Marketing on the Record Episode 2: Unlocking Sustainable Growth for Law Firms with Stuart Foster

Keith Edwards (04:09)

You’ve worked, your career’s been in working with a lot of big brands, as you mentioned. What are some of the things that you find are the most transferable from your background into the world of law firm marketing?

Stuart Foster (04:23)

Well, I think the interesting thing about law firm marketing and one of the things we bring is the concept of brand. So one of the first things I ever learned, a boss told me, I’ll never forget, he said, take care of the brand and the brand will take care of you. And what he meant was: be true to your brand, keep things on brand, do things for the brand, and you will grow the brand and therefore the brand will take care of you and you’ll get your bonus at the end of the year. That’s very transferable to law firms, you know.

Law firms are brands. A series of names can be a brand. Morgan and Morgan’s a brand, and any one name or two name can be. I think when you get to the sort of six names, you know, Edwards, Foster, Johnson, Lifschitz and and O’Brien or whatever it may be, right? Is like a firm. It sounds like a great firm, it doesn’t sound like a brand.

A brand has to be memorable. It has to have alliteration. You need to be able to say it easily. I teach this to some – you know, if one of your partners has a hard name to pronounce, don’t make it part of the brand. He or she can be a partner and get an equal part of the profits, but we gotta drop the ego at the door and come up with a name that’s – you know, Mike Morse is a brand, but it’s easy to say. It’s alliteration, right? Mike Morse. Everyone knows I’m talking about some of the big ones.

But particularly the PI space, it’s a brand business. And so you’ve got to build a marketing engine that builds awareness and drives leads and differentiation for the brand. The brand is really three things. It’s differentiation. How are you different? And if you tell me you, you know, don’t pay until you win, and we fight hard for you, and we’re really skilled at winning, you’re saying the same three things as everybody else. So you’ve got to find different points.

If you’re the best trucking lawyer in America, you better be able to tell me why, right? So be different. Number two, be relevant. And this is where I think lawyers get it really wrong. They talk about themselves. They say, We do this, we do that, we fight for you. We’re board certified. We went to this law school. We have 50 lawyers. We’ve won 350 billion dollars, whatever the number is. And you know what? Nobody cares. It’s not relevant.

What’s relevant is are you gonna solve my problems? Are you gonna make sure I don’t lose my job? Are you gonna make sure my medical bills are being paid? Are you gonna make sure I’m made whole? All these are what the consumer’s concerned about in a personal injury case, right? So you’ve got to be relevant to them and talk to them about what are you gonna do that’s gonna take care of those things. And then number three, you’ve got to consistently build trust by communicating these things through all of your marketing.

That’s how you build a brand in the law firm space.

Keith Edwards (07:10)

Really interesting stuff. What led you to focus on personal injury and probate?

Stuart Foster (07:16)

How did I go from champagne and luxury hotels all the way into the PI world?

Keith Edwards (07:22)

I mean, they’re all pretty fancy, I get it.

Stuart Foster (07:24)

It was by chance. I have two partners. The three of us were fractional CMOs. And one of my partners, out of the blue was approached by a personal injury law firm. And then he was approached by a probate firm. And what he discovered was how unsophisticated marketing was in the law firm space, how ancient, old fashioned it is. Most law firms are deploying probably a 30 year old model of marketing. You know, they’re using broadcast TV.

They’re using radio, they’re using billboards, and they’re not doing it behind a cohesive strategy. So they’re not good marketers, right? Lawyers were never trained to be business people. That’s the one thing I think law school really misses is they don’t train lawyers how to do marketing. They don’t train them how to do operations. They don’t train them how to do finance. They train them how to be lawyers. Now these lawyers build a reasonably successful business and then all of a sudden they turn around and they’re trying to figure out marketing.

Well, instead of trying to figure out marketing, why don’t you hire someone who’s been doing marketing for twenty, thirty years, really knows how to do it? Same way you would say the same about a lawyer. Like, rather than me trying to figure out how to solve a legal case, shouldn’t I hire a really good lawyer, right? Who knows what they’ve been doing and is trained in it? That’s essentially what we’re proposing. And so what we discovered was a very large market of very bad marketing, very under-resourced, very old fashioned in its approach. And we thought we know – and now it’s really proving itself – we’re bringing something very different to the space.

Keith Edwards (08:50)

I personally spent the last decade working with all kinds of law firms. A lot of personal injury, but all the way up to some of the, you know, largest law firms in the world. And what I’ve found is, they’re pretty different. When I think of personal injury firms, I think that they are willing to try what works. I think they are so driven on results, on cases and measurable results.

Has that been your experience? And how is it working with a client that puts marketing under that kind of pressure?

Stuart Foster (09:23)

Well, we measure our success with one metric. Only one, signed cases per month. And so when you talk to us versus talking to an agency that’s selling you impressions or website visits or number of pages ranking, or, you know, and these are all things that you need to measure, but they’re not the end goal. The end business goal is signed cases per month, right? Because that’s what leads to revenue and revenue is the business goal.

So I do feel like lawyers are frustrated. They’ve tried a lot of things. They’ve changed agencies. They’ve tried this. They’ve tried that. And I hear it. I just heard it ten minutes ago from another prospect who said, I tried TV, I tried radio, it doesn’t work. And, you know, lots of “tell me more” questions pop into my head. Why didn’t it work? What did you try? What were you? What did you do? And why did you do it? So that’s kind of where we start. We start with that assessment and audit.

And start asking a lot of questions about what’s working, what’s not working, what have you tried, what haven’t you tried. And what we find is that they have tried a lot. They’re very entrepreneurial. I would say most PI attorneys, because their business is small and entrepreneurial. So they understand the entrepreneurial mindset. I think the hard thing for them is sometimes to admit that they don’t know what they don’t know. And that’s where we come in. So we try to educate them and show them what they don’t know.

And usually it’s a “my God, I had no idea.” And it builds trust. And once we start demonstrating success, then that trust goes way up and then they’re happy to defer and let go of the marketing responsibility entirely to us.

Keith Edwards (11:01)

It’s interesting. We’re a digital marketing firm. Thinking about how we obviously offer a wide variety of services, how we can partner and work with fractional CMOs in particular. How do you see that fitting together?

Stuart Foster (11:17)

It’s very synergistic, right? So we need agencies to execute a lot of the tactics and a lot of the strategies that we’re gonna put in place. We need web designers. We need people to build websites. We need people to implement SEO. Some of that’s changing, you know, with AI, things like content creation is definitely changing pretty quickly. So the model of what agencies can and should do is constantly evolving. But we have to work with agencies. We do something very different.

We start with sort of business strategy and the marketing strategy and we speak agency. And so what we find is most of the agencies we work with love working with us. We have someone who understands what they do. They don’t have to explain it to us. We speak their language and we move quickly and we work hand in hand together. I think the ones that don’t like working with a fractional CMO fear that if they haven’t been doing a good job, it’s gonna get revealed.

Because we don’t work for the agency. We work for the law firm. So we’re the same as a law firm employee. We’re just not a hundred percent of the time, right? We go inside a law firm, we’re part of their leadership team. First thing we’re doing is we’re auditing the agency. Now I have a lot of agency owners and leaders that come to me and go, “I welcome it. I love it. Make us better. Show us what we’re doing wrong.” And we have some AI tools that can help with some of those things, particularly around like AI search and SEO. We have some pretty sophisticated tools.

But they welcome it. The ones who are afraid of it probably have a reason to be afraid of it.

Keith Edwards (12:51)

We spend so much time lately on AI search. The world is changing so quickly and it’s so different than it was a year, two years ago. Where do you see all this heading? And what do you think is the implication for law firms?

Stuart Foster (13:06)

AI is dramatically changing the way people find law firms. Now, you know, traditional Google search is still 70% of the game. It’s still very important. But I think where most firms are not understanding is what we call GEO, right? Generative engine optimization. And the game is no longer about pages ranking. The game now is your brand visibility increasing. Notice I said the word brand.

It’s not about pages. It’s not about your website. It’s about your brand. And a lot of your brand is visible through your website. So yes, your website’s a large piece of it, but it’s not the only piece of it. And it’s amazing to me that I think too many SEO agencies are still focused on perpetuating that their end goal is about getting to those top three spots on a simple transactional search.

A transactional search is like “I need a lawyer now.” “I need a lawyer near me.” You know, “I need a truck employer now.” Those searches are still very relevant and that is still very much Google driven. But the informational searches are almost entirely AI driven now. And if you’re deploying a SEO strategy that’s from before May of 2024, when Gemini was launched, you might as well be deploying an SEO strategy from 1982, right? Like, I mean, it’s just ancient.

So we’re helping firms recognize how their site’s not performing for AI, why their EAT is poor, you know, why toxic backlinks, broken backlinks, you know, lack of authorship, lack of the right meta tags in there, all those things, how that’s hurting them. And so then we hold the web agency accountable to fix those things and work with them to actually – and our tool review, our tool called RankNav gives us a roadmap for all of these things.

But then how you can rank, you know, when I entered this game two years ago I heard things like SEO is a long game. It takes time. You need time to rank. SEO is no longer, you know, GEO is not a long game. You can have brand visibility and AI summaries in two to three weeks if you do it right. Now it’s no longer nine months, fifteen months. So it’s getting faster and faster. And we’re creating content that is AI optimized that SEO agencies used to take months to do, and now we create them in an hour, including imagery, because we have the AI tools to do it. And the headlines are exactly 155 characters and the links are already researched and inserted and the images are created. So yeah, that puts a little pressure on the agency that used to charge to create articles. And they had three or four people. You had a lawyer writing the article who knew nothing about SEO. That article was then given to a digital expert who knew nothing about law.

And now you’ve got conflict in the editing process. And it was given to a third person who inserted links, who was out there doing research on links, and you end up with a hodgepodge that wasn’t optimized. Now an AI tool can do that in minutes and get it perfectly structured, perfectly organized. And then we still need a web agency to upload that to a website. We’re seeing results in like two or three weeks already. It’s amazing.

Keith Edwards (16:25)

Before we get back to the show, I want to take a quick minute to talk about Good2bsocial, the team behind this podcast, and the agency I’m proud to call home. If you’re tuning in, you probably already know that legal marketing is in constant flux. What worked yesterday is never guaranteed to work today. At Good2bsocial, staying ahead of the curve is what we’re all about. We’re privileged to work with all kinds of clients, from AmLaw 100 firms and boutique practices.

To legal technology companies and even bar associations. And in every case, we bring the latest thinking and most effective cutting-edge strategies to the table. When AI started reshaping how consumers find and evaluate legal services online, we were already on it, developing AIO strategies to help our clients stay visible and competitive in our new zero-click reality. From SEO, AIO, and content marketing, to social media, paid advertising, and website design. Everything we do is built around what’s working right now and what’s coming next, with a singular focus on driving measurable results. Are you looking to establish thought leadership? We can help with that too. From professionally produced podcasts and videos to blogs and long form articles crafted by our Legal Writers Bureau, a team of experienced writers, editors, and attorneys who specialize in creating high impact legal content. No matter your practice areas or niche, we’re ready to showcase what makes you unique and help you gain a competitive edge. If you’d like to learn more, head on over to good2bsocial.com and schedule a consultation with my team. We’d love to connect. That’s good, the number two, the letter B social dot com. Now let’s get back to the show.

I wanna ask you some questions about law firm marketing in general. What do you think is the most overrated marketing tactic that law firms are still doing?

Stuart Foster (18:32)

Broadcast TV. I think they believe that if they have the budget to afford broadcast TV, they think it’s like the 800 pound gorilla they can throw at the market and beat everybody else. It’s highly inefficient. When I say highly, I mean I tell most firms that they’re wasting between seventy and a hundred percent of that spend is waste, the efficiency is somewhere between zero and thirty percent. Because you’re broadcasting to a market. You’re broadcasting, usually a bad message.

So there’s not only the media, there’s the creative. You’re broadcasting a generic, undifferentiated message to a large audience and you’re not differentiating yourself and you’re marketing to a lot of people who don’t care, don’t need you, and will never need you. So why do you want to spend the money doing that? So why not re-target people programmatically on television? You can do it on television, you can do it on social media. And most don’t realize they can do it on television to people who’ve just done a search for something that’s relevant, or who visited your website, or visited your competitors’ website. Why not put an ad in front of them and only them? So you can hit fifteen thousand people in a market instead of six hundred thousand, but those fifteen thousand people need a lawyer now. And you can capture a hundred of them, fifty of them or more, right? So I think broadcast TV to me is still the biggest waste where lawyers are wasting money.

Keith Edwards (19:53)

This is a two-part question, I guess. But if I’m at a party and I tell someone I work in marketing for law firms, many times they will look at me and say, do you mean like billboards and sides of buses? And I will explain, No, it’s far more sophisticated than that. However, I do still see that. My question to you is, does that happen to you? And how do you feel about out-of-home advertising?

Stuart Foster (20:17)

Yeah, it does happen to me. Usually the answer is, you mean like Morgan and Morgan? So Morgan Morgan’s built very large awareness, but I would argue that for as large as their awareness is and for as much as they’re spending, do they really have the share of markets. But yeah, so it does happen. And a lot of it is the buses, the billboards, right? And the awful “The Hammer” messages. We fight for you, all these sorts of things. You know, “Injured?”. What do I think of billboards?

I think there’s a role for billboards. I think it is way overused. I think firms use too many of them. There’s a model to billboards that is, part of it is it’s hard to track, right? And so you can’t have I mean, even digitally, you can put unique URLs, telephone numbers, things like this on there, but why people put phone numbers on a billboard I’ll never understand today. When was the last time you remembered any phone number? Right? I don’t know my kids’ phone numbers. Sometimes I have to open up, you know, the info in the iPhone.

But surely I’ll remember, you know, a phone number for someone – and, making it all eights, or all sevens, or all fours doesn’t help. Because I’m still gonna go, do I remember? And I’m gonna Google their name and I’m gonna click to call. I think there’s a geography of how many and where the billboards are located. It’s one of the messages, you know, you have to hit people eleven times on four platforms for them to remember you. So that billboard can be one of the four platforms. But it’s not the only one.

But the other thing that I think a lot of firms get really wrong is the message they put on the billboards is just poor. They put the word injured with a question mark. There’s a guy standing there like this with books behind him like “I’ve got it”, right? And he looks like a lawyer. He’s in a suit. He’s not in a polo like I have, right? He’s in a suit. They put their URL, they put their phone number, they put “hablamos español” on there. They’re putting nine messages and none of them are really compelling. So make sure you understand your brand.

Build some messaging that’s really compelling. And, you know, there’s a famous story down here. I live in Florida and a lot of people have seen this. There’s a guy who built an eight million dollar HVAC company into an eight hundred million dollar company based on one billboard. And the billboard had a picture of a very attractive woman. And the billboard said, Your wife is hot.

And everyone’s, you know, and then it had the name of his firm, the name of his HVAC. The reason it worked is that it’s also funny, right? So it’s eye catching, it taps into this idea that, you know, we all battle the thermostat with our wives. We turn it up, she turns it down. You turn it down, she turns it up. We have different temperatures. And the whole idea that in Florida, your wife is hot because your air conditioning’s not working is a – you now you tap it into what the consumer needs.

And he’s like, call us, we’ll fix your air conditioning. He doesn’t get up there and say, we fill it with Freon and we change the filters and we, you know, service – nobody cares. It’s just you want your wife to not be upset that the air conditioning doesn’t work the way she wants it. You want happy wife, happy life. And he built a huge business. Same thing for law firms. Find that thing that really resonates with the consumer about why they should hire you, that they need, not that you need. Find what they need and put it succinctly up there. And if you can do it in a fun and clever way to get attention, then a billboard works.

Keith Edwards (23:43)

I love that. It’s a double meaning, but it’s also got an insight. So we talked about what’s overrated: television, too much, too many billboards. What’s underrated? Where should law firms be spending their money now?

Stuart Foster (23:58)

I think really two areas. One is content. Content is king. And this AI search is just dramatically increasing, but it’s also how you get there, right? So your content strategy for transactional searches has to be different than a content strategy for your informational searches. So a really detailed content strategy is how it’s going to be a cost effective way to beat the big spenders on TV billboards, big spenders and paid pay-per-click that are suppressing you. And you know these markets are getting more and more competitive. So I think content is underrated because it doesn’t cost a lot. And so they think, well, it shouldn’t cost that much because it’s on your digital footprint where you’re placing the content. I think number two, having an ecosystem that is not dependent on one thing. So I mentioned that programmatic retargeting for TV, but also, you know, referrals.

Most firms manage referrals on an Excel spreadsheet. They don’t actually have a referral marketing strategy. Who are the target audiences beyond other law firms? Who are the other trusted advisors that people are gonna look to and to say, I need a lawyer, who do you recommend? They’re gonna talk to their bankers, they’re gonna talk to their insurance brokers, they’re gonna talk to their real estate agents, they’re gonna talk to other professional services. And are you marketing to those people in a systematic and automated way, giving them compelling messages?

So that you’re top of mind when they do get that phone call or they are at a cocktail party and someone says, I really need a lawyer, and they go, I know who you should call. You should call this person. Because it’s top of mind. So I don’t think there’s just one. I think it’s having a strategy. And this is where I think we add a lot of value beyond maybe what an agency is more in execution. What is the complete go to market strategy that’s gonna deliver against the business goals and have this six or seven kind of

We call them pistons because we like the term of an engine, right? So what are the six pistons of your engine? It’s interesting. And you know, PPC and LSAs, they have a role. They absolutely have a role and you need them, but they’re not the engine. They’re frankly one of the smaller pistons in the engine.

Keith Edwards (26:13)

Right. Looking ahead five years from now, where do you see the market? How will it be different?

Stuart Foster (26:19)

Well, I think you’re gonna see a lot of consolidation. I think law firms and, you know, MSOs are gonna become, in my opinion, they’re gonna become a normal way of operating. They’re gonna allow firms to outsource their operational needs. People see them today as a way of PE money coming in. I see it as a way for firms to grow and consolidate. But I think there’ll be huge consolidation in the law firm space. There will be fewer single shingle, one lawyer shops.

And there will be more platforms and the brands will win.

Keith Edwards (26:51)

The final question for me is what’s one thing that every PI firm should be doing in the 12 months?

Stuart Foster (26:57)

Auditing their marketing completely. When was the last time you went into the doctor and they just asked you, How you feeling? Good, great. Step on the scale, measure your height. You feel good? Great. Come back in a year. That’s what most law firms are doing with their marketing. I feel great. So they’re not running an EKG. They’re not running blood work on their marketing. Audit everything of your marketing. Why wouldn’t you want to know where your waste is?

You know, we find on average somewhere between thirty to forty percent waste of spend, so we’re able to make a difference because we redeploy those dollars into things that actually work. So hire someone who can audit your marketing, really derive what is working, what’s not working, what’s the ROI of different initiatives, hold your agencies accountable and build you a strategy that is going to be, you know, the entire engine, all six pistons. What is the engine for your firm? And you start with an audit. It’s nice.

Keith Edwards (27:51)

Is there anything else that we should talk about?

Stuart Foster (27:52)

We talk about lots of things.

Keith Edwards (27:56)

I love key lime pie. What’s your favorite key lime pie?

Stuart Foster (28:01)

Do you know Dave Portnoy who reviews pizzas? One bite, everybody knows he was yours. So I do that with key lime pie. You do. I do. And I really should have like an Instagram and like I just don’t have the time. But every time if there’s my favorite dessert, it’s because my mother introduced me to it. I now live in Florida. It’s a really simple recipe and it’s really hard to make it great. A lot of very mediocre.

My favorite, honestly, I think is probably the key lime house. It’s the oldest restaurant in Florida. It’s in Lake Worth, just south of Palm Beach. It’s an old dive bar-y kind of place. We go and drink rum runners and the fried chicken, you know, the wings and the burgers and the fried fish is not very great, but their key lime pie. They believe they invented it. Yeah. I don’t believe they invented it if you

If you trace back I’ve done a lot of research in this space of who invented it it’s not clear who did, but I’m not sure they did. Theirs is outstanding. It has to do with the crust, how light it is. It’s not too cheesecakey, not too much whipped cream. Don’t add any sauces on top. Don’t drizzle raspberry on top and all this sort of stuff. Right. Key lime house makes an outstanding key lime pie. The only place better with a key lime pie is my wife’s. Is your

Keith Edwards (29:20)

Wives. That’s good. I gotta put a plug in for – have you had Steve’s in Brooklyn?

Stuart Foster (29:25)

I have, yes, quite good.

Keith Edwards (29:28)

Like who makes a whole thing about importing the key limes, he hands out free seeds. I always loved his approach.

Stuart Foster (29:34)

A lot of them don’t. I had one the other day at a very renowned Florida restaurant, and I don’t even think it was made with key limes. I think it was made with limes. And you can tell right away. Yeah. Right. And they made like a decor on the top that was a slice of, it was this big, so it was a lime. Key limes are about the size of a cherry. Right. They’re really small. And there’s not much juice in them. They’re like rocks. So yeah. Key lime pie. That’s my thing. I love that.

Keith Edwards (30:03)

Well, Stuart, I appreciate the talk. Thank you so much for participating. It’s been a lot of fun talking to you. You bring in great perspective and working with law firms. So I really appreciate your sharing your insights.

Stuart Foster (30:06)

Down that was fine.

Well, it’s been nice being here. Thank you. Yeah.

Keith Edwards (30:20)

That’s a wrap on this episode of Marketing on the Record. Thanks for hanging out with us. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, don’t forget to hit subscribe so you’ll never miss an episode. And if you’re ready to take your legal marketing to the next level, head on over to good2bsocial.com. We’d love to help. Until next time, I’m Keith Edwards, and we’ll see you on the record.