Category: Strategy

The number that changed how I think about marketing budgets is that the firms growing fastest aren’t just spending more, they’re spending roughly three times more as a percentage of revenue than the firms that aren’t growing, and they’re more profitable while doing it, which breaks the assumption most attorneys have that marketing is a…

Every attorney I talk to asks the same thing before they spend a dollar on marketing, which is ‘what should I expect back’ and the honest answer is it depends on about five variables that most agencies never walk you through.

At Percy Martinez we ran both channels for years and I spent a lot of that time treating PPC as the real marketing and SEO as the thing we did on the side because the agency said we should, and it wasn’t until I looked at the numbers over a three-year window instead of monthly…

At Percy Martinez I learned that the person approving the marketing budget doesn’t care about clicks or impressions or cost per lead. Percy wanted to know one thing: if I give you this money today, when does it come back and how much bigger. And I didn’t have a good answer for a while because…

I saw this firsthand at Percy Martinez. The agency kept showing us more clicks, Percy kept saying the leads weren’t turning into cases, and I couldn’t figure out which side was wrong until I pulled the data apart and realized both sides were measuring different things and neither one was tracking to the signed case

At Percy Martinez the marketing budget kept going up every year and for a long time I thought that meant something was wrong, but what I eventually understood is that PI economics are different from every other practice area and the firms that try to run PI marketing on a family law budget end up…

For years at Percy Martinez I calculated our cost per case using only the ad spend, and when I finally added the agency fee and the intake salaries and the software the number was about 40% higher than what I’d been reporting to the partners, which was an uncomfortable conversation but at least it was…

At Percy Martinez I thought we had bad marketing for about two years before I realized the marketing was fine and our intake was losing half the leads before anyone picked up the phone, and that’s a more common problem than most firms want to admit.

I spent years at Percy Martinez calculating ROI wrong because I was using the numbers the agencies gave me instead of the numbers that came out of our case management system, and the gap between those two versions of reality is basically what this whole post is about.

The solo attorneys I’ve worked with who do well on tight budgets aren’t doing anything complicated, they’re just not wasting money on the things that big firms can afford to waste money on, and that difference in discipline is basically the whole strategy.