Steve Nober (00:03):
And so let me jump into assessing your local market. I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but I love doing this sometimes because it’s really interesting for your market. These are the top DMAs. So I didn’t use everybody, all the attendees, but basically they’re from everywhere in the country. So we took the top markets, top biggest cities in the country and we said, based on the population of that city divided by the legal spending. So we can track legal spending in every market. What’s the spend per person? So just very simple calculation, total dollar spent divided by population to get a spend per person. Because I think, what that does is, that gives you way to compare every market in the country and how your city compares to everything else on how crazy the legal marketing is.
Steve Nober (00:48):
Digital, offline, TV, it’s all of it combined. And so you’ll see here, Savannah at $18, is the highest. I can tell you the average is five to six dollars per person. That’s the average in the country. All the cities that made this list are probably places you go that you’re absolutely barraged with legal ads everywhere. It’s just good to know. It’s important to know if you’re in a market or you’re in the other markets which is, here’s the underspending DMAs in the country. And you guys can get this later. I think they have it in the book and they’ll send out these presentations after the conference, or we can just send this to you. So if you want, just send us a note and we’ll send you this. And so you’ll see it’s as low as 69 cents.
Steve Nober (01:32):
So there, if you’re looking for different offices, do you want to relocate or open up in a new market? This is interesting to look at. How does this spend compare? And so I’ll move on, so again, the average is five to six dollars. These are just interesting numbers on the averages. We can go a lot more into the data but I don’t have time today. And then, I used Bart Morris, and he’s usually here, so if he’s in the room, sorry, Bart, but he’s usually here, but I’m just using him as an example. If you’re not looking at this in your local markets, you should. And we were happy to supply it for you. There’s no cost to it, which is just a competitive look at your market. Who’s spending what, and usually with Morgan these days, in after markets, there’s a dominant spender or someone else that’s spending five or six or eight times as much as anybody else.
Steve Nober (02:18):
If I ask you to raise hands, it’d probably be almost everyone here has that as their situation in their markets. And so, this is interesting because you can just look at who’s spending how much. You can look at what stations. So you want to know, what are they on? What are they not on? You can look at, how does it break down by day part? How much money are they putting into daytime, evening, late night. And so it’s interesting. And you can even look at searches in your market. Are they by phone? Are they on the computer? What else is there? Computers, tablets, or mobile devices. Again, what keyword? So if you’re looking to how to compete in your market and reduce your costs, you’re going to go get mass tort cases or your single event cases.
Steve Nober (02:59):
This is just for me, I feel like it’s really good to look at and it’s easy to get if you haven’t looked at it. So what does next year going to look like? It’s an interesting time of year to ask this question. What’s the balance of your local single event? What are you going to do with mass torts? I think it’s great. There’s a record amount of new firms that have not been to an MTMP that are here this year. It’s amazing. It just shows you the interest level. And mass torts is expanding quickly. So I would guess there’s more and more firms that are going to put more energy, resources, money into the left side of that, the mass tort side. And so it’s hard to figure out, it’s actually impossible to figure out how to spend your money to be perfect.
Steve Nober (03:40):
And I say that, not just in mass torts, but in your single event too. How much to put where? How often to change it? It’s an impossible task to perfect because there’s too many options. And so I know everybody struggles with that each month. You all have your formulas that you’re using that work for you. And so there’s a lot of channels. Which one do you get the best ROI? Where’s their best branding for your firm? What’s the diminishing returns? So all these are variables and then you’re trying to perfect it. And it’s almost impossible. And so I would just argue that if you introduce more tracking and analysis into your activity, all the way from what you’re spending to the response, whether it’s digital or telephones, to what qualified to which you signed to back to originating, where did it come from that you signed and not just tracking it, but actually do something about it.
Steve Nober (04:32):
If I ask a room, how many track, what comes in each week, each month. Most rooms are like, “Oh yeah, we track it. We absolutely do in our law firm. We have a great system. We track it all”, which is great, because you should. But then I ask the question, so how fast do you make changes from the data you’re tracking? And usually that’s where, it’s less people responding, because it’s hard to do that. If you’re doing your marketing internally at your own firm, it’s not easy to be that quick and flexible. And so, that’s the difference of reducing your costs and being the most efficient you can, in your marketing. It’s just tracking and getting the right data points and then making decisions quickly.
