Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
Fired After Asking for a Raise? Now She Runs Law Firm Marketing Departments Nationwide
Tifiny Swedensky shares her expertise as a fractional CMO for law firms, revealing the essential roles, strategies, and metrics needed to build an effective marketing department that consistently delivers results.
• The six key roles every growing law firm marketing department needs
• Why having a dedicated intake manager is critical for converting leads
• How to structure a smaller four-person marketing team for maximum effectiveness
• The importance of consistent weekly marketing tasks like social posts, newsletters, and content
• Why output beats perfection in legal marketing
• How to properly allocate your marketing team's time (50% routine tasks, 10% data, 40% unique initiatives)
• Why attribution in marketing is often misleading
• Top marketing strategies for 2024 including Facebook retargeting, local service ads, and community events
• Essential marketing tools and technologies for law firm marketing departments
• The value of marketing director mastermind groups for sharing ideas and resources
Grab your tickets for Tif’s event at special pricing for LBTB listeners here: https://www.sharpcookiedev.com/sharp-marketing-seminar-glm/
Visit sharpcookiemarketing.com to learn more about Tiffany's marketing director mastermind program and marketing audits for law firms.
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
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Hello, welcome in to a very special Tuesday episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own, design and build practices they actually like showing up to on Monday mornings. So, as you know, on Tuesdays I usually interview people, typically lawyers, but also the people that help lawyers build great law practices. And today's episode is something a little bit different because I have a good friend who's working on a project of her own. Today's episode is my friend, tiffany Swidansky, and her presentation from the 2024 Great Legal Marketing Summit, and I'm giving this to you today because Tiffany serves this space that's in between lawyers and marketing vendors. She's got a fractional CMO business and she's putting on an event that will be in my office on June 12th through the 13th, and it is not for lawyers, this is for your marketing director. So if you have a marketing director who would benefit from hanging out with a marketing expert and also like, maybe or probably, ben and I will pop in, share some of our insights and help your marketing director not only do better marketing for your law firm, but also become a better communicator with you and with your vendors, then this is the event that you want to get them to Tiffany's event details. I'm gonna put a link in the comments, because she's given me, or a link in the show description because she's given me very special pricing only for listeners of this show. So if you're interested in sending your law firm marketing director or assistant to an event hosted by one of the premier legal marketers and fractional CMOs in the space and having Ben and I in your marketing director or marketing assistant's ear about what they can do to help your law firm grow, this is the event for you. Again, it's June 12th through the 13th. It's going to be in my office in Fairfax, virginia. So for most people that's going to involve some travel on the part of their marketing director, and Tiffany is doing something that I've never seen anybody else in the industry do guaranteeing that within six months of having attended your event, your firm will sign 25 more cases than your base case last six months, or she'll give you all of your money back and your marketer will get to continue to participate in her monthly mastermind meetings.
Speaker 1:All right, now you're saying, brian, I don't have a marketing director. Why should I continue to listen to this episode? Well, even if you're not going to send your director or assistant to Tiffany's event. Here's what you're going to learn in today's episode. Number one the six roles that every growing law firm marketing team needs and the four that you definitely can't be skimping on. Number two how to know your marketing is working, even when attribution gets fuzzy and attribution is almost always fuzzy. Number three, why output beats perfection every single time, while your team should just be doing, doing, doing, rather than waiting for it to be 100% correct. And lastly, what smart firms are doing this year to generate referrals, lift their brands and sign cases, even if they're on a budget.
Speaker 1:So, again, if you want to learn from somebody who's learned from us and who ran our marketing department for a number of years before going on and starting her own entrepreneurial venture, this is the episode for you. I hope you enjoy that is a lot of information. If you want all of the details on exactly the offering that Tiffany has, you need to check out the website. I'm want all of the details on exactly the offering that Tiffany has. You need to check out the website. I'm going to put the notes, the link, in the show description. And now Tiffany's presentation from the 2024 Great Legal Marketing Summit.
Speaker 2:All right, everyone, thanks so much for being here today. I'm assuming this is everyone. My name is Tiffany Swidensky. Most of you know me, but most of you don't exactly know what I've been doing these days, what I've been up to, because back when I was working with GLM, I did a lot of the digital marketing Built landing pages, email follow-up sequences, all that cool stuff. Would come to the summit and talk to you guys about what I've done this year, and so a lot of people just know me as a digital marketing guru or something like that. Right, but honestly, I've expanded beyond digital marketing roots and just really focusing in on being a fractional CMO. And a lot of you are like what is that? What is fractional CMO? Get it all the time. This is my elevator pitch is I manage law firm marketing departments and basically just make sure all of the wheels are turning and that everyone is moving in the right direction, and so I'm there to help keep projects on track, set strategy, forecast for the future train, give advice and all of this cool stuff. And a lot of times, because I have this technical background, whenever there's something that needs to be done that requires some technical expertise, usually Tiffany is the one to do it. So this is where I am now and I'll share a little bit about like where I got started, my backstory. I didn't used to talk about it too much because, honestly, I was embarrassed by it.
Speaker 2:I actually graduated with my marketing and communications degree when I was 27. And at the time I felt like a grandma because everyone else had already graduated. I was just getting my bachelor's just getting finished up and I just moved to not here, but to Northern Virginia where I live now, and I was struggling to find a job. I was putting in applications for every marketing job you could imagine in DC Marketing coordinator, marketing admin, marketing specialist. I never got a call back, never was getting callbacks, and I was made it my full-time job to find a job. And one day I called up one of the places I applied and I said, hey, I'm just checking out a resume. How do you know? Is everything all right? You guys like me? And I heard the guy tickety type on his computer and then he looks at my resume and he was like, oh, there's a gap here. I see you dropped out of college. And I was like, yeah, I dropped out and had a baby, went back and finished my degree. I kid you, not this guy I don't know if he meant to say it aloud, I have to imagine it was an accident but he was like, oh, I guess that's why we passed you over. And I was like I remember where I was.
Speaker 2:I was in the little one-bedroom apartment me and my husband had in Woodbridge commonly called Hoodbridge if you're from Northern Virginia and I was sitting there and I just felt so defeated I am never going to get a job out here and I gave up. I just started looking for any job that would take me, found myself working for a tech staffing and recruiting firm and I was really excited because it was an administrative assistant job but it had some marketing components to it. Right, and I was blown away when I started this tech staffing firm because the experience there was so much different from what I had experienced on the other side of applying for jobs. Because at this tech staffing firm our recruiters were calling people and basically saying will you take this job? Will you work for us? Will you work for us? They were calling people who had minimal experience, what I thought was minimal experience people who didn't have college degrees but had built a website, or people who maybe did have college degrees in some other field but went to the coding bootcamp and all of a sudden, these people were being hired for 60,000, 70,000, $80,000 a year jobs in DC, and I was lucky to get whatever. I was freaking out I think I was making $30,000 a year at the time and I was like, wow, like I fucked up, I should have gone into tech, and so that's what I started to do, and so I taught myself web development, I taught myself WordPress, basic, basic web languages, and I rebuilt this tech staffing firm's website and I was really proud of myself and I promptly asked for a raise, as you do, and I got the raise.
Speaker 2:But two weeks later I was let go. I was fired. It was quite sudden and actually like I talked to the people I worked with at the time years later and they're like, yeah, he, the boss who owned the place, had a habit of firing people as soon as they asked for their first race, and so I was just one of those people. I got shuffled off and I was devastated because now I had some experience, but I felt like who would hire me? Who would hire somebody who was fired from their last job. Fortunately, great Legal Marketing did and I started to work for Ben and later Brian. When Brian came on board and I started out as his digital marketing specialist, building landing pages, doing the email follow-ups, all that cool stuff. And then eventually Ben asked me to be marketing director for Ben Glass Law. Did that for a little while. Same time was the marketing director for Great Legal Marketing. Did that for a little while.
Speaker 2:After seven years I just felt the entrepreneurial itch and decided to strike out on my own and start Sharp Cookie. Fractional CMO was just something I had learned about and it seemed really cool and it seemed like a place where I could work with many different firms and get a lot more experience and just learn more about legal marketing. So, to get started, I'll brag about myself. These are some of the stats that I've accumulated either working at GLM or through Sharp Cookie 60% increase in total qualified leads year-to-date 2024. 30% increase in qualified leads for another firm. I've generated over a million dollars in product sales using only Facebook ads. 600% increase in total leads for another firm. 454% increase in signed cases for another firm. Actually, I guess these are all stats from this year, except that million-dollar one, and then I have some reviews from people who have reviewed me over the years, and I love testimonials if you love giving them, and if you want to see more, you can visit whylawyersloveuscom and see all of my reviews and accolades there. So, to get started, today, what I'm talking to you guys about is what I do when I'm building a marketing department for a law firm and what I'm thinking about how I'm structuring it and what I'm having these marketing teams do.
Speaker 2:So, first off, there are three types of firms, and all three types are in this room right now and at this event. The first type is the law firm. That's the solo. We're just getting by here, and this is. We don't have a marketing department. The lead attorney is the law firm. That's the solo. We're just getting by here, and this is. We don't have a marketing department. The lead attorney is the lead marketer. Maybe they're writing some website content, maybe they have some people to help, but by and large, they're doing it all on their own.
Speaker 2:And then we have the doing well but growing slow, which makes up this huge swath of firms in the middle. A lot of people, a lot of law firms are growing, but it's not like huge leaps and bounds of growth. It's just the steady upward slope, which is great. We're growing, but a lot of times we're not on pace to meet our goals. And then we have the record-breaking growth firm that's just growing and growing every day. You guys sometimes see them. They come up out of nowhere, spend a ton of money, get them on a bunch of TV, and there are some challenges to having a firm. I listed like challenges, advantages to each of these, and there are challenges to having the firm that is record-breaking growth. But the advantage is you get to make a lot of money, which is nice, and most people want to be in that third category. Even if your goals are pretty modest, you still want to hit those goals and you don't want to take your time getting there, and so that's what a marketing department can do for you.
Speaker 2:If you have a well-established, structured marketing department where everyone knows what they're doing, everyone knows how law firms attract leads, then you have something that's humming along. You have something that can generate more. You have an asset for your business, right? So what I have up here is what I call the marketing dream team. This is the six-person team. You could do everything in the world with this team. You could get six person team. Who's this? You could do everything in the world with this team. You could get to the moon with this team, probably. Who know? I say and I'll break this down pretty quickly but you have your web administrator.
Speaker 2:Seo that's like marketing hire number one for most firms, right, your SEO company. They're the ones S E O it sounds like I'm saying CEO, I don't know. So they're the ones managing your website, writing your content, building your backlinks, doing technical SEO, right, and that's pretty much like the ante to play the game these days, if you're going to start a business and market your business and then hire. Number two is your dedicated intake manager. I'll be honest, I really struggle working with firms that don't have a dedicated intake team, because if you're the solo attorney who's answering all the phone calls and acting as primary point of contact in sales, you're probably not answering the phone when it rings. You're calling them back later, and a lot of times, if you call somebody back later, they've moved on, they've hired another firm, and so, like firms that are growing have a dedicated person who's answering the phones and for lack of a better term just closing, just signing clients. Every firm that just explodes has this person.
Speaker 2:And then we have our marketing generalist marketing admin person. And then we have our marketing generalist marketing admin. Now this is your person who's just going to get it all done, and this is usually what a lot of attorneys think of as their marketing hire number one. Right, this is your, not a marketing director. A marketing director has more experience. You know they're somebody who manages, but a marketing generalist is somebody who's going to go into your CRM and update your emails, or who's going to go on your website and write some new content or publish some new content or update your Yoast scores.
Speaker 2:A lot of times I'm seeing this being outsourced these days to offshore workers or even remote workers, because it's honestly not a heavy strategic role, but it is essential because you do need somebody who's going to log into the computer, push that button can't get by without them. And then you have your social media specialist, and that's just who posts on social media, who manages your accounts and your community. And this is again another role that I see more and more being sent offshore, where we have people who are marketing experts but live in another country and their whole job is posting on social media every day and it works out really well in a lot of cases. And then we have our CMO marketing director and that's the role who's this person is setting strategy, managing everyone else and just making sure the wheels are turning, all footsteps are moving in the right direction, all of that good stuff. Now you may look at that and feel like, tiffany, you're a CMO and you put yourself on number five and it's yeah, because if I'm being intellectually honest, you could get by without a marketing director.
Speaker 2:If you have a really good intake person or you have a marketing generalist who's going to go home and implement three strategies in 90 days that you pull here from the summit, you're going to go a long way with hires one through three, one through four. But by the time you get to a point where you're investing big money into PPC or TV or radio or whatever your big media budget is, you need a CMO. And when you have a team that's four-person big, you do need somebody dedicated to keeping the house in order. And then, finally, you have your community and events person. And then, finally, you have your community and events person. And this is an essential role, particularly if you're going out and doing boots on the ground, marketing and networking with the community.
Speaker 2:So you say to me, tiffany, that's a six-person team. I'm just a small town country lawyer. I read my John Grisham novels one page at a time. I'm not going to hire six people to run my marketing department. That's cool. I have a smaller, more manageable team for you and it's the same people more or less your SEO vendor, your intake manager, your marketing strategist or CMO or marketing director, and then your marketing assistant, again the person who's going to log into the emails. Again the person who's going to log into the emails, push the buttons, update the templates, all that good stuff. Right, and with this four-person team, I can do quite a lot with the firm. Right? This is what we can do easily with this four-person team and as a fractional CMO, I put all of my clients on a program, right. So we do a set of things weekly, monthly and quarterly, and this is the list of our weeklies. Essentially, this is what my team is making sure. Me and my team are making sure the firm gets done each week, and this is really focused on the deliverables, the output.
Speaker 2:I was talking with a marketer who comes from outside of legal and I was interviewing him for a role that they didn't get hired for. And they didn't get hired for it for a couple reasons. One when I asked them what their first 90 days would look like, they said it would strictly be research. 90 days of research that is insane. That is absolutely insane. And I told him it's look, we move faster than that. And he was like you can do your research in your first 90 days, but if you're hired for this role, you step into this role and we have deliverables that we're trying to get for the firm. And his reaction was oh, it sounds like you guys market like like you're an agency, and it's no. We market like a business. We're trying to get things out the door, we are trying to market the business, and we can't do that without doing shit. So this is the stuff that we do, and so we're posting on social media daily, across all platforms, if we can, and for a lot of you, that's a big commitment, because that means scaling up your video marketing and I highly recommend that you get comfortable with video marketing really fast.
Speaker 2:Send email newsletters each week. That's another thing that I try to hit. You don't have to hit your entire client database every week, but still send an email newsletter each week. Segment it, email your current former clients, email your leads another week, email your referral sources another week, but make sure that you're always sending out marketing. And then write and publish two to four articles a week. We all know what that is Write and publish and mail a printed newsletter. This one's each month and then the next one is each month as well, sending out referral letters. A lot of you have heard these strategies at GLM and I highly recommend them still do.
Speaker 2:And then the next one is a little bit more abstract. I got a smile for the camera. Hey, what's up? I never look good in my summit photos, so I'm like hamming it up. Hey, all right, oh, it's video. Oh shit, you should have told me Say something, man, okay. So the next one's more abstract, but it's knowing how all the leads are getting to the law firm. That's an important part of what a marketer does is just making sure the tracking and attribution are all on track.
Speaker 2:And then, finally, this is again what I do, kind of quarterly, but what I try to do for each of my clients and what I think all law firms should try to do as a marketing department with their marketing departments, is implement three to four unique marketing initiatives each quarter, because not everything we do in marketing is repeatable. Not everything is this cool little checklist and hand it to your marketing team and they got it right. Not everything's like that. Sometimes there are things we're going to do once and not again for two or three years and you have to have time to do that and you have to have, like unique initiatives to do that. And it's a little bit scary for law firms personal injury firms in particular who are used to running cases through a system, and sometimes it's not like that. I always like struggle to relate to the law firms because I'm a marketer so I'm guessing it's hard to. You can't market everything on a system. You have to have these unique one-time initiatives. Oh, is there water over here? Dope, gotta reach for it. All right, cool.
Speaker 2:So next thing, you guys saw that list and a lot of times, like when people ask me questions about what I do and what I have the marketing teams do, a lot of times their question is like some variant of how, like how do you get the teams to do that? How do I know what my team should be doing? How much should I spend? How do we track? How do I know it's working? How do we get all this done? I get all of those questions usually when I come off the stage and sometimes I don't always know how to answer them, because it's not rocket science Writing an email newsletter and sending it is not rocket science but I think what happens, and what happened to me, is that a lot of I'll just I'll say this like early in my career, I thought it was a marketer's job to tell the business owner what were good or bad ideas.
Speaker 2:Right, that's what I thought a marketer was. We go to a business. The business owner says I want to do this, I want to do that, I want to do that, and the marketers are like thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs up, thumbs down. It doesn't work like that. It does work like that If you make it work like that, but that's not how you build a business, because the dichotomy of good and bad is that's just in our heads. There's no good or bad marketing. Tiktok isn't good or bad. Instagram isn't good or bad. Maybe it's not appropriate for your business, maybe it is, and in most cases, all of these channels are, by the way, absolutely appropriate for personal injury firms. There are personal injury firms on every social media platform. There is right.
Speaker 2:But this idea that marketing is going to be good or bad, or we should judge it or it should be a certain way like that's, forget about that. You know all marketing. If you're implementing, it is good, because the biggest failure that you can get, the biggest marketing failure, is that nobody sees your marketing. That's the worst. Right, you make something, you invest something, you have this really cool idea and then you like build it up and put it out there and nobody sees it, nobody reacts to it. That sucks. That's the big failure. And it's not because what you did was bad, it's just maybe it wasn't promoted enough or maybe you don't do enough marketing. You haven't built a following yet. You don't have eyeballs on you. But the point I'm trying to make is if your law firm's marketing department exists but does nothing, then that's the failure.
Speaker 2:But if you're hesitant to implement marketing because you're worried about doing it the right way or the wrong way, just implement. If you want people to notice you, you have to make stuff for them to see. If you're not making stuff for people to see, nobody's paying attention, nobody cares, right, it does nothing to sit on your hands and dream about all the marketing we're going to do. We really have to implement this stuff. Just like that marketer said when I was interviewing him, you market like an agency. I do, because, like agencies, I focus on output. We're here to meet deliverables and we're going to meet the deliverables and we're going to create the best marketing we can. But also and we're going to create the best marketing we can. But also my team knows we have to email a newsletter each week, so we don't have time to think, oh, is this article good enough? We've got to publish it. Nobody cares. Focus on output, because your team should always be making stuff and always be finishing stuff, and if you're not reviewing it and approving it, it's your fault. By the way, calling you guys out.
Speaker 2:So there's a video here. I can't play it because they're like you should have embedded it and I'm like I'm done, but anyway. So this is a Rand Fishkin video. If you're familiar, I highly recommend that you follow him on LinkedIn or you look him up. I think his company name is Spark Toro. He has a great blog and he talks a lot about marketing attribution and here's where I start maybe to depart a little bit from the core teachings of GLM. Because GLM teaches make all your marketing trackable and I 100% agree with that To the best of our ability. Make your marketing trackable so you can know how you're spending your money and how everything is going.
Speaker 2:But Ran, in this video that I can't play, very eloquently explains that this idea that we can know exactly where all of our leads are coming from is a myth. That's the lie that the tech company sold us in the wild west of the internet Because that's what us business owners wanted to hear. Right, that we could track everything. But a lot of marketers figured out, maybe kept quiet about it for a long time. It's actually hard to know where our leads are coming from, because if somebody sees your billboard or sees your TV ad, they're not noting down your number, they're not writing down your web address, they're remembering your name and then Googling your name later, and so most things come through attributed as organic SEO, right? So it's hard to know. So, instead of thinking like I don't want to implement this because I can't track it, be mindful of what's going on out there in the world For a technical marketer.
Speaker 2:I'm talking about AI surprisingly little in this presentation. I'm doing some cool shit with it, though, so subscribe to my newsletter and you'll hear about it, but I'm not talking about it today, anyway. So our large language models have made marketing easier, and what I like to say is it's raised the floor, but not necessarily the ceiling. It is so much easier to mass produce content these days, and that's exactly why, if you're on LinkedIn and you always did text-based posts, that you saw your text-based content drop off and all of a sudden, people weren't seeing it, engaging with it. Linkedin has pivoted to video, because it's easier to mass generate text content. You can use AI to make video, but you can't use AI just to mass produce video the way you could just a LinkedIn post, and it's just so much easier to make all of the stuff that I'm talking about email, newsletters, videos that, if you want to stay competitive, law firms and businesses overall have to think about, like, how are we going to keep up, how are we going to make all of this stuff? And for me, it's about eliminating the self-reflection, eliminating, like, the insecurity of, is this marketing good enough, and just implement it, because you never know what takes off and then also it gets lost in the flood of all of the stuff that's out there. You make something. People love it, they hate it. They forget about it the next day right, but what they remember a lot of times is that you said something or you showed up in their LinkedIn feed or you showed up on TV. They don't necessarily remember the specific ad, but the overall brand impression, which I don't like to say, very often goes up. So if what's my next slide? Okay, how do you know your marketing is working if attribution is?
Speaker 2:This is what I track. I track a lot of stuff, but this is some of the stuff that I track week over week. This is what I picked out and said this is what y'all should be tracking for your marketing. I'm going to give you a second to take some pictures. Surreptitiously wiped my nose inside my shirt. Nobody saw that. So this is.
Speaker 2:I'm about to show you my KPI dashboard, and the KPI dashboard is what I build for a lot of my fractional CMO clients and that's going to. It's going to be graphs and you're going to love it. I love it. It's bragging, but this is what you should be tracking week over week. Are your leads going up. Not necessarily are leads going up because SEO, but are they going up Because, really, that's what's important. Marketing is cumulative and everything supports everything else that you're doing. So think of it in terms of whole numbers. Now you can drill down and get specific. So this is a KPI dashboard for one of my clients and, honestly, they're the client that's doing the best. Otherwise I probably wouldn't show their graph right, but this is what we're seeing, implementing the things that I'm talking about focusing on output, focusing on making more content, not judging and just putting more out there and scaling that up. And the numbers have been incredible.
Speaker 2:So this is something I like to cover and because, again, like I feel, like a lot of businesses, they want to feel secure when they hire a marketer and when they bring in a marketer on board, a lot of business owners will say to me Tiffany, I want to have their first few weeks planned out, I don't want them to have a second of free time. I want their schedules filled, I want them to know exactly what they're doing. Great, but when we're working with marketers, we can't fill their time 100%, because if we fill their time 100% with daily tasks and checklists, that keeps them busy eight hours a day, they don't have sufficient time to implement those what EOS systems would call rocks, what I just basically say the unique quarterly initiatives that we're implementing each quarter. Right, and so if their days are filled with the routine, they just don't have time for it.
Speaker 2:So this is me breaking down like how a marketer should be spending their time. 50% should be on that routine stuff making sure your email newsletter goes out each week. Making sure your email newsletter goes out each week. Making sure your print newsletter goes out each month, making sure posts go up on social media each day the things that we're going to do every week over and over. That should take up half their time, 10% of their time. A little tiny sliver should take up them screwing around with data and stuff.
Speaker 2:I find that, by and large, marketers spend a little too much time on research and not enough time implementing, and truly there's only so much we can know, and so really, for me, you should only be spending like 10% of your time accumulating data, looking at data, researching data. The remaining 40% should be spent on, like, implementing stuff. That should be the rocks if you're doing EOS, or that should be doing whatever marketing projects come out of the summit. You know the three that you're going to take home and implement in the first 90 days. They need enough time to do that, and so what I like to emphasize to lawyers is your marketers need time to do that, and make sure they have time to do that. Don't be too laser focused on filling their plates, filling their schedules, because they have plenty to do, trust me. Okay, oh, there's some more links in here. I can't click, so you're going to have to take my brilliant descriptions. Okay, so these are my favorite marketing ideas from 2024. Brilliant descriptions okay, so these are my favorite marketing ideas from 2024.
Speaker 2:Facebook, instagram retargeting Now that's top of my list for a few reasons. I sell a course on it. That's one. Two it's really effective. It's really fun to scale and play with. There are a lot of things that we can do that go beyond just showing website visitors our ads again. So, for one of my clients, we're showing retargeting ads for three different audiences People who visited our website great, that's 101. People who are leads for a law firm, like they've called us, but they haven't signed as clients. We're showing them a different set of ads on Facebook. And then, finally, current and former clients basically our referral network. We're showing them a whole different set of ads on Facebook. And then, finally, current and former clients basically our referral network. We're showing them a whole different type of ad to remind them that we exist and also to hopefully generate more referrals and there are. We're even with some firms playing around with building out referral retargeting audiences and there are tons of possibilities here and for me, like bang for your buck, we spend like $10 a day on these things. They're reasonable. You guys are spending like 5k a month on Google PPC and get nothing from it, I know. So Facebook retargeting is great. I highly recommend it.
Speaker 2:Local service ads I'm very fond of. A lot of people don't like them because now we can't dispute leads and that sucks. I get it and it's higher maintenance than it seems, because these dashboards want you to give them tons of information, right, and we want to mark all leads as booked and then we can get leads from local service ads and then we can get leads from local service ads and the CPA is very reasonable. I love them. Donations to local charities and schools. So the video I would, if I could click on it and show it, would be one of my clients, david Vickner of Scott Vickner down in New Orleans. They did recently completed project backpack where we handed out 500 backpacks to local school children and we did so at three different events and it was incredible, got a ton of buzz from it and we even got like a new spot, which would have been the video that I would have played for you guys, and it's David and his mom being interviewed by a local news team. All about how Martha gave David the idea to do this program and because she was a former school teacher and we loved it, it was actually my idea for it to be Martha's idea, because it just plays a little better Nice reason and people love Martha truly. We actually saw an uptick in people visiting our website searching for her name. That's David's mom, by the way. It cracks me up.
Speaker 2:And then we have email marketing. I know a lot of people talk about email marketing and they're all right, it's great, just do email marketing. You can segment your list, send out e-newsletters. You can improve upon what you're already sending. You can re-engage old website visitors. You can re-engage old audiences. There's a ton of stuff that you can implement in email marketing that you're probably not doing TikTok content clusters. So it's this idea of honing in on a particular format of TikTok video and making several in that same format and if you have several different types of content clusters, you basically have a TikTok video plan and focusing in and also taking a look at what other creators are doing and I can point you to a few creators. If you come ask me later, just don't want to call them out of here. Linkedin networking is essentially getting on LinkedIn, posting your own stuff, commenting on other people's stuff, engaging with other people's stuff. All of these things are important. And also, if you're making videos for TikTok, take those to LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:Podcasts are still great and TV ads are still great. That last one was going to be a TV ad that we did for Scott McNair. That's really funny because we have Brad here, who's half of Scott McNair, and he's the Scott half, and people don't realize that there are two different attorneys, and so the joke is like Scott McNair, oh, that's one person, but no, it's two. And if you go to the YouTube channel for the firm, you'll definitely see those commercials. They're a hoot and I love them. My clicker go. My clicker go. Oh. And to prove the local service ads. That little pink sliver is a sign. Cases by source. I think that's to date 2004. But just to note that purple slice up, there is a Google PPC cases that we acquired through Hennessy. Actually Give them a little shout out through Hennessy. Actually Give them a little shout out.
Speaker 2:So before I go, two things for you. One, this is a shopping list of all of the programs that I use on a regular basis, and I didn't okay, I took Jasper off here because I started using Google Gemini and Google Gemini for me. I'm already using the Google Workspace. I added it onto my account. Really good chat GPT alternative and it really works just as well. So if you're already in Google, I recommend it. Canva's great, hootsuite is great. It's expensive but it's great.
Speaker 2:I use Trello for my project management kind of heavily. So all of my clients, my fractional CMO clients, are put on a Trello board of their very own where we manage all their projects and their pipelines. Zapier and then ChatGPT. I've done some cool stuff with ChatGPT this year. I'm going to tell you guys about it real quick. So I have beyond just like write marketing copy for me. For me, I'm using ChatGPT through their API connection to do stuff like create action items after my team has left a project note. So if somebody says I scheduled the e-newsletter to be sent on Wednesday, they're assigned a follow-up task to review the results on Thursday. It's really cool and I programmed it to basically mimic what Tiffany would assign people to the best of my ability. Sometimes there are limitations to how good it can be and it still needs some hand-holding, but it's a really nice way to just automatically create the next steps for your team if they don't know necessarily where they need to go next.
Speaker 2:I'm also using ChatGPT to estimate how much time was spent on various projects. What was the other thing? Oh, to classify what we're doing, to help me say okay, we're spending this much time on content creation, we should be spending this much time on setting up paid ads, and there are so many more things that you can plug into that ChatGPT AI connection if you know how to use it, and it's a lot of fun. I'll tell you about it if you ask me about it. Callrail and LeadDocket particularly LeadDocket. The dashboard that I showed you guys earlier is built basically on LeadDocket and it's just really a great one place for us to see all of that data and it wouldn't be possible without a program like LeadDocket. So I'll leave you guys with my pitch, which is kind of weak.
Speaker 2:So today at the summit I'm not really taking on any new fractional CMO clients and if I am I'm not going to tell anyone, it will be a secret. But what I can offer is I have a marketing director mastermind group and if you have a marketing director no attorneys and you want them to join our group, you can send them to sharp marketing. I have a ton of links. If you go to talk to tiffcom you're going to see all my links right and you can see more about the mastermind program. But I love the mastermind program because it's a great way for the marketers to connect, to share ideas. Right now we're mostly personal injury marketing directors and it's a good place to vent. It's a good place to share resources, to get new ideas, to ask questions. It's oh, this company wants this much, we want to spend this much. Like how have you done this? And I just love it and I'm trying the best I can to build a community of marketers because there was some support when I started, ben had the elite marketing director bootcamp.
Speaker 2:You guys remember at the little camo binders that handed to me on day one. That's where I first started to learn about Ben Glass style of marketing. Right, I'm trying. That was the support in the beginning for me those binders. I'm trying to create a little bit more than that. People meet face to face and really to help marketers, give them the resources that I didn't have and the leg up that I didn't have, because very much for me, when I first started in marketing and came to my first mastermind group, it felt like all the other marketing directors were up here and Tiffany was like over here. And it's a lot nicer when you come into a community and everyone embraces you and everyone says we're all in this together, we're all dealing with the same things, and it's great. You and everyone says we're all in this together, we're all dealing with the same things, and it's great.
Speaker 2:And then the second thing I have for you is I do marketing audits where I look at your website, your marketing department, your CRM and give you a nice report with all of the stuff that you need to give your.
Speaker 2:Basically, what I'm trying to do is give your marketing department action items for the next 90 days and you can learn more about the marketing audit. I have cards at the end of that table and at that table and at that table and you can also scan this QR code and learn more about it there. And as like a special summit offer because I want to do that if you sign up and get a marketing audit, your marketing director can participate in the mastermind meeting for one month for free, and so that's what I want to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to get in to sample that, see what it's like and all that good stuff. So I hope you guys learned something. I hope you guys got something interesting from the presentation today. If you have any questions, I'll be over there dabbing the sweat off my face and thanks so much.
