Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Relay, presented by lexameca, the number one attorney referral network. I'm your host, Gabriel Steeritz. The Relay is a show for law firm owners and the C suite at personal injury, mass tort and other plaintiff law firms. Joining me today is Michael Mann, lead strategist of the legal vertical at Scale Marketing. Scale Marketing is a boutique full service marketing firm providing big agency services to small to medium sized businesses. Michael, it's great to have you on the show. Today we're talking about moving from passive marketing to active marketing through testing and optimization. There's more data available today on every channel across tv, radio, digital, social. The question is, how do you get that data? And even more importantly, how do you leverage all of that data to improve your business through testing? I had dinner with Michael recently, wanted to sit down with him and learn more. Is a fascinating conversation and I think it'll be beneficial for you, our listeners, to understand what's available today. This is changing dramatically and rapidly and it even affects traditional media channels that you might not be thinking about. So, Michael, great to have you here. Let's dive in.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Great to be here, Gabriel. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So, Michael, listen, you are working with some of the biggest names in plaintiff side legal. This is one of the things that really impressed me when we sat down was that you haven't been doing this that long in the legal space, but you already are working with some of the biggest players and helping them grow rapidly. So really impressive work that you're doing. And one of the things that you're doing is really is helping law firms to iterate toward better growth in their existing marketing spin. So just kind of like give me some of the background on where you're coming from. And I would love to see here, even from more of an outsider's perspective, what you saw when you started moving into the plaintiff legal space.
[00:01:48] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's a great question. You know, so, Gabriel, thanks again for having me on. I'm thrilled to be here. You know, I've been in marketing now for 25, 30 years, and you know, so you have the advantage of perspective and space to kind of look back, you know, even if you go back five, 10 years ago when you were doing an ad campaign, you know, you were building it based on the available data relative to television, radio, whatever the case may be, even paid search, and you'd put it in place and, you know, obviously you hoped it worked and you'd kind of look a month later, two months later, three months later, you know, and how's it going? Maybe you make a change or two. That's really not the pace of marketing business today, you know, And I think the word you used is really the word that I focus and key on with our clients, which is iteration. I mean there's no set it and forget it. You're not doing, we, you're not doing monthly meetings anymore. Sometimes you're doing, you know, daily meetings where there's. So there's such a major influx of data, consumer habits are shifting at breakneck speed. And all these various digital tactics, they have so much more of a wealth of data to understand what's working well, what's not. And so that old set it and forget it. I kind of look at it as passive marketing, placing an annual buy, letting it do its business and kind of seeing how your year went. To me, that's a thing of the past. It's really, you have to be a passive marketer. You have to be in it, in it with the data and really asking questions, is this working? What's my hypothesis? What should I test? What's the next, what's the next thing that I can test to help make this better? And I think those are the questions that we try to ask with, with the various clients that we have. And I think that's yielded, I think there was a second part to the question.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: No, no, that, that's, that's great. And I'll jump in. So what kind of growth are you seeing with your clients? Like before we get into like what the strategies are, like what kind of growth are you like with the lawyers you're helping in the space? What's the proof is in the pudding. What's happening here?
[00:03:34] Speaker B: Yeah, we're held to account on bottom line case performance. So you look at case volume and you look at average cost per cases. We're held to two standards. Great. Growth we're seeing on the low end, 20, 30, 40% year over year growth for the 4, 5, 6 clients that we work with on an ongoing basis. I don't, I don't. Very rarely do we see a client that does not have double digit growth. And usually if we see in a month or two that that's not happening, we can identify the reason why and help them kind of optimize to it.
[00:04:01] Speaker A: So I've got clients and is that, is that, is that growth commensurate with ad spend increase? Is that like double digit growth plus double digit increase in spend or are you getting better cost of acquisition?
[00:04:11] Speaker B: We're getting better cost of acquisition. I think it's goes back to that iteration phase of looking at where are they coming from, what was their marketing, you know, how, who are they targeting, what were they buying, how were they buying it and kind of doing a full dissection of it and understanding were they buying the right target, were they getting the right impressions? And so what we've done is just kind of take clients current marketing, pick it apart. Like almost like you take a car apart, pick it apart, look at it piece by piece, find the holes, fill them and then once you do, you kind of look okay, How'd the competition react? What's our next move? What's our next step?
[00:04:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, great. So you, you definitely seeing actual growth. So you're optimizing on ad spend, create creative. What? Let's, let's talk about the baseline. These guys, have they been kind of doing the same thing? Are they already grow? Like, are you coming into someone who's at a steady level of scale and then helping them? Are you taking an existing growth trajectory and making it steeper?
[00:05:07] Speaker B: That's a good question. I think we've had a lot of success with companies and firms that have been in market, Gabriel. You know, like they've been doing TV advertising for five, 10 years. Maybe they've been doing paid search, they've had success. But there's a lot of room for optimization and growth. They don't know what's behind the scenes of what the television stations or radio stations are pitching or presenting them or are they really getting the impressions that they purchase. And I think so. To your question earlier, we've seen a lot of double digit growth with just maintaining budgets and just optimizing. Now we're two, three, four, five years in with some of those clients and we can't optimize that same budget anymore. You start to hit diminishing returns. So we are seeing clients starting to take their budgets now that we've kind of worked them through a series of optimizations of.
[00:05:48] Speaker A: Yeah, so two things. Efficiency is when you're taking, you're trying to get the same performance but for less expense. Productivity is where you're taking the same level of resources and getting more performance out of it. What do you like if you've got someone who's kind of stale, they've been doing the same thing for a while. Are you finding that you can more get efficiency so you're actually like reducing the waste or are you taking the same spend and optimizing for better, for better results on that? Like what's A better approach for someone who's like, yeah, my marketing has kind of been the same.
Everybody's talking about case acquisition is going up, there's more competition in the space. Like where the people that are incumbents, what's broken where, like, what are they doing that they need to fix right now? Based on what you've seen, you know.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: Gabriel, it runs the gamut. I would say no two clients are the same. And I think that's why you need a uniform assessment. I've seen clients where their search is off Mark. I've seen clients where their search was great, but their TV was being bought off the Roth off the wrong demographic or they were paying the wrong CPMs. And I think that's why you really have to have a holistic view of all channels. Like, what's the overall symphony of media? What are all these? What role does each channel play? And then you pick them apart and you look at them individually and you go, okay, how do I fix this? So I don't see consistent issues across clients. I'd say optimizing TV is definitely one of them. Integrating digital and testing new digital channels, which a lot of PI firms haven't done that, that kind of helps boost productivity as well. But it's really looking at all facets. Creative data, media, CPMs and really value engineering.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: That is it that there's, is that they're not, they don't under, they don't see all of the different pieces. Like there's not a holistic view of the funnel. And then, and then each of those, those pieces are then potentially misaligned. Like is that, you know, we're trying to do here is come up. What is it? Like, what do you need to look at if you're running a million dollar plus a year ad ad spend. Like, what can we give viewers to take away here and say, here's the thing that I can do to either test and see if, if I am doing things correctly or figure out like the high level potential issues with my, my ad spend for this year. Is it, is it lack of a single picture of the entire funnel that you're running into and so there's, you're not able to figure out what is going wrong or is it just that people aren't looking at it enough, that they're just like looking at it once a year, every six months?
[00:08:17] Speaker B: I think they're definitely not looking at it enough. But even the data that they're looking at may not be center of the bullseye forum, Gabriel. Like, so we've got clients that have been buying off of adults 18 plus. We have clients that buy, you know, that's a target demographic for television and radio. And we have clients that run the gamut of who's their, who's their target, they don't know. And so doing a customer segmentation analysis and profiling their best customer, that's informative because that starts to tell you who is that core customer that you should be trying to laser focus on and then understanding how does that person consume media, what channels do they spend the most time with, what's going to be the most influential. And so I agree that probably most, most PI firms are not looking at that holistic symphony. But I also think that you got to know your data, you got to know your market, you got to know your clientele, you gotta be looking at what your competition's doing on an ongoing basis. And I think once you start to do that and you methodically look at your data and the market data, in all candor as a data analyst, on some level, like the answers start to kind of present themselves. Like you start to see. I had a client, I'll give you an example, Gabriel. We had a client, part of the segmentation analysis showed that they were under indexing for a certain ethnic group in that market. And so we saw opportunity. It was very clear, like, you know, the market has 40% of this ethnic group in the market and you're not reaching them, you're not speaking to them and it's a blind spot. You know, the law firm wouldn't know it, they wouldn't think of it. But the only way to get to that is by looking at your data and trying to understand who is that target customer. And Gabriel, that ability for small to mid sized businesses really wasn't robustly in place five, 10 plus, 15 years ago.
[00:09:54] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I think that's fantastic, Michael. That's really good insight, which is by pulling the data together into a place where it's readable, you begin to see the patterns emerge. And I also hear you talking about too, it sounds like a lot of law firms, they think, well, I'm going to buy a high level demo spin, but I don't actually know what my ideal customer profile is because I, because yeah, everybody gets in car wrecks. Well that sure, that's true. But also your creative is going to speak to a certain type of person. The way that you're buying media is going to hit a certain demographic and you need to understand what that is and how, how that is going to Play more effectively so that everything lines up. That's, that's great. Tell me about the differences and in how you. What data do we have access to now that we didn't have access to four years ago?
[00:10:42] Speaker B: Oh, it's amazing. I mean the connected television, the DSPs, the demand side platforms, if everybody's aware, that's where a lot of the programmatic inventory gets bought and sold and transacted between publishers and buyers and the wealth of third party data segments. The ability to see click through rates, conversion rates lag and cost per is like it's just on such a granular level to be able to see this data target. How's it performing? This data target, how's it performing? You know, do I need to retarget to this group 5 times? Do I need to retarget to this group 10 times? How long does it take? You know, and it is, is this the right message to convert? And is that the right message to convert? I, I don't, I don't think I do believe that bigger advertisers, Gabriel, had access to this data and knew how to decipher it. You know, you think of the big brands spending billions across, you know, the country and the world. Like I think they had access to this data. I just think at the small, small to mids, there just wasn't that access. And now you know, you get access to a demand side platform. There's so much more available data there that you can optimize off of.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: Yeah. And just that's, that's incredibly helpful. Did any of your customers, before you start working with them, how many of them were looking at this information and not just looking at it, but really using this to optimize their funnel.
There you go. So yeah, I mean that's huge, right? Like if the billion dollar companies are using this technology and this data to optimize their fund, then, then lawyers need to as well. And just for, for clarity, no one in the plaintiff law space is really enterprise and I don't mean to, to point fingers but like law firms in the plaintiff side, they're SMBs. Like in the grand scheme of things, none of them are Fortune 500 companies. They're, they're generally smaller. And so getting access to that information is one thing, but also being able to review that on a, on a day to day basis is a lot harder than it sounds because you got a million things you're trying to do. And to dive into complex platforms to review data and optimize this is, is, is difficult. I was cfo, COO for a law firm for several years. And you set these dashboards up, and if you don't have a regular way to engage with those, eventually you just stop looking at them. You just start to kind of. Other things vie for your attention. And dashboards or fancy, but they don't, you know, they're not a fire to put out. So I think it's really important to have someone who's also knocking on your door saying, hey, like, here are the numbers. Like, I'm looking at them, I care about them. Small things can. Can often show a lot bigger issues. Dashboard, you know, it's like the check engine light goes on. It's like, yeah, the warning light's generic, but you gotta drill down and figure out what it is, because it may indicate, okay, well, you know, the. The tire pressure sensor is broken. Or it could be that, you know, your oil's low and you're about to destroy your engine. So I think it's really important that you have someone who can help you set that stuff up. Especially when you're running a law firm between 30 and 230 and 300 people, which is a really large range. But, like, at some point you have. You have to outsource some of this stuff to someone who really knows how to look at these platforms because it's. It's not easy to interpret all of that data.
[00:13:55] Speaker B: You know, Gabriel, you're making me laugh inside because. So I had a recap meeting with one of my clients yesterday. We were recapping their performance in September, and on paper, they were up 45% in case volume. And you're sitting there and you're going, hey, most. Most folks would be doing a little jig. You know, they're excited. Up 45% is nothing to sneeze at. But, you know, it's interesting as I was walking through the presentation and kind of picking it apart and looking at some of the lead sourcing, looking at the paid search performance, and looking at, you know, kind of looking under the hood at some of those things. I actually said to the client, I said, I know on paper this looks like a good performance, but I know we can do better because I can see the holes. I can see where paid search, there's an opportunity, and here it is. I can see that this tactic that we're trying on radio, there's an opportunity to make it even better with radio. And so my point is, that's the whole iteration. It's, you know, it used to be set it and forget it and okay, I'm making a lot of money, I'm getting a lot of cases, everything's great. But even 45% up, I know with this client as of yesterday, I know I can do better because the data is kind of shining that light. And so I said, like, we shouldn't feel bad about this performance, but let's discuss what we can do to fix these holes that we're seeing along the way.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: Well, I love that you're taking a first principles analysis. You're not just saying like 45%. That's amazing. You're saying 45% is a number that could either be fantastic if we've gotten massive market share and we're tapped out and we're approaching an asymptotic level of market cap, or that could be terrible because there is three times as much growth available and you're not even getting close to it. So I like that approach, which is to say, look, the number is, is fine, but we're not going to cheer until we know what that number means in the context of everything else that's going on. So this is fascinating to me, Michael, because I wasn't aware that you could get so much feedback on your radio and your TV spend. My assumption, it's incorrect, it sounds like, is that you could get that from like your social, your digital spin, but that you weren't going to get as much. The feedback loop wasn't nearly as tight on the traditional. So this is, this is really interesting.
[00:15:56] Speaker B: Well, let me be clear. I mean, the, the data available on te television and radio is not nearly as robust as what you can get on the digital side. Okay. But there are signals, obviously, Nielsen, Scarborough, there's a variety of different sources of information that can kind of downstream tell you what's happening to the audiences, what's happening to the quality of the audience, the engagement and so on and so forth. And so you don't have that real time television and radio data. I want to be clear. But, but what we are seeing is with the available data, we are seeing TV viewership like we're seeing. It's like in the Nielsen parlance, it's called hut and putt levels. Households using television, people using telev, and across the country, market by market, those are declining. And that poses a threat to a lot of personal injury firms who have built their business on TV advertising. And the challenge right now is as we're seeing those viewership declines, we're not seeing the performance declines, which is really interesting. So Nielsen's reporting a decline in audience but we're seeing growth on the case side. So that's where testing comes in. And really being intentional about how do I start to integrate connected television, how do I try to use it to fill the gaps of where even if my performance is still, still good with television now, in a year from now, in two years from now, as that audience continues to erode, you know, set myself up for that eventuality right now, test and lean into it, understand how am I filling that gap? But I just, I want to be clear, like the degree of data availability and digital and social and programmatic far exceeds that what we have in TV and radio. But you have to look at whatever data is available for each individual channel.
[00:17:25] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, no, that, that's a great point of clarification. And it sounds like you're able to use that digital data as a proxy to answer, inform what you're doing with TV and with radio as well. There's. I'll say this over and over, they're not dead. TV and radio are not dead. They may be declining, but they are absolutely critical to acquiring cases and building a good, a strong brand that's acquiring cases at a reasonable cost. I like that, that blended approach. So, so let me ask you this because we're getting close to time though. Just tell me a little bit about like what's your approach to testing and iterating on creative? How quickly do you think you need to do that? Are you trying to a B? Is it more just iterative over time? Let's get some insight into that.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: You know, where we're at right now. I mean, we do creative for our clients every six to 12 months, just depending upon their cadence. Obviously you need to make sure that everything comes out of one central message, one creative brief, one voice, where I will say we're getting more intentional with creative. Testing is on the digital side being able to a B test. And I know everybody's doing a B tests, but really using, identifying, how am I using this channel? Like meta, what role is it playing? Is it top line awareness or is it, hey, somebody's in market and I want to pull them through? And so really what you need, you know, there's retargeting messages that you can create. Like somebody's already gone to your website, they've expressed, they've raised their hand, there's some interest there. So what's the right message? You can't feed them the same message that got them there. It's like, what message do you show them that that's going to get them to go further to your website or search or a branded search, whatever the case may be. And so so to me, there's great opportunities to be had.
[00:19:07] Speaker A: Fantastic. Michael, this was really helpful. Thank you so much for coming on. And I would encourage anyone, if you are dissatisfied with your marketing performance, talk to Michael. He's the real deal. I know the names of some of the clients that he works with, and they are not people who mess around. And so that's one of the reasons I wanted to bring Michael on the show, is because there's a lot of people that say they do great work, but when you know who Michael works for, you'll understand that he really knows what he's talking about. So, Michael, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate you sharing insight with us.
[00:19:38] Speaker B: Gabriel, thanks so much for having me. This was fun.
