Diverse Marketing || 30 Days In

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam:

Gyi, congratulations on making it to your 100th episode on LHLM

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A Hundred episodes. Amazing. And even though you’re giving me credit for a hundred episodes, you are in on episode 22, so 80 or 78 of those episodes if you want to be specific, but 80 of those episodes ish you contributed to. And so congratulations to you.

Conrad Saam:

So we’ll celebrate my 100th sometime midyear to note most podcasts, 83% of podcasts fail within the first six months. This is all about kind of keeping that flywheel going and boy oh boy, I’ve really enjoyed the last 78 episodes that I’ve done with you, but we’ve got more to talk about today than just about how amazing and long-lived this podcast is.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam:

Alright, so we tried to stay away from talking about nothing but Google in the news you have managed to sneak in the Detroit Lions Go Lions. So stay tuned for the news about Google and the Detroit Lions. Our next segment is one that we get a lot of questions about but have frankly shied away from a little bit, but we’re going to tackle it head on diversity in marketing. And that is through a question submitted by a listener. And finally, and I’m super psyched about this, we are kind of 30 days into the year. We spent a lot of time talking about annual planning, but we’re going to do an amazing segment about what to think about 30 days in with a new campaign, a new agency, a new CMO, what does that look like? What are the things that we want to see and maybe what are we not looking at just 30 days in

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Lockwood? Hit it.

Speaker 3:

And 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:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I always wait until the in the riff before moving right into the news. I love the, yeah,

Coming out of Google. Our good friends at Mountain View have finally given us a data point that is useful for optimizing local service ads. And that is the amount of times that your ads show up A really basic metric that, I dunno, Gyi, I feel like we’ve been flying blind with this thing for a long time and it’s just been a nightmare to try and do anything with because you don’t know what the levers are to pull and you don’t know where you’re aiming. So it’s been a pain in the neck as an agency. How about yourself?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s a double-edged sword because now we see the impressions, but we still can’t do much to change them.

Conrad Saam:

So this is like we’re flying a plane, we can now see through the windshield, but there are still no controls,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No control. If you’ve got a few controls, you’ve got, yeah, speed and that’s about it,

Conrad Saam:

But you don’t know which doesn’t work, which controls are actually doing anything, the

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Control doesn’t actually work.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, so Google, listen to us complain about the shitty interface for local service ads. Alright,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Speaking of shitty interfaces for Google, Google is shutting down it’s business website product. When are they doing that? Conrad.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, that is hitting the airways on March one. If you have made the poor life decision to have your website generated by your Google business profile, that’s going away on March 1st. Now, Google announced this early January, which does not give anyone a lot of time to make better life choices about their website provider. Gyi, I know you have a cynical take on why they’ve done this so quickly and frankly a little bit quietly, what’s your take?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Because most of their websites are spammy lead gen sites, not even real businesses. I shouldn’t say that. Look, I’m sure there are some small businesses that are like, okay, cool, I can get this business site from Google. But most of what I’ve seen and legal is particularly is spammy trying to do exact match and partial match and link up and trying to get all your juice to line up so that you think that you’re getting some kind of bump from it. And I do think there was a period of time where maybe they were outperforming what they should because certainly there wasn’t great content on these sites

Conrad Saam:

And duplicate because it was drawn right out of your GBP profile.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

They weren’t all that good to look at.

Conrad Saam:

So for those of you who think that we’re done taking the baseball bat to Google, you’re wrong. We’ve got one more. Google announced massive layoffs from their advertising team at the same time. There’s lots of reports by kind of the SEOs who’ve been around for a long time about spam being up. Not a surprise to the legal marketing community, but if you are looking to hire, Gyi, someone for your agency who’s good at advertising sales now might be a good time to do it. Just throwing it out there

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And not just ad sales, they’ve made multiple rounds. There’s some engineering teams and product teams that have been laid off. You mentioned the spams up. I mean, I was kind of half jokingly suggesting that maybe some of the engineers did some nastiness on their way out. But our search liaison, Danny Sullivan actually just published it, but short version is is that he’s like, look, we’re going through a thing right now. We’ve got some of this helpful content stuff, we’ve got some new things that we’re trying with generative ai, we’re going through this cycle and some of the spam, it takes some time for these systems to learn. And so we’re dealing with some of the spam stuff that’s at least Google’s position of it. The other thing that’s frustrating is at the same time they’re making these laughs on ad sales. Everybody’s talking about how the support is at its worst than it’s ever been. You can’t get ahold of anybody. I don’t know what to tell you.

Conrad Saam:

We’re going through a thing, we’re going through a thing also. Those loyal, we’re all going

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Through it, it

Conrad Saam:

Together will remember that Danny Sullivan told you to buckle up towards the middle. Is this the buckle up of December? I don’t know. This is a bad buckle up by the way. If buckle up was, we’re laying off a bunch of people and it’s going to get worse. That’s not a good buckle up.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I mean that makes sense. That would make sense.

Conrad Saam:

Moving on from abusing our good friends at Google, Gyi, you somehow were able to flex the Detroit Lions into our legal marketing news. I’m going to let you go with that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, as a go blue and Detroit Lions fan, this is the best football season anybody could ever hope for. Those who are not sports ball aficionados, the Lions have made the playoffs and actually won a playoff game as we’re recording this and playing their second playoff game. And it’s the first time that’s happened in 30 years. So the story goes that Matt Stafford, he was quarterback of the lions. He went to LA Lions played LA in the first game. And so a lot of Detroit fans have Stafford jerseys from his days in Detroit. Well, he is back playing the Lions. And so a local, let’s see, Jeff Glover, who’s the owner and Embroker of Glover Agency, realtors got to give him some love for this idea, had an idea, a local marketing idea. He’s going to give away a thousand new Detroit Lions jerseys if you bring your old Stafford Lions jersey because now he’s on the Rams to exchange it.

So a trade-in deal and it went viral, it got picked up in the news and the NFL actually came out and said, Hey, please don’t do this. And so he is on everybody’s mind. And so look, I’m not saying this is the right thing for your firm, but this is the type of thing where he’s capitalizing on call it news jacking sports, news jacking. And his name’s out there, he’s getting interviewed, he’s obviously getting links for this. This is the type of thing if you’re a sophisticated person you want to go do, look at the back links and look at the news coverage of this, I think you’d be impressed. And so I’m calling it out because it’s a good marketing play by a local realtor in the sports context. Go lions.

Conrad Saam:

So this is really fascinating to me. It’s not that hard to think about. Yeah, I mean I’ll think about real estate agents with a level of disdain and if you needed a real estate agent and you happen to be a Detroit Lions fan, now you have a really easy choice and someone who’s into what you’re into. This is so well done, affinity

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Baked in. It’s so

Conrad Saam:

Easy to do things like this. And by the way, guys and ladies, if real estate agents can pull this off, you guys can too. I don’t believe there’s a master’s in real estate agency. You got more education, you got more creativity, you’ve got more dollars, be more awesome.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And if you get the NFL to say, don’t do this, it’s great. Now you don’t have to even spend a dollar on a jersey,

Conrad Saam:

Take that to the local station genius. Alright, when we come back after the ad break, we’re going to talk diversity in marketing spawned by a question that we picked up from a lawyer at Mass Torts made perfect. We had the tapes rolling while we are at Mass Torts made perfect and taking questions directly from lawyers. Here’s one that I loved.

Speaker 4:

Hello, my name’s Aaron Dickie. I am managing attorney at Dickie Anderson Law Firm. We’re based out of St. Louis. We help veterans and we also do mass tort cases. So I guess my question is, we’ve been trying to help more people in the Spanish speaking market, and if you’re doing advertising in the digital space in the Spanish speaking market, would you approach that differently for mass torts? Culturally, how would you recommend approaching that in English versus in Spanish?

Conrad Saam:

Gyi, you must get this question at least once a month. We have strategic conversations about this all the time. How do you think about this?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I want to parse this question a couple of different ways. So the first direct response to the question is thinking about Spanish speakers. Okay, so there are SEO issues that need to be considered. I think in terms of the language that you’re using is your content being crafted by someone who’s a native speaker? But bigger than that, and that’s why really I think we were thinking about this in the context of diversity and inclusion in marketing more generally is it’s really important to remember that not all Hispanic people in the United States speak Spanish as their primary language. And so to me, the real point of this segment and in answering this question is that especially if you’re trying to focus on a segment that is not familiar to you, you don’t have, is not represented well at your firm, you need to spend some time getting to understand that audience even more so than when you’re kind of writ large like, oh, I’m a personal injury lawyer and I want to get in front of everybody in the state of Illinois.

And some of this was in some of our research for the show, we actually checked out some demographic information. There were a couple points that I think were worth highlighting from e-marketer about the Hispanic audience that I think we’ll put this in the show notes. We’re not going to hit all of them. But the headline of this e-marketer article is that the US Hispanic population is bilingual, young, upwardly mobile and growing faster than the general population. And so the other part of all of this is that it’s the business case for inclusive marketing. You’re missing out on opportunities if you just focus on English speaking or you’re creative, your ad copy, your messaging is not speaking to this broader audience. And so that’s really to me, I think in answering the question, my first answer would be make sure that you’re really talking about what you’re trying to talk about in terms of an audience. Are you just talking about Spanish speakers or are you suggesting, Hey, I actually want to have a more inclusive marketing strategy that is marketing and speaking to a larger swath of our population, in which case Spanish speaking is only one segment of that larger audience.

Conrad Saam:

And so a little side point on this, this is not just about Spanish. I think one of the things to think through, you talked a little bit about being underrepresented in your firm, two white guys, middle-aged white guys sitting here talking about this is potentially fraught with ignorance. I think it’s really important that your firm actually represent who you serve as well. Representation really matters, and I think that is a really important thing and I think it’s an asset that everyone should leverage, Spanish, polish, whatever it might be. One of our favorite sites that we ever worked on was a quadri lingual site that is in Mandarin, Spanish, polish and English. It’s in Chicago. But make sure that you’re also representing the market that you’re trying to serve. I think that’s really, really important. I remember, and I think this is important just to note, the early days you’ve been around long enough to have experienced this.

I have as well the early days, if you built a well-built Spanish site, multilingual site that included Spanish and you did it correctly from an SEO perspective, and we’ll get into some of those tactics earlier. It started kind of in the Florida, Texas and California markets where we would get sites running multilingual, both from an SEO perspective. You could clean up and from a pay-per-click perspective, you could clean up from an economic sense no one was servicing the market. What we’ve seen over the last, I don’t know, it’s probably been 10 years, that adoption is slowly marching northward, right? And it used to be there were these amazing economic efficiencies if you were in Southern California by having it correctly done bilingual site. Now everyone does, right? But the further north you move, the more of an asset it is and the more of an unfair advantage you have if you have a multilingual site. So I don’t want to ignore that. I want to get Gyi into some, let’s get really specific about some of the tactical things that you can do. And this is technical and tactical things that you can do to do a multilingual campaign correctly. I’m going to ask you a question. It’s a softball. Should you have a English site and a different Spanish site? What do you think?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, it depends. People hate that. But I think the technically accurate answer is to say you should have one site and use Hre Lang to deliver different languages. However, my experience is that exact match and partial match domains still work, even though Google says they don’t. And so if you have an exact match or partial match keyword domain that’s in Spanish and it’s on that domain, you might get some extra benefit from that. But the technical correct way, and again, a lot of this too goes back to the original point. Who are you targeting? If you’re targeting US based Spanish speakers? For sure, you should be using Hre Lang on your main site, not for an SEO reason, but from a user experience standpoint. So that an inclusivity and accessibility standpoint so that when people come to your site that don’t speak the language that your site is coded in, they can view it in a version of their language. Now, I don’t want you to go rush out and go try to buy up a bunch of Spanish domains because to Conrad’s point, this tactic has been now abused at this stage. And so I don’t think cost benefit, depending on where you are, unlikely you’re going to rank nationally just because you use some Spanish exact match domain.

Conrad Saam:

Let me go over two complete clusterfuck mistakes. You should never do this. Examples of trying to provide services in Spanish. Number one, the page that says we speak Spanish on your otherwise entirely English site, completely useless. In fact, what you’re actually signaling is that you don’t speak Spanish or you’re too lazy to bother translating your site. Number two, speaking of translating, using Google Translate or any other translation service to automatically change a page from English to Spanish, two things happen. Number one, the translations are always garbage. And you end up with things like the most famous mistranslation was Kennedy saying, I’m a jelly donut at the Berlin Wall. But you end up with stuff like that, you guys have seen it. And the other thing that happens with that is, Gyi mentioned HF Lang before you end up with a single page that actually does not represent English or Spanish.

And Gyi, I want to go a little bit into HF Lang and explain what that is and why we talk about this so much when we’re dealing with multilingual sites. HF Lang is essentially code that from an SEO perspective identifies two different URLs as being in the same contact, albeit in different languages. And one of the frequent mistakes, and you’ll see this at the very top of the code on most pages, is you can identify the language in which the content on that page is set. And usually it’s says English. And frequently I’ll open up the code on a Spanish page and it’ll say that the language is in English, but there are the right ways to do this from an SEO perspective. And I still see these mistakes. I mean, they’re rudimentary mistakes to you and I Gyi, but I see this done all the time. Best intentions, poor execution, and doing this right? It really, it services the market the right way.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, and the other thing thing for me that I keep wanting to pull back and think more broadly than just the language difference is coming back to this e-marketer thing. So about 39 million US Hispanics, 67% of the total Hispanic population, ages five and older speak Spanish at home. There’s many of them. And I’m looking for the stat here, I don’t have it. I’ll read

Conrad Saam:

It for you. 39 million US Hispanics, 67% of whom age five and older speak Spanish at home. However, among the US born Hispanic population, 45% speak English only. That’s what I was looking for. English only at home,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? Thank you. There you

Conrad Saam:

Go.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So let me make a point about this though. So again, if your goal is to have a marketing message that’s expanding your audience being more inclusive, and you recognize that 45% speak English only at home, you’re not speaking to that audience in Spanish. However, and you’ll see this in search console data too, how that segment searches might include queries like I’m looking for a Hispanic lawyer. And so to Conrad’s point, having team members that are representative of your clients is really, really important here. Because even if you create a page that says, we serve the Hispanic community, and if you don’t actually have that representation at your firm, your marketing is going to not work. The other thing, and we’ll drop this in the show notes too, but there was a great presentation by David Douglas at two Civility, which is the Illinois Center for Professionalism’s Conference.

He talks a lot about this and more representation in the actual practice of law. And again, to me, there are all sorts of great arguments for inclusivity, but the business case is the one that tends to be under discussed. And so if you’re in a local community and you are a white guy and you’re by yourself and you want to serve the community more broadly, it might be worth investing in inclusivity and diversity both at your firm and in your marketing. And it’s not just a Spanish speaking issue. I think that’s the thing that I keep coming back to.

Conrad Saam:

I’m going to leave you with one thought before we move on to talk about what to think about 30 days in. My favorite use case for multilingual is to have someone do a search in Spanish, click an ad in Spanish, go to a landing page in Spanish, pick up the phone and call, and it is answered by your intake people in Spanish. The technology to make that happen has been around for, I want to say a decade. It’s not that hard to make that work. And yet that is an amazing and welcoming experience when you can pull that off. And I bet nine out of 10 of you don’t have that capacity right now. Think about what could you do to immediately demonstrate that not only can you hire someone who can write something in Spanish, but actually at the firm, we’re going to converse in Spanish.

That’s a great way to do it when we come back. What to look for 30 days in to a new marketing engagement. Alright, and now we’re going to do a quick cover of a review left by Code Rro 1932 free ride, which sounds like you’re selling a pair of skis, I dunno, maybe some old skis. Anyway, I recently tuned into an episode on annual playing and KPIs and was thoroughly impressed with a content and delivery, the host’s willingness to discuss specific growth goals. Like aiming for 30% year over year growth was particularly enlightening. It’s rare to find such a focus discussion on tangible objectives, especially when many in the legal field have vague aspirations of wanting to grow. Boy oh boy, do we see that all the time? Gyi, this episode’s emphasis on hard numbers and strategic planning truly resonated with me and offered practical advice that stands out in the world of legal podcasts. Highly recommend to any legal professional, serious about growth and goal setting. Game on. Hooray, we resonate. Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We resonate. Least with one person

Conrad Saam:

At least with code Rro free ride. Think it’s, we hope it’s a person. It might be Elon Musk’s fourth child.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay.

Alright, so here we are on January 16th recording. We’ve been talking a lot about planning and budgeting and creating this one year plan and how do you tell if you’re moving in the right direction? So we wanted to talk about, alright, you’re one month in, you’re one month into your annual plan. Maybe you made a new hire for a marketing person on your team. Maybe you started a new engagement with an agency to start the year, or maybe it’s just a brand new year and you’ve got your new plan and we want to talk about a couple of different contexts. One, if you’re 30 days in with an new agency, what are the things that you should be expecting from that agency? If you’re working with a new in-house marketing person, how do you know that this in-house marketing person, what are the leading indicators this in-house marketing person’s on track for the plan? And if you’re in a plan, what are some of the things you might look at? 30 days in 30 days is not that long, but it’s not nothing. Conrad, what do you think lawyers should be asking or what should agencies be delivering to lawyers in those first 30 days?

Conrad Saam:

So my answer has a lot to do with where I believe the status of legal marketing, tech stack and infrastructure and reporting and orientation lives. And it is so nascent and underdeveloped, and I’m speaking from the Mockingbird Agency perspective, but this could be a new CMO coming in. It could be a new COO internally, I would expect as a law firm to have your agency so deeply focused on ensuring that the business metrics, not the marketing metrics that you can automagically create every 30 days when you pull it out of X, Y, or Z and you dump it into Ninja Cat and it creates a bunch of pretty pictures and graphs that don’t have anything to do with the business of your firm, but are really, really focused on the tactics of the marketing. I want your person or your agency to spend so much time ensuring you have accuracy of your reporting infrastructure, your business reporting, and by business reporting, Gyi, I’m talking about things like what is our cost per client?

What is our cost per consultation? Can we actually look at our leads and segment them out by marketing channel or by contact type phone versus form fill? Is this data accurate? Is it tracked? Is there automation between that? Or do I still have Bill the guy who’s been tracking this on the Excel sheet manually for years? Is that how we’re looking at it? And so this involves things like what’s your intake management system? Does it tie into your matter management system? Can they tie together or not? And so if those things don’t happen, you can’t get the business reporting that really matters. And so we can look at things, marketers like to look at things like what does my cost per click on my ads and how many pieces of content have I written? And none of that matters if it’s not generating business. So my perspective right now is by and large, despite the fact that we have the proliferation of intake management software, all this matter management software, we’ve got awesome tools like our good friends over at CallRail, we haven’t said CallRail yet. I feel like we’re going to add a shock collar if we make it through a whole episode without saying CallRail, but dynamic call tracking with something like CallRail, putting that all together, getting to the business centricity of your mindset, that becomes so amazingly important. And by the way, if you could knock that out all of that correctly in 30 days, game on, that would be really, really unusual in my experience.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So I agree with all that and I think that that’s fair is that different firms are going to be at different stages. They’re 30 days in. So there are firms that they might have all this locked down. And so your first 30 days is really easy and then you’re into benchmarking and making sure that you’re actually, your systems are doing what you think that they’re doing. But to me, the next evolution is establishing those benchmarks. Where have we been? Where are we now? That should be an indicator of where we think we can go. And depending on the types of campaigns, the other thing that we talk about all the time, different marketing campaigns have different timescales. And those timescales are also dependent on your objectives and where you are today. So the most obvious one is you just launched a new website 30 days ago, this is not the time to go start measuring your return on investment from your SEO campaign, right?

You’re 30 days in now, what could you measure? You could start to see are you getting more pages indexed? Are impressions growing? Are you benchmarking average positions? This is we’re talking brand new site. I think the other thing the first 30 days is really important for is research. So if this is a brand new engagement, do you really understand our firm? Do you really understand our audience? Do you really understand where we’re trying to go? If you didn’t have those conversations in pre-engagement, look, a lot of agencies, they don’t. They’ll say, look, you sign up, we’re going to start to do work. And I don’t fault agencies for doing that because everybody wants to get paid for delivering the value of the service. If you’re an in-house marketing person, it’s very similar. I think it’s stress testing all of those systems, checking the data. Lawyers say all the time we answer every phone call. Do you know lawyers say all the time, we close every deal. Do you know, right? Those are the types of things. And then I think also just from a technical standpoint, there are technical auditing things that should be going on as well. So crawling sites, the auditing you might do on an ad account, auditing, creative, and how creative is being trafficked, but it is, it’s heavy research benchmarking data infrastructure stuff.

Conrad Saam:

So what you did not say, you did not say analysis. You never said the word optimization. And I think those are noted because 30 days in, you don’t have enough to do analysis or optimization. We talked about benchmarking, getting to a point where we actually have a number, whatever that might be. It’s your phone call answer rate. It’s your cost per click, click to rate. It’s your speed with which you respond to form fills, whatever it might be. We’ve got to get to a benchmarking, but we’re not monkeying with any of that stuff until we have a benchmark. And so we’re not doing analysis, we’re not looking at things and saying, this is how I’m going to optimize your pay-per-click campaign that launched 30 days ago because you don’t have enough to work with and even pay-per-click, which a lot of times I look at pay-per-click and you’re like, oh, well, if you have a big enough spend, you have enough data with which to make some changes. But bluntly, 30 days in, even with a massive spend, a brand new campaign 30 days, and Google’s still learning a lot about you, you are not at a stasis point. You don’t have a quality score that’s stable. So you’re sitting the problem, Gyi, that I find with this, and by the way, this is all 100% accurate. You end up with a relationship problem because what we’ve just told you is nothing tangible. We haven’t made changes, we’re not doing this. Where’s the

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Show? The stuff?

Conrad Saam:

Where’s all my things? I just give me the

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Deliverables.

Conrad Saam:

Totally. I want my deliverables. And you’re like, your deliverable is information, right? Super intangible. And so as an agency, it can be difficult to demonstrate to a client that like, Hey, we just went on the first date, we’re really into you. We’re doing a great job, but I got nothing to deliver for you. And so this is philosophical on my part, but I do believe, and maybe I don’t know if agencies listen to this pod. I suspect you do, but I believe so. We actually know that they do. But I’ll give you this piece of advice as the agency, and this is what I would look for if I was a law firm. When you’re stuck in this, we’re still in kind of the dating courting phase and I don’t have a great bunch of deliverables to deliver to you. Communication is the deliverable, right? This is what we’re doing early, early on. You want that over communication, even if it doesn’t mean anything. Hey, we just checked your blah, blah, blah. We ran a test on X, Y, Z, we’ve started to develop data on this side or the other thing. You want to start to feel that this is a agency that is going to over communicate with you and that gives you trust. But I don’t think you have those tangible analytical optimization changes 30 days in too early. It’s too soon, man.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, most of the time. You’re right, especially if it’s brand new stuff, you have no historical data. Now, some firms, they have a bunch of historical data. You can look back and there are things you can learn, you can learn a lot. Now you’re right about, especially if you’re launching something like T ROAS or something where the Google machine has to do some learning that’s brand new. There’s no way around that. That’s a condition. But look, most of the firms that we talked to, either the historical data is very dicey or it’s extremely scarce or there’s some kind of major infrastructure problem. So the data that they have been relying on is just totally wrong in those cases. You’re right, all of that, there’s no analysis or insights. And I think you used Overcommunication. My big thing from that side of the house is expectation alignment.

If you’re an agency person listening this and you’re like, you’re stuck in deliverables world, you should be talking about what expectations the client can expect. We talk to lawyers about this all the time from a marketing perspective, tell your clients what they can expect throughout the process. Well, that’s good advice for the agency people too. And so talking about meeting cadences, talking about when they can expect certain things, what reports are going to look like, how often they’re going to receive reports, what should they do if they have a question, and how can they get ahold of you and what’s your response going to be like in terms of response times and what’s turnaround times on design and development projects, all that expectation alignment is so essential. That’s the only way to make sure we’re starting off on the right foot. Build trust and do what you say you’re going to do, right? If you do those things, that’s how trust is built. If you’re silent, don’t be surprised. 30 days in to be like, Hey, I just paid you for 30 days worth of work. Where’s my stuff? Right? Right.

Conrad Saam:

Gyi, I want to turn this backwards. And I can imagine some agencies listening to this going like, Gyi and Conrad can’t do shit in 30 days. You should hire me instead. I am going to guarantee. And by the way, you kindly came to my defense a couple episodes ago from someone who was guaranteeing a positive ROI in SEO within the first 30 days. So I remember that that episode, it’s not that long ago. How do think lawyers should think through those guarantees of 30 days results or you don’t pay? What is that like? Well, again, I mean, this contrasts with what we’re talking about here, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. Look, you can set up an account very fast. You can get up on, you can open a, now interestingly, Facebook, you can’t open it all that fast all the time because there’s some delays in just getting up and running. But you can get up and running and Google ads really fast. You can create a campaign, do geotargeting, and you can pull a couple exact match keywords and go bid on them. And maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe this person that’s doing this for you will get lucky that if they happen to drive a return on ad spend, and again, I’m talking about ads here. I’m not talking about SEO, but how about even SEO? Maybe they get lucky. Your site has been de-indexed and they removed the no index from robots, and all of a sudden your index and traffic’s going up through the roof.

Those are exceptions to the rule most of the time. And lawyers, they’re listening to this. They know this because they’ve been working with these folks and they know that. It’s like, yeah, you’re right. In the first 30 days, and someone that’s guaranteeing stuff guarantee, what are they going to guarantee? You’re going to write a well-published piece of content in 30 days. I mean, maybe some basic stuff you can do, but are you going to do anything that’s actually required some knowledge of your firm, of your location? You’re going to go and do some kind of link building activity in the local community that you’re going to see result in 30 days. I mean, some of these sites, Google’s not even crawling in that time period. So even if they make the changes, nothing’s happening because Google hasn’t crawled the site yet.

Conrad Saam:

There you go. Gyi and Conrad’s perspective, on the 30 day guarantee,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

30 days, I can do it in seven.

Conrad Saam:

When we come back, it will be the next podcast episode because I am terrible at delivering these wrap-ups. I’m going to pass this over to Gyi to do a much better job than I just did right now. Well,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Thanks, Conrad. Hopefully I can do slightly better, but if you’ve just landed on this episode, please do subscribe. Again. I think we’re likely to continue this theme of segments as we move throughout the year. And so if you’re interested in that kind of thing, like kind of getting us following along with what’s going on month over month, quarter over quarter, please do subscribe. Check us out on YouTube, leave us a comment, send us a topic suggestion. Leave us a review. We’d love to hear from you, and we’re so grateful for your time and attention. Until next time, Conrad and Gyi on Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Farewell.

Speaker 3:

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