Conrad’s Crystal Ball: The Re-Re-Return — Sponsored by CallRail

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Hail to the Victors Conrad

Conrad Saam:

Michigan wins. And Gyi and I were there to witness it. What an amazing game. And frankly, I got to be honest, Gyi and I were seated in the Bama section, and boy oh boy, were they awesome, awesome fans, including the random family who drove me to the airport so I can make my flight after the game ended that night. But it was a glorious, glorious game. I think. I’m never going to watch football again. Nothing will get that good.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, we’re sitting here on January 3rd. We predicted a win on December 15th, and by the time folks are listening to this, we’ll have an answer to our next prediction that we’ll save for the end of the show. But before we get to all these awesome predictions, Conrad, who are you grateful for?

Conrad Saam:

This is a special episode brought to you by our amazing friends at CallRail. We talk about CallRail all the time. We talk about them organically, not because they’re a sponsor, but you should all know that Gyi and I both utilize CallRail every day for our clients. CallRail did this special episode. They wanted to sponsor the crystal ball, and we’re super grateful that the friends that we have at CallRail did so. You can hear more. An extra episode, more GUI and Conrad in your life. Thanks to our good friends in Atlanta at CallRail.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What else are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam:

So we are going into a review of how brilliant we were with our predictions from 2023. We’re going to look at the trends that current, the present, what has happened during 2023 and how have law firms changed fundamentally, and there’s been a lot of change. And finally, I’m going to go back to my closet, open up that satin line box in which I keep the digital marketing crystal ball that we pull out once a year.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Hail to the oh wrong music Lockwood, hit it.

Speaker 3:

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:

Alright everyone, welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing and welcome to 2024 a year that I predict is going to be full of changes in chaos personally, professionally, and politically. But for your law firm, we are going to first review how good were our predictions from 2023. So if we completely bungled our predictions from 2023, you should just stop listening now because our predictions from 2024 might be equally awful. But Gyi, how well did we do? What were our predictions from last year and how well did we do?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, we did pretty good on the predictions that we made. We obviously missed a huge one with the year of AI, but let’s review ’em. Conrad, what was your first prediction?

Conrad Saam:

Okay, I said we were going to see more in-house marketers in law firms in 2023. That was 100% accurate and that trend is accelerating. There’s an interesting Wall Street Journal article about agencies working with and being seen as competitive to those in-house teams, but more in-house marketing. Absolutely happened. Gyi, what was one of yours?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I went with law firms utilizing video, the short form video on TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube shorts, and gosh, from my feeds, lawyers were all over it. I saw a lot more lawyers coming online, A lot more of that expertise content, a lot more. Also just social content people letting us know who they are, what they’re about, what they’re interested in, building that brand affinity. And I think that we’re going to continue to see more of that, but I won’t talk more about that until we get to predictions. What else did you say last year? Conrad? Well,

Conrad Saam:

That brand affinity and brand awareness, but this was really based on a marketing channel diversification beyond Google. And there’s two reasons for that. Number one is the younger generation is not looking to Google with trust. And number two, you guys are all playing in the Google game and it’s getting increasingly difficult and increasingly expensive to play. So we absolutely saw diversification beyond Google and a lot of that did have to do with, as you mentioned, the video content

Gyi Tsakalakis:

One that I had last year, which I think played out throughout this year. I called community fragmentation, not just the scattering on social media and private social groups, but also mastermind groups. And there’s been proliferation of these different groups. And so there’s not a single source, and I think this goes into what you just talked about with diversification, but got people on different channels, different private groups, different mastermind groups, more conferences. And so I think we’ve seen a lot more fragmentation of the community as a whole.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, my next prediction was really around lawyers working to build the know, like and trust regardless of practice area. And so there are a handful, and I don’t think this is as widely distributed as it is not commonplace, but there are a handful of law firms that have done an amazing job of driving. I like you, Janet, the lawyer. I don’t even know what you do, right? I dunno what type of law you practice, but I know you’re in my town. And boy oh boy, I like you because the things that you care about are common to me. We’ve seen that really, really be effective during 2023, not by all law firms, but it has certainly been extremely well adopted by a handful.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And my last one from last year was more personalization. I think we saw some of that more personalized customer and client experiences, personalized gifting. I still think that that’s on the front end of that wave though. I think we’re going to continue to see more of that. But I definitely saw lawyers leaning into that in terms of swag, in terms of gifts, getting a bit more about the client’s interests than about branding the firm, which I think is a good thing. So overall I would say Conrad, we did pretty good missed on ai, but the predictions that we made seemed to have come true.

Conrad Saam:

Are you suggesting that we’re brilliant and our listeners should continue listening on to hear the upcoming expectations for 2024?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I wouldn’t go that far Conrad, but hopefully they do stick around. And with that, let’s take a quick break. Figuring out how to grow your law firm can be challenging, but CallRail makes it a breeze. CallRail provides insights into the origin of every lead from paid campaigns to organic search and everything in between.

Conrad Saam:

That’s right. CallRail can tell you whether someone called you from a Google ad, your billboard or anywhere else, your phone number is listed.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And get this CallRail helps you automatically transcribe and analyze all your conversations so you can make smarter decisions about how you’re handling your leads

Conrad Saam:

When you know what’s driving your best leads, you can confidently invest in marketing that works for your firm.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Go to CallRail dot com slash lunch to try CallRail for harin. And we’re back. So you heard us review ourselves on last year’s prediction. Now we’d like to talk about some of the other trends that we observed in 2023. So what’s the 2023 all about? Conrad

Conrad Saam:

Boy, oh boy. Did chat GPT come and smack us in the face with a surprise? I do remember I was at the risk of keeping the theme of football. I was watching football when that launched, and there were a bunch of my NBA friends from Michigan, believe it or not, watching a Michigan game. And we pretty much stopped watching the game and messed around the chat GPT for the afternoon. It was fascinating.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, that’s of course a trend that I think we’re likely to see continue. One of the things that I think has been so interesting is seeing the proliferation of AI in CRM intake software, even CallRail in their call sentiment analysis. I think that’s a really interesting tool. And so no doubt 2023 was the year of ai.

Conrad Saam:

I mean, the interesting thing is it is not only amazing, but fairly easy to implement anyone. And so it has really opened up what was previously really, really difficult to do. But you can create, in fact, Gyi did create the chat GPT version of the podcast and we can now generate content based on the style and content that has come out of this podcast for years, right? And that’s amazing. And so that was a big, big thing that has just hit the world. I’m going to be fascinated to see how this changes consumer behavior coming up. I think that’s the real story that we don’t know the answer to at this point,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But we will predict it at the end of this episode. Another big theme trend of 2023 from my perspective is the move to accepting qualitative attribution or as Conrad and others have called dual source Conrad. Tell us about dual source attribution. Well,

Conrad Saam:

This is a quick historical context. You and I grew up in a world where you could, if you had really good infrastructure, you could nail down exactly why people were turning into clients. Was it because of your Google ad? Was it from organic? Was it from local? Was it from X, Y or Z? It presupposes that every single client that you have is direct response, which means that there’s a single touch, like a single marketing channel brought this lead in that turned into a client, and I can do that attribution. Therefore, it’s easy to make ROI calculations by marketing channel. We lived in that world. That has completely changed because we’ve recognized there’s a multi-touch world and some of the tactics that we are undertaking now really do focus. We talked about affinity and awareness, we talked about social media, those things. It’s not direct response.

It is a long-term game. And the really smart firms this year have accepted that we’ve got firms who are investing millions and they’ve accepted that a vast majority of the business that they generate can’t be tracked down to that single source. And if you are stuck trying to only work on channels where you can have that direct response attribution modeling, that is a very simplistic mindset because you’re going to cut off a bunch of marketing channels that actually work and will generate clients. So just because you can’t try, it used to be like, if you can’t track it, why would I do it? At this point in time, if you can’t track it, it’s probably still working. And if you throw that channel out, you’re constraining the size of your addressable market.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, it’s an interesting thing too because you’d said some things in there and I was thinking about it, I was like, well, sure there’s been some change in consumer behavior. There’s more, there’s things like messaging apps and podcasting and stuff that might not lend themselves a direct response. But the truth is the big picture, it was really us. It was the marketers that were getting everybody so hyper-focused on direct response. And if you don’t get me wrong, there’s still a lot of direct response and that’s why it’s dual attribution, not just dump attribution and do qualitative only. But it’s a funny thing because it’s the marketers who have been trying to prove their worth for all these years that have hyper-focused on direct response, that created that narrative. And I think we’re starting to realize, because what happens, and this is from the CallRail data showed this as well, but 70% of law firms wasted money on low ROI marketing campaigns.

Well that’s because not all of it. Some of it’s just bad performing marketing campaigns, but a lot of it is is that you’re only looking at the direct response stuff. And so that’s something that’s changed in 2020. There started to change in 2023, and I think we’re going to continue to see that. And it’s a good thing because you’re not cutting off your nose, spite your face, so to speak, by only focusing on that lower funnel direct response stuff, which by the way tends to be incrementally more expensive. Direct response, pay per click, direct response, any kind of immediate channel that you’re buying, that direct response stuff that goes up because a lot of those are auction-based systems.

Conrad Saam:

I think it’s worse than you’re actually talking about. I think you are being kind to agencies. I think agencies have deliberately obfuscated the non trackable efforts that law firms are undertaking in order to create a perspective, a mis perspective, that they are responsible for a lot of that success. Let me give you a simplistic example. You do a ton of radio advertising. You have a vendor who is bidding on your name as they should from a brand perspective, that radio advertising generates a click for your name and then the vendor is now claiming that their pay-per-click campaign is responsible for that client. This happens all the time. It’s gross, disgusting. Good agencies know this and they’re either pulling the wool over your eyes deliberately or they’re an agency that’s just too stupid to understand that these things need to be broken out. So I think this has been made worse deliberately by agencies trying to take credit for things for which they don’t deserve.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What else did you see this year?

Conrad Saam:

Alright, sorry, you got me fired up there. This was a beautiful surprise to me this year. And again, this is not all firms, but I see the firms that are leading growth this year, this is a common theme. They have moved from lawyer to CEO, right? So you have someone running the CEO role and in a really well-run firm, they have a very, very capable COO, right? So you’ve heard a lot of firms talking about EOS, you’ve heard a lot of firms talking about fireproof, which has been pushed by John Na Hazel, also a Michigan business school grad for those of you who didn’t know. But there’s a lot going on with regards to firms running their business as a business and seeing themselves as A CEO, but also, and I think this is maybe even a more critical role, having that COO that is making things happen with a business mindset and a technical background that has happened among those firms. And I’ve seen this just repeatedly, and I don’t think this is just confirmation bias of the firms that we are working with. I’ve seen this outside of our clients where those that are really driving growth, those that are really transforming the industry, have a business mindset and really that COO role.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And I’ll even take you one further, and I agree with you, and it’s an EOS parlance, businesses have sales and marketing functions. And one of the things that the CallRail trends called out from last year was that 69% of these firms that lack confidence in their marketing strategy have no one responsible for marketing, right? There’s no accountability chart. There’s no one’s sitting in the sales marketing function lead. And that’s not surprising that those firms lack confidence in their performance. And so I agree, I think we’re seeing a lot more of that. I mean, look, you and I are old enough to remember when people look down their nose at things like law firms are businesses, right? It’s a noble profession. It’s not a business. I think that’s been changing, gosh, over the last 15 years, but definitely this last year with the proliferation of coaching, business coaching and as you mentioned, people adopting uss and stuff. So I think that that is definitely a trend this year.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, what else you got? Gyi, what else was a major trend in 2023?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, kind of in the same vein as we were talking about in terms of the short form social media, there seems to be this wave of new, they tend to be a little bit younger, they tend to be a little bit more aggressive creative as well call them. I don’t know, social adopters. And this goes to that. They’re doing the right things. I think to a large extent they’re building brand. And so anyway, I think that the trend here is that yes, lawyers are online, lawyers are adopting these strategy. I think the next, and we’ll get to this in the predictions, but now that they’ve jumped in, I think they’ve got to start looking at it and saying, Hey, is this actually doing what it purports to be doing? Which I think will be interesting to observe, but look, I don’t think anybody can deny. There’s a lot more lawyers across these platforms and they tend to fit a certain kind of like, I hate to use the word persona, but it’s a similar approach.

Conrad Saam:

So the interesting thing that we’ve also seen with that, especially with social, but it’s also shown up with reviews, is the fak been, and it also happened with fake offices, right? There’s been an absolute explosion of the fakies that’s happening. I think what you see, especially in social, but it’s also happening reviews is oh, they look like they’re doing well because I see them all the time on social. And they’ve got the most obvious example is the follower count. Well, they’ve got 10,000 followers, so their social platform must be doing really, really well. Well, all of those followers happened to be in Bangladesh. And so the growth of fak us that really happened and picked up in 2023.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And with that, let’s take another quick break.

Conrad Saam:

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Gyi Tsakalakis:

Hey there, Lunch, Hour, Legal marketing listeners want to supercharge your law firm’s marketing efforts? Try CallRail for free today. Just head over to CallRail dot com slash lunch and get a 14 day trial on us.

Conrad Saam:

Setting up CallRail is a breeze and it only takes a few minutes. Once you’re up and running, you’ll have all the insights you need to optimize your marketing strategy. With CallRail, buy your side, marketing your law firm has never been easier.

And now that Gyi has done a great job of cementing in your minds that we are brilliant prognosticators about the future of legal marketing, what you’ve all been waiting for, the reason you listened to the first 12 minutes of this show coming right now, I am going to my closet. I’ve opened up that box where I keep the crystal ball that only ever comes out at the beginning of January and I’m looking in deeply at what’s going to happen in 2024. Usually crystal balls, they start out hazy and eventually reveal what’s happening. But this one, it’s a clear shot. We’re going to be talking a lot about AI in 2024. There’s a lot that’s going to come out with AI and we’re going to see more and more AI coming into the practice of law. I don’t think anyone is going to disagree with that one.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, I think that’s pretty confident. But as I look into my crystal ball looking deep into the crystal ball, I actually think we’re going to start seeing a lot of lawyers, what I’m calling rush to client service. Now, some of that might include ai, but I think lawyers are going to quickly recognize that they better find ways to spend the time that they spend in their firm on providing better client service because that’s the thing that AI can’t replace at least yet. And so empathizing with clients, listening to their issues, really being for them in some of the most difficult issues in their lives, that’s the stuff that I think that lawyers who are spending their time in their practices will start to spend more of that time on.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, now gh, I’m back in my very hazy ball looking in and I see job descriptions. I see lawyers on Indeed and salary.com posting for more in-house marketing talent. We saw that in 2023. I believe that is going to continue to accelerate during 24 and you and I and other agencies are going to learn to work with and even make better those in-house talent for law firms. I also see the level of understanding of marketing moving up. Most of the time when people have been thinking about hiring in-house marketing talent, it’s been at the entry level or at best mid-career tier, I think you’re going to start seeing, and it may not be a CMO role, but that kind of larger, more expensive person as the CEO builds out her EOS leadership team, it’s going to have to include a person at the top who has authority and experience to make some fundamental shift in marketing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And I can see your crystal ball through the Zoom camera, and I also can see that other non-lawyers on the team in the data science and the analytics areas, not just our traditional notions of marketers on the team. I think we’re going to start seeing these teams involve a lot more people that are nothing to do with practicing law, but they really know how to derive insights and analysis from firm data.

Conrad Saam:

We’re not yet, Gyi, at a point where there is a higher education institute that is teaching classes on running a law firm like you could do in medicine for example. But I don’t see that being that far off, especially running a law

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Firm. No, there are schools that are doing it. There are schools that are teaching marketing business mostly as an elective but

Conrad Saam:

Not widespread. You’re talking about law firms teaching lawyers how to do marketing and business. What I’m talking about is a business school or even an entire track or a degree around the business of running a law firm for which lawyers are not involved. We haven’t seen that yet, and I don’t think that is far off. If I am a higher education institution, I want to think about adding high value degrees. I don’t think that is far off, especially if you talk about non-lawyer ownership of law firms, et cetera, et cetera. This is going to continue.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Alright, I’m back to looking in my crystal ball and I’m seeing two words start to appear and those words are verified identity, and this is going to take many forms, but the essence is, is that we as human beings in a world of growing misinformation and growing AI generated content are going to start placing a higher premium on identity and the people that we know that are publishing authentically as themselves, when people are commenting when it’s them and not chat GPT or an assistant, that’s going to become more and more valuable as we start to try to sift through all of this. I can’t tell whether this is real land.

Conrad Saam:

So it’s an interesting point. What you’re really talking about is a change, an adjustment in consumer behavior. The expectation that a lot of this is going to be AI generated and therefore I don’t care. The counterpoint on this, which continues to surprise me, is the ongoing use of reviews by the consumer to make important decisions. Whether you’re buying a new pair of skis or a lawyer services that review count regardless of how garbage it is, and maybe we just live in our world where we expect the fraud and so we see it. I don’t know that consumer behavior is really cottoned on to that as much as I would’ve expected.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh, I think you and I are vastly different on this one. I think people are how people use reviews. They sort by worst review your raw count is a lot less important. And the other thing that they’re doing is think about it. If you’re vetting whether it’s a legal services professional or buying shoes, the review from J Dog 8, 7, 5 9 6 4 3 is a lot less valuable than the review from Conrad that I know because we’re connected on TikTok and blah blah blah. And so I actually think the sentiment is changing. The sentiment on reviews and the skepticism and cynicism is actually going to start to change a lot faster than I think a lot of these influencer like types are going to recognize.

Conrad Saam:

So the second level impact of the review, especially review count, which I think people are buying into is the huge driver in GMB, right? In local results. It is a massive driver in local results. And I think people are just kind of accepting the local results, which are driven by what are frequently a whole bunch of fraudulent reviews, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No doubt. I was thinking more holistically, I think you’re right in local PAC World, that is absolutely right. But again, and I think this is a problem for Google, the shift isn’t to be like, oh, I’m going to go sort through all of this trash reviews. I’m not going to trust local pac. I’d rather go to all of these other platforms that I’ve got, all these people that I know that I can get a recommendation on somebody than just to solely rely on a local PAC review.

Conrad Saam:

Do you see that as a generational mindset gap?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Largely generational, but I even think people our age are starting to figure it out again. You just see it’s so bad and it’s so gross. It’s getting coverage by Wall Street Journal. It’s getting coverage by the times people are becoming more cynical of it. And I haven’t checked up on this in a while, but I know that there’s a casework in its way through the courts that has to do with relying on false reviews to make a hiring decision. I know the FTC is trying to make an effort, and again, I know people are listening to this, they’re going to be rolling their eyes and be like, the FTC is not going to do anything. But I think from the consumer standpoint, people are becoming more, I mean, I even think about it for myself. I was trying to go buy this, I don’t know what it was like this pot

Conrad Saam:

You’re trying to buy

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Pot type

Conrad Saam:

Thing. Okay, you’ve now gone hot pot

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Shabu shabu. And my instinct was just to sort by the negative reviews because I know that these companies are paying for all these positive reviews that sound very similar and a lot of ’em you can tell are written by chat GPT.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, I’m going to take our conversation on reviews. I’m looking back into my crystal ball and it’s merging with that theme. Gyi, I feel like I’m in Florida driving down the highway. I’m looking at a billboard. Oh, it’s John Morgan. It says Size matters. So the reason I’m tying this to reviews, and it’s not just reviews, but there is a systemic advantage for larger firms and that is a marketing advantage, right? Period. And that has changed. It used to be small firms that were tech savvy could figure new stuff out. That’s changed. So with reviews specifically, the more reviews you have, the better you show in the local PAC period. Whether those reviews are fraudulent or not, I’m making the fallacious assumption that they’re not fraudulent, but there’s just value in size. There is value in multi-channel marketing. And in order to afford the time and money to run multichannel size matters, right?

You can’t do that if you’re a small firm, and we’ve talked about this before, but the more you advertise offline, the better your click to rates are on your pay-per-click campaigns, which means your quality score goes up, which means your economics improve. And not to mention the CEO approach, like we talked about this earlier, law firms acting more like CEO, the more this happens, it’s hard to be a CEO and a lawyer at the same time. So I definitely see, we talked about this at the consolidation growth. The bigger the firm is, the faster a firm is growing, the more successful they will be. And I hate this, I love the small business concept, but it is going to become increasingly difficult to be a small business in a large market.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, and I think, look, I think that this isn’t limited just to law firms, right? I mean, how many local hardware stores do you have in your community now? How many home depots do you have, right? I mean, that kind of corporate trend is come into legal. Alright, back to my crystal ball, looking through the mist listening. I don’t even know crystal ball’s maid sound, but apparently they do. And I’m seeing financial accountability trending in 2024. And what I mean by that is that we’re going to see more accountability from firms with their in-house marketing people, more financial accountability in terms of working with agencies. These vanity metrics, I think finally in 2024 are going to start to go to bed. I think this is part of the shift in consumer behavior, the recognition that a lot of this stuff is fake. But at the end of the day, if you’re focusing on follower counts, if you’re focusing on raw calls, things like that, I think there’s going to be a shift this year on holding people more accountable for things like profitability, cost per client. Those conversations have been happening a lot more in my experience.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, my last prediction for 2024 is the deliberate diversification from a marketing channel perspective away from Google. And this is for two reasons. Number one, all the things that we’ve been talking about about people and trust moves people away from Google, right? Especially a younger demographic. The other part of it is law firms traditionally being slow to adopt new marketing channels and also being sheep following what the law firm across the street is doing. You’re already all there. You’re all fighting over the same users, over the same prospects, and it’s increasingly expensive. We saw this happen. The really clever law firms are going to find a way to diversify away from Google and have a much more even split, a much better portfolio theory. I’m not saying avoid Google altogether, but don’t have all those eggs in that single marketing channel basket. We’ll see more of that, more adoption by more firms making it harder to stand out in those new channels.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And for my last one, as I peer deeply into my crystal ball, gosh, I’m seeing law firms, but I’m seeing a lot less lawyers. And I think that this has to do with non-lawyer ownership of firms. I think it’s the consolidation impact that we’re seeing. I think it’s a lot of the things that you’re talking about in terms of firms being run as businesses and the impact that size has. It is a prediction, but non-lawyer ownership of firms has already come to some jurisdictions. I think we’re going to start to see the impacts of that in this next year and beyond.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, Gyi, by the time our listeners are listening to this episode, they will already know the answer to this last prediction I’m going to ask of you, does Michigan come out on top in Houston?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Michigan wins the National Championship in 2024.

Conrad Saam:

Love it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, everyone, thanks once again. A special thank you to CallRail for sponsoring this special episode. You can try CallRail for free at CallRail dot com slash lunch. We’ll also include a link in the show notes.

Conrad Saam:

And by the way, be cool about this, actually go to the slash lunch hour. We want the people at CallRail to know just how much you appreciate them sponsoring this show.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Be cool, everybody. Until next time, Conrad and Gyi saying farewell and go blue.

Speaker 3:

Thank you for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. If you’d like more information about what you heard today, please visit legal talk network.com. Subscribe Vieth Apple Podcasts and R Ss. Follow Legal Talk Network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

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