445. Why Your Law Firm's Marketing ROI Is So Hard to Track

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[00:48] You drop in serious capital on Billboard's TV and digital, but when you look at your
[00:56] signed cases, can you actually point to which marketing channel did the work?
[01:00] Most firm owners try to give all the credits to a single touch point, but the massive fragmentation
[01:05] from streaming and local maps to TikTok and LLMs, attribution is incredibly murky.
[01:09] We can't just slap a tracking URL on everything it called a day.
[01:13] Today I'm revealing the single most important metric in the game that dictates whether
[01:17] you're going to scale up or stall out.
[01:19] We'll uncover how to track the right leading indicators.
[01:22] The simple question you must ask is in take and why jumping on emerging platforms early gives you an incredibly unfair advantage.
[01:32] This is Personal and Dream Mastermind.
[01:34] I'm Chris Triar, founder and CEO of Ranking.io, be a lead for Format's Parking Agency for Personal and Dream Law firms.
[01:40] Let's get into it.
[01:42] So one of the questions I'm often asked is like,
[01:47] how do I know my marketing ROI?
[01:50] How do I think about attribution?
[01:52] I'm going to be kind of long-winded here.
[01:55] But there's multiple things that you need to do on the front end.
[01:59] So first, you need to have a CRM,
[02:01] and you need to use UTM code,
[02:03] you need to have all your attribution set up to understand
[02:06] and to get the data into your different text acts
[02:10] different text acts to even track where a conversion happens.
[02:15] The issue is, where do you place the conversion?
[02:19] If they come in on a billboard, but then they go to Instagram, and then they go to
[02:25] another location, and then they talk to a friend, what gets the credit?
[02:29] So a lot of times, personal injury attorneys are trying to give credit to one particular
[02:35] channel, and that's really challenging to do.
[02:39] So people talk about first touch and last touch attribution.
[02:43] The first touch, maybe was the billboard, maybe the last touch was Google or an LLM.
[02:49] Maybe they came direct.
[02:50] And so first, having an understanding that it's not going to be clean, no matter how you
[02:55] look at it.
[02:56] And I'm going to circle back around and how you do this.
[02:58] But attribution and conversion tracking is really murky.
[03:03] And in the past marketing and advertising was wasn't fragmented.
[03:08] It was like TV, Google Facebook.
[03:12] That was it.
[03:13] That was really it.
[03:14] Now we got streaming.
[03:16] We have connected TV.
[03:18] We've got YouTube.
[03:20] We have on the radio.
[03:21] We got Spotify.
[03:22] We got Pandora.
[03:23] We have Google.
[03:25] And now we have LLIMS.
[03:27] And now we have different placement on Google.
[03:29] We got LSA.
[03:30] We've got local maps.
[03:31] Tons and tons and tons of tons of fragmentation
[03:33] across the industry.
[03:34] It's not as consolidated.
[03:36] social media is not just Facebook, it's TikTok, and Snapchat, and all the things.
[03:40] Right? So understanding that first from a marketing perspective, you need to be in more areas than one over time.
[03:49] If you really want to have a big business. The second thing is, I think there's a tip here in Chris Walker talks about this.
[03:55] I like an open-ended story, and I like people to verbalize and not just to read the data.
[04:01] you to data. You want to read the data and port that into your CRM, but you also want them
[04:06] to tell and explain where they saw you or why they hired you. So you just ask them on
[04:11] the intake. How did you hear about us? And some of them will say, oh, I saw your TV advertisement
[04:16] is so funny blah blah blah. Oh, I spoke to so and so you get a little bit more context.
[04:21] And when you get the data component and the just subject, you know, what, what, what they
[04:26] remember it kind of starts to tell story over time with volume. That's the first thing that's how you
[04:32] start to look at attribution. I know some of the there are some individuals that think that
[04:37] oh I can just put a dynamic tracking URL and everything and I know exactly which shit that's bullshit.
[04:43] Like nobody can do that. And here's a bigger picture. You need to look at your front end
[04:49] marketing and intake. Okay, what's it cost to acquire a case? Total up everything. You're
[04:55] your entire marketing spend, all your labor, all your labor for intake, all your bodies
[05:00] that you have, your marketing managers, everything.
[05:03] Okay.
[05:04] That is your true hack.
[05:06] What did you spend to acquire a case?
[05:09] Marketing an intake, total everything.
[05:11] Then you take all your fees that you've collected and divide them by the number, what's your
[05:17] average fee.
[05:19] Once you have that information, you can get the most important metric in the game.
[05:24] It's CAC to value ratio.
[05:27] You wanted at least a 3x.
[05:30] You talked to any PE and a venture.
[05:32] They want at least a 3x because it goes below a 3x very hard to make money.
[05:38] So let me explain the CAC to LTV ratio.
[05:40] If you're CAC, you're cost to acquire a case is $4,000.
[05:44] That's looking at everything.
[05:46] All your labor, all your expenses across all channels.
[05:49] And your average fee is $12,000.
[05:52] Okay?
[05:53] $1,000 for your fee divided by $4,000 to acquire the case is three.
[06:00] That is a three to one ratio.
[06:02] And the better the range.
[06:05] So if you can acquire cases cheaper, you're going to have a better ratio.
[06:09] If you can extend your fees, maybe your fees are $16,000.
[06:14] Right? $16,000 divided by $4,000.
[06:17] Now you're four to one ratio.
[06:18] The higher your ratio, the better you're off.
[06:21] and that's the main thing that you need to look at,
[06:23] because everything adds up.
[06:25] If you're just looking at the channel spin
[06:27] and you're not counting the bodies
[06:28] and your paper-click managers and your demand-gen team
[06:31] and your social media specials,
[06:33] you're really losing out and see,
[06:35] you've got to be cost-conscious of the big picture,
[06:37] which is cack to value ratio.
[06:39] A lot of times attorneys talk a lot about vanity metrics.
[06:47] Rankings is a vanity metric.
[06:49] Followers is a vanity metric.
[06:51] A lot of these, I don't love the word vanity because it can be predictive of a future
[06:56] behavior.
[06:57] If you have better rankings, it tends to give you the opportunity to capture more cases.
[07:03] If you have more followers, it has the ability to maybe increase your distribution.
[07:09] more eyeballs can see it. There's a lot of interest based on social media marketing now.
[07:15] And so if something really hits, you can be displayed throughout a big audience. But really,
[07:20] when people say vanity, that's what they're talking about. They're talking about impressions and
[07:26] likes and comments. But I do think that they give you information. So if you're an EOS based company
[07:33] in entrepreneurial operating system, business if you're working with fire proof or scaling up,
[07:39] even has similar setup. You want to track your leading indicators. A lot of times your leading
[07:45] indicators are what these quote unquote vanity metrics, your rankings, your followers,
[07:51] you want to see those increase. You know, if you're rankings decline, you're probably not going
[07:56] to get as many Google conversions, right? So it's predictive, but then you want to have the lagging
[08:00] indicators, the results, the cases, the cost per lead. So you really need to track both. And I
[08:05] think that's one of the big failures of Gino Whitman's book traction is it only talks about
[08:10] tracking the weekly L10 leading indicators and doesn't talk about enough about the lagging indicators
[08:16] to make decisions. So of these vanity metrics, of these different signals that you can look at,
[08:22] there are a lot of them on specific to a channel. So let me give you an example. One of the things that
[08:28] that you need to look at on social media for most platforms are the comments and engagement
[08:35] because it could be something that your consumer, your prospective client, finds interesting.
[08:39] Also, content that tends to get a lot of comments and engagement, it could seem by a bigger
[08:44] audience. So then you can create future content that resonated with your audience based upon the
[08:50] engagement. Even the comments will give you ideas for other pieces of content in the future.
[08:55] So that's one thing that that specific to social media.
[08:59] There are things like search engine marketing, you know SEO.
[09:03] When we're talking about being discovered in the LLM or ranking on Google, look at backlinks, look at domain rating.
[09:09] The authority of your links, the relevancy of your links, are they contextual body links, or where is the placement of the link?
[09:17] That's really important contextual body are stronger.
[09:20] Each channel has some of these nuanced metrics to look at.
[09:24] And they are very important.
[09:26] And that I would say in most cases,
[09:28] these are a sub leading indicator of that particular channel.
[09:32] So you got big picture like rankings,
[09:34] but like you want to go deeper,
[09:35] you've got citations for the LLMs,
[09:37] you've got links,
[09:39] you've got maybe reviews as another metric to watch,
[09:43] because it's really important.
[09:44] So each channel has these nuanced metrics to look at
[09:48] that are predictive for future behavior.
[09:54] Even up, as a specialized proactive AI built for personal injury law firms.
[10:00] The imagery is in there DNA.
[10:02] Visit evenuplaw.com to learn more.
[10:05] A lot of books, a lot of business owners talk about.
[10:14] It's better to be first in particular things because you have less competition.
[10:20] Let's take social media in particular.
[10:23] And by the way, the LLMs are going to follow this exact same method.
[10:28] Typically, they need network effects in the beginning.
[10:31] They need followers, they need content.
[10:33] So they will give the distribution out very freely.
[10:38] Many of you, when you jumped on Facebook, use to make a Facebook post and all of your friends
[10:42] would see it.
[10:43] And you think, oh, this is great.
[10:45] And it was like that on TikTok too.
[10:46] You could put out a terrible piece of content and it would be seen by a hundred thousand people.
[10:50] Once they've established network effects and a community and they've got all this content,
[10:55] they crank it to you.
[10:57] They're going to decrease your visibility from organic content because they want you to
[11:01] advertise.
[11:03] chat to be teet gets adoption they're already starting to experiment with ads.
[11:07] Once Google take Google, every single platform is the same.
[11:11] Google, again, all this resource, all these people creating content will now there's three
[11:15] links, there's four links, now you got, now you can sponsor the local map pack, there's tons
[11:20] of way to to advertise, but there's way more advertisements than there ever has been
[11:23] before.
[11:24] That's basically how they monetize and that's the plan, right for them to make money.
[11:29] They've got to cover their costs.
[11:31] So here's the thing, you have to ask yourself which platforms are you still getting a lot
[11:36] of organic visibility for?
[11:38] Which platforms are emerging that need network effects that aren't going to crank it to you?
[11:42] Those are the ones that you need to look at and those are the ones that you really need
[11:45] to focus on.
[11:46] And when that next snapchat or TikTok comes out, just jump on it because the early content
[11:53] that you can contribute is really going to be distributed very widely.
[12:00] So a lot of times, personal injury attorneys are confused like what they should do to create
[12:05] content, whether it's on Google or social media and should they follow a vibe, should
[12:14] they try to be authentic to themselves, should they go model someone else?
[12:20] Here's what I would tell you.
[12:21] The fastest way to success is from there's a book called TheoLike and Artist.
[12:26] These individuals that are already crushing an on social media, you can model them and have success.
[12:31] They've already went through the pain of what content create, they know what works.
[12:36] So you can still like an artist.
[12:38] But I think it's incredibly important to still be authentic and have your own take and approach on things.
[12:45] And the more content you create, it gives you the opportunity to see what resonates with the audience on whatever platform it is.
[12:52] be YouTube, it could be Google, it could be, it doesn't matter.
[12:56] And from that engagement, it can provide you opportunities and ideas to create that
[13:02] calendar of the future.
[13:03] The thing that I'll say is quantity creates quality.
[13:08] You're not going to be good at YouTube or social media when you do 10 posts.
[13:12] Hermosie talks about the rule of 100.
[13:14] You need to do things 100.
[13:15] Mr. Beast talks about that.
[13:17] Hey, create your first 100.
[13:19] YouTube videos.
[13:20] They're all going to be terrible.
[13:21] You may think that number 89 is good, but I promise you, within your at 989, you're going
[13:27] to look back at 89, be like all that was tear.
[13:29] So quantity creates quality and steel like an artist.
[13:34] So model the masters, but then create your own authentic version of that.
[13:43] If you're a PI attorney and you just have no clue what the return is on your investment.
[13:48] There's a couple of things that you can do.
[13:50] The simplest, it's like the envelope system.
[13:52] It's like old school.
[13:54] Mike McCallowitz's book, profit first.
[13:57] You could create multiple checking accounts
[13:59] and then shuffle around your money.
[14:01] It helps you budget for things back in a day,
[14:04] your grandma used to put $5 in the grocery envelope.
[14:07] But $10 in the internet, you can do that.
[14:09] That's kind of like Mike McCallowitz's book, profit first.
[14:12] Talks about paying yourself a profit first,
[14:15] and then the expenses second, which is kind of contrarian.
[14:18] thought most people pay all their expenses and then they take profit.
[14:21] He's kind of flipping the narrative to be leaner to basically have an understanding of what
[14:25] profit you want to take.
[14:27] So that's a great book.
[14:28] The other thing is if you have no idea, but you have cases, I mean, you've got financials
[14:33] to some capacity.
[14:34] I'd get a fractional CFO, a fractional director, a finance, to just clean up the data for you.
[14:40] You don't necessarily have to bring the CFO in-house because a good CFO is going to be
[14:46] 200k plus no matter where you look. I mean it's very rare that they're under 200k. So use a fractional CFO.
[14:53] How to manage a small law firm, Arjan Robbins. They have as part of their program. I believe they have fractional CFO's CMOs.
[15:03] That's somebody that's talked to and maybe get an opinion on, but ultimately the simple version is if you're managing your own finances,
[15:10] maybe take a look at Mike and Kyle. It's his profit first. If you're more, if you've got a little bit of capital deployed,
[15:15] deployed and you want a third party assistant I would look at fractional health.
[15:21] You can't scale a law firm on vanity metrics and gut feelings.
[15:24] If you don't know your true cost to a choir case, backering in every single dollar spent
[15:28] on things like marketing and taking labor and your leaving money on the table.
[15:32] Stop guessing, get your financial house in order and start tracking the hard math that
[15:35] actually drives growth.
[15:37] If you're able to stop playing defense with your marketing and partner with an agency
[15:40] that prioritizes ruthless, ROI, proof-over promises and aggressive marketing
[15:45] dominance. Let's talk.
[15:47] And in over to ranking.io to discover how we can help you capture more high value cases
[15:51] and completely own your backyard.
[15:53] I'm Chris Jarrett and this is Ben, Personal and Dream Mastermind.
[15:56] Catch you next time.