Last week we took a look at building referrals through things like direct mail
Josh Villarreal: [00:00:00] They spent 25 percent less and they got 2 percent more cases. So all that 25 percent went to the bottom line and then they increased their case volume as well.
Narrator: Welcome to the Law Firm Growth Podcast, where we share the latest tips, tactics, and strategies for scaling your practice from the top experts in the world of growing law firms.
Narrator: Are you ready to take your practice to the next level?
Jan Roos: Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Roos, and today I'm here with Josh Villareal from ACQ Inc. So Josh has been running traditional media agencies for the past number of years. He actually ended up scaling one up and selling it to Findlaw. Before starting ACQ, which is his current venture, we've done a lot of stuff in the realm of digital marketing, but I thought it was really important to have a guest on who has a lot of experience in the space, generating case files in a really predictable way that doesn't touch the internet whatsoever.
Jan Roos: So thanks and welcome to [00:01:00] the show, Josh.
Josh Villarreal: Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
Jan Roos: I like to get started with sort of the superhero origin stories. Do you mind telling me how you got to the point that you're out running the agency today?
Josh Villarreal: I went to school and I was probably like everybody else trying to figure out what to study.
Josh Villarreal: So looking at my circle influence and my dad told me not to study architecture. So I marked that off the list, my cousin and my uncle worked in the industry, the advertising industry and public relations for some pretty big agencies out of Austin and Houston. It looked pretty sexy. So I decided to go with that.
Josh Villarreal: Studied communications with emphasis in advertising, which was more in school. It's more about kind of branding. And even there was this advertising competition that colleges competed and that was building a campaign for a big corporation. Coca Cola was the client the year I did it. And then when I got out of school, my first job was actually as a junior media buyer for an agency in Houston, but it was more direct response.
Josh Villarreal: It kind of, it had some sexiness to it in terms of the [00:02:00] creative, but it was more so about the numbers and the science behind it, which they don't really teach you in school, but it's more important in my opinion, with a sexy creative kind of worked my way up through the ranks in that agency from junior media buyer to a senior level.
Josh Villarreal: And in the meantime, we had kind of found a niche and started building some decent referrals and a good client base within the legal industry. Just mainly mass torts, but then we started getting into some other localized campaigns as well. And so we had actually approached a company, Pine Law to acquire an agency, but that was back in the heyday of the transnational mesh mass tort, where everybody was spending a lot of money acquiring those cases.
Josh Villarreal: So that was a good year for us. They couldn't really scale it to the realm that they wanted it to. So they, after about two years, they switched gears and decided to go more of a Legion model. Which was good for me because I stayed on and worked as an affiliate manager and it kind of taught me a lot about the digital space as well.
Josh Villarreal: So I kind of have a little bit of a unique perspective [00:03:00] and working offline for about 10 years, but then also just taking a crash course in digital media from a legal perspective, legal case generation. Perspective as well over the last two or three years. So I kind of have a little bit of a unique perspective, but I left fine law and started ACQ Inc with my mentor, Keith Cone, who's been in the game for a long, long time.
Josh Villarreal: He sold radio for about 10 years. So he knows a lot about traditional and his background is actually in finance. So he looks at more return on investment. And that's how I kind of look at everything. Marketing is an investment. And what your return needs to be and kind of working backwards and engineering a campaign that will achieve that.
Josh Villarreal: So, yeah, I have ACQ Inc. and then I have Mass Marketing, which is just a small boutique shop that's more digital first and traditional second. ACQ is more TV, radio first, digital second.
Jan Roos: All right. Awesome. So, Josh, there's a lot to unpack there. One of the things I want to dig into is this whole concept of direct response marketing.
Jan Roos: So, obviously, we're both marketing guys. We run agencies. And so this is kind of the stuff that, you know, guys like us will talk at the marketing events all day. All right. But a [00:04:00] lot of the times it's like you said, it's not the kind of stuff that you see in school. I always like to say, you know, most people get a really bad idea of what's working in marketing when watching Super Bowl ads, because, you know, they think they're going to say some, you know, some funny story about a horse falling in love with the dog and you think that's how you're going to market your law firm.
Jan Roos: So for the benefit of the the, the practice owners and the managing partners that, that might not understand the difference between direct response and traditional branding, would you mind defining a little bit more like that and and why it might be important for law firms.
Josh Villarreal: So direct response, we kind of put it as you're listening at direct response from your advertising, whereas Super Bowl commercials and more branding type commercials, you can watch, you know, 28 seconds of it and not know who the company is until the very end, whereas direct response is hitting the pain points, telling the person about your firm and getting to pick up the phone and call you.
Josh Villarreal: And then tracking that. So it's the commercial that basically tries to get somebody to pick up the phone and call.
Jan Roos: I think it's really important because, you know, there's, there's a lot of stuff out there. We had kind of a tough time personally, and I do at least when you know, there's a whole social media [00:05:00] craze and people are talking about getting their brand out there.
Jan Roos: And it seems like, There's a big resurgence in brand marketing, and there's still some old standbys that are out there, you know, selling law firms. Honestly, I have no business trying to be people in a branding perspective, paying huge retainers for this stuff. So, you know, we constantly are seeing people getting their shirts taken off by this kind of stuff.
Jan Roos: But you know, the thing is that a lot of law firms, in my personal opinion, are in need of, of getting case files quickly and direct response. And I think it's one of the best ways to do that. It's kind of interesting. I think in the whole realm of TV and radio, it seems to be kind of a, a niche. In which a lot of branding stuff is taken first.
Jan Roos: So, you know, people just try to get the jingle going or whatever. But no, it's kind of interesting that you guys are taking more of a lead based approach to that. So could you kind of tell us how you guys have been differentiating from traditional TV and radio agencies?
Josh Villarreal: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, you'll get some branding and it's a by product of just frequency.
Josh Villarreal: So that you're, you'll have some name recognition and stuff, but we don't base anything on brand awareness or anything like that. We just base it off phone calls and conversions into cases. So yeah, [00:06:00] we kind of are a little bit different in just the aspect that we're not trying to do the whole Super Bowl commercial.
Josh Villarreal: Like you mentioned, make it more entertainment based. I read an article the other day that the people tune into the Super Bowl to watch the commercials. And it's the only time that people really tune into the commercials to just to see the commercials. So we differentiate ourselves from more traditional kind of Madison Avenue type agencies by just developing a brand through frequency.
Josh Villarreal: So what that means is the more times that you're on the air. And just the name itself will give you the brand awareness that you need to serve that purpose. But the main goal is to pick up the phone, have someone pick up the phone and call you and grow your case acquisition and have your lowest lower your case acquisition as well.
Josh Villarreal: Just from that perspective. So it's not so much about brand awareness and entertainment factor. It's just more results driven and conversion based.
Jan Roos: Gotcha. Yeah. So no, I totally vibe with that, Josh. And as far as the kind of metrics that we're talking about, so what are the you know, when you, when you're going out and talking about a [00:07:00] client about the success of a campaign, what kind of numbers are you guys focusing on?
Jan Roos: And I mean, also, if you, if you want to share what kind of results are coming from these campaigns, I'd be really interested to hear what's coming through.
Josh Villarreal: Yeah, for sure. So I'm going to focus on just personal injury because that's kind of one of our main, we mostly focus on mass tort class action and personal injury.
Josh Villarreal: So I'll focus on just local market personal injury. So typically we try and generate a unique 30 second connected call for about 150 bucks. And then assuming an acquisition or a conversion into a signed retainer, we try and keep it around 1500 bucks per signed retainer. Now that's going to be different in multiple markets, somewhere lower, somewhere higher, L.
Josh Villarreal: A. being one where it's probably going to be a bit higher. I mean, we're actually having some success in In Austin as well, what'll be a little bit lower. So you just kind of have to play the market, look at the competition, and then you can kind of somewhat predict what your results are going to be.
Josh Villarreal: But that's kind of the main, the main two is obviously the first kind of top of the funnel is the unique phone call and then the conversion on the back end. And then [00:08:00] also kind of knowing that some cases will fall out just after the records are ordered and whatnot. You may have some fall out there. So we'll, we'll take a look at how many calls are coming in, how many of those calls are converting into records.
Josh Villarreal: Cases and then kind of a predictive fallout as well to kind of project an overall lifetime return on investment.
Jan Roos: That brings up something that historically been kind of challenging with some of the clients that we've worked with for example, but the actual ability to track how cases are getting through and being signed from the lead.
Jan Roos: Do you guys have a system for doing this or what do you usually recommend clients to do in order to get a handle on these numbers?
Josh Villarreal: We're talking to somebody in the intake department, at least like once or twice a week, just to see how things are progressing. We heavily utilize call intelligence as well.
Josh Villarreal: So there's a thousand of them out there. We've used dial 800 and call rail as the two most recent ones, but there's, you know, several ones that serve the same purpose. And what that does is it just tracks every single phone call, regardless of if somebody hung up and we've actually recovered some cases and some new clients by just setting up a basic missed call notification to ping somebody [00:09:00] in intake.
Josh Villarreal: So if somebody calls, hangs up, intake person gets an email saying, Hey, this person called, but didn't speak to anybody. That person picks up the phone, calls that person back. This is, you know, Melissa with the Smith law firm. Just, you know, so I'll let you call. Can we help you? I mean, a lot of times that's a step that most firms don't take.
Josh Villarreal: But it's just all about that, that front end intake and keeping it, make sure everything's buttoned up in that, in that regard.
Jan Roos: Yeah. And it's actually one of the things that I found super important. We did a great interview with intake specialist, Gary Falkowitz. And you know what I think is super attractive for this.
Jan Roos: And I will, from the first part, the firms that really have a handle on these numbers, it's really the backbone for planning any sort of growth that you have in mind. So when you guys, you know, if anyone finds out that, you know, we can put 10, 000 in this campaign, we can expect 50, 000 to come out. And that's something that you can count on every single month, then it becomes a lot easier to make decisions about hiring associates, moving to a bigger office, investing more money in marketing.
Jan Roos: If that's what people want to do, there's really no way to do that unless people end up getting a real handle on these numbers. [00:10:00] And yeah, the second thing is the actual followup process is something that's a lot, a lot of firms struggle with. And again, it's like. You know, we're talking about in the instance of the stuff that we're typically doing search advertising.
Jan Roos: You know, there's nothing stopping for somebody from calling the next two listings on Google. Gary Falk, which mentioned, you know, you have to assume that somebody is going to call one person before you and one person after you. So you happen to be the firm that ends up calling back or treating people a little bit better on the intake process.
Jan Roos: Then you end up being the firm that ends up retaining the case. And, and what becomes really attractive about that is that, you know, I mean, you mentioned the number one in 10, if somebody can get that number from one in 10 up to one in five. Then you're posting twice as many case files in the exact same marketing expense.
Jan Roos: So it's really something that people, I think need to take a lot more focus on. And, and, you know, absolutely something I find super important. All right. So switching gears a little bit. So a lot of the times, you know, TV and radio have been around for a long time. And in the marketing world, there's always something new.
Jan Roos: People tend to focus on whatever shiny, sexy object that they have in front of them. But, you know, I estimate the TV and radio is still important. So you did mention, you know, having the experience [00:11:00] with running the digital practice as well. Do you see any sort of differences in the type of leads that are coming in the scale within a given market?
Jan Roos: You know, what's different about TV and radio and why should people that are already considering other channels use it?
Josh Villarreal: You know, you need to look at what your investment's going to be. Just like anything, any advertising or marketing, there's no, no guarantee. So you have to be, you know, okay. Investing a certain amount of money in.
Josh Villarreal: Maybe not getting anything back, but from a TV perspective, I mean, you're getting some by product branding as well. So if somebody sees you in a search results and they recall you from a radio or TV ad that may increase click through rate, we've had some studies done where just the brand searches.
Josh Villarreal: So if you look at kind of where people are coming to your site, just brand searches, somebody, Searching for the exact firm name and going to your site that's increased with offline media as well. But yeah, the main thing is we're basically it's getting somebody to pick up the phone and that's been for the most part converting higher than most web forms and more web form fills.
Josh Villarreal: I think it's just because there's a live person on the phone and you kind of missed that step of having to return that [00:12:00] call from a form submission or from a chat chat box on the website. So it's just connecting a live person with a live person, and so that, that somewhat helped our conversion as well, and it's a little bit more broad, you're getting a little bit more wider of an audience, where with pay per click, it's intent based, and you know, there may not be the search volume to get you a high case volume.
Josh Villarreal: But with TV and radio, the audience is fairly large and you'll have some ways, no doubt, but with that large audience, you also get a higher volume of calls and, you know, assuming your conversions up to snuff, you should be seeing some more, some more cases to more high volume.
Jan Roos: Yeah, no, I definitely imagine that.
Jan Roos: I mean, we run up against limits with search volume all the time. And it's like, you know, at the end of the day we can't create. Create any more demand than people are already pulling out their cell phones or, you know, going on a desktop computer search for stuff, but you know, you're kind of accessing this entire universe of, you know, people watching TV, people in their cars, everyone knows somebody who just can't get a router set up in their house and still uses a flip phone for whatever reason.
Jan Roos: So, and those people have cases too. So it's definitely intriguing. [00:13:00] So as far as a firm that might be considering this, you know, what kind of firms have you seen this working really well for? And you know, what stage should a firm be at when they're considering doing something like TV and radio advertising?
Josh Villarreal: Yeah, for sure. So the first thing is just look at your service area because I'm in Houston, Texas. And if you look at the DMA of the designated marketing area that most TV stations and radio stations cover, it's a huge area. I'm kind of closer to downtown and the TV signal reaches like an hour, hour and a half North to the hour, hour and a half South.
Josh Villarreal: So if you're not looking to serve those people, if it's more kind of a lot of in office, then it's probably not the best route. If you're just looking to kind of stay within like a 10 mile radius or something like that, then TBN radio is probably not for you. But from a practice perspective, I mean, personal injury, mass tort, class actions have done really, really well.
Josh Villarreal: And you, you see that on TV all the time in the daytime commercials and on the national television on cable as well with all the mesothelioma, defective drugs and devices currently like Physiomesh, [00:14:00] Invokana is kind of fizzling out. But there's a couple of big ones that you'll consistently see on TV and that's very much a direct response geared game from a mass tort class action perspective.
Josh Villarreal: But. There's been success that we've had in local markets with criminal, tax, family, bankruptcy, SSDI, workers comp, MedMal, immigration, just, it's a lot of practice areas that we've had success with. But I'd say, you know, you probably want to invest depending on the market, you know, LA versus Louisville are two completely different markets, but from an investment perspective for TV and radio, I wouldn't go any less than, you know, 15 to 20 a month, 15 to 20 K a month, just to get a fair test.
Josh Villarreal: And you could probably assess after week two. If you see some traction, don't expect results week one, but week two, you can kind of reassess and see it should be trending. The cost per call should be trending downwards, and you should have at least a case or two in that short period of time. Kind of the service area is one thing you want to look at.
Josh Villarreal: Marketing budget, you know, 15 to 20k a month is probably where I would start. You can obviously do it for less or for more, and you may [00:15:00] have to in different markets. And then the intake portion as well. You have to make sure that you're staffed up. Especially from a Mass Torque class action perspective, where you may have, you know, super high volume with physio mesh, you know, cost per call in the 60 to 70 range.
Josh Villarreal: So you're getting double the amount of calls for a PI campaign. So you have to make sure that you're staffed up. And I, with, you know, Gary Falkowitz and his group, we have after hours and kind of overflow as well. So we can set that up through call intelligence to kind of help streamline intake. But that's a huge part of it as well.
Josh Villarreal: There's been firms, same campaign, pretty much same commercial, same spin, same everything, and have their cost per case is double the next guy just because they're not picking up the phones live or going to voicemail and they have to call them back. So I can't emphasize how important that is, not from just a TV perspective, but just from a general operations perspective as well.
Josh Villarreal: And you don't have to spend a ton of production out of the gate as well. So if you think about just the media costs, that 15 to 20 K can include production. If you watch, you know, national cable [00:16:00] television, you'll see just the basic standard stock photos with words and just a voiceover. And funny enough, those usually outperform the ones that are kind of done up really, really nice.
Josh Villarreal: We had a campaign here in Houston where we were running just a basic graphic and word voiceover type ad chugging along, but the client got a wild hair and said, we need to do, you know, these productions and go to this location and shoot live and ended up costing 20 to 30, 000 for all these commercials.
Josh Villarreal: And we put it on air and the results went went down. So we ended up putting the just straight kind of quote unquote, ugly commercial back on the air. And it started chugging back exactly where it should. So you don't have to spend a lot of money on production out of the gate. Just kind of dip your toes in the water, book something for a month and just see how that goes.
Josh Villarreal: And then reassess and regroup and adjust. But you have to, Basically we were running a commercial that was just graphics and voiceover only. You've probably seen one in your local market or for a mass tour on cable television and things were going well. The case [00:17:00] acquisition costs was good. And this was for actually for first party insurance claims after a a storm, but we were just running the graphic ad with voiceover and he kind of got a wild hair.
Josh Villarreal: His competitor was doing some production that was a little bit higher end. So he wanted to go that route. So we fired up a camera, got to some live shoots on location. And. Had probably six or seven different spots that were really, really well cut, well edited. And we put those on air and sure enough, the results dwindled.
Josh Villarreal: And so we said, you know, media is the same, the cost is the same, everything's the same. The only thing that changed was the production. And so we swapped it back to just the straight voiceover with graphics. And. The results kind of fell back in line. So production value is somewhat overrated. It's kind of a means to an end.
Josh Villarreal: You know, there's some, some people out there that spend a ton of money getting spokespeople in the market, famous athletes, whatnot paying those guys, you know, ridiculous sums of money for a retainer and just, yeah, spending a too much money on production. It's. It's a means to an end, and you can just get a better sense without spending 20, 30 grand on [00:18:00] production.
Josh Villarreal: Just, I think our typical voiceover graphic commercial runs like 1, 500, 2 grand, so it's not, not expensive at all. And then radio, usually the stations will produce it for you, so there's no really money out of pocket for that as well.
Jan Roos: That's actually super interesting because we kind of see some parallels in the web world.
Jan Roos: A lot of the times when people want to have like a really slick or sexy website you know, we've been testing a lot of this different stuff as well. And you know, we've got a template that's running, it looks ugly as sin, but if we can get 20 or 30 percent of the people that land on that site to page, it's, you know, I like to say this, it's like, do you want your website to look pretty?
Jan Roos: Or do you want your commercial to look pretty? Or do you want your checking account to look pretty? And like most people will go for the second. And, you know, that's really kind of the power of direct response because it's. It takes you out of this realm of, of, you know, I've had a lot of situations in past lives where it kind of becomes a creative head butting contest, but you know, another power of the direct response thing is that you can just literally point to the numbers and say, look, this is what's working.
Jan Roos: This is what's not. So it's an objective, rational decision, as opposed to, you know, going based on feeling Josh, I wanted to ask you is like, in terms of, you know, do you have any like [00:19:00] really big success stories or like, what does these campaigns look like in terms of the returns to a client when they go off really well?
Josh Villarreal: We actually took over an account from a personal injury account in a local market. The firm was spending multi six figures in the market and they were just missing some of the key elements that we typically implement just in our whole direct response marketing system that we employ for law firms. So we came in, analyzed their media by cut quite a bit of waste off.
Josh Villarreal: So when we look at all media off a cost per thousand, just because you can compare it across multiple mediums, you don't have to. You can't really compare a cost per point, which is just you know, a percentage of the population in a given market, you can't really analyze your CPM on TV versus, you know, Facebook ad or what have you, because Facebook doesn't use cost per point, they use cost per thousand.
Josh Villarreal: So that's kind of the main metric that we use to kind of base our media buys from, and they were in some areas that were. Exorbitant in terms of cost per thousand. So we just transitioned some of those dollars just straight out of the marketing plan and actually [00:20:00] lowered their spend by 25 percent the following year.
Josh Villarreal: And they got actually, it wasn't a lot more cases, but it was like 2 percent more cases. So they spent 25 percent less. And they got 2 percent more cases. So all that 25 percent went to the bottom line and then they increased their case volume as well. That was a personal injury firm in one market. And then market analysis and just kind of competitive analysis is something that's extremely important as well, especially if you're new to TV and radio in a market, a lot of people will just go and try and butt heads with.
Josh Villarreal: The two or three big players in the market from a personal ending perspective. There's usually two or three that just completely dominate the television market, usually one that outspends the next closest competitor by two to one, or sometimes four to one. And so they'll go in and they'll see them on TV all the time and they'll try and compete in that game.
Josh Villarreal: But what you can do is you can ask, you know, you're one of your station ramps or the agency may have access to it too, but there's a couple of different systems out there. Media monitors is one and there's Cantar is another one where it'll actually give you the spend of your competitors and you can [00:21:00] actually request that they do by day part as well.
Josh Villarreal: So you can see not only where your competitors are spending in the market on what stations, but also what time of the day and try and find a niche that you can play in where we're not spending that much money. And the cost of a thousand is where it needs to be in line and just try that. A great example of that is in Texas.
Josh Villarreal: There is a market where very competitive on English TV, but we found just a niche on Hispanic radio. So Spanish radio. And brand new firm and it's the cases are, you know, below 1500, but 1500 a case on a personal injury, a car accident case, just because we found that niche, we did the market analysis, the competitor analysis down a niche where not a lot of people were focusing and just hit that hard.
Josh Villarreal: And that was one of the success stories as well. So it's kind of taking a step back, looking, assessing the whole market, and then kind of actually having strategy, not just going and trying to say, okay, we're going to go on TV. So we need to be on the news because everybody watches the news, or we need to be on the number one station and morning drive because everybody's listening to [00:22:00] morning drive.
Josh Villarreal: That's just not the best way to go. You have to be a little bit more strategic than that.
Jan Roos: Yeah, no, that's super interesting. Like a lot of parallels that we see across different channels of marketing, but yeah, I know it's definitely important to have, you know, somebody who I kind of understand these different things to, to work with you to, to, I mean, cause it's the thing it says, you know, it took years for you guys to figure out how to do this.
Jan Roos: And now this is something that people can work with. So if anyone's considering this, what kind of people are you looking to speak to Josh? And what's the best place to find you online?
Josh Villarreal: My email is just [email protected]... and anybody that's currently, maybe they're advertising on TV and radio, But the results have kind of dwindled or they're not getting the returns that they want.
Josh Villarreal: I'm already gladly, you know, hop on a quick call, see if we can't look at their campaign and see if we can't make some adjustments to that, to to kind of see if we can't get it headed in the right direction. Or if somebody is interested in TV and radio in terms of acquiring cases in a [00:23:00] local market and then also nationally.
Josh Villarreal: And one thing that I want to mention about national television advertising is people think it's super expensive, but it's actually a lot of times. Less expensive than local like a national Fox News commercial is actually probably just as expensive as a local news commercial on a New York CBS affiliate.
Josh Villarreal: So if you can go national, that's typically the way we push people. That's why Mass Tort and Class Action work really well in that regard. But yeah, anyone that's looking to, you know, to acquire more cases in their market. We'll have to speak with them.
Jan Roos: All right. Fantastic, Josh. So yeah, it's been a really interesting discussion.
Jan Roos: I think for any listeners, it's always great to see, you know, just how different channels work. There's, there's some ideas that kind of fall across whatever kind of marketing you're doing. I think the focus on intake and making sure that people know their numbers and kind of taking that direct response mindset is something that, you know, regardless of the channel is something that people are going to be able to take advantage of.
Jan Roos: So I want to say thanks for providing all this awesome information, Josh. And for the rest of the listeners, thanks again for listening to the CaseFuel podcast. And we'll see you again next week. [00:24:00]
Narrator: Thank you for listening to the Law Firm Growth Podcast. For show notes, free resources, and more, head on over to casefuel.com slash podcast. Looking forward to catching up on the next episode.