Chris Dreyer:
As a personal injury firm, you already have product market fit. PI attorneys operate on a contingency fee model where the consumer pays nothing upfront to get a massive payout at the end. It is the perfect offer. So, where do most firms go wrong? They're just boring. They chose the color blue, launch a generic website, and disappear into a sea of sameness. Today I'm going to break down the exact strategies you need to stand out in the saturated market. We'll talk about targeting your ideal client profile. I'll tell you where I would spend my marketing dollars, and we got to talk about your firm's name. 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.
I had an interesting conversation with Sam Pond from Pond Lehocky the other day, and we were talking about brand and I made a comment that personal injury attorneys are very fortunate, because in other industries you have to think about your offer. It takes a significant amount of mind space. "What am I going to charge? What's my hourly rate? Am I going to do a retainer? Am I going to do cost plus capacity? Am I going to do value-based pricing?" There's this whole segment of product market fit that takes forever to uncover. Now fortunately, you're a personal injury attorney, you already have product market fit. You have a contingency fee-based model. If you think about Alex Hormozi and the value equation on the numerator, a Dream Outcome, getting cash, getting a recovery, likelihood to achieve, everyone has all these social proof. And then on denominator you have speed.
That's a component, people, but there are things to do that could accelerate speed but all factors into treatment. So, there's only so many things that you can do from a speed factor. And then decreased effort and sacrifice. You're the consumer that's hurt, you don't have to do anything, you have the PI attorney. You have the perfect offer, okay? A lot of people take that for granted. So, where do you go from there? What are the things that you can actually do? Well, you can be phenomenal at marketing and you can be a phenomenal attorney and get amazing fees. Be an incredible trial attorney, get significantly higher fees than other individuals.
But let's just talk about marketing. Now that you got out of the way, your pricing model and all those factors that every other business in the world has to think about, how are you different? Here's where a lot of PI attorneys go wrong. The first thing that they do, they choose the color blue because it's often associated with the PI space. Wrong. Everybody chooses blue. You're in a sea of sameness. The next thing that they do is, the websites all look the same. So, you need to think about how to be different. Seth Godin wrote Purple Cow. Morgan & Morgan has a Purple Cow committee meeting every month to discuss how they can be different, how they can stand out, how they can get attention. You get attention by being different, not by being the same. You're not right for everybody. You're definitely wrong for some individuals, you need to own that. You need to think about who you're speaking to, who is your audience, who is your ICP, and create content that resonates with them.
Being authentic is a way to be unique. And well, some people are ... I don't love that too because some people are generically authentic, right? There is nothing unique about them. It's just they're just the, "Yeah, I like sports." And okay. All right. So, create a life that lends itself to authenticity and lean into that if that's ... I'll give you some examples of people that really play on the authentic side well. Chris Early from Boston, his last name's Early, so he has fun with that. Call Early before it's too late. Great tagline. Using being authentic.
I like to think about Amanda Demanda and the color she uses and the messaging and how much fun she has on social media. And she's got the smile on her face and leans into that, and the high heels and uses that in the TV commercials. Those are ways to be authentic. She uses the color pink. Jen Gore used the color green. It stood out. It was different. And I think that's something that people can think about is like they need to think about how to be different, because by the nature of being different, you automatically stand out.
A lot of times when you're trying to choose how to deploy your brand, once you have created the unique taglines, a style guide, what makes you different? It's like, how do you deploy it? If you want to deploy your brand properly, it needs to be congruent and consistent. The opposite side, State Farm spends billions of dollars to get in your brain, "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there." I don't know any of the other taglines. I don't know. And they spend billions of dollars. That's why in the PI space, One Call That's All is such a prompt. That's why it's leased by all these other PI attorneys. It's had millions of dollars spent behind it. So, if you're going to have a unique tagline, it's one tagline. You don't have enough money to deploy. None of us have enough money to deploy to make it memorable to the consumer, because they're not looking for PI attorneys in the same way that they're thinking about food or these other things that they're going to consume. They may never even be injured.
So, you have to think about consistency and congruence. And that's a big component of brand. It's deploying it all everywhere. It's the same, it's the same message over and over and over. Now you may think, "Oh, my consumers already have heard this." But the likelihood that they haven't is so significant that that's why your Facebook ad, your TV commercial can run for months at a time and people sometimes never see or recognize that they've seen them.
You need to think about who your ICP is, your ideal client profile. People talk about your avatar. And it's not that you won't sign a client that is outside of that avatar, but it allows you to resonate with those individuals more strongly. They become your loyal fan base. I'll give you an example. Yesterday I was speaking to a New York advertiser, 1-800-CANTASO. I don't speak Spanish, for those listening. 1-800-CANTASO. And I was checking out, and look, I immediately, their homepage and everything is in Spanish and I translated it to English. And the first thing that ... The messaging was so specific, it's like, hey, the first thing I noticed is, let me pull this up right now. It says, and I'm not getting political here, it says, "Zero contact with ICE or the government." Okay, it's very specific.
Now I imagine, your target ICP, that's probably something that detracts you from speaking to a lawyer. It probably decreases your conversions. They don't know. There's some fear around there. They speak to that. They also speak to visas. Let's see here. Can I sue without having my documents up to date? It's very specific. Depending upon who your ICP is, your target demo, create copy around that, create imagery around that. It's going to lend itself to more referrals from that target demographic. And I think that once you have an avatar that you can speak to, it allows you to think about where I'm going to advertise, where I'm going to deploy my brand and what grassroots initiatives I'm going to be involved in. A lot of times it's authentic and it's a group that you resonate with that you care about.
For example, one of the groups that I've always found interesting that lawyers don't target are the nerds and the comic book fans. And there's tons. There's comic book conventions, there's Gen Con, there's the D&D. That's a loyal fan base. It has a set, an age range, as opposed to everybody immediately goes to sports. I know it's because a lot of the trial attorneys were former athletes because you have that zero-sum game, winner or loser. It's a way to compete. Now you're not in sports, you're competing in trial. I get that. I get that. Look, I played sports too. And it's immediately, like I want to be a sponsor of the Red Sox. I want to be a sponsor of whatever football team, whatever NBA team there is. But there's also these other groups. It's like, okay, the comic book nerds. Is that authentic to me? Can I go put a Sean Astin on my website as a celebrity endorsement? Those are things. People like Sean Astin, Goonies, Rudy.
There are things that you can do to be outside the box, to be authentic, to be unique and to stand out. And it could be the voice. It could be audio based on your radio ads, and it could be a famous rapper. It could be a famous country singer. It could be all of those things play into authenticity and building a brand, being memorable, being unique. And I think it take time to be introspective, to look at what you have, what your story, your authentic self, but also look at the competition and think about how you're different. One of the biggest issues that firms have is their business name is an afterthought.
I'll tell you a story. And I don't think I told this to James Helm, and we're good buddies, but he tells a story and I think about this myself. I think one of the best things that happened to him, and I believe he's told a variation of the story, I've kind of reflected on this, is he went and sold pay-per-click advertising to lawyers before he opened his law firm. So, he got to see all these different firms. And there was one, I think he tells the story of LawBoss. So, when he went out, he didn't immediately start Helm Law. He started TopDog Law. It's more memorable, easy spell, D-O-G. I think there's so many firms out there that's got this very long name. I understand the partners want their name on the business, name on the door and there's some status orientation, but you don't want to get in a situation where every name partner, then you got to go have to update the firm name. You want to think about a trade name, State Farm, Geico, Progressive. None of those are the names of the attorney, but it's because they're more marketable.
So, where I'm going with this is, you have to spend an absolute trillions amounts of dollar, billions, whatever, to be memorable if your name sucks. There's so many tales. I interview people on my podcast. I've got four interviews today, four pods, including this one, today. And I had to tell my team to put in the pronunciation of the name. If I can't pronounce your name, do you think a consumer is? I'm in this space and I'm trying to study and say your name properly. I'm listening to multiple YouTube videos. How hard do you think that is for the consumer? It's terrible. I have a rule of thumb. I mean, there's a podcast on My First Million. It was three or four pods ago where the guy, the only thing he does is he does names. Swiffer Sweeper, that was him. Blackberry, that was him. That's the only thing that he does is make a memorable name.
And a lot of times there's all this sunk cost. Well, I've been so-and-so law offer. And they're like, there's sunk costs. But a lot of times you need to start over with the name, make it simple, get a trade name, and then go and redeploy capital. We heard Ross Cellino talk about this on stage from PIMCon. He wouldn't use Cellino. He said something like kickass lawyer, something like that, that would resonate with the consumer. I think everything, everything in the PI says, "Remember, you don't have to worry about the offer. You already got product market fit. Congratulations. You're in a space that has that." So, now think about how you're going to go to market and your name. Sweet James, amazing name. A lot more brandable. Some of these super long names, long rant, but think about the trade name, because it's going to cost you a lot less to be memorable. That's why people remember Nike, one word. When you get over two words, you're in trouble. I think three is the max.
And not only that, I mean, we're talking eight, nine characters and that's about it, max. And that's what you need to be targeting. There's so many people listening and there's like, "Well, I've already got this name, or I wish I would have though of this. I've got so much invested." Well, I want you to go to Google or go to your LON, and I want you to type in sunk cost and go look up the definition. Go look it up. And that's what I want you to do. I want you to look at that. I want you to take a step back. Ego Is the Enemy. Go pick up Ryan Holiday's book, Ego Is the Enemy, and think about what I'm going to do to try to make myself more marketable. Am I going to have a name that you can't even fit on a billboard? Or am I going to have something that the consumer can actually remember and pronounce and say? And spell, by the way, and spell.
Yeah. So, let's say you got a name established, you've got a brand. And then I think about like, okay, where are you going to deploy capital to try to take up some of that mind share? From a top of funnel perspective, I really like radio. Gary Sarner's probably wanting to give me a kiss on the cheek right now, from ROI 360, because he does a ton of radio advertising for ... He does a great job. The reason is because what you have to produce to deploy radio, there's no imagery, unless you got an RDS dash. You're writing copy that's 30 seconds, 15 seconds. There's not a ton of copy. It's not having to make a 10,000-word long form sales page, giant sales letter. You can deploy that capital and create content that's short and memorable and use it for years. You can put it on a rotation.
I think the go-to market for radio is significantly easier than TV, than Facebook ads. Now, I'm not saying that don't do those. I really like Facebook ads too, because you can create an abundance of content. You can flip it out easier than say radio or TV. You can mass produce different practice areas, different demos, different locations. So, I'm a big fan of Facebook ads, but then you go to TV and streaming, got to hire a video production company. What if all that money that you spend on the video production isn't the right content that really resonates, that doesn't convert? Then you got to go spend a ton more money. That's where you don't have to spend a ton of money to go create a radio script. Now, the deployment might cost a ton, but okay, so that's how to get the brand out there. Of course, on the back end, I would be remiss if I didn't say, you can't deploy all this money on building a brand and top of funnel disbursement and not capture it.
So, you got to think about your reputation, got to think about having visibility from a local services ads perspective, Google Ads perspective, Google Maps, organic. You have to think about SEO. If you deploy all this capital and you don't have SEO, you're not going to capture, you're going to have a big, leaky bucket. If you just think about the bomb of the funnel and you don't have any top of funnel awareness, you're only marketing to people that are injured, actively looking now, instead of the mass market. Then it's going to be higher cost because shorter term orientation is higher cost than longer term orientation brand, brand compounds. And it's a lot better when people are looking for you specifically than just typing in car accident employer.
You have the perfect offer, but so do your competitors. Stop trying to appeal to everyone. Find your ideal client profile, build an authentic brand they actually remember, and deploy consistently. Whether you're targeting a niche community or banning that terrible firm name, you have to be different to get attention. But a memorable brand is useless if you aren't showing up when those injured clients actually go searching for a lawyer. That is exactly what we solve at Rankings.io. We help elite personal injury law firms turn their marketing into qualified opportunities and high-value signed cases. Check us out at Rankings.io. I'm Chris Dreyer, and this has been Personal Injury Mastermind. Catch you next time.
