Are You Thinking Long Term? – Empowering Your People & Building Legacy

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I am Conrad Saam from Mockingbird, and I have a cousin from Tasmania. I was born in Sydney, my cousin’s from Tasmania, and we did not grow up even close to each other. Our politics and our care for the Earth are absolutely identical, even though we spend maybe a total of 10 days together in the last 20 years.

Gyi Tsakalakis :

And I’m Gyi Tsakalakis from Attorneys Inc. And I am in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. I’ve never been here before.

Conrad Saam:

And this is lunch, our legal marketing where we sit down and have a cheeseburger and answer all of your marketing questions, of which we have one. Very, very good one. Gyi, you are in North Carolina and I’m north of you as usual, even though you are up in the upper reaches of Michigan in many cases. I am currently on Cape Cod, sweltering in the heat. What are you doing in North Carolina?

Gyi Tsakalakis :

Well, we came to visit my freshly minted niece in Greensboro,

Conrad Saam:

Freshly minted. All right.

Gyi Tsakalakis :

Yes. And then we decided to make a family trip out of it. Went to the beach and it’s beautiful. I highly recommend it having a great time here in Wrightsville Beach. But it has been hot here too. I think it’s hot everywhere. I think it’s even hot. Is it hot in Seattle today? Did you check?

Conrad Saam:

It is hot just about everywhere. Hey, Gyi, beyond our vacations, both to the beach, what else are we talking about?

Gyi Tsakalakis :

Wow, you’re throwing me for a loop because I never do this part, but we’re doing news and we’re talking. Investing in your law firm over the long term.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, now my turn for once to say, Mr. Lockwood, let’s hit that music.

Announcer:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, teaching you how to promote market and make fat stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Before I go off and turn on another fan and have another swig of Angry Orchard to try and keep that temperature down, let’s hit the news. Welcome everybody to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. We’ve got some really good news going on. Alright, again, we have a quick update. We did promise you to hear directly from Clio and Scorpion about their arrangement, their marketing agency, preferred exclusive arrangement, whatever that might be. We were going to record this right now, but it was a little bit tricky to get all of the cooks in the same kitchen. We do have that scheduled for next week. And so stay tuned, subscribe to the pod and we will make sure that you hear directly from Clio and Scorpion the difficult questions that Gyi and I throw their way. You’ve also heard us talk about the Bruhaha that Ben Sessions has created in his market. We’ve got a report back on that gi, what is the latest breaking news from Ben Sessions social media vendetta.

Gyi Tsakalakis :

Ben session wins. This elected prosecutor has resigned.

Conrad Saam:

He’s resigned from one of his jobs. So Ben session is calling a, this is a half victory,

Gyi Tsakalakis :

A half win for Ben,

Conrad Saam:

A half win. We’ll keep you posted. And I think the more thing about this, Gyi, on vacation laws kind of hanging out, I think it would be interesting for us to have a quick session with Ben to say, Hey listen, why was it from a pure marketing sense that you got involved in blowing the whistle around some pretty nefarious activity outside of your market? I mean it’s in the same,

Gyi Tsakalakis :

I bet he says it has nothing to do with marketing.

Conrad Saam:

Well, if he is a good marketing person whispering in his ear, he will talk about why he is just concerned for the public in general and the sanctity of the rule of law, which I suspect is utter bullshit. And we should get to the bottom of what the marketing upside was for Mr Session.

Gyi Tsakalakis :

A session session.

Conrad Saam:

Oh, a session session. This sounds like we should be drinking a Triple Pale Ale from Belgium. If any of you are big beer drinkers, you’ll get my triple entendre. Okay? I also got a note from Google that they’ve updated their local ranking documentation. Gyi, interesting. Or something that we don’t give a shit about.

Gyi Tsakalakis :

Well, it’s probably nothing Burger in terms of actual tactical anything. But here’s the thing, they haven’t updated this in a long time and I’m particularly interested in the, as we’ve talked, if you can listen to prior episodes, we’ve talked about this relevant systems prominence, but prominence in particular, they’ve reduced it down to two things, essentially websites that link to your business and how many reviews you have.

Conrad Saam:

Oh boy,

Gyi Tsakalakis :

They talk about positive reviews I guess if you wanted a nuance there, but I just loved it because this is a new update. Now again, you can be cynical and skeptical about Google, but they were like, it’s reviews and links folks. And guess what we’ve been talking about for a long time? Reviews and links.

Conrad Saam:

So a couple of things out of this, the reason you and I have been talking about reviews and links is because we watch how these things actually perform and we’ve seen that reviews and links make the thing dance, right? So that’s why we’ve been talking about it.

Gyi Tsakalakis :

I mean, I’m not a search engineer.

Conrad Saam:

There’s also been some pushback about the value of links and we have pushed back on that pushback and we’ll find the episode and link to it. So at the risk of you and me just sounding like, ha, I told you, so the reason you’re saying this is a bit of a nothing burger is because this is what you’ve already been doing from a local ranking perspective, correct?

Gyi Tsakalakis :

Yeah. I mean I think if anything, and in fact Darren Shaw is carrying the torch, bringing the local search ranking factors survey back again for another year. I’d be very curious this year how the local SEO community ranks links in their grand ranking survey. I would say, if anything, maybe it’s reviews are more important now also from a conversion standpoint and consistency of getting reviews, not just get a bunch of reviews and then stop. But yeah, it’s reviews and links. I mean, I don’t know what else to say and change your name of your business.

Conrad Saam:

So interesting, foreshadow right there. D and I are both members of Darren Shaw’s survey and we will be doing a full episode on the local ranking factors survey results, which will include opinions from beyond the two of us. So expect that coming down the pike. And finally in the news, I find this much more fascinating and it hasn’t really been talked about much Google business profiles are automatically adding social media links to businesses. What’s going on here? Gyi, why do you think this is so interesting?

Gyi Tsakalakis :

Reported by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable. Can’t give enough love to Barry in Search Engine Roundtable. Go check out his publication. But in speaking of Darren Shaw, he’s quoted in this post, but they’re seeing a huge surge in updated social media links in Google Business profiles. And again, Google’s doing this, so if you haven’t done this yourself, which you should go check to make sure that Google got it right because a lot of times Google doesn’t get it right. And you might have the wrong social media links in your Google business profile, but even more interestingly is you’re seeing social media content populated in one boxes for lawyer searches. And so short version is I’ve seen YouTube, I’ve seen Instagram, I’ve seen TikTok showing up with actual almost like posts like how you’d see a Google Post show up in Google business profile one boxes. And I think that this intersection between search and social, those lines continue to blur. I’d get on social,

Conrad Saam:

And I hate to give away the hypothesis of the episode, but the reason I want to have Ben’s sessions back is because if anyone did social media extremely well over the last two months, it was Ben’s sessions and this whole, I call it a vendetta, I think that’s probably the accurate term. He was prolific, he was not only prolific on social media, but he was well covered and his social media content was well covered. I mean his social media accounts were actually the subject of a lawsuit threat because of this. And this was covered by the news, et cetera, blah, blah, blah. I am philosophically interested as to whether or not that had any impact on either his AI performance or his search performance and and how any of that shows up in his Google business profile. But now I’ve kind of given away the idea for an upcoming session. But I’ll use that to again prostitute ourselves and suggest that you should subscribe to entire legal marketing. So you can answer that question with us.

Gyi Tsakalakis :

And now for a break.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, Gyi, I got some mail from Holden Rupp. I don’t mean in my mailbox, I mean in my internet mail communications,

Gyi Tsakalakis :

Your electronic mail,

Conrad Saam:

Electronic, I don’t even know if it was as the old people call it electronic mail. It was through some form of outreach. This was from Holden Rupp, long time listener, first time questioner. And Holden wrote, I would love to go to the summit. Your latest podcast said you could send me some information on how to pitch this to the partner in charge. And so we’re going to answer this question very self-serving to convince you guys to go and convince your bosses or the powers that hold the checkbook to send you out to Las Vegas to join me and ge September 22 to 24 for the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing in-house summit. But then we’re going to parlay this question into a bigger conversation about you’re the in-house person, how do you think about and how do you talk about and track those long-term investments that you should be doing? And that can be, in this case your own skillset, but it’s also lots of different things. Ai, for example, SEO, this has been the old one. So we’re going to talk about how to talk about and how to think about those long-term things. But first Holden’s questions, Gyi, what can we tell listeners who want to go and pitch three days and $800 to go and hang out with us?

Gyi Tsakalakis :

And this goes back to kind of the theme of longer term investing. And we hear this all the time. It’s funny, when we started framing this idea out for the topic, it made me think of so many conversations with attorneys that we have that call Attorneys Inc. And are talking about like, I need leads now. I need to change directions now. I need business now. I need now, now, now, now, now. And this isn’t unique to law firms, businesses in the United States, there’s been tons written about how they are way too short term focus. But to answer Holden’s question, you’ve got to start with how do you change the managing partner, the partners in charge’s mindset about making longer term strategic decisions? Because let’s face it folks, and this is going to be the opposite point, sending someone to lunch, our legal marketing summit is not going to likely change your lead volume in October of 2025. And so if you go in thinking like that, you’re never going to send anybody to a summit, you’re never going to do training, you’re never going to invest in building a team, you’re never going to invest in larger technology projects including data infrastructure or custom chatbots or ais or anything. And so to me, it starts with having a conversation but with a partner in charge about

Longer term investing, but then to say, look, this is why we do these things. Here’s what the longer term payoff is for Lunch Hour Legal Marketing summit. Number one, I promise you, you are going to learn things at Lunch Hour Legal Marketing summit that you are not doing at your law firm today. Now again, they might not change your lead volume in October, but I promise you, you will take something away that it will change your direction or reprioritize something at your firm from a growth standpoint. The second thing that you’ll walk away with that I promise you’ll get is you’ll make a connection with at least one other person that is battling the same battles that you are battling and is going to be able to help you navigate solving these issues even beyond the summit itself. Conrad and I talk about this in designing the conference, why should people go to conferences? You can go to YouTube, you can go to masterminds on Zoom, you can read blog posts, you can listen to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. But the real value is to be in the room with somebody that’s dealing with a lot of these issues and them talking specifically about how they’ve solved these issues and then taking that connection, that relationship that you’ve built with that person and now having a new resource to be able to have these conversations with that person over a longer period of time.

And that is an investment across the board at your firm. Again, for me it’s like you’d set the ticket’s 800 bucks, you got to give ’em a hotel room so the hotel room has a cost to it. You’re talking about a couple thousand dollars investment and between the learning and between the connections that you’ll make and you take a long-term investment mindset on that, it’s a no-brainer that you’re going to get a return. So it’s a guaranteed.

Conrad Saam:

So I’ve got a couple of thoughts. Number one is if you are in a firm that is focused on keeping the lights on right now, it’s probably not the right conference and it’s not the right tactics for you to be undertaking. You need to be worried about today. And there are firms that live in that world. This is not for firms that have a three to six month window into what they’re going to be doing. I think that’s one thing you need to be thinking about. What type of firm are you in? The other thing I should think through, I would want to think through if you want to come to this, is longevity and aggressiveness of your firm. If you are at a firm that is working to grow maybe five to 10% or you don’t really have any growth goals grow how much?

Not sure it’s probably not the right place for you and your in-house people are probably not that interested in investing in their own growth through you. That is a kind of harsh thing to say, but that is part of the reality. If you happen to be in a marketing role at a firm that is not interested in growing the business, that’s a bigger LinkedIn question for you to kind of think through. But the other thing is, Gyi, you mentioned, I don’t know that we’re going to have an immediate impact. Sometimes we do, right? Sometimes there are direct response things and we’re going to have a bunch of direct response content and direct response channels that you could be doing differently or that you could add. There are some things that you may be able to turn on right away. I use a very simplistic example, but let’s figure out how to get the phone answered on a regular rate.

If that’s one of your major problems, that can have a very immediate impact if you go back and fix that problem immediately. There are certainly some things that you should think through that do have a short-term perspective, however, you’re talking about getting a business to invest in its growth through an individual. And so I think one of the things you should think through is, and we’re planning on ending the session with this, it is a roadmap to be able to go back to your firm and lay out a three to six month plan of the things that you want to do as well as the way to measure the effectiveness of the things that you have learned and that you want to do. The only question that I’ve told the bosses panel that we are going to ask them is how to ask for a raise.

So what I mean by this is you need to take a three to six month view of some tactics that you can come back with, you can implement and show the success of and then say, Hey, maybe this is about the time that we do a raise, right? And I’m using the raise part. I’m throwing that in there because we do really want to make you the in-house marketer more successful, but you’ve got to start by making the agency more successful and you have to tell them what you’re going to do. You have to do it and then it’s got to work. And that’s kind of the path to change.

Gyi Tsakalakis :

I think the other thing that I think about, and you alluded to this, but I hadn’t said, and I feel like expanding upon it, and maybe this isn’t, it’s not for the in-house marketer to make, it’s more for the partner in charge to hear maybe from an outside person. But if you’re not investing in your people’s growth, you are not going to have those people on your team. And we hear this all the time. I just got a new marketing director. What happened to the old marketing director? And so many times it goes to things like either the law firm owner, the leadership just didn’t have clarity into what their expectations of an in-house marketer should look like or they’ve dumped all this extra work. The in-house marketer’s responsible for growing the firm and is also doing intake and is also printing things. And it’s also doing a bunch of other office admin around the firm. And look,

Conrad Saam:

I’m

Gyi Tsakalakis :

A small business owner, I get it and I get people can wear more than one hat, but if they’re just in the business, working in the business and nobody’s actually stepping back from a growth perspective to work on the business, people are going to leave and your culture is not going to be great. And I’m sure lawyers are sitting here while they’re eating their lunch, rolling their eyes about culture. I’ll be honest, if that’s where you are at in your firm’s journey, you’re right Conrad, the summit probably isn’t for them. You have to get to a point where you can step back and be like, we’re doing a bunch of stuff, but is this even the right stuff to be doing? And that’s the part that the summit brings to you is to say, Hey, here’s some blind spots you probably don’t even realize that you have and you won’t know.

You don’t know what your blind spots are until someone unveils them to you. And I think going to the summit is part of that. But I think if you really boil it down, investing in your people’s training and to the in-house marketers too, because again, I know there are some in-house marketers, they’re going to hear from their boss that’s like, Hey, I listened to this podcast. These guys are doing this summit. They’re going to have a bunch of other in-house marketers going there. You’ve got to carve out resource budget being your time and the cost of the admission of course. But to me, I think the inertia is really in the, I got to take some time away from my job, step back and think, go to this conference. And again, for me it’s mindset. You’re never going to decide to do something like this unless you’re in the mindset of I’m investing for the longer term intermediate term. Sure, maybe there’s some things you’ll take away that will move the dial in the short term, but this is an investment in the way we think about how we do things at the firm from a growth perspective.

Conrad Saam:

And I want to be clear on this. We’ve been talking about the summit. This does not have to be about the summit. This is really, it’s about how

Gyi Tsakalakis :

You run your business.

Conrad Saam:

It’s about how you run your business. It’s also about the type of people that you hire into these roles and their level of qualification for doing what you want them to do. And I think marketing is one of those pieces of business, especially technical marketing. It’s one of those things that does not feel all that difficult. It is often shuttled down to a younger person who has limited to no experience in many cases. And I think you need to think about your staff who is sitting in that role, what have they previously accomplished? And I don’t even mean this to sound as pejorative as it’s coming across right now, but what have they accomplished from a cutting edge technical marketing perspective? And if the answer to that is not much, they were just the person who knew how to log into our Facebook account. And that’s probably one end of the extreme.

There’s so much more that person can deliver for you. And again, this is not about the conference, but there’s tons of training, there’s stuff that’s on YouTube, there’s plenty of places for you to go and invest in your people because I believe this marketing role is often filled by people who are underqualified, right? And what we don’t see all that often, Gyi, and I would love to see some examples of this. It’s very rare that someone at a law firm is like we’ve just hired a marketing person who was running marketing for a firm that was three times as big as us, and they are really, really expensive and they really know their stuff inside and out, and they’re going to take us to the next level. If you’re not doing that, it’s very difficult to expect Tony to be able to figure that out on his own.

Gyi Tsakalakis :

I got one more for you now we’re going to do brass tacks here. So if all of these other things, you can’t convince ’em on mindset, you can’t convince ’em on culture, you can’t convince ’em on long-term, open up the p and l and go show them all the places that they’re wasting money on. That’d be a better investment to invest in. And again, it doesn’t have to be the conference, and we talk about this all the time. We especially talk about it with the offline media buyers. You’re buying radio, you’re buying tv, and you won’t spend a single dollar on digital. You won’t invest a single dollar in helping your team learn something about whether it’s SEO or digital media management. Not to mention a lot of the things that law firm owners are packing into their networking budgets that really are them just hanging out with their buddies. There’s waste. There’s waste in these p and ls, Holden, you want to go make it easy because they’re, oh, we don’t have any money to do this. Go break the p and l open and look for that waste.

Conrad Saam:

You think Holden’s going to access to the p and l?

Gyi Tsakalakis :

No. This is, again, this is just me being facetious, but go look at your, Hey, you know what? Go look at your software budget. I bet you can find waste in your software budget. This would be a drop in the bucket compared to what you’re paying for unused software at your

Conrad Saam:

Firm. Well, at the risk of saying the word RO, I mean one of the interesting things to think about is how much are you spending? How much is the firm spending on your marketing efforts right across the board? What does that look like? And if you were to drop 2000 bucks to improve that spend by 5%, would you do it? That’s easy math. Let’s take a break.

Gyi Tsakalakis :

And we are back and we are continuing to rant about long-term investing, but this time we want to talk about from the law firm owner’s perspective. And so we’ve mentioned the summit. This isn’t going to be more pitch on the summit we promise, but we do have to highlight that one of the things that we’re very excited about that’s happening at the summit is we’re doing a CMO panel and then we’re going to do an owner’s panel on a separate day. And so we’re going to get this juxtaposition between how CMOs think about things and navigate some of these things and how law firm owners think about these things. And so for the law firm owners out there, now we’re going to talk about long-term investing from the owner’s perspective. And with that in mind, Conrad, what are some of the things that you think about when you think about long-term investment from the owner’s perspective?

Conrad Saam:

Well, I think there are four things on my head. Maybe we should get them one at a time, but you and I have been talking ad nauseum for years about brand, right? We’ve talked about brand affinity instead of brand awareness. So not just, I know who you are, but I like who you are. We’ve talked about how brand awareness increases things like pay-per-click, click-through rates, which improves your quality score, which lowers your necessary bid numbers, which can get more clicks out of a given budget. There is so much you can do with your brand that is not going to have that immediate impact. It’s also something that you could theoretically, and this is by definition, the long-term thing. You could turn that off if you’re really nailing brand, you could turn that off for six months and it wouldn’t have an impact, but you don’t because you’re not doing it for those six months, you’re doing your brand investment for the next six years. I think that’s one of the things that really has an impact. It is going to continue to have an impact both on the digital and the offline market activities, but just those brand elements are just so unbelievably crucial and it’s a persistent, if done correctly, it is a persistent asset that most of the stuff that you and I talked about, Gyi is a little bit transient. Even like SEO prowess, we’ve seen that come and go. So brand is something that I can’t emphasize enough the value of moving into that.

Gyi Tsakalakis :

I want to go a little deeper. I agree. I think brand is probably the thing that if I had to just think of one thing, long-term investing that law firms aren’t doing its brand. But if I’m sitting there listening and I’d be like, I’ve heard you guys say this a lot. Two things. One, I would say, what do you mean when you say brand? Let’s just say I’m a small firm. We’ve been doing all direct response. We agree with you, the cost per client, the cost per qualified lead. Things are going up, we see what you’re talking about. We understand what you mean. But what would I do to start investing in brand? What does it mean? And then the second thing, and this is the one I’d be really curious of your thoughts when you say what do you mean by long-term? How long is long-term?

Conrad Saam:

Okay, let me hit these sequentially. Make sure you come back to the how long is long-term because I think that’s a really key component of this. When you are talking about brand, those loyal listeners will know that Gyi and I have mocked made fun of and downright jeered metrics like impressions. It doesn’t really matter because impressions don’t pay the bills. But when you’re talking about brand, you’re really talking about putting something that’s recognizable in front of someone over and over and over and over again. And this is why we’ve used this example over and over again. This is why Coke still has a massive marketing budget. Even though if they turn their branding efforts to zero tomorrow, they would still sell as many Cokes eventually that runs out. And so when you talk about tactically, I think there are a couple of things to think about.

Number one, there’s a reason you guys are sitting here and Gyi has got the cheeseburger sitting on his left Peck Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing, and there’s a reason that if we weren’t on vacation, my background would have my logo on it all the time. We’re always putting that logo in front of everyone and it’s not to remind people that if they have an SEO problem that they can come and call us. And it’s not to say if someone that has been injured in a motorcycle accident, please call Fred in June, right? It is not that. It is the repeated exposure. Now, we did an episode a long time ago around dark social. We talked about building brand affinity instead of just brand awareness. And so I want to hit on that really quickly. Having something that cheeseburger stands for. I mean Gyi and I stand for, we want you guys to be empower.

We don’t want you to get taken advantage of. We are going to mercilessly quiz the Scorpion and Clio mouthpieces about why that is a good thing for anybody that they have this relationship. We stand for that. And so we’re building an affinity with you because you guys feel the same way. And I don’t care what that affinity is. If it’s you like people who run or you like the small town of Sheboygan or you are into empowering women to run own businesses, it doesn’t matter. The scan for something is a part of the brand and that is more than awareness that is affinity. And the third stool to the brand answer that you asked me, and this is very, very difficult. In fact, we’re doing a session where we’re calling Don, well the ocean in many cases, people feel like I’m too small to build a brand within my market, and this is why it is very important to segment your market down to people.

Even if this is an affinity plate, we’re only going to put our brand in front of this group of people simply because we lack the budget to cover all of Chicago, simply because we can’t compete with Morgan and Morgan across all of Atlanta. We’re going to find a way to get our brand in front of the same people, multiple impressions over and over and over again. So they’re seeing you more than they see anyone else because you are extremely focused. So those are the kind of the three tactical elements to the brand’s stool that you really have to take into account, otherwise you are going to fail.

Gyi Tsakalakis :

That makes a lot of sense. Let’s say I’m going to start doing that stuff. I’m doing the stuff GUI and Conrad talk about what expectations should I have? What should I be looking for? Even if it’s a leading indicator that this stuff is working. I mean I hear you on impressions, but can we say more than that? Can we say what should I be listening for that like, oh, my brand and these investments I’m making in brand are starting to resonate. What should I be seeing or hearing?

Conrad Saam:

Gyi gave me the softball across the plate by saying, what am I listening for? And what you are listening for is your inbound inquiries to the firm. Mention your firm. I am looking for you, and you will see this in Google Search Console where you’ll see impressions for the brand start to rise. You’ll see the cost from your pay-per-click branded campaign Start Rise. I just had a conversation with a firm dropping 18 grand a month on their brand and that money is well spent. You’re starting to see this, but really it’s the listen for how did you hear about us? Should I send someone a thank you? Oh, I saw you on the whatever it might be. I heard the radio, I did this, I did that. And if you try and work your attribution down to perfect one-to-one attribution, when you’re doing brand stuff, it will never work. So don’t try to but start listening and start listening for mentions of I know your name or I heard you on the radio. When you’re doing those intakes, that is unbelievably valuable.

Gyi Tsakalakis :

The other place that I would listen for you will see an uptick in referrals. So Conrad said this, but you’ll be like, this is the thing that’s so funny about this is people will say, oh, it’s referrals or cornerstone of the business. But if you ask a little further, again, I’m not saying you do this during intake,

Conrad Saam:

But

Gyi Tsakalakis :

What you find is is that when someone gives you the name of somebody that referred them to you and then you ask that person, often it is because of some of this brand activity, right?

I saw your ad and so I referred, I saw you at this local community event. And so I referred and I think that too many lawyers are still stuck in this. Referrals are free world where it’s like you just do good work. People sing your praises and send you business. And I would say this, it is you must do good work. You must give people remarkable experiences and you should be advertising to your referral sources because they’re not thinking about you. They forget about you. They know 10 other lawyers that do what you do. And so this is where that brand marketing comes into play. And it’s funny though because so many times, unless you’re actually monitoring and tracking your brand investments and what those campaigns are doing in conjunction with your qualitative and quantitative attribution data, people will say things like, oh, just a good month for referrals. And it’s like, no, it wasn’t just a good month for referrals. It was the time and money you were spent investing in brand that were driving more referrals for you.

Conrad Saam:

And that time and money was over the last 20 months. It wasn’t the month before, right? That’s key element here. Okay, the other thing,

Gyi Tsakalakis :

Sorry, you just answered my second part of my question, which is how long and so 20 months, so is two years is one year from doing this brand stuff. How fast am I going to start to feel this impact?

Conrad Saam:

Let give you two answers. I think for the flywheel to be working, you’re looking at a 24 month time horizon. Having said that, you’ll start to see the impact of brand advertising as a direct response vehicle much faster than I intellectually think you will kind of word salad here. I’m surprised at how effective brand work is at generating direct response business. This is an example of we’re talking about a long-term thing, a brand thing. When people get in an accident, they want to see you. Having said that, sometimes it does actually work as direct response and that has surprised me the extent to which that is true, where you can start running branding and you’re generating business right off the bat from our branding perspective.

Gyi Tsakalakis :

So I totally agree with you intuitively I’ve always thought, but you know what I’ve noticed is the key factor with the speed. It’s how much your brand resonates if you’ve got good strong brand position, if you’ve got strong affinity. So the simple version of this is the thing you’re passionate about, you’re out there in the community, you’re investing in visibility in that community and your message is compelling in that community. It happens a lot faster. If it’s a picture of you talking about how hard you fight and things exploding in the background and gavels and American flags, it can still work, but it’s probably going to take a lot more impressions. It’s probably going to take a lot more hammers over the head to get your marketing message built in to somebody’s mind than if it’s a message that’s appealing. It’s the same thing with the billboards.

These billboards that are supporting teachers in the local community or they’re interesting, whatever it is. Again, I don’t mean to just go down this, it’s got to be support local. There are brand messages that can be appealing in other contexts. Look at top dog, top dog’s messaging. His brand messaging appeals to his audience. It works faster when the brand resonates. That’s kind of stating the obvious, but I’ve had the same kind of thing as you where I’m like, these brand campaigns, they take a long time. Well that’s because it’s just I fight hard, I work hard, we win. It takes a lot longer to have that message than if you have something that actually resonates.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, let me switch gears to the next thing that I think you should be thinking about from a long-term perspective. And this presupposes that you have a long-term vision of your business. Yesterday was the day to start taking tactical execution on ai. And I think you and I need to clear up a couple of things here. So Gyi, let me ask you this. What is the widely accepted universal truth about how to be successful in ai?

Gyi Tsakalakis :

I have no idea what the universal truth is. To be successful in AI is

Conrad Saam:

That’s the right answer. No one freaking knows. So don’t listen to people who are certain about what is going to make this game work. I think we need to start off from an understanding that when we are making this investment, we are doing this from a position of I think I believe, and I’m experimenting, right? And Gyi, one of the things with AI that’s difficult is what AI are we optimizing for? What should we be working to?

Gyi Tsakalakis :

And if you’re talking about in the context of generative engine optimization, like consumers going to engines to have conversations about their legal issues to be ultimately directed to a lawyer. Again, I’m going to say this, and this is like anti a lot of the hype out there. I’d still be focused on Google and here’s why. One Google still has the volume and we hear it from our clients as well. Hey, we’re starting to see people show up in the CRM, they found us in chat, GPT, they found us in perplexity. Attorneys think has the same thing happening. But if you look at the overall numbers, search is still primarily on Google. There is opportunity on these other platforms, there is opportunity on social, but guess what? For a lot of the lower funnel business lookup turns and chat GPT, you know what they’re using? Google business profile data.

They’re showing you Google business profile. What’s Google showing in aios and AI mode? Google Business profile. And again, this is just one context of AI because for me, when you said ai, the first thing that I started thinking about was deploying AI against your firm’s data. And my big long-term investment thing, it’s the length of the term varies depending on how big the lift is to get your data in check. But I’d be investing in data infrastructure firms that call us. And our messaging is we want to use your firm’s data to make decisions about marketing resource deployment, where we should be spending our time and money based on what’s going on with your firm’s actual data if you have it. Now, a lot of firms will say, we don’t have the data. And so step one, you got to start collecting the data. So we start diving in, we start getting access to accounts, we start looking at what’s going on.

And you know what the story is over and over again. You have a huge data infrastructure problem. Your data is not reliable. It is not telling you what you think it’s telling you. You think you’re making these data informed decisions, but it is garbage in, garbage out. It’s bad data. Cross platforms aren’t talking to each other. And so for me, the long-term investment would be in data infrastructure. And I cannot tell you how much pushback we get about making that investment. People are like, I want to grow. I want to spend money, I want to invest in marketing, we want to help you do that, but do it from a data informed approach. We don’t want to spend any money investing in the data infrastructure. And so for me, and for a variety of reasons, some of its costs, but some of it goes back to the same concept.

It’s going to take some time to get your data infrastructure and then it’s going to take some time to start collecting the data that’s for your firm. And again, we talk about this in the broader context of agencies and other vendors that have access to lots of data. And I think it’s valuable. But the most valuable data is not the firms down the street, it’s not your agencies, it’s not industry reports, it’s your firms data. Invest in the infrastructure so that down the road one year, three years, five years, you’ve got a very reliable data infrastructure that’s telling you exactly what’s going on at your firm.

Conrad Saam:

Let me ask you a question. I love this. So I’m going to just recap and then I want to push a little bit further on this data thing. We talked about long-term investments. You said brand, I said ai, and then we moved over to this data infrastructure and accuracy. And I’m going back to the original question. How do I convince someone to send me to the conference? If you were to invest money in better data, Gyi, for a law firm is the right answer to that question. I’m going to get an advanced crm, I’m going to a Lawmatics, I’m going to get a HubSpot, something like that that ties into matter management system. Or is it a person? Is it a data analyst? Is it a data systems person who can put all this stuff together? Is it an experienced COO or is it a lot of those answers, right? Where would you think about throwing that money? And I’ll say this because I want you to address this. Most of the salespeople at SaaS companies that focus on the legal industry convinced that their solution is the answer to what you just described. And I suspect you don’t believe that to be the case.

Gyi Tsakalakis :

Well, I think they’re the ones who have created this problem that I’m describing where it’s like you’ve got all these disparate systems that don’t talk to each other and the data actually isn’t doing what Anyway. So my answer to you, and this is the annoying thing about all this stuff, is my answer is it depends. It depends on where you are and your growth journey. If you’re a startup, I don’t think that dropping the money for HubSpot is your first foray into data infrastructure. But lemme describe some of the elements of good data infrastructure intake is the starting point, and we talk about this all the time, but if you’re able to say you’re asking people how they found you and that’s being tracked and that’s being connected to quantitative attribution data. So you know that their last touch was whether it’s an ad, and some of this stuff too is out of the box you can get quantitative and qualitative pretty tight. Think about CallRail. CallRail will pull quantitative into your phone calls and then you can add qualitative, right in the CallRail system. And so if you’re a startup, you’re early stage and you’re not really sophisticated, but you want basic data infrastructure, CallRail maybe with a couple other things might be enough. But

Conrad Saam:

This segment brought to you by CallRail,

Gyi Tsakalakis :

Well, this goes to your second point, which is if you don’t have a person that’s actually actively, that’s my point. Managing CallRail and holding people accountable for entry into CallRail and making sure that maybe you’re listening to summaries or implementing the tagging system for the AI assist and all this kind of stuff, the tool’s going to do what it is. But to me the centerpiece is to make sure that you understand accurately how people are actually finding you and then once they’ve found you, what their journey looks like in terms of contacting and hiring you. And that can be done in a lot of different ways. In theory, if you’re a lawyer and you’re managing this stuff by yourself, your startup mode, yeah, it’s going to be you maybe with a CallRail, maybe with a CRM or something. So if you’re talking about data, it depends on where you are in your journey.

I think it’s a mixture of the right hires, the right roles, the right technology, but there is no one size fits all answers to this. But again, for me, lawyers are so ready to invest money in growth, they’re ready to invest money in operations at their firm, but they’re reluctant to invest in the data function. And I think that that longer term investment pays off a huge dividend. And so I would encourage you to make that investment and that will be something that also we’ll be talking about at the summit. And with that, we are unfortunately out of time. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Lunch Hour Marketing and we hope you’re able to convince your boss to let you go to the summit. Please do like, subscribe and connect with us anywhere you find us, and we’d love to hear from you. If you have questions, topic ideas, please do reach out. Until next time, Ian Conrad for Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Thanks.

Announcer:

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Gyi Tsakalakis :

Oh, I’ve got bad hotel internet. It’s Gyi, with Attorneys Inc. With Bad Hotel Internet.

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