Community Table: Branding vs. Marketing (And How to Use Both)

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

The Un-Billable Hour community table where real lawyers from all around the country with real issues they’re dealing with right now meet together virtually to present their questions to Christopher T. Anderson lawyer and law firm management consultant. New questions every episode and none of it scripted. The real conversations happen here. Our episode today centers around the differences between branding and marketing. Through this, Christopher helps an attorney examine why the attorney’s leads are down.

Caller:

So I want to talk about branding and marketing. They go hand in hand. I’m assuming

Christopher T. Anderson:

They do in that they’re both. The objective of both usually is to eventually acquire more clients. They don’t in the sense that a lot of people get them mixed up.

Caller:

So I was meeting with the marketing strategist, strateg, whatever you want to call them, and she told me that I needed to brand myself. And I guess once I branded myself, then it helps me with marketing my firm. Is that how that works or

Christopher T. Anderson:

No? I think she might’ve meant something different. I don’t want to put words in anybody else’s mouth, but let’s talk through it. And just for the listeners that we don’t need, because it’s a radio show, we don’t need to get into very specifics about your firm, but would you say your gross revenues are under 1,000,001 to 5 million or five to 10 million?

Caller:

Under a million.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Okay. I ask because under a million, quite honestly, branding is your smallest concern and it’s definitely not the thing you do first. Is it important to have a brand? Absolutely. Is it important that you’re consistent with your brand? Absolutely. Is it important that you know what it is so you can be consistent with it? Yeah, sure. And the most important thing about it’s, it should be absolutely 100% authentic and true. This is not one of those things. You fake it till you make it. Because inauthenticity is not a brand, it’s a front, and that’s not what a brand is. A brand’s not a front. It is an authentic expression of your values and of your mission that you want to express into the word world. And from that perspective, it is important. But what a lot of people mean by brand is like, look at me.

What do I got behind me? I’ve got The, Un-Billable, Hour. And in fact, we’re going to change that because when I’m on this show, I often talk about the brand that I use to actually help law firms all across the country, which is Sunnyside services. We know the brand and we’re very authentic with the brand, which is to liberate law firm owners and to help them build a business that supports their goals and their desires. And that comes from an honest place what the business does for me. And so we carry that brand always forward, but we don’t lead with it. In other words, I’m not spending a whole ton of money going out into the world and pushing my brand.

I’m going to date myself now because I don’t watch television very much anymore. But once upon a time, Coca-Cola had the big white, fluffy polar bear with the Coca-Cola bottle. He would drink it and he’d go, and Coke is life and McDonald’s, they are able to spend a lot of money on branding, which is great because the brand is what sticks with people. The brand allows people to carry forward your message because it is delivering that consistency to the market. Branding is very powerful, but it’s a long play. And when you’re in a business and you’re trying to build that business and you’re trying to get yourself above a million dollars if that’s what you want to do, branding has to take a strong second seat. Now, I don’t want you to hear ignore it. I don’t want you to hear be this way and that way and just deliver a confused message to the market.

You want to be clear on what your brand is, but then you’ve got to put it behind you, literally like mine is behind me. And you spend your time, your effort, and your money on your message and on your call to action what you need, right? At this level, we need clients who are going to pay, and that’s done through marketing. And there’s a variety of kinds of marketing, have direct response marketing. You can have digitally aimed marketing. You can have all kinds of marketing. We can talk about which ones you’re doing, which ones you might want to consider doing. So what does brand mean to a firm of your size? I get a sense of brand off of when you’ve, you’ve come to The, Un-Billable, Hour several times. You show up professionally, you have a tidy office behind you and you have the least today and you’ve spoken well of what you’re trying to do in the marketplace. And you and I have talked about narrowing that down and honing in on what you’re trying to get done, which helps with your brand. But then we’ve got to talk really about marketing. How are we going to get the clients that are going to pay the bills over the next month, quarter and year? Brand is just the background to that. It’s not in the forefront, not for a while. What are some things that I do focus on in branding and then we’re going to talk about your marketing. Do you have brand guidelines?

Caller:

I don’t have anything when it comes to branding and marketing right now.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Okay. That’s all you need by the way, is brand guidelines and probably a good sense of what your mission is and what you’re trying to accomplish. Why the brand guidelines? Because that way when you do your marketing, they’re consistent. So that slowly but surely over time you’re building a brand. Again looking behind me, that yellow and that purple of that guy behind me, the font. And I don’t build my own brand guidelines. I have my marketing coordinator do that, but those are all part of my brand guidelines so that when we go to a digital advertiser, whether we go to a print advertiser, when I’m going to go do a chalk, when I’m doing a video, whatever, we have a color palette, a font palette, and this is the way you can use our logo and this is not the way you can use our logo. Those are the brand guidelines so that our stuff looks consistent over time. And one day people will see the Yellow Sun logo and go like, oh, that’s that guy that does law firms and helps law firm owners. And the brand will have evolved and been established, but it’s not my primary effort. I’m just being consistent so I don’t have to do it later. Does that make sense?

Okay. What does your business do?

Caller:

We help the disabled get their benefits and those injured by the negligence of others get the compensation they deserve. So that’s in a nutshell. But we are small, so we are very personable. We are very approachable. We’re very hands-on and empathetic because we serve a lot of clients who are uneducated, underrepresented. Their voice isn’t really heard.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So what you just did is you did give me sort of a branding statement, some call it elevator statement or magic statement or whatever, and then you did gave me some core values, which is good. Does everybody that works with you, would they be able to tell me those core values? Just like the way you rattled ’em off

Caller:

The core values? Yes, because we’re so small right now, they would be able to.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Okay. You would be surprised. A lot of really small firms, nobody has any idea what the core values are. None at all. When I go in, one of the first things I do when I start working with a firm is I go and I do a site visit, but I’ll actually come on site and interview your whole team. And this is one of the questions I ask, what’s this place about? And man, most places it’s all over the place, why do you guys do what you do? And they’ll just give me all sorts of stories, which is fine and fair because the truth is that everybody that works with you comes with their own reasons and for their own reasons. But if they’re not clear on what your reasons are, then their reasons will take acy and that’s not what you want and your brand will suffer because when people deal with different parts of your business, they’ll get different core values and the people will act differently.

I think your mission statement is good that you help disabled get benefits and you help those that are injured get the compensation. They deserve two different messages. So that’s okay because they’re kind of simpatico. And at the end of the day it leads me to ask questions. How do you do that? Why do you do that? I would encourage, we could spend a lot of time working on those and really tightening them up because the goal of them is to get people excited about it and to ask the next question. So depending on who you’re talking to, you probably want to just rattle off one. I know you were talking to me, so you were like, I got to tell ’em both things, but depending on who you’re talking to, just rattle off one. Okay. Are you confidently month after month, getting the number of new clients that you need?

Caller:

Well, I was up until it seems the last month, it seems like LSAs have changed or something. I’m not sure what’s going on with Google my business. But initially, yes, we were meeting goals as far as clients signed per month. But for this year, no. Hence, I’m sure CRAs Crunch is on the horizon. Yeah, it is not. I’m sure I know.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And how many new clients were you planning to get this year?

Caller:

This year I would need to pull up my business plan. I don’t have it in front of me right now.

Christopher T. Anderson:

But you have it, you know it. Yes,

Caller:

I know

Christopher T. Anderson:

It. Yeah. Okay. And did you have that broken down month by month by month?

Caller:

Yes. By month per practice area and month.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And when did you start to fall behind?

Caller:

I started the year out behind. I’ve been working to figure out what needs to be done. I’ve been doing calls talking to my referral network.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So let’s walk our way down the whole funnel. Has the number of leads been lower than what you need historically?

Caller:

The number of leads has been lower.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Have the leads that you’re getting, are they booking at the same percentage rate at the percentage rate that was part of your plan?

Caller:

No.

Christopher T. Anderson:

They’re also your booking rate down.

Caller:

My booking rate is down as well.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And once they’re booked, are they showing up at the rate that they’re supposed to?

Caller:

They are showing up. Okay.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So show up is okay, and once they show up, are you converting them at the rate that you’re supposed to?

Caller:

It’s slightly down just a little bit.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Okay, so slightly down. But the big problems are in the actual total number of leads.

Caller:

The total number of leads,

Christopher T. Anderson:

Correct. And in what percentage of them are booking, which means that your lead quality has also shifted. So a lot of the leads are not marketing qualified.

Caller:

Correct. And they shouldn’t even be scheduled.

Christopher T. Anderson:

No, I got it. Yeah, they’re not marketing qualified. So one of the things that’s really important to identify is what’s going on. So we’ve got at least two things going on. One total number leads is down. Two, who we’re getting is down is wrong, is shifted somehow. And you mentioned that one of the things that you were concerned about is that LSA is not something you think that something about LSA has changed.

Caller:

Yes, and I’m waiting on my marketing or not marketing website, CEO people to get back in town to have a call with me regarding what I’m seeing in LSA.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Okay. What other things other than LSA are you doing for lead generation?

Caller:

That’s all I’m spending my money on monthly. I have a billboard and the city that I’m from, which is a small city right outside of Memphis, at one time it was a big money maker, but I’ve noticed in my CallRail calls that we’re not getting what we were getting in the past as well. So I’m probably going to let that go when the contract ends in July and I do a lot of organic posting on Facebook, Instagram, and I’ve started to give content or give information on TikTok. I see that I’m getting a lot of likes. I don’t think I’ve gotten any leads just yet, but I just started that within the last month.

Christopher T. Anderson:

No, search engine marketing, paid search, Google AdWords,

Caller:

I don’t really know. I don’t know what my marketing company or those people, what they do. I mean they do the SEOI have to approve content for blogs and for backlinks.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, that’s all SEO, but so SEM or paid search, same thing is where you pay Google or some of the lesser players to appear in the top of the searches to have good search results and then you pay them per click in order. You’re bidding yourself to be in those sponsored spots. Are you paying Google for all

Caller:

That? Not for pay per clicks, but I pay for LSAs.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Got it. Okay. Why not pay-per-click?

Caller:

Because my practice areas, I’d just be throwing money away with the people who always show up top. I mean I,

Christopher T. Anderson:

You’d have to spend a lot and it’s very competitive. I

Caller:

Don’t have Morgan and Morgan money. I can’t compete with them.

Christopher T. Anderson:

I promise you. You don’t need Morgan and Morgan money. What you need is good marketing people. You don’t have to take them on head to head. And I mean I know it’s expensive and it may not be the right play for you, but what’s probably happening is you’re not the only person that knows about LSA anymore either. And so the same players are competing with you across the board and so you’re facing a more competitive environment. What concerns me? And that’s not to say, oh gosh, the world’s on fire environment is competitive everywhere. It takes creativity and nimbleness to compete well, if you know, what does a click cost in your practice area, in your market?

Caller:

So for social security, around 54. Between 54 and 60.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Okay.

Caller:

And personal injury, 80 and upwards.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Those are not astronomical numbers. And what’s an LSA lead cost?

Caller:

I thought that’s what I gave. What did I give you?

Christopher T. Anderson:

I thought you were giving me your paid pay-per-click 54 to 60.

Caller:

Oh no, I gave you LSAI didn’t per click. I gave you LSA.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Okay. Do you know what a pay per-click is in your jurisdiction? I know

Caller:

Jurisdiction for a personal injury, it’s pretty much up there. So it’s over a hundred for pay per clicks for,

Christopher T. Anderson:

Let’s call it for fun. Do you think it’s 200 or less?

Caller:

No.

Christopher T. Anderson:

300

Caller:

Maybe. So

Christopher T. Anderson:

Let’s call it 400. I am pretty damn sure that 400 is more than it’s, you can get plenty of lead flow at under four. Oh, let’s walk through your funnel. Do you want to talk about PI or social security?

Caller:

Let’s talk about pi because I’m getting the SSA leads. I’m not getting the PI leads. Okay.

Christopher T. Anderson:

When things were working, how many of all, what was your booking rate? So if a hundred people contacted you through LSA, how many of them got booked to a sales call? What percent

Caller:

Maybe? Well no, 70 would’ve been how many I converted that was that rate, maybe 50.

Christopher T. Anderson:

That would be pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. Alright. And then of those that booked, what’s your show up rate?

Caller:

So if it’s a PI call, it’s a hot transfer. We don’t do show up rates, we just,

Christopher T. Anderson:

Okay, so a hundred.

Caller:

Yeah.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And then you said 70% conversion.

Caller:

It used to be 70% conversion. Yes.

Christopher T. Anderson:

What is it now?

Caller:

So looking at PI conversion rate for this month, it’s 50. Last month it was 83.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Alright, let’s go with 60 as an average. Alright, now just for fun, so I’m going to take your $60 LSA number. If 50% book, that means a booked appointment is costing you $120 and since they all show up, then we know that someone sitting for their sales call is also costing you $120. And if you convert 60% of ’em, your cost per new client per acquisition is 120 divided by 0.6 is $200. What’s your average case value for these PI cases

Caller:

Around five. Now

Christopher T. Anderson:

5,000 you can spend more. Alright, so that is 200 to give you 5,000, that’s a 25 times return. On the marketing spend,

You can afford to probably spend 500, right? So 10 x is sort of a benchmark. Now I need to know a lot more about your business to give you your real number, but just as sort of a generic number that’s not specified to your firm. 10 x, if you can figure it out where for every dollar you spend on marketing, you get $10 back, you’re doing okay, particularly in pr. And here’s the dirty little secret. Everybody gets afraid to compete with Morgan, Morgan and all that. Their average case value is not dissimilar to yours. Their show up rate’s not dissimilar to yours and their conversion rate’s not dissimilar to yours. Maybe they’re a little bit better on each one of those, but not a whole lot. So what they can afford to spend is the same as what you can afford to spend. They could just afford to spend it longer.

So you didn’t tell me how many leads you needed, right? So let’s just say just for fun that you needed 20 leads a month. That’s probably more than what you need based on your numbers. But let’s say you needed 20 leads a month. So if I said you could spend $500 lead, that means that your marketing budget is $10,000 and you could spend $10,000 on pay per click or paid search or any other market or LSA or whatever you want to say. You could spend 10,000 to get your 20 new clients. Now you’d be like, oh, but Morgan Morgan’s going to go spend 500,000 bucks. That might be true. You might not spend as much per day you might spend, if you’re spending $10,000, that means you’re spending three $30 a day. So you might start spending at 10:00 AM and you might be done at noon and they’re going to spend 24 hours.

Or you might say, I’m only going to spend it from the fifth to the eighth. I’m going to spend it all day long, but only for seven days or five days or 10 days, whatever the number is, and they’re going to spend it all month long. But what you can afford to spend per lead, per client is the same or similar. Now if you can do better than they, because I don’t think there’s a whole lot of people out in the world that say Morgan, Morgan treats their clients better than anybody or gives them personal touch or really helps their clients for their full life cycle from the minute they come in the door till the verdict and then beyond or really fights for the best verdict they possibly can get. People don’t generally say that. Just for the record, since this is a radio show, I’m not saying anything about Morgan.

Morgan, I don’t know anything about ’em. But what I hear out there is sometimes people feel that they don’t get quite the personal touch from this giant firm that they might get from a firm like yours. And if doing that can raise your average case value because you care and you dog the files and really work to get them the best possible result and you have a better average case value, then you can spend more. You can outspend them on marketing, not total dollars, just get total dollars out of your head. It’s how much can you spend per lead, per client. And then because once you’ve got your number, you’re done and you can leave the rest for someone else. So it is easy to get intimidated and say, I don’t have the money that they do. It’s not true. You do. You don’t have the volume, but per client, you can compete.

Caller:

And I found my total number of leads I need, need 476 for this year,

Christopher T. Anderson:

4 76 leads or new clients

Caller:

Leads, I need 172 sales. Perfect.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So now we know, and the exercise I just walked you through about how much can you spend per new client 172, if your average case value is 5,000, I’d say you can spend 500. That means your marketing budget for those 172 clients for the year is $86,000, which is $7,166 a month is your marketing budget for those 172 new clients for that practice area. That’s your marketing budget. And if you run your marketing well that should deliver the clients that you need. That’s how you build a marketing plan. What you and I just did that exercise is how you build a marketing plan and now you say, well, what do I spend it on? Then we could break it up. Well, you spend some of it on LSA, you spend some of it on paid search, maybe you’ll spend some of it on a billboard. It just depends on what you’ve been able to, what your market tells you has been successful in the past, knowing that whatever’s successful in the past will stop working at one point. You have to find new things all the time. The one other thing that we talked about, one thing that gave me great concern is when my marketing team gets back, we’re going to talk about it. How often do you meet with your marketing team?

Caller:

Once a month.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Oh my god, once a week. It’s got to be once a week. You got to be looking at

Caller:

Not going to reach out to them and email them, but

Christopher T. Anderson:

As no, no, no. It’s got to be a set call. Same time, same day, every week does not need to be long. 15, 20 minutes, but I needed X leads this week. We’re spending X dollars on campaign A, B, C, D, and E. How did each one of them perform? How many leads did we get? And then a review of every bad lead. So every lead that did not convert feedback, what happened to that lead? They should be getting you money back on your LSA for people who call for employment discrimination. I don’t know what people call for, but if you’re anything like me, people call for all sorts of crazy shit on your LSA line that you didn’t advertise for and you get your money back on those LSA Google gives you your money back on everything that wasn’t for what you were paying.

And so they should be doing that for you. But you should be saying, because then you, every week you go like, okay, well campaign A and B, we’re doing all right. Campaign C did not. All right, what happened? What do we need to change? Do we need to kill it and move the money to the ones that are working? Do we need to change the landing page? Do we need to change the verbiage on the LSA? Do we need to change the geographical scope? We need to change something and everything’s an experiment. So you have a hypothesis about what you should change. You probably do AB test on it and you then meet next week to see if that change had the results you expected in your business. In my business, a month is forever. You can’t afford a month of things this, your money’s still gone, your marketing spend is still gone.

How dare you. They spend your money after the first week knowing something’s not working. Marketing has got to be a weekly adjustment cycle for all the digital stuff. Listen, billboard, if you’re on a six month commitment on a billboard, you don’t have to monitor it every week. You should monitor it before you renew and you should think about what you might want to change. We ran some billboards, they did terrible, but it was our first go. And so we found some people that drove by and asked them about those billboards and we came up with a hypothesis. And so then we put out two billboards that were similar to the first one, but we changed a couple things on. One, changed them a different way on the other one, and now we’re in the middle of the experiment to see what that’s going to do.

Marketing is constant experimentation and monitoring the results. Before I go, I’m going to give you the five commandments of marketing. Everybody ready? So important commandment one. If you’re under $10 million in revenue commandment, one, you will not commit marketing without a specific call to action on everything you do. Your should be specific about what you’re asking the client to do or the prospective client to do. Call me. Here’s my website. Go there, meet me at this place. I don’t care what the call to action is, just have them do something. Two, you should not commit marketing unless you have hypothesis about what the result is going to be. I’m going to spend $7,166 on paid search. I expect 172 new clients a year, however many that was a month. I expect the leads to be this. I expect the booking rate to be this. I expect the show up rate to be this, and I expect the conversion rate to be this.

That’s your hypothesis. Don’t do it if you don’t have hypothesis because otherwise, how can you answer the question of whether you should do it or not? If your hypothesis results in an unacceptable return, then you just don’t do it. Three, you shall not commit marketing unless you commit to measuring the results. It’s no good having then most people stop at two. They have. They say, okay, here’s my hypothesis. Go. And then they never measure. Got to be committed to measuring the results. Four, you have to be committed to learn from the measurement. So, okay, I had a, here’s the measurement. What did I learn? And oftentimes that question, the answer to what did I learn is another question. I don’t know what I learned, but I think I learned X. And that cycles you back to number two through the fifth commandment, which is the fifth commandment is you shall not commit marketing unless you are committed to taking action on what you learned. So call to action, hypothesis, measure, learn, take action, and then action usually is cycling back to number two. Do an experiment form a new hypothesis, and that’s how we build a marketing plan. That was my rant of the day.

Announcer:

Thank you for listening. This has been the Un-Billable Hour Community table on the Legal Talk Network.

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