After leading marketing efforts for Avvo, Conrad Saam left and founded Mockingbird Marketing, an online marketing agency...
Gyi Tsakalakis founded AttorneySync because lawyers deserve better from their marketing people. As a non-practicing lawyer, Gyi...
Published: | June 9, 2021 |
Podcast: | Lunch Hour Legal Marketing |
Category: | Marketing for Law Firms , News & Current Events |
If your firm recognized Memorial Day on social media, there’s a chance the celebratory language fell flat against the occasion’s solemnity.
Gyi and Conrad explain how to recognize holidays from a business perspective appropriately.
Search engine optimization leads the news with the release of The State of Link Building Report 2021, controversy over Google penalizing a firm for link practice relating to a scholarship it provides, and the latest Google Core Update.
Confused? Gyi says not to worry and explains the three things you really need to know.
Looming large in the marketing space is the shift to user privacy by the big players, namely Apple, Facebook and Google. Gyi and Conrad chat about what the shift will mean to marketers. Listen for the bottom line on cost and creativity.
Conrad and Gyi round out the episode with six tactical takeaways from their recent Bedlam legal marketing conference.
Topics include conversion and local SEO approaches, the counterintuitive value of no-follow links, and the benefit of testing title tags regularly.
The world isn’t standing still. Neither should your marketing strategy, they advise.
Special thanks to our sponsors Alert Communications, LexisNexis® InterAction®, LawYaw and Clio.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Conrad, how was your long weekend?
Conrad Saam: So, I really enjoyed the Memorial Day. I did nothing but putter in my garden, to be blunt.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Oh, what are you what are you puttering around with?
Conrad Saam: Well, you know we have chickens and like an old man, I just like to spend time outside in the garden. I find it very, very relaxing.
Gyi Tsakalakis: And for folks listening in, we recorded these a couple days after the long weekend. But one of the things we were talking about this lead up to this show, you notice how every time there is some kind of holiday, like everybody starts posting happy whatever holiday on all of their social medias, and you start seeing the American Flags rolling out. And sometimes you start to see it and it’s like the same American Flag across a bunch of different businesses because their social media people are doing it. What do we think about holiday marketing on solemn occasions like Memorial Day?
Conrad Saam: Well, I think the key that you hit there Gyi, is that Memorial Day is actually for a select group of people, a very solemn day. And I think Memorial Day, it’s a great example because it’s specifically miss celebrated in many ways. Memorial Day is a very solemn occasion, right? And I think most people think about cheeseburgers and frisbees and maybe a cabin at a pond somewhere, which is very nice. But like it’s actually a very solemn occasion. And for some people, it has a much different meaning than a cheeseburger. And so, you know, specifically for me, my take for Memorial Day is, I think when you fly an American Flag, that is very meaningful — much more meaningful to some people than you will ever realize, and I think that is a, you know, that’s kind of my Memorial Day thing. But I think the bigger thing here is, you get social media to post the obligatory happy this and happy that and I don’t think we’re, in many cases, like — like you could do so much more and so much more meaningful to Memorial Day than just like the misstated, thank you for your service, right?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. For me, like I kind of fall on a variety of different points on this. But, you know, as you alluded to, it’s like if you’re inclined to recognize Memorial Day from a business standpoint, it certainly doesn’t help your authenticity from your marketing if you’re rolling out the same stock happy Memorial Day image that a bunch of the other, you know, lawyers in your — certainly in your community, but really, anywhere and that’s the one — I mean really, it’s even a (00:02:33), it’s not just a Memorial Day specific one, right? It’s, I see the same thing around happy new year and it’s like, you know, they’re paying people to do that. I think at Memorial Day, it strikes you I think even more so I think 0the solemnity of the event. But, you know, as you have mentioned it, it’s like, you know, if you want to recognize the holiday and do something from a business standpoint, it seems to me there are other avenues you can do besides just updating your social media imagery. But I’m not necessarily against doing that.
Conrad Saam: No, I mean, it’s nice, but it’s token.
Gyi Tsakalakis: It’s just the devil’s in the details, right?
Conrad Saam: You know, I use Thanksgiving as a great example. I don’t like sending the December Christmas gift basket, right? I like sending that at Thanksgiving to say, “Thanks for being our client,” right? And so, like you can do things differently that kind of fall in play in a little bit more meaningful and standing out way. This is a long casual banter intro, Gyi.
Gyi Tsakalakis: This is not casual banter. What do we — give us the rundown.
Conrad Saam: We got straight into tactics. So, today, as usual, we are going to talk about the news. We’re going to talk about an increased move toward privacy and what that means tactically for your marketing efforts, and finally, we’re going to go over — Gyi and I are each going to share three of our favorite tactical tips that came out of the Bedlam Conference. So, we promise this would — when I came on, Gyi said, “This is going to be tactical and we’re going to go to three of the best tactical tips that came out of the Bedlam Conference.” So, with that, let’s make the world go round.
[Music]
Intro: 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]
Intro: Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Before we get started, we wanted to thank our sponsors LexisNexis Interaction. Clio and I was on a call with three amazing people from Clio including one of the original Lexicotta people. Lawyaw and alert communications. All right, let’s hit the news.
00:05:02
[Music]
Conrad Saam: Gyi, there was a new document that came out, the State of Link Building Report for 2021. Now, I know how you feel about links, in fact, your Bedlam Talk was specifically around links. What is inside the State of Link Building Report of 2021?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Link Building is hard. So, the report —
Conrad Saam: I thought you were done there?
Gyi Tsakalakis: That was it.
Conrad Saam: Link Building is hard, move on.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, I mean, look, Link still make a big difference. I think that the report, it’s Paddy Moogan’s — I think, it’s Aira, I apologize if I’m pronouncing that wrong, A-I-R-A. If you do the 2021 Link Building Report Paddy Moogan, you’ll find it. You know, they specifically mentioned they get some good insights on what types of tactics are working and what people are continuing to see working. But yeah, I mean, look, you’re not SEO, it’s still a Link-based algorithm for the most part. We can fight about the details, but New Link Building stuff, check it out.
Conrad Saam: I would say, if you are — if SEO is important to you, read this, right? Because most of your agencies haven’t.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, or send it to your agencies. Send it to your people. Send it to your — we always talk about agencies. We just assume people are working with agencies. A lot of people have in-house marketing teams too.
Conrad Saam: Okay. So, this is — I think the State of Link Building Report is really pertinent to your in-house marketing people because they actually have an advantage over those who are working with agencies because they’re much closer to what you are doing so, jump on that. While we’re talking about Link Building, this is an evil segue, Gyi. Really quickly, there was news that hit the SEO legal world like a sledgehammer, there was a law firm that had a manual penalty from their college scholarship efforts. Now, college scholarships had been going on for six plus years, can you explain, Gyi, what the manual penalty is and why this is to some people very surprising?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, a couple big caveats in there, right? So, you can — I think, search engine journal covered this and Jim Boykin covered it because it was — I think it was actually his site that he was helping to get a reconsideration request in on. But short version is, is that the — there are a bunch of issues with some of the links, and they had an unnatural links point to the site manual action which means, somebody at Google got wind of this unnatural link pattern and flipped a switch which impacted this site’s visibility and organic results. And one of the example links that they pointed out is manipulative was a scholarship link. And my view of this is, if you’re going out and hammering scholarships to get all these .edus, and you’re the — another one of these, some hundreds of scholarships on the same page, yeah, like that looks like an unnatural manipulative penalty. On the other hand, I have a hard time believing that we can just paint this broad brush and be like, if you offer a scholarship, and it gets picked up by local newspapers and local schools and it’s a positive thing in the community and you’re making a big thing about it, and it gets some links, that I think it’s really bad PR for the Google crack being like, “We’re cracking down on businesses giving away scholarships.”
Conrad Saam: But hold on, how many — you already know the answer to this question, how many law firms are actively getting involved in the community with their scholarships versus how many of them don’t even know they’re doing it because they’ve got some agency that’s just barfing out $200 scholarships for submitting a vapid essay about DUI(ph)?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. A lot more are in the, you know, just trying to do a scholarship to get a link from a .edu. But I can tell you, you’re seeing more and more of the actual like community involvements. I mean, the scholarship Link Building is not a new thing, it’s been going on for forever. It’s just the first time that Google actually like called it out as a something that might be manipulative in the context of a manual action.
Conrad Saam: I mean, they specifically called this out, but like, can you explain how algorithmically how a computer could very quickly devalue, you mentioned this before, a scholarship link that’s on a page full of scholarship links, right?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, right. I mean, that’s really easy, right? They’re just like —
Conrad Saam: Wow.
Gyi Tsakalakis: In fact, they could be like, “We’re gonna just not count any of the links in this entire subdirectory on this site because we know it’s manipulative.” I mean, you could measure the links and links out, you can measure like where it lives in the hierarchy of the site, there’s all sorts of things that they can do. But anyway, it’s an interesting news item. Because here’s the thing, the short question is, it’s like, “Do you recommend people use scholarships as part of their marketing?” And I would say, “Sure, sure I would.” Would I go out and contact 500 different colleges and universities to try to get a link on all of those sites especially when it’s a large percentage of my link profile like, no.
00:10:02
And frankly, I still think it’s still unlikely it’s going to lead to a manual action. I think this is just an exemplative case, but, you know, think about it. Guess what, how many of your clients would be lighting up right now with manual actions because they have a link from a .edu, right?
Conrad Saam: Right. Okay, just because we’re talking about Google, and I know we’re to trying to steer away from Google dominating our conversations —
Gyi Tsakalakis: We try, we’re not good at it.
Conrad Saam: — we failed. We put these notes together and then this morning, Danny Sullivan screwed us up and added another bullet point from Google new core algo rolling out today, which is June 2nd, Gyi, are you looking at Danny’s tweet right now?
Gyi Tsakalakis: I’m actually looking at the Search Engine Land article on it.
Conrad Saam: Okay. Let’s read it.
Gyi Tsakalakis: No, I think it’s —
Conrad Saam: Not the whole article.
Gyi Tsakalakis: It started at 1:00 pm Eastern, you know, they say it takes a couple weeks to fully roll out. Here’s my thing about it, we got to mention it, right? We’re SEO people, we feel — and I think the SEO community in general feels like they need to tell clients and tell people like, “There’s an update.” Google makes a lot of changes. They don’t always update us on when they’re happening. When they do, it seems newsworthy. But my problem with all these update stuffs is all of the fear, uncertainty and doubt that SEOs use to create, “Oh my gosh, like you’ re gonna get hit by this Core Web,” I mean, even Search Engine Land, what to do if you are hit?
Conrad Saam: Yeah.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Like, you know, this is just selling tactics so that people are — website owners are scared. And guess what, do you have clients who are like, “Hey, what can you tell me about this new core update?” like, “Oh,” like, “Because I work at Google and I’m one of like the five people in the world who actually has seen any part of the algorithm.”
Conrad Saam: Did you just take that phone call from a grumpy client?
Gyi Tsakalakis: I haven’t yet, but I know it’s — I can sense it’s coming.
Conrad Saam: I know. We got literally that call of complete panic from one of our clients who attended Bedlam and saw the Core Web Vitals thing, and they’re like, “Ah.”
Gyi Tsakalakis: And did they forward you an email from another agency saying, “Oh my gosh, Core Web Vitals are here.”
Conrad Saam: And was it a little video email of someone walking through an assessment of Core Web Vitals? That’s a classic sales tactic from the desperate agencies who are using fear, urgency and doubt to try and drive business for themselves.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. Anyway, be aware of it. See where Google’s going generally, but here is the thing, here’s all you need to know, fix technical issues on your website, publish relevant content, build links.
Conrad Saam: Meh.
Gyi Tsakalakis: And you might say “Meh” to publish content, right?
Conrad Saam: No, no. Well, here’s — sorry, here’s my take on content. There is a wide spectrum in terms of how you should be approaching your content strategy. Many of you should be trimming content. Some of you should be publishing aggressively. None of you know where you fall on that spectrum because you’re not looking at this analytically, and you’re dealing with agencies, et cetera, who just like to deliver content because it’s the tangible thing and you think you’re getting something out of it.
Gyi Tsakalakis: How many blog posts per week do I need, Conrad?
Conrad Saam: As many as possible.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Just tell me.
Conrad Saam: Because (00:13:05) Gyi. More blog posts. More blog posts on more blogs, that is the answer, let’s move — let’s move to an ad break from someone who does not sell websites or vlogs.
[Music]
Male 1: No one cites routine drafting as the reason they chose to become a lawyer. But that’s where a lot of time goes for solo practitioners and small firms. Lawyaw can help you transform your existing word documents into reusable templates with no coding required. Save time and avoid errors with intuitive features like conditional logic. Use a tool that empowers your experience and expertise. Learn more at lawyaw.com. That’s L-A-W-Y-A-W.com.
Male 2: As the largest legal only call center in the U.S., Alert Communications helps law firms and legal marketing agencies with new client intake. Alert captures and responds to all leads 24/7, 365 as an extension of your firm in both English and Spanish. Alert uses proven intake methods customizing responses as needed, which earns the trust of clients and improves client retention. To find out how Alert can help your law office, call (866) 827-5568 or visit alertcommunications.com/ltn.
[Music]
Gyi Tsakalakis: And we are back with the exciting topic of privacy. Why are we talking about privacy today, Conrad?
Conrad Saam: So, IOS 14.5, all of the data shows that no one is opting in, right? People are opting for more privacy, which makes a lot of sense. The trick here, however, is that is going to make your job as law firms, and our job as marketers less effective, more expensive, and more difficult to turn perspective visitors to your —
00:15:08
I mean, you can go back to the old retargeting, right? Every time I’m on ESPN, I see pictures of John Deere tractors, because I’m looking at John Deere tractors, right? Like so, that is going to become less and less prevalent. And so, I think, law firms need to be recognizing that A, their cost per acquisition may increase; B, the value of that traffic because it’s harder to turn it into a client now is actually much lower, right? And see what can you do in this kind of privacy-focused world to be more effective for those more casual visitors.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. I mean, this is the part of the Apple, Facebook, Google war. In fact, I was just reading Facebook just sponsored some research to talk about how this is anti-competitive and bad for small businesses, you know, they got to have that — the industry-backed PR research. But bottom line is, this is for lawyers, I mean — you know what also was interesting, not to completely change subjects, but do you remember at Bedlam when someone asked if retargeting was illegal?
Conrad Saam: Yeah.
Gyi Tsakalakis: It goes to — there’s just such a question mark around this stuff and, you know, I think, at least a lot of people are like sympathetic to this idea of, we should be adding more privacy, giving consumers choice, and, you know, at the same time though, less tracking means less levers to pull which means, cost per acquisitions. I mean, if you go read what the big advertising giants are saying, the ones that have tested all this stuff, they’re saying costs are going up. So, I don’t know, you know, it’s also an interesting issue from a regulatory standpoint for state bars. I mean, they’re not even on. They’re still debating like whether you can use the cloud. But I think, the interesting thing is, is like, this is an area where actually like if privacy wasn’t shrined in the rules, in the advertising rules, it would — it could become a bigger issue for lawyers specifically, but I don’t know.
Conrad Saam: Well, I think that — I mean, the whole retargeting is a legal question gets interesting, right? And it’s, in many cases, retargeting is completely inappropriate, right? So, divorce is one of those where like you just do not want to be using retargeting. It’s just inappropriate, but the onus becomes on the experience with the law firm’s website to try and get some form of engagement, subscription, opt-in, something beyond just the, “I’m reading your online brochure where,” and, you know, this has been around illegal for a while, right? The drip campaign has been dripping out for years and years. But my gut feel here Gyi is that the focus on — and retargeting is a great example of this, but the focus on privacy means the onus is on you, and us, the agencies to try and work and deliver a much better engaged like two-way experience rather than I’m just reading a bunch of content about, blah blah blah, divorce lawyer Honolulu, Hawaii, right?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Right.
Conrad Saam: And so, the creativity, the community engagement, like all of these things that are going to become more — it’s not that they’re going to become more effective, they’re going to become more important, I guess, that’s my take.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Right. And guess what becomes — I was going to say, becomes more important, but I’ve always — we’ve been talking about it forever, always been important is, email opt-in, right? First party email opt-in. Get people to subscribe to stuff that you’re delivering, none of this is an issue for you.
Conrad Saam: Right. And then, you need like really good CRM, right?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Oh.
Conrad Saam: Oh, I’m just saying.
Gyi Tsakalakis: CRM.
Conrad Saam: Just saying.
Gyi Tsakalakis: All right, if you like this conversation, or if you’ve got some thoughts on this as you’re listening, we’d love to hear from you #lhlm and join the conversation. Ask us marketing questions, we love to give away ideas, advice, answers, experience shares.
Conrad Saam: Quesadillas, books.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Conrad’s giving away quesadillas and we’ll answer it on the show too, and it will help shape — join this conversation, you know, talk about engagement, engage with us.
Conrad Saam: Now, time for the Legal Trends Report Minute brought to you by my friend, and Gyi’s friend at Clio. All right. So, the Legal Trends Report Minute talks about solo law firms and the benefit from technology adoption solos benefit 35% more than larger firms by adopting technology and the data coming out of Clio shows how tech-based solutions for lawyers help solos earn an average of $50,000 per lawyer for those who are really aggressively adopting technologies like online payments, client portals, intake software, which have become really essential to the legal practice.
00:20:02
And solos benefit the most, but are actually — and this is not a shocker, slower to adopt these cloud technologies. And so, Gyi and I, we were really happy when Clio approached us about including the Legal Trends Report because I think, especially for solos, there are so many unique advantages that solos can have over other law firms by reading the Clio Legal Trends Report. So, go to clio.com/solo and get smarter like you — there’s so much great data out there that you can get from the Clio Legal Trends Report. Let’s take a break.
[Music]
Conrad Saam: The right client relationship management solution enables and empowers firm growth. LexisNexis Interaction is designed specifically for law firms and embeds client intelligence at the heart of every interaction providing valuable insights into client relationships so you can make strategic decisions about how to focus your resources to gain more business. Learn more and request your free demo at interaction.com/lunchhour.
So, we’re coming off the heels of Bedlam and again, as we promised at the beginning of the show, this is going to be highly tactical. So, Gyi, what I would like to cover are three of your favorite tactics that came out of the Bedlam Conference. Go.
Gyi Tsakalakis: I’ll give you one and I’m going to throw it back to you.
Conrad Saam: Good.
Gyi Tsakalakis: So, both Mike Ramsey and Darren Shaw talked about the conversion aspects to local SEO. And so, what we mean by that is, you know, everybody’s focused on rankings, but you can rank, and if you’re not competitive in terms of reviews, and hours, and category, and something compelling to get somebody to click, call, just fill out a web form, it doesn’t really matter and, you know, what’s the tactical thing there. Like, you know, it sounds silly, but it’s put yourself in the consumer’s shoes. If you do a search, and your competitors are showing up, you’re in the local — your competitor is in the local pack, and they’re open and you’re closed, find a way to be open.
Conrad Saam: Right, right. It seems very basic. You know the funny thing is, I don’t know if you saw Darren’s article this morning, it was literally titled, Why Ranking Still Matter in a World Obsessed with Conversions.
Gyi Tsakalakis: So good.
Conrad Saam: Kidding me, kidding me, yeah.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Such a marketer, that guy.
Conrad Saam: Totally, totally. So, my favorite thing, and I actually tweeted this during the conference, because I don’t think most of our audience looks at it this way. This is a quote from my very good friend and amazing marketer, Gyi Tsakalakis. No follow is a suggestion. No follow is a suggestion, and I don’t think people get this, right? You guys look at this as like, “Lawyers, you’re very rule-based and so, you believe that if it’s a no-follow, it’s a no-follow, and it doesn’t matter,” right? And so, it’s binary. It’s not binary, it’s not. And so, get over that very simplistic easy thinking and realize that some of those no-follow links have a lot of follow value. I loved that.
Gyi Tsakalakis: I got one from Casey. So, Casey talked a lot about little things. And I’ll tell you one thing he mentioned this and we’ve seen this happening a lot more too. You know, so many people think about the meta tags to page titles and headings as like kind of like set it and forget it or maybe we would revisit it periodically. But man, that is a great opportunity to test more frequently. And so, testing changes to titles. Titles meta description specifically because they show up as obviously the snippets in the search results, but we have seen so many things where you’d be like, you know, everybody knows I’m always talking about links, but we have seen some big gains from small changes to title tags on a more regular basis. So, I would check that out. I’d be testing those title tags.
Conrad Saam: I mean, it’s really fascinating because by the way, this is not a world that’s standing still, right? And what used to work doesn’t work anymore. And so, there is room to evolve into things. How many times a month do you get a call from that attorney that’s like, “Oh, four years ago, I was dominating the search results and all of a sudden, it disappeared,” you’re like, “Well, what do you think has happened?” right? There is a great quote from Inherit the Wind where he says, “Maybe it is you who have changed by standing still.”
Gyi Tsakalakis: Wow.
Conrad Saam: And that’s what a lot of you guys are doing —
Gyi Tsakalakis: Profound.
Conrad Saam: — With SEO. Yeah, there we go, go back to my junior high acting days. But I remember that, he says, “Maybe it is you have changed by standing still.” Okay, I’ll give you another one, “Not all conversions are created equal.” So, a chat conversion and a phone call — and this is like, no like, “Duh I was just about to give us our R rating there.” But you should have, and you have at your fingertips right now the technology to answer this question.
00:25:03
You should know how well a phone call converts compared to chat, to a form fill, to a text, to an email, and you should know how those — because they convert at very, very different rates. So, the number that I remember was a chat converts into a client, which is what we care about here at less than half the rate of a phone call, which is like, yeah, of course, that makes sense. But like that then begs the question of how aggressive do you want to get with your chat implementation, right?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Here’s another one, and actually this might — even open up a discussion even though we’re running a little out of time here. How do you get your LSA ad to show up more frequently?
Conrad Saam: That was a miss on the agenda. We will make sure that we talk about LSAs aggressively August 25, 26 is the next Bedlam. So, bedlamconference.com if you want to hear us talk about LSAs, because that was specifically not on the agenda, and we will talk about that. But so, tactics, Gyi, for having your LSAs show up more regularly.
Gyi Tsakalakis: You know, I don’t have a great answer here, but I’ll tell you what some of the levers and some of the chatter that we’ve heard. One is obviously changing budget, right? Budget and your target. Obviously, Google makes more — the more money Google makes, the more likely there should — they are to show your listing.
Conrad Saam: Let me re-ask this question, Gyi, does changing budget ever mean reducing your budget?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Not unless you’re stopping —
Conrad Saam: Moving on.
Gyi Tsakalakis: I think a couple other ones. Playing around with your locations, right? because the way that you can add — you can add a whole state, you can add cities, I think you might — can you add zip codes, I don’t remember that from the top of my head. You do cities. I think you can do counties.
Conrad Saam: So, along those lines though, in terms of showing up, right? One of the things that that was a Google, specifically, it doesn’t work but it specifically does and this was covered in Bedlam was, you can have two LSAs for the same firm showing up, right? As long as you’re from a different location.
Gyi Tsakalakis: That’s a good tip right there. Yup. So, for folks that might — if that’s a little bit nuanced, but you can have, you know, multiple lawyers showing up in those results, or multiple office locations.
Conrad Saam: Yeah.
Gyi Tsakalakis: The other one too that’s been chattered about, and I haven’t been able to reproduce it but, I’ve heard a lot of lawyers talking about it is, engaging with the platform. So, like we talked about this a little bit and I know there’s pluses and minuses, but like marking appointments booked, keeping up to date on following up with what’s going on with those entering details in there. There’s something about that engagement that Google is looking favorably upon. I think it goes to the same thing we talked about before, which is like, “Yeah, look, if you’re paying for those leads, you’re marking them booked.” Google’s going to — you got a better win rate, Google’s going to be more likely to show your listings for those.
Conrad Saam: 100%, right? And then, we had a discussion about taking that way too far. We had a crazy, crazy attorney who was like, “Well I’m marking everything as booked,” and it’s really, really expensive, right? So, there is a balance here, don’t go bananas like you told us to — it was literally, I can’t remember which attorney it was, but this came up at Bedlam.
Gyi Tsakalakis: It was me.
Conrad Saam: It was someone who’s complaining about how it’s very cost ineffective, right? But he’s also at the same time marking every single appointment as booked, right? And so, like of course, it’s ineffective when you’re getting bad leads and you’re marking them as booked, of course, Google is not going to refund that. So, you have to like be careful here. One thing I was not expecting that I was very happy to see was, our experience in terms of — and Mike Ramsey showed this very well. But looking at the patterns of search traffic for law firms during the COVID period, pretty much seeing a pretty severe dip in the March, April of last year, and then followed by a significant, if not over, recovery. So, Mike showed that data, he then demonstrated, and I think this is if you sat through a microeconomics class ever, this will be obvious, but if you didn’t it may not be. Everyone pulled out of the market and those lawyers who didn’t reaped, is that even a word? Did very well, let’s put it that way. So, like if you stuck with the marketing and the advertising when everyone was pulling out, supply and demand, your cost went down, you’re going to be able to buy more for what you were spending. And they were actually doing very well. And especially in the absence of any other marketing online. And so, that was a really interesting fascinating point that like, “Hey, when the chips — when it looks terrible, it might be the right,” this is very Sun Tzu and The Art of War like when everyone else is pulling back, that’s when you advance, right? And it was nice to see that corroborated by Ramsey’s data. You coming back to Bedlam in august?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Me?
Conrad Saam: Yeah, you.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Oh, if I get invited.
00:30:03
Conrad Saam: Come back to Bedlam, see me, Mike, Gyi and Casey. We’ll have some other speakers as well and so, we’d love to see you. It’s august 25-26. You could find it at bedlamconference.com. That, I think, is it for us today, Gyi.
Gyi Tsakalakis: That raps us, follow us now on Apple Podcast. I was told it’s follow-on Apple Podcast, or whatever podcasting device tool, platform, station, place, go to the Legal Talk Network to the episode page and click play there. You don’t have to even download anything if you don’t want to. I’m probably not supposed to tell you that. Thank you so much for listening.
Conrad Saam: Because we can’t track it that way, right? That’s why we’re not supposed to share that piece.
Gyi Tsakalakis: See, privacy.
Conrad Saam: Privacy.
Gyi Tsakalakis: I’m concerned for your privacy, listeners.
Conrad Saam: Data. Gyi and I want data on how this is working.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Thanks so much. Until next time. It’s Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Conrad and Gyi signing off.
[Music]
Outro: Thank you for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. If you’d like more information about what you heard today, please visit legaltalknetwork.com. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts and RSS. Follow legal talk network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram and/or download the free app from Legal Talk Network in Google Play and iTunes. The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of, nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network, its officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders, or subsidiaries. None of the content should be considered legal advice. As always, consult a lawyer.
[Music]
Notify me when there’s a new episode!
Lunch Hour Legal Marketing |
Legal Marketing experts Gyi and Conrad dive into the biggest issues in legal marketing today.