Chapter 11 · The Great Differentiator
The Rise of Digital TV Advertising
Today, it’s virtually impossible for mass tort lawyers to know where to effectively allocate their TV advertising dollars without the assistance of data-driven guidance.— Jacob Malherbe, X Social Media
As previously noted, the primary aim of any advertising campaign is to find the highest number of potential new clients at the lowest cost possible. At X Social Media, we believe that Facebook advertising offers lawyers, without question, the best ROI for the vast majority of mass tort cases, while simultaneously ensuring the maximum number of victims find justice under the law.
Th at being said, there are instances when adopting a more expansive multipronged strategy—one that leverages digital TV advertising—can prove extraordinarily effective as well.
Let’s return for a moment to our panning for gold analogy and the many hidden mass tort clients that are scattered across the landscape, just waiting to be discovered. Facebook remains the most resource-rich river system available to us. It’s the stream that will yield the most “gold nuggets” at the lowest prices, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t nuggets waiting to be mined at affordable prices in other river systems as well.
The key idea and phrase to unpack here is “media fragmentation.”
Consider, for a moment, just how fragmented the entertainment landscape has become in recent years. Rewind a generation or two and we had access to a fraction of the number of entertainment platforms and media channels that are available to us today.
Generally speaking, these established channels are now referred to as “old media” platforms. Think newspapers. Magazines. Billboards. Radio. And, of course, broadcast television, which we now refer to as “linear TV.”
Linear TV leans on antiquated viewing behaviors that dominated cable stations and satellite services for decades. Programs were produced, commercials were created, and then those ads were broadcast at preordained times. If viewers wanted to watch a particular show or movie, they had to tune in at specific times and passively watch the show and its accompanying commercials as they were being broadcast.
Broadcasters set their respective TV schedules, and viewers tuned in accordingly.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, the exponential growth of cable and satellite services led to a proliferation of hundreds of new channels and advertising opportunities. With these new options came new advertisers, including some forward-thinking mass tort lawyers who began shifting some of their advertising dollars from billboards and newspaper ads to TV.
The results proved inconsistent at best. Those who did find success tended to focus on major pharmaceutical torts, especially torts that required a national or semi-national reach.
When, for instance, the arthritis drug Vioxx was pulled from the market in 2004 due to its increased risk of causing heart attacks and strokes, some mass tort lawyers acquired leads by running ads on cable stations, local broadcast networks, and PBS affiliates.
These campaigns often worked because a large proportion of the US population was taking Vioxx at the time. By advertising on individual TV stations in large cities or choosing targeted cable stations that aired programs that arthritis sufferers watched, mass tort lawyers were able to cultivate quality leads at reasonable prices.
In the years since, the media landscape has changed and grown exponentially. Consider how many different screens and entertainment options are available to us now. Computer screens. iPads and Smart TV screens. And multiple smartphones per household. Not to mention all the different kinds of content those screens are now streaming on a minute-by-minute basis.
There are five thousand to six thousand different local TV stations broadcasting shows. Twelve different major broadcast networks. More than five hundred national cable networks. There are satellite platforms like DIRECTV and DISH. Plus the growing number of OTT (over-the-top) streaming services, which can be viewed on an ad hoc basis, whether that involves subscribing to HBO Max directly, watching apps on Roku, or using a split-offering platform like Hulu.
Even within a particular segment, say OTT services, lawyers have a dizzying number of questions to ask themselves. Which apps or streaming services should we advertise on? Should we pay extra to ensure viewers are blocked from fast-forwarding through our ads or pay lower rates to enable skip-ad functionality? Which shows or movies should ads be attached to? And how often should we do so?
Today, it’s virtually impossible for mass tort lawyers to know where to effectively allocate their TV advertising dollars without the assistance of data-driven guidance from companies like X Social Media.
In many ways, X Social Media’s targeting expertise (i.e., using Facebook to identify key demographic, geographic, and interest data about potential clients) provides us an extraordinary advantage in crafting effective digital TV and OTT advertising campaigns. Our experience allows us to answer those questions with the kind of precision lawyers in the 1990s could only dream of.
By leaning on a hybrid model that leverages both Facebook and digital TV, we’re able to aggregate all of our accumulated data and shunt our clients’ ad buys through one point of insertion. It’s a level of integration that produces maximum efficiencies. Using our platform, our clients can advertise as little or as much as they want on multiple media channels and reap the benefit of a great ROI and extraordinary conversion rates.
Mass tort lawyers who hire old-fashioned TV buying agents simply can’t compete with our data-driven model. Fully integrated campaigns require too much manpower and too much data to succeed in this fragmented world.
The key to any campaign, as I’ve previously mentioned, is to split test early advertising dollars to determine where you’re going to find the best ROI. This is impossible to do if you don’t possess a deep understanding of both TV and social media advertising.
Split testing only works if you’ve perfected your targeting strategies and can generate effective look-alike audiences. At X Social Media, we specialize in leveraging Facebook to cultivate demographic, interest, and behavior data, but we can now combine that data with what we can learn from people’s TV watching habits. If Facebook provides us ten thousand data points, digital TV provides us a thousand additional points.
If Facebook advertising is a highly targeted sniper rifle, then smart TV advertising is more like firing a shotgun, which scatters ads far and wide. The best approach is to employ a targeting mechanism that allows for scope-like targeting as well as a shotgun approach at the same time. Here’s a look at how we do just that.
A Brave New TV World In retrospect, it’s clear that long-standing TV advertising rules and paradigms were fraught with waste and inefficiencies. Ultimately, they benefitted large corporate advertisers and old-guard networks more than lawyers and small advertisers. It was a model ripe for disruption, as TV station bonuses were often tied to how many full-price ads were sold to an advertiser, which in turn led to free bonus media and discounts being sent to entrenched advertising agencies that placed the ads.
In the past, mass tort lawyers worried that they would spend a lot of money on advertising TV buys and receive very few leads in return.
At X Social Media, we’re committed to disrupting that flawed paradigm. In 2020, we decided to shift into sandbox mode to explore new ways to crack the established TV paradigms in hopes of improving ROI for mass tort lawyers.
Like any new initiative, we researched the industry, educated ourselves on its flaws, and tested the waters, seeking ways to boost stability, predictability, and scalability, while simultaneously reducing advertising risks for our clients. The $3 million we spent led to a new advertising strategy that we now call, simply enough, X Social Media Digital TV, which improves predictability while lowering the risk of lost advertising dollars.
In order to demonstrate the particular targeted strategy we recommend, it’s essential to begin with some basic definitions that are inextricably intertwined with TV advertising. After all, anyone who hopes to transform the status quo must first understand the limitations and flaws embedded within the current system.
TV advertising can be broken up—roughly speaking—into four macro models, which we will define and briefly deconstruct below.
Cost Per Point It’s extraordinarily rare for mass tort lawyers to buy advertising on a cost-per-point basis. Large blue-chip companies and major brands often adopt this model. Think fast-food chains, insurance companies, major retailers, car manufacturers, movie studios, and the like.
In layman’s terms, cost per point (CPP) translates to the amount of money required for an ad to reach 1 percent of a given population. You can define that population any way that you like. An advertiser, for instance, may want to reach female viewers between twenty-five and fifty years of age or target people living in a particular urban market, perhaps Los Angeles or Chicago.
To do so, an advertiser often has to leverage multiple media channels—perhaps a popular TV program, radio shows, web ads— at the same time, which makes the cost-per-point model too pricey and inefficient for the targeted searches required for most mass torts. If you’re selling shoes or a laundry detergent, there’s an advantage to showing as many households as you can an ad. Everyone wears shoes; everyone washes clothes. But when you’re dealing with mass torts, it’s far more effective to distill down your focus to people who have actually used the product in question. Cost Per Thousand As the name implies, cost per thousand is defined as the amount an advertiser would have to pay to achieve one thousand impressions. When it comes to cost-per-thousand contracts, rates differ based on which network or show you’re choosing to advertise on. Some networks charge $5 or $10 for every thousand impressions. Others—say CNN or Fox News during an election year—could charge a lot more.
Let’s say, for example, that a company runs an ad on network A for time slot X that charges $5 per thousand. It runs as scheduled, and five million people see it. That ad buy would cost $25,000. But that same ad could be shown on another network during a buzzy show—say an Oprah special—and the cost comes in at $25 per thousand. If that show receives five million impressions, the ad buy would cost $125,000.
Despite these differing rate cards, it’s important to understand exactly what the term “impression” actually means. In our world, the term “impression” is defined as any instance in which a viewer sees a portion of an ad. It doesn’t mean that they viewed an ad or commercial in full, from beginning to end. And it definitely doesn’t mean that someone actually bought a product or reached out to contact an advertiser, which is what mass tort lawyers require for an ad to be successful.
In the mass tort world, we want to ensure potential leads not only view an ad but reach out to law firms and agree to become clients as well. Cost Per Spot TV networks and OTT streaming services want to sell their commercial inventory at the prices listed on their rate cards. If they are unable to do so, they will offer discounts on those rates, slashing prices in hopes of filling that airtime at reduced rates.
It’s no different than when a clothing retailer launches a weekend sale. It doesn’t matter that a group of shoppers have already bought some of those products at full sticker price. When a store’s inventory begins to accumulate, retailers need to push some of their products out the door any way they can. In most cases, the easiest—and most cost-effective—solution is to simply slash their prices.
Consider what happens, however, after TV ad prices are slashed and networks find they still possess unfilled commercial inventory. They absolutely need to fill it—and fill it relatively quickly—so they offer advertisers the opportunity to secure that commercial airtime via a blind auction. In this case, it all comes down to bidding power: Whoever pledges the highest price earns the spot.
As a result, advertisers who don’t want to pay on a cost-per-point or cost-per-thousand basis can roll the dice and bid on particular time slots or slots attached to individual shows in hopes of driving down their advertising costs.
There are, of course, potential pitfalls to employing this strategy. It’s entirely possible for your bid, at any time, to be trumped by a competing advertiser. When this happens, your ad simply gets bumped from the schedule altogether.
This can happen without warning. No one is going to call you from the station and say, “You’ve been outbid.” The bids simply pour into the system and whoever offers the highest rate gets the ad spot. And if there’s one thing successful advertisers hate, it’s uncertainty as to whether their ad will get airtime.
Think about it this way: When an advertiser signs on for a costper-thousand ad buy, the network is beholden to deliver those impressions. By contrast, if you adopt the cost-per-spot model and you win the auction, you get your ad slot but you have no idea how many people will see it. For a mass tort lawyer, this approach represents something of a risk. You may find that just five hundred people saw your ad and only one of those five hundred people picked up the phone or visited your website and filled out a form.
It’s important for any advertiser who buys time on a cost-per-spot basis to embed some kind of direct response (DR) mechanism into their ad. Let’s say, for instance, that Pfizer or Procter & Gamble buys ad time on a per-spot basis. They will often stick a 1-800 number or a URL into the ad, so they can track how many people have responded to the ad. Often this is done by promoting a coupon. Perhaps it’s a dollar off for a bottle of shampoo or a discount card for a medication. The number of people who download or use that coupon becomes a key data point in determining the effectiveness of the ad buy.
Once these companies crunch the numbers, they can compare what they would have spent—either at original rate card price or discounted prices—with the price and response they received via the cost-per-spot (DR) auction.
Let’s say, to use very small and round numbers, it costs $500 to place an ad at rate card prices and costs $250 to buy an ad when the rates go on sale. If you participate in the auction and score a commercial slot at $200 or $150—and still receive a fair response—you’re ahead of the game.
There is a potential drawback, however, to this approach. Eventually your pay-per-spot (DR) ad buys will become saturated. Competitors may see that you’re buying into certain slots and finding success— this can be done by utilizing competitive media research tools—and then they will start bidding for the same slots you were winning.
Now, you find yourself having to bid higher to reclaim those spots. Also, this newfound competition can fragment the market. Consumers—whether it comes to insurance, legal services, or consumer packaged goods products—begin to window shop. They might call lawyer A and lawyer B or call insurance company A and insurance company B and start comparing rates. As a result, the effectiveness of your ads may decrease, forcing you to go out and buy more ads, perhaps on multiple channels and programs, just to keep pace.
Often, the better approach, as we will see, is to adopt a model more laser-focused on viewer responses and actions rather than simply wrestling with all the variables and potential unknowns associated with cost-per-spot (DR) rate cards and auctions. Cost Per Action At X Social Media, we recommend that the vast majority of our clients adopt a cost-per-call or cost-per-lead strategy, which is a contract that bills an advertiser if—and only if—viewers perform some type of action after seeing the ad.
Actions are far different from impressions. An action is any response from a viewer that is trackable. A viewer could visit a website or send a text after seeing an ad. They could call a 1-800 number or text message an SMS code at standard text message rates. These are all actions.
Some studies show that highly effective campaigns receive one response for every ten thousand impressions and mediocre campaigns receive one response for every forty thousand impressions. As a result, the cost-per-action model not only ensures viewers see an ad but also respond to it in some way—minus all the uncertainty that comes with cost-per-spot auctions.
Our clients don’t assume a large risk when we advertise using this model, as we only pay when people call in to an intake center and stay on the phone for a minimum of thirty seconds or one minute. This leads to greater optimization on the intake side of the equation, as we at X Social Media know which questions to ask up front to quickly determine if a caller will qualify for a given tort.
Take the Zantac mass tort, for example. We’re skilled in asking the right question to determine if there’s a high likelihood that the caller will qualify for the tort, so we move these to the top of the list. The questions might be as follows:
• Did you take Zantac over the counter or via a prescription for at least three months?
• Have you been diagnosed with a form of cancer?
• What type of cancer were you diagnosed with?
Cost-per-action models are not new. Google pay per click (PPC) relies on a similar model, charging us for every click to our offer page or website. The advantage, of course, is that a phone call yields clients at an exponentially higher rate of conversion than a mere visit to a website.
What we’ve done is simply turn this model on its head and used it to improve our digital TV advertising.
Think for a moment about the advantages this model brings to the world of mass torts. Many law firms who run TV advertising have zero understanding of the metrics that govern successful ad buys. They often fail to stop running a spot after one or more unsuccessful insertions. They just keep paying high TV advertising costs without mitigating their risk. After the campaign is complete, they chalk it up as a failed experiment and say, “Well, you can’t win every time.”
In truth, it’s wasted advertising dollars and a reoccurring flaw that we help our clients avoid.
Understanding TV Ad Inventories Why, you might be wondering, do TV stations agree to cost-peraction contracts? The answer lies in understanding the somewhat opaque world of TV inventories and rate cards—as well as the fact that successful cost-per-action ads can generate more revenue for a network than a cost-per-spot ad, network promo, or a simple PSA (public service announcement).
Let’s begin by deconstructing the myth of sold-out TV inventories. You hear stations and networks say all the time that they’re completely sold out, but that’s often the result of slotting in fire-sale spots, programming promos, bonus spots, PSAs, or advertisements for one of their own shows into those commercial blocks.
TV stations never ever want to show the marketplace their barebasement rates. They want it to appear as though they are booked solid so that they sell ads based on their rate card to all existing clients as well as newcomers and reap the financial rewards of those prices.
Given the choice, however, between not making any money by running an internal ad or a PSA and turning to someone like us, who can fill those semi-empty spots with ads that can generate real revenue, they will always choose the latter.
Think of it this way, if a channel doesn’t have a marquee advertiser or a marquee time slot during a popular show, they don’t want to do a cost-per-thousand model because it’s too risky, as thousands of people need to show up to see the show for the ad to be highly profitable. But if we can deliver networks and streaming apps a cost-per-action ad that convinces people to take some kind of action, the networks can make a great deal of money.
As previously noted, lawyers need to eliminate their preconceived notions about cost and focus on their ROI. It’s quite possible that a mass tort lawyer will actually pay more for a cost-per-action contract than a cost-per-spot ad because it will motivate so many people to pick up their phones or go to their computers after seeing the ad.
The question worth asking is simply this: Which would you rather have? A cost-per-spot ad that costs less but only brings in a handful of leads or a cost-per-action ad that costs a little more but generates more leads and better conversion rates?
This is one of the reasons why a cost-per-action model aligns so well with X Social Media’s overall philosophy on advertising. We’re laser-focused on ROI. We want a win-win result for everyone involved. If we can help a mass tort lawyer find clients and win the trust of a TV network by buying these cost-per-action ads through a broker on a nondisclosure basis—meaning we have not forced them to compromise the integrity of their rate cards—everyone walks away a winner.
The mass tort lawyer scoops up more clients. The TV station doesn’t have to offer a fire sale or run a non-revenue-generating PSA.
And in the end, more victims find their way into a mass tort. That’s always the end result we’re seeking.
Consider, for instance, the parallels between TV advertising and the airline industry. When you book a seat on an airplane, no one pays the same amount of money. One customer might buy a ticket directly from the airline for $300. But airlines also sell some of their excess inventory to online brokers like Expedia and Travelocity. Someone else might log onto Google and purchase a ticket on that same flight for $250. Since there are different ways to pay for the seat, there are different prices available for buyers. The very same principle applies to TV advertising.
Adopting a cost-per-action TV strategy helps lawyers acquire leads at the lowest rates possible—just like the bargain shoppers who manage to buy airplane seats at a lower price than their fellow passengers.
At the end of the day, mass tort lawyers want to acquire leads and convert them into clients at the lowest prices possible, which has always been our area of focus at X Social Media. Every single ad campaign that we run on Facebook is performed with conversions in mind. A conversion is a conversion, whether it comes from Facebook, a text, or a 1-800 number.
Adopting a cost-per-action TV strategy helps lawyers acquire leads at the lowest rates possible—just like the bargain shoppers who manage to buy airplane seats at a lower price than their fellow passengers.
The Power of Digital Technology It’s often difficult for individual mass tort lawyers working with inexperienced TV ad buyers to mimic our approach because networks are wary of offering cost-per-call contracts to advertisers who don’t have a track record of delivering actions.
Remember: The TV stations turn larger profits on these ads if— and only if—people respond to the placed ads. Therefore, TV stations want to work with companies that can accurately track actions.
Building trust, in this regard, takes both time and cutting-edge technology. In our case, we run a system that relays real-time data back to the stations and streaming services at a rapid rate. We don’t report calls, texts, or website visits every day or hour or minute; we do it every six seconds.
This gives TV stations complete transparency regarding the effectiveness of our ads. This is important—from the network’s perspective—because they need to estimate how much they are going to make from every ad placement. When they work out their advertising budgets, they can’t leave a time slot blank and pray for the best result. Their goal is to ensure their cost-per-action ads produce as much revenue as possible, even before a contract is signed.
The quality of our ads and the strength of our real-time multichannel data system ensure that every action is not only recorded but also quickly relayed back to the network. It’s not unusual, for instance, for our ads to yield the equivalent of what a cost per spot would yield. Yet at the same time, we are mitigating the risk for mass tort lawyers because if a relatively small number of people respond to an ad, our clients don’t have to pay a lot for that placement. They only pay for the consumers who respond and take action.
Ads that allow viewers to respond in a variety of ways—phone calls, website visits, text codes, etc.—ensure that interested viewers will respond in whatever way they feel comfortable. Some people might call, others might turn to their computers, and still others pick up their phone to text. In essence, we’re giving people options, the freedom to contact us as they see fit.
Honesty really is the best policy. If we see a lift we call the organic halo effect to a landing page, we want to give that particular network a lift in additional revenue in ad costs because those networks will trust us more and give us additional slots in the future.
As you can probably imagine, this cost-per-action model aligns perfectly with our Facebook advertising strategy. Our goal, at the end of the day, is to ensure mass tort lawyers can find as many potential clients as possible in an increasingly fragmented world. Sometimes placing targeted ads onto Facebook feeds yields plenty of clients, but sometimes, it’s worth combing through other rivers and streams to find them. And what better way to do that than by employing a costby-action strategy that can be tracked with performance indicators, while keeping costs low?
Efficiencies are efficiencies. Low costs are low costs. Found leads are found leads—no matter what platform you leverage, provided we’re giving our clients the best ROI for each individual platform.
When to Use the Cost-Per-Action Model Generally speaking, we employ our digital TV cost-per-action model in two different ways. Either at the end of a Facebook campaign, when the cost of acquiring new leads has risen so high that it’s more economical for our clients to turn to digital TV. Or at the beginning of a campaign, when a combined Facebook and digital TV effort can yield impressive results simultaneously.
Take, for example, the work we performed on behalf of lawyers working on the Boy Scouts of America mass tort. Facebook ads worked brilliantly in the early going, but there came a time when we encountered bandwidth issues. We’d been so efficient at finding leads on Facebook that it became cost-prohibitive to continue scooping up stray leads—the proverbial digital needles in the internet haystack— by placing ads on Facebook.
To ensure we could find additional leads, we used the same data sets and audience profiles we’d honed on Facebook to create a lookalike audience for TV. We segmented our TV spend, focusing on “open states” (i.e., states that have legislation that allow us to look for any instances of sexual abuse when they were minors). As a result, this strategy helped our clients recruit another round of worthwhile clients.
On the other hand, when seeking potential leads for the mass tort focused on 3M dual-end earplugs, we launched a more comprehensive multichannel strategy at the start of our campaign.
Produced chiefly for the US military, these high-tech 3M earplugs were designed to provide soldiers new levels of flexibility in terms of ambient noise. When pushed deep into their ears, the plugs were meant to block out all exterior noise and explosions. But when slightly popped out, the earplugs were supposed to pick up orders and communication from their commanders.
The problem, however, was that the plugs were found to cause severe tinnitus and hearing loss to the soldiers who were using them.
The 3M case is a perfect example of a mass tort that benefitted from a hybrid Facebook-digital TV strategy.
In one regard, using Facebook proved effective because we were able to geo-target certain areas, sending ads to soldiers who were working on military bases and in training facilities around the globe. On the other hand, we also found extraordinary success by placing ads on a subset of digital streaming channels that these young soldiers were watching. They checked their Facebook feeds, and they streamed movies and content on their phones, allowing us to acquire leads on two separate fronts. In the end, our campaign uncovered close to twenty thousand new cases.
Even if we start a campaign on Facebook to capture an audience profile, we can quickly shift advertising dollars to TV if our client’s ROI is higher there.
It’s really a two-way street with unlimited capabilities. Once you define your perfect audience, you can continue advertising on Facebook, or you can shift that data over to digital TV. The data leads the way. Whichever approach yields the best price for the highest number of leads is the direction we’re going to take.
Take, for example, the talc baby powder mass tort. By launching a digital TV ad campaign, we reinforced the fact that our target audience was going to be women from forty-five to sixty years of age with extra emphasis on African-American and Latin-American women (who often used the product) as well as viewers in Southern states, where the heat can be oppressive and lead to the need for talc. Once we found and proved that was our ideal audience, we could send targeted ads out in every direction.
Consider the numbers. In terms of talc cases, we’re seeing costs hover between $1,200 to $1,500 per case acquisition on digital TV, which is quite low considering our law firm clients hoped to spend $3,000 to $3,500 per case. And in terms of total numbers, X Social Media and our ad buyers have uncovered over ten thousand leads while delivering thousands of cases for the tort.
We were able to find these leads by targeting our TV ad buys and purchasing airtime on hundreds of TV stations and media networks. In the case of talc, the fact that we could show thirty- to sixty-second ads proved to be an added plus, provided viewers added context as to why they should join the tort.
In terms of talc cases, we’re seeing costs hover between
$1,200 to $1,500 per case acquisition on digital TV, which is quite low considering our law firm clients hoped to spend $3,000 to $3,500 per case. And in terms of total numbers, X Social Media and our ad buyers have uncovered over ten thousand leads while delivering thousands of cases for the tort.
The key, of course, is that we’ve set our cost-per-action strategy just right. We negotiated our contracts wisely with the TV stations and apps, which allowed us to help our clients drive down their ROI.
In the end, our goal is always the same: help lawyers figure the best and most effective place to put their ad, at the best possible cost. Now with our expansion into digital TV, we simply have a wider array of options and platforms to do just that by combining the scope-like targeting of Facebook with the shotgun effect of advertising on other media channels.
In the end, our goal is always the same: help lawyers figure the best and most effective place to put their ad, at the best possible cost.
A New Edge: Personal Injury Lawyers and Digital TV Advertising It’s an all-too-common complaint. Personal injury lawyers are always approaching me with concerns over the spending power and advertising budgets of their competitors. “I just can’t compete with Lawyer X,” they’ll tell me, rubbing their forehead in abject frustration. “In my local market, law firms are spending millions on advertising, and it’s costing me valuable clients. What am I going to do? I just can’t spend that much money.”
The simple answer—in most cases—is that you don’t have to spend that much money.
We heard very similar sentiments from mass tort lawyers when we launched X Social Media. In most cases, the solution to the problem lies not in trying to blindly keep pace with the big spenders but to spend your advertising dollars more strategically and shrewdly than the competition.
We convinced mass tort lawyers to do just that by using Facebook advertising, which allowed our clients to initially spend $10,000 or $20,000 a month, while simultaneously finding the kind of success many of their rivals couldn’t match with much higher advertising budgets.
I firmly believe that this same paradigm shift is about to occur in the world of personal injury law. There will always be established lawyers who throw money at TV networks and stations, hoping that some of those dollars will stick. That’s an ineffectual long-term strategy. The wiser move is to employ the targeted digital TV model we’ve outlined in this chapter.
The advantage of this model for personal injury lawyers is apparent. Adopt our model and you’ll know exactly what a cost-peraction lead will cost you and whether you want to spend $5,000 to
$10,000 a month in your market on personal injury or motor vehicle accidents, such as car, motorcycle, or big rig eighteen-wheeler accident cases. Then you will have some hard data. For example, if fifty to seventy-five calls come in based on your budget and pricing, you really don’t carry much of a risk on this cost-per-action approach. Once you have established your base conversion rate in your market after these initial calls, you will know your average cost per signed case going forward on a month-to-month basis.
As a result, a personal injury firm can set more accurate monthly or yearly goals. A personal injury firm could say, “We need five to ten signed cases a month to meet our projections.” X Social Media could then calculate the aforementioned conversion rate and provide local TV stations a cost-per-action number that will help you acquire those cases and achieve an ROI you will be happy with. Let’s say the conversion rates on the calls are 10 percent. If your firm approves a $2,000 cost per case in your local market, we can offer TV stations a $200 cost-per-action price.
With any advertising campaign, it’s critical to keep four key performance indicators (KPIs) in mind:
• Stability: You can spend as much on advertising as you like, provided you monitor your cost-per-action rates.
• Predictability: After your first advertising placement, you will sleep well knowing that the conversion rates and cost per case as “cost per action” are likely to remain stable.
• Scalability: If you need to advertise more, we can scale up quickly by sending your offer out to more local stations.
• Advertising risk: We let the media (i.e., TV stations) take the risk in order to minimize yours.
There are other benefits to our digital TV program as well. Often personal injury lawyers tell us that they only want certain kinds of cases, say eighteen-wheeler cases.
They want to know if we can zero in exclusively on those.
The short answer is yes, we can. With X Social Digital TV, the TV spots we provide to local stations can focus exclusively on trucking cases, motorcycle cases, wrongful death cases, or any other theme because we only pay when a viewer actually performs an action after seeing the ad.
Of course, some of these cases are harder to find than regular motor vehicle accident cases, so the amount of money we offer TV stations for every viewer action has to be higher for the TV stations to run it. Fortunately, the targeting abilities we’ve developed by using Facebook has helped us narrow the number of TV stations we should contract, which helps our personal injury law firm find clients—all while helping level the playing field and ensuring victims find just restitution for their injuries.