Can AI Make Me a Marketing Plan?

Can AI make me a marketing plan? 

Join our host, Toby Rosen, as we go through a marketing plan created by ChatGPT, and touch on each element of the plan. Can AI really make a good marketing plan? Find out in this week's episode. 

For more, visit https://rosenadvertising.com

Transcript

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(gentle music)- Can AI make me a really good marketing plan? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101, I'm Toby Rosen. Today's topic is actually pretty straightforward. It's kind of what the title says. Can AI actually make a good marketing plan for your firm? And the short version is, yeah, it really can. It's pretty good at estimating the costs of certain type of marketing. can adjust to the requirements of what you're doing or what you need or your market. And of course, it's not going to give you estimates for like your current marketing providers or specific software unless you get really granular and tell it that. But you can tell it a lot of detail about what you're doing now and it's going to give you some really solid answers. I'm sure there are some other products by now or some other lead magnets or something out there that are essentially just reskinned versions of chat GPT that will help you create a marketing plan. If you just search for like marketing plan AI, you'll probably find something, but you can do it literally just in chat GPT really easily too. So we're going to get into the real meat of the conversation. Can AI make me a marketing plan? So I went and I asked Chad GPT to create a marketing plan for me. And you'll see in the show notes that I've added my very, very basic prompt. It's super basic. I've just asked for a marketing plan for a law firm in Atlanta, Georgia, giving them some detail, but it's pretty simple. So what we're going to do now is we're going to go through the 10 sections that chat GPT spit out. And I'm just going to kind of give an a thumbs up or thumbs down and a little bit of comment on on each section. So today's a little different. I don't have notes or anything like that. I've given a brief skim of this marketing plan. But as we get into it, I'm going to find out some more information. And there may be some things where I go, Oh, I didn't expect that. So let's dig in. ChatGPT's response to my prompt is, "Of course, I'd be happy to help you outline a comprehensive marketing plan for the Smith law firm in Atlanta, Georgia. Given their monthly revenue of approximately$200,000 and their intention to allocate 15% of that to their marketing budget, let's break down the key elements and estimated costs of their marketing plan." So ChatGPT gave me 10 sections, like I said, and section number one is Branding and Online presence enhancement. This includes five to ten thousand dollars for a redesign of the firm's website for a more modern and user-friendly look, a thousand or two thousand dollars for a professional logo and branding material design, and five hundred to a thousand dollars ongoing for monthly website maintenance and updates. So we're really looking out like an outlay of cash of somewhere around seven, six to twelve thousand dollars in the, plus a thousand on that in the first month here, but this is really going to depend, right? So depending on what your firm situation is, if you have a logo that you're happy with, nobody comments on it or they comment that they really like it, you're probably fine. So you may not really need to do this. And the same may go for your website. Five to $10,000, I think, depending on what you're trying to do, could either be way more than you need to spend or way less than you need to spend. So it really depends there. website maintenance and updates. I think that makes a lot of sense, 500 to 1000 bucks a month. It's probably less to host your website and deal with some of the basics, but including all the software and maybe some developer hours, those numbers start to make a lot of sense. Moving on to number two, we have content marketing. And this is something I'm a big evangelist of. I love content marketing. We have two sections here. One is an estimated thousand dollars a month for some regular blog posts on legal topics to start establishing expertise and these can be in-house or outsource content creation. And then we have the creation of some informative legal guides or ebooks which is a thousand five hundred a three thousand dollar one-time cost and both of these make a huge amount of sense. Again we're talking about a three thousand dollar max on that one-time cost and then constant content production of a thousand dollars a month and there are some ways to cheat this just like having your team write some of your content or even using chat GPT to do some of this, although there are some caveats to that that we won't get into today. But yeah, I like this strategy. I mean, I think this makes a lot of sense. It's definitely basic, just having an ebook or a guide and doing that once and then having a handful of maybe four or five blog posts go up a month, it's kind of basic. But this is the basis of a good strategy. So I really do like number two, content marketing, But moving on to number three, social media marketing. And I think everybody knows that this is just sort of a basic thing. You don't actually have to do a whole lot with social media marketing in the legal world, but you do have to do something. So what I'm seeing here, we have two sections once again. We have creation and management of social media profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, formerly known as X, and 500 to $1,000 a month for that. And that is probably a good number to think about, 500 to $1,000 a month actually allocated to doing that, whether that's within a person who's managing marketing or a particular marketing contractor. I think that makes sense, but obviously this isn't required. One thing about social media is I don't think it's required to be super, super active. There are ways to sort of cheat that and to make sure that your profiles look really good. Number two in social media marketing is sponsored posts and targeted advertising campaigns. And for this, they have $1,000 to $2,500 a month. Again, I think that's a good number when we're talking about $200,000 a month in revenue to spend up to $2,500. But obviously this is again something that isn't mandatory. And if you're doing social media, it is kind of mandatory to do sponsored posts, especially on any meta or Facebook products because they limit visibility so much for organic reach. But yeah, I mean, I think this is a reasonable number Once again, I don't think it's a crazy thing. And really the only note in section three for social media is that it's just not required. You don't have to be doing social media really heavily. There's some ways to cheat it, to automate it, all that kind of stuff. Number four is search engine optimization, SEO. And they've got two sections. Once again, most of these have one or two sections as we go along. For this, we have a thousand or $2,000 a month allocated to on-page optimization, keyword research, content optimization. And I see this as pretty high. I think $1,000 is already relatively high. Depending on what your website platform is, on-page optimization should be done almost automatically. Content optimization is a little bit more of a wild card as is keyword research. There are some really good reasons to spend a lot of money on someone doing keyword research, but it heavily depends. So I think this number's a little high for the vast majority of firms out there. And the next item in SEO is backlink building and off-page SEO efforts for which they have budgeted$500,000 to $1,000 a month. And this I agree with. I think this is very much in the lane of what most firms in that $150,000 to $300,000 a month revenue area should be spending. Obviously, things scale up a little bit as things generate a little more ROI. But for long-term efforts for SEO, $500 a month,$1,000 a month to buy a few links, keep things growing at an organic-looking rate, Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. So this section, a little high on the on-page side, but really good number on the backlink stuff. Moving on to number five, we have my favorite, PaperClick PPC advertising. So Google Ads or Bing Ads Campaigns, this is our one section that we have here, they have allocated $2,000 to $4,000 a month. And again, I think this is a pretty good number. So depending obviously on your market and how effective your ads are, how effective your advertising manager is.$2,000 to $4,000 could be plenty. It could be generating leads at like $100 or less per lead, or it could be really difficult. So you might need a lot more to get things. So it really is heavily dependent on your market and some of those variables about whether or not that's effective. And it's not something I would always include, PPC. It is definitely my bread and butter, But PPC is not something I always recommend just because there is sort of an immediacy of it and you get a finite amount of time to make it work. Moving on to number six, once again, we're moving on, email marketing. And I think everybody should be doing this, looking at all of these options. We're gonna get into a couple that are almost no dollars or they're a time investment. But dollar for dollar, I think this is one of the most effective ways to do marketing. And we have two sections here. Section number one is creation of a monthly newsletter with insights, updates, things about the firm, and the cost for that, we're looking at $500 to $1,000 a month. I think that's, again, maybe on the high side. I'm not sure what we're talking about cost-wise. There's gonna be some email software and someone who has to write it, but I don't know how we get to $500 even for that. So I do think this is a really good idea. I think the cost that Chat GPT is estimating,$500 to $1,000 a month, that's a little high. Maybe if we're doing weekly newsletters or weekly emails, then it makes more sense, but monthly, that shouldn't cost us more than 100 or 200 bucks max. Item number two in email marketing though is email automation and management tools. So I guess I was wrong. They are not including the software. For the automation and management tools, we're looking at a thousand or a hundred to $300 a month. And I think that's very reasonable. Obviously, depending on the size of your contact list, you may pay more, you may pay less, depending which provider you go with. We've talked about active campaign and MailChimp and HubSpot and a lot of other good programs out there.$100 to $300 a month sounds reasonable to me.$500 to $1,000 a month for that monthly newsletter. That sounds way on the high side. But again, this is something you must be doing. Section six here, email marketing that chat GPT is recommending. You have to be doing this. So very, very important to focus on that. Section seven is networking and community engagement, which is not something we talk about a huge amount on this podcast because I'm mostly a data nerd. So I don't do too well at legal events, things like that. It's not really my most comfortable arena. I'm a good public speaker, but I do have not the best time in networking events. So it is really important though. And when I am able, I do try to engage because the two sections we have here are participation in local legal events, workshops and seminars. And this will have some variable costs depending on the fees for the events. But obviously for attorneys, really, really valuable for referral sources. If there are any seminars that make sense for your potential clients, that's hugely valuable. And sometimes we're going to have a time cost here. In the real estate world, speaking gigs is sometimes about just sort of knocking on the door until it happens. And it really depends on what you're trying to participate in. But even going and showing up and going to events that are related to your clients or related to your peers that could give you referrals, those are really valuable. But item number two in section seven or networking and community engagement section is sponsorship of community events or charities. And I think this is an interesting one as well. Again, it has variable costs based on our sponsorship levels, things like that. But I think this is really interesting, but I do think it is for a slightly more mature law firm. I don't think this is a day one marketing item. I think this is when you're really trying to establish yourself in the community and really brand a little bit.'Cause this isn't something that's gonna lead to sales. I mean, it is gonna lead to sales, but it's not gonna lead to them in the same kind of way we're talking about when we talk about leading to sales with Google ads or with Facebook ads or something online. It's much more difficult to track. And usually that type of conversion isn't going to happen as quickly. But networking and community engagement, This is one of the most critical assets you can build within your marketing program. So you can't skip this. Again, like email marketing, this is a critical part of your business. So you don't have to run Google ads. You don't have to make a Facebook profile. But you do have to contact people and you do have to go out and be part of the community. Moving on to section number eight. And I've hammered local SEO and that kind of thing a bunch in the last few episodes and we have a series on it coming out. But section number eight is online reviews and reputation management. And in the legal world, I don't have to tell you, it's really important. So the two things we wanna do, both of these are a time investment, but they're really important. They could have some small costs related, but generally they're a time investment. Number one is encouraging satisfied clients to leave positive online reviews. And chat GPT, you have killed it here. I mean, this is one of the best recommendations that chat GPT could give you. And number two in section eight, which is even better I think, is to monitor and address any negative reviews. I can't say any better myself. I don't think I prompted it to say this. I mean, I can't do any better than myself when it comes to online reviews. There's more you can do, but when it comes to the basics, encouraging clients to leave reviews and then monitoring and quickly responding to any negative reviews to help deal with those issues, that's everything. That's the whole game. So moving on to number nine, we've got two more to go. Number nine is video marketing. And we're going to talk a lot more about this on the podcast in the next few weeks and months. But this is a great channel for marketing. It does come with a little more cost, though, than the last two sections. So Chat GPT has given us two ideas here for video marketing. Number one is creation of informational legal videos or webinars. And they estimate $1,000 to $3,000 a video. And again, I think this is a really high cost. Now it drastically depends how you produce that video. So if you're doing a webinar on your MacBook, and that's all you have to do, then it's just a short time investment or the investment to get the webinar created. If you're doing a commercial level shoot, it could be well over $3,000. So what Chat GPT is estimating here for the vast majority of law firms who can really just do something good with software like iMovie or Canva or something like that, then yeah, a thousand bucks is already pretty expensive. But if we're talking about different levels of production, a thousand to $3,000 a video is very reasonable, especially when we start to get into more complex things and motion graphics and all of that fun creative stuff. But section number two is sharing videos on YouTube and social media platforms. And this is really included in the social media budget, says. So that's a no-brainer to me. Good job, chat GBT. I think that's a killer. But section number 10, our final section, is investment in analytics tools to track website traffic, social media engagement, and campaign performance. And that is a budget of a thousand or a hundred to three thousand dollars per month. And again, I think that's really reasonable. I think that's a really good investment. Not enough firms put money into the analytics and measuring and tracking and understanding what's happening with their online advertising and with their advertising as a whole. So putting in even a couple hundred dollars a month to get a better understanding of what's really going on is probably the easiest yes you'll hear from me in any of the sections that ChatGPT has generated here. So there's a little disclaimer at the bottom and it says the total estimated marketing budget is 15,000 to $25,000. I think that's relatively reasonable for a firm doing 200K a month in revenue. And I told it, you know, we're looking to stay around that 15% mark or slightly under,'cause obviously there's gonna be a little more time investment. So it invests 15 to 25,000 and assumes we're gonna spend a few thousand in time. But it says at the end, remember that these cost estimates can vary based on factors such as the complexity of processes, whether certain tasks or handled in-house or outsourced and the competitiveness of the legal market in Atlanta. So it kind of even hedges like a lawyer, but tells us that this is all going to vary. It says that it's crucial to continuously monitor the effectiveness of each initiative and adjust strategy to achieve the best results within the budget. And of course, this is all definitely true. It's the kind of thing I would say, and I completely agree. So the reality is, AI is great. And it does do a really good job at building a marketing plan. It has broad knowledge of the options that are out there. But the other reality going through this is that it doesn't do anything that's super creative. It doesn't do anything that's unexpected. You'll notice that as I went through all the 10 sections there in the plan, nothing surprised me. These were all good ideas that were basic. I mean, they were the first thing I would recommend doing for a law firm. So when it comes to a marketing plan that covers what should I already be doing and And using chat GPT to sort of confirm that you're on the right track, maybe that's an even better use. But when it comes to creating new ideas, it seems like chat GPT just isn't really there yet. But overall, as you learn how to use it as, you know, open AI makes changes to the algorithms and makes changes to the data sets that you can work with, or if you create your own LLMs so that you can do really interesting things with data that you've created or that you're pulling from, this is going to get better. And the reality is, it's so powerful that you can't afford not to be using it. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out rosenadvertising.com for more. Thanks.[MUSIC]