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Wanted to talk about your audience size. You know, we've been hitting on this a little bit over the last couple of weeks. And the big thing that I think a lot of people, the one thing that we kind of have talked about is just how people approach their philosophy on the audience size and all of that. And so, you know, basically what I mean by that is, you know, most marketing companies, most people, when they think about marketing, they think, oh, I have to grow my list, I have to grow my audience, you know, I have to get all these followers on social media and all that. And we'll talk about social media specifically here in a second. But the overall philosophy is that, hey, I just need to grow my audience and that will help me have better marketing. And when you do that and when you put, you know, 90% of your marketing budget towards growing your audience, you don't leave enough for nurturing your current audience. Mostly because that other 10% goes to more basic marketing materials, you know, kind of branding related stuff, not, not content like, you know, spotlight branding, what we do, but like branding stuff like, you know, getting business cards made or maybe you get a big sign to put up in your front lobby or whatever the case is. But yeah, the majority of marketing budgets go to audience growth. And if you're a brand new lawyer, you've just opened up your own firm, you don't have a book of business, a bunch of contacts, whatever the case is, then sure, you do need to focus on generating a lot of leads pretty quickly. But if you've been in business for a couple of years there, you should have a good list built up. Especially if you've been networking, especially if you've been working closely with referral sources and building up a book of business. That way, you know, even an audience size of a couple of hundred, few hundred, you know, especially once you get into the thousands, that is significant enough that you should be paying attention to the people who are already on that list because you can generate the referrals and the repeat business from them and it's much more cost effective. That's what we talk about, you know, especially as we get into inflation and all of the rising costs of everything. You know, you're probably looking for things to cut better ways to spend your marketing dollars. Man, there's a bunch of business to be had in your current list and just not enough people are utilizing that. And so you know how you lose out on business, it's because you're not keeping in touch. And so people who may have already been on your list but haven't heard from you and in a while and they've forgotten about you, they're gonna, you know, they're gonna end up going with another firm because that other firm does a better job of keeping in touch. So you see kind of how it all works together in this, in this larger ecosystem. But, you know, the thing to keep in mind especially is like, it's, it's like I said, it's much more cost effective to market to your current list. And again, like, you don't have to have a huge list. You don't have to have a huge marketing budget for that. So, you know, there's so many different things to consider when, when you're going down this path. And so if you feel like you aren't doing a good enough job keeping in touch and nurturing your current audience, but you also feel like the ROI that you're getting from your lead generation isn't doing a great job, adjust your ratios a little bit. You know, like, you know, for us, you know, as a marketing company, you know, we're, we're, you know, if you're on our list, you know, we don't let you forget us. But that's, I mean, there's a reason for that, you know, but we also still do some lead generation because, you know, we, we want to continue to grow and reach other people. And, you know, we, we are being very aggressive at that. And so if you, if you want to be aggressive, great, but you need to do both to be aggressive. You don't, you know, if you're just, if you're just looking for steady business, a steady flow of business, you know, if you're not concerned about necessarily massive growth or, you know, you know, breaking records and revenue or anything like that, you know, you just need to keep in touch with your audience and you can, you can lower your overhead. You know, you can increase your actual profit margin, make your life a lot easier, kind of reduce those peaks and valleys, you know, where, you know, you went total gangbusters on marketing. You know, got a bunch of leads, got a bunch of cases. You're super busy. You've never been busy in your life. Your life is super stressful. But then you get through all of that, and then everything drops off. Because when you were up here, you had to cut back your marketing, probably because you were doing your marketing yourself, which is another story altogether. But you cut off your marketing because you couldn't handle anymore. I've heard that before. And then when you get done, oh, we didn't restart our marketing in time. We don't have anything in the pipeline and now we're panicking. So, you know, but that, that, that simple little ecosystem of continuing to stay in touch with your audience is, is more cost effective and it keeps things moving and it keeps a steady stream of clients coming in. And so it just, it all works together in so many different ways. And the other point that I wanted to make is kind of tangential to this. I, I briefly mentioned social media, you know, a lot of times, especially for social media marketers in most other industries. And that's the key. Audience growth is a little important, you know, especially if you're an influencer. If you're trying to be an influencer, you need to grow your audience. You need to have a ton of followers and a ton of engagement and all that legal industry. It's not going to work that way. Right. You can still be very successful and you can still get a lot of value out of social media. As a lawyer, it's just going to look very different from other industries, you know, restaurant industries, for example. If you're looking for engagements and you want to build something that way, go for it. But you're going to have to do a lot of behind the scenes stuff, a lot of like office life sort of things, meet the team, you know, little, little skits and videos and stuff like that to drive engagement, you know, and you can see that kind of stuff, like on TikTok and stuff. A lot of law firms are doing that and they're having some success doing it. It's really great to see. But the key thing to remember though is that for most law firms on social media, don't worry about audience growth. Like, sure, get some followers, whatever. But like the difference between a law firm that has 100 followers versus a law firm that has 1,000 followers isn't much or even 10,000 followers, you know, because especially with Twitter, if you have the algorithm setting on, especially Facebook, they're not going to show your content to everybody. So it doesn't matter how many followers you have. That's one of those vanity metrics that we talk about. You know, it's going to be how much you, how much you put into, how much you spend on those posts to boost them, to make sure that everyone sees them. And if you're going to do that, you don't necessarily need to have all of the followers to do that because you can then start targeting people who don't follow your page and basically turn it into kind of a quasi pay per click ad. So that's the thing. Audience growth is overrated, honestly. And the key is creating touch points. And you don't have to have a bunch of followers and a big audience to do that. You can use social media to reach people who aren't connected to your firm, and you can use your email list to create a bunch of touch points to stay top of mind.
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