How To Do Social Media Marketing the Right Way

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad, I’m looking at our rundown for this week’s episode and it says, keep it fun, personal, and loose. And so I figured I’d ask you, how is your 4th of July been?

Conrad Saam:

Do you mean the very last 4th of July in the history of the United States of America?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What do you mean?

Conrad Saam:

Well, we’ll see how the Supreme Court’s recent decisions, not just decision, seems to impact where we are at 12 months from now. But boy does it not look good. But congrats to the legal community for finally Debarring, Rudy Giuliani, at least in the state of New York.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, in addition to the end of America, Conrad, what are we talking about this week?

Conrad Saam:

So you’ll recall those eager regular listeners will recall. Last episode, I was very excited to not talk about Google this episode. We are constraining Google just to the news where there is a lot to talk about, but we’re then going to talk about social media marketing for lawyers outside of the PI context, criminal defense and family. And secondly, we’re going to talk about oversharing. You and I are accused of oversharing quite a lot, but we’re going to talk about how you unwittingly overshare your data with your marketing vendors.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Lockwood, let’s go.

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:

All right everyone, welcome to Lunch Hour. Legal Marketing, the summer edition. We are in full swing doing lots of barbecues. We’re going to start this section with the news. I have to believe that was written by John Souza. There must have been lots of John Souza listened to during your 4th of July small town marches. I hope I don’t know that I’m right about that. Perhaps someone can correct us. So Gyi, we have done a ton of news coming out of Mountain View, starting with as of right now, a failure of Google Search Console. What’s going on with GSC?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Gosh, I hope they fixed this by the time this episode has dropped. But at the time of recording, we’re about 81 hours in to no update on search console data. And gosh, that makes our job more challenging.

Conrad Saam:

You were a big fan of Google Search Console data. You use this very, very regularly from an SEO perspective.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Fan is strong, but it does give you some very valuable data, especially in terms of impressions. And it’s a data point check on average position. It’s huge for segmenting query data between Google business profile and your regular website. So it does a lot of lifting and a lot of context in the grand scheme of things. You can adjust your data for three days of a hole, but if this persists or if it’s something more fundamental going on with search console, this could be a big problem. But we never like to see that. I mean, think about it. What if analytics went down? What about when CallRail goes down? Do you pause ads when CallRail goes down for three days? It’s that kind of bad to me.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, speaking of Google and that kind of bad reports of volatility, talk to me about search volatility and what’s been going on there.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, nod to bury at a search engine roundtable covering the volatility over the 28th and 29th weekend basically showing a lot of volatility from rank tracking tools. And look, I’ll say I’ve seen some volatility even in our SERPs that we monitor now. Is this short term, is this the result of some kind of impact from these June spam update TBD? Still early to say, but there’s a lot of movement in the SERPs right now.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, and speaking of the SERPs, you and I have been talking a lot and everyone is talking a lot about AI and some interesting data. We talked about how there were some really bad results, especially in legal coming out of ai. And outside of legal, you’ll remember the how do I make my pizza better, put some glue on it so it doesn’t fall off. That was one of the examples. But what we’re seeing now is searches delivering AI results down to about 9% when that really kind of was much more pervasive. And the second thing, and this came and we’ve been talking way too much about Rand Fishkin, but here he comes back again, an interesting article published by Ran Fishkin, the no longer an SEO, talking about SEO, that zero click searches are around 59%, meaning people are finding their information directly within the SERPs and not clicking through to your website. The takeaway from that was if you’re only tracking activity once it gets to your site, you’re missing a lot of really, really important data. We also have a launch from one of our good friends. Gyi, you want to share what Ryan’s been up to?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, Ryan McKean announced his launch of Best era. I think he’s got a really great perspective and written a great offering. He’s open to a Slack community up. So go check that out. Want to wish Ryan the best? And folks, if you’re getting started or have questions about the intersection of law practice and business and running a law practice, think Ryan’s a great resource to get to know Conrad. You were recently on Charlie Mann’s podcast. They don’t teach that in law school, and I thought Charlie did a great job of getting you animated. What did you guys talk about?

Conrad Saam:

So those of you who are loyal listeners to LHLM, you’ve probably had enough of Conrad, but if you want to hear me go off a little further, GH is actually the instigator who fed Charlie a bunch of things that he knows pisses me off. We talked about all sorts of vendor shenanigans and kind of how to market in a very spam filled world. He also got me going, and this was directly your fault, GH, by talking about ROI. So it’s great opportunity to, if you want to hear more of me, I can’t imagine that’s the case, but if you do check out his pod. Charlie’s been in business for a year now, so congrats on hitting the annual mark. Well played.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Let’s take a break. And we’re back. And we wanted to cover a question we got on LinkedIn from David Boyle. Thank you David for submitting the question. We love answering questions directly from folks who might listen to Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing. David asked, what is the best vehicle for social media advertising, Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, et cetera, and what percentage of ad budget should that be of total ad spend, criminal defense and family law practice, not pi, where clients don’t need money to pay Conrad? What a great question. What do you think?

Conrad Saam:

So I love that he’s politely calling us out for talking about PI too much, which

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Is a very fair and constructive critique.

Conrad Saam:

A hundred percent valid. And I’m going to parlay that shift into part of the answer. And part of the answer to your question is where is that audience and what does the audience look like? And so from a social media perspective, you specifically said family and criminal law. And I’m going to suggest probably fallaciously, this is probably not an absolute, but those audiences are very, very fundamentally different. The question that Gyi and I receive whenever we talk to family law attorneys, I would like to get more qualified leads. And when you say what does qualified leads mean? The answer is always it’s people who can afford me, which basically mean people who have enough assets to make hiring a lawyer worthy when splitting up those assets. And so you’re looking for a income demographic with criminal defense is different. And I’m not necessarily saying that white collar crime doesn’t happen. In fact, we started this segment with Rudy Giuliani who

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Uses meta to find a lawyer,

Conrad Saam:

He’s going to need to start looking for a lawyer. The irony that is a great referral channel, more referrals from the political lawyers. Okay, sorry, I digress. My point being, these audiences are generally fundamentally different. And so I think you need to think about two things. Number one, where is your audience? So from a social media perspective, your audience is fundamentally different on the family law versus criminal perspective. And I’ll use one client that we specifically work with who is looking for high net worth individuals and they’re doing a lot of their just basic, I’m out here through LinkedIn. And the other thing that you can do, and it’s more pervasive, you specifically said social media and I really, really would like to avoid talking about Mountain View, but the ability for you to target your ads geographically at very, very targeted levels geographically through pay per-click, and by targeting geographically you typically can target by income is something that is very, very effective or can be very effective from a pay per-click perspective. So again, I promise not talking about Google and here I am talking about people.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And again, I would just add to that because asking social media advertising. So to your point, one, you want to be on platforms that obviously match your demographic, but two, you want to be using platforms that allow you to target in ways that can help you zero in on that target demographic. And not every platform has the same tools at your disposal for targeting.

Conrad Saam:

So one of the things that I think you need to think about when we talk about channels, Gyi was talking about targeting. I think one of the channels to throw out is retargeting specifically to family. And this is where the nuances at practice areas becomes really, really important. Retargeting in family is a really, really bad idea because if I’m thinking quietly of leaving my terrible spouse and we share a home computer, it’s very easy for those ads to start popping up when you don’t want them to. And so that can be extremely problematic. And so there are lots of platforms that limit family law, for example on their retargeting ads, but not all of them do. I would not assume that you should do retargeting just because you can. That is a very, very bad idea and you’re going to do more harm than good. So that for me is something I would really, really think about carefully in retargeting. So family law, it’s often a long purchase cycle at the risk of using a ghost word to talk about family law, it’s a long consideration. And so retargeting sounds like something that should really work, but you got to be really, really careful with that. The other

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Thing that I think is worth noting is because so far, if I’m David, I might say you guys are kind of dodging the question. I’m trying to ask you which platforms I should be on. And I guess what I would kind of push back on is the question as it’s phrased is not really the right question. To Conrad’s point is really much more about who the audience is, what your brand is really matters because the ads that are going to work to draw attention and then what kind of attention they’re drawing, the effectiveness of the ads is highly dependent on the messaging and this is why it matters. Thinking about your brand, what you’re trying to put out into the world, who you’re trying to attract, all those things have to be in alignment. And that should start to tell you also about what your creative strategy is across platforms, especially from an ad perspective because you might have a way of doing business that it doesn’t really work from a social ad perspective.

On the other hand, we know plenty of both criminal defense as well as family lawyers that are doing really, really well with social advertising. So anyway, the easy thing to say is, okay, go match up your target audiences and see where there’s the biggest overlap with the platform and then think about how to spend money across those platforms. But it’s not as simple as that. And frankly, thinking about it like channel platform, I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem like that’s a deep enough analysis about understanding the connections between your position, the target audience, your pricing, a bunch of other things that go into play about, because the right part of the question is as you get into what percentage of ad budget, what percentage of total spend, and again, I would say this and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this, but you better have dual source, multi-source attribution set up so that you can actually see like, Hey, how did you hear about us?

Oh, Facebook, right? Because I am against this pure, oh, just the rising brand rises all ships kind of thing. There are some things you can do to validate that your social media spend is accountable for something certainly leading indicators, but honestly even qualified consultations, in my opinion. We see it in our own data. You’ve got to be asking those questions. But anyway, I’m ranting. Yes, choosing the platforms matters. It has to be in front of a place where your audience is, but how you actually create the campaign, do the targeting, the messaging, whether it’s nurture or direct response or brand building, all those things, that’s where you have to start doing the work, not on just pure on a platform, but let’s move on from that and move into how do you start thinking about how much of your total budget should be spending on this stuff?

Conrad Saam:

So I’m going to go back to, we have talked about this framework many times and I’ve kind of stuck with this. I think you need to think about how you allocate your profit to tomorrow’s revenue. That’s the whole point of this. And your profitability is going to be negatively impacted by how aggressively you want to grow. That is how marketing works. And you can do things that will generate direct response business right away. You can do things that will generate brand awareness or ideally brand affinity over time, but that is all in the future. And so I would again, go back and this is overly simplistic, but we’ve shared this many, many times. If you want to keep the lights on and you’re very happy being who you are, and you can generate most of your business from referrals, sure, put 5% zero to 5% of your revenue into marketing and you’ll be a more firm from a percentage perspective overall.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But how do you think about it specifically respect to social ads?

Conrad Saam:

To social ads.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Let’s say I’m with you. Let’s say I’m like, look, I’m on board, I want to invest in my future, yada yada yada. This is where I’m trying to go. Got we come up with some dollars, some real money we’re going to put against it. Yep. How do you think about social ads in this media mix?

Conrad Saam:

Okay, so I think you need to answer one very specific question around that before you understand what your overall spend should be. The question is how much of my social advertising is direct response and how much of it is brand building or brand affinity building? And you need to look at those fundamentally differently.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes,

Conrad Saam:

The answer to the direct response question and by direct response means I see the ad or I do the query and then see the ad, I’m ready to buy the pencil or the whatever it might be. And so you are trying to get yourself in front of those people in social. That’s not impossible and it does happen, but it is less common as a percentage of the overall social spend. But for those advertisements and for those channels where you are thinking about things as a direct response vehicle in a wreck, get a check. Sorry, I am going back to PI as my example here, but you get my point. You want to hire the lawyer right now. You need to look at your, what am I willing to spend in order to acquire that customer? Is it 20% of the value of the customer? Is it 5% of the value of the customer? If I’m in criminal defense or family, what does that look like? That can be because it’s direct response, a moving target that you can try and nail over time if you have good reporting.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And what of the total market share do you think direct response social ads plays for family and criminal defense? So if you had to pick, do you think that what I’m trying to get at is what are your thoughts on directionally, how big of the piece of the total pie is direct response social ads?

Conrad Saam:

Less than 20%,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Probably less. I was probably, I was going to say like

Conrad Saam:

Five, say probably less than 10%, maybe three. Yeah. So where I got caught up on this is I think that’s from an effectiveness perspective, it’s probably less than 10%. I think a lot of people view it

Gyi Tsakalakis:

As a direct response channel. Some people I think are all in, yeah, they’re all in on just social ads

Conrad Saam:

As the direct response channel, but they’re wrong because that’s not how it works. In many cases,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And I know there are people listening to this that are like, these guys are wrong. We do direct response social ads, we want to hear from you, but my hunch is the same from an effectiveness standpoint and not so much as a knock on direct response social ads, but in where the real magic happens is, like you said, it’s the brand building. And so anyway, this is a long about way to get to trying to come back to this original question of, so look, social direct response ads, they’re not going to make a big part of your budget personally, that’s just my view of it because there’s so many other places to spend more effective dollars in my view. But to Conrad’s point, if I’m looking at this, I’d be like, look, we got to attach a cost per acquisition to direct response social ads, and you can segment that by platform and yada, yada, yada. And ultimately for direct response, you should be tying it all the way back to the multiple that you made on the dollar spent. That’s exactly right. Anyway, so that’s direct response brand is tricky. Now. So what do you think about brand? How do you think about attaching some kind of leading indicator that we should continue to spend this money on brand? What looking at, so

Conrad Saam:

This becomes much more difficult because it is less direct, right? It is less linear, it is harder to tie the dots together. However, we’ve talked about brand awareness and brand affinity. I do believe that done right with the right creative, whether that’s gross and tasteless as Gyi was alluding to earlier or clever and community involvement, and I love puppies on the other end, there are, I’ll say this as an absolute, I cannot come up with a better marketing channel to build brand awareness and brand affinity from a cost effectiveness perspective as social media. I just can’t a hundred

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Percent.

Conrad Saam:

And if you get your positioning and your messaging and then you use spend to amplify that positioning messaging to people with whom that resonates, which is exactly what social media does done correctly, I can’t come up with a better vehicle.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So I agree with you. How do you measure it?

Conrad Saam:

Okay, and you measure it over the long term with dual source attribution modeling. What is that? And it is two things. Number one, you’re going to use automagic reporting to identify where that person was their last click. Did they click on an ad? Was it an SEO query? What was that? But we’re also going to ask them how they heard about us. And over time, and I’ve said this over and over again, over time, if you do this process and you go through the data and by you, I’m really talking to the person at the firm who can make decisions. I’m not talking about Billy the intern fluky who is doing a project during college. I’m talking about someone who can get really deep in terms of what you’re doing. Your COO is getting deep in this. Your CMO is getting deep in this, the managing partner’s making these decisions, getting deep in this to understand that you know what?

People really like that adopt a puppy thing that we did, or they really like the fact that we support women in the community, or they really like the fact that we are all over the Turkey trot or that we hate Ohio State or whatever it might be. You’re going to only learn that by asking the question. And the other thing that happens is most of the time this is multitouch, so it’s not one thing, it’s rarely one thing that actually works. Although you know what? Gyi, some of those really tasteless campaigns on social on, I think of TikTok specifically, but it’s not just TikTok. They’re single channel. I’m just going to flood TikTok with a bunch of absolutely insane things about criminal defense stories or I’m going to flood TikTok about my insight into celebrity divorces, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I just want to make sure that we’re driving this point home that part of this analysis is going to be, because again, I’m trying to get back to answering the question. Okay, so now we’ve said, all right, look, your social ads budget, it’s probably for direct response is going to make up a very small part of your total budget. It’s even going to make it probably a small part of your paid social ad budget. Then you’ve got this brand part that’s going to make the larger chunk of that social ad budget. We’re going to track it with dual source attribution. So we should see Facebook, I watched your Facebook video, we see this in our, let’s put, we serve you from Facebook, even though quantitative attribution, we’ll say they did a search on our name or something. So it’s in the mix. So maybe it’s not a direct, like you might eventually assign a cost per that includes Facebook.

You might say, Hey, look, show me a report on all of our clients or all of our qualified consultations where Facebook was referenced. That’s an easy thing to look into. So that’s just trying to tie it together for folks, a leading indicator that might be a good way to kind of correlate or hold accountable some of your media dollars. But the thing that I wanted to get to is in answering this question, it’s still going to come back to the same place that we always come to, which is I would keep spending more as long as it’s meeting those business metrics. And so what percentage of your ad budget should it be? I’m like, I have no idea out of the gate. I’d be diversified. I’d probably, honestly, again, you’re talking about, you got to have the conversation about when’s this going to start to pay off? Because to your point, this is not the same as direct response, so you got to put some timelines against it. But my answer would be keep investing in the channel as long as that you’re validating that it’s meeting whatever that leading indicator of success is. And frankly, I bet you it ends up justifying itself even from brand campaigns over a year, two years, three years, even from a cost per acquisition target where Facebook is mentioned or whatever platforms mentioned.

Conrad Saam:

Speaking of platforms, when we come back, we’re going to talk about how some of the platforms and some of the vendors have a better view into your digital marketing success than you do, and they do that through pixel tracking.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Favorite podcast, five stars, Gyi and Conrad are brilliant marketers who always have the best insights on all things SEO and branding. I love the new episode artwork too. So fun. Dolores, Rachel, Dolores, thank you so, so much. I have to imagine Conrad personally or something to write such a nice words about us. And for those of everybody else listening, please do go drop a review and rate us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, wherever you like to listen to Lunch, Hour, Legal Marketing, and subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel, which we’re really obviously trying to drive home. Also find us on LinkedIn. That’s where I find myself the most of the time. So see you there.

Conrad Saam:

Gyi, our next segment starts off with a question from our mastermind group, and I believe this came from Dylan. The question was, and we had a long discussion on this, should I install the iHeartRadio pixel on my website? What do you think,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad? Why don’t you tell everyone what the iHeartRadio pixel is first?

Conrad Saam:

Alright, fair question. As you may imagine, the iHeartRadio Pixel is something you install on your website from iHeartRadio that they use for their reporting to convince you that the money you’re spending on radio is worthwhile. Gyi, would you install the iHeartRadio pixel on your site?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, if that’s all that it’s doing, probably not. If it’s not actually informing my media buying strategy, and there’s not some value to me beyond just reporting, because look, you can still measure your web traffic and then do post logs from radio station. There’s all sorts of tools to do that kind of stuff. And look, thar, this is not casting Spurgeon our heart. Lots of platforms do this. In fact, I would guess, I’m trying to think of a platform that doesn’t have some kind of tracking on it. We’ll get into that. But to Conrad’s point, and what he’s healthily skeptical of is that iHeart might be using that conversion pixel data to decide on what they charge you for advertising on radio, right? Conrad,

Conrad Saam:

Wow, that’s not where I was going with iHeartRadio, but I like the aspersions. You’re casting on the industry, but your point is well taken. What they really look at is like, and we just talked about direct response. This is kind of direct response as it pertains to radio. They’ll basically be like, Hey, we ran your segment and we’re looking at this timestamp and we’re looking for an increase to your traffic. That coincides with that radio segment that is as close as you can get to direct response.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, and frankly, you could take it a step further and say, we got phone calls in this window

Conrad Saam:

And this timeframe, which would be conversion tracking,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? Yeah. You could take it all the way to conversions,

Conrad Saam:

And so that is doable. My take, and you led me to this because you knew what I was going to say. My concern with vendors having access to your success metrics, and by the way, Gyi and I are both vendors who have gone to great lengths to have access to your success metrics. So let’s call that out for what it is,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And I think we should spend the back half of this segment talking about that. Why is it okay to give Conrad and Gyi access to this versus some other providers? But again, so what are the issues here? What are the issues with oversharing?

Conrad Saam:

Okay, there are a couple of issues. Number one, you brought this up early on, is pricing. And I’ll throw GUI and Conrad under the bus right now in terms of what we could do if we wanted to jack up the prices on our clients who we thought we were killing it for, we would have the data to do that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And in fact, we have clients that are reluctant to share for this very reason.

Conrad Saam:

I don’t think we would work with a client. They may be reluctant, but I think if we didn’t have the ability and take pay-per-click, for example, if we didn’t have the ability to know that this turned into not just a phone call, but actually a consultation, I can’t do anything for you.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What about, but what fee about fee

Conrad Saam:

Down to the revenue level?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah,

Conrad Saam:

So I have believe, and I counted this a little while ago, this may be dated information. I believe we have fee information for six, just six of our clients.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So for some, but for a lot you don’t. Yeah,

Conrad Saam:

For the vast majority, we don’t.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Why is that? Sometimes they probably don’t have it easily accessible. Are there any ones that are like, look, we don’t want to share feed data with you.

Conrad Saam:

There’s probably clients for whom who do not want to share data with us. I think the bigger reality and the bigger problem that we have is frankly tying your marketing reporting infrastructure all the way to fee. There’s just a limitation of most of, you’re going from a Qlik through Qlik to a website to CallRail all to intake management software to matter management software to some billing software. Tying that all together, difficult, very, very

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Difficult. A hundred percent.

Conrad Saam:

And I will share with this, and I really hated it when this happened, and this is when it started to feel wrong when I was working at AVO and we installed the click to view the phone number on the website, and you’ll have to go way, way back into history to remember this. Most of you don’t even know what I’m talking about, but at some point in time, we installed something where to see the lawyer’s phone number, you get to click on it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I remember

Conrad Saam:

You remember

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That. I’m old enough to remember it. Conrad. Okay,

Conrad Saam:

Alright. Well,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Why did you guys do that?

Conrad Saam:

Because we could determine how valuable we were for our clients and we could use that to change our pricing. And that felt gross. It just felt gross.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And due to your knowledge, are there legal marketing directories today that, or doing exactly this?

Conrad Saam:

Wow. They all should be wanting to know that they’re delivering value for you. But the problem when you expose that is you expose yourself to how dependent you are on that directory. And it’s not just the directories, whatever vendor it is in

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Order, wait, other vendors are doing this.

Conrad Saam:

This happens everywhere except for GI and Conrad. No, but you’re how valuable that resource is, and you’re opening yourself up to pricing changes. I think that is problematic. Even worse is if you are sharing your conversion data, and you mentioned this earlier, if you are sharing your conversion data with a vendor who also works with competitors, you are really problematically opening up your information.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What if your vendors Google?

Conrad Saam:

What if your vendor is Google, your vendor’s not Google?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What if the tracking pixel is Google and it’s sharing conversion data with Google, who’s also a platform that my competitors are buying media on? Are you worried about that?

Conrad Saam:

Oh, because they’ve already talked about they’re not actually just a straight bidding system in the recent data.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Look, to me, the root of this conversation is, look, it’s pretty obvious there’s some issues around making decisions about tracking, right? And there’s, there’s risks, and you’ve implied at least so far, I’m going to paraphrase, and maybe you haven’t implied this, so tell me if I’m wrong, but hey, if the tracking pixel is merely doing reporting on the platform side, maybe probably don’t include it, right?

Conrad Saam:

Okay. You’re actually arguing that giving data back into Google helps Google figure out how to drive more conversions, whatever you may refer

Gyi Tsakalakis:

To that, we haven’t gotten there yet, but I’m trying to help listeners build a framework for making decisions about whether they should have tracking which vendors they should allow tracking pixels on. So you’re like, look, if it’s just reporting, you used iHeartRadio as an example, but really if it’s just a conversion or some kind of pixel tracking so that the platform can report back to me as an advertiser, like some lift on my website or something that’s going to say, Hey, look, we drove more visitors to your website when we ran ads. You’re saying maybe think about keeping that kind of thing off because there’s some bad things that data could be used against you then, and this is true not just from media platforms. This could be like a chat vendor or it could be one of these,

Conrad Saam:

Okay, you want to go down the chat vendor path?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, that’s what I’m chat vendor’s an example where it’s like,

Conrad Saam:

Give me an example of why that’s especially problematic.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, for the same reason, because especially if it’s pay per chat, then you could be like, they can say, Hey, look, I mean, in some ways they need to be able to measure the number of chats.

Conrad Saam:

Well, they can measure the number of chats, but they don’t need full Google analytics reporting in order to measure the number of chats, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right. Well, why don’t you articulate what

Conrad Saam:

The, this is why I hate the chat thing. Chat is a conversion function, okay? It is. I am deciding that I want to connect with this law firm, and if that chat vendor is gathering all of the data on all of the sessions that are turning into a conversion, that is massively problematic because now you’re segmenting out the most valuable landing pages that you have. You’re segmenting out where that user came from, so you’re getting geography data on that user. So too much

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Data.

Conrad Saam:

There’s so much data, and

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You can use that against you.

Conrad Saam:

So just imagine that that chat vendor is owned by a large conglomerate called internet brands that has all sorts of proper properties. Pick one, one. I just picked one out of the air, but let’s work with that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

An example.

Conrad Saam:

An example that has all sorts of legal properties that they now have conversion information on your specific business

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And your competitors and yada yada.

Conrad Saam:

Now, Gyi, if you were looking at chat vendors, would you read the terms of service on that?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, again, I mean, this is the thing. It’s like part of this, because people are going to ask, well, how do you figure this stuff out? And it’s like, well, we’re trying to give you a framework, but it’s probably in most of the terms of service. So you got to look in the terms of service, how are they going to share your data? How are they going to use your data? I know that people hear that and they laugh and roll their eyes. No one’s looking at the terms of service. You can call Conrad up and ask him to read the terms of service for you. But I think for me, practically speaking, beyond getting into the terms of service, there’s got to be some derive benefit of using the pixel. So look, we know there’s risks. We know there’s potential issues that could arise. So to me, it comes down to, well, then there has to be some huge benefit of why I would put the pixel on my site, and that’s why I brought up Google.

Conrad Saam:

That’s fair.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Totally. That’s why I bring up meta, because to be able to feed the platform data to be able to make buying your media on the platform or on the network better, that’s a pretty good reason. Now then the question might be, well, can you do it without, can you limit the amount of data that you send back? And the answer is, of course, anyway, what do you think? Are you antip pixel for everything?

Conrad Saam:

I’m not antip everything, but I agree with your statement that the Pixel has to make the effectiveness of the platform dramatically better in order to make it worthwhile. Again, Gary Sarner is probably going to call me with a slap in the face about don’t speak poorly of iHeartRadio. I don’t think iHeart radio’s pixel data is going to make their radio AB testing dramatically better. I just don’t, and I could be wrong about that, but there’s not that incrementality to learning that. And dramatically better to me means driving more business. I just can’t see that happening.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You did raise a good point there that we had not addressed. That’s a new point, is that it might not just be for the benefit derived from including the pixel might not just be for improving optimization of the media buy, but could also be for testing. And that potentially could be, you’re saying it probably you don’t think it has a lot of value in radio, but that’s a value derived that I think is worth exploring.

Conrad Saam:

So I think it’s worth exploring. I think you have to think about that. Okay, so we’re doing creative testing. You’re going to have a plus or minus of 10%, and it’s over time how it’s a stretch, right? It’s going to measure whether or not you

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Responsible IT value. I get it. It’s a potential value derived.

Conrad Saam:

I want to move on to the next question that you raised, which is why are these two vendors telling you not to trust any of their other vendors, but they should trust Guillen Conrad?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, look, I mean, my attitude about this is that most of this stuff at the end of the day is a matter of trust. There’s going to be a matter of risks that you take with sharing data outside your firm at all. I think you want to keep it pretty tight about in terms of how you actually do the sharing. Look, you can have the conversation about it, but ultimately, the way I look at this is once you make the share, I think about the way that we deliver our services is that the cost of us has to be absorbed in the business metric.

I’m not analyzing profits. I’m looking at this very much. Here’s our model. Here’s what our target cost per acquisition is in that model. Here’s where our fee is going to live in that model. And so it’s not like if I arbitrarily raise that, it’s going to throw off our performance targets. And so put it this way for me, when this conversation comes up, we just talk about it like, Hey, to incrementally do X, Y, and Z more or differently or whatever, then we have a conversation, but it includes a conversation about new business metrics that, again, our fee has to be accounted for in. So I don’t know that I can just like, oh, this client anecdotally is doing really well from a qualified consultation standpoint or even a signup standpoint, and then be like, I’m going to change my fee linearly based on that increase. Now, does good performance lend itself to finding ways to deliver on more valuable services within performance targets? Of course, there are client’s objectives for growth go up for us to meet those objective needs, like the services that we deliver, the cost of those services and the resources needed to deploy against that. Yeah, they’re going to go up too, but

Conrad Saam:

I don’t know. So here’s my take.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s a matter of trust to me,

Conrad Saam:

And you establish that trust in, to me, two fundamental ways. Number one, and I think I speak for yugi, but I’m not positive. I don’t understand why anyone would work in a vendor relationship when that vendor is also dating the guy across the street. That does not make sense to me. It just is why we work on market exclusivity. You do too, correct. I’m pretty sure I’ve got that

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right. We do. We have places where people are like, look, I don’t want to pay for exclusivity because we think about that in terms of pricing, and I’ll throw the issue back to you. So firm opens up a new office where there’s a conflict. Are you offering exclusivity at the zip code level? County level, city level, state level. But yeah, I agree with the principle that if I’m a law firm, I would be like, yeah, I don’t want you working. Especially for me. It’s funny having done this now for a long time, it would matter who the competitor is. So if I was in a major market and the person that I’m neck and neck with to market dominate, I’d be like, yeah, that’s not cool. Now, if it’s an upstart new firm that’s just starting now, maybe that’s naive too, because who knows that upstart new firm could take off. They might have the capital and the insights and strategy to become the market leader. So maybe that’s, but I think there’s no question that it’s something that should be talked about.

Conrad Saam:

And I think the other thing, so on the trust side that you brought up is you want to work with a vendor. I really believe this, and this is going to, can only come across as pitchy, but you want to work with a vendor who can talk to you about raising budgets, not raising fees. And you need the conversion data to be like, and you’ve heard key and I talk about this, cost per client, cost per acquisition, cost per consultation. These numbers are really, really good for you. They look like they’re absolutely outperforming where you want to be. Let’s turn this up, or This is an absolute disaster, let’s turn it off, or let’s turn it down. And so you can’t have that conversation without understanding how things are working at the business level. I just feel like too many vendors are using that data against you instead of sitting on the same side of the desk with you. And I know that’s a really corny way to try and wrap this up, but it just happens so frequently that it’s just gross.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Totally. So you’re probably oversharing your information. There are a thing that we think about in this context, not just pixel firing, right? It’s account ownership. It’s permissions on accounts. How many times do you open up a Google Analytics account and there’s 30 different people from vendors’ past that still on there? Oh, that’s a good one. So tighten up your oversharing. Your information is really what this is all about.

Conrad Saam:

Let’s leave these, dear listener. Go look at all of the people who still have access. I’m amazed you get these notifications like blah, blah, blah has now taken ownership of this account. And you’re like, they stopped being a client three years ago, right? That’s bananas. And that’s on you. That’s on. So stop listening to the podcast and go check who has access to all of your data. It may scare the crap out of you.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And now that you’ve left to go check, we’ll wrap up too. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Lunch Hour. Legal Marketing. As always, we want to hear from you. If you’re new to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, check us out on all the podcast apps and feel free to subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel. Thanks so much. Until next time, Gyi and Conrad for Lunch Hour Legal Marketing

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Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. How long did we go on that segment?

Conrad Saam:

Adam’s been trying to shut you up for a while.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I wasn’t the only one talking by way.

Conrad Saam:

I Know. I know. I know.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I know. Okay. Okay.

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