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Personal Injury Attorney Logan Quirk joins us for Episode 25 of the Personal Injury Marketing Minute.
In this podcast, Logan discusses marketing initiatives. Some of Logan’s leads come from business referrals, attorney referrals, referrals from past clients and SEO and digital marketing. Logan uses case management software and a spreadsheet to track leads and measure marketing initiatives.
You can visit Logan Quirk online at https://quirkwins.com/.
See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/.
Transcript
Intro:
Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute, where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world.
As a lawyer who is savvy enough to listen to a legal marketing podcast, you understand that a marketing plan has a big impact on how you get more clients. Clearly, a highly effective marketing plan is one that gives you the best return on your marketing budget. Just a wild guess, but you probably don’t want to waste thousands of dollars and needless hours on marketing strategies that simply aren’t working. So how do you gauge your marketing ROI and figure out which strategies are best for you? The short answer is data. However, it isn’t enough just to collect data. You need to actually use it to inform your decisions to make a good investment.
With us today is Logan Quirk, the founder of Quirk Accident & Injury Attorneys, APC, a successful personal injury law firm with offices in California, Nevada and Montana. As Logan has expanded his practices, he has honed in on some simple yet effective ways to organize his marketing data and use those numbers to inform his ongoing marketing initiatives. Thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me, it’s a pleasure.
So Logan, tell us a little bit about your practice?
Sure. I actually was informed that this is the 10 year anniversary in my office.
Oh, congratulations.
Yeah, thank you. It didn’t even dawn on me until one of the case managers was like, “Hey, what are we doing for our 10 year anniversary?”
Big party?
I think they just wanted to go to a Dodger game or something. So I’ve been 10 years, started my practice in San Diego, migrated back north of the Los Angeles area and have slowly expanded since then. I started out with my brother in a small town called Ventura. I was young and needed to go, moved down to bigger and warmer weather, to San Diego, and slowly came back as we talked about. And so that’s where we’re at today.
Well, that’s great. Well, as you’ve expanded, it’s obvious that you have needed to rely on marketing, as all law firms do.
What marketing initiatives have you relied on the most to bring in clients?
I think I’ve gone through every marketing initiative possible. As a smaller injury firm without the robust budgets of some of the bigger firms, we rely on a lot of, say, guerilla marketing, just word of mouth and going and meeting people, traditional business to business. As I’ve gotten some more money, I’ve gotten more into the digital space, especially with your founder Len, he’s been able to give me a whole new avenue of revenue, which has been nice.
So we want to diversify our portfolio as I say, or our revenue basis as much as possible, but I’ve traditionally relied on the business to business contacts, word of mouth from our past clients, making sure we’re doing a good job. Those are your biggest source of referrals if you’re doing that right. And then other attorneys have been a good source of revenue for me. And now we are developing the digital side and fine tuning that. And I think it’s always a process and evolution to make sure that you have the right strategy in place.
Absolutely. That makes a lot of sense because your marketing initiatives are going to ebb and flow. And over time, some things are going to work, some things aren’t. But as a busy lawyer bringing in new clients, you only have so much time and so many resources to allocate to different marketing strategies.
True.
How do you collect marketing data?
So as you continue to grow and attract more clients, how have you been collecting data on what’s working and what’s not working? What kind of things do you look at when you make marketing decisions?
Sure. I’m not really big on data, but with the pandemic I was trying to be more conscientious about crunching the numbers and seeing what worked. So I have case management software, we track where the clients came from and I just created a spreadsheet and sat down one day and went through everything and was able to figure out what our best sources of revenue were at that time.
I know there’s a lot of lawyers in this space that are much better at me, that have perfected using case management software. And I think it all comes down to data input and then being able to run the right reports and produce a nice little tidy spreadsheet. So I’m trying to fine-tune that data, it’s probably my weak point, the point of most resistance for me, but is definitely a necessity in this day and age to definitely track your dollars and seeing what your ROI is best spent doing. So that was the purpose behind that. Especially with COVID, for personal injury attorneys, I think a lot of us had a downturn just due to people not driving, especially out here in California.
Oh, for sure. There was definitely a reduction in accidents going on out there.
Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to see what was working and what wasn’t. And then I also used that as an opportunity to redefine how I approach marketing and that’s where we’re at today.
That’s great. And I think one of the things that I love about what you just said is that it really doesn’t have to be rocket science. It can be as simple as creating a spreadsheet, putting in the numbers. But it does start with collecting the data and actually taking the time to input it and look at the data and analyze it. And so, when you are making that spreadsheet, what kind of things are you looking at in it?
So key to me is tracking where the cases come from. Because if you’re just getting a bunch of cases and you’re not tracking where they come from, then you’re not sure obviously where your cases are coming from. So that was step one, was making sure that every client that comes in the door, whether it’s retained or not, we at least have some basis of what generated that lead, be it digital marketing, social media, a client, a doctor, a lawyer.
And then from there, we were just able to track down, okay, this week brought in X amount of leads, this month brought in Y amount of leads. And then, comparing that historically over the last 12 months, it was like, “Oh wow, this isn’t working as well as I thought it was. This isn’t working. This is actually working really well.” So it was nice to see where your efforts were being most fruitful.
When you start to see trends, what’s your action plan on when something is working versus not working?
I don’t ever want to shut something down because it’s not working immediately. I don’t want to have a knee-jerk reaction. I think that’s something I had earlier when I started my practice, especially with the finite dollars was, “Oh, this isn’t working this month, I’m going to scrap it and dump it.” And I think being a little more patient will help see the results. And you also have to understand that, a lot of times, not every marketing effort’s going to yield a bunch of fruit. And you’re not going to get cases that month from every avenue. And that’s why it’s important to have different avenues because some might be slow and some might produce a ton of leads in a given time.
The old ad adage is, “When it rains, it pours. And when it’s dry, its dry as a desert.” So we want to make sure that we have different sources. And I think the pandemic was really good to see what was functional and what wasn’t. And I think when one’s not working, you want to see why it’s not working. And if it becomes a pattern of it not working, then you want to retool it or scrap it. There becomes a time when, I don’t have a magic number in my head, but you know when things aren’t working anymore and I think it’s just time to cut bait and run. I think addition by subtraction can be a huge benefit for us.
That’s a great point. And you don’t want to have that knee-jerk reaction, as you said, with different marketing initiatives. Some are a slow game, some are you can expect a really quick turnaround on case generation. It’s something that we see a lot in the digital marketing world, where with SEO in a saturated market, it can take six, eight months before you start seeing any traction. So just because it’s not working after month one doesn’t mean that it’s not actually highly effective. Whereas with a paper click ad in a low saturated market could have a really quick turnaround if it’s done right. So everything is going to have a different timeline and metric for success.
Most definitely. And I think that’s hard for us in this space. I’m really impatient. And having gone through different companies like, “Why aren’t things working in it?” It was always like, “Well it takes six to eight months.” And sometimes I thought that was a sales pitch.
And it can be, for sure.
Yeah. And I think after a while you start learning, “Okay, well maybe it is a sales pitch,” but you start seeing the results coming a little bit. And if you find good people, you will be able to get some transparent answers. And the nice thing about working with Len Legend is I can text him and he just comes back like, “Hey, this is working, this isn’t working and we’re going to try and retool this.” So I like it, it’s like a trial and error process.
So as long as we’re trying to tinker with it and get the most bang for our buck and have some type of consistent lead generation, I’m always open to try and stay with people. There were a few companies previously where I probably got maybe prematurely frustrated, but it turned out probably to be the right decision.
And that can absolutely happen. And when you’re working with the right company, right companies, and they can get creative with what they do, that’s actually what I see as a mark of a really good company. If you are getting a, “Well, this is the one thing we do. And the one way that we do it.” And there’s no flexibility to try to make it work, that can be a red flag when I’m looking at companies for a procurement relationship or something like that. If there’s no creativity going on behind the scenes, then you know that you’re just a number.
Yeah. I think that word creative is an operative word, especially with the saturation in these markets. There’s so much competition. A lot of the firms do have bigger budgets and the mid-size firms might have midsize budgets. And then wherever you fit in is where you have to market. And the whole thing for me back when I first started was, marketing on a shoestring budget, how do I get that silver bullet with the limited amount of bullets I had?
So I’m still doing that, trying to find what works and what doesn’t work. And if you can find that couple of sources of revenue that do work consistently, hold onto them and make sure that they don’t go away. But if they do, don’t be scared to retool it and ultimately scrap it if necessary.
Absolutely. And there are some marketing strategies that have historically worked over time, where other marketing strategies have gone the way of phone book advertising and just become a glorified door stop. So you have to keep an eye on that and know what the trends are, know what’s working. We were just talking about banner ads on websites and how that used to be all the rage in the ’90s. And then you’d have the popup ads and that would actually drive traffic to a website.
And now it is so archaic and these things can happen overnight it seems, but usually over the course of a couple years. But you have to be able to stay on point with what the market is doing, what innovations are out there. And find some ways to be flexible and creative, for sure.
Well that’s why I’m glad I have you guys, because I don’t even know what is now current and what’s not, so that’s not my space.
That’s what we nerd out on, so… Well every firm and sector and market has strategies that work and don’t work.
What have you found recently to be the most effective marketing strategies for your firm?
- Referrals from businesses
- Referrals from attorneys
- Referrals from past clients
- SEO
The most consistent to me still are the old fashioned business to business. If we meet on Zoom or if we have coffee. I think having a relationship with the person that’s given you that business is always going to be the best source of revenue. I think if you do right by your clients, that’s going to be your best source. Having a good social media and website presence can serve as validation for leads that come in. I do believe that SEO is definitely very important. And that’s become pretty consistent for me because I think now that’s where people are turning is to their phones and everything is done on that little thing in your hand.
But to me still, the whole relationship referral networking has always been consistent. And the pandemic reinforced that with me, where I think I got maybe a little too reliant on digital marketing. When the pandemic came, a bunch of that dried up and I had to, “Oh shit.” Excuse my French but, “These leads aren’t coming in anymore, where am I getting my cases from?” And it was from the people who I established relationships with in the past. So rekindling those and making sure that we were good with those and trying to go out and reestablish or go out and establish new ones was the turning point for me.
This is a long answer to your question, but I think the best source of referral revenue right now is still my relationships I had built in the past and those relationships I’m continuing to build. And it’s always a process. It’s a relationship and it takes work and you have to make sure that you are maintaining that. But in that same vein, having some type of digital presence is absolutely required in today’s business.
That’s the truth, for sure. And relationship building and networking, especially in something as foundational and important as personal injury law, if you have someone who is injured and their financial future and their recovery is dependent upon what you as a lawyer are doing for them, that can change the outcome of the rest of their lives.
They’re not wanting to trust that to somebody, and especially if they know somebody and they have a good reputation or they know somebody who has worked with a lawyer who has done right by them, they’re putting a lot of faith in you. And the warm lead and the reputation and the relationship that’s coming out of that preestablished connection that you already have is always going to supersede any Google search. And that is my, probably not the best to say from an SEO perspective, but nothing’s going to beat that.
And when you don’t have that connection, then of course digital marketing is required as a fallback. If I don’t know somebody who’s been in an accident and had a great lawyer that they’ve worked with, or I don’t have a connection with a great accident attorney, then I’m going to turn to Google. But so much of the investment that you make in relationship building is going to pay off. Of course, that’s a lot more of a time commitment from you to be able to go out and make connections, remember people, and invest in building those relationships. But if you have the time to do that, that’s 100% going to pay off in the long run.
And you always have to remember that marketing is working. You don’t have cases of work on unless you get them in the door. So, you better make time if you’re not making time or you better have a nice little someone in your office that can do that, or have the budget necessary to circumvent that together. And then just going back on what you were saying, the referrals are an extension of yourself. So if they know, like, and can trust you, then it’s nice to have that connection because it already has that preset credibility already established. So I think it’s important to have both, the best of both worlds.
It’s great to have that balance there. Well, thank you so much for sharing your strategies with us today. If anybody has questions about how to collect or interpret or apply marketing data so that you can get the best return on your marketing investments, feel free to contact me through optimizemyfirm.com.
