Chris Dreyer:
You're dropping serious capital on billboards, TV, and digital, but when you look at your signed cases, can you actually point to which marketing channel did the work? Most firm owners try to give all the credit to a single touchpoint, but the massive fragmentation from streaming and local maps to TikTok and LLMs, attribution is incredibly murky. You can't just slap a tracking here all on everything and call it a day. Today, I'm revealing the single most important metric in the game that dictates whether you're going to scale up or stall out. We'll uncover how to track the right leading indicators, the simple question you must ask at intake, and why jumping on emerging platforms early gives you an incredibly unfair advantage.
This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the elite performance marketing agency for personal injury law firms. Let's get into it.
So one of the questions I'm often asked is like, how do I know my marketing ROI? How should I think about attribution? And I'm going to be kind of long-winded here, but there's multiple things that you need to do on the front end. So first, you need to have a CRM and you need to use UTM codes, you need to have all your attributions set up to understand and to get the data into your different tech stacks to even track where a conversion happens. The issue is where do you place the conversion? If they come in on a billboard, but then they go to Instagram, and then they go to another location, then they talk to a friend, what gets the credit?
And so a lot of times, personal injury attorneys are trying to give credit to one particular channel, and that's really challenging to do. So people talk about first-touch and last-touch attribution. The first touch maybe was the billboard, maybe the last touch was Google or an LLM. Maybe they came direct. And so first have an understanding that it's not going to be clean no matter how you look at it. And I'm going to circle back around on how you do this, but attribution and conversion tracking is really murky.
And in the past, marketing and advertising wasn't fragmented. It was TV, Google, Facebook. That was it. That was really it. Now we got streaming, we have connected TV, we've got YouTube, we have on the radio, we got Spotify, we got Pandora, we have Google, and now we have LLMs, and now we have different placement on Google. We've got LSA, we've got local maps. Tons and tons and tons of fragmentation across the industry. It's not as consolidated. Social media is not just Facebook, it's TikTok and Snapchat and all the things. So understanding that first from a marketing perspective, you need to be in more areas than one over time if you really want to have a big business.
The second thing is, I think there's a tip here, and Chris Walker talks about this. I like an open-ended story, and I like people to verbalize and not just to read the data. You want to read the data and port that into your CRM, but you also want them to tell and explain where they saw you or why they hired you. So you just ask them on the intake, "How did you hear about us?" And some of them will say, "Oh, I saw your TV advertisement, is so funny, blah, blah, blah. Oh, I spoke to so-and-so." You get a little bit more context, and when you get the data component and the just subject, what they remember, it kind of starts to tell a story over time with volume. That's the first thing. And that's how you start to look at attribution.
I know there's some individuals that think that, "Oh, I can just put a dynamic tracking URL on everything, and I know exactly which channel." That's bullshit. Nobody can do that.
And here's a bigger picture. You need to look at your front end marketing and intake, okay? What's it cost to acquire a case? Total up everything, your entire marketing spend, all your labor, all your labor for intake, all your bodies that you have, your marketing managers, everything, okay? That is your true CAC. What did you spend to acquire a case? Marketing and intake, total everything. Then you take all your fees that you've collected and divide them by the number, what's your average fee. Once you have that information, you can get the most important metric in the game. It's CAC to value ratio. You wanted at least a 3x. You talk to any PE, any venture, they want at least a 3x because if it goes below a three, it's very hard to make money.
So let me explain the CAC to LTV ratio. If your CAC, your cost to acquire a case is $4,000. That's looking at everything, all your labor, all your expenses across all channels. And your average fee is $12,000, okay? $12,000 for your fee divided by $4,000 to acquire the case is three. That is a three to one ratio. And the better the range. So if you can acquire cases cheaper, you're going to have a better ratio. If you can extend your fees, maybe your fees are $16,000, right? $16,000 divided by $4,000. Now you're four to one ratio. The higher your ratio, the better you're off.
And that's the main thing that you need to look at because everything adds up. If you're just looking at the channel spend and you're not counting the bodies and your pay-per-click managers and your demand gen team and your social media specialists, you're really losing out. And so you got to be cost-conscious of the big picture, which is CAC to value ratio.
A lot of times, PI attorneys talk a lot about vanity metrics. Rankings is a vanity metric. Followers is a vanity metric. A lot of these, I don't love the word vanity because it can be predictive of a future behavior. If you have better rankings, it tends to give you the opportunity to capture more cases. If you have more followers, it has the ability to maybe increase your distribution because more eyeballs can see it. There's a lot of ... I know we're in the interest-based social media marketing now, and so if something really hits, it can be displayed throughout a big audience. But really when people say vanity, that's what they're talking about. They're talking about impressions and likes and comments. But I do think that they give you information.
So if you're an EOS-based company, an entrepreneurial operating system business, if you're working with fireproof, or scaling up even has similar setup, you want to track your leading indicators. A lot of times, your leading indicators are what these "vanity metrics." Your rankings, your followers, you want to see those increase. If your rankings decline, you're probably not going to get as many Google conversions. So it's predictive, but then you want to have the lagging indicators, the results, the cases, the cost per lead. So you really need to track both.
And I think that's one of the big failures of Gino Wickman's book Traction is it only talks about tracking the weekly L10 leading indicators and it doesn't talk about enough about the lagging indicators to make decisions. So of these vanity metrics, of these different signals that you can look at, there are a lot of them specific to a channel.
So let me give you an example. One of the things that you need to look at on social media for most platforms are the comments and engagement because it could be something that your consumer, your prospective client finds interesting. Also, content that tends to get a lot of comments and engagement, it gets seen by a bigger audience. So then you can create future content that resonated with your audience based upon the engagement. Even the comments will give you ideas for other pieces of content in the future. So that's one thing that's specific to social media.
There are things like search engine marketing, SEO. When we're talking about being discovered in the LLMs or ranking on Google, look at backlinks, look at domain rating, the authority of your links, the relevancy of your links. Are they contextual body links, or where is the placement of the link? That's really important. Contextual body are stronger. Each channel has some of these nuanced metrics to look at, and they are very important, and that, I would say, in most cases these are a sub-leading indicator of that particular channel.
So you got big picture like rankings, but you want to go deeper. You've got citations for the LLMs, you've got links, you've got maybe reviews as another metric to watch because it's really important. So each channel has these nuanced metrics to look at that are predictive for a future behavior.
A lot of books, a lot of business owners talk about it's better to be first in particular things because you have less competition. Let's take social media in particular. And by the way, the LLMs are going to follow this exact same method. Typically, they need network effects. In the beginning, they need followers, they need content. So they will give the distribution out very freely.
Many of you, when you jumped on Facebook, used to make a Facebook post, and all of your friends would see it, and you'd think, "Oh, this is great." And it was like that on TikTok too. You could put out a terrible piece of content, and it would be seen by 100,000 people. Once they've established network effects and a community and they've got all this content, they crank it to you. They're going to decrease your visibility from organic content because they want you to advertise.
Once ChatGPT gets adoption, they're already starting to experiment with ads. Once Google ... Take Google, every single platform is the same. Google, get all this resource, all these people creating content. Well, now there's three links, there's four links. Now you can sponsor the local map pack. There's tons of ways to advertise. There's way more advertisements than there ever has been before. And that's basically how they monetize, and that's the plan for them to make money. They've got to cover their costs.
So here's the thing, you have to ask yourself, which platforms are you still getting a lot of organic visibility for? Which platforms are emerging that need network effects, that aren't going to crank it to you? Those are the ones that you need to look at, and those are the ones that you really need to focus on. And when that next Snapchat or TikTok comes out, just jump on it because the early content that you contribute is really going to be distributed very widely.
So a lot of times, personal injury attorneys are confused, what they should do to create content, whether it's on Google or social media, and should they follow a vibe? Should they try to be authentic to themselves? Should they go model someone else? Here's what I would tell you. The fastest way to success is from ... There's a book called Steal Like an Artist, right? These individuals that are already crushing it on social media, you can model them and have success, right? They've already went through the pain of what content to create. They know what works.
So you can steal like an artist, but I think it's incredibly important to still be authentic and have your own take and approach on things. And the more content that you create, it gives you the opportunity to see what resonates with the audience on whatever platform it is. It could be YouTube, it could be Google, it could be ... It doesn't matter. And from that engagement, it can provide you opportunities and ideas to create that calendar of the future.
The thing that I'll say is quantity creates quality. You're not going to be good at YouTube or social media when you do 10 posts. Hormozi talks about the rule of 100, you need to do things a hundred. MrBeast talks about that, "Hey, create your first 100 YouTube videos. They're all going to be terrible." You may think that number 89 is good, but I promise you, when you're at 989, you're going to look back at 89 and be like, "Oh, that was terrible." So quantity creates quality, and steal like an artist. So model the masters, but then create your own authentic version of that.
If you're a PI attorney and you just have no clue what the return is on your investment, there's a couple things that you can do. The simplest, it's the envelope system. It's old school. Mike Michalowicz's book, Profit First, you can create multiple checking accounts, and then shuffle around your money. It helps you budget for things. Back in the day, your grandma used to put $5 in the grocery envelope. You can do that. That's kind of like Mike Michalowicz's book, Profit First, talks about paying yourself a profit first and then the expenses second, which is kind of contrarian thought. Most people pay all their expenses and then they take profit. He's kind of flipping the narrative to be leaner, to basically have an understanding of what profit you want to take. So that's a great book.
The other thing is if you have no idea but you have cases, I mean, you've got financials in some capacity, I'd get a fractional CFO, a fractional director of finance to just clean up the data for you. You don't necessarily have to bring the CFO in house because a good CFO is going to be 200k-plus no matter where you look. I mean, it's very rare that they're under 200k. So use a fractional CFO.
How to Manage a Small Law Firm, RJon Robins, they have, as part of their program, I believe they have fractional COOs, CFOs, CMOs. That's somebody to talk to and maybe get an opinion on. But ultimately the simple version is if you're managing your own finances, maybe take a look at Mike Michalowicz's Profit First. If you've got a little bit of capital deployed and you want a third-party assistant, I would look at fractional help.
You can't scale a law firm on vanity metrics and gut feelings. If you don't know your true cost to acquire a case, factoring in every single dollar spent on things like marketing, intake, and labor, then you're leaving money on the table. Stop guessing, get your financial house in order, and start tracking the hard math that actually drives growth.
If you're ready to stop playing defense with your marketing and partner with an agency that prioritizes ruthless ROI, proof over promises, and aggressive marketing dominance, let's talk. Head over to Rankings.io to discover how we can help you capture more high-value cases and completely own your backyard. I'm Chris Dreyer, and this has been Personal Injury Mastermind. Catch you next time.
