In theory, good marketing is selling money at a discount. You spend X, you get 2X, you’re a happy camper.

The big question is when exactly that 2X comes back.

If I traded you $5 for $1 today, would you be happy? How about $5 in a year from now? Questions like these are baked into every marketing decision you make whether you know it or not, and very few people ask them.

So without further ado, let’s get started with the two major different types of payoffs in the world of marketing.

Arbitrage vs. the snowball

Apologies in advance if this graph gives you flashbacks to your highschool algebra class, but we’re going to need it for the next little bit.

Believe it or not, almost every kind of marketing in the world can boil down to one of these two basic models.

On the linear side we have the direct response channels: direct mail, pay per click advertising, and sales

On the exponential side we have the rest: social media, SEO, content marketing, brand advertising

Neither is better or worse in theory. But the payoffs are different.

The strength of linear channels is speed. You could book a case your first day advertising on google adwords (we typically see leads come in within 72 hours).

The weakness of linear channels is linear costs. You’re never going to get 100x the eyeballs without paying 100x as much for ads, of any sort.

The strength of the exponential channels is outsized returns. You could publish an article that “goes viral” and ends up getting you 100 inbound leads in a day.

The weakness of exponential channels is that they start slow. You’re never going to reach an audience in your first 72 hours on social media.

See how this gels nicely with our graph above? Up until position 8 on the graph, linear is beating the pants off of exponential. But once exponential gets things going, it crushes the linear channel.

Theory vs. practice

Up until this point we’ve been speaking purely in mathematical ideals. When the rubber meets the road for a small or solo law practice, things are pretty different.

First, unless you have more time than money, exponential channels can get pretty cumbersome. Retainers for content marketers, social media or SEO can get pretty healthy, in the $1-5000/month range. Because of the nature of things not turning out for a while, contracts of 6-12 months are generally required.

Do you have 6 months of runway to let your money start coming back?

Maybe you do, but if you’re paying a social media firm $2000 per month for 6 months before things start to work out, that’s $12000 that you’ll be out before you see how things work.

Second, there is no guarantee that the kind of traffic you’re getting from an exponential channel will be qualified to turn into cases for your firm.

Quick story: a recent client signed on with Expert Engines to generate leads for traffic tickets. She had done extremely well with these leads through networking. However, after generating half a dozen leads in the first few days, we realized that there was intense price competition.

She had a premium, service oriented practice but people on google just weren’t ready to pay more for it. We spent all of $100 on ads to find this out and were able to pivot to another practice area of hers.

Imagine what it would have been like if she had found this out after investing $12000 in SEO? That’s the risk of betting on exponential channels as a small business.

The worst part is, due to the sunk costs you’ll often see people holding on for things to finally ‘turn around’. Month after month goes by with no results, but they figure that they’ve spent so much that to stop would waste it all.

And they’d be right! For most channels, the flywheel stops turning when you stop paying to have people push it.

Why linear is a great fit for small and solo law practices

We’re almost certainly biased, but linear channels are a great fit for small and solo practices. The time-to-results has three super important implications

First, the risk is greatly lowered. At the time of writing, one month with Expert Engines is a total of $3500 ($2500 of which is refundable for qualifying practices). You can figure out whether you have a channel that pays for itself for $1000.

The fact that we can even offer a guarantee like this is a function of the time-to-results. Exponential channels could never do this, the labor costs of months and months of work are just too much.

Second, linear channels can pay you. And they can pay you fast. One of our recent clients was able to sign his first retainer by the end of the first month, covering our service and ad costs handily.

From a cash flow perspective, he essentially ‘found’ thousands of dollars without any investment. It doesn’t happen every time but we aim for it with every client.

Third, linear channels can pay for exponential channels. In the example above, our client could take that money to the bank, reinvest it into more ads, or even go ahead and hire an SEO firm to boost up his site in the long run. As long as the PPC keeps delivering, he’ll have clients to keep the lights on for the whole operation.