The SEO Insider | Legal Marketing Mastery with Mark Benhard

BluShark Digital  0:00  

Welcome to the SEO Insider with your host, Seth Price, founder of Blue Shark, taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.

Seth Price  0:10  

Welcome everybody. We’re thrilled to be here today with Mark Benhard, who is in the seat of the CMO 11. Papantonio, welcome Mark.

Mark Benhard  0:18  

Thanks. Seth, for sure, you know, we got, got to see a dad in

Seth Price  0:22  

Miami recently at NTL. And I know that I’ve gotten to 11 Pat people extremely well through the MTMP over the years. But tell me a little bit about, I mean, it sounds like a pretty overwhelming role, being the CMO of arguably the top mass tort firm in the country, yeah.

Mark Benhard  0:41  

Well, it’s, I’ve only been on the roll for two years now, and it’s definitely been a bit of a learning curve. And as much as I’m not from the legal space, I’ve worked for four or five Fortune 500 tech companies, global organizations, and had, you know, pretty senior roles and communications and marketing realm, but it often switched industries from one industry to the next. 

So there’s always a bit of a learning curve there. But really knew very little about the legal space, the mass tort space. Frankly, you know, I wasn’t familiar with the 11 Pap Antonio name itself. And you know, of course, very quickly I realized what an amazing, you know, national reputation they have, you know, started right here in Pensacola Beach, where I’m at right now in 1955 so we’re celebrating our 70th anniversary. And you know, there are cases that they have been involved in and continue to be involved in today. Um, it’s just, it’s really remarkable.

Seth Price  1:43  

What’s, you know, as you moved into this space, and it’s got a lot of national press, not but Mass Torts in general, the aggregation of cases, etc. What? What sort of surprised you is the most, as far as you know, not being familiar with the space, and all of a sudden, being deep in it.

Mark Benhard  2:00  

I think the job itself is typically the same, you know. And so, you know, I’ve been doing what I do for 30, years, so pretty comfortable in that, in that regard. But you know, anytime you enter a new space, you know, it’s, it’s new organization, to get to know new people, to get to know both internally and externally, new my role, of course, I’m involved, you know, handle community relations, all the media relations. 

So, you know different media, you know, the conferences, the industry leaders, you know, let alone the actual substance of, you know, the services that we offer in the cases that we represent and you know, we really handle so many different types of cases within the personal injury mouse towards space. So, you know, it’s a lot to absorb, but, you know, try to be quick on my feet and pretty, pretty pleased with what, what we’ve done the last two years. 

Seth Price  2:52  

So, you know, people, and listeners to the podcast. A lot of them are, you know, in the legal space or in the marketing space. And they’re, you know, they see all the different options out there. You walk through the trade show floor of MTMP, there are all different options. And you guys both as a law firm that does its own marketing as well as an outside I remember what, there was a point where they said, Now we don’t want to do our own marketing. We’ll upset our referral partners. 

And that sort of has morphed over the years. But my question is when you look at the mix of what works because you see it from your own bottom line of what you’re putting money out for, as well as which referral partners are successful in getting cases at scale. What are you seeing driving the needle today? Which, which, you know, what? What do you know I get? It depends on the torts I get. But generally, what do you see working best these days, as far as aggregating Mass Torts, yeah, so you’re right.

Mark Benhard  3:43  

So the Mass Torts made a perfect conference that we host twice a year in Las Vegas. You know, a couple 1000 people should attend, mostly, you know, trial attorneys, attorneys, but then there are, you know, you know, 100 plus vendors that are there, and each having, you know, carving out a different niche in the space. And whether it’s on the front end, on the marketing side, or the back end, you know, kind of the automation and streamlining of, you know, going after your medical records, or, you know, a lot of the different litigation aspects of handling a case over, you know, long period of time, and so, you know, again, for me, you know, the bread and butter of marketing is really always, you know, an understanding, you know your target audiences, and then identifying what mediums are most successful at reaching those target audiences and typically, you know you want to mix. I mean, you want a little bit of everything. 

And then as time goes by, you adjust that mix. Because, you know, to the extent that you can evaluate each and everything you’re doing, put a monetary component to that so you can determine ROI. And then you. Then you you know, initially, you place your bets, and then, you know, you adjust those bets and what’s working and what’s not so for our firm at Levin Papantonio here again, 70-year-old, you know, you know, firm with what’s such an incredible reputation, traditionally, they have kind of handled a lot of their marketing themselves. Definitely used outside firms to help support them. 

But never had, you know, someone like myself come in who had, you know, kind of a professional background and doing this for, you know, for a living, and you know, their instincts are just incredible. I mean, you know, you know, see what they’ve done over the years and how they’ve grown, but there were a lot of things that we wanted to do that, you know, so I call them kind of like, you know, avenues that were not explored. 

So for example, we were not doing digital marketing ourselves. We were using some other firms to do that. But we now have a mix of doing our own digital advertising. We use outside firms to help us do digital advertising. And we, you know, for our model also was such that, you know, we work with hundreds and hundreds of CO counsels across the country, and who, who do their own marketing and then send us their cases, because they, you know, most of these, most of these firms are private injury firms in their local markets. 

And to the extent that they’ve dabbled or seriously invested in the mass tort space, they typically don’t want to manage those cases themselves. They recognize that a firm like Glyph and Papantonio, who has, you know, you know, 35 plus attorneys, many of whom are on the leadership of all these cases as they start to get litigated. And then the MDLs across the country, we’re in a position to really handle and manage, you know, a large case where they can still participate, but they don’t necessarily have to manage those cases themselves. So what we find subsequently is that you know, most of our business on the national level comes from CO counsels who partner with us and bring us those cases directly. 

So it’s a combination of, you know, our own advertising that drives traffic to our website through working with third-party vendors who drive traffic to our website, or cases and then, and then working with, you know, these co-counsels across the country, very often, I find that we learn a lot through our mistakes.

Seth Price  7:28  

Are there any things that either you’ve tried that haven’t worked? or things that you thought would work really well? but did okay, but not nearly as well as you thought.

Mark Benhard  7:40  

Did a lot of you know, again, in the local markets, right? You would expect, you know when I moved to Pensacola, I was a bit shocked as I came down from the airport. It’s a small town, but amazingly beautiful, with great history. I mean, I could not believe how many billboards I saw from personal injury attorneys and, you know, so to me, in marketing, you’re really trying to differentiate yourself from the competition, right? 

And not blend in because and so, you know, I looked at all those. I’m like, you know, why do we want to have a billboard? Like, you know, some of your listeners are probably like, I’ve got a million billboards. I spent a lot of money on billboards but in billboards. 

To me, it just didn’t make sense to be one of literally dozens and dozens of others who had billboards just lined up, you know, after each other. So I got rid of all of our static billboards. I call them because number one, they fade over time. You can’t change it, you know, if you want to, you can change it, but there’s a cost associated with it. And, you know, they get very weathered over time, particularly, you know, the sun and Florida. So now we do have a number of digital billboards, and what I like about those is, you know, within, you know, an hour’s notice, I can, I can adjust that billboard. I can change the message. 

We do a lot of events locally. So we can promote local events and local nonprofits that we’re supporting. We can do a lot of things with those digital billboards. So I think it adds some flexibility to that we were doing things like bus wraps and bus benches and things like that. So I kind of got moved away from some of the traditional things we were investing, you know, fairly heavily locally and in TV advertising, again, cutting back a bit on that. And now we’re doing streaming, which is something that the firm hadn’t done before. 

So we’re streaming on all the channels locally, and then the three counties. Now, again, this is all now, this is our local, you know, personal injury marketing, which is in advertising, which is different from what we do on a national level. So, but, you know, again, I don’t think your listeners, you know, could be a bit of both. So that gives you some examples of some of the things that we’re doing differently.

Seth Price  9:55  

Gotcha. What are some of the things, sort of as, you know. That you’re excited like, are there things that you’re excited to test that maybe sort of cutting edge out there? What sort of excites you that’s coming down the pike? I

Mark Benhard  10:08  

I think streaming offers a lot of opportunity, and it’s relatively new for us, so I don’t have, you know, hard numbers. What is streaming? Yeah, yeah. Streaming, I think, is very important, digital on a national level. We weren’t really in a position to do the digital marketing ourselves in terms of, you know, Google Analytics and social media on a national level and so on, but we’re now doing that on top of using some partners too and driving our own traffic to the website. That’s been very, very effective for us, and I expect that to grow. And so you look at case acquisition costs significantly less expensive to run our own digital advertising than to use a third party partner.

Seth Price  10:55  

Is there AI? Is all the buzz? Have you guys at Levin pap been thinking about creative ways to leverage AI for everything that you’re doing?

Mark Benhard  11:04  

Yeah, you know, I gotta be honest with you, it’s not, I’m not on a personal level, you know, I’m not, like, as crazy about AI as some people are, or as alarmed by it as other people are. I definitely think I know that you know from a content development as you know, and you’re, you know, your realm, content is king, and you really want to create as much content as possible, because the more content you push out, whether that’s on, you know, social media, or, you know, organically or paid, or, you know, pushing it out to the news media. 

The more and more content you have out there is going to increase your search traffic ability for people to find you, right? And so I think what you can find with your eyes. So, for example, if you’re trying to write something, you know, AI and almost a blink of an eye can get you 90% of the way to the finish line of what you want to write. 

Now, obviously, you’ve got to fact-check it and make sure it’s accurate. And everything else but compo writing is, you know, in my last job, I had three full-time writers, and you know, it’s, it’s, it’s an art in and of itself. And good writing, I mean, there’s speed writing, and then there’s, you know, good writing, which also requires research. And the research piece can, can really be the most, you know, time-consuming part of it. So it’s really remarkable what AI can do in terms of just, you know, almost, you know, giving you 90% as I said, to the finish line. So I do feel bad about some of these people, that’s what they do not stop, because I think it is going to cut into some of these great writers out there. But no.

Seth Price  12:53  

I think it’s very scary on the journalistic side, a lot, a lot of jobs that way. You know, as we wrap up, what sort of advice do you give to people you’ve now been inside the belly of the beast? What? How would you, you know, so, sort of parting words. How would you frame, you know, from what you’ve seen, the best way to find yourself in the mass tort space working with some of the larger players.

Mark Benhard  13:16  

Yes, well, if people want to get involved in the mass tort space, I definitely recommend going to MTMP, but you know, there’s just no single better conference to read, to be a fly on the wall, and listen and learn and meet people and everything else. So I think you know you can be a relative. The thing about Mass Taurus is it’s a multi-year investment, right? So these things typically take three to seven years to pay out. 

If they pay out, they never, you know, there’s no guarantees. But historically, you know, most of the big ones have and so you have to have an appetite. You have to continue to build that pipeline over time. And initially, you’re not going to see any type of payback for the first, you know, few years so, but if you have a long-term play, you know you’re thinking like, 10 years down the road, and you systematically, each year, invest X amount, and you start building that pipeline, and then it starts when it starts paying off in the returns, you know, then you have that residual income over a period of time. 

But I think, you know, so we meet with a lot of CO counsels, a lot of firms come to us like, hey, we do personal injury in our local market learning involved in Mass Torts, and so we have that conversation with them every day, and sign a co-counsel agreement with us. We’ll help you. We’ll give you the insights that we have in terms of how to get in based on your appetite and how to work with a third-party marketing partner. 

A lot of these firms don’t have, you know, in-house marketing to any great extent, so they’re reliant on outside firms, which is fine. I mean, because, you know, there’s a lot of different agencies out there, a lot of different people that offer a lot of great services that can help, help support you, depending on you know what you’re trying to accomplish. So, yeah, so. Just try to, you know, be a resource for those firms. And I think there’s a place for everyone. Is kind of like the message, you know, if why not? Most firms are pretty successful in their local market in the PI space, but why not take the plunge and get involved in Mass Torts too? You know, it’s just, I think, a really huge opportunity, and you can do so at a relatively small level. Mark.

Seth Price  15:22  

Thank you so much. I appreciate your time and expertise, and look forward to catching up at the next MTMP. Okay,

Mark Benhard  15:29  

sounds good. We’ll see you out there. Thanks so much.

BluShark Digital  15:32  

Thanks. Thank you for tuning in to the SEO Insider with Seth’s price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand’s online presence. Episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital’s website.