Gyi Tsakalakis founded AttorneySync because lawyers deserve better from their marketing people. As a non-practicing lawyer, Gyi...
After leading marketing efforts for Avvo, Conrad Saam left and founded Mockingbird Marketing, an online marketing agency...
Published: | December 9, 2020 |
Podcast: | Lunch Hour Legal Marketing |
Category: | Marketing for Law Firms |
Gyi and Conrad turn their attentions back to Google Screened and discuss a new audio-only advertising option. Speaking of Google, Gyi and Conrad define and discuss UTM parameters and how these bits of code should be used (but often aren’t) to track key metrics. Expect more on UTM as Gyi and Conrad develop their “Market That Podcast” challenge to grow the #LHLM listener base.
In “By the Numbers,” Gyi digs through ABA TechReport 2020 to reveal the percentage of law firms that budget for marketing and the percentage of lawyers and firms with someone overseeing the marketing of their firm or practice. Don’t know where to begin a budget? Gyi and Conrad talk through approaches based on a firm’s particular needs and goals.
Still manually entering how a client found your firm? In “Dumb S*** Lawyers Do,” Gyi and Conrad discuss intake software and why many lawyers are missing out on the biggest benefit of the tool by failing to tie it to, yes, UTM. If set up correctly, UTM can automatically (or, as Conrad says, automagically) populate this field. The two also explain the dangers of “renting” out communications tools, including analytics, email, content. Conrad shares a client horror story as a cautionary tale.
Join the conversation on Twitter with @GyiTsakalakis and @ConradSaam using the hashtag #LHLM!
Special thanks to our sponsor Alert Communications, LexisNexis® InterAction®, and LawYaw.
Lunch Hour Legal Marketing
Demystifying UTM and its ‘Automagical’ Powers
12/12/2020
Gyi Tsakalakis: Conrad
Conrad Saam: Hello Gyi, how are you today?
Gyi Tsakalakis: I’m great. Hey your agency hasn’t been purchased has it?
Conrad Saam: No, it hasn’t.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Have you done any purchasing?
Conrad Saam: Nothing I’m a big loser in the acquisition space.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Maybe you’re a winner. Acquisitions are hard to make it happened, right? we seem to talk about them a lot on this show. So, we’re going move on from the acquisitions but beware that even in our little agency space we are seeing lots and lots of acquisitions and mergers that’s happening. So, more and more attention coming to the legal space from people with loads of money. I don’t know if that’s good for everyone except for me and Gyi.
Conrad Saam: Yeah, lawyers be — where there was a I think it was on LinkedIn there was a thread talking about — this is kind of the Nexis of non-lawyer-owned law firms and what the impact of money coming into that space is going to be so stay tuned folks it’s probably going to be a topic we’re going to talk about again but we’re going to try to talk about it less.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Stay tuned because we are going to try and get someone a non-lawyer in Utah to come on the show, even though we don’t have show guests, right? that’s a policy. We’re not doing guests but that would be an interesting conversation to have.
Conrad Saam: If you’re listening and you’re a “non-lawyer” also known as a human being –
Gyi Tsakalakis: Wow dude that’s cool.
Conrad Saam: Well non-lawyers are cool. What kind of kind of word is that, in any event and if you own a law firm in Utah give us a holler.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Get a hold of us.
Conrad Saam: Okay today we’re not going to talk about that because we’re going to talk about that later. We’re going to do in the news some google wrap up as usual because there’s always google stuff to talk about. We’re going to talk about — Gyi the ABA Tech report that just came out, right? Numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers, we’re going to go into the ABA tech report for our numbers section. We’re going to go into the word of the day covering a word or a three letter acronym but most of you don’t know what it stands for but all of you should UTM.
Gyi Tsakalakis: I thought it was WTF.
Conrad Saam: No, this is a child appropriate — actually, right now the language is going to devolve because the last thing we’re going to talk about is dumb shit lawyers do.
Gyi Tsakalakis: And let’s roll that beautiful music.
[Music]
Advertiser: 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.
[Music]
Conrad Saam: Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, before we get started we want to thank our sponsors. 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.
Gyi Tsakalakis: And thanks 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 and before we go to the next one, I want to remind you guys that last time we talked about, our number was 91% that was 91% of phone calls get answered. That means you’re blowing 9% of your marketing budget just by not answering the phone. So, hook up with something like alert.
Conrad Saam: And also 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: All right, let’s hit the news.
[Music]
Conrad Saam: So, Gyi.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah.
Conrad Saam: We’ve been lying to everyone about Google Screened.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Misleading – misleading.
Conrad Saam: Not deliberately misleading but apparently we’re seeing some new information tat coming out of what Google calls local service ads what you guys should know as Google Screened. Actually can you explain Google Screen for everyone? if someone’s just catching up?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, you get a nice little green check box next to your name saying that you’re endorsed by Google at the top of the search results.
Conrad Saam: At the very tippy top with a green checkbox that says Google Guarantee. So, when this rolled out, I was very excited that it was going to go into the local search results to try and get rid of a lot of the spam that’s showing up there and I was wrong and Google told me that these ads were only going to show up at the top and the checkbox would only show up if you were paying for the ads but what we’ve seen in the HVAC industry — not legal yet but
in HVAC is those Google Screen check boxes which in HVAC is called Google Guaranteed are actually showing up in the local search results.
(00:05:00)
So, perhaps coming to a three pack near you, Google Screened. Let me ask you this because I know there was a little bit of a question about this. If you have an LSA running, does that mean you can’t have a traditional ad also running in the same result?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Oh no, double up — triple level up.
Conrad Saam: Go mad.
Gyi Tsakalakis: That’s a good one to know too.
Conrad Saam: It is a good one and you should — like I mean, Gyi is making a really good point. Own as much of that real estate as you can and as many of the places. There are now
four pieces of real estate where you can plant your flag.
Gyi Tsakalakis: If only this was a webinar, we could show people a visual to close their eyes. So, just imagine Smith & Jones Law Firm all over those search results because you now have that option as long as you have a really deep bank account in some cases. All Smith & Jones all the time. Okay, now Smith & Jones also might be interested in knowing that they can launch audio only ads directly through Google and YouTube. So, this is coming out new it’s basically radio via Google and YouTube that launched — I want to say 48 hours ago so if you have access and want to get into the beta on that. Find a premier google partner to talk to and see if you can get in because it might be a new thing.
Conrad Saam: Why are they doing this? What’s the point of this?
Gyi Tsakalakis: I suspect there is a great opportunity for Google to make some money by getting lawyers to spend money on radio ads right?
Conrad Saam: But on YouTube — I mean maybe they’re testing it so they can use it on like a podcast network or something that would be a good idea.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Like this network?
Conrad Saam: Or what you know — whatever but I just — it seems odd to me that it’s like okay you’re sitting there on YouTube getting ready to watch whatever amazing children unwrapping presents is that what people watch on YouTube these days?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Well so, I think maybe what we’re dealing with here is a lot of people are just listening to YouTube, right? so like –
Conrad Saam: Listening to YouTube.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, I mean you put it — you can run music through YouTube. There’s all sorts of stuff that you can do just audio and I mean we’re living in this multi-screen, multi-media related environment all the time and it may be something where that quick voice over ad can be effective. Don’t know, we’ll find out.
Conrad Saam: Interesting.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Okay, let’s talk about the ABA 2020 tech report.
Conrad Saam: We will talk about it. You just search for 2020 ABA tech report there’s some really interesting data in there especially for us you know, we talk websites and marketing but I don’t want to spoil it. So, I’m not going to share the numbers.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Teaser.
Conrad Saam: So, this is the teaser to stay and listen through to the numbers. So, I know you’ve spent a bunch of time looking at both the Clio growth report as well as the ABA tech report. Are they painting a similar picture Gyi?
Gyi Tsakalakis: That’s a really interesting question. I think Clio is a more optimistic view of where lawyers are — I think they both identify some real opportunities for improvement for law firms. You know, Clio talks a lot about the utilization rates but I don’t know — when we talk about some of these numbers — I think also some of it is just the audience, the survey respondents so, Clio survey respondents, Clio users, probably trend a little bit more savvy you know, the ABA is kind of more like the wide open lawyer legal industry at large and so I think they — I think it sheds some light on the stratification of the legal industry you know there’s a very, very sophisticated savvy lawyers and there are some that are need to hop on the tech train. Interesting question though Conrad.
Conrad Saam: I mean if you were — so we’re going to move on to the word of the day. If you were to suggest to an attorney read Clio growth, ABA tech report or both what would you say?
Gyi Tsakalakis: I would say both. They’re not that long. If you really twisted my arm I think there’s a little bit more tactical, I mean I always tell lawyers all the time like you can build your whole marketing plan around the Clio trends report.
Conrad Saam: Right.
Gyi Tsakalakis: In my view but there’s some interesting data in there. We’ll talk about some of it.
Conrad Saam: Word of the day, okay kids. Today’s word of the day is UTM parameters.
[Applause]
Conrad Saam: Now I’m wondering how many people are going get that reference.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Cowboy Curtis.
Conrad Saam: Hit us if you get the reference. So, Gyi, UTM, that’s a — that is a phrase it marketers throw around all the time. Can you first tell us what it stands for?
Gyi Tsakalakis: No, you’re going to tell us what it stands for because in the show prep you actually pulled this and I knew the first two but I didn’t — I didn’t get modules so — all right. Go for it.
Conrad Saam: So, UTM stands for urchin tracking module back in the day and I go way, way, way, back here. Urchin was a small a very small kind of insignificant Google analytics I was going to call it a Google analytics platform. It was an analytics platform that google bought.
(00:10:00)
Conrad Saam: And when they purchased urchin to turn it into Google analytics, the way urchin tracked things was with this thing called UTM parameters and the UTM —
[Applause]
Conrad Saam: I loved it — watch this UTM —
[Applause]
Conrad Saam: Okay so I’m going to try and not walk into that trap again but these parameters are essential you can see them on URLs with a question mark equals and then there’s a bunch of gobbledygook behind that. Can you go and so the thing with Google when they bought urchin, they did not want to lose all the tracking infrastructure that had already been built in for urchin’s customers and so instead of adding and creating a new googly type term, they maintained UTM as their tracking infrastructure. So, Gyi can you tell me what these are, how they work, and what we look at?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Okay kids this is really important stuff and we’re going to talk about in the
context of marketing in this podcast but Conrad if you’ve been listening you know that we’re going to have a competition and one of the things that we need to be able to do is to attribute our campaign efforts so when Conrad decides to go out and share a link on twitter or do an ad or put it in his email, we want to know that the click that came from that — came from Conrad’s campaign versus Gyi’s campaign and so what these urchin tracking modules do is —
[Applause]
Gyi Tsakalakis: Tell your analytics tool information like the source so it could be the referrer like Google or a newsletter. The medium cost per click banner ad email the content so if you’re testing different versions of your content which you should be you can differentiate ad creative and track better performing ad creative and then campaign and so you know, in the context we’re going to do for the marketer versus marketer competition. The campaign is going be simply Gyi for my campaigns and Conrad for his but it doesn’t just apply to podcasts that’s the thing I think is really important for us to nail is that everything that you do especially if it has ad dollars behind it should have some of these parameters on the URL so that you can actually you know, look in your analytics profile and say hey, this campaign that I did whether it’s a Google ads campaign or a Facebook campaign or a paid social promotion or a banner ad or display network, you can actually tie it back because that’s the only way you can get to
return on ad spend, return on investment, target cost per client by channel or medium or campaign.
And it’s really, really important. One of the other things — I’ll just give one kind of final — we promise at the very beginning we would say super tactical, one of the things that everyone should be doing is using these UTM parameters to track and search –
[Applause]
Darn it, I stepped in it by accident that time. You should use these parameters to determine whether or not your traffic is coming from local, right? So, are you getting a ton of traffic from
local because if you don’t use the UTM parameters you will end up munging all this data in
with your other organic and that is — those are two very fundamentally different channels. GA does not report on those independently unless you take advantage of this type of tracking. Super, super important in fact I’m going to belabor this point because it’s so important, what Conrad is talking about here is making sure that you use the tracking mechanism on your Google my business listing. You can use it in the main URL, you can use in your appointment URL, you can use it in your post URLs in addition to tracking and analytics the real gold, the secret magic SEO goal is you can track the queries in search console that your google my business listing is populating for. So, you know classic paradigm you want to know how you’re showing up in the local pack for searches like Chicago criminal defense lawyer this is how you do it and so basically it segments out the impressions clicks and positions for your Google my business listing from your traditional organic listings in your main website. Really, really, really important. In fact, you know I think — most agencies are on this now, right?
Conrad Saam: Come on, you are being so charitable. Are you trying to poke me again?
Gyi Tsakalakis: It says charitable, right? in the show notes here.
Conrad Saam: So, I was in my head as you were talking, I was going to say hey Gyi is there any good reason why an agency wouldn’t let you have access to this type of data? and then I thought you know what Conrad? don’t be such an asshole and then you’re like you know what Conrad? you know you are that and then you moved right you pushed me right into it so let’s not — let’s not pretend this is different.
(00:15:16)
Gyi Tsakalakis: And one other thing too that I think because we — it was important for us to give some tactical and you know we’re SEO dorks so we went down that road but you know, it’s interesting too, I think as we talk about in the context of marketing in the podcast, there are some other tools out there that are podcast specific. We’re playing around with charitable which is really interesting because we believe and I think a lot of the podcast networks are uncharitable but even just going through the experience of how they present
they’ve got these magic links that include the ability to track performance by URL and also we believe are going to increase the likelihood of subscribers so and we’ll touch base back on that because this is really an experimental phase with them but they have a section that
talks about these tracking mechanisms.
Conrad Saam: So, brief aside if you’re running a podcast and you want data, check out Chartable. This podcast is not brought to you by Chartbale. Gyi and I are working to figure out how their tracking mechanism works and they basically have two different versions what they call source ID as well as what looks to be a replication of this Google UTM parameter.
[Applause]
Gyi Tsakalakis: You did that on purpose.
Conrad Saam: I did actually do that on purpose but we’ll see how that pans out but again if you’re running a podcast check out Chartable it’s fascinating and perhaps next month we will have more insight on exactly how Chartable handles Google analytics type tracking versus their own internal tracking and now for a quick break.
[Music]
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[Music]
Conrad Saam: All right happy listeners, now as we always do we’re going to read reviews
because we want your feedback good or bad although if it’s bad send it to us as an email so it doesn’t make us look bad that’s another good tip for your law business. Ask for the bad reviews via email, ask for the good ones publicly. So, I’m going to read this. This comes from
Dina Cataldo. I’m a lawyer and a marketing geek so I may be a bit biased but I love this show Conrad and Jim. Dina you’ve just insulted Gyi.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Not at all. I actually — maybe I should change my name to Jim.
Conrad Saam: I don’t think so. I supposed you get the FYI as opposed to the Gyi autocorrect and sometimes it turns into Jim.
Gyi Tsakalakis: I get tons of autocorrect in my name.
Conrad Saam: Okay, we’re really butchering this review though. Okay sorry back to the review. I love hearing Conrad and Jim help lawyers think differently about being a lawyer. A lot of lawyers I work with tend to believe that marketing is hard or confusing but these guys break it down in a way that makes it easier to understand. They also make it fun. I highly recommend this podcast.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Dina, that is very, very nice of you. Thank you so much for listening and
thank you for that review. Appreciate that. If you have a review, please do head over to twitter and hashtag it LHLM to let us know that you left one or you can go directly to Apple podcast wherever your favorite place to review podcast. All right, as promised we’re going to
jump into by the numbers and the number here is less than half but what we mean by less than half– i’m just going to read the whole paragraph here it’s very short and this
is from the 2020 ABA tech report websites and marketing. According to the portion of the 2020 survey covering websites and lawyer marketing less than half of law firms of all sizes have a marketing budget, and only 32% of firms from 2 to 9 lawyers and 14% of solo respondents say their firms have marketing budgets as compared with 63% from firms of 10 to 49 lawyers. Wow, I mean is it wow? I don’t know — i mean we experience this
every day.
Conrad Saam: So, I have this experience and I think it’s an interesting. We’re going through this annual planning with all of our clients right now. And even as you talk to prospects Gyi, I have this conversation regularly where it seems like some law firms many law firms when you say what do you want to do is we want to grow and they say how much. Well, bigger than last year. How much bigger? I don’t know but bigger and so it’s really hard to kind of build a marketing plan for bigger, right? or grow and there are very few times Gyi and I don’t encourage this I don’t know if you do this with your clients but there are very few times where someone will say we have 20,000 a month to spend.
(00:20:40)
Conrad Saam: We have $4,000 set aside a month where our job as agencies is to squeeze as much out of a fixed budget as possible. Do you — I mean I’m going to say one in ten looks at it that way maybe charitably is that your feel Gyi? is that your experience?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, definitely and you know we try to encourage, one of the things we have to do is to start having conversations about how do you craft a marketing budget because it’s easy for us to say what’s your marketing budget and they say we don’t have one and then we say okay let’s just throw something against the wall but I think that’s a disservice I mean, you really need to think about your marketing budget in the context of your firm financials, right? So, you know if I — if I arbitrarily come up with a number of
you know $10,000 a month, right? so $120,000 a year and your revenue is $200,000 a
year that’s a pretty high market at 50% of your total revenue going to marketing. That’s pretty high and so this is actually wonders as a board member of the ABA tech show board this year. One of our sessions in the marketing track will be coming up with a budget, how do you come up with a budget even beyond just marketing but budgeting in general — I think it — this is just one of those things it’s you know we lawyers talk about this all the time like they don’t teach budgeting in law schools they don’t take business in law school you can’t — it’s just so hard to give any kind of salient advice to someone about marketing and growth and projections and forecasts and return on ad spend and target cost pers and all that stuff without having some frame of reference to a budget in the context of the larger financials,
right?
Conrad Saam: And I would say that budget — I mean there’s lots of ways to do the budgeting but I think you need to start with like what are we trying to do next year? What is our business objective? And you know there’s lots of different good answers to that. That answer might be hey I’m trying to survive COVID until the middle of the year and I’m going to pop my head up but we’re going turtle for as long as we can financially and just survive. Some of it might — I mean your goal might be I want to do a 30% revenue increase. Your goal might be I
want to open one office or another office. Your goal might be I want to hire two more attorneys so there’s lots of different goals or if you’re in PI one of the goals that we see most frequently
is I want to have x number of matters per month because your matters are going to takes 24 to 36 months to settle out anyway. So, there’s lots of different goals that you can have but without knowing what you want to do next year from a business perspective budgeting becomes silly.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah I’m –
Conrad Saam: Go ahead Gyi.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, I say you know, you and I are small business owners and you know we joke around about the conversations about acquisitions and what the future is going to hold in legal for you know non-lawyer ownership but the lawyers that are going to survive the day are the ones who can articulate their practice in business terms and so lawyers hate
this a lot. Some — I think — I shouldn’t say that you know, we always give lawyers such a hard time and they’re our best friends and I’m a lawyer but you better be focused on
profitability and so if your budget isn’t considered in a context of target profitability, you can end up really shooting yourself in the foot because at the end of the day if you’re not profitable
over a long enough period of time, you’re probably not going to be in business anymore.
Conrad Saam: Right, right. The simple and simplistic budgeting tools is percentage of revenue growth, right? which again can miss profitability that’s like all right every year we want to grow by 10%, right? that’s simple, easy, doesn’t require much thought another one Gyi would be the percentage of your revenue that you’re going to apply to marketing. Now, those numbers are available and some of these — is that one of the ABA tech report? Is that a number out of there or is that — I know that’s numbers in Clio, right?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Like suggested budget as a percentage of revenue? I don’t know — i don’t think it’s in the tech report. I don’t remember if it’s in the Clio Grow but I know the ABA does publish on this but Clio probably publishes it on even if it’s on their report. Another resource the SBA — sba.gov they publish all sorts of stuff and again you know because I was going to ask you I was like what’s your rule of thumb on this you got to be careful though because you know all practices, businesses, firms are different but do you have a rule of thumb on revenue? I usually think of it in context of percentage of gross revenue so after direct costs but what do you think?
Conrad Saam: I don’t use it as a budgeting rule. I think it’s somewhat simplistic and it is so contextually relevant like if you’re — if what I’ll call a Walmart of law where you’re doing
tons of volume at very low margin and you’re paying your lawyers as little as you possibly can, your marketing budget needs to be very high.
(00:25:26)
Conversely, if you are a boutique provider that has a sterling reputation and you’re looking for a small number of high margin clients, your reality is very different so I don’t like looking at it this way but it at the very least Gyi it’s a quantifiable number, right?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Got to start somewhere.
Conrad Saam: Yeah, you got to start somewhere. A couple other
numbers from here.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Go.
Conrad Saam: 13% of respondents say no one is responsible for marketing in their firm 32% of solos no one is responsible. Most solos 66% do their own marketing and over 73% of attorneys from firms of 2 to 8 and 10 to 49 lawyers say lawyers perform marketing tasks so I think that stands a reason. This is a — it’s a personal professional branding type of business
and so I think that it’s good for lawyers to be involved in the process but guess what? If no one is responsible, then don’t be surprised if you’re not hitting your marketing numbers.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Let’s cut to break but while we cut to break I want you to put a number
in your head think about what that number should represent for next year if you don’t know what the answer to that question is, spend some time thinking about that as we cut to break.
[Music]
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Conrad Saam: All right, now we’re going to talk about and the reason we get the naughty rating from the podcast services because we use naughty language especially for our titles
Dumb shit lawyers do. So one of the things that I am dealing with right now Gyi I see this a lot and I know you’ve been really more involved in the intake management software business than I have you know this really well is I think a lot of lawyers think of intake management software as the solution and its really just part of the solution and I’m going to get super tactical on this. In almost all intake management software there is a field or there should be a field for marketing source, right? And I’m still talking to lawyers who are manually inputting marketing source by asking their prospective clients, how did you find me? Now Gyi and I we had a fight about where did you find me, a small fight about where did you find me a couple episodes ago but the reality is if you configure this correctly. If you have a sophisticated marketing reporting infrastructure not only can you get more accurate data on that but that can be automatically populated, we call it automagically in the tech world that can be automagically populated into your intake management software which gives you two things.
One, more accuracy because your reporting infrastructure is telling you where they came from and it’s not just the internet or Google which is super, super unhelpful and two, your very caring intake management person doesn’t stop the conversation about wow I’m really sorry you were hurt in that car accident where did you find us on the internet which is why I hate this question so much. So, if you are still asking your clients where did you find me and you’re using an intake management software, you’re missing 90% of the value of that intake management software.
[Music]
Gyi Tsakalakis: This old sad trombone and how does this intake management software actually track intake by source in medium.
Conrad Saam: Yeah and this is where you need like I try and get a lot of lawyers to do most of what we do by themselves because they can, right? you can write content better than
we can but if you’re using a CallRail for example to track inbound phone calls if you are using sophisticated form tracking you know or you might even use ready — ready for it Gyi? UTM parameters
[Applause]
Gyi Tsakalakis: That’s what I was setting you up for.
Conrad Saam: I know — I didn’t see it at first. I went to CallRail and then I smell it’s a set up. If you use those parameters, that information can get fed into your CallRail, it can get fed into your Google analytics account.
(00:30:17)
It can get fed into your intake management software through form fails chat whatever it might be. So this is very, very doable and yet I don’t know it’s very rare that I run across a law firm
that’s automating this process, they’re doing it manually and they’re getting crappy data.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Right, so mine is renting your stuff and renting your stuff means your Google
ads account, your google my business account, your G-suite account, your email.
Conrad Saam: Are you setting me up again?
Gyi Tsakalakis: I am, let me say two more and then you can tell your story. Content, data, content management system, I can’t tell you how frustrating it is when a lawyer comes to us and we’re like we can’t help you because you’re completely locked out of all of your stuff.
[Music]
Conrad, do you have a story to tell about?
Conrad Saam: I do have a story. This happened last night I got a panicked email from a personal email account from a client of mine brand new client, we’ve been working with them for six weeks maybe their previous agency in leaving basically shut the door on access to Gmail and drive and was basically like screw you. Now that’s a super, super extreme which means this law firm literally cannot receive email and they cannot access their work. The work around for this — to deal with this which I’m currently working with them through is a three to five-day business day at best process to prove to Google that you actually have ownership of the domain but this happens in all sorts of areas Gyi like give some examples of where you
don’t have access to this and why it’s so important?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Google ads, right? the agency claims oh it’s on your own or proprietary Google ads account.
Conrad Saam: So, that’s your data, it’s your account, you’re paying for that. Your website, right? you’re on proprietary CMS and they block you out of your own website and say keep paying us until you know whatever — they never actually say stop paying us and to the agencies and vendors that are doing this stuff. Stop, this is — this should not be happening. People are being taken advantage and again they’re we’re going get — I’m sure we’re going to get the hate mail on well you know it says in our agreement it’s like well change your agreement like this is not the right way to do things. Lawyers own your data, own your websites, own your content, own your email, don’t give ownership permissions on google my business so that you know you’re frozen out of your local pack I mean this can be — this stuff can be really damaging to your you know, if you’re an email you can’t even do the work but certainly from a marketing standpoint it’s just not — just not good. It’s terrible I mean —
Gyi Tsakalakis: You should know better by now too by the way.
Conrad Saam: Yeah and and I’ll — I’m going to riff on the ownership of the site so many of — some of these agreements say hey if you want you can pay us $2,000 or $5,000 we’ll download the site and send it to you which would be great if they were using something like WordPress but they’re not. They’re using their own system. So, it’s — I’m trying to come up with a good analogy they’re going to send you a bunch of useless crap, right? you can’t work with this stuff and the downside with ending with dumb shit lawyers do is we need to end this in a positive note Gyi so we need to stretch for this my stretch here is go into relationships with your vendors assuming you’re going to break up. You have to assume that you’re going
to break up because if you don’t assume that you’re going to break up at some point in time
you’re opening yourself up for failure have a — have a great marriage have that commitment to your spouse but don’t have that commitment to your marketing vendor that’s still not happy enough can you close this with a happy Gyi?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Well you know, I think the good news is that if you — I’m just getting it back
to the tech report, some of the trends and the numbers in there are good so lawyers are getting it you know, having done this now for over 12 years 2007 and 2008. The sophistication level that has changed is improved a lot and so I think that these lawyers getting taken advantage of less and less but still some room to grow so stay tuned you know, if you share this podcast if you’ve got someone that you think needs to hear about the tech stuff and contact us you know, we’re happy to help you walk through sorting some of these issues out but stay safe out there.
Conrad Saam: And with that have a great month, we will talk to you again in a month but in the interim subscribe to the podcast, share it with your friends leave us a review wherever you get access to those podcasts. We might even read it for you next time. So, from Gyi and Conrad this is Lunch Hour Legal Marketing signing off till next year.
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Lunch Hour Legal Marketing |
Legal Marketing experts Gyi and Conrad dive into the biggest issues in legal marketing today.