Five Videos in Three Months Is Not a Paid Media Strategy

Hey subscriber,

On this week’s episode, I sat down with Fransisco Wiles, a paid media director who runs Meta and YouTube ad campaigns for personal injury law firms across the country. Fransisco is deep in the numbers every day. Cost per signed case, drop rates, CRM integrations, creative testing. He sees what works and, more often, what doesn’t.

The conversation got into some territory that I think a lot of law firm owners need to hear directly.

When I asked Fransisco what most law firm social ads are doing wrong, his answer was immediate: they’re not filming enough and not testing enough. That’s it. Not the targeting. Not the budget structure. The creative volume.

He sees it at every budget level. Larger firms sometimes have someone dedicated to organic content and do a decent job there. But the moment it shifts to Meta or YouTube ads, the creative pipeline dries up. Suddenly a firm that needs to be rapid testing with volume is waiting three months for a polished production piece.

His best performing ad for some clients? A forty-five-second video shot in a parking garage on a phone. Smaller firms will do it. Larger firms won’t. And that creative gap ends up costing the larger firms more than the production savings ever justified.

Fransisco doesn’t manage organic. But he tracks it closely because it’s the clearest signal he has for how a paid campaign is going to go.

His top performing clients are already filming regularly before they come to him. They have a cadence. They have a dedicated filming day. They’re comfortable on camera. When paid launches, it doesn’t feel like a foreign exercise. It’s just an extension of what they’re already doing.

The other thing organic does is keep a firm’s profile alive. When someone sees your ad and clicks through to your page, they should see a real law firm. Real people. Real content. Not a Canva text overlay from six weeks ago. That first impression, the one that happens before anyone fills out a form, matters more than most firms account for.

This was one of the most practical parts of the conversation. Fransisco made it non-negotiable: every law firm he works with has to connect their CRM back to Meta before he considers the account properly set up. Litify, Lead Docket, Lawmatics. Whichever system they use, it has to be feeding data back to the ad platform.

The reason is simple. Without it, Meta optimizes toward leads. And leads are not cases. He’s seen accounts generating strong lead volume where almost everything was turning into slip and fall cases when the client wanted MVA. The front-end numbers looked fine. The back-end numbers were a mess.

Once the CRM is connected, he can see down to the individual ad: leads, contacts made, turn downs, retainers sent, signed cases, kept cases. That’s the level of visibility that actually lets you make better creative decisions. Without it, you’re guessing at what’s working and optimizing toward the wrong thing.

Fransisco sent scripts to a client. Good scripts. Scripts he’d tested and knew worked when delivered with confidence. The client filmed every single one of them starting with: “Hi, my name is X, and I’m with so-and-so law firm.”

Cost per lead: eight hundred dollars. They made one edit. Removed the intro. Cost dropped to two hundred overnight.

The first seconds of a video ad are not for introductions. They’re for the hook. The moment that stops the scroll. If you lead with your name and your firm, you’ve already lost most of the people who would have kept watching. This is something direct-to-consumer e-commerce brands figured out years ago, and law firms are still learning.

We spent some time on Google Ads, which is its own conversation. The short version: in most major markets, a $200 average cost per click on personal injury terms means you need real budget to do anything meaningful. Fransisco’s floor is $1,000 a day before he considers a market viable. I don’t disagree.

The strategy that worked best for us when I was in-house was a market domination play. Not a lead-generation play. We tracked impression share, top-of-page rate, absolute top-of-page rate, and click share, then cross-referenced that against intake data. At our best, we were capturing four out of every five clicks we wanted in certain markets. That’s not cheap. But it’s also not something a competitor can easily walk into.

The other thing I’d add on Google: ignore most of the platform’s own recommendations. They’re built for e-commerce. Turning on AI Max so you can show up for “lawyer near me” is not a personal injury strategy. Most of the time when Google makes a recommendation, doing the opposite is the safer call.

Fransisco’s closing advice was direct: make content, get comfortable on camera, and keep doing it. Not a campaign. Not a one-time production. A practice.

The firms that are winning on paid social right now are the ones that treated content like a habit before they ever spent a dollar on ads. The ones struggling are the ones who hired a paid media shop, handed over five videos, and expected results. Five videos is not a strategy. It’s a starting point that runs out in the first month.

Cost per acquisition is going up every year. Private equity is coming into the space. Lead sellers are getting more aggressive. The firms with a creative engine in place, one that produces content consistently and feeds the paid machine, are going to have an increasingly large advantage over the ones still waiting on production approvals.

Talk soon, 

Al 

P.S. The full conversation with Fransisco is live now. He goes deeper on CBO campaign structure, how he handles clients who refuse to film, and why he’d run ads for that rap video lawyer for free. Worth the listen.