The First Annual LHLM-ys: And the Winner Is

Episode Notes

Transcript

Lunch Hour Legal Marketing

The First Annual LHLM-ys: And the Winner Is

02/12/21

 

[Music]

 

Intro: Welcome to the first annual LHL Emmy Awards.  With your hosts, Conrad Saam, and me, Gyi Tsakalakis.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Conrad, you are looking gorgeous in that tuxedo this evening.  The baby blue really brings out your eyes.

 

Conrad Saam: Thank, Gyi, and you’re looking pretty snazzy yourself. Now, I have to say I’d only ever before imagine you in Hills, but it’s great to see you in real life.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: I’ve been practicing all week and doing a lot of calf raises.

 

Conrad Saam: I can tell, it’s showing.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, we’ve got a great show for you tonight or this afternoon, or whenever you’re listening to this.

 

Conrad Saam: That’s right Gyi.  The Academy of Legal Marketers has voted, and we will be presenting the awards for what is proven to be a monumental year for legal marketing.  Including the winner of our marketer versus marketer competition.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: And to help us celebrate, we’ll be joined by musical guests, Beyonce, some Grateful Dead cover band, and a special poem recitation by the MyPillow Guy.

 

Conrad Saam:  Hey, Gyi, you know those people aren’t actually coming, right?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Wait, what? Now, I’m going to talk to my agent.

 

[Laughter]

 

Conrad Saam: While he clears that up, let’s thank our sponsors.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: First, we’d like to thank our brand-new sponsor, Clio. Clio is cloud-based practice management software, makes it easy to manage your law firm from intake to invoice.  Try it for free at clio.com.  That’s c-l-i-o.com.

 

Conrad Saam: Thank you to LexisNexis InterAction, the leading client relationship management solution purpose built for the way law firms engage with their clients.  Learn more at interaction.com.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: And also thanks to Lawyaw.  Lawyaw provides end-to-end document automation for solo, small, and mid-sized practices.  Save time and avoid mistakes with documents that you draft over and over again.  Learn more at lawyaw.com.  That’s l-a-w-y-a-w.com.

 

Conrad Saam:  Last but not least, thank you to Alert Communications for sponsoring this episode.  If any law firm is looking for call, intake, or retainer services, available 24/7/365. Just call (866) 827-5568.  All right, Gyi, the moment you’ve all been waiting for.  Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats, silence your cell phones, get off Twitter, let’s get to it.  Gyi, what is our first award?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Our first award at the first LHLM-ys is for “Best Legal Tech Acquisition”.  Conrad, the envelope, please.  And the winner is, InfoTrack acquiring “Logical” in the Legal Talk Network.

 

[Applause]

 

Conrad Saam: Now for those of you watching from home, you should know that LTN has a new boss, as does Gyi and myself.  So, we’re looking forward to moving forward into 2021 with one of the newest legal tech acquisitions.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Congratulations.

 

Conrad Saam:  Congratulations to us, right?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis:  Congratulations to everyone involved, and we are by no means pandering to our new bosses.

 

Conrad Saam: We will not pander to our great new bosses, best ever.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Good point, good point.

 

Conrad Saam: Okay, the next award goes to the “Best Unintentional Link Building Campaign”.  Gyi, hand me that envelope.  Now this envelope seems to have been

reviewed by the Federal Government, multiple variants of the Federal Government.  And as I open this up, the winner of the “Best Unintentional Link Building Campaign” goes to the McCloskeys of St. Louis who gained infamy by pointing guns at protesters walking by their mega mansion and in return received a massive, massive volume of links back to their website.  There is no such thing as bad PR in SCR.

 

[Applause]

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Although, Conrad, I got to ask you, did you do any investigation into whether or not those links made them rank for anything?

 

Conrad Saam: I don’t know about the ranking side of things, but are you trying to get me to say domain rank.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: I’m not trying to get you to do anything, man.

 

(00:05:03)

 

Conrad Saam: We’re going to talk about domain rank in the next award. This is a close cousin of the Unintentional Link Building Campaign. This is the “Best Intentional Link Building Campaign”.  Please, Gyi, throw me that envelope.  The “Best Intentional Link Building Campaign” goes to Seattle Law Firm, Harris Bricken, who successfully took two separate blogs on two different domains, pointed those blogs to their firm’s domain and created a domain rank 71 law firm, which puts it really, really at the top of the domain rank, if that’s something you care about, Gyi. Would you like to share your thoughts on this?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well why don’t you tell — or should we cue the applause real quick for Harris Bricken?

 

[Applause]

 

Conrad Saam: Yeah, let’s not — let’s not short change them on the applause there. That’s like a golf clap applause needed.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: It’s a wonderful applause sound. Well, Conrad, why don’t you first tell our dear listeners what this domain — what do you call it domain rank, domain rating?

 

Conrad Saam: Domain rating. So DR, we use —

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: And I will try not to —

 

Conrad Saam: Mock? Interject-ing.  Good thing no one can see your face right now.  So, there are a variety of tools out there that try to poorly — Well, they try to do a great job of measuring the overall authority of a site, and they typically are on a 0-100 scale.  We use Ahrefs.  There’s couple other of those tools out there, but the domain rating is a 0-100 score of the overall link profile of a law firm website.  Now, Gyi, would you like to unveil your snickering and talk about why you think this is a bunch of hui?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, I think you already said wise, bunch of hui.  You know one,

it’s not part of Googles, anything.  Two the people who actually — at least one of the proxy metrics that was created, the inventor of it said, “It doesn’t correlate well with rankings.”  And three for me, and this is the biggest one is — you know most of the firms we work with are local consumer facing practices, right?  So, it’s your local personal injury lawyer, your local bankruptcy lawyers, local criminal defense lawyer.  And getting a link from something like Forbes, which is a high DR — Yey, DR.  How many — what are you going to pay for your high DR site links?

 

Conrad Saam: For my Forbes guest poster?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Right, don’t move the dial in my experience, like a link from say, “Oh, I don’t know a local elementary school, or a local newspaper,” especially when you’re talking about localized links.  So, I would say my focus is on — you know relevance in terms of topics and location.  But you know —

 

Conrad Saam: All right, Gyi, we are getting hushed off the stage, like that acceptance speech that has gone on just too long.  The audience is yawning looking at their watches, wondering whether you stop talking.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Sorry, about that.  You asked?

 

Conrad Saam: I did ask.  But Gyi the next award is the Worst Use of Social Media.  Here’s the envelope.  Who is the winner of the Worst Use of Social Media?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: The winner for Worst Use of Social Media, attorney Lin Wood for his great use of Twitter.

 

[Applause]

 

Conrad Saam: Did he say, “great” here?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, it’s “worst use”.

 

Conrad Saam: Okay, fair enough. “The Greatest Worst Use of Social”.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Getting banned from Twitter.

 

Conrad Saam: He’s in good company, isn’t he?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: These are not the views of Legal Talk Network or Conrad or Gyi. Someone handed us a random script to read.

 

Conrad Saam: All right while we regale in the awesomeness of this evening. Gyi and I are going to go munch on some sushi that’s being passed around, but you guys are going to listen to the advertisements.

 

[Music]

 

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[Music]

 

 

(00:10:04)

 

Conrad Saam: All right everyone, welcome back to the first annual LHLM-ys.  Please take your seats, and we’re going to open on the award for America’s Most Public Lawyer Meltdown, along with a side nod to the worst stress.  Gyi, the envelope, please.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Here you go.

 

Conrad Saam: Anyone surprised at this one. Everyone knew who is going to win this one.  The Most Public Lawyer Meltdown this year goes to — and by the way, this may — I’m not sure this will ever be bested, Mr. Rudy Giuliani using the word “meltdown” quite literally.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: For our next award — this is a special one, it has close meaning to our hearts because it is the award for the “Best Contest Submission”.  So, as those that are listening, recall, we asked lawyers at large to submit their best example of legal marketing, or worst example, or whatever they wanted to submit.  And this is the winner of the “Best Submissions”.  Conrad, the envelope, please.

 

Conrad Saam: Here you go, Gyi.  I’m sitting at the edge of my seat.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: And the Winning Submission goes to attorney, Mike Morse and his masked man video, which we are going to play, and Conrad and I are going to kind of voice over this as we go and describe what we’re seeing.

 

[Music]

 

It’s black and white.

 

Conrad Saam: All right, this is a good retro feel.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Mike’s in a mask.  There’s a girl with some balloons, the balloons are up in the air.  Mike’s running up the stairs, he gets the balloons.  He’s got the balloons.  Little girl has the balloons, she’s running, Mike’s following her.  There’s a dog.  Mike’s still running, he gets the dog.  The dog got away from the woman, so he’s helping.  Now he’s helping someone recover their lost wallet.  Mike is all about helping.

 

Conrad Saam: Mike is very Lone Ranger-ish, very retro.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: This is Mike’s mom.  The backpacks, which actually is a nod to another campaign that he did, which is really quite impressive.  Settlement check for the injured, of course.  So, congratulations to the Mike Morse Law firm.  Thank you for the submission and your creativity.  You can check out the ad for yourself on Mike’s YouTube channel.  He actually has a bunch of very creative ads up there that are both — some are web — made for web some, some made for tv.  But if you want some inspiration on creativity, check out Mike Morse Law Firm on YouTube.

 

Conrad Saam: Gyi, why is it so important. I mean this does not look like every other law firm ad.  It’s just very, very counter to what you typically see.  Why do we care?  Why did this win?  Why did the Academy of all the thousands of submissions, why did they pull this one out?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Outside of the box, right?  You know how many times — well, I don’t watch a ton of daytime TV, but lawyers love to advertise on daytime TV, especially personal injury lawyers.  And if you watch them, they’re all basically doing the same thing.  Stuffs blowing up behind them, they’re fighting hard, they’re angry, they’re talking about how hard they fight.  This one really much more creative.  There’s an artistic appeal to it, and it’s through the lens of you know helping, right?  So, instead of this aggressive trial attorney who’s just fighting, and trying to hammer the insurance companies, he’s out there helping people, helping the little girl with the balloons, helping the woman recover her dog, helping the guy who lost his wallet.  So, totally different angle.  Kudos to Mike and his team for putting this together, and thank you so much for submitting it.  And for those interested, we’ll also put a link in the show notes, so you can watch this for yourself and be the judge.  And of course, as always, we encourage your feedback.  So, love this, hate this, please do.  Tweet at us at #LHLM.

 

Our next award is for “Best Use of Search Data in a TV ad”.  Conrad, the envelope, please.

 

Conrad Saam: There you are, Gyi.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: And the winner is the Bernstein Law Firm and they have a very creative website ad, and we’ll roll that now for you.

 

[Music Playing]

 

[Ad]

 

callsam.com is Michigan’s most visited personal injury website.  If you’ve been injured, help is always just a call or click away, 24 hours a day.  Michigan’s number one personal injury website, that’s the Bernstein advantage.

 

Conrad Saam: The most visited, I like that.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Most visited.  So, you know this one, I actually wrote about this, and we’ll put a link to that, quick write up.

 

(00:15:02)

 

I saw this ad on television.  Very well-known — an institution in Michigan, the Bernstein Law Firm.  Very strong brand and presence, great lawyers, great tradition, great family law firm, but it really struck me when I saw it on TV.  I was like, “They’re saying they’re the most visited personal injury website.”  So one, creative because it’s going to drive clicks, right?  People are going to be like, “Oh they’re talking about their website.”

 

So, you know in a multi-screen world, someone is watching that TV ad, it’s going to make them prompt them to go, “Look at the website.  Why is this website

number one?  What’s so special about it?  So, that’s smart.  You know opportunities for retargeting all of that other kind of stuff we talked about, internet marketing.  But then I was like, “Wait a minute, how do they know this?  What’s this data based on?  And so, if you go to the end, and again we’ll put this in the show notes, and you look at the disclaimer at the end of the ad.  It’s very specific that their claim — because you know you got to have objectively verifiable stuff to pass State Bar Muster is based on — they say Google Analytics data in two specific months of SEM rush data, and I was like, “Wow.  Look at them using SEMrush in their TV creative.”

 

Conrad Saam: Also Google Analytics data which presumably they do not have access to any other lawyer in Michigan, right?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Right.

 

Conrad Saam: The other question, just to clarify here, Gyi, and I have another thought, but like, Gyi, what is SEMrush?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: So, SEMrush is a search nerd tool that does things like, you know it checks your website, it tracks rankings, but they collect data.  They try to model data across a variety of sources to try to like do what Google Analytics does.  So, it’s not Google Analytics, not actually tracking website traffic.  They try to show like competitive landscape.  You can go read about — honestly, in Russia’s website how it all works.  But the thing is that I found really interesting too when I decided to do this, of course I wanted to go see, “Is that right?”  And the data does support it.  But here’s the interesting thing, and it’s not surprising in hindsight, but when you think of the “Most Visited Personal Injury Website,” you know search people think, “Oh, well they rank for like personal injury lawyer and car accidentally,” and all the stuff.  But if you filter out the brand keywords in SEMrush, you’ll actually see its brand is what’s driving it.  And so that’s another part of this story, and I think that’s part of their strategy and getting kudos to their marketing people and their approach to this, but they’re building brand, right?  In fact, they’ve got a popular billboard that’s just 1-800 and a picture of one of the lawyers there.

 

So, like that’s how well-branded they are here, and people are searching on that.  And so that demand for brand, that’s something that I think is — we could do a whole show about demand generation, but they do a really, really good job of that.  However, when you filter out the brand queries, you see a whole different competitive landscape.  And so, you know you might be inclined to think, “Oh, they’re driving all this personal injury traffic,” but really it’s brand traffic.

 

Conrad Saam: So, this is the other thing and now I’m going to get dragged off the stage for going on too long about something, but the other thing that comes to mind for me is there’s a fallacious correlation in people’s minds between the quality of a law firm, and how well you rank in Google, right?  How many times a month do people complain to you about like, “Hey, Google doesn’t know who I am, but I’m a much better attorney than those guys.”  I hear that every single day, but that you have to realize, like there is a very simple-minded connecting of the dots among many people.  They’re like, “Hey, if Google thinks this is a great pizza then it must be a great pizza, right?

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Definitely.

 

Conrad Saam: The next award. This is a revolutionary award, this is the Best App, not just a legal app but the Best Use of an App in the Practice of Law.  Gyi, the envelope, please.  The Best Legal App, not just legal submitted by Kelsey Johnson goes to Calendly.  The reason the Academy has selected Calendly is this might be the one single thing that is most revolutionary in the practice of law for those who are employing it, because a well-used Calendly app stops that prospect from searching when they’re talking to your intake specialist, but they actually can’t talk to an attorney at that time because you can get that time booked on the lawyer’s calendar for tomorrow morning.  And that means that that searcher is much less likely to continue looking for another lawyer.

 

Now, this came in.  This is a very heated competition, there were submissions for many intake management softwares, but the ubiquity of Calendly helped push them over the edge to be the final winner.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: And I’m biased, I’m a Calendly user myself, and wow what a difference it makes when you don’t have to go back and forth with your availabilities, right? You just give somebody a link, it syncs up with their calendar too, they can pick when it’s convenient for them.  Talk about reducing friction for scheduling meetings, especially in the remote world that we’re in.  It integrates with Zoom.  So, boom, you drop the link, you get the scheduled meeting, you got an embedded zoom link, all right in your calendar, done.  Good job, Calendly.

 

Conrad Saam: Good job.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Thanks, Kelsey.

 

(00:20:02)

 

Conrad Saam: And before we get to the award you’ve all been waiting for the Marketer Marketer Awards.  We’re going to end on a sour note with the Worst Abuse of Technology Award.  Gyi, please hand me the festering, rotted envelope that contains the winner of the Worst Abuse of Technology.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Let me pull this right out of the toilet.

 

Conrad Saam: Okay, the Worst Abuse of Technology goes to everyone including the agencies and lawyers involved, spamming the crap out of the local results for car accident in California.  There happens to be many law firms with many, many, many offices, sprinkled across every little hamlet in California.  We don’t like you guys.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis:  And we called out California, because it’s particularly egregious there.  But I got to tell you, even when I was doing the research on the — one of these previous awards, just looking at a local pack for even around me, it was like four of the top five were spamming the local pack.  And I was like — and this was just — this was not — this was just off the cuff, no research or anything, it’s just like — and also shame on Google for not fixing this problem, right?  I know you can’t say anything about Google, but I’ll say it for you.

 

Conrad Saam: Well, what we should say here is, now that they’re collecting things like licensing information, they may be able to make a slightly better assessment as to whether or not those offices are actually there.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Let’s see, if they do that.

 

Conrad Saam: Just throwing that out there.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Just a suggestion that we have never brought up to Google before.

 

Conrad Saam: Well, ads and organic, they don’t talk to each other.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: That is true.

 

Conrad Saam: All right, now as the moment that you’ve all been waiting for comes closer, we’re going to take a small break, so you can collect your thoughts

and we will be back with the winner of the Marketer to Marketer showdown.

 

[Music]

 

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[Music]

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: And welcome back from the break.  So this is the big grand finale for those that have been listening, you know that we entered into this competitive “Marketer versus Marketer” competition in which Conrad and I went out and tried to get people to subscribe to the podcast.  Now, we’ll go through some of the details of this.  I even want to do that.  Give me the stupid envelope, Conrad.

 

Conrad Saam: Here’s the cute envelope.  There’s a big check in here, by the way, I think.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Congratulations to this year’s winner of Marketer versus Marketer, Conrad Saam.

 

[Applause]

 

Conrad, how did you do it?

 

Conrad Saam: Gyi, thank you. I would like to thank my competitors, the people who taught me my craft, and especially, Ezekiel, who’s in Czechoslovakia, spamming the crap out of the results.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Oh also you should be paying some mind to your Haro, person De Bayes(ph) whatever.

 

Conrad Saam: Well that’s, that went through to Czechoslovakia.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Oh, okay. Yeah.

 

Conrad Saam: So, there were a couple of things that we did on this, and I wanted to kind of showcase how easy it is.  The reason I bring up the cheating right off the bat is because I want you guys to — I want to demonstrate just how easy it is for us to lie to you about how well we’re doing.  And I think it’s really important that you take your agency’s self-reported metrics with a grain of salt and start getting some accountability.  You guys should have your own accountability for evaluating whether or not your agency is doing a good job and stop listening to their reports, because it’s so easy to cheat in everything that we do to make ourselves look good.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, it’s a really good point, and you know using that same vein, here’s the thing that doesn’t lie, open case files, new clients, legitimate qualified leads.

 

(00:25:05)

 

And so, you can work your way back from those.  But you know seeing things like — you know in our case, which we’ll go through clicks to an embed, opening the player, not that valuable to actually subscribers on the show.  And in fact, when we corroborated this with downloads of the show, no correlation — Conrad, you can go through the strategy here and talk kind of what happened here.

 

Conrad Saam: Yeah.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: But it didn’t correlate to more subscribers for us, although it looked pretty good in the report.

 

Conrad Saam: It looked great in the reports.  And so, what we did just because I wanted A to win and B to make my point, I took two very different strategies. One, which was frankly delightfully boring. That was actually effective, we generated

a bunch of lessons from that, and that’s where we put 98% of our dollars went to actually advertising, very boring, Facebook content. This is Gyi and Conrad talking about an episode. We were playing on an audience that we already which was really helpful, and we were frankly cashing in on the brand recognition between Gyi and Conrad to people who already knew us to drive people to listen to the podcast. And that was actually effective wasn’t it? In terms of getting people to listen.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Generate a lot of clicks too, the session, so that’s another thing we should point out, and this is again back to this idea of tracking the right metrics. The traffic to the pages we drove to was through the roof. But what happened was people were getting there, and they either weren’t playing the episode or they weren’t clicking through to subscribe to it. And so again, clicks are meaningless unless they can be tied back to that key performance metric that you’re trying to achieve.

 

Conrad Saam: And that’s really, really important. And Gyi, if one of our listeners has a case where you’re driving a lot of clicks but it doesn’t seem like a lot of what I will call real conversions, you need to start thinking about landing page optimization testing, you need to wonder.  Is there is there something about my site?  Is there something about my page that’s not working well, right?  And start thinking about, what can I do to convert 1.2 percent of the people, can I make that 1.3 and 1.4 and doing that scientifically becomes really, really important.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: And the other thing there, that I think is important that you alluded to is making sure all the — everything is working, right? Because –so how many times have you seen where it’s like, “Oh, the script’s wrong on the call tracking number,” or, “A form’s broken,” or whatever it is.  Another thing I think was a good thing to share on this, we talked about — I wrote about this recently too but Facebook’s library tool — ad library tool, you can actually see what your competitors are — what ads they’re running on Facebook.  So, in fact during this contest, I was curious like, “What kind of — Conrad, talked about his llama whatever — what was your llama supposed to be doing?

 

Conrad Saam: We were going to — What I’ve originally wanted to do was to have absurd creative verse boring creative and see what happens.  So, my original plan was to get just a picture of Conrad and Gyi and our very kind of well-dressed faces — well-dressed faces?  Well-dressed with just our faces is what I meant to say.  And then I wanted to do something like ridiculous like a llama with headphones, smoking a joint or something, and see whether or not —

 

[Laughter]

 

There we go, the Billy Crystal laughs — laugh track.  To see what would happened, right? And see how they would perform.  And the reason for doing things really, really fundamentally differently is, if we just did a like a Conrad versus Gyi, and the results are probably going to be fairly similar, or maybe they wouldn’t be and in which case if we did like say, you know Conrad versus Beyonce maybe the results would be very different.  But like you need things that are very, very different creative, it’s very, very different to start to identify nuances between them.  And so, what we actually ended up realizing was that the boring creative that we started with was performing pretty well at driving clicks.  And as I was watching the score card, I was like, “Oh, we’re ahead.  Let’s not shuffle the deck here because we’re winning.”  So, we kept the boring, but it worked.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. And again, regardless of whether you’re actually going to do advertising on Facebook, I think it’s worth your time for competitive inspiration, competitive intelligence, see what the other firms in your area are doing. Go type their firm name or whatever their Facebook pages into the Facebook ads library, and it’ll show you all the active ads they’re running.  And for some firms like some of these bigger national firms, they actually run political ads, and there’s certain ad categories that Facebook will even show inactive ads, so you can get like their whole history active and inactive ads.  And so, again good competitive intelligence but even if you want to see like content ideas regardless of whether you’re going to be doing anything on Facebook.  I think that there’s some good inspiration in there to take a look at.

 

Conrad Saam: Yeah.  No, it’s great stuff.  And so because we’re all running a business, Gyi and we need to be thinking about things like cost pers, and maybe even ROI.  One of the things we did start looking at was the cost per listen, right?

 

(00:30:02)

 

How much did it cost for us to gain a user, and you can then arbitrage that in in our world as to whether or not that makes sense to drive more revenue from the sponsors, right?  And so, this this is all just really, really basic business, but once you know what your conversion is, and Gyi’s point was really, really valid, you need to know that this is a real client, you need to know that this is a prospect.  It’s not the pizza guy delivering pizza who’s counting as a lead from your self-reported marketing agency, but get down to what is our cost per real inquiry, what is our cost per intake qualified lead.  The other thing that we learned on this process here, free works, right? Gyi, use your free audience and that drove a bunch of listens and I did too.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, in fact for even though I was the loser, the overwhelming majority of the plays, the valuable metrics that I was tracking were generated through organic channels.  And I’ll tell you, it was LinkedIn, some of the LinkedIn groups that I’m in, some of the Facebook groups that I’m in, and our email list, which is — you know it’s an opt-in email list for people interested in legal marketing.  So again, I think that that is an important part of the story here is that this organic stuff really, really works, but you’ve got to follow all those things that we talked about when you talk about inbound marketing.  You’ve got to actually develop, have something that people want to listen to, you’ve got to have some relationships already built up, but once you do that — You know, the cost of that was the time it took me to put the UTM parameters on the URL, and post it in one of these groups.  But again, I say this, I think this is another point that we are constantly harping on this show is, it’s not about just link dropping everywhere, right?  You’ve got to actually come up with some messaging around and give people a reason, like what’s the value there, why would they actually be interested in, it gives them a little tease or something like that, but it can work.  And so again, if you’re on a limited budget and you are looking for ways to meet new people and grow relationships and grow professional contacts, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Groups, Facebook, Facebook Groups.  And the other great thing is, is like people are asking for lawyer recommendations, there’s lawyer to lawyer referrals, other professional non-lawyer professional groups.  It’s a great source.  It can be a great source of new business for lawyers.

 

Conrad Saam: Yeah, and the key here, Gyi, as you alluded to, you need the audience and it takes time and genuine engagement.  And that’s something that no agency can fake for you.  Like it just takes your engagement.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, this concludes the first ever LHLM-ys.  Hopefully, the first in many.  As always if you enjoyed this show, if you enjoyed this episode, please do review us.  If you clicked on one of Conrad’s wonderful ads, please let us know #LHLM on Twitter or whatever social media, or you can feel free to message us or contact the good folks at LTN, we’d love to hear from you.

 

Conrad Saam: Yeah, we want to know why you clicked on that ad, right? If you’re a first time listener to the pod and you came here because of the ad, we want to hear from you because that’s — that is the insight that we’d like to bring.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: Unless of course Conrad paid you to click the ad.

 

Conrad Saam: Goodbye everyone.  It is time for us to head home.  The clock is about to strike midnight and Gyi’s crystal slipper is just about to fall off.

 

Gyi Tsakalakis: This dress is really riding up

 

[Music]

 

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