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The Personal
Injury Mastermind

The Podcast

119. Sarah Parisi, Whitehardt – Media Buying: Foundations and the Future

Sarah Parisi (@SarahParisi_)has over a decade in media buying for mass torts and personal injury firms. The Director of National Marketing and Mass Tort Strategist has worked with Nashville-based Whitehardt (@WhitehardtInc) to increase the bottom line of the largest legal empires in the country. I caught up with Sarah to discuss the fundamentals of media buying and what it takes to reach a qualified audience. We also cover the importance of renegotiating media buys and the future of data mining for a more accurate picture of campaign ROI.

Links

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What’s in This Episode:

  • Who is Sarah Parisi?
  • What was Sarah’s trajectory from Media Buyer to mass tort strategist?
  • What discrepancies should be looked for when media buying?
  • What are the fundamentals of media buying for personal injury firms?

Past Guests

Past guests on Personal Injury Mastermind: Brent Sibley, Sam Glover, Larry Nussbaum, Michael Mogill, Brian Chase, Jay Kelley, Alvaro Arauz, Eric Chaffin, Brian Panish, John Gomez, Sol Weiss, Matthew Dolman, Gabriel Levin, Seth Godin, David Craig, Pete Strom, John Ruhlin, Andrew Finkelstein, Harry Morton, Shay Rowbottom, Maria Monroy, Dave Thomas, Marc Anidjar, Bob Simon, Seth Price, John Gomez, Megan Hargroder, Brandon Yosha, Mike Mandell, Brett Sachs, Paul Faust, Jennifer Gore-Cuthbert

Transcript

Sarah Parisi

And broadcast TV by no means is dead. It is still remains one of the top performers in terms of ROI. It’s the best way I believe to connect with your local audience.

Chris Dreyer

When it comes to establishing a personal injury brand, don’t skip the foundations.

Sarah Parisi

If you’re coming out and you’re new to this entire industry, I would say that your biggest goal is to have a call to action and make that clearly visible upon the, and then have a caring sentiment. that should be your main stay.

Chris Dreyer

You’re listening to Personal Injury Mastermind, where we give you the tools you need to take your personal injury practice to the next level. Since 2002 Whitehardt has specialized in legal marketing for mass torts and personal injury firms. The Nashville based agency specializes in TV and digital advertising, video production and creative design call center, intake and contracts. I sat with the director of national marketing and Mass Tort Strategist, Sarah Parisi, to dig into the fundamentals of media buying, what makes a great creative and the future of data mining for a more accurate picture of campaign ROI. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. We help elite personal injury attorneys dominate first page rankings with search engine optimization. Being at the forefront of marketing is all about understanding people. So let’s get to know her. Here’s Sara Parisi, director of national marketing mass tort strategist at Whitehardt.

Sarah Parisi

I graduated from the University of Tennessee and my senior year, I’m getting ready to make, I’m going back to Nashville. That’s where my family lives. North of Nashville. So I’m from here. I didn’t really know what I was going to do. I had my advertising degree and my senior professor, I senior thesis professor, she knew Brad Wormer, who is currently our chief operations officer. And they were like, we need to, we, they were looking for a media auditor. And so I came down to interview is like a kind of snowy day in Nashville in December of 2010. And. They hired me and I never left. It’s a weird unicorn story because, we’ve found that those with advertising degrees often at this stage and the country, if you will, this year, it really was difficult to get into an agency. So I found one and

Chris Dreyer

The unicorn it’s like just the. Now it’s every year people are retaining your staff and it’s like a blood bath trying to hire. Good. It’s good.

Sarah Parisi

Really is. It really is. But I loved it. I loved the atmosphere. I loved it was very small then too. So we didn’t have think we had, I think I was like the 20th person hired. Maybe the 20th. It was an old house on music square. So if are familiar with Nashville that’s like music row where all the recording labels are. And we actually, the house that we’re in was Chet Atkins, old home. Now I will tell you, I have no idea what songs he sings, but I do know that’s his home we were in and we were right across the street from Reba McEntire first place.

Chris Dreyer

Very cool. Very cool. Yeah. So let’s talk about your trajectory here. from media buyer to director of national marketing, as a mass tort strategists, let’s talk about that trajectory because, I’ve watched some other videos with you, had, you have a very broad skill set. So you’ve done a lot. So what so let’s talk about that journey.

Sarah Parisi

I started as a media auditor. And what that means is basically local TV station invoices come in once a month and we need to make sure that local stations aired our stuff where it was supposed to be here. It seems, why wouldn’t they? But if you’re in this industry, you very well know that sometimes things run with not where they’re supposed to. So it was a grueling task at this point in time. We were dealing with. Which I say that, and they’re just like, wait, what? You didn’t do them digitally? No, it was all I had to print them out. Thousands of sheets of paper. We actually mailed physical completed audits for billing. We mailed them to the clients like via the post office, not via email. So it was a grueling task that I just thought look, I have an agency job. We’ve got to kill this. This is, my career’s coming up. We had an opening for a buyer about a year later and I was ready to rise up, ready to go. And so started my, I knew all the clients and I knew the placements. I understood the strategy because I was immersed in it. I was constantly reviewing, where our 30 second spots airing spots are, how many spots there are on Tuesdays? How many spots they had on Fridays? Nobody. I knew everything about all of our local clients. So the transition into buyer really was just teach me this new software, but I have to send orders on.

Chris Dreyer

Were there situations where they’re just throwing you into terrible slots? Like where the people don’t watch it, they didn’t watch it didn’t get any impressions or was it just, they just completely left you off and maybe you’re paying for airtime and you didn’t get any of it or combination of both.

Sarah Parisi

Yeah we send out annual orders. So really what that was some of the main flaws or main, we call them discrepancies. And that was another piece of the job. Like when you found these discrepancies, it was my job to email this station rep and say you didn’t hear this correctly and I’m going to need a credit. And so that kind of puts you in an awkward situation, especially just coming right out of college. You’re like, man, I don’t want to make anybody upset, but it’s really it’s about the jobs. It’s a whole personality evolution. But to answer your question mainly what ha the errors that come about are when our spots are preempted, they don’t air. They want to replace them as quickly as they can in order to make their full commission. And so spots will put back into rotation, but they weren’t approved by me. It wouldn’t be a bar or Kylie or whomever. The bud, the buyer was at the time. I say Kylie because she and I have been together wide heart for a very long time. It would be putting spots back in places where we had no business in our strategy. No reason to be in that timeframe. More importantly one of the biggest hiccups or blenders that they could commit would be not changing out the creative as required. And there are a variety of reasons. Clients come to us to shoot their commercials. They spend a lot of money on those ads. So when they’re done and they’re approved, they want them on air and for a station to not put the newest creative on air as the client had hoped then he’s not liable for, or he or she is not liable to pay that. So that was really one of the biggest offenses that I came across is, the miscommunicate and not even a miscommunication just do it. There are, especially at the state bar would reach out and say, Hey, pull this ad. If they don’t do that, then we are definitely not paying for that because we have the notice we sent it out.

Chris Dreyer

That’s so interesting. I think discrepancies is about the lightest version of what you could call that

Sarah Parisi

I know, right? It’s oh, I call them stationed credits and then they want to send over a a credit memo. And I’m like, no, it’s a discrepancy like that. I’m going to be put this as politely as I can to you this is an error.

Chris Dreyer

So let’s talk about media buying for PI for personal injury law firms. That’s the majority of our. When it comes to the media buying for personal injury firms, what’s the fundamentals. What does everyone need to know?

Sarah Parisi

You are not your audience. And I think that, that doesn’t, a lot of my battle cry, if you will, would be, I know you guys want to see your commercials. Of course, and everybody wants to see themselves on TV, but that’s not what you’re watching. Isn’t necessarily going to make the phones ring and so it was a whole learning curve in terms of, I know for one, I love The Today Show, but it’s a pricey piece to buy and it’s not necessarily going to have the best ROI. So there’s a demographic disconnect, I think, between wanting to see your commercials air on TV and wanting to get your phone to ring. So that was really what we were communicating through these strategy and these implementations.

Chris Dreyer

And I guess the different demographics that you’re targeting all different strategies there and, so knowing the fundamentals, first of all it’s kinda like one of those things, like when you’re a law firm trying to choose the right partner, what questions do they need to be asking? How do they identify a strong media buyer? Like how do they go in and make, even make this decision?

Sarah Parisi

So I have a great piece of advice given to me from Brad Warmer. He was the person who guided me all the way through my trajectory. So my success is I’ve just, I tell him I was on his coattails, just like a little duckling following right back along. But he mentored me greatly and a couple of key things that he said to me was one of the main, we are not an agency that sets it and forget. A constant rotation. So when you’re dealing with agencies who they placed your orders, and they’re like, that’s that done? That it cannot possibly after being in this industry for, as 11, almost 12 years, that is going to cost you because at the end of the day, the stations change up programming. The quarterly rates change in addition to. it’s not like cyclical with seasonality. It could be an issue of maybe there’s some drop off and we need to get out this network and put some money over here because the phone isn’t ringing. So if your agency is not correlating your buy to your results, I would say huge red flag. And you shouldn’t have to be the one to do that. A good agency is going to track that for you. .

Chris Dreyer

I think of Alex Hormozi his a Hundred Million Dollar offers a book. What makes a good offer from the value exchange is the buyer has less effort sacrifice. They don’t need to be doing that. It’s the agency that you hire. If it’s a good offer the other thing, I guess if you’re set it and forget it, some of that discrepancy creep may start to occur oh, they’re complacent. Let’s just add this here.

Sarah Parisi

Yeah. And then, yeah, that would be my second point is not every agency doesn’t. They you can, some agencies are, they will cover the co the bills they’ll pay the bills. So the client does pay the agency and then it’s agency Tunis to station. But for us, we perform an audit so quickly for our local clients that they’re still able to pay within net 30, but let us make sure that this is right. Let us make sure that the money that you’re paying them was what we intended. For you to pay or you intended to run for your best success. So are they auditing your invoices? Are they double checking and making sure that the orders were correct and are they setting it and forgetting it, not monitoring your results? It takes a lot. It takes a lot. And if you’re feeling neglected, if you’re feeling like they’re not looking or you can’t get an answer, an email back that’s another big flag. We, we have acccount services is our right-hand man number here. They’re the ones that we have flagged for us. So we want to, we would like in a perfect world or us to be able to identify the problem and fix it before our clients have even seen an issue. Seeing a drop. We want to go ahead and get on the front end of it.

Chris Dreyer

I think that’s super smart, those advanced retrospectives too Hey, what could go wrong here? I think all that plays into good service. Now, the other thing that’s just very intriguing to me is that the different types of creative and the strategies. So I don’t watch a lot of TV, I’ve seen. Yeah, the there’s many hammers across the the U S there’s the individual screaming, have you been hurt? When it comes to the creative side, what have you seen move the needle, w what do they need to do to have good creative, to even think about this strategy?

Sarah Parisi

At first, I note that the client that you’re talking about, that they’re very eccentric and they already have a huge following. if you’re coming out and you’re new to this entire industry, I would say that your biggest goal is to have a call to action and make that clearly visible upon the, and then have a caring sentiment. Once you establish yourself in a market and your known you have a brand step up, if you will get a little crazy, do what I, some of our clients, I think that. We’ve gotten several I think there’s some lions and some of our ads, and we know we’ve done alligators and bulls and everything across the board, but really what it stems down to is those clients who already have a well-established brand within their market. We’re not coming out of the gate with these ads that are gonna make people’s head turns. Although it does, it can work, the crazier, some do say, but creative, I I have always found what they do and then being alongside with our production team just fascinating for the point that they have to take the agenda from what the client wants and then spin it up into a format that at the end, if they’re happy with to see. All the kudos to them, but I would say if you’re coming into it brand new, don’t get caught up in trying to, be as flamboyant. You need a call to action. You need to come across as caring and compassionate. And really that should be your main stay orbit.

Chris Dreyer

That’s a great piece of advice. I see some attorneys they’ll have a celebrity with them on in the ads. Is that just an extra credibility point? Is it a distraction?

Sarah Parisi

It’s a distraction. We’ve done it. I think at the end of the day, he liked to have hope you would like to believe that this is going to, give you that credibility. if it were me and my money, how much they’re going to ask you to pay them for it, to be in their ad, to be in your ad. Unless they’re your best friend, I would invest my money elsewhere for the. Until you have a well-established brand and then bring it on, make you look a little bit cooler. Know.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. That’s really interesting. I’ve never, I wanted to ask that because I’ve always seen that big price tag upended to that and yeah,

Sarah Parisi

I we’ve done it. I think actually when I was, oh my gosh, my first year here at Wyre, it was my very first summer. One of our clients is friends with Aaron Rogers I am UT football. I know Peyton Manning , and like obviously the UT team at the time. But I no idea who he was. And so they had me walk over a big bag of footballs and there, I was like, I had, this is for Aaron Rogers design. Who was that? And just because like right here, Okay, cool. Cool. I came home and, it was telling my brother and my dad about that. And they’re like, I’m sorry, who was there? And you did what just could not believe, but I was just so does he play,

Chris Dreyer

But I guess that’s hilarious. That’s awesome. let’s talk about the future too. So you know, how’s the media buying changing, Not as many viewers for Live TV and maybe going more to streaming, but there’s still a huge audience on TV. Like how does the different channels kind of work, where is it going?

Sarah Parisi

So I’ve always been a big believer in broadcast. That’s inherent to me call it 11 years of drinking the Kool-Aid, but I’m going to still tell you that regardless of who is saying, ill everybody’s going OTT or CTV, we’ve got to be on, the digital elements. No, don’t worry about investing into broadcast. I then again, tell you to recognize your demo. And broadcast TV by no means is dead. It is still remains one of the top performers in terms of ROI. It’s the best way I believe to connect with your local audience. Yes, there are space. Yes. The digital elements know PPC and we break all of that into it. But in terms of people are still gonna watch the local news. And when. They’re at home laying on the couch if they are cutting cable, which I have, I believe that, and I’ve never been the big cable advocate and I hope that it’s okay to say on this because I don’t want to hurt your feelings or friends, but cable, just to me, it’s just not as lucrative or viable at all. It does not perform as well. Broadcast TV gives you those viewers who are tuning in to their local stations and markets into their favorite time periods. Your prices, rights, you’re young and the restless, those shows that they watch every single day. And. In the future for the horizon. I do, without a doubt CTV, OTT devices, all of that is, is definitely if you’re not paying attention to it, oh boy got a lot of work do, but you can get there. It’s going to be fine, but you should be paying attention to it. And at least dabbling a bit. My only issue with these, the CTB devices and all that is the cost per. So when you’re narrowing a doll down, you’re looking at your bio and you’re saying, where can I get the most eyeballs for my money? Those, in any local market, and I can tell you this, and some people may laugh at me, but just know that I did it for a very long time. Our goal was to be below $5 cost per thousand impressions.

Chris Dreyer

So $5 CPM. Wow.

Sarah Parisi

My boss, Brad would bring back the folder to me as I try again,

Chris Dreyer

That’s really, that’s way lower than I thought

Sarah Parisi

It’s aggressive. It’s very aggressive and it’s grueling and it’s time consuming because we think about the make goods. You think about the impressions in menu. Think about the station rep on the other end of this. You’re really going to get to know very well because no, your spots aren’t going to stick. They will sometimes. But that’s what you stick in there for, if it’s like a black Friday sale maybe you wait an extra month before you buy that TV because you’re going to get a great discount on it and you don’t get it right now, but you will. It’s the holdout for the best possible price for your overall impression. Yeah. CTV is still coming around like $30. But I will say this, within, and as well as I do the targeting capabilities within CTV and the digital elements, it allows you to narrow it down. So you’re not just providing a blanket, ad across an entire DMA you’re getting to narrow it down, based on. Income or household area education status where jobs, things like that, like all the stuff that they don’t want us to know that they can do, but they can do it. They can target that way. So it, at that point, is that worth it? Branding, branding, branding

Chris Dreyer

A hundred percent agree, a hundred percent agree. So I know the markets are going to completely dictate the, what your main recommendations going to be. But if we could just have a range, let’s say your. In a, like a mid market, like a St. Louis. And Morgan just came, they might’ve saturated it. And brown occurred there and Schultz Myers, but I’m just trying to think what’s a range. What does somewhat, a PI attorney has never done media buying? What kind of investment do they need to be thinking about? And that’s super broad. I’m gonna let you take it wherever you want. There.

Sarah Parisi

You need to be able to measure it by impression. So a good agency is going to be able to tell you, and the term, the terminology is changing by the way, from the broadcast TV. And it really TV in general. So what they’ve told us is no longer are we going to talk about rating points, gross rating points. And that was for the law. My tenure, that’s how you measured it. But now everybody’s switching over to impressions because it’s going to be able to unify everything across the board, since the digital elements, they also measure my impression. But for the purposes of the audience, I just want to make that clear that. It usually my benchmark is going to say a hundred gross rating points per week is whatever that equates to is going to be the absolute minimum investment. And that’s just for your one sector. That’s absolutely just one or excuse me, just one medium. So whatever it costs to put a hundred gross rating points on TV. That’s your minimum. And that equation can come in.

Chris Dreyer

What are we talking about? Are we talking 10 grand?

Sarah Parisi

Oh gosh, four. That depends on the market because of how many impressions are available. Additionally, so we, it depends also if you’re going to do it off of adults versus households. So we like to buy off of households. Instead of adults, that’s just, inherently one TV per household Gosh, in some markets, Chris, you didn’t go in for as little as 5k per week. And then in some markets you need, It could be, five K to two 50 K to two, a hundred K a week. Really? It’s how many households, what are you going to measure? And once you established your measurement households, Men, whomever, how many of those are available? How much is it going to cost to reach a thousand of them are to get your CPM level on there and then get your gross rating points. Get a hundred of those rating points per week. And that equates out. It’s not a long time since I’ve done this. This is bringing back some memories

Chris Dreyer

So we had Glen Lerner on and we had James Farren on and both of them were consistent on this. They said, Hey, don’t do TV unless you’re going to saturate the market and be one of the top three. Do you think that’s, do you think you have to do that because in some of the markets saturated the market to be in the top three, when we’re talking big bucks, but can you still have the impact and cut through the noise with maybe that minimal viable, that minimum budget,

Sarah Parisi

I can understand why they said it. I can understand why they feel the need, that if you can’t completely saturate, then don’t bother. But I also find. A bit misleading from the point that’s assuming you believe I’m going to be advertising exactly where you are. There’s so many, give a typical marketing. You’ve got your what’s, your like your big five, your ABC or CBS or NBC or CW, your Fox, your mind, you got your big networks on there. You saying. If you’re going to completely saturate everything. A I think that what defined market saturation are you just leading? Are you leading in spend or are you leading with impressions? Because those are different. Additionally, like in order to do that, there’s also a market cap. There’s also at a point where you’re spending way too much money and a good agency is going to tell you when any dollar amount spent beyond this, on this medium is not going to give you the ROI that you’re looking for. It’s actually, it’s not really going to give you anything else beyond that.

Chris Dreyer

Whitehardt offers more than just media buying and crafting creatives that convert .For mass torts, they offer everything from lead conversion to signing cases. I wanted to know how their services work in tandem.

Sarah Parisi

Our national program is something that has been evolving over goodness gracious. I would guess 2018, 2017? It was something where once Roundup came onto the scene, it was a pop forever. It was a, the industry itself has changed and not to mention now there’s a hot, there’s a hot tort and these torts come and go is what Kevin and Felix had told me. And Roundup was just a tour of the moment. And at that point it was all hands on deck. Like we have to start offering more because at this time we hadn’t really dabbled into contract services. But we’re hearing more and more about it. All of our clients of what do you offer to do the contract pursuit and to deliver, sign retainers. And it just became a point where it’s let’s figure it out, let’s get it down. Let’s work it out. It was an evolution, one that we’re still working on, but from start to finish, it’s your investment goes 100% to media. We can we break out the contract services you separately, and do that, just to ensure that throughout the, we predict we put we project, how many cases where we’re going to come in, where we’re going to land on. And that’s how we know how to tell it to divvy up those funds. We do that because inevitably what’s going to happen is there’s going to be some trade. There’s going to be somebody that can flow from the one, one piggy bank to the next piggy bank. But after that’s established, then national. All your ads and all your creative assets are done at no cost. And people are like how do you do that? How do you go? We are agencies, so by definition we get the agency commission, right? So across the United States any agency, it’s 15%, it’s called gross versus net. And so we pay the net cost and then that’s it. No Y heard itself, we don’t have a sales. I don’t make any additional commission. The agency makes it that’s how we make our money off of your national investment. But then from there, the only other charges are going to incur are going to be contract service related. Or if the call center minutes were completely out of hand, I’m probably going down a bit of an unorganized tandem for you. But. Basically investment ads are made no cost. We deploy them weekly. So we make your media buys weekly and people like, why do you do that? You don’t increase the cure inventory across national networks for a year. How are you going to be sure that you have any place to get air don’t it’s fine. If there’s going to be airtime, like Lord, I’ve never seen in moment when nobody could, sometimes they air their own. Like the, just we got to put something in here. There’s always going to be every time. And putting in an annual order for a such that’s a volatile market. Like national mass torts is counterintuitive. These torts , we don’t know how long the hype is going to mean. I’m not an attorney. I don’t know when they’re going to be settling. I don’t even know when the spikes are going to be happening. There, there was some stuff about talcum that came out, all of a sudden it popped back up onto the scene as my number two, top hot tort of the month. If I had planned 2022 with the forecast of 2021 in mind, I wouldn’t have bought a whole lot of networks that would have reached the demographic after talcum powder. Secure inventory based on an annual, but just in, it’s not the norm for most agencies, but we’ve never had an issue with that. And the reason is we place weekly we’re in constant contact with our networks, that our vendors we’re pulling data. Our, we have a big Wednesday meeting on our fourth floor, which is right above me. And it is just full of all national team members. We’re all reviewing the latest results because with TV, we don’t get clearance reports until the latest is Tuesday afternoon. And then we have to place orders on Wednesday in order to make Monday airlocks. So it’s it’s a quick turnaround. It’s fast and you have to be correct. You have to be analytical. You have to have your numbers in a box and everybody on board

Chris Dreyer

A lot to it. And I got to applaud the, just the operations, the processes, and the communication to make that happen. I’m sure the relationships that you built over many years make it easier from the communication standpoint where other people jump and new to the scene. The other thing that is intriguing to me is. There’s a couple of strategies I’ve seen, the Facebook ads getting the torts versus the media buying and like this, the different channels, and I guess every tort has its own competition. are you seeing that the TV media buys still that lowest cost per acquisition, is it shift back and forth? What are you seeing?

Sarah Parisi

It does depend. So I will tell you what we were doing Juul, for instance, TV angle work. That’s not your demo. You’re communicating to those of gen is a gen Z. Is that below me? I’m not sure. Or with letter we are, but I’m a millennial, which just blows my mind. So for Juul that, that gen Z millennial generation, you’re not going to get them on, you can get some, but you can’t, it takes some time. You have to strategize out from your initial ones when you’re, when you get a, toward this brand new to you, you do your research on it. You find out the demographic, obviously, the key injuries, everything like that. So you can better identify your audience. And from there, you divvy out based on medium. And Juul just seemed inherently. But, we don’t know until we know. So you get them to get a little bit, give a little bit to DV and you parse it out appropriately, then you have items like C-PAP where honestly, I thought for certain it was going to be a TV thing and it doesn’t do bad on digital. It doesn’t do bad at all. In fact, it’s about equal And I will tell you from the contract pursuit side is a little bit different depending upon who it is, because, once you get into the older demographic and anybody above the ages of 65 they’re, they are very hesitant of sending information over the internet. Having that option of automatic sign or just, Hey, give me a call. We can, we also can call you right now and you can talk to a person and we’ll get you a packet in the mail. That’s something that we offer that we just inherently think that is, should be an option. It should be brought up to the potential new client, because don’t lose a case just because you are forcing them to sign digitally because that’s cheaper for you. That’s not fair. Do you want to, good quality case then allow them the mail-outs. Establishing the demographic doesn’t just allow you to know where to advertise to, but it also allows you to know the best operations you need to have in play in order to get the best conversion to sign case.

Chris Dreyer

I love the contract pursuit. The, the follow-up they multiple mediums, multiple touch points. I think it’s super smart. It’s got to play into lower and the cost per acquisition on a whole. on the media buying side, I’m going to go back to that. Okay. I’m immediately thinking of like seasonality and holidays and Superbowl, other times to avoid. Yeah, the elections and things come in and just blow up all the prices. Are there times to avoid, the media buying side?

Sarah Parisi

Yes. But you already said it so holidays. And on it, I would have told you opposite if it had been three or four years ago, I would have told you that knows and not reduced rates. And inventory will free up at the end of the year. I don’t know if it was COVID that’s my only thing that I can think is different from four years ago to now, but this past holiday season was very difficult on TV it, it, people were. I don’t know if they weren’t watching or maybe they were all tuning into the Hallmark channel just to get those good Christmas vibes like that. Maybe that’s what they were doing. And you try by the Hallmark Channel. in December. I’m going to tell you, you ain’t getting them. And if you are you paying way too much, like it’s just not happening. But yeah, seasonality 110%, but outside of bad, outside of Christmas or new years or Thanksgiving, it’s really. It flows. It flows pretty well. It’s not something on TV at least. Now that’s nationally, locally is a whole other ballgame. I want to know when spring break is, I wanna know when fall break is. I want to know when they get out of school for winter Let’s see, are there any big happenings within the area? For instance is there some type of, not just local political events, obviously you have your stay at your house, all the district elections, you have to be aware of all of it. Behind this beautiful facade is a big old whiteboard that I would just mark everything on. So every single client and when I had it for local, I’m immersing myself. In this area, because I’m not boots on ground, but it’s helpful to know because you, you like, for instance, like where I’m from the homecoming week, we had two or one high school, two high schools when they played each other during homecoming, forget it. Nobody’s be home. Everybody’s doing the homecoming events that week. So being aware and that’s just the one county, but to give you an example of what we would look for within it. Yeah. Nationally, that’s not something we can’t predict. Every single DMA spring break, we can give it, or, at least the height, the median range and reduce some offers there. But for the most part, that’s just the very key moment that you need to step back and acknowledge are your audience.

Chris Dreyer

Your Hallmark example makes me think of like John Ruhlin Giftology right. he recommends not sending gifts during holidays, but when people don’t expect it, because if you send gifts, when everybody’s sending Christmas gifts you’re mixed in with everybody else. You don’t stand out versus those times you can surprise and delight. That makes me think of just how saturated, the Hallmark channel is when everyone’s coming in. So it’s the same thing. It’s just getting those it’s, attention arbitrary. A tangible versus, TV and broadcast. Yeah. So this is amazing. what’s next for Whitehardt. What’s on the horizon.

Sarah Parisi

We do experiment, like I said, CTV and OTT is something that, we’re definitely getting under our belt. But beyond that, it is about data and I say data versus data, I’m gonna use both of them because honestly, which one’s right. Do you know. Neither. Okay, great. Just making sure we’re on the same page here. So all, we’re sitting on just, piles and piles of Data from everything, from where our leads come through everything that we do your investment comes in on a particular line in our system and it’s associated with a group of 800 nbumbers. It’s associated with, certain placements. We can follow your lead from the placement all the way through the signing. And it’s connected the whole step of the way that allows us to go back into time and not only reflect on, Hey, this network was great, but what time did it air? Huh, are we seeing that over time? Are we seeing that over history? It’s the full map out of immersing ourselves within the data and saying, okay, how can we replicate this great result beyond that you go to contract services and you find that one network actually converts better over than other, or maybe you’ve got to kill our CPL on this one, but like you had 11% conversion. So actually the CPL kind of fools you into thinking that you had this, great honey, a little honey hole, like the fishing hole, but you don’t, because those cases didn’t actually come to fruition. Those leads didn’t convert. So it’s not just looking at the lowest cost per lead, the lowest CPA. I want to dig deeper and I think that I’m going to bring you back full circle. Now I’m going to go back into auditing and that’s just because I’m so used to going through every single line every single time period. Is this correct? Is this part, I know what I’m looking for and I want to do better because I do believe that identifying the lowest cost per impression, cost per lead cost per acquisition. All of that’s going to stand back in this data somewhere. So what’s next for us is the build, if you will, of, fully connected systems working with these firms to say, Hey, we’re doing your, the leads and the contract services for you. Once you get down through this path, and once we hand off these cases, on your end, would you help us know which ones are really excited about which ones you find are like, okay, this is a good, maybe you haven’t filed yet. I know the process takes a minute, but knowing I’ll ahead, what I call like the gold standard what you’re really excited about. You want to see more of these types of cases that helps me. That helps me do a better job for. Because I’m going to take that on, take that all you got to do. I’m just going to take that person’s name. I go into my system and I say, all right, I know when we aired that spot, I know what ad we used. I know what time it aired. I know how long it took them to go from a lead to a contract. How can we replicate this for our firm? How can we do a better job for our national.

Chris Dreyer

Fantastic. Fantastic. And there’s nothing more powerful than that when it comes to scale. So one final question here, Sarah. So where can people go to learn more?

Sarah Parisi

Oh man, that’s our second thing. And so we’re actually, so I’ve been doing this whole mass towards strategist and, I was the national director of the director of national media for the longest time. And we’re growing and why hurts? Hey, Nope, we don’t really market ourselves . And it seems odd as an agency that we’re not, taking time to market ourselves. So there were like, Hey so while you’re doing all this, like what about a little bit of business to business development, but also like content strategy. And I’m like why not? I’m honored like, yes, let’s do it. So that’s where it’s evolving out of. But all that, to answer your question by saying. We are in the works of a major, upgrade to just internally pushing out and marketing Whitehardt as a whole. I want people to be able to click on our website and say, okay, I learned something today, or I know where to go. I know what you know, to call Sarah or to talk to Kevin, whomever. There are so many opportunities and I think that for me, I actually liked. I pride myself on my email composition. And if any of my clients are watching this, they’re going to laugh because they know that I really beat myself up over my poised responses. So knowing that I liked to write, I was like, what we should. We should have something on here. Like here’s what to look out for. So where can you go to learn more? We’ll obviously feel free to email me and just know that, it’s coming. We, I do love to talk shop, and that’s where I find that most of my productive conversations come from in most of my well meaningful connections that I’ve made have been just people randomly reaching out and saying, Hey, can I just pick your brain on this? And those are my favorite conversations, but I want to put them into an accessible area where people.

Chris Dreyer

Identifying where your demographic feels most comfortable is sometimes counterintuitive. Test to verify and reallocate funds often so that you can get the most out of your marketing budget. Smart spending will help newer firms gain traction and what can seem like a very saturated market. I’d like to thank Sarah from Whitehardt for sharing her story with us. And I hope you gained some valuable insights from the conversation you’ve been listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m Chris Dreyer. If you’d liked this episode, leave us a review. We love to hear from our listeners. I’ll catch you on next week’s PIMM with another incredible guest and all the strategies you need to master personal injury marketing.