Lessons From a TikTok Ban: The List You SHOULD Be Building

One of the marketing things that has come out of this past week and what a week , by the way , with the inauguration of Donald J Trump for term number two , and everybody has a take on this and I'm going to keep mine to myself was banned , unbanned , taken offline and then given a stay of execution by now .

President Trump , and one of the things that we saw coming out of the marketing world is all of these people popping up their head and talking about the need for you to build your list and to take your list from whatever platform you're on , where you're renting the list , where you don't own the list , whether it's the Facebook audience that you've built or the

YouTube audience , or it's the strength that your Google business profile has , or , specifically , all of these people that have built multimillion dollar businesses off of TikTok who were watching their audience go up in smoke because the US had passed a law requiring China to divest by January 19th and China did not divest .

And so the marketing message that I have for you is that , as an injury lawyer , we need to be or as a lawyer in general , you need to be building your list outside of the traditional platforms , outside of your Google , outside of your website , outside of YouTube , outside of Facebook , even outside of LinkedIn , where I've built a list of my own , but you need

to be bringing that list off the platform and into your own email or into your own newsletter marketing , off the platform and into your own email or into your own newsletter marketing .

And the thing that I think most people who get this , most people who talk about this , get wrong is that the list that you should be building is not exactly a list of potential clients , especially if you're in the injury space , because most of my clients need me once in their career and they have no reason to continue to open emails from their lawyer from

their injury lawyer five years after the crash , and you know that most injury clients can't remember who their lawyer was , because anytime you have somebody who was in a crash five years ago and you ask them who their previous lawyer is .

They don't know , and sometimes it's that they don't want to tell you because that lawyer didn't do a good job , but more often than not it's that the lawyer has done absolutely nothing to continue to market to them after their case is over . So things that we do at our law firm are we have an email newsletter . We have a physical newsletter .

The physical newsletter goes out once a month , rain or shine . It's about eight pages long now , and it's written predominantly by members of my team . But it goes out , if only so that when the client gets it they have to be reminded that we're still alive , that we're still practicing law .

In the 35 seconds that it takes them to walk from the mailbox to the trash can , is it interesting if you read it ? Of course it's interesting if you read it , but it's the constant reminder that we're alive and breathing , not because I think those people will ever be in a crash again , but because I think they might know somebody who's been in a crash .

And more broadly than that , the thing that we have put concerted effort into in the last year and a half or so is building our list of referral sources , and that's what I want to talk about today , the list that you should be building and the people that you should be , it is your network of referral sources .

So the list that we've been building and the list that we've been marketing to is the Fairfax Virginia chiropractors , doctors , physical therapists , insurance agents , community leaders and other non-injury lawyers .

Although I think that bar is the hardest right , my sense is most lawyers think they can handle an injury case and or most lawyers already have somebody to refer injury cases to , and so we've really been targeting doctors primarily and trying to figure out what problems the doctors have and what things do they not like about the lawyers that they've dealt with in

the past , and you will get a laundry list of issues that they have with lawyers that they've dealt with in the past , and I've done a couple of other episodes on our chiropractor mailer sequence . But the reason the referrals work in the personal injury space is that they lower the trust threshold right .

So many people distrust lawyers and when they find you on Google and they don't have any other reference point for you , they're looking at two things Looking at how quickly can you solve their problem , which generally has something to do with how high you rank on Google and how good your team is at intake .

And if you don't have the ability to rank highly on Google and you don't yet have amazing 24-7 intake , then you need to lower the trust barrier . You need to lower the threshold to getting somebody to call you and lower the threshold to getting somebody to wait more than 35 seconds for you to get back to them .

If you don't have a 24-7 amazing intake team and while my team is very , very good , they are not a 24-7 , we will call you right back all the time for every caller kind of team .

And so we have to rely in cases like that , not on digital marketing , not on paid pay-per-click or on LSAs , but on referrals , because referrals will wait longer because somebody who's referred to you comes with some built-in trust and comes with built-in credibility from the other professionals in their life that they've already interacted with .

And so that really is the list of people that you should be targeting Again , not necessarily the list of people that think that you're interesting because you once handled their injury case or maybe you turned down their injury case , but the people and the professionals in your life who talk to your clients before your clients ever come into contact with you .

Again , this is their insurance agent sometimes , although those people generally are misinformed about what we do and that's kind of a hard lift to turn those people into referral sources . But it's like talking to their chiropractors and physical therapists is the easiest way to create a steady stream of referrals for your injury practice .

Let's talk very quickly about the tactical of how you do that right ? So let's say you do identify the chiropractic niche and you want to attract more doctors like that to refer you cases . So it's very easy . You just have a VA . Scrape the Google my Business , google Business profiles of every doctor within a 10-mile radius .

In fact , you could probably go to Virginia Chiropractic or you could probably go to your state's Department of Health and just pull the Excel list of doctors in zip codes . It's not that hard , it has all their mailing addresses on it . It's not that hard , it has all their mailing addresses on it .

And then you want to strategically connect with those doctors by offering them a solution to the problems that they have . How do you know the problems that they have ? Well , you talk to the doctors that you already have some credibility and some connection with One of the things that I did earlier in my practice .

I made a habit of every time I settled a case and had to pay an outstanding balance to a solo or a small practice doctor , I hand delivered that check and I tried to do it over a coffee or lunch so that I could make a connection with them , put them into my electronic Rolodex and continue to market with them to them afterwards , because nobody else is doing

that . That's how you become the face to the name , and once you've done that enough , you can begin to ask well , what are the problems that you and people like you doctors like you tend to have , people like you , doctors like you tend to have ? And now you build the list of problems and questions that you can market to the ones who you don't know .

And so we've done this mailer campaign a couple of times . I just recently got an invitation to go and be a speaker at the Virginia Chiropractic Association's fall meeting .

So it works , and if I can , out of that meeting , only generate one or two or three or four doctors who are going to send me one case a month , transforms my practice At the average case value from a chiropractic case of maybe a $10,000 fee if I can get $40,000 of referrals per month . That's another half million dollars , almost , of revenue a year .

And this won't work the first time that you do it . So you do have to stay consistent at mailing . We just sent the same mailer out to the same group of doctors and guess what ? It's yielded a different set of results . We took everybody who responded the first time off the list .

We added a couple names to the list as we expanded the geographic reach just a little bit , but then everybody who hadn't responded . We sent them a second letter with the exact same content we sent six months ago and it's generated more responses than it did six months ago . So you don't have to recreate the wheel every single time .

You can send the same product . Most doctors will have thrown the thing in the trash the first time around and you're targeting the ones who have not . And the goal of all this list building is not to have the largest list right . It doesn't matter if you have a 10,000 name list if you're not getting referrals and you're not getting work out of that list .

The goal really is to have 10 to 20 people that regularly refer you cases . That's a great first start If you can get to 100 cases that are coming from referrals . You really don't even need digital marketing , and then the paid stuff becomes gas on the fire , which is kind of what we're rolling into in 2025 .

And my law firm is we restart our LSAs and we consider whether we want to restart PPC and we begin working with a high level SEO content generation team . We are throwing gas on the fire in 2025 .

But if you haven't done any of this list building , like the action items are , make a list of 10 potential referral sources , reach out to all of them and see if you can set up three lunches , and then next month do it again , and the month after that do it again lunches , and then next month do it again , and the month after that do it again , and the

month after that do it again , and on and on until you've built up the residual list of people that are sending you cases . That's it for me today . I hope everybody has a great weekend and I hope that you use this weekend to plot out who in your world talks to clients . Your clients , before you do that , should be sending you cases , but currently isn't .

Have a great weekend .