Bo Royal is the Co-founder and CEO of Pareto Legal, a growth marketing agency helping injury law firms multiply their revenue. Before founding Pareto Legal, he worked at eBay’s Enterprise Marketing Solutions division, where he led teams of digital marketing experts and specialists overseeing $250 million in annual advertising budgets. Bo has worked with renowned brands, including Aeropostale, Calvin Klein, Dr. Martens, and Kate Spade.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Bo Royal’s entry into legal marketing
- Product versus service-based marketing: key differences
- Personal injury firms’ skepticism to invest in marketing
- How should you invest in PPC, and what is the average cost-per-acquisition?
- Bo talks about the Pareto principle for marketing
- Measuring your marketing efforts
In this episode…
PPC marketing is an emerging tool for law firms to acquire clients, but many firms are hesitant to invest in a strategy regarded as competitive. However, with a consistent lead generation system, this method can yield a high ROI. How can you invest in PPC and other marketing strategies to boost your firm’s revenue?
With experience leading marketing efforts for high-profile clients, Bo Royal affirms that 20% of your marketing efforts drive 80% of your cases. To unlock this growth principle, you should allocate your budget by focusing on bottom-funnel digital marketing tactics. These include PPC advertising and retargeting campaigns. Bo also recommends developing a system to generate incremental leads, allowing you to manage and track campaign metrics.
In today’s The Guts and Glory Show episode, Luis Scott welcomes his guest Bo Royal, the Co-founder and CEO of Pareto Legal, who talks about marketing campaign strategies for personal injury firms. Bo shares the average cost-per-acquisition for PPC campaigns, how to measure your marketing efforts, and the difference between product and service-based marketing.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Luis Scott: Website | LinkedIn
- 8 Figure Firm
- Bader Scott Injury Lawyers
- Bo Royal on LinkedIn
- Pareto Legal
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by 8 Figure Firm.
Co-founded by Luis Scott and Seth Bader of Bader Scott Injury Lawyers, 8 Figure Firm helps transform your law firm into a seven-figure or even eight-figure firm.
After their own law firm scaled from $3.5 million to $30 million in annual revenue in just two years, Luis and Seth started 8 Figure Firm to share their strategies and help other law firms achieve exponential growth.
Visit www.8figurefirm.com to receive a consult call and start scaling your business today.
Episode Transcript
Bo Royal 0:00
I see too many firms that, you know, they see another competitor, do a billboard. And they think, oh my gosh, I need to be doing billboards. And it’s like, should you be doing a billboard? Do you even have a functional intake system and team in place? Are you running other digital tactics like retargeting like, there’s just so much foundation that firms are missing, then could drive them more cases. And I feel like they they’re getting distracted by those shiny objects. So our the whole Pareto concept is we help firms really focus in the areas of their business that will help move the needle for them.
Intro 0:32
Get ready to be amazed, get ready to be transformed, get ready to believe it is possible. You’re entering the growth zone, on The Guts and Glory Show with your host, Luis Scott.
Luis Scott 0:54
Hey, guys, my name is Luis and I am the host of The Guts and Glory Show a show dedicated to helping you learn just a little more so that you can be bigger and better than you were before. And I’m really excited for our guest today, Bo Royal, the founder of the Pareto Legal marketing agency, he is going to be telling us some concepts about developing your marketing so that it gives you more because there’s nothing better than good ROI. I’m telling you, if you want to have good ROI, you got to have a good marketing strategy. And so I’m excited to share some of these tactics. And I know before the call, we were talking and I was excited just to hear about this Pareto principle for marketing. Because if you’re aware of the Pareto principle, you know, the 8020 rule, if you’re not, you’re gonna hear about it here. But we want to know, how does that apply in marketing? And how do we make a marketing scheme that helps us grow? You know, as a consultant for eight-figure firm, I tell people, you can go from 1 million to 10 million in five years or less, but you can’t do it without a good marketing plan. And so both thank you for being here. And looking forward to hearing your story. Thanks for coming on the show.
Bo Royal 1:53
Thanks for having me. Luis. Great to meet you. And yeah, looking forward to getting into it today.
Luis Scott 1:56
So tell us a little bit about how did you get into legal marketing, it feels like people who get into legal marketing, didn’t like, come out of college and go, I want to be illegal market. It’s like they they got there somehow. And I’m curious, how did you get into this? Yeah,
Bo Royal 2:11
it was it was kind of a happy accident, right. So I’ve always been in the marketing kind of agency space in my career. And before I got into the legal marketing world, I was actually working for eBays Marketing Solutions Division, where I worked with their largest e commerce clients, I was managing budgets, upwards of like $250 million a year just for a single client. So these were massive brands. But I quickly became disillusioned with like the big agency life, I got burned out. I was like, in my late 20s. I was like, I want to be doing something else and not working 7080 hour weeks. And I did kind of a 180. And I ended up becoming a marketing director for a large injury law firm in Philadelphia. And when I joined that law firm, something crazy happened. Two of my clients from the agency approached me and said, Do you want to freelance for us. And that was like, a lightbulb moment. For me. I was like, Oh my gosh, I’m good enough at this that people want to pay me directly. I don’t have to, you know, work for someone else and get paid that way. So that kind of started my entrepreneurial journey. And so the reason I bring that up is because I kind of have built this agency, while I was getting the on on the hands on legal marketing experience working as a marketing director for an injury law firm. So that’s my background in a nutshell.
Luis Scott 3:39
You know, it’s interesting, because you were essentially working with products, right, ecommerce, and so forth. I even saw that you work for Calvin Klein, or did some work for Calvin Klein? Yep. How does the product business really differ from the service based business? When it comes to marketing? What have you seen have been the differences if any?
Bo Royal 3:58
Sure. I mean, seasonality is one thing, right? When it comes to consumer products, there’s a lot of ebbs and flows based on the quarter based on the month. Obviously, we’re in a peak season for EECOM. Right now, it being you know, around the holidays, where it with service based businesses, it’s tends to be more even keel more steady throughout the year. The other fundamental difference, I would say comes around the goals, right? So with E commerce, it’s fairly straightforward. Your goal is to drive as many sales as possible with with law firms and lead gen specifically, on the front end, obviously, the goal is to generate as many leads as possible. So in the case of a law firm, a lead could be a phone call a form submission, a live chat submission, so on and so forth. But that’s the that’s only the first step in that that potential customers journey, you then need to track you know, is the lead a qualified lead, do they have the qualifications that that make them a viable lead for your firm? And then does the lead turn into an actual Client, right. So there’s there’s more onus on that tracking and attribution piece when it comes to running marketing for for a law firm.
Luis Scott 5:10
I definitely agree. Now, do you work specifically with personal injury firms? Or have you expanded into other practice areas?
Bo Royal 5:17
We work predominantly with personal injury firms. But we have dabbled in other practice areas as well.
Luis Scott 5:22
When you work with personal injury firms, what do you believe is like the biggest hesitation that people have in spending money in marketing? Because, you know, I worked at a previous law firm, before I, before I became partners in this current law firm. And in all of my years there, we were the if you do good work, people will come strategists, right, we didn’t spend a lot of money in marketing. And one time, we decided that we were gonna go out and we’re gonna just we’re gonna hit a big, we were gonna go out there, we had a big case, we were going to spend a whopping $5,000 a month. I mean, we were just gonna go all in. So there’s probably a lot of firms like that. And I can tell you why we were like that. But what do you see today? The hesitancy being in spending money in marketing when we know that every big company markets? Like why are law firm owners so hesitant to market? This
Intermission 6:12
show has been brought to you by 8 Figure Firm Consulting at 8 Figure Firm, we help law firms turn into law businesses. Stop wasting your time with gurus who’ve never built a successful business at eight-figure firm will show you how to unleash the power of your law firm for personal and financial freedom. For more information, go to 8figurefirm.com. Welcome back to The Guts and Glory Show with your host, Luis Scott.
Bo Royal 6:48
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think and I’ll be I’ll give you a specific example. So my agency specializes and pay per click marketing for law firms. And when I’m speaking with prospective law firm clients, one of the objections I hear is, Well, PPC is too expensive. It’s or it’s, it’s too competitive, it’s not going to work for me, right. And the reality is, it ultimately depends on some fundamental factors within your firm. One fundamental factor would be how strong your intake system is, if you’re not set up to handle incremental leads, and you can confidently convert those leads into clients. Of course, pay per clicks, not gonna work, nothing is going to work to help your firm you need to get that key foundation in place before you can start taking on more more leads and more clients. The other thing I would say too, is budget is definitely gonna matter as well. So you know, you gave the example Luis of a $5,000 budget, if you’re looking to make a splash in your given market with an advertising campaign $5,000 is really going to limit the amount of leads and cases that you’re going to be able to drive. So I’m not saying that, you know, if you have $5,000, don’t spend it on something like that. But what I would encourage firms to do is there’s a tool, it’s free, it’s Google’s keyword planner tool, and it’s accessible in their Google Ads interface, you can actually go and look at the estimated monthly search volume, and the estimated costs for keywords in your given market. So that’s a common exercise that I’m doing with prospective clients is we’re actually pulling up one of our calculators, we’re pulling that data into our calculator, and we’re estimating, alright, if we were to spend 10k A month or 15k a month, here’s how many clicks we think we can get. And more importantly, here’s how many leads in cases we think we can get. And here’s the associated cost per case, and estimated ROI from that investment. So really, you need to do that napkin math up front, before you just start spending money and hoping that you’re going to figure it out, you really have to have a baseline understanding of where you’re at from a conversion rate perspective. And then obviously, you need to have the budget to be able to make a splash in your market.
Luis Scott 9:03
Everybody wants to know, two questions, the answer to two questions. And so I’m going to try to get you to answer these and I know, do that tell me it depends. Okay, you got you got to these questions. Okay. The first one is what is the minimum spend that I have to spend on Pay Per Click to be competitive, give me a range if you want to, because I want my law firm owners to hear this. They need to hear what it is that you need to spend in order to really be competitive number one, and then number two, what should we be expecting? Again, give me a range in terms of cost of acquisition. If I do pay per click, and you can you can use anecdote and we’ll put the disclaimer, we can guarantee these results for you. This is results of clients in the past and so forth. But so what is what do I need to spend to be competitive because I knew 5000 wasn’t enough. And what do I what do I need to expect for the cost of acquisition, assuming I have a relatively decent intake department? If
Bo Royal 9:51
you’re focusing on a single practice area, let’s say I think a minimum viable budget to generate pins sistent lead in case volume in a given market. And when I mean market, I’m talking city, right? I’d say at least $10,000 a month, in terms of average acquisition costs for our pie clients. And by the way, there are, you know, subsets of case type within the personal injury spectrum or so. But I would say on average, case, cost would be somewhere between 15 120 $500 per case. So you’re looking at, you know, something like four to six cases on a on a $10,000 budget, right. So
Luis Scott 10:35
if you’re a law firm owner, any service based business and you come in the game, and you go, I’m gonna get a client for every $100, it’s just not going to happen, it’s not going to happen. So you have to be ready to really commit to the spend, and you have to be ready to commit to, you know, for $10,000, you gonna get about four cases, like that’s the way it’s gonna work. And so I think that that’s really important for people to hear. Now, you have the Pareto principle for marketing. It’s a concept that, that I guess your your business has been, has been developed around, right? That’s why it’s called Pareto legal. Tell us about that concept. How is it different from other marketing agencies alike? What is it that you do differently? Sure.
Bo Royal 11:14
So diving first, into the Pareto principle for the viewers that aren’t aware with it, aware of it, really, that concept is about 20% of the inputs yield 80% of the outputs. So if and this concept applies to everything from business, marketing, agriculture, like it’s kind of a law of the universe, if you will. And so when we apply it to marketing for law firms, specifically, if you were to look at the cases that your law firm is generating from your marketing efforts, about 20% of your marketing efforts are driving 80% of your your cases, right. And in in the context of law firms specifically, there are a few key areas that law firms need to focus on, if they want to unlock that 8020 growth. The first would be budget allocations. So something I commonly see law firms make a lot of mistakes with is they get shiny object syndrome. And they think, Oh, my competitors are running billboards, I need to run a billboard campaign. Oh, my competitors are running TV ads, I need to run a TV campaign. Those are very top of funnel awareness driving tactics that most law firms like small to medium sized law firms should not be dipping their toes in yet until they get a proper foundation in place. The proper foundation would be first advertising digitally, specifically on bottom of funnel tactics. So this is these are tactics like retargeting campaigns. These are tactics like going after non brand Injury Lawyer law firm keywords, optimizing their Google business profiles, so that they show up in the local results. And then doing what needs to be done from an SEO perspective so that people can find their sites organically. That’s like square one implementation foundation for for law firms. The other thing I would say too, is they need to look at their intake, I already kind of alluded to this earlier. But if your firm cannot confidently and predictably convert leads, you’re not in any marketing effort that you do any incremental leads that you generate, they’re just going to fall flat, you’re going to be spending money on all these leads, and nothing’s gonna stick to your bone. So that’s another key area that we help our clients focus on. And then the third is tracking and reporting. So once you get these systems set up, once you’re running digital advertising campaigns, once once you have an intake system in place, you need to make sure that you have the tracking and the metrics to be able to manage those different campaigns or tactics in real time. So for example, if you’re a personal injury firm, and let’s say you want to start generating more motor vehicle accident cases, and you build a separate campaign for that, if you don’t have the right tracking in place, you’re not gonna be able to see what ROI Am I getting from this investment? Or on the flip side, if you’re starting to drive more MVA leads, and you don’t have the right tracking reporting setup, from an intake perspective, you have no way to determine is my intake team doing a good job of converting these leads? Or are they just letting them fall to the wayside? So the really, I’d say the big three that we are commonly helping the clients with our clients with our around budgeting, intake and measurement and reporting. Yeah,
Luis Scott 14:30
and I think that that’s all critical because one of the one of the, I guess, mistaken beliefs about a lot from a lot of law firm owners is that somehow things are not interdependent. If I if I spend more money on marketing I should therefore sign more cases. No, you may get more leads but you’re not gonna necessarily find more cases unless you you have a very solid sales. And if I sell more cases, and I’m gonna have a good ROI know, if the production is not doing a good job, you’re not going to extract the best value. So like every I think in your law firm is really an inter, you know, connected or interdependent web of activity, and we have to make sure that we shore everything up, in order for us to get the result that we want. Now, one of the biggest debates that I that I get into when I work with law firm owners is this idea of direct attribution. And I think that in the people’s PPC campaign, and you know, direct response kind of stuff, you can see direct attribution, you know, when you go to branding, the billboard game, the TV game, the radio game, and some of these other branding tactics you can, and people want to be able to know. And I tell them, It’s not that easy to know. So how do you work with someone? Who is in the brand space? Who is spending money, doing things that are not easily tracked? How do you get them to see that there’s still a benefit to the marketing efforts, even when the attribution of that marketing effort doesn’t seem to be there?
Bo Royal 15:53
Sure. It’s a really, really good question. And, you know, I wish there was a world where you could run a TV ad and get that direct attribution, it just, it’s never going to happen. So instead, what we advise our clients to do is have a top down approach to looking at their marketing investment, and then also a bottom up approach. So top down would be simply looking at revenue generated from marketing efforts, divided by total marketing costs. This is what’s called marketing efficiency ratio. And you can look at this over time. And when I mean, over time, I mean, like over a course of quarters or years to see, okay, if I’ve introduced a new branding tactic, maybe I’m running more billboards, now. Maybe I’m doing more TV, is the overall case volume and revenue of my firm growing? If yes, then you can assume Alright, these these are these tactics are doing good things. But you’re not gonna be able to precisely point to any single one tactic and be like, okay, yeah, it’s the TV that I ran on this date with this creative, so on and so forth. Right. So that would be the top down approach. From a bottom up perspective. There’s a lot of great data available from a digital marketing lens that will enable you to see, or my branding tactics, generating more bottom of funnel awareness. And so what I mean by that is, you can look at things like branded search. So if you’re ABC law firm, and you just started running billboards, TV and radio campaigns over the last 12 months, you should assume that the number of branded searches over time for ABC law firm would increase. And you can actually go and look at that, within Google Analytics, you can look at that on Google’s Google Trends tool. But that’s another, I guess, bottom up thing that you can look at. The other thing I would look at as well is organic homepage traffic over time. Because again, if more and more people are hearing about your law firm, odds are they’re going to Google they’re typing your name in and they’re jumping onto your homepage. So that’s another, I guess, secondary KPI that you could look at and expect to see increase if you’re investing more and more in branding over time.
Luis Scott 17:59
Absolutely, absolutely. Bo tell us one thing that most people just don’t know about legal marketing, that you have been able to crack the code on. What’s that one thing
Bo Royal 18:11
I would say conversion rate optimisation, conversion rate optimisation is probably the biggest one. And what I mean by conversion rate optimisation is, it’s not just intake, it’s the click to landing page experience, we do a lot of AB testing with our clients on their landing page experience, where we’re running split tests, we’re testing new headlines, we’re testing new value propositions. And this is an area where I think a lot of agencies like mine fall short, is they build some landing pages, they push traffic to them, and it’s just kind of like, Alright, our job here is done. And it’s, it’s, you know, on autopilot from there, where we’re constantly testing new landing pages, we’re constantly testing, alright, we’re gonna move this form here, or we’re gonna make this a two step form, or we’re gonna add a live chat onto this page, things like that. So I guess, you know, I would tell anyone listening, if they are investing significant budget into a digital campaign, if they’re sleeping on conversion rate optimization, specifically like landing page testing, they are leaving significant money on the table. So
Luis Scott 19:17
we’ve talked a lot today about setting the proper foundation, the Pareto principle in the concept a B testing, budget allocations, a top down approach the bottom, I mean, there’s so much that we could actually get into more granularly. But I know there’s someone listening right now. They said, I need to figure out a way to get in touch with Bo, what would be the best way for them to get in touch with you visit
Bo Royal 19:37
our website at legal.Paretoppc.com And you’ll be able to book time on my calendar and if you ever have any questions, you can just set up a call with me. Awesome.
Luis Scott 19:46
Bo. Thank you for being here. Really enjoyed the talk and you’ve been listening to The Guts and Glory Show.
Outro 19:53
You’ve been listening to The Guts and Glory Show for more. And to learn more about Luis hit the website. At LuisScottjr.com for consulting opportunities, 8figurefirm.com That’s the number 8figurefirm.com. We hope you’ve enjoyed the show. Make sure to like rate and review, and we’ll see you next time on The Guts and Glory Show
