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There isn’t a magic number where Meta suddenly says, “Okay, these guys are serious. Release the good leads.” The right budget depends on your market, your goals, the type of campaign we’re running, and how aggressively you want to test. But you do need enough money to actually learn something.

Paid social is a testing game. We test hooks, videos, offers, landing pages, audiences, formats, and a bunch of tiny things that sound insignificant until one of them cuts your cost dramatically. That takes volume. If we spend $42, get one weird lead named Gary, and shut everything off, we haven’t really learned much about Facebook advertising. We have mostly learned about Gary.

You don’t need an unlimited budget. You just need a real one.

The books are nice. Keep the books.

But yes, in most cases, you’re going to need to be on camera. Not because I’m trying to turn every personal injury lawyer in America into an influencer who points at floating text bubbles. It’s because people connect with people, and social media works considerably better when there is an actual human being on the other side of the account.

You also don’t need to be particularly charismatic. Some of the best-performing attorneys I’ve worked with are not naturally “camera people.” That’s fine. My job is to figure out what version of you works on camera without turning you into somebody you’re not. Sometimes that’s funny. Sometimes it’s serious. Sometimes it’s just you explaining something clearly like you would to a client sitting across from you.

The goal isn’t to make you famous. It’s to make you familiar. And unfortunately, your tasteful bookshelf cannot do that by itself.

Immediately.

Okay. Now that everyone feels better, the actual answer is: it depends.

Paid social can move relatively quickly. We can launch something, get data back, see what people respond to, and start making decisions. But that doesn’t mean the first three ads we launch are going to be the three best ads you ever run. Usually the advantage comes from doing this over and over again—testing, learning, killing the bad stuff, making more of the good stuff, and slowly getting much less stupid about what your audience wants.

Organic social and branding take longer because humans unfortunately do not develop deep familiarity with a lawyer after watching one 37-second video. It takes repetition. They see you once. Then again. Then six weeks later they recognize your face. Then one day they actually need a lawyer and your name is already sitting somewhere in their brain.

Could something blow up immediately? Absolutely. I’ve seen it happen. I just wouldn’t build your entire marketing plan around being struck by lightning on Tuesday.

Maybe. But “going viral” is not really the point.

I have spent a very large portion of my life trying to make lawyers get attention on the internet, so yes, I know how to make content travel. But a million views is not automatically a business result. There are lots of ways to get enormous reach that will do absolutely nothing for your law firm.

I’d much rather make a video that gets 80,000 views from people in your market who now know exactly who you are than get 4 million views because somebody in the comments decided you look like their high school vice principal.

Virality is great when it happens for the right reasons. It gives you reach, introduces you to people who would never have found you otherwise, and can accelerate a brand very quickly. We absolutely want big hits.

We just don’t want to become internet famous because you fell off a chair.

You absolutely can. And I sincerely hope he crushes it.

Your nephew may genuinely understand Instagram. He might know trends, editing, hooks, captions, Reels, TikTok, and whatever new feature Meta launched this morning because it saw another app doing it. That’s useful.

The problem is that personal injury marketing is its own strange little universe. Getting views is one thing. Getting the right views is another. Getting those people to remember an attorney is harder. Getting them to eventually become cases without making the whole thing feel like a 2 a.m. local television commercial is harder still.

I’ve spent years working almost exclusively on that problem. I’ve made thousands of pieces of content, spent millions of dollars promoting it, watched a tremendous amount of it fail, and learned exactly why some things work while other things that looked brilliant in a conference room do absolutely nothing.

So hire your nephew if you want. Just make sure he understands that “this Reel got 12,000 likes” and “this is making the law firm money” are two completely different sentences.

Mostly the second one.

I have strong opinions because I’ve spent a long time doing this and have made enough mistakes to earn most of them. If I think something is a bad idea, I’m probably going to tell you. If you really love an ad concept that I think will bomb, I’m not going to spend fifteen minutes telling you how exciting it is before quietly putting it in a folder called “Client Requested.”

That said, this is marketing. We are not landing an airplane. Nobody needs to scream. Nobody needs an emergency 11:30 p.m. Slack thread because a Facebook caption has one too many commas.

I like working with smart people, I like clients who have opinions, and I’m perfectly happy being proven wrong. In fact, some of the best ideas come from clients saying something I initially think is ridiculous and then testing it anyway.

So yes, I’m confident. Occasionally annoyingly so. But I’m also normal to work with. I think.