On today’s episode of SEO Insider, Seth Price is joined by Todd Richheimer, founder of the law firm digital marketing company Lawfty. They talk about PPC challenges that COVID-19 has brought to the industry and the current volatility of the law marketing world. Todd explains the importance of economic consistency, choosing worthwhile PPC campaigns, and selecting the best keywords when bidding. The two deliberate over the possible contrast between a perfect branded landing page and the number of clicks on a page with an immediate response. They discuss the prevalence of influencers and how using social media in a relatable manner can help reach a wider audience.
Todd’s firm, Lawfty Law, can be found at https://lawftylaw.com/ and more episodes of Seth’s SEO Insider series can be found at www.blusharkdigital.com/seo-insider.
For more helpful tips on legal SEO, check out BluShark’s other channels:
WEBSITE: https://blusharkdigital.com/
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/blusharkdigital/
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/blusharkdigital/
LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blushark-digital
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/blusharkdigital/
#LegalMarketing #PPC #DigitalMarketing
On today’s episode of SEO Insider, Seth Price is joined by Todd Richheimer, founder of the law firm digital marketing company Lawfty. They talk about PPC challenges that COVID-19 has brought to the industry and the current volatility of the law marketing world. Todd explains the importance of economic consistency, choosing worthwhile PPC campaigns, and selecting the best keywords when bidding. The two deliberate over the possible contrast between a perfect branded landing page and the number of clicks on a page with an immediate response. They discuss the prevalence of influencers and how using social media in a relatable manner can help reach a wider audience.
Todd’s firm, Lawfty Law, can be found at https://lawftylaw.com/ and more episodes of Seth’s SEO Insider series can be found at www.blusharkdigital.com/seo-insider.
For more helpful tips on legal SEO, check out BluShark’s other channels:
WEBSITE: https://blusharkdigital.com/
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/blusharkdigital/
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/blusharkdigital/
LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blushark-digital
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/blusharkdigital/
#LegalMarketing #PPC #DigitalMarketing
BluShark Digital
Welcome to the SEO insider with your host, Seth Price, founder of BluShark, taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.
Seth Price
Welcome, everybody. We're thrilled to have Todd Richheimer here. He is the founder of Lawfty, both a law firm and a digital marketing PPC juggernaut. Welcome, Todd.
Todd Richheimer
Hey, Seth, thanks for having me. I much appreciate it.
Seth Price
Hey, you know, we met a number of years ago, and it's been really interesting to see you guys both grow and develop. You know, you guys probably are in more markets doing PPC than just about anybody. What do you see right now? What is the lay of the land? We have LSAs out there now, which have obviously, you know, if you're playing Yahtzee, scrambled all the, the dice. You know, what's the, what are you seeing right now?
Todd Richheimer
Yeah, it was, it was really kind of Google to throw in LSAs at the tail end of COVID, right? It's like, you think the world is going back to normal, and then they shake it up again. You know, a lot of volatility, I think is really the takeaway. You know, COVID really ended up the market. Obviously, less people out and about, there's less injuries, so for those advertising for personal injury cases, it was, it was a struggle. We had to figure out a really nice strategy that worked, and we did well through COVID, but you really had to be on top of it. And so, the volatility was really high. I'll say the beginning part of this year especially, and, you know, I think it was a combination of factors. I think, one, you had the tail end of COVID, and that spike, you know, in January and February, which sort of reduced volume. You had the rollout of LSAs, which up-ended up the market. And then third, and this has always been a hypothesis of mine, can't necessarily prove it, but I think that at the beginning of every year, you almost have like, what I call like the going to the gym, New Year's resolution, where you have small businesses around the country that say, alright, this is the year I'm going to advertise. This is the year I'm going to be on top of my business, and it's dumb money that floods the market. And I think that those three collided and really, really created a lot of volatility. That said, you know, May into June, things are looking more back to normal.
Seth Price
And it's like, I could speak for Price Benowitz, right? So, the law firm, which is my test kitchen, you know, I was freaking out, you know, fourth, end of fourth beginning of first quarter. It was really bizarre. You know, just lead gen and you were, you know, and then yet, all of a sudden, you snap your fingers and like, the last month, you know. May, June really a different, a different beast.
Todd Richheimer
No, that's exactly right, and, you know, what made me feel better is, you and I go to the conferences and whatnot, just talking to people and hearing that our experience was in line with what others are seeing around the market.
Seth Price
It is so true, right? There's so much when you go to conferences, it's not just true for PI conferences that I saw you at. You go to a white-collar conference, and my law partner does white-collar and he loves it, right? But every single guy, it's like a, it's like almost like a broken record how "we're so busy, so busy, but if you have more business for me, it'd be great!" And it's like, you know, there's, there's not an honest conversation as far as, you know what, this was a really bad month. You know, one of those months where like, if this continued for a number of months, we'd have real issues. And so, it's just fascinating. What were some of the things that, you know, tips or hacks that you have, that you, that got you through COVID? What did you find worked when other stuff was not?
Todd Richheimer
Yeah, you know, and I will say two things. I mean, I love the love the Warren Buffett quote, you know, "buy into fear, sell into greed." You know, and I think it was that combined with, and this is the overarching sort of tip that I give everybody COVID or not COVID, It's consistency, right? It's, the month is an arbitrary amount of time. And we've all gotten in this habit of doing our budgets and judging performance on a monthly basis. You're gonna see a whole lot of volatility over a month, and so, my tip is that you have to remain consistent. Month in, month out, no different than if you're investing into the stock market, right? The idea of dollar cost averaging. Month in, month out, put your money into the marketplace. And what you're going to do is give you actual data that you can react to what's going on. And so, what we did in COVID is we stayed on course and what happened was, is so many small businesses, so many law firms around the country, fled the market, and as we increased ads or ad spend incrementally, what we realized is that the arbitrage between the people leaving the market and the people that were still in it was, or the - I'm sorry, the reduction in accidents, compared to the firms leaving the market - there was this arbitrage that we were able to take advantage of.
Seth Price
Right. So basically, you know, but the consistency, let me ask you a question. You're talking about consistency from an economic point of view, that for PPC, it's generally not the great thing about what you're doing. You focus primarily on, on injury but that, in that world, it's not, it's not like you're building a brand, generally. It is consistency as far as just getting that return on investment. While some clicks or calls may cost you more over the course of time, if you're consistent with putting that money out there, that you're going to get those, those, when some people hypothetically turn their spend off Thursday through Sunday, let's put let's say that you're able to take advantage of the fact that there are less buyers in the market or people, as we know, right? When COVID hit people just completely contracted their, their ad buy that you just had more in the cost of media went down enough at different points during the month that you were able to take advantage of that.
Todd Richheimer
That's exactly right. When I say consistency, I'm referring to ad spend, right? Is putting as much money into the market as the month, as the market will absorb good returns on investment. Now, I have to add this, this story, I mean, we did have to reduce ad spend during COVID, right? But we were still able to spend a very large percentage of our budget by remaining the course. The other thing I'll say is, and I think a lot of firms get this wrong, is that I'll use your Thursday through Sunday example, right? Leaving the marketplace isn't the answer, you may want to reduce your bids, right? Those days may not be as valuable to you. But I'm not a believer in ever leaving the market, right? I think you're much better off being consistent and figuring out what the days of week, hours per day, times of year, right, are worth to you from a value perspective and then adjusting your bidding strategy accordingly.
Seth Price
So, one of these, and I ask a lot of our guests and I'll throw this to you, I think you learned a lot through mistakes as you guys have tested more things. What are some of the things that you've tried and you know, in the end, it didn't work that you intuitively thought would that might help some of the viewers as they're sort of putting their money into the market?
Todd Richheimer
Absolutely. I think it's what I call sort of the needle in the haystack problem, and I think that a lot of law firms, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of marketing agencies try and do this, is you have these events that will happen, right? These mass events, a building explodes in the Bronx, this was the example that happened to us early on, a building explodes in the Bronx, and you think that you could throw a PPC campaign out there to capture clients as they're coming in. And what you realize quickly is, you could spend a whole lot of money real fast because you get caught up in the news cycle, and you're picking up too much traffic that's unrelated to people actually looking for lawyers. And so, I think that, and that's a, that's a very extreme example, right? Because there's a small number of people in one isolated location, but I think that you have to be very careful of saying how many people have actually been injured in this accident, and, you know, is this PPC campaign worthwhile? So, that'd be one example of a marketing mistake I've made. There are loads of entrepreneurial mistakes.
Seth Price
We've got a whole podcast discussing the mistakes I've made and learning from them, because half the time that's how you get there. Really, let me throw this out to the market, because you see people you're talking to and doing PPC. What are some of the things that you see people doing or talking about doing where, from your perspective, they may or may not be, it's sort of a truism, or what you, what people think is working, but you looking at the data at a macro level, the way you guys do, that has demonstrated to you that maybe that that's a overstated concept or one that may not really have the effect people think it does?
Todd Richheimer
Yeah, so the first one, and I'll pick a different one, because I don't want to be repetitive, but would be the consistency issue, is people pulling their money from the marketplace at the most random times. The second one would be, if I walk into one more conference room and have a lawyer tell me, "I want to bid on traumatic brain injury", or "I want to bid on, you know, trucking accident", Yeah, that's got a place in the, in your marketing campaign for sure. Absolutely. But like, that is not a key to success, right? And, you know, I see lawyers, I see lawyers all the time, buying sort of the- and I love, I'll give you a shout out for a second, and then I'll answer your question, is I love how substantive your podcast is. I think that there's a lot of noise in the marketplace, and I love how you have brought on people that are experts within their domains. And I forget who the guest was, but I was, was listening to your one of your podcasts that made me think of this. There's got to be a, it's got to be a holistic strategy, right? You can't just bid on these high-priced keywords and expect to have a robust response. And what I was referring to in one of your earlier podcasts was... I'm sorry, I lost my train of thought, but anyway, it would be, it'd be this idea- oh I got it! It was related to the idea that there's a whole lot of vendor mistrust in the marketplace. There's a lot of people that have been taken advantage of and I think that this is another piece of advice that I would give is that oftentimes lawyers will have a marketing vendor come into their office and they'll promise them the world and they'll say, "I'm going to bid on truck accident lawyer, I'm going to bid on traumatic brain injury, and get all these catastrophic cases." There is nobody that has the data to do that effectively. And in fact, that's what Lawfty's after is mapping out this entire conversion funnel and figuring out what type of search terms will lead to that type of traffic. And so, I think a common mistake is allocating too much of your budget to those high-priced keywords.
Seth Price
Because they're expensive! You could use all of your budget, and it's, and half of it is your competitors looking at the other truck accident lawyers and saying, "Who's, who's doing this?"
Todd Richheimer
That's exactly right, and what I'd add to that is another mistake that lawyers make is not fully understanding what their acquisition costs are, right? So, like, the key to running good marketing is to fully understand what your acquisition costs are. And now, you have to separate the world, right? You're in the world of brand building and stuff, and it gets a lot harder in that space, and there are probably different metrics you could focus on, but in my world, right? We're focused exclusively on direct response related stuff, no brand at all, you've got to know what your acquisition costs are. And, you know, that'll dictate and the problem with these high-priced keywords is nobody can say to you, "okay, if you bid on Truck Accident Lawyer, you're going to pay $50,000 assigned case, right? That will monetize or whatever that number is." If you knew that, at that point is just a math equation, right? But nobody can tell you that. Instead they come into your office, and they say, "Okay, you can expect cases that 1,500 or 2,000. And if we've been on traumatic brain injury, yeah, one day, you'll get a truck accident case", but you don't know what that acquisition costs are, so it makes it very hard to make those decisions.
Seth Price
Well, right. So, two things come out of that, right? One is, you know, that is one of those things we're not honest about. People come to you and I, and say, you know, you know, I'm paying referral fees, and I know your model includes a referral fee, but people who are paying referral fees without anything else, and they're sort of like judging marketing versus paying a third out. If you could pay $50,000 for truck accident cases, you do that all day long. Like there are very few truck accident cases that are less than $150,000 settlements, you know, and so the idea that you are trying to $1,500 a case is nonsense, because that's really for just a motor vehicle, soft tissue baseline versus, you know, if you've had, if you could do truck action cases for less than 100,000 a piece, you would likely buy them, you know.
Todd Richheimer
Yeah, you know, that's exactly right. And the way, that the way that we do it, and, you know, I think there's different ways to look at it, it's another piece of advice I give to lawyers is like, really understanding what return on investment is, and then also what the implications of time are on the finance term would be IRR, internal rate of return, right? Like understanding the differences between those things because then you could start, you know, figuring out, like, is that traffic worth it to me? And so, from our perspective, you know, we play in the volume space, right? Our idea is to generate as much traffic as possible, and then make sure that it's getting the proper attention. And so, that's everything from the fender bender through the catastrophic injury.
Seth Price
In that room, I, that's my second question to you. You've teed it up for me from the second piece of that, that thought which is, okay, we get a bunch of people come to us at BluShark, you know, whether it be an injury or not injury, right? Whether it's a divorce person who only wants the high net worth, or it's somebody else who only focus on traumatic brain injury. That's great, and it's awesome, because they're top of their game where they can trial those cases, but from a marketing point of view, as those people are coming through, there's an issue, which is, you know, as great as you guys are, you're not going to be able to say "I'm only going to deliver you truck action or traumatic brain injury." Like there's a whole pyramid of cases that come and the piece that I struggle with is taking on clients that have that expectation and don't have a way to monetize down the pyramid, meaning, you know, serious injury down to fender benders, right? And if you can't monetize the rest of the pyramid, you know, we can talk about referring case down a step, but if you're, if that's not your jam, and you're not set up for it, the likelihood the cost of case acquisition dramatically increases because normally, you can sort of keep the lights on/pay for your marketing campaign with the lower part of the pyramid and those homeruns are the, are the profit or the, you know, are what, you know, keep you, keep you going in your business, versus I only want that.
Todd Richheimer
You, you and I are so aligned on this point. It, so a couple thoughts. If there's, the number one reason we walk away from partnerships, and our models unique, right? Is we're aligning 100% of our interests, we're putting our dollars right beside the firm that we're partnering with, right? So, we...
Seth Price
Also you have good agencies doing that, you have the economic side down but that's, that is the, the brass ring that we have. We can have our clients as partners, not as a vendor-vendee. Everything's right. So, continue.
Todd Richheimer
It's, that's exactly right, but the number one reason we walk away from partnerships, right, is because the firm is too selective. And, you know, this is another issue that I've found in the legal space is like, there's a lot of law firms that don't know who they are, right? It's like, we'll have these conversations and we'll say, do you handle volume? Yeah, we handle volume. Okay, what's your dollar threshold? We won't take a case for less than $50,000. You don't handle volume, right? That's not the game. And so, I think the first step is law firms need to understand who they are, and then you're right, from a marketing perspective, the setting of expectations, especially for those folks that want to be on the low volume, high value side of the spectrum is tough, especially because like I said, nobody has the data to say the acquisition cost on the type of specific case you want is going to be X. And my advice, you know, a lot to those people is, you know, brand is very important, and then take that brand and market the hell of it around town and play the referral game, which the best place for those, those guys.
Seth Price
Agreed. I see this in LA a lot. I don't know if you play in the LA market much but-
Todd Richheimer
LA is the best market out there!
Seth Price
Well they're the most expensive, right? But there are different worlds, and there's a world in LA and you see that there's a whole, their conferences are now based around these guys. Dozens of amazing trial lawyers who have won, they don't want $50,000, they want like half a million or more, it's crazy numbers that on the East Coast we could never dream of in volume like that. And yet there are scores of these lawyers, and half the time, you know, they, some of them have the resources to actually build it out whether it be PPC or SEO, right? But they don't have infrastructure in place and they're going to get very tired of this quickly. So, while they don't like paying a third on all the referrals, it's, it, it's not, they're not going to, and again, if you're their partner on this, it's gonna get pretty old pretty quickly. You know, one of the other pieces, which is sort of, which is "okay, you only want to take these, but I refer everything else out?" Well, there are a lot of issues with that, right? You need to know history. We've now seen in the last several months of lawyers who ended up going belly up and the referrals didn't pay out. You have your own people who don't track it right. The firm's are setting to have different thresholds when there's a referral fee attached versus not. So, it's not such a simple, so what it comes down to is not only picking like a firm that will answer the phone, but somebody that can monetize in one way or another, whether it be referrals, or whether it be doing it in house, that can monetize everything, because you're paying for every click and if you only take the cream, it's likely that, that just exponentially 3, 4, 5, 6X per case.
Todd Richheimer
Without a doubt, without a doubt. It, and so what we've done in those situations because we've been approached by those very big time, big name, you know, 7, 8, 9 figure vedict type guys, and the conversations we have with them, we would love to partner with you. However, PPC is a waste of your money unless we also pull in a volume firm, right?
Seth Price
Marry those two together.
Todd Richheimer
Marry the two together.
Seth Price
But, and this is the issue that you have, which is that - and again, I'm guilty as anybody, so this isn't like, okay, other people are like this, we're not - You have people aspire to be something. They talk to you about it. A lot of this comes down to like dating. You get every dating profile that, where somebody loves to travel and family's most important and you find out they hate their family and they never leave their house. It's the number of places that like, yes, we want to focus on catastrophic cases and you realize that they're doing, you know, everybody walks out the door without an injury as their client. It's, it's figuring out not just how somebody is positioned in the market but once you get in business with them, what's really there?
Todd Richheimer
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, we've had the unique experience of getting under the hood of all these firms around the country. And what I say is there's, there's no right way to do it. There's a number of very different ways to do it, but again, it's like knowing who you are and what you want to accomplish. You know, I'll tell you, the firms that I love most, I love coming across firms that have handled volume for years and now have the money or the desire to add in litigators into their sort of mix. I found that those firms really are very well positioned going forward, right? Because they have the systems in place to sift through and find the cases as they come in, and make sure they get into the right hands.
Seth Price
No, and, look, I've seen it for my own personal journey. We started, you know, the, the, the PI component about a decade ago and to see that iteration and that as the, with everything right, and you see this is no different for the first person you had working in your DC office compared to what you have now, you keep upgrading as you learn, you figure out what systems are better. You know, all those things that as we've been able to bring in some, like amazing litigators, it's kind of cool that you can sort of move, move that piece North, but it's, I think sifting through what's aspirational and what the current actual ability is at any one point.
Todd Richheimer
No, absolutely, and it's hard, right? It's like, you've got to put in, you know this from Price Benowitz, I mean, like, you've got to put in the work, and there's no shortcut, there's no, there's no one golden solution that's going to solve all your problems, right? It's being in your business, working in your business, paying attention to all these little details that matter a lot.
Seth Price
You know, as we, as we sort of get towards the end of this, and one of the things, you know, we talked about mistakes people make, but what are some of the sort of, you're talking about being consistent the market, but what are some of the things that you have sort of seen that, you know, you say, hey, these are the positive things that we see the eight players across the board doing? You know, is it, you know, a focus on quality score? You know, let me ask you, just landing pages versus hitting back into the site that, you know, from my point of view, I love the double dip of the SEO optimization plus, you know, with the paid search. What are some of the sort of truisms you see? Like, do you see some of your most successful people in the market running dedicated landing pages versus working off firm, firm websites?
Todd Richheimer
Yeah. So, we are we are definitely a fan of dedicated landing pages specific to the, I mean, look, if you look at our landing pages, and this is a constant battle we have with, with firms all the time, your landing page looks ugly. I don't care that my landing page looks ugly, I care that it converts at 35 percent, right? And so, there's, there's this, there's this, pay attention to the numbers, so that would be number one, is like don't, and my co-founder who's, you know, tech background, very, very strong tech background, got me into this early on. Aesthetics don't matter, right? You should be paying attention to the numbers and what converts, and what I'll say is that what looks good isn't necessarily what converts best. So, yes, landing pages, because your PPC campaigns can be very different from the brand that you're going to put out there. The other thing...
Seth Price
Let me hold you up there for a second. So, in general, they'll give you truisms, right? You see a Bob Goldwater on national TV with some of the most god awful ads that clearly award him because you wouldn't be doing that for all these years if they weren't making money there. They won't have you quote your ugly landing page. Versus the benefits of a local single event practice that, when that ad is clicked on, having that reinforcement that there's a brand behind it versus here's the page where you get information. Look, I've always said this, there's a certain percentage of the market and a lot of them are clicking on the paid ads that are just click, get me help, don't care who it is. If they answer the phone, I'm there versus some percent of the market that is slightly more discerning, and many of those are not going through paid search but some are. But what you're saying is of the of paid search, there's a significant monetizable percentage where you are less concerned about brand and reinforcing the brand on that click rather than just getting somebody help immediately.
Todd Richheimer
Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, all of our success has come off of that traffic. Now, admittedly, we are looking more into the branded side of things and how those two can marry each other. That's exactly right, but what I'll say is PPC can work very, very well with a non-branded approach, right?
Seth Price
You're basically, you're doing the Bob Goldwater approach. I don't mean to be derogatory towards him but a generic approach towards "here, injury, injury, click, call help" versus "Amazing team, historied legacy, we've helped your grandparents; we're going to help you."
Todd Richheimer
Well, I think, I think this is the other thing, right, that's important to understand about the PPC market, is like, by-and-large the folks searching online for a lawyer are people that don't know lawyers, right? And so, these are people - and I'll give broad generalizations about the demographic data we have, right - that basically says, you know, they're in the bottom 50 percent socioeconomically, right? They are more diverse, less educated, and they don't know lawyers. And what we found is that these folks are not necessarily searching for the best lawyer, they're searching for the first lawyer that will get on the phone with them. And so, speed is the name of that game. Now, that is not to diminish or not to say that the other side of the market should not be paid attention to, right? And that there should be a brand to reinforce those folks that are doing their homework and vetting lawyers, but...
Seth Price
And look, I've distinctly seen that, like, I see that it because we get both. We have the, thankfully we have a brand. So, we're getting people that have researched and say, "wow, they have good reviews, I liked their look and feel their videos or pictures, It's a good holistic approach. I've done my work, homework check, but I'm well aware." You know, it goes back to, you know, I have a partner who's really into reading the content 17 times and changing stuff and making sure it's perfect. Like at the end of the day, if they get to the page and they click, I don't want something that's gonna dribble at the bar, that's like horrific or embarrassing, but, you know, it's, there's for, unless you get in front of somebody, you don't have a shot.
Todd Richheimer
No, that's exactly right. Totally granted. The other thing that I would say is like, you're asking about, like the eight players in marketing and where my head went, I think it's worth making the point is that like, the eight players in marketing need to meet eight players who are running firms and, you know, because at the end of the day, I feel like as an industry, both on the, on the law firm side and on the marketing side, we've lost focus on the conversion metrics, right? Like, we start judging things on price per lead, right? Or price per inquiry. Unless you know and understand what is coming out the bottom of the funnel, it is really hard to make marketing decisions. And so, the folks that are well positioned to do that are ones that are using their case management systems and are doing their best, and I know it's hard to attribute where that traffic is coming from. And it just leads to a lot better decisions.
Seth Price
Well, look, what I always admired, you guys are so focused, you know, I've had the dubious distinction at the law firm of having some of our biggest cases ever, like, you know, significant high seven-figure cases, that we still don't know where the frickin' case came from. And I just fight trying to figure it out, you know, you know, it is amazing. You know, when I started this, this, this journey, there was always the idea of like, okay, there's a click, I could know exactly where it came from, but I feel that, and again, we, in your world, I think that it's much more doable. The, you know, I saw a Google presentation at SMX in Chicago years ago, where they talked about like the multi-channel attribution and, you know, I looked at it like going on a family cruise. It may not be the hot thing right now, but when we did a Royal Caribbean cruise, the idea that there might be 10 touch points of seeing a TV Ad, Googling, checking reviews, coming back, there might be 10 different touch points in the Royal Caribbean site, before you booked, and I'm seeing on the legal side more of that. It seems that, you know, it, as best you can on that side, if you can go directly from the click to the call to a converted case, I mean, that's, that's the brass ring that Gary Falcone talks about all the time, you know, getting that phone answered, giving them immediate satisfaction, using the John Morgan analogy, it's a plumbing company, it's not, you know...
Todd Richheimer
Oh, absolutely. And I'll contradict myself for a second, but I'll highlight the area that I'm currently quite interested in and we're working on internally, don't have any public facing at the moment, but like, I'm very interested in this idea that like legal advertising has really been around for like 40 years, right? And the way firms present themselves is, there's a way that firms present themselves that seems to, there's a common thread throughout the industry. What's interesting to me is like this new age of media where like the influencer has all of this, you know, influence for lack of better way of putting it, and how law firms can tap into that. And it complicates the attribution problem for sure, right? But it's like imminent and it's amazing how captive the audience, the Instagram's, Facebook's, TikTok's have, right? And how you can tap into that world in a meaningful manner.
Seth Price
And I think some of it, like, you see some people use shout out to Morgan, who's done a really interesting job to put himself out there as a personality and influencer. The flip side is I'm seeing the people who have made inroads leaving injury across the board, depending on the, the timeframe that people are deciding on using a lawyer, that things like immigration, Jim Hacking, a buddy of ours, Max, Max law founder, he, you know, he's done great volume of videos on YouTube to the point where he has a international following, and that people are not like, "Hey, I need immigration lawyer today, I'm hiring." It's a process they may go over for a year or two and they're diving down that rabbit hole at levels that are unheard of. Not that there aren't people who are just clicking in hiring an exploiter they find, but that there is an amazing sort of certain areas like family law where somebody may decide over a course of two or three years to hire somebody. Again, some people call, don't think about it and go right away, but that there are areas in the market that I think are more right for that. There are areas that are much, much harder, or at least I haven't figured out how you can get to the point where you leverage it because it is amazing how many law firms use a similar playbook present company included, where how do you really differentiate yourself from the market? Not that's such an easy question to answer.
Todd Richheimer
No, it's not. And the thing that comes to mind for me, and we've been tossing around a lot internally is, as lawyers, we focus a lot on, like, who am I? What can I offer, you know, to the world, my credentials, my CV, etc.? Whereas like, it seems like the way media is shifted is like, how can we provide value to the end user? And especially like, you know, in the personal injury context, right, it's, how do you provide value to something they may not need down the road? And I think, you know...
Seth Price
That's the question, right? Why not get them at the moment they need it versus spending all this time and effort and they don't remember who you are when they need you?
Todd Richheimer
And I think, and I, you know, this is a hypothesis we're playing around with internally, that adding value today to that person, we need to expand the definition of value. And value may just be humor, right? It can be as simple as like having something that's entertaining up on, you know, some Instagram channel that this person wants to interact with that is tangentially related to personal injury, right? And then, you have this very captive audience that down the road, you know, they remember you. My point being is that, like, we're moving, we're moving away from like, remembering the jingle to like, you know, who you interacting with on your smartphone for an unprecedent amount of times per day.
Seth Price
It is, like the answer is there should be a way to get that intersection is frustrating and how, you know, again, playing around with it, and that balance with when social media first came out, it was a cocktail party, you want to, you know, you don't want to just like me, me, me, right? Versus, you know, you know, getting that balance of sort of personality, entertainment, versus like, where they remember that it's not just a fun channel, because the worst thing is, you have a fun channel, somebody gets injured, they're like, oh, yeah, I didn't even think that these guys did that, versus it's too much about injury, and they're like, they're not interacting and finding that balance. So, when you figure that out, I'll visit you on your island. I get that and you could, you could share with me so that I could get my island.
Todd Richheimer
Yeah.
Seth Price
Well Todd, thank you so much. Any final words for the audience?
Todd Richheimer
No, this was great! I really appreciate it. I applaud what you're doing. You know, again, like sifting through all the noise and finding the substance in this industry is really interesting to me and I look forward to keeping the conversation going.
Seth Price
Absolutely. Look forward to seeing you at a conference real soon.
Todd Richheimer
Awesome. Thanks, Seth.
Seth Price
Bye-bye.
BluShark Digital
Thank you for tuning in to the SEO insider with Seth Price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand's online presence. Episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital's website.