What’s Your Best Cost Per Acquisition? || Drafting Your Marketing Dream Team: Round 4

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad, how are your knees holding up?

Conrad Saam:

My knees are fantastic, sir, why do you ask?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I know that you are a very proficient and committed skier, and I understand you were just on an awesome trip.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, last year I took my eldest. This year I took my middle, and next year, maybe I’ll take the little guy. We went skiing up in the middle of nowhere in British Columbia. There’s supposed to be 24 people at this place. It’s about 200,000 acres in the British Columbian wilderness. And because the snow was allegedly so bad, everyone canceled, but six of us. So we had the whole place to ourselves. It was over the top. Ridiculous. You’ve been on the other end. You’ve been cruising?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Cruising. I actually had, my last two weeks were a whirlwind. I had tech show, great to see if we had tech show, and I actually had to scoot out on Thursday evening, so I didn’t get to stay for all of the festivities because I had a scheduling conflict to travel down to Tampa to board a ship, cruise ship for my mother-in-Law’s 70th birthday. About 35 family members all got together to celebrate my mother-in-law’s. Great time, great way to be together. Cruise is not really my first choice of a vacation, but I got to tell you with kids, it was really great. Lots for the kids to do

Conrad Saam:

And you’re being the awesome spouse, the trophy husband.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Ha. This episode not sponsored by Claire, but in addition to our travelings, what else are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam:

Alright, as usual, we’re covering the news, a lot of the Google Reddit deal. We’re going to talk about Google and machine learning in the news. We are answering a listener question about the best cost per acquisition. And then finally, we’re going to come back to our marketing dream team and talk about a player that we think is really important that has often gone overlooked

Gyi Tsakalakis:

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. Let’s hit the news. Alright, Gyi, there’s a lot of talk about this Google and Reddit deal. Now, you and I talked a lot about Reddit last episode, and so it was interesting to see this hit the news. Tell me what’s going on between Google and Reddit and the $60 million deal in ai.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So it’s funny, I’m looking at this CBS news article. The headline is Google Strikes $60 million deal with Reddit, allowing Search Giant to train AI models on human posts, which is funny. But for context, there’s this idea that Reddit is this bastion of human user-generated content and Google as it moves into Gemini and advanced Gemini land to train its ai, it wants to use that user-generated content. So they’re paying Reddit for API access to use all the data from Reddit to train their AI so that the AI will be getting better human input. Now look, I’m not an AI scientist here. I think Google has not been doing a great job. People in the SEO community have been up in arms about how bad the results have been getting for a variety of reasons. But Google’s trying to make this move towards helpful content. A lot of sites have been impacted by it.

And my thing is, my experience, and I’m going to be talking about this on a webinar tomorrow with Smith ai, so by the time this is published, you won’t be able to see it, but maybe you can get a recording of it. The results aren’t very good. In fact, if you compare Gemini Advanced with SGE and Google Original, I think Google Original is the best results. But anyway, I think the takeaway here is we’ll put a link, we’ve talked about this before, there’s a huge opportunity for businesses to be more engaged with Reddit and you can go listen to that episode. Just we’re going to rehash all that.

Conrad Saam:

Alright. Also in the news, speaking about ai, et cetera, Google working with machine learning to keep contributed content helpful. Now, they talked a little bit about using machine learning to catch fake reviews faster. So we’ve got ostensibly a drop in the percentage of reviews that are getting through that are fake. What’s your take on that? Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, the headline is, this is February 13th. Google Maps proud of their using machine learning to be able to distinguish real reviews from fake reviews. And the big number here was 45% over 45% more.

Conrad Saam:

That’s right.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Reviews were blocked or removed for violating a policy than the prior year. And in the pre-show, how does that strike you? Conrad? I mean mission accomplished here, about half of them, 45% improvement. Sounds good.

Conrad Saam:

Well this is the problem in measuring things with percentages when the absolute number has gone up a lot more than two x 45%, you’re actually further behind than you were 12 months ago.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s my sense too, by the way,

Conrad Saam:

Google, you’ve done this to yourselves by making the reviews so unbelievably overweighted in their effectiveness regardless of how genuine they are. So while you may be stopping 45%, you now have 500% more to weed through and you’re going backwards instead of forwards on this.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, we should probably have Curtis Boyd on from Transparency Company at some point to discuss this if you’re not familiar with Curtis and his work checkout transparency company and what he’s trying to do. But it is a absolute disaster out there to the point that I think it’s only a matter of time until someone gets made an example of. But we’ll see.

Conrad Saam:

And finally, Gyi, you were on Trial Lawyer Nation, what was that about?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I was very grateful to be invited as a guest on Michael Collins. Great trial lawyer nation. If you are a trial lawyer and you want to hear some really great conversations both from other trial lawyers and other people in the intersection of trial lawyering and all the tech and other stuff that goes on, highly recommend it. And we’ll put a link in the show notes for that too, for people to check out that conversation. But really enjoyed my time and it’s great podcast to check out.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, after the break, we’re going to answer the question, what is your best cost per acquisition? Now, loyal listeners, you’ll remember that G and I hit the conferences with recorder in hand asking people to ask us questions. Now we’ve kind of come to the end of some of the good questions, but we did leave with this final one that goes like this,

Speaker 4:

Christian Burridge, salt Lake City, Utah personal injury lawyer prominently MVAs, what is your best cost per acquisition on A MVA using social media?

Conrad Saam:

This was a very specific question and our answers to this are going to be tailored to the specificity of the question, what is your best cost per acquisition on social media for an MVA? Gyi, what’s your answer?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

47.

Conrad Saam:

47. That’s shekels.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think people hate this, right? You know what this conversation reminds me of though? The ROI conversation.

Conrad Saam:

It does not annoy me as much as the ROI conversation.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, why does it annoy you at all and what’s an MVA Conrad

Conrad Saam:

Motor vehicle accident? Fair question. For those of you who do not live in our occasionally PI focused world, I think I don’t even go Why ROI pisses me off so much.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No. Why does cost per acquisition still annoy you even though if it’s less than ROI?

Conrad Saam:

Oh, fair question. That was a leading question for me to then answer. Answer. That was beautiful. Well done. A great interviewer. Thank you. Good job. You’re like a podcast host.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’ve been doing this a minute.

Conrad Saam:

So to walk through the door that Gyi just opened for me so beautifully. There are two elements to this. The first is the assumption that you’re really looking for a low number on this, and I think that is a very, very simplistic perspective. And the reason for that is while you may actually get a really, really low number, the low number may be zero, right? You send out a tweet, someone saw it, they referred you a case. Cost per acquisition is zero minus the time it took you to type out 148 characters.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, you got to take your hourly rate and multiply it by the time you spend

Conrad Saam:

All that kind of garbage. It’s not

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Zero. It’s not

Conrad Saam:

Zero, it’s not zero, but it’s $2 and 18 cents a low hourly rate. That is your best ROI. But if you think that you can survive or grow a law firm on a low cost per acquisition, you are sorely mistaken. The other question, and this is really specific to MVA, and I’m going to answer this with motor vehicle accident specifically direct response in social, it’s a thing by and large when Gyi and I have been talking about social media, we’ve been talking about building both brand awareness and brand affinity, which makes measurement of an individual attribution for a specific matter, impossible. It’s not a thing, it’s not a one touch thing. There are however, direct response options in social, they tend to, I mean, I know what you think about the creative that does work for direct response for specifically say auto accidents in social Gyi. But it tends to be less of a focus, at least for my firm and my clients than that brand awareness brand affinity built.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I think it’s a different play. And I think you said a lot of good things in there that I think we probably should parse a little bit, especially if this is still kind of new for you all this mumbo jumbo. But the first thing Conrad was mentioning is that if you’re going to try to answer this question with some universal number, again, we give plenty of examples where the cost per acquisition for a specific campaign was disproportionately lower than every other campaign we’ve done. And we could start talking about all of the campaigns that we’ve ever run and say, oh, I’ll take an average, which there’s problems with averaging, especially when the dataset is wildly all over the map. So you could take a median, but even then, are you talking about direct response, right? So you’re saying we’re only counting, you show up in the feed call hire and it’s all tracked right there.

And then we’re going to assume that we’re just talking about motor vehicle accidents and we’re just talking about in Salt Lake, you should be normalizing across location. That’s going to vary a lot as well. And then you still got to talk about volume. So how many cases are you opening from social media at the cost per acquisition? And so then again, we’re still back to it and we’re not trying to dodge the question, what’s the best one you’ve ever seen? There are a lot of people out there talking about sub 100, sub 100 cost per acquisition across a variety of practice areas. But certainly PI would be in that mix.

Conrad Saam:

Sub $100 cost per acquisition. That sounds delightful. Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s what folks are out there. That’s what my Facebook feed is filled with.

Conrad Saam:

So at the risk of asking the obvious, do you believe that, Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well again, I am not even going to try to Cast aspersions that there’s something nefarious going on. You just got to be specific in what you’re reporting on, right? So do I think that there are examples of sub 100 cost per acquisition social media campaigns? Yes. I know there are for MVA in Salt Lake that’s solely single click, direct response and at a volume that can support your practice or hit your growth objective. I think the cost is probably higher maybe, but

Conrad Saam:

Well, no, no. So I think your focus on the volume piece, I think that’s what everyone misses. You may be able to get one or two cases at a very low cost and that’s great, but it is not enough. And so it is the wrong, when you look at the bell curve and those averages and the means and the medians and all that kind of stuff, it doesn’t matter if you can’t feed your people and keep your lights on. The focus on the best as lowest is just so shortsighted. We’re now abusing our questionnaire. We’ll beep out your name or something like

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That. Yeah, no, but again, I’m empathetic to the questioner because the questioner if assuming that they’re spending money, they want to benchmark, they’re like, Hey, I’m going to ask these guys who do this, what’s their best cost per acquisition? And we’re saying, without intending to dodge the question, we can throw out some numbers. I throw out 47. But the point is that contextually, it doesn’t do anybody any good to go out and say, if you’re not doing a $50 motor vehicle cost per acquisition, you should fire your agency or fire your marketing director, blah, blah, blah. Because there’s all sorts of variation. There’s all sorts of variables in there. And again, at the end of the day, I think you should be looking at your cost per acquisition change over time. But if what Conrad and I think are on the same page about is optimizing to your cost per acquisition is probably the wrong metric to be optimizing too.

Conrad Saam:

I think a different framework to think about this with, we try and talk about this all the time is, and it’s the same math, but what is your acceptable cost per case? What is the percentage of that case that you’re willing to give up in order to acquire the case? And if it’s 20%, that means you work for Google or Conrad or Gyi on Mondays and that may or may not be okay with you. It’s just a much better way to look at things than the focus on the best because the best won’t really get you where you want to go from a volume perspective. Okay, we’re on take a break

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we’re back. So for a long time, Lunch, Hour, Legal, Marketing listeners and YouTube viewers, you’re probably familiar with this theme that Conrad and I have been running with and it comes back from a tech show presentation that we presented on Gas Now two tech shows ago. The idea is that we’re building this team of marketing people. If you had a limitless budget and resources, what roles would you have on the team? And today we’re going to talk about the off hours operator. So Conrad, when you think of this dream team member, what do you recall telling Tech show? What do you think is important to think about? Why is the off hours operator on the Dream team?

Conrad Saam:

So this was a flagrant push to consider using, and I’m literally looking at our notes from that ABA tech show talk. We pushed Smith, Ruby, Lex reception and Posh. So Posh was a sponsor of the podcast for a while. Smith, we’ve been friends with Maddie over at Smith for a long time. Ruby was kind of one of the earliest players in this game. And Lex reception, although I don’t have a lot of clients on it, they have always had a fairly positive presence in the marketplace. And that was kind of what we were pushing the counterpoint.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, hold on a second though. I want to zoom out a little bit.

Conrad Saam:

Zoom.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So because you named a bunch of virtual receptionists, but you don’t necessarily, what are some other ways you could have an off hours operator rights? So I think the starting question is why is this person on the team For me, and I know we’ve talked to this a million times, you’re running paid ads, you’re doing call tracking from a variety of sources, whatever it is, and you’re like, there’s a bunch of people calling not during the day,

Conrad Saam:

Right? Go back to an earlier episode where Gyi, and I suggested that running LSAs when you don’t have anyone to answer the phone is a bad idea.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Great. So that’s really, it’s answering inquiries on off hours. I think hopefully it’s obvious why this is important. We, I’ve been trying to be empathetic. There are lawyers that still say, I don’t want cases from the people who are calling at off hours. And I’m like, okay,

Conrad Saam:

Great, your market is now 10% smaller.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Talk about cost per acquisition, I bet it goes up. So then you realize it’s like, look, there are a lot of people that want to talk to you, get a consultation from you off hours. How do you handle that? So option one lawyer, you can just be on your phone answering all calls all hours of the day. No sleeping, not realistic. Not scalable, not healthy. Okay? You could hire probably a couple people to cover 24 hours. I dunno how many people at least maybe three or four. And that’s pretty slim, especially if you’re doing volume.

Conrad Saam:

In all fairness, I do have a couple of clients who offshore this and they have full-time staff 24 7 right now. They’re larger firms and that has been their approach and it is effective.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Do you distinguish that from virtual receptionists?

Conrad Saam:

Yes. I’ll tell you why. And this is a really key distinction. They’re

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Dedicated

Conrad Saam:

Problem, they’re dedicated a hundred percent. The problem with the virtual receptionist is, I’m Joey, I don’t really like my job. I’m working remotely. I answer the phone for 700 law firms around the country. I don’t really care to figure out how to answer with your correct name. The pronunciation of that weird name, SOM or Saam, I don’t know. And I don’t really care. I don’t know what type of cases you really do. And probably I might not even have access to your calendar and know who Mike can book and who I can’t book. So I’m going to do a at best average job. So the answer to your question, Gyi, is I do not consider those to be the virtual receptionist because it is dedicated and because those people are going through training, they learn about the firm, they’re bought into the firm, they only work for that firm. There’s some level of training that you can actually give them. I think it works.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s another option. Automated, right? Phone tree could be like, press one for this, press two for this, work ’em through, and then eventually that’s still either going to go to a human or someone’s going to call you back.

Conrad Saam:

Welcome to movie phone,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? I mean my bank is on this system. Yeah. I’ll tell you, that’s the one where I’m like, you got to do something else. Because when we first implemented call tracking years ago, it was not surprisingly in hindsight, but hangups, people just hang up

Conrad Saam:

Because what people want from a lawyer, they want responsiveness and nothing says, I’m not responsive, then please press three to speak to somebody.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And I think that also it’s at least in my experience, you’re screaming operator or connect me to somebody or zero the whole time. That was the other thing we noticed when we were looking at our CallRail data. It’s like, why are people pushing the button? It’s because they’re trying to push zero to get to the operator. So again, client experience stuff. Now I’m sympathetic because not everybody can hire the full-time team. I know some firms we get a lot of pushback even trying to hire the virtual team. And so if cost is a major factor, this is one of those areas where people think maybe I trim some costs. I don’t love that place as a cost trimming area, but some firms will say this is the best we can do. What about automated voice, like AI type of thing? It’s a bot, it’s a voice chat bot. What do you think about that?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, so this is where things have really moved dramatically over the 12 months since we put this out, right? There is the growing expectation, and you guys get this when you call in for customer support in lots of different places that can be handled through voice and you can still scream operator, operator talk to a person. But with ai you can respond to that differently than please press three. You didn’t press three, go back to the beginning and start all over again. That is really becoming something and a changing pattern of what we expect. And so that did not exist in our ABA tech show off hours operator conversation, but it is certainly on the table today.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And look, this is where it’s going enterprise wise. I mean many major companies are moving to this kind of model. Where is frontline of defense is this voice bot, which just getting warmed up. So folks, if you’ve had experience with these, you can hashtag LHLM or post on your social media how these things don’t work very well. They’re getting a lot better. And I think the other important thing here is what is the purpose of the off hours operator? It’s not to conduct a full intake at three o’clock in the morning.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, so yeah, let’s go. This is actually really tricky. You’re right. It isn’t to conduct a full intake at three in the morning unless maybe you do have that dedicated staff, which would be a better solution.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I’ll tell you the ideal with that would be is you’ve got frontline of defense, either virtual receptionist or maybe you do, here’s my stack, this is the stack I would have to recommend, hit it. I would do chatbot starting voice chat bot start, make it very clear how they can opt out supported by a virtual receptionist with the virtual receptionist script identifying lead qualification. And you hear lawyers, trial lawyers talk about this all the time. Someone calls you at three o’clock in the morning and says their family member was killed in a semi-truck. That’s not a we’ll call you in the morning. It’s just not. You’re going to have a really hard time winning those clients because they have a totally different expectation. And then you start doing the math game and you’re like, well, that’s one out of a million calls. But this is why it’s much more about systems and processes and how the tech works within those systems and processes than the tech itself. Right now, a chatbot is not the end all be all for every intake experience, and frankly, neither is a virtual receptionist.

Conrad Saam:

So there’s two elements. This one is different. People want to interact with your firm in different ways, and this is generational, it’s situational. And so you need to understand that what my standard answer to this, and this has been what we’ll call the standard third party virtual receptionist, Smith, Ruby, LS, et cetera. Their job is not to take a message. And I think that has been an often mistaken perspective like, oh, it’s okay, we’re going to take a message and I’ll get back to you tomorrow. Bullshit. You may as well just have a, please leave a message for me. You’re just leaving it with someone who happens to be a human who doesn’t know how to say your name. What their job is to me is to schedule an appointment to bring that person further down the funnel. The experience of engaging with your firm, right?

The classic is like, okay, I see that Joe is available to talk to you at 10 o’clock tomorrow. Is are you available? Yes, that’s great. Can I get your email? Yes, I’ve got your email. Now we’re going to send you an automated email that shows that you’ve got an appointment with Joe tomorrow at 10. At 9 45 tomorrow morning, you get the reminder, blah, blah, blah. And Joe gets a reminder and it’s on his calendar. And that all happens automagically through a virtual reception service. That’s kind of my ideal. The problem with that is the vetting on that can be sloppy. You can let people in who you don’t really want to talk to. If you’re really picky firm and you’ve got someone at Smith who doesn’t know the pickiness of your firm, it’s going to be very hard for them to do a great job of vetting that client. And you can lose some business that way or waste a bunch of time that way, but ultimately focus on helping that consumer, that possible spender of money with you further down the path to spending that money. And I do think that with AI and integration with more technology, you can make that even easier and more seamless. That’s where some magic starts to happen.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I agree. When I think of the off hours operator, the objective is to stop the search.

Great. Get them to stop going to the next law firm. And so I think all the things you said are great. I think they’re less likely to search if they have an appointment coming up, they’re less likely to search if they feel like they made it a connection with the intake person. And again, that’s the stuff hard to scale. Empathy is hard to scale. Client service is hard to scale. But for me, that’s my thing is flip it on its head and say, there are all sorts of places to do automation and more efficiency and yada yada yada. And maybe even the front end of intake is. But at the end of the day, that experience, that potential client experience and client experience, you better have it locked down. Because if that’s where you’re going to cut costs and switch back to leave a message or phone tree, we’re going to tell you that you don’t have a lead problem. You have a conversion problem from qualified lead through the intake process. But unfortunately I can’t tell you anymore about that because we are out time. Thank you dear listeners for chiming into tuning in. I suppose as we’re chiming, you’re tuning tune into this episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Please do provide us some feedback, leave a review, find us on YouTube, get involved in the conversation. Until next time, Ian Conrad saying farewell.

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 via Apple Podcasts and RSS, follow legal Talk network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Conrad Saam:

The social media aspect of this, hold on.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad’s shaking the snow out of his brain.

Conrad Saam:

Sorry, that sounds like I have a drug problem.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We’ll edit that out. Yeah, Conrad was hawking up a lugie.

Conrad Saam:

Thank you. Much better.

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