Personal Injury Marketing Minute podcast

September 18, 2024 What a Law Firm CMO Does - Catherine Register - Personal Injury Marketing Minute 75

Catherine Register is the Director of Marketing at Fasig Brooks, a well-respected personal injury firm in Florida. She joins us for Personal Injury Marketing Minute 75 to tell us what a CMO does.

This is an excellent episode all personal injury attorneys should listen to!

Catherine discusses how she successfully approaches marketing, what is often kept in-house vs being outsourced, budgeting, marketing silos, referrals, measuring ROI, what’s been the most effective strategies for client acquisition, branding, collaboration, SEO, billboards and much more.

Visit Catherine online here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherineregister/.

See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/.

Transcript:

Lindsey:

Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute, where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world. I’m your host, Lindsey Busfield. As many personal injury lawyers grow and scale their businesses, it becomes necessary to hire and delegate responsibilities that you once undertook. One of the most important delegation tasks involves deciding whether you need to hire a CMO and then hiring the right one for your firm. In order to do that, it is crucial to understand what exactly a CMO does in the legal sector, and perhaps what questions to ask a prospective CMO as you are looking to add to your team. Catherine Register is the director of marketing at Fasig Brooks, a well-respected personal injury firm in Florida. Thank you so much for joining us today, Catherine.

Catherine:

Absolutely. I’m thrilled to be with you.

Lindsey:

Well, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into legal marketing.

Catherine:

Sure, yeah. My background is in public relations and strategic communications. My focus before coming to Fasig Brooks was exclusively on digital marketing and advertising. I worked for a number of years as a consultant and then in leadership at a full-scale ad agency. So I had a lot of experience with numerous clients in all kinds of sectors, but had never taken on the challenge of legal marketing. When the opportunity presented itself to come join Fasig Brooks, I was really thrilled to do so because it’s such a unique market and one that I hadn’t really done a deep dive into, and the idea of coming in-house as opposed to being a consultant or working at an agency was really appealing to me, to be able to go deep with one group and do a really, really thorough job in all facets of their marketing and advertising.

Lindsey:

Well, with that strong advertising background, it seems like it’d be an obvious natural fit. So talk to us a little bit about what does a marketing director or CMO do?

Catherine:

Yeah, we have one of the most important roles in a law firm, we make the phone ring. And you can have the best attorneys and staff, but if you don’t have well-qualified leads, you’ve got nothing. So in addition to developing and managing the many advertising and marketing campaigns of the firm, I, as the marketing director here, I’m responsible for overseeing our budget, for supervising all of our vendors, and then most importantly, tracking data to nail down exactly where our cases are coming from, where our high-value cases are coming from, and how to best promote growth in the future.

Lindsey:

And those are some incredibly important aspects to the life and vitality of a law firm, whether they are just keeping their status quo in terms of the cases that they have coming in or if they’re to build and scale, having that data behind that is so crucial to informing those business decisions. So as a really important part of that, how do you approach building a marketing strategy for a law firm? And what are some of the more unique challenges of marketing in the legal industry itself?

Catherine:

Yeah, and that’s really what it comes down to, right? I mean anyone, an attorney or a admin staffer at the firm can press the buttons and sign the contracts needed to run some advertising and marketing campaigns. But what a marketing director, and then even more so a CMO does for a law firm, is to really dig in and build that foundational strategy that’s going to guide the firm towards the growth that they want to realize in the future. So in terms of building a strategy, let’s assume we’re talking about an existing law firm rather than a new practice because those are very different scenarios.

So with the situation in mind of many years of data being available to dive into, the first step of building a marketing strategy is to do a comprehensive data review of the firm. You need to identify your key client demographics. Who is the most common client? What is their gender? Where do they live? What zip code are they in? How did they come to your firm? Amongst your most common clients, then who are the most valuable ones? Look at your high value cases and see if there’s any common threads between the plaintiffs that you represented. How old are these people? Are they coming from referrals? Are they watching a particular spot that you have commercials airing on, on one advertising channel versus another? The more data you have on all of that, the more comprehensive and targeted your strategy can be.

So once you have that client demographic data, you use that to build your avatars. And then once you have your avatar, you might say, my ideal client is a 34-year-old African-American woman who lives in one of these five zip codes in our area, who’s most likely to hear about us through our commercials. So then you go and you find out more about what 34-year-old African-American women in your community are doing. Where are they? Where do they consume content? How do they get information? What kind of searches are they doing? You pull all of that information together and then you build out the next step of that avatar development, which is what are their pain points? What are their concerns? What would keep them from hiring an attorney or even reaching out in the first place? What motivates them? What are their needs that they’re seeking to be met?

And then answering all of those questions together builds a really strong framework for your marketing strategy from where you should be advertising, to how you should be messaging, how you should be building your brand and communicating the unique value proposition of what you bring as an attorney or a group of attorneys to your community.

Now, you asked a two-part question there. What are some of the challenges of marketing in the legal industry? And I mean, first of all, everything that I just described is incredibly challenging, right? More often than not, a law firm has been operated by practicing attorneys who don’t have time to tend to the hygiene of their data. So just digging in and finding the information that I just described, that is often not as simple as just getting in your CRM and clicking a few buttons to download an Excel spreadsheet, right? That can be a massive project in and of itself, particularly if you have an established firm that’s been in business for a long time and they had a transition from more of a paper-based system to an electronic system. And a lot of times when you’re making those transitions between systems or even between one legal CRM to another, you lose a lot of that demographic data. You prioritize, of course, the case data, but sometimes you can lose the contact information that really drives the marketing side of things. So that’s a huge challenge right there, is just tending to the data.

Then the other thing that really stands out to me, that just makes this an incredibly fascinating area of marketing and advertising is the lack of comprehensive information about the actual market. How many people are being injured? What kind of predictions can we make around that? What’s the market look like in the areas in which an attorney is practicing? And then how in the world do you ascertain what your market share is or could be? In personal injury law, it’s not a practice where many of our cases are going to go into litigation. And of course once they’re in litigation, that leaves records. But as long as things are settled between your firm and an insurance company, there’s not a public record of that, that I’m aware of. And if there is, someone please tell me, because I need it desperately.

Lindsey:

Right. The only other metric that we’ve ever really been able to look at is pulling data from different cities on car accidents and injury accidents, and where those are happening.

Catherine:

Exactly, yeah. So we do all of that-

Lindsey:

And even those records are incomplete.

Catherine:

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s fraught with all sorts of complications. And in our area here in North Florida, we’re finding that with the funding and staffing issues of our local police and sheriff departments, that often these accident scenes are responded to by community officers who are just facilitating an exchange of information and not issuing a formal crash report. So it really undermines a number of things when that happens. But then those incidents that are attended by those individuals, if we understand it correctly here at Fasig Brooks, those are not always entered into those databases that you can search, of the crashes.

And then you just get into, okay, well if there were 50 crashes in our area in the last week, well, how many of them have any sort of clear claim that can be bought from them? And how do we know that the defendant isn’t going to call us as opposed to the plaintiff? So all of that is, I think really at the heart of one of the biggest challenges of being a PI firm, just trying to figure out what cases are available in your area, so that you know when you’ve maxed your market share and need to expand, versus double down in a specific geographic area to advertise more and bring in more cases from that particular spot.

Lindsey:

That is an incredible challenge and definitely one that I know our listeners probably feel all across the country just with the incomplete data, to be able to inform and drive those business decisions, especially as law firms are looking to expand. And if you are looking to expand, how do you make the decision of where to expand into? And sure, there are a few things that we can look at in terms of how saturated market spaces are or where an ideal location would be to set up shop, but as you said, knowing exactly how many accidents, injury accidents, the value of those, the intensity of those are happening across the board is a difficult metric to really grasp and standardize. But even so, you build out your marketing strategies, you move forward with that. But how are you determining what initiatives to use as you are building out your marketing strategy?

Catherine:

Yeah, so with my background in advertising and consulting, I’m very familiar with what services bring true value to a client versus ones that are pretty simple to execute and just serve as a profit pattern. As a rule, no matter what, I always bring in an external agency to manage a website and SEO campaigns. That’s just consistently value added. The complexity of those projects are best handled by someone who’s exclusively focused on that with both the technical skills needed to execute the campaign and just the time available to do the monitoring needed, to see the real growth in your rankings and traffic. And I just view SEO as such a fundamental pillar of any strong advertising and marketing presence. That’s not something that I mess around with, and that’s always something to outsource and pay top dollar for.

Google Ads are really simple to run in-house. I wouldn’t have an agency run those unless it’s a part of a much larger package of services. If you have a marketing director or CMO who has ad buying experience, they certainly can run digital ads for you. It will result in either eating up a significant amount of time in their week, perhaps even up to 25% of their time. Or the other option is to run it as what I call a set it and forget it ad campaign where you just put it up there and let it run, and check in with it every couple weeks and then shut it down when it stops performing. And there can be value in that. So if you can find a digital ad vendor who provides really active tracking on your behalf and then corresponding tweaking of the campaign strategies along with comprehensive reporting, that’s ideal. That would be my perfect solution as opposed to keeping anything in-house.

But you do have to be wary of vendors who are going to charge a premium in order to run that set of and forget it style campaign, and then are going to send you real vague and meaningless reporting on your ultimate ROI. An example of that would be an agency that’s reporting to you that they made the phone ring 600 times as a result of their advertising last month, and you’re like, “Huh, that’s a lot of times. I don’t know that we got that many leads last month total. So where did those calls come from?” And then you dig deeper and you find out, well, 570 of them were less than two seconds long.

So that’s an example of you’ve really got to make sure that the reporting that you’re getting from your agencies is detailed and that whoever you have in that marketing role is knowledgeable enough to dig in to the data that they’re receiving and make sure that your ROI is actually there. So ultimately, if you’re a larger firm like Fasig Brooks that’s running a multi-million dollar ad budget annually, your in-house marketing team is going to have their hands full just monitoring and tracking everything. So I would caution law firm owners with tasking their marketing team with creating too many of the deliverables themselves, as your team will quickly become overburdened and ultimately your ad campaign performance is going to suffer as a result.

Lindsey:

Absolutely agree. There are so many different marketing agencies out there. And I think that it’s the nature of business to want to put your best foot forward, say, look at this data, look how great we’re doing. But if it’s not actually meaningful and moving the needle for a law firm, then it’s just smoke. And having a great team in place who can look at the data and be able to ask the right questions, and really just knowing what questions to ask is an art form in and of itself, and is a real skill set. So I agree with everything that you’re saying on that.

And yes, the smaller firms might not have the bandwidth or the budget to be able to outsource everything. They might be running their own social or they might just have natural engagement with activities that they have going on, and it makes sense for them to run different pieces of their own marketing campaign. But once you get into some of those more technical components, especially as you mentioned with SEO or anything that requires a really technical understanding in order to make it effective, it’s helpful to outsource and outsource to the right people.

Catherine:

Exactly. I mean, I really think of it in the same way that we think about our legal referrals. We’re a personal injury firm. And could we take worker’s comp cases? Yeah. But would we do them well? Probably not. We would rather outsource that to someone who all day, every day just works on worker’s comp and that’s their area of expertise. And that’s really how I view a lot of the vendor relationships that I have. I’m extremely picky regarding the vendors that we sign with and the ones who I choose, then I view them really as an extension of our in-house team because we work so closely together, but I expect the amount of work that they put into our account to be much greater than anything that we could provide for those efforts in-house.

Lindsey:

Absolutely, and that’s definitely the way that it should be. And with that, you have to be mindful of creating not only the plan and executing that, but really being cognizant of the budget that you put forth. And so as the director of marketing, how do you decide the budget for the initiatives that you’re putting in place?

Catherine:

Yeah. Well, a lot of budget decisions come down to how much is available. A lot of these expenditures in a marketing department are connected to contracts, and so a considerable amount of your budget can be locked up at any given time. So outside of those considerations, it goes back to marketing strategy. Where are your target demographics? How can you most easily connect with them, and how can you get your message in front of them as many times as possible with the most attention paid to your creator? And then the price point of those efforts is going to really determine how your budget flows from there. If you’re a firm that’s getting the majority of your clients through referrals from other attorneys and you want to go all in on LinkedIn to target those attorney employees and firm owners directly, those LinkedIn ads are going to be really expensive. So you’re going to need to have a higher social media advertising budget than somebody who is targeting that 25 to 45-year-old individual, who has a lower socioeconomic status and might spend more of their time on Instagram or TikTok.

So those things of course, really matter. But in general, you want to aim of course, and I think this is common knowledge, you want your marketing budget to be 15 to 20% of your firm’s overall revenue if you’re not in gross mode. And within that budget, I then like to break the budget down into categories of brand awareness, conversion and advocacy. And I put 50% of the budget towards awareness, 30% to conversion, and 20% to advocacy. And that has worked well for me, not only at Fasig Brooks, but also just in other sectors of marketing and advertising, to put the heavier spend on awareness and still have considerable funds left over for conversion and advocacy.

Lindsey:

So for our lawyers who might not be as familiar with those terms, what type of initiative would you describe as an awareness initiative?

Catherine:

Yeah, so that’s going to be your broadcast cable or streaming commercials, for example. Billboards are awareness. Print ads would be awareness. Radio. Any sort of mobile advertising or out-of-home advertising that you do. If you’re doing car wraps or bus wraps or many billboards at bus stops, anything like that, where you’re just getting your name, mission and your value proposition in front of people’s eyes as many times as you can.

Lindsey:

And then how is that different from a conversion?

Catherine:

So a conversion campaign is going to be something that you want to directly make the phone ring. So the digital ads that we run, that the ad actually has a tart or button on it that you can click to call or click to visit our website, that would be a conversion campaign. I would consider SEO a conversion campaign as it’s targeting those conversion seeking keywords like injury while you’re near me, car crash while you’re near me. Those are the things that when you connect with a person as opposed to just making them aware of who you are and what you do, you are hoping to turn that directly into a lead.

Lindsey:

That’s helpful. That’s some great clarification. And that touches on some of the different types of marketing and advertising that you can do. So you briefly mentioned billboards and TV, and radio. But what are some of the other types of marketing and advertising silos that you oversee?

Catherine:

Yeah, so I think that this aspect of what we do here at Fasig Books is so fascinating. We are a dominant traditional advertising firm in our region, that is shifting into a hybrid model. And in other markets, take Metro Atlanta, for example, you have a lot of up and coming firms who are coming at their marketing strategy with a 100% digital approach. You can’t buy billboards in Atlanta for love of money, the bedrock Atlanta PI folks have those all locked up. So in those larger markets, sometimes you have to choose if you’re completely traditional or completely digital, and the markets that we serve, it is feasible to create a hybrid of that. And I view that as really a pioneering effort that we’re doing here because we have seen so much success with our traditional advertising. And so that’s your billboards, broadcast ads, radio, print, things that people were doing 15, 20 years ago before the rise of the digital technology that we are dealing with now.

We’ve had so much success there and we don’t want to minimize any of that, right? We want to keep all of that going, and we want to build a full scale digital presence as well to invest in our future and maximize our growth, and we don’t want to spend any more money. So we’re really in the deep part of the process of figuring out, okay, what in our traditional advertising channels makes the phone ring? Where can we find pennies, dollars, any amount of money that we can pull from that to invest in digital, while not losing any of the leads that our traditional is generating?

So overall, we’ve got our SEO, our web design team. We work a lot on the UX of our website. Google Ads, local service ads through Google, as well as display and video retargeting ads, both organic and paid social media, print ads, billboards, out of home print ads in local malls, and different areas where we just need a little bit more visibility. Then the digital display, video, television, radio, we do a lot of mobile advertising with taxi headers and car wraps. And then our advocacy and networking efforts with community events, client outreach and referral networking.

Lindsey:

And building on that referral networking. How do you go about engaging those relationships with referral partners or creating referral relationships from previous clients?

Catherine:

Yeah, I think a lot of it starts with the experience of working together. So if it’s referrals from clients that we’re seeking, then we task our legal team here at the firm to create raving fans out of their clients, to give them world-class service. And actually, I just took an ad call before we hopped on this interview together, and a woman said, “I was in a crash 12 minutes ago in front of a barbershop, and someone ran out of the barbershop as I was getting out of the car and said, ‘don’t talk to anybody. You have to call my attorney at Fasig Brooks right now.'” And so she got her phone, he looked up our number on her phone, and she called us and she was like, “I don’t know his name. I don’t know what’s going on, but I guess I need a lawyer.” And it’s a great case. It’s a solid, really good MVA case. So that is the kind of relationship we want our attorneys and our legal teams to be facilitating with their clients so that people do that kind of brand advocacy for us.

Beyond that, when we’re not in touch… Well, I shouldn’t say not in touch, we’re not actively working with our clients, we stay connected with them through sending handwritten birthday cards, holiday cards, emails throughout the year. Email is something that we’ve been struggling with a lot lately, and I think a lot of other firms have. Two, three years ago, you used to be able to get an account through Constant Contact, MailChimp. You could load in your contact list of 10, 15,000 people and send it out, and you’re going to get a 30% open rate. But now all of our email providers, Gmail, Yahoo and so on, they’ve locked down the ability to access people’s emails through that kind of bulk communication way so considerably. The last email that I sent out through our MailChimp account, I sent to more than 10,000 people and we, I think, had 150 people open it.

Lindsey:

Oh, wow.

Catherine:

And I included every single email address that I have access to, and I didn’t receive it on a single one, it all went to my spam or junk. So the emails throughout the year is something that I’m definitely digging into and trying to figure out a way to send bulk emails through our email server, so that they’ll be received by our clients. So I’m excited to see how we can pull that off.

Lindsey:

Well, wish you the best of luck on that. That is definitely one of the big challenges out there. And I mean, we have a couple of different techniques that we’ve had some success with on that, and I’m happy to share that with you as well. But that can be so challenging, and it’s definitely an issue that law firms across the board are seeing. But you have your hands in just about every type of advertising there is out there. I mean, the Fasig Brooks brand is truly something that you can see everywhere, whether it’s on radio, print, social, on digital, billboards, everything. Everywhere you look, there’s an opportunity to become more aware of that brand. With so many initiatives out there, how are you measuring the ROI for each of those campaigns?

Catherine:

Yeah, I mean, that’s what it all comes down to, right? There’s nothing more important than measuring your ROI and there’s nothing more interesting to the owners of a law firm than what the ROI is on their considerable ad spend. There are many, many layers to not just uncovering what your ROI is, but developing a system where you can routinely monitor your ROI. On the highest level that we all I’m sure are aware of, you look at your spend versus how many leads and cases you took in a given timeframe, right? Your cost per lead, cost per case. And then from there you can assess what your average fee is depending on a case type, whether it’s an MBA or a premises liability, dog bite, if you take those, look at what your average fee is and compare that to your cost per case. That’s an interesting metric.

And then beyond that, and this is really of so much importance, and many attorneys don’t fully understand the nuances here, cases signed at the end of it all, is not necessarily the best metric for ROI. There are other metrics that really, really matter, particularly if you’re trying to grow your firm. The goal is not just to make the phone ring today, but it’s to create an entire ecosystem in the area that you serve, that leads clients to you and then funnels them through the whole process of becoming the person who rushes out to the scene of an accident and says, “Go not pass go. Call my attorney right away.” So those things, those are an investment in your future. You can’t just turn some of these advertising campaigns on and then see the phone start to ring.

And when the phone does ring, you aren’t necessarily going to know what parts of your advertising campaign led to that call, right? Very few people who call our firm say they saw our billboards. But I know without a shadow of a doubt, if I made the call today to pull down all of our billboards, our case numbers would suffer considerably going forward. So there is some inference that you have to make there, particularly with those brand awareness levels. It’s not so much the billboard, but what you just described so wonderfully, you have a system where you’re just everywhere. And so maybe one part of that isn’t what makes the phone ring, but all of it together is important.

So anyways, I digress. The way that you measure ROI on those things comes back to that way of differentiating between brand awareness, conversion and advocacy. So your brand awareness KPIs are going to be impressions, how many times were your ads seen? Reach, how many people saw your ad, and at what frequency did they see it? And then your CPM, which is just going to be the cost measure of impressions. So then from there, with your conversion ads, you look at cost per click, cost per call. And you can also do that if you’re utilizing tracking numbers and traditional advertising campaigns. And at that point, you have got so much data on your hands that you really do start to be able to, in a systematic way, look constantly at the performance of your advertising and marketing campaigns and how that translates into making the phone ring.

Lindsey:

Yeah, and having all that data is so important. But then the ability to actually take that data and transform it into a narrative where you can say, this is working well, this is working well in conjunction with the other components of it. And then here are the intangibles that have some ambiguity, like you said, with the billboards where you know in your heart that it’s working, even if you can’t have a data point that… You have your target demographic case calls in says, I saw this billboard and then I saw the commercial and then I saw the radio, but then I had to be in an accident before I could pick up the phone and call you, but I had some subconscious awareness that you existed. You’re never going to be able to get that story in a concrete way. But putting all those pieces together can give you a really good picture that your campaign is actually working.

Catherine:

100%.

Lindsey:

And so for the next question that I have, I know that the answer is going to vary incredibly differently actually between different markets. But in your particular market, what have you found to be the most effective strategies for acquiring new clients? I know we have kind of this holistic approach going on, but what are the pieces that you have found are 100% making the phone ring?

Catherine:

Yeah. I mean, I think you’re right, it does vary on the market that you’re in. But at the end of the day, there are some constant factors here. Most PI lawyers will tell you that they get the majority of their highest qualified leads through referrals, either attorney referrals, medical provider referrals, or client referrals. So I think the most effective strategy for acquiring new clients, A, is to provide top tier legal service. And that’s one of the things that I love about Fasig Brooks and why I really wanted to come work for them, our managing partners, Jimmy Fasig and Dana Brooks have such a powerful vision for using personal injury law to develop really meaningful relationships with clients and leads, even people who we don’t sign. We want everyone to know that we are their trusted legal advisor.

You can call us if you have an estate question or if you have a family law question. If we don’t know, we’re going to figure it out and connect you with the best people in the area who can help you. So I think that relationship building is absolutely vital, and that applies to the smallest town all the way to the largest metro market.

And then beyond that, be everywhere. What are the cheapest ways that you can have the most brand awareness? Because you don’t know when people are going to need you, so you can’t really plan to be at the right place at the right time. I mean, I guess you can look at the intersections where crashes are more likely to happen and try and grab one of the billboards there, but what are the chances that someone’s going to look up in the moment and notice that as they’re in shock after being in a collision?

So it’s really just about creating that awareness, communicating your unique value proposition, what makes you different from all the other PI attorneys, all the other billboards that I see? And so that is doubly guaranteeing a phone call when someone says, “Hey, you should call Fasig Brooks.” And then the person who’s being told that is like, “Oh, yeah, you’re right. I’ve heard of them. Yeah, they’re the people with those cool ads that I see. Yeah, I love them. You are right, I will call them.” That’s money right there, literal money. And then the value of that relationship and being able to help more people. So it’s a win-win.

Lindsey:

That absolutely is. And those two pieces have to work together. But in order for that to effectively work for somebody to say, “Yeah, I remember seeing them on that billboard,” or “I remember seeing them in that commercial,” there has to be some sort of brand that is consistent across all of those different avenues. So talk to me a little bit about how branding comes into play within your marketing strategy across all these different avenues.

Catherine:

Yeah, it’s critical. I mean, you’ve heard me say the phrase, unique value proposition numerous times in our discussion today. The legal market is so crowded that you have to brand yourself and you have to explain why your value to a potential client is unique, what makes you stand out. A lot of PI attorneys across the country try to achieve that through taking a real brash persona. They’re the hammer or the fighter, or the strong one. You need someone who’s going to fight for you. That doesn’t line up with my philosophy on marketing and connecting with people, and that’s one of the reasons why Dana and Jimmy’s vision and passion for relationships and connection with clients resonated so much with me and the way that I like to run marketing campaigns and brand messaging. I think people are hungry to be cared for. They’re hungry to be seen and supported and helped, and to be loved. And I think that that motivates people a lot more than fear. And I think that those kind of bedrock philosophical messaging points matter as a part of your marketing strategy.

And that goes back to what we were talking about earlier. Who are your target clients? What does motivate them? So certainly there are demographics who are more motivated perhaps by that strong arm messaging and mentality, but we have found that it is highly valuable to communicate in a relational way to people who are experiencing trauma, which not many people who call a PI firm haven’t experienced some kind of trauma. So I think that branding is really important to tell people who are hurting either physically or emotionally if they’ve suffered loss, who you are, why you do what you do, and why it’s so vital that they call you for help in some of their darkest hours?

Lindsey:

And that is a huge, huge piece of it. And having that brand that is genuine and is going to be reflected not just consistently across all of your marketing initiatives, but as you come in-house as well, as you meet with the lawyer, as you meet with the intake, as you meet with every single person within the firm, that is going to have an impact and influence on the opinion that the clients are going to have of you. Those things work together to create those raving fans that are driving your business forward. And all of that has to happen with this collaboration. So talk to me a little bit about what the internal collaboration looks like as you execute these different marketing initiatives and build your brand identity, and build that value proposition. How do all of those pieces work together internally as your team?

Catherine:

With incredibly high levels of structure. And this is really why law firms need marketing professionals, because attorneys who are practicing cannot build the structure required to keep all of this going. Because you can imagine with everything that I’ve described, that we run a marketing campaign in, when you focus on one thing at a time, and then you get that rolling and you move on to the next thing, and it’s a ton to keep up with. And you can easily touch something, touch a vendor, start a project, get interrupted. There’s some priority or fire that needs to be put out, and then the next thing you know, the vendor has been operating without any oversight. Someone hasn’t been reading the reports that they’re sending over. You haven’t checked in on your ROI. So that all requires an enormous amount of structure and systems. And if you don’t bring organization to all of this, chaos is going to reign.

So it starts with just a really immaculate storage system for all your contracts, all of your collateral, your budgets, your plans, reports. In business, we want to make sure that if one person leaves, the entire thing doesn’t crumble, right? And so we’ve got to leave good records. We’ve got to make sure that everything is laid out in writing so that everyone’s on the same page about what’s going on. Then beyond that, you’ve got to have great communication.

My team consists of people who are in office as well as some incredible people who work for us in offshore capacities, so we utilize Slack to stay connected with them in particular, and then we rely heavily on the project management platform, ClickUp, that we use for task management so that we know all of the irons that are in fire, we can remember, hey, in March of 2025, we need to be sure to drive out and check out those billboards that we put up in a different color and see how they faded. Just all of those things, it’s really important. You’ve got to manage your brand every single place that you’re represented. So to keep track of all of that, you’ve got to have a system. Our marketing team meets three times a week for check-ins, in addition to just continually communicating through Slack and ClickUp about our ongoing projects.

Lindsey:

And those tools can be so helpful to keep everybody on the same page and having the right infrastructure. As you said, you never know if you are going to lose a member of your team and you can’t have everything crumble because so much was just put into that one person and not having that one person be a part of the system that you’ve built for the organization itself.

Catherine:

Exactly.

Lindsey:

So as we wrap up this conversation, what advice would you give to law firm leaders who are hiring a marketing executive for the first time?

Catherine:

Oh my goodness, I’m so passionate about this. My biggest piece of advice is to hire a business person first and foremost. I mean, we have talked for I don’t know how long now, and have we discussed anything about catchy slogans or cute graphics or color schemes? Creative comes second if not tenth, in the line of priorities. You are not hiring an executive to make your brand look good, and that’s it. You need someone who understands systems and data reporting, so that you can build out a sophisticated marketing department that provides you as an attorney with the information that you need to make decisions and the time that you need to run your firm. You don’t need to be deep in the weeds on everything all the time. You need a system that reports to you that high level data so you know quickly, exactly what’s going on and where you need to put your dollars so that you can move on to the actual work of making it rain through the legal side of things.

That is easier said than done. We’re definitely deep in that work at Fasig Brooks right now. Definitely have a long way to go still, before we have those really, really smooth systems running, but we’re building them, and it is so exciting to see the progress and the rewards as we go. But I think in general, there’s just a misconception about high value marketers being people who have the wittiest ideas. You think about it from the Super Bowl commercial, what’s the cleverest thing that you saw? And that’s clearly the best marketing person behind that. And that is very valuable, but the reality is that you can outsource a lot of that. At the end of the day, you need somebody in place who is going to build you a department to facilitate the growth that you dreamed of when you opened this law firm to begin with. And they can hire 22-year-old with great ideas as an intern, or bring in a great ad agency to do the creative part of it, but the system side cannot be outsourced and it should not be skipped.

Lindsey:

That is an excellent, excellent point. Well, thank you so much for sharing your time with us today and your insights. This has been truly invaluable. This is information that every law firm needs to know, whether they are just now exploring hiring a marketing executive, or whether they have marketing in place in-house, and they are looking to evaluate and become better internally. So thank you so much for your insights.

Catherine:

Yeah, thank you for having me. This was super fun.

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