Chris Dreyer

Coming up with a hit viral video can do great things for you. It could bring you internet notoriety, raise awareness for an issue you believe in, or even bring a smile to a few million faces. But for my guest today, creating a viral video, wasn’t just about giving people a hit of endorphins. It was about promoting his brand.

Ed Herman

Well, you know, to me, there’s two stages of branding, there’s brand awareness, and then there’s brand love. You know, whether they they’ve heard of you and then whether they formed that opinion of you. So a lot of people think of branding is just about getting people to know your name. And that is that’s the first part. That’s the very top of the funnel. Whereas as we talk toward the middle of the funnel, I know we’re going to talk about the channel. The channel is really about developing an opinion around your brand, and that’s where the brand love comes in.

Chris Dreyer

My guest today is Ed Herman, managing partner at Brown and Crouppen. For nearly 20 years, Ed has been helping personal injury and auto accidents slip and fall cases fight the big companies to get the compensation they deserve. But perhaps what Ed has become most known for recently. It’s his string of viral videos. His series “Ed verses”, and “Three Lawyers Eating Sandwiches” are regularly pulling in half a million views. Join us as Ed tells us what the secret is to creating attention, grabbing marketing content, how to avoid the pitfalls of YouTube marketing and what you need to do to grow a successful practice. That’s coming up on The Rankings Podcast, the show where founders, entrepreneurs, and elite personal injury attorneys share their inspiring stories about what they did to get to the top and what keeps them there. I’m Chris Dreyer, stay with us. Ed made a great point about how branding should be considered in terms of awareness and love. And this reminded me of the saying that people do business with who they know like and trust.

Ed Herman

RIght? And those are all forms of love. A trust is a form of love. Liking somebody relating to somebody, feeling somebody as approachable, feeling somebody is competent- these are all things that fall into that umbrella of opinions about your brand and that’s brand love.

Chris Dreyer

Absolutely. I think one of the things our audience really struggles with is they can’t quite wrap, wrap their head around measuring ROI from the awareness type of, of marketing. So what are some things that you look at to measure the success of say a billboard campaign or a bus wrap?

Ed Herman

Well, you know, you got to think about what the goal of each type of marketing is. If, if, if people sit there and believe that the goal of marketing is, is solely the end results, how many cases did you get from it? If that’s what people were using as the only measure, first of all, it’s almost impossible to do a complete attribution of that. But if that were really the case, nobody would ever do something like billboard. If you were just looking at how many of your clients or customers said, I signed up with you, cause I saw your billboard. It would never justify its expense. And yet, if you were to, instead of measuring billboards, by how many cases you got, you measure it by how many of your clients were familiar with your billboards? How many of them had been exposed to your billboards? Were aware of your billboards? It’s an awareness play. It’s this whole idea of a person needs to be touched by you a certain number of times before you’re kind of cemented into the top of their mind. And we just had some brand research done. And, and, and when they’re doing brand research, they’ll do something called, um, unaided recall, and then they’ll do something called aided recall. Unaided recall would be something like this. They ask a group of people say from St. Louis or Kansas city, without any prompting, they’ll say, make a list of all of the law firms that you can think of off the top of your head. Okay. That’s unaided recall. And you know, some of them will write down Brown and Crrouppen. I can tell you that a hundred percent of them in four different focus groups done, uh, we wrote down Brown and Crouppen. And aided recall is when, uh, they’ll give you like a list of firms and they’ll say mark off whichever of these firms you’ve ever heard of. And obviously if we’re a hundred percent unaided, we’re a hundred percent aided, but you could also see our competition. Uh, you know, we’ll take a jump, you know, they won’t, their name is not right on the top of your head, but if you prompt them and say, well, have you ever heard of so-and-so that’s all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve heard of, so and so. And those are the kinds of things you have to do to measure the effectiveness of your branding campaigns.

Chris Dreyer

I love that and that, and that’s really smart. I actually, I hadn’t heard of the aided, you know, the aided review, the unaided review, but that that’s, that’s an excellent way to measure the success of the campaign. Uh, and it’s, it’s more than that too. It’s, it’s looking at just all the brand initiatives, the traditional marketing type tactics too.

Ed Herman

Right. Well, and especially in personal injury law. Consider this, at any given moment, a tiny, tiny percentage of the population that you’re paying to put your marketing in front of actually needs your services at that time. If you’re McDonald’s and you want to, if you want to push quarter pounders, you can put up billboards with delicious looking quarter pounders. You can have commercials featuring the quarter pounder, and then you could look right at your sales of quarter pounders. Did my sales of quarter pounders go up? And, and you can get an immediate answer. As to whether things worked, but in personal injury law, you can have a large population of people out there. They know you, they love you. In their mind they’ve already committed to the idea that if I ever need a lawyer, this is who I’m calling. But if those people never need a lawyer, you never find out just how effective your marketing truly was. So if you know that better than 99% of your audience doesn’t need you today, you got to ask yourself, what’s the right message for them? You know, are you better off than you can tell them, we’re going to get you justice, we’re going to get your money. But I don’t know that that message resonates with people who don’t have an existing case. You know, those are good messages for people who were just in an accident. That’s maybe what they need to hear because they’re dealing with it right now. But what message does everybody else need to hear? And, you know, in my opinion, the message that I like everybody else to have is. I like these guys. I think they’re smart. I think they’re funny. I think they’re likable approachable, competent. I want to be memorable. That’s that’s all you can do with the first one that doesn’t need you today.

Chris Dreyer

And I, I see it many, many times, particularly on Facebook, we’ll see a law firm’s website page, their Facebook page, and it’s nothing, but these FAQ’s all these articles about auto accidents. You know, if I’m a consumer, I’m not wanting to see that in my feed. Yeah, if I’m in an accident. Sure. But yeah, but if I’m not, I just unfollow it.

Ed Herman

Well, I think all of that information is very important to have on your website, because I do think that people that have been in an accident are going to do searches looking for just those type of answers. Uh, but putting that out as content to the general public… why would 99% of the people right now who don’t need you really care much about your fees? I mean, There was no fees since they don’t need you. You know? And, and so these frequently asked questions unless they’re really being targeted to people who have done some type of search that, that leads you to believe that they do need a, an attorney or somebody in their family needs an attorney. You know, I think those are great things to pop up if somebody has done a search of how much is a personal injury attorney costs or who would be the best person to hire for my sister’s case? Boom! That’s when those things, they have a place they’re important. I don’t want to have, when somebody does that search, I don’t necessarily want to say, Oh, let’s watch Ed mixing cereals. You know, you have to deliver the right message depending on what the people are doing. But if people are just browsing their Facebook feeds and they come across me mixing cereals or, or doing any of the other things I do in my videos, that’s, what’s going to get them to stop and watch.

Chris Dreyer

Ed makes some fantastic points as a lawyer, your clients don’t always need you at the precise moment. They’re seeing your message. So it’s better to make an impression, build some trust and keep top of mind, which Ed is a pro at. And not only is this content reaching millions of viewers and potential clients, but he’s even won an Emmy for his work.I wanted to find out why Ed makes his particular style of videos and what he has planned for the future.

Ed Herman

Yeah, they’ve kind of taken off a little bit more and some of them have now gone over a million views on YouTube, but most of my videos have also gotten over a million each on, on Facebook because you got to give people something they want to watch. And there’s a lot of ways to do it. It’s not just what I’m doing, but if you think about it, what do people want to see when they’re on the internet for pleasure? Which is most of what they’re doing on the internet for pleasure. We’re all looking for things that either, um, We laugh at, we want to laugh or we want to be educated. I mean, that’s basically what we’re doing on there. So it’s either we want to be amused or we want to learn something and that’s, if that’s our spare time scrolling, that’s, that’s what we’re doing. Now. Maybe what we want to learn about is what our friend’s kids look like. And you could find that out on your Facebook scroll, but basically you’re learning and you’re laughing. So the stuff that we put out has got a, sort of, be a leaning toward one, one of those or the, or the other. Uh, so if we’re doing, um, something like Ed Versus Naps, which was, you know, one of the biggest hits, we’ve had 2.2, 2.3 million views total. And, uh, that, that’s a perfect example of one where you are learning something and you’re also laughing. Uh, the serial ones you’re learning and you’re laughing. Uh, airplanes, the one that won the Emmy, um, out here, uh, you’re learning and you’re laughing, uh, elevators has been doing really well, same idea. Uh, and I think that, look, I didn’t invent it. I’m just playing to that formula and doing my own, my own version of that.

Chris Dreyer

You know, when we had lunch a while back, I went and went to your YouTube channel. I ended up watching Ed Versus The Dark Knight and. It was amazing. It was entertaining. I watched the entire video. So my followup question to that is, is there an Ed Versus Tiger King or is there an Ed Versus Zoom Video Conferencing in the works?

Ed Herman

Those are both been recommended, suggested lately. Ed Versus Social Distancing, Ed Versus, uh, uh, Zoom, uh, you know, conference calls. You know, I’m, I’m, I’m trapped at home now like everybody else, I’m using a background of a beach, but I’m just sitting in my basement. Uh, you know, I, usually my stuff is pretty well-produced. I may attempt to do something and get some footage on my phone and send it to, you know, the guy who, the people that helped me edit and put something together. I would love to do some right time content like that. I’ve watched Tiger King all the way through. And I even watched the bonus feature that they just released like two days ago with the, where are they now interviews. So. Um, I don’t know. I mean, those were both be good things to kind of hit on right now. I usually it’ll just hit on a topic that I have a lot of opinions on and I’ll just start jotting down bullet points, like in an outline, I’ve got a whole, I’ve got outlines on several different topics now that I just have a shot. I have an Ed Versus Uber. I have an Ed Versus Snacks. I have an Ed Versus Going Out To Eat. Um, I just haven’t filmed any of them. I just, I just keep compiling little bullet points. And then when I feel like I have enough to say on it, I’ll go in and film. And I just, I just rant. I don’t have anything written out. I like to just go off the top of my head and then craft in the editing, you know, so that it’s very, um, very organic.

Chris Dreyer

Absolutely. So, you know, Ed Versus it’s, it’s crushing, but, but many people don’t know this. You’ve also, there’s also Three Lawyers Eating Sandwiches. Very successful and, and great show. And then Terry Safety Squad, you’ve got Terry who’s, who’s singing a musical and the musical episode. He probably never thought he would be doing that.

Ed Herman

No, but yeah, that’s, what’s so fun. And that’s where you can be creative in your marketing. I guess if I’m looking to give advice to, to other places. Um, you know, you can take some chances and do some fun things and don’t be afraid to make an impression on people. Uh, it’s it’s hard nowadays. They’re getting bombarded a million different channels and streaming services, and they’re whipping through their scrolls on, on Facebook and other social media, just they’re looking for something different. They’re looking for something to get their attention and stand out. And I think sometimes people are, are afraid to be themselves and show whatever that is. And people are interested in just about everything. If you can make anything interesting. If you’re passionate about it, because what people are going to connect with, they’re going to connect with authenticity and enthusiasm. So any topic that where you can be authentic, you know, you’re, you’re speaking about something you actually care about. And that you’re enthusiastic about, those two qualities will always connect with people that enthusiasm is contagious and people love to see other people talking about something they’re passionate about because it inspires them. So, you know, anybody can do that. It doesn’t have to be like the kind of stuff that I do. I know people that are like workout nuts and they take their exercises so seriously and they take their food so seriously, and they have theories behind everything that they do and why they do it. And I would encourage those people, get those thoughts out there on video. That’s just the kind of thing. People, people are looking for gurus everywhere. We’re living in a nation where we don’t trust elected leaders and all we really want are gurus, be a guru, whatever that subject may be.

Chris Dreyer

So, so that takes me into my next question. So our audience is primarily personal injury attorneys and there’s a personal injury attorney that wants to create a new YouTube series. And you know, everyone’s doing these FAQ videos. Not that they don’t have a place, they do have a place for those individuals that have that intent. So, is it more about your unique strengths and finding that your own niche to create it?

Ed Herman

Yeah, we’ve worked with, uh, cause Coolfire does our production and I work closely with Coolfire on every phase of, of our videos. I sit in, I do the editing with all their editors. I. I work with that. And we actually have worked with other firms to find their voice, their digital voice, and, and it really boils down to, you know, somebody, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the owner of the firm, but it’s somebody at the firm who, you know, who can be genuine and who has an area of interest that, that they can be truly enthusiastic about. Um, you know, that’s why we did Three Lawyers Eating Sandwiches because we knew, first of all, people love watching food. Food is, is porn on the internet. You know, people take pictures of their food, they talk about it. They post the cooking shows. Everyone’s familiar, you know, you’ll get, you got water cooler talk about the great British Baking Show or Nailed It. You know, I used to watch Chopped or Bea Bobby Flay. There’s a ton of these shows, Diners Drive-ins and Dives. You can just binge that all day. And so we looked at that and said, you know what? You know, we can do a lot with a show like Three Lawyers, Eating Sandwiches and not just for our business, you know, we can, we can help out businesses that we care about mom and pops that we care about that are doing something really great on bread. You know, I mean, we go in there and, and, and we’re authentic again. We have no script. We, we lunch together every day, whether they’re filming it or not, at least before the quarantine. So. You know, what we tried to do there was be ourselves and be passionate about the food and our city and those things come out and people watch those shows. I mean, they’ve got 9 million views so far for that series. And for those restaurants, it’s, it’s been a wonder because every place that we feature, it gets a huge jump in business and they’re, they’re very appreciative. And I think for other firms, that’s my point is look at your community. Um, look at what makes you special, look at your, your habits. Think about the stuff that people said to you, that you do it a little differently than everyone else, you know, but whatever it is, you know, whether it’s, uh, golf tips, whether it’s a cool collection that you have, that means something to you, uh, whether it’s that you like to cook, uh, you know, whatever your thing is, I promise you if you’re authentic and enthusiastic people will want to watch it.

Chris Dreyer

I love that. I love the aspect of getting the community involved too, because you know, that restaurant will want to share the video. They’ll want to engage too. They want to have their, their servers, their, their cooks engage and comment, and like.

Ed Herman

Right. They’ll engage. And also, you know, a lot of food sites, uh, there’s a ton of food sites, uh, in every community. Foodie sites and eat stuff sites. And. Local restaurants stuff. And you know, we have sauce magazine out here and St. Louis, and, you know, you, you get a group of pretty good local food influencers and you can get your stuff shared to a really wide audience and really had no cost. Um, now we do obviously put money behind promoting our videos. You know, you have to do that. You got to at a minimum, chum the waters a little bit, put a little kindling on and hope that things sort of catch a little organic fire. Um, but you know, you can’t create something that’s, uh, that you think, well, this is great. It’s going to go viral and it’s gonna get all these views for no money. You know, that you shouldn’t think of if I do it right, the internet is going to give me a bunch of free stuff. Okay. That’s not how you should look at marketing on the internet. Marketing on the internet, you should look at it like any of your other marketing, how much money do I have to put behind this to get so many eyeballs to watch my content. And then what you really want to do is you don’t want to judge your, your, your content simply by views because you, you know, if you put enough money behind it and keep it in front of the public, you’re going to get views. But you want to judge it by is how people react and engage too, you know, with it, how many people reacted on Facebook? How many people commented? How many people share? And then on the comments you want to respond to the comments. And create a dialogue. You know, you can’t do that with television. Television – people are barely paying attention to the commercials. The second the commercial goes on, they all turn their eyes to their phone. So you want to be on the phone. That’s where you want to be. And you want them to watch your content for as long as possible. So, you know, with YouTube, for example, you get great metrics that they give you, how many people chose to watch your video? How long was the average duration that they watched for? How many people made it through the first 25%, the first 50%, the first 75%? And that’s when you really learn about what’s working, you know. What are people looking for? How comfortable are they? You know, how many people will watch something to the end? Don’t save your most important information for the end. Really teaches you that you got to hook people at the beginning, catch him with a good laugh or two in the first 15 seconds and you’ll see that the percentage of them that hang on longer, uh, it’s a lot higher. And then you get to see the total minutes. I got, I didn’t remember the number off the top of my head, but the total minutes that’s been watched of our stuff is just, it’s hard. It’s hard to even fathom.

Chris Dreyer

There are tons of nuggets there. One of the things is, you know, the different algorithms can come into play. So Amazon, it bumps up products that get sold more. They’re going to show those more. For SEO, it’s, it’s backlinks, it’s content relevancy, and things like. That for YouTube, a lot of it’s engagement. So, so those things you’re doing, you know, commenting, making sure that they get the, the, the likes, the shares and all of that stuff, it’s got to have just a, a huge impact on, on their visibility and their reach.

Ed Herman

It definitely does. And what, and then when they recommend your video, um, you know, the more stuff that you’ve done, uh, you want it to be, you know, connected to subject matters where there’s other videos on the same subject. So what happens is, you know, somebody maybe watching some video about Batman and you want them to recommend Ed Versus The Dark Knight, as you know, the next, the next video to view. You wind up picking up a lot of use that way. Same with the cereal video. And the original cereal video, and I’ve done a series of three of them, the original one, which we’re back to featuring right now, just because I thought during the quarantine, that would be an, a perfect video. People are trapped in their homes, looking for fun activities with their kids. So I thought, you know what? Let’s bring the video, the cereal one back. People can do it. You know, any kid can go in there and feel like a chef just by mixing cereals together. And it’s a good activity for parents and children. So I thought, well, let me bring that back. That one for whatever reason always does extremely well. Like it’ll go viral anytime we promote it. And anytime we promoted, the number of organic views is insane. People share it and people watch it. And the comments are always higher on that video.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, I’m not sure, but, but I’m one of those individuals. I’m not sure how I found your video, but I ended up watching the Ed Versus Cereal. So, I mean, that’s the perfect example. Let’s talk about, we talked about tons of tips, tons of strategies. Individuals can take to get more exposure to, to utilize YouTube effectively. Let’s talk about some, some mistakes you’ve learned or pitfalls when you jumped into YouTube marketing or is there some things that you said, Oh man, I, I, that was a mistake. I’m not going to do that again. What are some takeaways there?

Ed Herman

Uh, well, let’s see. That’s, that’s a good one. Um, you know, I, all I can say is, is, is keep a close eye on what your cost per view is because it can vary quite a bit with YouTube. Uh, and you need somebody who’s going to be looking at that all the time. Um, You know, you obviously want to keep the cost as low as possible. You want to make sure that you’re always targeting regionally. You know, some people can get really enamored with just the idea of getting a ton of views. So their instinct is, Oh, you know what? I’ll market this everywhere. You never know who will see it. And it’ll spread bigger. If we go bigger. Don’t do it. You’re better off really. Hyper-focusing your, your whatever dollars you put behind, just like you went on television. Or on billboards, you don’t go buying a billboard in some other city, just because it has a huge population. A lot of people are going to see it. Who cares if some people in Los Angeles see your billboard, you don’t practice there. So you want to really keep it tight. You want to really promote it so that the eyeballs you’re getting are as close to the demographic that might actually hire you. And the first step of that is by doing it regionally. So you, you just want it really promoted to your region and then drill down as far as, as the, let you do it on YouTube. Whether they can do it by income level, whether they can do things by ethnicity, whether they can do things by, you know, w any demo that you think is your typical demo. That’s where you really want to concentrate your dollars. Get the eyeballs of the people that may hire you. Don’t start thinking is that this is a common thing. People say, well, do I want to keep going after more of what I already have or do I want to branch out into some other pond and start expanding to, you know, a group of people that, that have never traditionally hired people like us, but maybe they will. And my best advice on that is saturate amongst the people that will actually hire you. You’re never, you’re never going to have a big enough market share, most likely, to get all of that anyway. So I know it seems like why do I want to be in the same pond as everyone else going after the same fish, when I can go to this other pond and maybe I’ll catch something? My experiences, you, you never catch enough in that other pond. There’s there’s reasons why the fish and that other pond are not fighting for your services. You got to stay in the pond where, you know, this is the group of, of fish that are going to bite my bait. And I’m going to compete with my competitors. I’m going to try to get as much of this pond as possible in my boat.

Chris Dreyer

And I, a hundred percent agree, you know, being an SEO nerd myself. I see a lot of the, the clients that we work with, they want to expand. So they’ll take, you know, maybe they’re in, let’s say Atlanta and they want to go to Los Angeles and I’m like, whoa, you’ve got a brand in Atlanta. You need to think about maybe expanding your territory in Atlanta and not jumping all the way over to Los Angeles where they don’t know about you.

Ed Herman

Yeah. And you know what? I can tell you my advice to anybody who does want to go into another market. Don’t try to go from a smaller market to a bigger market. Yeah. You’re not ready for that. You’re not ready to make the financial investment that that’s going to take. And even though it seems like it’s bigger and there’d be more cases, there’s more money spent. There’s more competition and everything is more expensive. If you want to expand, hopefully you have a good home market to begin with. My first step would be, try to find a market that’s comparable, but slightly smaller. Uh, that’s why when we started in St. Louis, Kansas city was the perfect and natural and logical place to go next. We had other options. We could’ve got up and said, well, why not just throw our hat into Chicago? Nice, huge market. Plenty of people. We’re all licensed in Illinois. We already do a lot of business in Illinois. Why not go after the, the, the biggies there? Um, but that when we started doing the analysis of that, it was obvious that that really just didn’t make a ton of sense for us. I think the ideal is a comparable market, slightly smaller than where you are now. If you want to go into a third market, you’d do that all over again. Your comparable market’s slightly smaller and you just can build your up your empire that way. Um, I think if you try to get into a larger market than your, than your, your home market, I don’t think you’re, you’re, you’re ready to take on that challenge. I just don’t.

Chris Dreyer

There’s no doubt in my mind that Ed just saved lots of people, a ton of money with this YouTube and branding and marketing tips. But what other advice does he have for lawyers looking to grow a successful practice?

Ed Herman

You know the most important thing the most, and this is, I, I know this there’s not even a question is you have to turn all of your clients into a strong, loyal group of advocates for your firm. The most valuable commodity you have are the people that are currently using you and the people that have used you in the past. So that means you have to do a great job with their case. You have to care about them. You have to give amazing client service and you have to keep that relationship going. Never let them out of your, you know, out of your circle. That means that you should be while you’re younger and smaller, and you can do this a little bit more easily, you have to be maintaining a relationship with everybody who’s come in and not just the people you help, even the people that just called you think about this. I’ve talked to many firms about this. There are two, you know, a couple of big challenges to why a person will never become a client of yours. Okay. Maybe it’s, they’ve never heard of you, so how can they become a client? Or maybe it’s, they’ve heard of you, but they would never hire you. You know, maybe they already know a lawyer and they’d never hired anybody who calls your office is already over those two hurdles. You know, they, they have heard of you. They would use you. Right. So think about the value of knowing those two bits of information you say, well, my God, for this person who called I already have checked the first two big boxes, the only box that was left was that for whatever reason on that call, they didn’t have a matter that I could help them with. But everything else I had, that’s gold to know that that means that every person who calls your office or interacts with you – you need to figure out how you’re going to maintain a relationship with them. Even if you turn them down, there’s different ways of turning people down. I turn people down all the time, but I, I, we, I explained to them the analysis and why, why they don’t want to go down that road. And they’re very grateful that I saved them, the heartache of, of pursuing the matter that that may not have ended favorably. And then they trust me because they know I didn’t make any money from that. You know, I always tell him, I said, listen, I make money. If you have a claim, I have every incentive in the world. If you have a valid claim to pursue it for you. And here I am telling you that I don’t know that this is going to be worth your effort. And here’s why. Those people will trust me for life. So you have to take that list and take it seriously. And you gotta be sitting down all the time and think about how am I going to reach out to them? What am I going to send them? How often am I going to call them? And I mean, that call them. We call, we have teams of people all day long. All they do is call for more clients, checking in on them, reminding them that we’re still there. We still care about them. Um, we’ll tell them about other areas of law that maybe they didn’t use us for. Tell them about products that are, you know, got warnings on them or off the market. I mean, you do everything you can to cultivate the database of the people that knew you and were willing to hire you. That’s it.

Chris Dreyer

Ed is so right. You need to remember that any lead that calls has already decided that you’re the lawyer for them. So even if you can’t help them at that moment, nurture that relationship so that they come back when you can help. You’ve been listening to The Rankings Podcast. I’m Chris Dreyer. A huge thank you to today’s guest Ed Herman for joining us. You can find all of the links from today’s conversation in the show notes. And we want to hear from you. What’s the best viral marketing campaign you’ve ever seen? Drop us a review and share your thoughts. Thanks for joining us. We’ll see you next time.