Transcript
Fransisco Wiles (00:00)
Make content, get good at it, get comfortable in front of a camera and keep doing it because I think that’s the way to activate better performance across the board.
Al Ludwig (00:07)
Fransisco Wiles, thank you for joining the Law Firm Brand Builders Podcast.
Fransisco Wiles (00:10)
Thank you for having me Al.
Al Ludwig (00:10)
So, as a paid media director for law firms across the country, what are most law firm ads doing wrong on social media?
Fransisco Wiles (00:19)
Yeah. Not filming enough content. Is what it comes down to. most law firms are just not filming enough and testing enough.
Al Ludwig (00:26)
And you think from the from the paid side as well, not just organic?
Fransisco Wiles (00:31)
All the above. Even so even with larger law firms where they tend to have somebody dedicated to filming organic content, they do a pretty good job there. But as soon as it gets to like meta ads or even YouTube ads, it’s just not enough filming or they want it to like a certain production standard when it should be just rapid testing.
Al Ludwig (00:50)
Having the phone sometime and
Fransisco Wiles (00:52)
Yes.
Al Ludwig (00:53)
speaking to camera.
Fransisco Wiles (00:54)
But they hate that. Most law firms and partners hate that. Even though sometimes often those are my best videos and the smaller law firms that we work with can sometimes just have like a forty five second video in a parking garage and that’s the top performing ad across the board and we can’t always replicate that with our larger firms because they need like a whole production and then it takes three months to get done.
Al Ludwig (01:18)
Yep. When I was in house, we we we built out a lot of our social media and we were doing content very, very, very regularly and had the ability to just play a lot. And I think that’s very valuable. I think where a lot of law firms missed the mark with it is they don’t they don’t know what to build, right? And then wh whatever they build, they want to make sure that from day one they’re they’re tracking it back to to cases and all and you should be. But there’s also a learning curve, right? Especially if you’re gonna do some of it in-house.
There’s a learning curve if no one’s there to teach them. And if the person you’re bringing in hasn’t done it successfully in the in the past. And where I find a lot of law firms fall into is we’ll bring someone internally, but it’s not someone who’s really done it to a certain level of success for another business, especially a law firm. And so they’re also figuring things out and being held to a standard that necessarily doesn’t make sense for them.
Fransisco Wiles (02:10)
I see that all the time. So some of our law firms have like fractional CMOs or they might have like a dedicated like director of marketing. And it might typically it’s from an SEO background. I don’t know why that’s always the case. Heavy SEO background versus paid. And then every time they’ve tried, you know, they’re filming content, getting things done, but they haven’t successfully, you know, made TV commercials or, you know, successful meta ad before. And it’s something this they I routinely see struggle with.
Honestly, like the marketing the twenty year old marketing managers they hire oftentimes can start doing better a lot faster than somebody with like a lot more marketing experience in terms of just raw video content because they’re willing to test and they’re looking to see what’s actually working well, but also not getting frustrated when they don’t see performance right away. Whereas I see it happen constantly where things just get shut down, the first round of videos didn’t work well. I’m not gonna do more.
Al Ludwig (03:05)
Yeah. Yeah. And do you feel like there should be a heavy focus on organic social media?
Fransisco Wiles (03:11)
Absolutely.
So I I don’t manage anything organic, but my top performing clients are ones that are already routinely filming. Without a doubt. They have some kind of frequency. They’re comfortable with the process. They might have a dedicated dedicated filming day already. The ones that are filming organic content are usually ones that are s gonna start doing really well on meta because it’s not new. It’s not like pulling teeth. They’re not scared to get in front of a camera.
It it it is I think a really good indicator that their ads are gonna go well. Not only that, you look alive when people are looking at you online or going through your profile as soon as you start running ads. And if you look like a real law firm that isn’t just posting like Canva overlay text images every two weeks and they get to see your law firm and how you interact, I think that’s also a really good way to find local clients if you know, if you’re getting some engagement or, you know, people in your community are seeing it.
There’s this particular lawyer in Boston, I think his name’s Joe, he makes rap videos for all
Al Ludwig (04:16)
I’ve
seen this guy. I’ve seen him.
Fransisco Wiles (04:19)
Yeah, call Joe. I have DM’d him on Instagram saying I would get I would run his ads for free if I can just test out all the videos that are going viral.
Al Ludwig (04:29)
Yeah. And he’s they’re they’re entertainment.
Fransisco Wiles (04:31)
The it works.
Millions of views and engagements. And I imagine he’s solo ’cause like when I click to his website, it is just like here’s a form, in some website builder. I imagine he he’s crushing it right now just by filming content and being interesting and that’s who he is. And I sure a lot of people are very happy to work with him after they see his Instagram or come across him online.
Al Ludwig (04:56)
Yeah, yeah. I it it’s it’s funny because what he’s doing, you know, kind of the the shtick, so to speak, it works because it’s entertaining, it’s unexpected. There’s definitely people out there that aren’t gonna hire him because of the shtick, right? Because of that, they don’t wanna work with someone like but there’s also people that will absolutely hire you because of it. And he’s increasing his visibility across as many people as possible. And and I have conversations with with our law firms when they’re
You’re thinking about being a little more intentional about social media, having us help them with social media, both on the organic side and the paid side. And the way I distill it down to a lot of them because a lot the guy you just talked about there, that is an exception, right?
Fransisco Wiles (05:41)
Yeah, I could firms are not feeling content that good.
Al Ludwig (05:45)
We we probably can’t create that for him, like initially, right? Like he has to have that fortitude, that idea, that personality to want to go down that. And then we can finesse it into the right direction and and and get the good videos and run the ad campaigns. but most law firms aren’t like that and don’t have someone that’s gonna do that. Or in most and a lot of them don’t wanna be perceived like that as well. Yeah.
Fransisco Wiles (06:10)
Absolutely not. It takes it takes a personality. Like another couple that come to mind are CEO lawyer, that’s definitely personality. Miami Lawyer Daddy, I don’t know if you’ve seen him on Instagram.
Al Ludwig (06:23)
I don’t I don’t think I’ve seen that one.
Fransisco Wiles (06:24)
He his name is Miami Lawyerdaddy. And just let that sink in for what you kind of think he looks like, like and how he interacts. Is it I don’t know, it has to be a personality. I don’t think most lawyers are gonna want to do that, let alone let somebody go crazy with those ideas.
Al Ludwig (06:41)
An alternative to it for law firms, especially personal injury law firms, and I have this conversation with with many of our clients, is we can sit down and do just good conversational prompts. Yeah. Find ways to have good text hooks and make the story interesting. Like, you know, we’re prompting you to talk about your most interesting case, right? And you and you let the attorney roll, you give them some prompt guidance, you you get that and you turn that into multiple videos and you do a bunch of prompting.
And you get that going and you start posting every day, and they’re they’re pretty easy to make. They don’t scare the attorney because they’re sitting there, just they’re just sitting there talking about things they know, knowing that the edit is what’s going to bring it together. And even the worst of those, when you publish it across five platforms, you’re probably looking at minimum a couple thousand views on the on the worst performing ones. And then in between those, you also get ones that hit harder.
the ones that hit better. And that’s that’s free views, right? And that’s free there’s more at bats. And the more you do it, the more you also realize what you like talking about, the more you realize what’s resonating better. And you get better on camera. You start doing other things that are maybe a little more interesting. But you know, by the way, we can also take those best ones and run them as, you know, if we’re if we’re trying just for brand building, you know, running ads, engagement ads that are still going to bring us some leads.
And then supplement that with some intentionally made lead gen ads, both video and graphic based, static based, to to generate clients for you. And then it it varies by practice area. And this is where I want to get get your kind of insight here. When we talk about social media, are there certain practice areas that you feel like it works best for?
Fransisco Wiles (08:29)
I mean, it’s really fierce. The competition is fierce and it’s hard to jumpstart a c accounts without a minimum budget. But general personal injury, car accidents, expensive to get started. I don’t know what your guys’ minimums are, but ours is a minimum of ten grand a month to get started. We really like to be at fifteen to twenty and that’s a high barrier to entry for, you know, most solos. And then I feel like slip and fall. Nobody wants but man, can you generate so many cases cheaply for it?
Nobody wants it though.
Al Ludwig (08:59)
If you say the word slip and fall in an ad, you’re getting calls. And so when I do find the law firm that wants them, I I love just putting the pedal to the metal on those and hitting them hard. Now, in that space, they don’t want them because you gotta go through a lot of them to get the ones you really want. Yeah. But if you have the systems in place, you you’re gonna make money because you’re gonna get them for a fraction of the cost of the MVA ones.
Fransisco Wiles (09:26)
Half the cost I find most of the time, or like a third. Like in Florida, I’ve seen like $500 to $750 sometimes at a larger scale of spend, all the way to like $1,500. But it really doesn’t get higher than that, I’ve found in most states. Mm-hmm. But man, every time I talk about do you want cheap premise liability or slip and fall cases, the answer is no, I want car accidents. And then if they do take slip and fall.
It quickly changes how do I get more car accidents? How do I get more VA cases? That never I’ve never had a single client want to scale up a slip and fall.
Al Ludwig (10:05)
One interesting way to get more MVA is if you can easily get the slip and fall cases in the door and you get a large number of them, you now have a larger client pool to send you referrals for MVA cases. You have those clients that when they get in erect, you should be training them that even though they came to you for slip and fall, in the future, if they get an erect, a loved one gets an erect, anybody, they should be contacting that law firm, right? and that’s where I see a
Fransisco Wiles (10:33)
It’s hard for me to justify selling them direct direct direct response meta ads where I need direct attribution and if they even have a good like referral and a referral program to get people to even do that in the first place.
Al Ludwig (10:47)
So I…
Fransisco Wiles (10:49)
Well, it’s a…
Al Ludwig (10:52)
It depends on yeah, it where in the journey with that client you are, the conversations you’re having. But if if I’m talking to a client who intentionally was like, Yeah, let’s get slip and fall, and then three months later it’s it’s working and they’re getting slip and fall, they’re like, Okay, how do I get more MVA? I’m gonna tell you how to get more MVA and we’re gonna run MVA campaigns, but I’m also gonna dive into the strategy of what are you doing with your current client base that is an MVA to make sure that they’re coming to you when that happens. Because the larger your your client base,
Over time, the more of the good cases you’re gonna get. And that’s and that’s why I I coach a lot of law firms in that like don’t turn away the the minimum policy limit case just because you know that the ROI on it isn’t gonna be as much as the ROI on a seventy-five thousand dollar case, a a six figure case. Still take that case if you could do good work, if you could still get them the client a positive outcome and you you could still make an impact on their life.
Yeah. Because there’s gonna be a lot more of those cases available than the other ones. And those people are gonna drive the six figure cases to you over time.
Fransisco Wiles (12:00)
I fully agree. Fortunately me telling that to a client so I can get cheaper signed cla cases because they have a really strict criteria and and minimums that they want is a little bit of a long shot. I’m forgetting the name of the book. I mentioned it in intake form for this. The Mike Morse’s book, Firefox.
Al Ludwig (12:18)
Fireproof. Yeah.
Fransisco Wiles (12:19)
And I I haven’t finished reading it, but I th I really resonate with a lot of what he says, how he got started and grew his firm. And I feel like a lot of
attorneys are not hungry enough to work those cases. Maybe like, you know, some of the larger firms I work with just ingest them in such high volume. But like some of these smaller attorneys I work with, I feel like are not hungry enough. And they like they keep saying those are terrible, terrible cases to work and don’t want them. So I feel very strongly about that because I I’m like, what about this? They sign it. And they’re like, yeah, it was terrible. There’s nothing to make there. And I’m just like
Al Ludwig (12:56)
I’m very empathetic to that when it comes to the the law firms and and the owners, you know, because it’s it is one thing to say it, but at the same time, certain sizes have limited resources and work in those cases, especially if it’s like the the owner, right? It takes away from a lot of the other things that he probably has to do. Right. And so if you really want to work it, you gotta build systems, you gotta get more people in place. That that in itself, early on, is gonna eat into your revenue.
And so you’re not gonna be profitable early on with the hopes that you’re gonna be more profitable later. Right. So it’s definitely it’s yeah, it’s it’s definitely a fine balance to walk with it. I just I I have not run into one law firm that decided to take that strategy that regretted it in in the future. Right. When they were
Fransisco Wiles (13:42)
Nice.
Al Ludwig (13:43)
three times, five times, seven times bigger all of a sudden. But they they had to hide
Fransisco Wiles (13:48)
probably
gonna solve that for these larger firms to a degree. I don’t know, you know, what like legal AI use you, if at all, your firm that you worked in house in was using or your own clients. I know like some of my smaller solos are getting pretty darn efficient for like speeding up some of the things that they’re doing. I think that’s the answer having more resources available for smaller cases. That at least that’s what I think.
Al Ludwig (14:17)
I think the best methods in that space with with the integrations of AI, it looks different from firm to firm and how they’re structured and and how they can utilize it. But definitely making it do the work that anybody can do, like that part of it, that speeds up a lot of the process, right? And the lawyer still has to be a lawyer. The lawyer still needs to do certain things, right? But I yeah, I think that’s that’s extremely helpful. I wanna pick your brain though on a little bit more on
social media and like w when you’re working with a client, whether it’s personal injury, work injury, mass tort, employment any any practice area, and you’re going you’re going forward with a a paid social media strategy, what’s kind of like your ideal build out in terms of the type of creative they have and the type of campaigns that they’re running. So
Fransisco Wiles (15:07)
Well, my process is fairly straightforward. I would say ninety-ninety five percent of all our creative is video at this point. Statics are supplemental. They do not scale, but they do occasionally get like, you know, sign cases depending on the practice area. So for example, we work with a large law firm in Florida. I would say probably ten percent of their sign come from statics. It’s a nice addition. They’re usually cheap, and a lot of it is around classic clients holding check.
Or testimonial videos for clients. So it’s a really good supplemental creative type, but in terms of getting any campaign off the ground for any practice area, it’s video. And typically, it’s the same kind of kind of story based ads that you were mentioning earlier. It’s, you know, I’ve seen X, and this is, you know, how we handle it. And, you know, if you’re spacing something similar, you know, reach out to us. And those kind of story based ads drive almost all of our performance.
And it’s something that any attorney can do in volume. And the occasional cheesy stuff if a if a client will do it, like having a hood of a car open B roll and some text over it, things like that. Or like, I don’t know, something less serious or more informational. But 90% of it is pretty story driven, video creative, overwhelmingly. And we run a very simple structure in terms of how that’s deployed.
Almost all our clients have just one campaign. and depending on the ad spend and X, Y, and Z, like we typically only create like a bunch of different campaigns if you have different practice areas or if you’re targeting another state. We do statewide targeting. So I I it’s because we we are pretty much direct response. We our promise to our clients is getting signed cases through Meta.
So we are not getting credit for kind of lift. So we have one client where we’re getting credit for lift on a on a certain DMA where we started it, it spends like 10 to 15 grand a month. And they said the baseline after our ads were running after a few months, their baseline sign cases started rising. We have only one client who’s been able to measure that. So statewide targeting is absolute minimum for us. And we run CBO campaigns if we’re getting into weeds of it.
And we launch new creative in their own ad sets and we pretty much let meta decide what’s gonna be a winner and we’ll, you know, with enough budget, we’ll force minimum ad spend of the cost per lead a day for like seven days to see. And then if it doesn’t work, remove it, it’ll stop spending. if it works, it’ll spend more. So fairly simple structure that’s very much creative led. And then to kind of tie in that performance aspect of it for kind of meta ads is
We got to connect the CRM. We have not seen a consistent performing meta account until we started connecting every single one of our law firms CRMs, whether that’s Ledify or Lead Docket or Lawmatics. I don’t like Clio. I never want to work with that again. don’t suggest Clio. It’s awful for marketing. But connecting it and reporting back every lead stage back to Meta has been the biggest difference for performance. Cause now when I open up meta ads, I can see down to the ad level leads, if they made contact, turndowns, retainer sent, signed, kept, you know, whatever their lead stages are, we see it down to the ad level, which has made a big difference.
Al Ludwig (18:47)
Do you have trouble with some of your clients getting that to happen, getting them to make sure it gets all connected and the processes in place where it’s sending back the appropriate data that really helps it?
Fransisco Wiles (18:58)
Yes. recently we had the Connect Monday dot com. It’s a f the only law firm I’ve ever worked with that’s using Monday for their intake and kind of case management. And that was a it’s taken typically like two to three weeks to onboard and get connected, meet the team members, get access to things. It’s taken almost a month and some change. Working with their head of IT, their marketing person. I’m sure you you’ve seen it no matter the size of the law firm. Access is all over the place typically. Yeah. Unless they’re I would say a lot more established and bigger law firm and then they have like people who know what they’re doing for everything. But in this case, I’ve been working with their like CTO to figure out how to connect Monday to dump everything back. It was it’s a lot of work, but it’s a baseline minimum for performance for us. It truly makes a world of difference once you do that for every single client and you make that like the minimum for your process. Because how do you make better ads if you don’t know what’s signing in the first place?
Because I can see now ads that generate a lot of lead flow, but almost always have a very high cost per signed or just a ridiculous amount of turndown to signed. And we turn those ads off.
Al Ludwig (20:11)
Yeah. Do you when you said the ones that generate a lot of leads, but maybe maybe not a lot of cases, do you find that there is a common thread that you you can see and helps you learn in the creation of the ads? ‘Cause when I hear that I go, it was probably an ad that unintentionally was slightly more generic than it should have been. And so and so it led to more leads, but not the ones we necessarily wanted.
Fransisco Wiles (20:35)
Yeah. So and again, we’ve played around over the like the last six months a lot of our initial qualifying questions for intake, especially for general personal injury and car accidents. We used to have like a more general kind of form that allowed people to select anything like let’s say premise or workers comp or something like that versus just MVA focused questions and
What we learned is that some of our ads were just generating an obscene amount of slip and fall over car accidents, which kind of as we rapidly scale some campaigns, shot ourselves in the foot because we started flip flopping between premise, premise, excuse me, and car accidents. And at at a larger span, like fifty to eighty grand a month, week over week the client was getting really upset with the wildly different performance in cases they were signing. So yes, and it tends to be the generic and then the
The front end form was also a little too generic and open versus being very focused.
Al Ludwig (21:29)
Yeah.
Yeah, and I I think that speaks to the importance of connecting back that data from the CRM to Meta, to Google, to anywhere else, because if you’re judging if it’s basing it off of the leads, it’s going to optimize towards whatever is performing more, right? In this case, unintentionally slip and fall. But if they’re feeding back that case data.
hopefully it’s correcting itself each and every time and and still going more for those intentional MVA cases or more catastrophic personal injury cases as opposed to the slip and falls.
Fransisco Wiles (22:02)
That’s something we haven’t figured out how to do better reporting on for clients is like more catastrophic cases coming back in a different way. ‘Cause usually they that’s not marked with the lead statuses and like Litify or Lead Docket specifically. That’s probably the next steps, but I don’t think most of our accounts are big enough to really start focusing on that yet. When the goal is to start getting meta to drive signed cases. ‘Cause I don’t know if you’ve kind of seen this, but
A lot of law firms that spend a lot of money buying cases or leads, there’s still a lot of them that are not successfully running meta ads themselves, which is really surprising. the more this and the more we get on sales polls, those can be nightmare clients because like they expect you to hit performance metrics the right away. But a lot of them don’t have successful meta ads or they’re not measuring the their success well compared to, you know, the $200,000 they’re spending on cases every day.
Al Ludwig (22:59)
Yeah. Yeah. And we’ve had clients where we’ve implemented large scale meta ad campaigns, some nationally, some more regionally. And they were buying leads as well from those areas. And they came back and told us, you know, once it got off, once it got lifted off and once they started really seeing things coming the door, it was coming in cheaper under their own brand. It’s like, yeah, that’s and that’s our goal. I wanted to come in cheaper under your own brand because I want you to have the brand lift.
But also wants you to act it to actually generate the cases for you. and so that was kind of an interesting case study in that because historically the firm had had always bought a lot of leads and you know, I I bought a lot of leads whenever I was in house. I we did every aspect of marketing.
Fransisco Wiles (23:46)
And I understand it, like, because at the end of the day, when you’re buying cases and leads, they’re running ads that you will never be able to run and hit a certain audience that you’re never gonna really get in front of. Like the the biggest kind of one right now are all the AI ads, like characters like Pixar and Fruit and everything like that. Not
Al Ludwig (24:06)
Yeah.
Fransisco Wiles (24:07)
a single law firm is gonna approve any of those ads that I’m working with right now. But like that’s gonna hit a certain demographic of people.
that are not gonna watch a generic lawyer ad, that’s boring. So
Al Ludwig (24:17)
The other aspect of it, like perspective I had, where we we wanted to be the biggest, the best, and grow up into the right continuously. And it and it was when I’m running, say, Google Ads, I’m seeing the the lead sellers in there more often than I’m seeing my local competition. So it it was cool. If I if I partner with them, then I’m now I have my ad, I have their ad, I have my LSA, my my SEO is doing great.
And all of this is combined together. It’s like I almost have full full real estate for all this bottom of the funnel stuff if I’m also buying the lease, right? That means I’m doing it at a I’m I’m kind of double dipping, right? And and paying a little bit of premium to make sure that I’m I’m backfilling with the ones that maybe wouldn’t have hired us. So I I I do think it has its place. what I don’t like are the the ones that are unethical, right? The ones that are a little snake oil.
The ones that I I’ve actively seen basically take money from people I know and disappear, right? I’ve seen ones that get in trouble, close down shop and just open up another business. Those are the ones that give the whole legal marketing, you know, a a bad name. It’s very visible. But I you know, I a well curated plan, everything has its has its place. But yeah, it’s it’s interesting that you just kinda speak to that. Cause I do think that when a law firm runs it themselves, they all they have an opportunity to to either perform even better.
than the ones that they’re buying or supplement it. And now they’re getting two flows of it in. And if if the profitability makes sense, then keep on going with it. Absolutely.
Fransisco Wiles (25:52)
Absolutely. And like a clear example I’m seeing for a client right now, our baseline like kept our true cost per signed. Like their main goal is between five and six grand. And they’re paying like right above with the cases that they’re buying from sellers. And it’s taken a long time for us to get everything really dialed in. But like this month, we’re starting to see their cost per sign be front end cost per sign be sub $2,000.
And then we see like the drop rate increase over like a month, month or two. And it’s as we scale up the account and it’s getting better on our front end intake, our ads are getting better. We’re seeing that rate drop. So last month we were at thirty five percent and that’ll probably creep up to like forty, forty five percent. But now we’re well under what they’re seeing from what they’re from what they’re buying. And they buy a lot. So it takes time, it’s hard, it takes a lot of focus. we almost lost that client ’cause like
It took a while to build it up and get the creative done to get there. And like we had some months where it like costs jumped through the roof as we were figuring it out and trying to scale up the account. We scaled a little bit too rapidly and that ended up breaking a lot of things. So but the long term is you have a consistent you have consistent lead gen and case generation that you own. That can scale up as you get better at it. Because all these other guys are doing, they’re middlemen for typically what I see as meta and YouTube ads.
Which a lot of law firms are s struggle with.
Al Ludwig (27:20)
Yeah. Well, that’s probably why it works so well for them, right? Because I think a lot of law firms struggle with doing those things themselves. And so it’s an open area to go ahead and do it for the the lead sellers. You know, I think a lot of law firms invest heavily in Google Ads, obviously broadcast TV, billboards, and and a lot of other things where it would be hard to try to jump into those in the same manner as compared to Meta or compared to YouTube.
Fransisco Wiles (27:48)
Right. and again, they’re also not willing to test the same kind of creative as these case sellers are doing as well.
Al Ludwig (27:54)
Yeah.
I think I a as a law firm you want to know what creatives out there, you know, generating those le those leads for you that are being sold back, right? Because things are getting tighter and tighter. Things are being looked at more and more. And you would hate to be the law firm that is used to make an example of if it ever go you know, does go down that that route.
Fransisco Wiles (28:16)
coming.
Somebody we’re gonna see a a news story here soon about one of these law firms that are buying obscene amount of leads and it ends up I think you commented on the video I posted recently about the specific landing page I saw where every single click was like a hundred thousand dollars on the intake form, two hundred thousand dollars, all the way up to a million dollars once you answer all your questions correctly on what your estimated case value is. I think it’s coming. I it’s like more and more states are cracking down on it.
I haven’t seen any kind of news on anybody’s hands getting slapped yet or fines, but it has to be coming soon because the industry is so competitive. Cause I keep my ear to the ground on lead sellers. I participate in those groups. I see what these guys are doing. And like you’d be surprised at the amount of like twenty four year old just gone into meta ads being hyper aggressive there is with some money that are pretty good at running meta ads and making ads. And it’s fiercely competitive.
And it’s just getting even more so on all platforms. And then you have private equity money coming in and purchasing up some firms or other larger firms doing the same and in vet like injecting a lot of cash. So it’s just gonna get more expensive. So it’s gonna get more aggressive.
Al Ludwig (29:30)
Yeah, that’s that’s one thing I I do talk about a lot about is if you love your cost per acquis or you if you hate your cost per acquisition right right now, you’re gonna hate it more in each additional each additional year, right? It but it but it speaks to the importance of looking at your the entire firm as a full system, right? And what what can you do to increase your your case values? What can you do to to get your clients more money? Because if you can increase your average
case value, then you can swallow some of that additional cost per acquisition. And a matter of fact, if you’re doing so good on your case values, you can objectively spend more on the cost per acquisition and make it harder for your competition because they’re trying to stay within certain normalizations for in what makes sense to them. A final thing, because I I I know we’re we only have so much time, you talked about a good bit about creative and the video creative, all that. Do you go in and help the firms make the creative?
Fransisco Wiles (30:29)
We are starting to because a lot of the firms we work with, you’d be surprised at how many firms hire us, refuse to film anything, and pay us for months to only deliver five videos. We email them, we call them almost every single day. I’m not even kidding. This is a big reoccurring problem. And they will film five videos and then get upset when those five videos don’t hit off the bat, or they were so uncomfortable in front of the camera, it’s just like they did
They didn’t turn out well even with scripts that we know work pretty well. So yes, we are starting to offer it. We have our team will fly out and we will shoot anywhere from I don’t know, I think our goal is ninety days worth of video. So our goal is to have at least fifty videos to get filmed. And anywhere from one to three days, depending on the the law firm and if they have multiple people to film X, Y, and Z. But yes, that is something we’re starting to offer and really push.
This is absolutely necessary.
Al Ludwig (31:26)
It’s hard when you without going there, right? Because you you’re not in control of the creative, you’re not in control in control of the execution of it unless there’s someone there that’s working with you as a partner. and w we kind of do the a similar thing where w when we go to a client for social media video, we’re planning to get as much as possible, right? At least three months worth of content we can push out and ads that we could run for a very long time and obviously
Changing them based off of performance. But even with that, you can end up editing more ads out of it just from the the content you got there. And then the firms that work best are the ones that also have someone internally who is available to get content when you have an idea, when you need it. One one of the firms that that does the best that we work with, he’s f that they’re filming pretty much every, every other week. They’re doing podcasts and
We’re also we’ll send them scripts and tell them exactly how we want it. They’ll shoot them, they’ll send them over to us. We’ll do all the editing and the cleaning up, all that. because we have certain ideas for the the ad campaigns, ’cause we see something working in a different way than what was working two months ago. But definitely it’s definitely more advantageous to kind of be there. So it’s like, I’m gonna hold your hand for four hours today. Right. And then I’ll fly back home.
Fransisco Wiles (32:47)
Cause then you can also give pushback when they start in injecting things on the script. my gosh. I you probably deal with this all the time. Working with a law firm, sent them over scripts that I know work well. A hundred and fifty percent know that these work if they’re filmed with a confident
Al Ludwig (33:00)
The are out.
Fransisco Wiles (33:01)
They started every script with Hi, my name is X, Y, and Z about so and so law firm. And I’m like, You just wasted all this time. Now we have to do an awkward cut on all these videos. And guess what? They wanted to run those videos.
eight hundred dollar cost per lead. As soon as we made that edit, it was still a little awkward intro. It cut down to like two hundred bucks. Like overnight.
Al Ludwig (33:22)
Yeah, ’cause i i if they do that, they’re not leading with the hook that you want them to lead with, right? And and you’re having to ’cause I I’m imagining if they start it like that, they also probably aren’t following the hook and script that you put together. So then you’re having to go in the edit and try to figure out, okay, w now what’s the new best place for me to start this? But then like you said, it’s sometimes the client ultimately it’s the client’s product.
Fransisco Wiles (33:45)
Yes. They want to prefer their girls and certainly.
Al Ludwig (33:47)
I say,
no, I’m not gonna authorize this until it has the intro that I want at the beginning of it. You can say everything you want, but but they’re but at the end of the day, they’re in charge, right? But we can coach and guide them. Usually I don’t run into too many issues when it comes to that. It’s like, well no, we really need to do it like this and here’s why. But every now and then, you know, they have a certain way of of how they like to see something and and we have to be cognizant of that and just let them know, Hey, I think it’s doing this to your cost per acquisition.
Fransisco Wiles (34:16)
I don’t even say I think. I I fit I find just being very direct at this point being the answer. But and one thing I think a lot of law firms and then like legal agencies kind of need to take a page from are like direct to consumer e-commerce and how they like run ads and their strategy across the board. I think a lot of law firms need a dedicated creative strategist for all their ad channels and content that they film. And ’cause like a direct to consumer e-commerce business
has like a creative agency. They have a creative strategist. They have actors that they just pay based on performance with creative they film. So if they have one one script or kind of video style that works really well, they give it to everybody and everybody makes more money. Based off that I think law firms could probably learn to kind of get in the habit of delivering that much creative more frequently and then paying based off it because a law firm can make exponentially more money on the right
sign case than you know, a you know, a hundred dollar shopping cart. Yep.
Al Ludwig (35:19)
Right.
And that’s yeah, there’s definitely creative lessons to learn from from other areas. and then on the same token, there’s always things to keep in mind with with the the creative or the executionist. this is where I beat my head against the wall with Google, right? Because Google always has these recommendations. And Google looks at things through an e-commerce lens. And when you’re talking personal injury law, it couldn’t be anything further from it, right? And so
ninety percent of the recommendations they come with it’s just like no like we we’re not doing that, right? It’s gonna ruin everything that we’re putting
Fransisco Wiles (35:55)
Max with all the image optimization and YouTube ads on. What do you mean? You’re gonna get cheaper leads even though they’re like thousands of random porn cells.
Al Ludwig (36:05)
You need to turn on AI Max because you’re you’re throttling your your the amount of people you can serve to. But you turn on AI Max and you show up for state form phone number.
Fransisco Wiles (36:16)
Or you start showing up for lawyer near me and who knows what those people are looking for.
Al Ludwig (36:21)
Hundred percent, man. it’s usually when Google has a recommendation, I’m like, Okay, we should do the opposite.
Fransisco Wiles (36:26)
I’d be curious to get your take on Google ads. Do you guys have like a baseline like recommendation on ad spend for personal injury at this point?
Al Ludwig (36:35)
For so for personal injury, you know, I don’t wanna see anything below ten thousand dollars a month for sure. and we in when you say personal injury, I assume you’re talking more motor vehicle accidents.
Fransisco Wiles (36:46)
Either or, either or. I personal injury is like the lower barrier to entry ’cause like I know a certain portion of personal injury learning researches are gonna include car accidents. Yeah. And also everything else because all the all the advertising is mostly for car accidents. So I know there’s a good segment of car accidents in there.
Al Ludwig (37:04)
Yeah. So I I like to start at that at least that much, but sometimes, you know, it it depends on where are you located, how big of a target are we going after, how competitive is is that market. And then also layering in the the expectation where it’s hey, your budget’s ten thousand, right? If if you’re ex if you’re expecting ten cases from this, then this is we’re not the right people for you. I mean.
For for for MVA, right? But if if they come and tell me that that they want workers’ compensation or general injury or employment law and some like ’cause we we work with with law firms in many different practice areas and like I we ran one very successful social media campaign recently that also layered in some some Google in there for the people that were smart enough to know to search for a lawyer, but it was very little, right? Where we ended up getting the cases for three hundred dollars per for the case. But it was to it was
the type of event that that works well for. an MVA, you know, if if I get you two cases off of ten thousand dollars, like it’s that didn’t fail.
Fransisco Wiles (38:16)
Yeah.
Al Ludwig (38:17)
And
then we and we might have a month where you get four cases, right? And over time it it balances out. And so I think a lot of his client education and making sure they know
Fransisco Wiles (38:26)
Kind of like what we’ve struggled with with Google ads is the wildly very the wild variations in like cost per site performance on lower spend. And I typically find lower spend on Google ads for like car accidents and generally personal injury like less than thirty thousand dollars at this point. Like if you can’t spend a thousand dollars a day in most markets, I I see like an average cost per click in most major cities at two hundred bucks at this point.
Al Ludwig (38:50)
Yeah, I I can tell you when I had the most success in Google Ads, it was when I was running a market domination play. It was I was looking at impression share, top of page rate, absolute top of page rate, click click share, and then my actualized click share based off of the impression share. And then cross referencing that and sending in the data from intake. Right. And that’s where I saw the most success because ultimately it it wasn’t a cheap play.
But it was a play where there were some markets where, according to those, those those formulas, we were getting four out of every five clicks that we wanted to show up for. That’s awesome.
Fransisco Wiles (39:29)
So that’s really cool.
Al Ludwig (39:30)
And w but it was also a very, very tight bottom of the funnel campaigns. And that also did a good job of helping keep people out of the auctions, right? They come in and they see like God, I can’t compete with that.
Fransisco Wiles (39:42)
yeah.
Al Ludwig (39:42)
But you have to have a lot of money to do it.
Fransisco Wiles (39:45)
That’s what I find ’cause like at this point for car accidents, if you don’t have what I consider an enterprise budget to get started at like a hundred grand a month, how do you expect to dominate a
Al Ludwig (39:55)
Like
Fransisco Wiles (39:56)
Why
do you absolutely dominate Atlanta in the suburbs or in
Al Ludwig (40:00)
La
layering further layering even further into that.
Fransisco Wiles (40:04)
Yeah.
Al Ludwig (40:06)
Back when I was in house, I would I would run truck campaigns. Cause if someone was smart enough to mention an eighteen wheeler or a truck or anything like that, I I did not care what happened at intake. I wanted the shot at. Yeah. And so we aggressively bit on those. And there were months where it would spend a lot and not yield any case we could track back to it. Right. But then all of a sudden there was a month where there was two of them and both of them were very large cases. And so it
Fransisco Wiles (40:32)
That’s
the hard part that
Al Ludwig (40:33)
You
can’t how do you judge that on a month to month basis? It’s very hard to. You need to judge it on a a philosophical basis. Like I believe that this is going to work over the long term and judge it over that. And it but it’s hard to do that when, as you said, you you don’t have like the enterprise budgets. But if you but if you if you do have the right expectation in mind and are and are agreed upon on how this is going to be judged with the client and that client stays to that, I still think it’s it’s a it’s a perfectly
Fine place to generate cases at a a good profit. One
Fransisco Wiles (41:08)
Right.
Al Ludwig (41:09)
one thing to personal injury.
Fransisco Wiles (41:10)
At the agency level, it’s harder to get the buy-in for that. I think that’s where having like in house and having the right marketing leader in a position to do that who understands like, hey, this is gonna spend a lot of money, but like one million dollar eighteen wheeler truck accident case will pay for everything and more. Right. So it’s really hard when you’re just like, All right, another month without leads, another month without leads. Or like we got a lead and you know the
Al Ludwig (41:37)
I did a multi million dollar push into a market and within four months we pulled out an amazing case that was gonna pay for a large majority of the marketing spend in that market. And that was one that we were jumping into, right? It so we were trying to figure out like we it it has to work for us to sustain it long term, but you get that one win and you go, Okay, great. My marketing budget for the years almost paid for with that one case. And that’s the
Interesting bit of personal injury and motor vehicle accidents that you can’t replicate in in most industries, right? A sneaker’s going to sell for sell for the price and profitability that your sneakers sell for, period. And you have a perfect average. But the outliers in personal injury are always so crazy. And and also in the personal injury space, think firms, these law firm businesses, right? They got spoiled to great margin, right? When we talk a back in the day when I could get a five, six X margin on a
fifteen hundred dollar cost per case and then now even being able to get like a four X margin on a five thousand dollar cost per case depending on the on the setup of the law firm. Like that’s a ton of profitability, especially when you compare it to e commerce and other in other areas that sometimes if they can get one point five, they’re doing good.
Fransisco Wiles (42:56)
Yeah, on front end cold cold audiences, yeah, one point five is amazing.
Al Ludwig (43:01)
And
and then you gotta look at the lifetime value thereafter, right? And once you have those measurements in place and the the history in place, you’re able to say, okay, yeah, this case cost me five thousand dollars. But based off of my referral rates and the average cost per case of of client referral, past client referrals, each one of those is now is actually worth one point two eight times more than what I got for that case. Right. And and if you can nail that down.
It helps you guide towards a a budget that makes a little more sense ’cause you’re factoring in the future advantage of having that client on board now.
Fransisco Wiles (43:43)
Are you guys able to measure that effectively for your clients or is it case by case basis?
Al Ludwig (43:48)
Measuring it i it’s one of those things where if if someone’s internal and running the shop well, it it you can do it. It’s hard to scale that client by client from the agency side because they all operate differently and and and and you don’t know truly how how well they’re reporting on it. Whereas if you have a law firm that just already reports on it, then you know that they have a the system in place and that’s how they’re judging it.
Right. So you’re able to more appropriately do that. So for me, it’s more having the the higher level philosophical conversation sometimes, unfortunately, and them understanding and buy and and buying into that that theory because they they know it’s true, because they’ve seen it in action, they just haven’t turned it into a data point yet. Yeah.
Fransisco Wiles (44:38)
Yeah. It’s something I’ve we’ve been kind of thinking about more over here. How can we be more involved in those conversations to kind of start doing like a deeper analysis and kind of instilling those things? ‘Cause I you I’m sure you deal with this every day with the smaller clients, but like all these leads are terrible and it turns out they take six hours to respond to a call. For respond to you know.
Al Ludwig (45:01)
Yeah, well I mean it’s it’s w we take it as our our responsibility to to report on that, communicate to that with them, tell them the the values that they missed out on. You know, what’s that what’s the price of that phone call? What’s that phone call worth? What’s the re what’s the cost of of a review? What’s a one store review worth? What’s a five store review worth? And creating objective measures for those so that they can feel and understand the bleed of what’s happening there.
and I feel like the the better you’re able to define that, the better it it works out. So Fransisco, I know we’re running up on time now. So I wanna leave you with one one last sixty seconds of you know, if there’s anything if a law firm owner came up to you and asked, What’s the most important thing for me to know right now, what is it?
Fransisco Wiles (45:48)
Make content, get good at it, get comfortable in front of a camera and keep doing it until you’re really good because I think that’s the the way to activate better performance across the board.
Al Ludwig (45:57)
Love
it. Well, Fransisco, I appreciate everything. Thanks for coming on.
Fransisco Wiles (46:01)
Yeah, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.