rank in the map pack for Houston, you want to be in the Houston Chamber of Commerce, Houston Associations, Houston websites. If you want to be associated with legal, you need to be at Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers, Avvo, Justia.
Prominence are the citations: Yelp, Apple Maps, all the sites that list your driving directions, list your firm. Better Business Bureau is a very trusted site. Prominence is being everywhere. So relevance, distance, and prominence. You got to have the keywords, the relationships, you've got to have the distance plays into a part, and then the prominence being externally everywhere.
How do you track the success of a campaign? Everyone wants to talk about attribution, but really no one's talking about how. When you're thinking about tracking top of the funnel, you need to be looking at CPMs primarily. That's cost per thousand. That's the main metric that everyone uses. And I would use that for all platforms, including social, to compare against each other.
So if your cost per thousand on radio is 4 to $6 and your cost per impression on programmatic is, let's say, $16 and it's $4 on radio, you can get four times the amount of distribution on radio than you can programmatic. So that's why it's important. Even though there's emerging channels, there's also supply and demand and where attention goes and the impact on pricing.
Broadcast television, that's a low CPM. Many of the programmatic, it's on the primary channels, yes. There are some individuals who talk about low cost on programmatic, but maybe not on the primary channels. It's significantly more costly. That's why you don't see it as prominent. But tracking top of the funnel, you need to be thinking about CPMs.
Tracking bottom of the funnel, that's where you can do cost per lead because there's just so much intent. You can do dedicated landing page, you can even do cost per case, you can do dedicated phone numbers and all that. But I think the big mistake that most firms do wrong is they don't do a blended. A blended across everything, cost per lead and cost per case.
You do want to have granularity and try to measure if I should deploy more capital on a specific channel, but it's not going to be perfect. Ultimately, you want to look at the blended because we've even noticed that if you're advertising on Google Ads, surprise, your SEO is better because maybe they don't click on the sponsored result, but then they click through on your organic results. So all of it has an impact, and we know that consumers need to see the advertisement many times before they make a decision.
What are the best tactics to get reviews? What should we do? What should we not do? And there's a black hat area, a gray hat, and a white hat method of acquiring reviews, but I'll kind of try to keep it simple. You're supposed to have a client experience. So technically, even the reviews that you get on the intake, if they're not a client, they typically don't stick. Your coworkers, those are conflicts of interest. Those aren't supposed to be there. Your peer, maybe you have another attorney, you're going to do a review swap. Those technically are against the guidelines.
And also here's another thing that people do wrong is, let's say, you get an evangelist, let's say you get Sally that had a car accident, she's very happy with the result, and you're like ... and she's willing to do whatever for the firm. You go have her leave a review on every Google business profile. That's a big no-no because she only had a client experience at one location. Those are the things you shouldn't do.
Now having said that, if you've asked employees, if your mom or your brother or what have you, sisters left a review, that's okay. It's not like the FTC is handing out fines regularly for these actions. What could happen is they could stick, and then eventually be filtered or disappear.
Now what you should be doing is think about what are the moments of delight that you have with the client after they become a client? My favorite one is the orientation. Once they sign and that first experience where you're setting expectations of how long their case is going to take, who their primary contact is, what's going to happen throughout this journey, that is a perfect time to ask for a review. And then there's other milestones, of course, during the closeout, whether they come and pick up the check in person or what have you. But I really think that orientation's a great opportunity, and anytime that the consumer says thank you is a potential opportunity, a trigger to ask for review.
And then last but not least, don't buy reviews. Just don't do it. You could Google right now, buy reviews, and you could probably find some schmuck that's going to sell Google reviews, but I have never seen this work. Maybe temporarily it'll work, but they'll use programmatic content, and all the reviews look the same, the users all have ... they haven't warmed up the emails, and they've left one review, and everybody's ... You're just going to get in trouble. There's a trust rating on your Google profile. Once you start doing that and that trust decreases, that's where if you open a second office and you don't have all your documents, that's where it gets suspended. You change your phone number, firm name, or whatever, that's where it gets suspended. It's because Google Profile has a trust rating, so just don't buy reviews. Do everything above board. Try to set up those points of delight, try to determine when those are at your ...
And every firm is a little different. Maybe there's a big update that you give at certain point in the case. Well, for your firm, that could be a point of delight, and focus on that because reviews are incredibly important on local services ads, local maps, conversions, all the above.
Some often ask like, "Should I sponsor Little League Baseball team? Should I do this scholarship and what have you?" And a lot of times it's asked in the context of, "Will it help my search engine optimization? Will it help my generative engine optimization to help from a discovery perspective on the LLMs?" The truth is, again, I'm not an either-or, I'm an and. I would do it because it's the right thing to do to build a relationship with your community, particularly if it's low cost. It can complement a social media campaign. It could just build trust in the community. So that's the right thing to do.
Now on the other side is, is it really going to help your search engine optimization? Most of the time it's not. These schools, they don't have any authority and backlinks on their website, the content's not structured properly, they don't have the right title tags. Many times it's not. There are exceptions, there are exceptions of big organizations that you can sponsor, but if you're looking at it pure from an SEO play, I would say most of the time being listed and having your logo on the website is not going to be a big contributor of helping from your discoverability, your search positioning. But I do think it's the right thing to do. It helps with the grassroots marketing, building trust in the community.
Currently, we get a lot of questions about, "I'm the small guy, I'm the little guy. How do I compete with the big dog?" Well, first of all, I can't stand that question of itself because it already sounds like defeatist. It's more like, "No, I'm going to kick the shit out of them, and here's how it's going to do it. Here's how I'm going to carve out my market, my positioning, and how I'm going to be different."
You got to think about how are you authentic? What do you bring? What's your authenticity? What's your story that you can say? What demographic can you target? Who can you appeal to the most? Then you look for opportunities like a lot of these big firms, even the ones that expand nationwide, they don't have as big of a local presence. So maybe that's where you get more involved in the community and do the grassroots marketing and build true relationships. Maybe that's where you're from, maybe where you grew up. Leverage those sphere of influences to get a referral because typically the referrals are where the big cases come in. You absolutely get them through advertising, but you certainly get bigger cases through referrals too.
And I would think about what are the things that I could do? What maybe I can work up a case to get more value because I don't have as many cases, so maybe I can spend more time on this particular case. They can learn all the nuances about it.
Ultimately, look, if you're staying above that three-to-one CAC-to-LTV ratio, meaning if you can acquire a case for a couple grand and it's worth at least 6,000 plus, you're in good shape. Obviously, that range needs to be better to really be thriving, but that's how I would work against them is build a community, have an authentic message that only you can say, and try to position yourselves where they aren't, and that's where you can gain an upper hand. And then ultimately when you start to get the capital and you have the right capital allocation to go compete with them head on, then you can go make that adjustment and deploy in those big areas like broadcast television and radio.
So I was asked like, "What's the first step if I was going to take over my city?" Depends on the capital. Okay, let's just say you don't have any capital. The first thing that I would do is I would go meet every single one of my competitors, "Give me your D, E, and F cases that you're not accepting. I will take them. And not only that, Joe Blow across the street's going to give you a third as part of the referral fee. I'm going to give you 40%. I'm going to give you 50%. So I will monetize these." So that's how you get cases at no cost other than the referral fee. That's the first thing that you do.
Then you do the same thing with the big Kairos that you build the relationships. There's no payment here. We're talking about building relationships with your local community. That's what you can do from a belly-to-belly perspective is be known. Maybe it's the big realtor in the city. It has a ton of relationships. It's build relationships with people in the community. Join BNI, be a part of the Chamber of Commerce, be a part of the community. That's what you do to start.
Now if you have capital, and I just still think that you should do what I just said and this, you're going to need a solid website because that's a conversion point. Get that going. You can get it low cost. You can get something for under 20 grand, and you can get it financed. That's strong. Get a solid website because you need a conversion point. Set up your SEO because that's going to take a while to start paying off.
But then how am I going to build a brand? Is it going to be radio? Is it going to be broadcast? Is it going to be Facebook ads? If I'm a new attorney and I'm limited on capital, I would probably choose Facebook ads and just scale it from there. So that's the game plan, that's a playbook for the start of taking over your local market.
Market domination doesn't happen by accident. It happens when you stop throttling yourself and start deploying capital needed to saturate your market. It happens when you nail your client experience so those reviews pour in effortlessly and when you get your hands dirty, building authentic, real-life human relationships in your community. Those massive national firms simply cannot fake that. Stop playing defense and start carving out your position.
If you're tired of blending in with background noise and you're looking for a true marketing partner who demands excellence, check out Rankings.io. We're all about proof over promises, and we are dedicated to helping top-tier personal injury firms sign more cases and absolutely take over their cities. Visit Rankings.io to find out more. I'm Chris Dreyer, and this has been Personal Injury Mastermind. See you next time.
