Episode

15

In this episode of The Law Firm Brand Builders Podcast, Lindsay Lucas, VP of Growth, and Haley Weigle, VP of Advertising Services at PMP Marketing Group come together to unpack ChatGPT's reversal on legal marketing, what these new ads look like in the wild, and the five things every firm should bring to their annual planning meeting.
Haley Weigle headshot

About Haley

Haley serves as VP of Advertising Services at PMP Marketing Group, directing cross-functional teams across media, creative, and client success to deliver campaigns aligned with clients’ growth goals. She built and now leads an insights-driven approach to account management, creating scalable processes that improve collaboration, accelerate turnaround times, and keep strategy grounded in performance data.

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/haleypweigle

Lindsay Lucas headshot

About Lindsay

Lindsay serves as VP of Growth at PMP Marketing Growth. With more than 20 years of experience across sales, digital, and marketing, her background includes leadership roles at agencies, LinkedIn, Autodesk, CBS, and CNET, where she managed Fortune 500 client relationships and helped businesses drive growth through strategic marketing and lasting partnerships.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsaylucas/

The Law Firm Brand Builders logo

PMP's Law Firm Podcast for Building Brands That Outlast Ads

HOSTED BY

Alex Ludwig friendly smile

Alex Ludwig

Chief Executive Officer

Haley Weigle avatar

Haley Weigle

VP Advertising Services

Lindsay Lucas avatar

Lindsay Lucas

Director of Client Success

Transcript

Lindsay (00:00)
Three weeks ago, ChatGPT reversed their decision on banning legal entities from advertising on the ChatGPT platform. We have so much to go through and so much to share. I’m Lindsay Lucas, VP of Growth at PMP Marketing Group, and I’m joined by the fabulous Haley Weigel, the VP of Advertising Services at PMP. Haley leads our team of media strategists and buyers at PMP, as well as our client success team.

Hailey, welcome to the show. So excited to have you on today.

Haley (00:31)
Thank you, Lindsay. I’m glad to be here. And I know that you and I are looking forward to the opportunity to step up and do some co-hosting here for a little bit. Al is gonna take a step back from the show. And so Lindsay and I are gonna get to share the spotlight a bit. We’re gonna do this one together today and maybe take some turns co-hosting and bringing some different folks onto the set. So I’m looking forward to doing this with you, Lindsay.

Lindsay (00:53)
Absolutely. Thank you for joining today, Haley. So let’s get into it. As I mentioned earlier, three weeks ago, the rules changed. To give you a little background on why this matters and how we got to this point on ChatGPT, we’ve to go back in time. Earlier this year, around February timeframe, ChatGPT opened up advertising on the platform and then went through a a stage where it was kind of a self-serve type model. And then strangely, in the month of June, they restricted all legal marketing on the ChatGPT platform. And so we’ve kind of been in this waiting period trying to evaluate the why and then what would actually initiate a policy change on the ChatGPT side. So lo and behold, about three weeks ago, they updated their latest policy version and now legal marketing is available on the platform. As I mentioned and teased out earlier, this is definitely something we are already testing within PMP.

Haley and her team are getting various partners set up and launched for tests against different practice areas. And it’s something we’re very bullish on.

Haley (01:59)
Yeah, absolutely. It’s you know, been an exciting piece of news to come through and we jumped right on it and like you said, we’ve mocked up some ads and got some early adopters on board and we’re looking forward to going live as soon as we can.

Lindsay (02:11)
Absolutely. And just to give people a little bit of additional background here, you know, this is not a Facebook ad. This is not a Google ad. It is, you know, onto itself a new thing. And Haley’s going to help us to unpack some of that. But, you know, some of the conversations we’ve been having internally, Haley, you know, we’re like, this is more of a paid search type play than it is maybe a paid social. I’d love to hear your perspective on how this looks and behaves versus some of the other platforms that our our partners have become used to.

Haley (02:47)
Yeah, so I think what’s interesting is that when this initially surfaced, and we were talking about it last week, a lot of the comparisons were coming up comparing to meta. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, like this is still a search query that we’re typing in. And we have sort of been mentally preparing for this, right? We all knew this was coming, everyone in the marketing field, certainly not just in legal marketing. But yeah, I think the the weird part about it is that it is search, but you can’t buy a keyword, right? We’re not bidding on individual terms. There’s some context that you can put in there. Obviously AI is gonna crawl your landing pages to make sure that those key context words are matching up with what it is that you’re selling. But in a lot of ways, which we’re gonna talk about, it is still a little bit of the Wild West, right? We’re anxious to get on there and get some ads running. I think it’s gonna be a little bit of a mix of all of the above. There’s gonna be an element of branding. The ads that we’ve seen running already are heavy brand. There’s not a lot of room to be wildly creative with your visual. It’s a very small space there. so a little bit of the branding piece. It’s gonna be a little bit of, you know, the SEO piece. People keep asking about AIO and what this is gonna look like. What we’ve been talking about and referencing with Mark Riley, our VP of Web Services, is that these trends are gonna fall in line with the AI search if your SEO foundation is strong.

And so then last is that search piece. This is just an element of search. So it’s gonna all work together, a little bit of the branding and visual, a little bit of that foundational SEO, and then a little bit of just getting the key context right. But again, it should be exciting. I mean, I don’t know about you, Lindsay, but I’ve jumped in there. I can see some of these ads, you know, in the wild and to get one served to you is a little bit of fun. And so it’s it’s gonna be an interesting couple of months, I think.

We’re already preparing the clients that have pledged a little bit of money in addition to the promotion with open AI. We had a discussion just this morning — what if this absolutely takes off? Like how much more money do we wanna be like, you know, nimble enough to reallocate or go back and ask for more? So we’re expecting this to be a big thing.

Lindsay (04:53)
So exciting. It’s interesting because we look at this new platform solution three fourths of the way through the year, like something that would have taken typically months or a quarter to ramp up towards and you know, set up a strategy and build out. We’re doing this in a matter of days now,  hence is the speed of 2026, I feel like, for everyone. But, you know, it puts us right up against annual planning too.

So this test is actually going to help inform that distribution of budgets as we’re thinking ahead for the following year. And I’d love to get your your POV on that too, Haley. But before we move off, one final question on that solution within ChatGPT. And I think that this kind of brings home the point you were making about how this fits nicely within the search ecosystem already. Can you talk through when individuals are on ChatGPT the part of the funnel they are in?

What’s the mindset? Like where are we actually intercepting a person while they’re in the ChatGPT environment?

Haley (05:54)
Yeah, so I think that’s the interesting piece of this too, you know, when we talk about performance marketing or search, we’re very much at the bottom of the funnel. And for the brand marketing, we’re at the top when we think about TV and out of home and things like that. And so, you know, oftentimes when people are on ChatGPT, they’re sort of in this research phase. Sometimes that’s top to mid. Sometimes, we’ve seen people typing in search queries. And literally what I typed in the other day when I got mine served to live was, your best law firm near me. I’m looking to take action.

That’s the interesting part about AI that I don’t think is true for every channel, is that it sort of serves multiple parts of the funnel depending on what the query is. I think we’re gonna see that matter in our key context as we’re typing that in. And I say it like that because that’s literally what it’s called as we’re building the ads on the back of the platform, is that context section. And so I think it’s gonna be interesting. I think there’s gonna be opportunity for more top of funnel. and I think there’s absolutely gonna be opportunity for bottom of funnel too. Again, the ads that I’ve seen and the ads that we’re mocking up right now are very much general branding, right? When someone types in that law firm near me or whatever it may be, there’s not a lot of ad space there. The visual piece is very, very small and we really have to push the information through when they get to that landing page.

Lindsay (07:12)
Absolutely. I’m just thinking about a quote from earlier in my career when I was at LinkedIn. We used to say, Content is king, but context is queen. And here it is again in a new platform. So interesting. What’s old is new again in some ways, right?

Haley (07:28)
Absolutely.

Lindsay (07:30)
We were talking about this test at PMP. obviously this is gonna take us up against the end of the year and right into annual planning, which I know you and your team are elbow deep in already, thinking through any clients that maybe haven’t had the need or the opportunity or the want to re-strategize throughout the year. Like now is that time within our our planning cadence. So talk us through where you see this new platform playing a role as you guys are thinking through this for various clients.

Haley (08:05)
Yeah, so I’m still very much looking at it on the paid side as an advertising tactic. And it would fall, mentally, for me if I’m thinking about the departments that I oversee, it would absolutely fall on that digital paid media piece. But I do think again, the unique elements of it’s also tying in a little bit to the web services side and the SEO side of things. It’s also tying a little bit into the brand consistency piece that you’re seeing on buses or television. So I think as we’re talking about layering it in for annual planning, the first thing, as you mentioned, is that the timing is fantastic.

We have like a 90-day window for some testing here. And then, if we’re seeing results, and to me, just to be clear on what results mean this early on, obviously like creme de la creme would be like a signed case, right? But for what we’re looking at right this moment, are we getting some volume? Are we getting some click through? Is there any element of quality there? Are we getting the volume, right? And if we’re getting the volume there in a meaningful way, I think we’ll recommend this for most clients into next year. Again, in that paid piece, a lot of our clients when we reached out last week, immediately were super excited. You know, they’ve all been hearing things about it and they’re glad we’re on top of this. They just wanna get out there and be a part of it.

I think that’s really the smart way to approach this. I think there’s a low barrier to entry. Obviously, open AI right this moment is running that promotion. They’re wanting to get people in the door. and so it’s a smart way to test and try that. But then, we’re gonna be layering it into our paid media side. You know, Lindsay, something I was thinking about as sort of preparing for today is we talk a lot, which I know we’re gonna dig into later, about every year there’s this increase in budget ask, at least for most agencies, and even historically, I think, for PMP. But what I think has been fun and different about our approach this year is really being focused on making dollars work smarter and harder with the dollars that we do have. And so I think one of the faux pas, if you will, is there’s something new that let’s push all these dollars over into it, right? We saw that with CTV, people took a heavy bit of their broadcast budget and they’re like, let’s shift this over and then test CTV, right? One of the things that we’ve been really clear on this week about testing Chad GPT ads is that this has to be incremental. We’re not taking these dollars away from something else that’s working, that’s in place.

So what’s gonna be key for me and my team as we’re doing annual planning is whether there is an interest and a propensity to test. Does it make sense with the competitive landscape in this particular DMA? And do we have enough money to meaningfully put towards this without really taking from something else? And that’s why I’m excited about the clients that are willing to test this in the first 90 days, because we’re gonna be able to tell, I think fairly quickly, whether or not we really wanna cut out a slice of the budget next year for this. Cause I think that’s the biggest, that’s the faux pas, right? That’s what you fall into is, there’s this new shiny thing. Let’s just throw budget at it. And that’s not something we’ll be doing. There’ll be room for it. We’ll be exploring it. We’ll be talking about it. It’s a trend. Obviously we have to do that. But I don’t see us steering other dollars away from meaningful paid media for something this new.

Lindsay (11:35)
So that being said, I’ve actually had a call this morning where someone rightfully said, Wait, is this the new paid search? And so I think some people listening might actually maybe have some of the same questions, right? My opinion, I’d love to hear it too, Haley. Too soon to tell. We all know that Google has been getting more expensive, right? but there are other dynamics to consider within the search space that are changing right now, even as we’re on here today. But only time will tell. Right now — test and learn and then have it be proved out through the metrics that matter — cost per case and quality of case, right?

Haley (12:15)
Yeah, yeah. I think you and I are pretty aligned there. It is a bit too soon to tell. Like for me, I’m a heavy user of AI, right? So it makes it makes sense to me to see this growing. And for me personally, AI has absolutely switched to be the new search. But I don’t think Google is this eight hundred pound gorilla, and they still absolutely corner the market. I don’t think that’s gonna change overnight. In fact, I think there has to be a comparable product that’s right on the heels. I mean, like that’s gotta be coming out really soon. You know, we could spend a whole another episode on this, but obviously there’s some talk about LSA changing a little bit. Is Google making room for another product? That’s my hunch. Yes, it’s too soon to tell, but also I would say not yet. Like if this is gonna be the new search, I still think we’re months, if not a year away or more from that being everyone’s go to for everything. I think Google is still the major household name — it’s what people are comfortable with. They can use the interface, right? Like I just don’t think that we’re gonna see this massive jump over to AI platforms overnight.

Lindsay (13:28)
I agree. I agree. It’s interesting that the dynamics you’re calling out as far as Google having a response to the call for open AI coming out with a paid product. You know, there are whispers that the product is in; that it is slated to come out soon. And I think we’re seeing some of those symptoms, you know, and there’s a lot of people researching everything from the different signals that are going on within the Google ecosystem.

And one of them, to your point, is LSA shifting, right? We’re anticipating that. We’re getting messages about that. We’re reading the tea leaves that will be incorporated in another way within the ecosystem in the future. Think about the Map Pack and how that has been, you know, shifting, gutted, however you want to term it.

Haley (14:15)
Yeah.

Lindsay (14:18)
And then there there’s another piece of evidence to support what I think we both  concur on here is that we look at those AI overviews, what we’re looking about in there over the the last number of months, you know, researchers and analysts looking at the density of the AI overview and what it once contained versus what it contains now. Another warning sign there, right?

I think in the May-June time frame, the AI overview was listing up to eight different companies, or in this case, law firms, within a given response. Now they’re finding that the average, you know, organic AI overview is listing five point five company names on average, right? So something to be aware of where the sands are shifting. and I think it just points to the fact that as we’re seeing organic start to be deprecated, it reminds me of the social space years ago. Obviously, paid is going to come to the forefront, and that’s what we would anticipate in the coming months from Google.

Haley (15:22)
Absolutely. So sort of shifting this and maybe turning around a question or two for you, Lindsay, if you don’t mind. You know, you just gave some stats like that. Obviously we’re talking about that AI overview space. You know, if that answer box is shrinking, is that space more valuable — less? Like how do we stay in there you know that we’re sort of talking back about Google again? Like what does that look like in your opinion?

Lindsay (15:45)
Well, supply and demand, right? Supply has gone down, demand stays high, right? So inevitably it’s become more valuable, I would argue, for the time being, right? Future state would be to be able to cut in upstream as some capacity through a paid solution, right? We’re just not there yet. How can you get in there? The million dollar question, right? How do you get into the LLMs? How do you get picked up, right? And that goes back to a much larger conversation and strategy. I know within PMP, we actually re-termed the go-to-market strategy for SEO. We re-termed it months ago as search intelligence. Like why did we do that? Because to do it well nowadays, you have to be able to have the agility to shift with the dynamics within the space. You know,  we’re talking about all these changes within Google, within the ecosystem, within a matter of months. Being an agency that is on the front lines and continuing to educate ourselves, that’s what search intelligence is to us, right? Reconfiguring websites so that the LLMs are picking them up and reading them correctly. Leaning into entity marketing where you have to be reinforcing all the aspects of the entity that you’re building and marketing on an ongoing basis.

And all the other typical blocking and tackling with an SEO we all know about from backlinking to Google business pages for the time being, right? And doing all of that helps. But like always, you have to check all the boxes if you want to actually make your way into the AIO or the LLMs.

Haley (17:29)
Absolutely. Yeah, I think that the key is you’ve gotta scratch everyone’s back and and make sure you’re doing all that well. I remember, gosh, this was truly years ago, but when, you know, those initial paid placements came up above the organic listings and there was all this conversation with, are people clicking on them anyways? Are they gonna scroll past? And it was like kind of a crazy number. If I remember it was like 70 percent of people do indeed scroll past the ads and were still looking for those organic listings.

Do you think there’s room for that to happen here? I mean, is it realistic to think that we can direct people or ask people or assume that people might scroll past that AI overview and dig into those original organic listings, or is that just ludicrous?

Lindsay (18:14)
I think again we’re on shifting stands, Haley. And I say that through the lens of having lived through the original advent of social advertising. And at the time I was in the sales side of the house in that world and trying to convince individuals that they needed to buy ads on social. Why would I do that? They would say. I can just post it organically. But as I alluded to earlier, over time we would expect the playbook to be monetized very similarly, where the supply of organic is reduced again and again and again. And now you find yourself organically being on the third page instead of the first page, right? And so as unpleasant as that sounds, that we would expect that the monetization of these platforms would start to look more and more like the the social playbook did back in the day, where over time the the ability to drive effective marketing or value from the platform organically would be diminished over time.

Haley (19:21)
Yeah, yeah, I think that tracks, I think that makes sense.

Lindsay (19:24)
As we’re talking about annual planning, I know there are a lot of people who are gearing up for this themselves, whether internally at their organization or maybe externally with an agency. When you think about that, you know, on the client side, for example, what do you need to come prepared with or what expectations should you have going into that sort of session? Can you walk people through what that usually looks like and what they should be expecting?

Haley (19:52)
Yes, absolutely. So one of the first things that I discussed with my team onboarding here three planning seasons ago was we need a planning meeting with the client for the annual planning meeting, right? So it was kind of like the meeting before the meeting, which I’m usually not a fan of, but in this in the case, something as heavy as annual planning, it makes sense. And so we would go to the clients and say, like, Okay, how’s the year really going? How does the budget feel? Do you like your commercials, do you get good feedback from them? How’s the firm doing? Are you interested in seeing a whole bunch of new stuff? Or do you feel like it’s working for you, like you’re comfortable and you don’t want to make big changes? Because what I didn’t want to do was go into a firm’s annual plan and be like, here’s all these bells and whistles, and they were thinking it’s their best year ever. We don’t want to change a thing.  So I wanted to be really careful and that’s really made us look a lot stronger in our preparation coming to that meeting, because we’d already asked. We weren’t like, hmm, I hope they might be interested in this, or hmm, wonder where they are — are they hot or cold on CTV? We sort of pre-asked some of those questions. So now when I tell clients or when our team tells clients to prepare for annuals, we’re typically asking them to bring along five things. The first is signed cases by source on a trailing 12 months.

So not just leads or calls. Leads are calls. Some firms call them contacts. It’s great to have that, right? But as I referenced earlier, there’s this quality over quantity piece. And sometimes, the channels that we’re using drive a bunch of volume and we want it to be that way. Sometimes we’ve tweaked things on purpose for the quantity to be lower because of quality, depending on what your intake rules and regulations are.

We really need the signed cases and we need them by source. And then the source is easier than ever, at least on the digital side, right? Because of tracking, we can see some of that information we have. Most of our firms, we encourage them to do this, but most of them already, when a client calls, they’re asking, how did you hear about us? And they’re tracking that, right? so that’s the first thing is sign cases by source, not just leads, not just contacts or calls and on its way trailing 12 months.

The second thing is average case value by practice area. So what’s their target? What’s their goal? And then is that moving? Has that been moving for them? Or do they want it to move? We had a client several years ago that really had the quality and the volume. And they were like, our volume of intake is too high. We’re employing too many people in our intake department because the volume’s so high. And we’re taking such a specific type of case, and the intake questions and qualifiers get rid of so much that it’s not good for us to have all that volume. And our average case value just went way, way up. And we’re okay with that. We know that that’s gonna make the marketing numbers look different, right? It was sort of stressful for us at first because we went from indexing on a totally different number when they changed it that much. But what was really important for us to know is that hey, our average case value has changed and we want it to change, right? And so them communicating that with us was really important. The next thing is real intake numbers, answer rate, speed to first contact, consultation to sign. We need to know that. And there’s a lot of things that agencies can do now. I’m sure every agency does this. We certainly do. Because of call rail and platforms like that, we can listen and do some screening. We actually ghost call for our clients sometimes and send those reports back. So intake is such a key part. And really in my mind as far as the law firm operations go, it really falls under marketing. I don’t know that everyone thinks about it that way, but certainly from a marketing seat, I think about it very much like our client success folks are the front lines. You know, the tone of voice matters when answering the phone. Customer service is so key. So, anyways, some insight on your intake department is really important. And if you don’t have the insight that you need, telling us that is important because there’s some solutions out there. There’s some things that we can do and help. We also help you find solutions to strengthen that intake department. The last thing that we want to hear or have a firm experience is like the right type of volume coming from us and the right types of clients calling, but they’re not getting the signatures because of an intake issue. If something’s getting lost or phone calls aren’t getting made back, that’s always really disheartening for us to hear. So talking about intake in a really real way is important. That’s the third thing.

The fourth thing is anything changing operationally. I think, Lindsay, since you and I’ve been here, we’ve had three different firms talk about succession plans. And so when there’s things changing operationally, we need to know that. Are we hiring an attorney? Are we retiring? Is a son or daughter coming into the practice? Are we selling a piece of it? Are we opening a new firm in another location? Are we, you know, getting rid of a certain practice area? Like we need and want to know those things. And some of it’s just as simple as logistics. You know, if you’re opening a new office, like your marketing budget may have to like your line item for marketing may have signage and all the type of stuff under it or or print materials for business cards because you change locations.  We need to be able to like push and pull and be aware of that. Like we don’t want to put extra pressure on your marketing budget if it needs to be in that same line item. and you know even more importantly if you’re making a change in leadership or whatever, like getting the messaging right on that is really important. And so anything changing operationally like that is good for us to know.

The last thing is like what’s your actual capacity? How many cases could you take versus what you’re actually taking right now? And we have some clients that are like, I want to grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. Like the sky’s the limit. Let’s push. And then we have some clients that are like, I’m really happy. Like if I hit this same number next year, I would be ecstatic, right? And so we need to understand that too, because sometimes if we’re looking at the data and we’re like, okay, X number of cases, next year, we’re gonna push for my number of cases. And the client’s like, I don’t want to they don’t want to hire more, whatever the case may be. And so that meeting before the meeting to plan for that, for the firm to communicate with us so that we can come in with as much knowledge as possible and we’re preparing in the right way. I think that’s really important.

Even if you don’t have an agency, hopefully you’re having discussions like this with your stakeholders and making these decisions. October time frame is a good time to do that. That’s when we aim to do it. We try to get our presentations, the goal is to get them done in the month of October so that in November we can make, you know, tweaks, have discussions, make changes. And then, you know, the couple weeks in December, we’re placing buys, you know, we’re solidifying the plan that we put in place. So I think those five things are really important. They strengthen your agency partner, they strengthen you, and ultimately help us get to the right goal on the same page in the same book and making sure that we’re doing that.

Lindsay (27:03)
Yeah. Words of wisdom there. A lot you know, all of it, gold. And just a couple takeaways for me where I’m like, you know, to distill it down. Understanding the definition of success for each firm…

Haley (27:17)
Yeah.

Lindsay (27:18)
… can be wildly different based upon the size of the firm, the practice area, the DMA, succession expectations, right? So much there, right? So important and at the core of so much that we do at PMP. Yeah.

Haley (27:31)
Yeah, I think and I think the capacity piece gets left off a lot, right? Because we naturally just assume that you wanna grow and you wanna do and up, up, up, up, right. And then again, that’s not everyone. Everyone’s in a different piece in their story. But I think one of the most exciting things that happened to us earlier this year is we’re talking to a prospect and we’re deciding whether or not we’re gonna engage with them and they asked us this question that was so exciting to hear was who do we need to hire in-house to prepare to hit the ground running with you in a meaningful way? I think that’s just really insightful for owners that think that way. It’s like the crux of a capacity thing, both their capacity, but also like when you’re looking to partner with any sort of third party. But certainly with a marketing advertising vendor like us, how do we set you up for success? Do you have what you need on that side? And if growth is important to you, having the people in the right seats on that side is is really key. So I know you remember that. That was an exciting sort of moment for us when a prospect like has that insight. You’re like, they get it. They get the capacity discussion.

Lindsay (28:41)
Yeah. And that’s the kind of backbone of operations to a good partnership, right? And as a level of sophistication that does get us excited. I also it’s interesting when you were thinking through and kind of unpacking for us the the idea around intake and really having that very raw conversation, frankly, with our our partners around, what does success look like for you in cases?

Some people may feel pressured, you know, in certain seats within the firm to say, we’ll take all of them. yes, we can handle we can handle all the volume. It’s totally fine. But the reality is, going back to what you were just talking about, the realization of having robust operations in place within the firm already, whether that’s intake or other seats. Having a conversation outside of this one earlier today, you know, I was reminded of the the gaps that we often see within firms around

Something as simple as call answering, right? So being very clear eyed about if you’re you are gonna pay money to drive volume, leads, making sure you have the infrastructure inside the firm to be able to meet that supply, right? So wisdom…

Haley (29:53)
Yeah, absolutely.

Lindsay (29:55)
…to people who are planning on going through this or or about to, whether internally or externally, as you mentioned.

Haley (30:01)
Yeah, absolutely.

Lindsay (30:03)
Well, Haley, we talked through so many good points today regarding some of the new opportunities that firms have going into 2027 and the associated strategic planning that has to accompany that to really understand where they fit in within that overarching strategy and support the overarching goals of the firm. As we’re coming in for our landing on today’s conversation, what are the the key takeaways that you would like to leave everybody with?

Haley (30:27)
Yeah. So I think immediately there’s two things really that come to mind. One’s a little more PMP focused. But I think the research piece, when you talk about annual planning and you’re making decisions, national averages are one thing. They are a metric, but they’re really not the metric, you know, with legal marketing. It’s so local, it’s so DMA specific. And I think that’s something that sets PMP apart is that we invest in local research and what we’re putting in your annual planning decks are very specific to your competitors in your market. We’re not talking about national averages. We may reference those, but it’s not what we’re making our decisions on. And so I would certainly encourage you to look for a partner or look for your own research that’s very much local DMA focused. I think that’s important.

The other kind of broader stroke here to leave you with is that there really is a difference between annual planning and just renewing your buy for the next year. Those five things that I mentioned, really thinking about those with your key stakeholders and or bringing those to your agency partner and talking through those things are really important. And that really helps to make sure that you’re planning thoughtfully and not just should I renew this or not or should we move a little bit of money around or not.

That planning discussion should be much, much deeper than just what channels should we use. It it should be what’s our goal and how do we help you get there, even if it’s a three or a five year goal. So I would just encourage you to to focus on the planning and not just the renewing portion of end of year.

Lindsay (32:08)
Absolutely. such good advice there. Definitely a difference between the two and a great call-out.

Haley (32:14)
Thank you.

Lindsay (32:16)
That is another wrap for us from Law Firm Brand Builders. Thank you so much for joining us. It was a pleasure to have this conversation with the incomparable Haley Weigel today. And we look forward to joining you in the next couple of weeks for another engaging conversation about law firms and the brands that we build for them at PMP. Thank you, and we look forward to seeing you soon.

Haley (32:37)
Thanks Lindsay.

 

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