Brand Conquesting: Dirty and Underhanded? || How would you spend $5000?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad, I believe we owe our dear listeners an apology for blowing our production schedule last week because you were completely off the grid.

Conrad Saam:

I was completely off the grid. I talk about this a lot. I don’t do it a lot, but the value of leaving your laptop and your phone behind is outstanding and I’d encourage you to do it,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But it wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns on this trip.

Conrad Saam:

I unfortunately returned to a nightmare created by my 11 year long relationship with Chase Bank, and we no longer have relationship with Chase Bank after that. We talk a lot about encouraging people to think local and support local businesses. Drop Chase everyone. Drop your big bank. Go work with a local credit union. You’ll be happier with yourself and they’ll actually do their job

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well. Enough about Chase. What else are we talking about today? Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

Alright. We are covering as usual the news, which coincidentally includes Chase, our first segment. We are going to talk about the underhanded brand, conquest strategy that is old, but still effective. And finally, we’re going to answer a great user submitted question. How would you spend $5,000

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Money makes the world go round. Money makes the world go round.

Speaker 3:

Money makes Round.

Welcome to Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing teaching you how to promote market and make Fat stack for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:

All right everyone, welcome to Lunch Hour. Legal Marketing. Let’s do some news with our new retro news drop.

We started off talking about my hatred of JP Morgan Chase as a business banker, but they were in the news. It was fascinating, and this is a really, really big seismic shift. We’ll put a link in the show notes to this, but JP Morgan has started an advertising agency and the basis of this, and this is very obvious, and we’ve talked a lot about digital privacy. Guess who’s got a lot of access to a lot of data about your purchasing behavior. The issuer of that Chase credit card, 80 million people using Chase credit cards and JP Morgan started a marketing chase media solutions to help brands get in front of highly targeted people based on their user behavior. The other interesting thing that I see with this, Gyi, this is really fascinating and impacts the legal world. So what this might mean is legal is out of the game, but they’re doing this on a performance basis because it’s a credit card. They know, they literally process the payment and can take that payment out. So if you’re really into Coke and they start advertising Coke for you and you buy a Coke, they can actually literally run as a percentage of revenue, which is, I mean, this all makes a ton of sense to me. I don’t know that this will ever hit legal, but it is a fascinating evolution. What do you think?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I love this story for forever. We’ve been saying things like everybody is in the digital media business and this to me is the final proof of a bank is a digital media company. Everybody is, I think you hit on some of the high notes. I think it’s fascinating from a PR consumer privacy thing, and this is somewhere in some department inside of Chase with probably some help of some consulting companies, market research surveys, all this stuff to conclude that on balance advertising on our customer data is more valuable than the potential hit that we might take from people being concerned that they’re selling our data. And again, anecdotally, we know that even despite a lot of the vocal concerns that consumers have had about privacy, they don’t dump the services. They don’t stop using Google. They don’t stop using meta. They don’t stop using TikTok. Remember ad blocker apocalypse, that’s never happened. No one’s adding ad blockers to their browsers. Yeah. There’s no doubt to me this is going. And so you were talking about in the context of it coming to legal, I think the interesting thing is going to be lawyers are going to want to advertise on this data, right? Yeah. We hear this one all the time. Divorces for high net worth individuals.

Conrad Saam:

Sure. That data is right there, right? Very much right there.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And it’s not just the amount, it’s spending habits.

Conrad Saam:

Well, it’s things like, okay, so let’s take divorce. I’ll be silly because I can’t come up with a good example here, but I just bought a bunch of scotch and tissues and ice cream. Maybe that indicates that I’m having marital problems

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Or an awesome party

Conrad Saam:

Or an awesome party, or I bought a new car or I bought some crutches. All of a sudden you go buy a bunch of crutches at CVS and all of a sudden you’re getting hit with advertisements from law firms.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The ideas are limitless.

Conrad Saam:

I mean, we should have some scotch and get creative with this, but it’s fascinating,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? Well guess what? If Chase is doing this, get ready to see a bunch of other, oh

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, yeah. This jump is the tip of the iceberg. Okay. Paid search. Talk to me about recent data on paid search. Gyi.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, so this comes from the good folks at Search Engine lan. US search and ad revenues hit 88.8 billion in 2023. Search revenue grew 5.2% year on year. However, paid search is still king. It continues to own the largest market share of all advertising, 39.5%. However, that is down from 40% in 2022 and 41% in 2021 and 42% in 2020. So paid search overall buying, trending down, Conrad, what’s up with this? What’s going on with paid search?

Conrad Saam:

I think the interesting thing here, and I’m making the assumption that you get the very similar questions that I get, and the number one question I get is, what are the channels other than paid search that I can be spending my money on? And I think that’s a good thing to be thinking about because it is a very, very expensive channel.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s what I was going to ask you. Why do you think people are asking that more and is that part of the story of why paid search revenue’s down?

Conrad Saam:

I think people are looking to expand opportunities outside of paid search because everyone is playing in the game. And as we’ve talked about before, the economics of the bidding system mean that the more people who are playing in the game, the more expensive it is for everyone playing the game. And Google has made it unbelievably easy to A, get in the game and B, spend money in the game on things that you don’t think you’re actually spending money on. And so the amount of money going in there just has increased. It’s made it more expensive. And I do not want to lose this point, and this is a poor comparative, but we can use this if we’re talking about 40% of the market, 40% of advertising is done through paid search. That means if you sit down and you’re like, this channel is just so expensive, I’m out.

You’re walking away something close to 40% of the market, that is a big deal. Now we have clients who do this paid search is the first thing that I want a jettison if possible, right? Because it’s so expensive. And if you can generate business outside of paid search, Merry Christmas, do it all day long, and I encourage you to do that. But you are walking away from a significant portion and assume that those ad dollars aren’t spent evenly across the different channels from popularity. And that goes to my point of it being expensive. So maybe it’s not 40% of the market, but it’s not 10% either. It’s probably closer to a third of the market or 30% of the market on digital. That business goes through paid search. And if you walk away from it because it’s too expensive, you are constraining your growth. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that, but it is a point to keep in mind when you talk about leaving paid search.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I think there are a couple things going on. I think certainly as you mentioned, the price per click is becoming prohibitive. And even when it’s not consumer behaviors changing, people are giving attention to other platforms. In fact, part of this report year over year growth for search advertising is slower than the digital industry as a whole. So there are options for advertising that have lower cost per acquisition and there’s increased consumer volume on these other platforms. Now they still don’t have intent.

Conrad Saam:

Advertising has traditionally been spent on intent-based advertising, which makes all the sense in the world to me. If you want to sell coffee cups, you want to find people who are buying coffee cups. However, an increasingly amount of money is being spent on longer term brand development and affinity and awareness. And that is being done through different platforms outside of PaperClick, by and large,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Very well articulated. Let’s take a break.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, Gyi, we are going to talk about an age old tactic, the underhanded brand conquest, and using digital marketing to generate clients for yourself by at least mentioning, if not pretending to be your competitor. Why are we talking about this? Ben Glass sent us a example of someone using his very good reputation for their own efforts. Gyi, can you talk about what was done to Ben Glass and how the company that did it would profit from doing so?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, so this is an old school tactic,

Conrad Saam:

Dirty,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And essentially another firm created a page on their website optimized for Ben Glass Law and actually said some nice things, nothing bad, pretty benign. It wasn’t even a nasty thing for the uninitiated. The idea here in theory is that you got a page on your site, it shows up in searches for Ben Glass Law as it did for Ben’s marketing team. That’s how they found it. So it’s ranking for Ben Glass Law. And the idea is that maybe someone that’s searching for Ben Glass Law clicks on that link reads the paragraph on Ben Glass Law. But below that paragraph is all the great things that this firm does and why they should hire this firm instead. And Ben’s asking what you do about it. So what do you think about this Conrad? What do you think about this aggressive brand conquest strategy?

Conrad Saam:

So I’m going to take this at a highly philosophical level, and then I think we need to kind of get down into the kind of dirtier grossness of it. I do believe, and Google has had this perspective on pay-per-click, you could bid on other people’s brands like go back a long, long time ago with pay-per-click. And the reason that they suggested this, and I don’t think they’re wrong, is that if you are looking to buy a Ford F-150, you should also consider a Chevy Silverado. And there’s no reason that Chevy shouldn’t be able to put their car in front of you because you’re considering looking at the Ford F-150, right? So I don’t conquest strategy, it’s total conquest. And by the way, this has been part of marketing for years, right? Absolutely. This is a part of the game and so we can kind of hate the way that this was actually done, but I do believe that philosophically at the highest level, I think this is a good tactic.

I’ll give you an example. If you are bidding on Morgan and Morgan and pretending to be Morgan and Morgan, when people call your firm, or if your website looks like Morgan, Morgan, we can get into this. If your website looks like Morgan and Morgan and you are pretending to be, that’s underhanded gross and you should lose your license. But when people are looking for Morgan Morgan, you want to give them why your local business is a better mousetrap. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think that’s a good thing and I think it’s a good thing for you. I think it’s a good thing for Morgan and Morgan because it falls right into their positioning and I think it’s a good thing for the end consumer. So my question, did you agree with those? Keith, do you agree with those premises? Well,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I philosophically I agree with you.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. Philosophy major. Gyi, for those of you who don’t know philosophy

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Major, Gyi,

Conrad Saam:

Gyi was a philosophy major. I was econ, I wish we had switched, but okay. Yeah,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I agree. I think that, look, you can’t do any of the misleading stuff. You can’t use competitor names in your ads. You can’t, is there logos? You can’t put it on their landing pages. And ironically, Google went from questions of like, is it permissible? Google’s like, sure, you can bid on competitors’ names too. Now we’re going to force you to bid on competitors’ names unless you tell us not to. Yeah,

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, yeah. That’s gross. Now we we’re, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But here’s my, let’s get a little bit more tactically objective here. Okay, I like this. So you got your pros and your con sheet out. Here’s the best you’re going to have on the pro side.

Conrad Saam:

Okay?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Somebody does a search for this competitor’s name, whether it’s your ad creative or your organic listing, you motivate them to click. Right now, I think it’s a little bit, we’re going to use this specific example, which I think is a little bit nasty because he’s using Ben Glass in the title tag, which means Ben Glass Law is showing up in the listing. That’s misleading to me.

Conrad Saam:

You think because it’s in the title tag? Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

He doesn’t say, thinking of Ben Glass question mark, try me. It’s saying Ben Glass Law. Ben Glass

Conrad Saam:

Law. Okay,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So you get to the page and you’re that the copy, the idiotic unedited AI copy as Ben calls it, is going to motivate someone who is searching for Ben to call you and hire you.

Conrad Saam:

Okay?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay? That’s the whole purpose of the strategy. The whole purpose of the strategy is that’s to try to, that’s the pro. That’s what you’re hoping happens, okay? But put a pin in the efficiency of that. How many out of 10,000 people, how many are actually going to search, click call and hire because of that? Alright. Con side of the house really not great for making friends, not great for professional reputation. I mean, you got Ben Glass calling you out on LinkedIn. Ben Glass isn’t going to be referring you any cases. Ben knows a lot of lawyers in your local community. He’s got a whole following that’s probably not going to ingratiate you to that entire community. Now maybe you don’t care. Maybe you’re like, whatever. That one case is worth it. But that’s the con side. Is there some false and misleading communication stuff going on here that might run AFO theBar rules? Yep.

Conrad Saam:

I think here, for those of you who are wondering, we are 14 minutes in and Gyi brought up ethics,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But not in a philosophical sense in a, you’re violating your rules of professional conduct in a way that might get you some kind of punishment maybe. I mean, we know the state bars, they don’t really have the enforcement mechanisms, but if Ben printed this stuff out and sent it to the Virginia State Bar, I bet he gets somebody’s ear on something. This guy’s trying to draft off my brand using my brand name and his title tags. So that’s in the con side for me. I put an asterisk in the pro, is this ever going to work? Especially if you’re, when you’re running, I think it does.

Conrad Saam:

I think it does if you do it the right way.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay,

Conrad Saam:

Let me use Morgan. Morgan as an example, right? If Morgan Morgan has moved into your market and you want to be like, listen, don’t hire the big Walmart. You want the guy who’s lived in small town USA and who went to the same high school that you did and came back to give back to the community, yeah, that’s going to work, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Why? Yeah. I think if you’re Morgan and Morgan versus my law firm, you have a page of Morgan and Morgan versus my law firm. Now, depending on how you do it, drawing comparisons, objective, factually verifiable comparisons between firms could potentially get you in trouble with the state bar. You have to be very careful of how you do it, but you could do it and pull it off. And again, philosophically, I’m with you. People have done this kind of thing in the offline world where they’ll make fun of another law firm’s ads. It’s the brand recognition that the other firm’s getting their drafting off of that. It’s not quite the same thing, but this is what positioning is standing out is it’s what do we do differently?

Conrad Saam:

A hundred percent. And I think, again, I’m an overly aggressive marketing person. If you can lean into positioning yourself against other firms and you’re going to attract or not attract some clients because of that, I think that is 100%. Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So you absolutely, you have no problem with what on the map did to us.

Conrad Saam:

Well, so Gyi, so this is where this gets interesting, right? Can you explain what’s going on? It’s the same thing that’s happening with Ben, but explain what’s going on.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What happened? Yes, what happened with Ben? Like we said, this is an old school tactic. Conrad and I have both been on the receiving end of this, and in some ways I’m like, oh, this is flattering. They think that we have brands worthy of conquesting, but on the map they write reviews of a bunch of other digital marketing agencies. And again, presumptively, they’re trying to capitalize and get some lawyers that are searching for Mockingbird and Attorney Sink to come to their site, read the comparison and contact them instead. And the first thing that I thought of is like, gosh, if a lawyer made that search for our company’s name, went to on the map, read that blurb and decided to go with them, it seems like not very critical thinking, you’re taking them what they wrote about themselves versus us on their own website. You’re giving that a lot of weight. That’s the thing to me where I’m like, that’s why I strategically too, because I hear you on the standing out and the differentiation, at least in the context when I was on the other side of it, I’m like, people are falling for this. And I’m like, yeah, they are, I guess.

Conrad Saam:

No, no, but they are. So I’ll read this is, and again, I want this to be an example as opposed to me coming across as defensive. I don’t mind. Yeah,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s a sour grapes Conrad. This

Conrad Saam:

Is not a sour grapes.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m marketing you,

Conrad Saam:

But we’re going to use this as an example of where I think this really works. I’ll read this is from their review of my agency, Mockingbird is well reputed online marketing agency with expertise and blah, blah, blah plot. Its right. However, you may want to work with a company that will focus all its energies on helping your law firm dominate the market. Not one that accepts work from your competitors. So if I read this and I’m looking at different marketing agencies, I’m like, oh fuck, marketing, I dropped your phone. Yeah, we got you. Yes. Dammit. Victory. So close

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Victory again.

Conrad Saam:

Oh, foo, I don’t want to work with an agency that doesn’t offer exclusivity. I’m going to cross Mockingbird off my list right now. The fact that they happen to be wrong about that, that’s

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The other thing that I was going to say is again, a lot of this stuff is just not right.

Conrad Saam:

Well, it’s not accurate, right? Not accurate. So you have the accuracy and I think that’s where a Chevy versus a Ford problem, you can’t have factual inaccuracies. I think the same thing applies in the legal world, but on the, you can write whatever you want. Well,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And again, here’s my, I’ll say the same thing I said about Ben Glass. When other agency people, it’s not a huge world. When other agency people see this, does it make you more, less, or indifferent about referring business to them or recommending them or inviting them to speak or all the other things that go into relationship building professionally?

Conrad Saam:

Yes. Your point is well taken. I would go on the less side of things. I also think bluntly, this indicates the tactics that they may use for your own firm. I would want,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You can’t say that

Conrad Saam:

You want to go there. And the problem that as you’re asking me as the agency owner, not as an uninformed lawyer looking at this from the outside, the reason this drops on the map out of the consideration set of really good agencies is if this is what they have to do for themselves and they’re okay with this inaccuracies and all this is the kind of work that they would deliver for their clients, I would not want that. I would never send them a referral because this reflects what their work looks like. And I think you would agree with that, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. I mean, again, my whole thing about this from the stop, the same thing with the Ben Glass thing is maybe someone that was thinking about us saw that page and was motivated to contact them. I’m

Conrad Saam:

Sure that happens.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And for that handful of clients, that happens to on balance, the impact that that has in the community, is it worth it? Is it worth it for the lawyer who did it to Ben Glass? Is it worth it? Here we are talking about it and maybe some other people think it’s clever and creative and they’re like, gosh, I wish I was doing that.

Conrad Saam:

It’s not clever or creative, right? Again, it’s this, I want to add another element on this because we’ve definitely seen this in the past. What if they’re actually bidding on Ben Glass’s name and then sending people to that? What if you add the pay-per-click advertising element on top of that? You said before, Hey, do these things actually rank for a name? I don’t know, Ben found it for his name, but what was that specific query? I don’t know. But you can add the layer of pay-per-click on top of this, which then becomes really, really fascinating because those clicks where there is intention to hire a Ben Glass and you can then buy those clicks at a much lower rate than the work that he typically does. Absolutely do that. I think the way this is done with Ben Glass is poor because there’s no positioning differentiation. There’s really not. I think that’s key to making this work. If you could make that case and you can buy that traffic at a lower cost, I don’t know that that doesn’t work.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Again, I presume that it does work some amount of the time. My question though is in the grand scheme of things in your local community, was it worth it? Because you are not, Ben’s joking around about sending a cease and desist out. That’s the way that you’re going to be viewed by your peers. So if you’re the 800 pound gorilla, it might make sense. Maybe John Morgan probably doesn’t care if you’re not going to refer to him. He’s like, you’re not referring to me anyway. You hate my billboards and you hate everything about me and I’m the king of the mountain. But if you’re the young lawyer just getting started or you’re maybe you’ve, you’ve been in the trenches running for five years, do you really want to disenfranchise the entire community? Do you want John Morgan sending you a season assistant?

Conrad Saam:

Hold on. I think I’m taking exception with your entire community comment.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay, fair. I’m trying to paint a broad brush to drive my

Conrad Saam:

Point out. So let me put this back to you. And you are too kind hearted and high minded to name anyone, but there are certainly people in the legal marketing industry who you think do not deserve to be in this industry by silent. Ski is agreeing with me.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes, theoretically.

Conrad Saam:

Theoretically. But you wouldn’t mind if their perspective of you was lower and you were able to draw good law firms who were going to get screwed by crappy agencies away from that awful miserable fate I would have. We don’t do this, but I don’t have a problem.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We’ve done conquest campaigns, we’ve bid on competitor names and said, thinking of them, try us to varying degrees of success. And to your point, you’re right, I didn’t care. I didn’t care if this company’s name that I was bidding on. However, I don’t bid on your name.

Conrad Saam:

So this is my point with the whole community thing. Lemme put this differently. In our world, I don’t care if the people at Scorpion or FindLaw hate my guts. There you go. I would actually like them to publicly hate

Gyi Tsakalakis:

My guts because that’s so much for them ever sponsoring Lunch, Hour, Legal, Marketing.

Conrad Saam:

It was interesting. I saw a scorpion at a booth at M tmp. I thought that was interesting, but no, I don’t care. It’s actually, if fine law hates me and Scorpion hates me, it’s a win for me. And I think

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That excellent point. But got to think about our worlds and stuff here. If you are in Fairfax, Virginia is not the same thing as serving a national audience of law firms. So your community, you’re in a smaller community, maybe you’re right. Maybe if you don’t respect the person, you still don’t care. But all I’m saying is there’s potentially a reputational cost. Sure. That’s all I’m saying.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, when we come back, we’re going to move on and answer the question, how would you spend $5,000 on marketing in a crowded market?

Alright everyone, Gyi and I had an amazing office hour session where we invited you to come and ask us questions in real time and we made up answers and most of them were accurate. We’re doing another one May 3rd, join us on YouTube or LinkedIn on May 3rd. Bring your hardest questions. If you are a member of the community, we’d love to hear from you. Write them down, send ’em ahead of time. If you can find us, we’ll answer them or show up in real time and we will figure out the answer to your hardest legal marketing questions. Join us on May 3rd, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Alright, Conrad got a great question for you. I want to paint a picture.

Conrad Saam:

Alright,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’ve been practicing 10 years. I’m a PI lawyer. I’m in a relatively big market, not one of the big three or big five, maybe top 20 market, maybe 10 through 15, 10 through 20. I got $5,000 a month to spend on my marketing. I’ve got a little bit of a web presence. I do have a Google business profile, got like 20 some reviews, I got five grand. How should I spend it?

Conrad Saam:

So I’m going to make the potentially fallacious assumption that you want to grow your business.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I do. I do want to grow. I feel like I should be growing.

Conrad Saam:

You feel like you should be growing. I feel like I should be growing hair. But that’s not happening either. And you do do personal injury in a secondary market in a large-ish market.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We’ll say I’m in a city of 700,000 people.

Conrad Saam:

Oh, that’s a smaller city than I thought you were going to say. Okay. So I think the starting point to think about this is the cost per client that you’re willing to accept in personal injury. And let’s use very, very round numbers to make my life easy. Let’s say in your industry, a motor vehicle accident is worth $15,000 and this distribution, but let’s just say that’s what our run of the mill number looks like. In digital marketing. You are looking at especially things like pay-per-click and probably LSAs. You’re looking at a minimum of 20% if not more, a lot more up to 40% of the cost per case in order to acquire that case. And so at five grand you’re getting one case a month. So plus or minus one or two. So you’re not going to see. So setting your expectations, dear optimistic 10-year-old lawyer, you’re not going to see a massive change by spending $5,000 on this. And the reason I can say that with a high level of certainty, and that’s on the direct response side is because you are in a 700 person city, which is not all that

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Big. So I screwed it up, it was 700,000 in 2018. Today it is a city of 2 million people,

Conrad Saam:

Which makes it so you’re reinforcing my point. I am. It’s going to be difficult to make a big dent and in the direct response as two very clear examples in that you’re probably going to cost per client of a third give or take. And it depends on how picky you are and how good you are at intake and all that kind of stuff. So your five grand is going to net you 10 clients a year. You’re not going to really notice it, I hope if you’ve been doing a bunch of work in the past and you’ve been around for 10 years, so that’s presumably the case. If I take a long-term perspective on this, I think what you want to do is find a segment of that 2 million that you identify with or that you want to support. And I don’t care what that segment is, but if you try and boil the 2 million person ocean, nothing is going to happen.

I do believe there’s an opportunity for you over the long term to build both brand awareness and affinity among a specific subset of that 2 million and be very, very effective in doing so. And I don’t care what that subset is. If it’s people who like Michigan State football or our runners, it doesn’t matter what that group is. But I do believe there is room for almost every firm to build a relationship with a market that resonates with ’em. So I’m out on SEO, unless you’ve been killing it for a long time and there’s no one else in the market who has thought that might be a good marketing channel, which is not the case. SEO is not going to work for you. I’m out on local. You got 20 reviews in a 2 million person sitting here in personal injury. Local does not exist for you. And I could be wrong, run local Falcon to prove that I’m wrong, but I’m not. That’s my answer. I don’t know. What would you do?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I want to also even define this persona a little bit more deeply because I’m going to assume for the sake of this conversation, they’ve already got intake locked down. They’ve already got delivering high level client experience locked down. If you’re not doing that, take some of that five grand and go invest in that first LSAs. I would say can’t hurt. Probably not going to help that much. PPC, forget about it.

Conrad Saam:

Forget about

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It. SEO in general, again, I’m not spending the 5K on that, so what would I spend the 5K on? I’d be doing old school local community stuff. Maybe I’m going to offer one of these super hyper-local scholarship things. Not for the purpose of getting backlinks to rank in the local pack, but to actually get some visibility, some good affinity. I think Conrad’s point about leaning into, whether it’s cause or a group or just something that you all like to do together, take everybody out to dinner, take everybody in that group out to dinner, sponsor that group’s race or something if it’s cycling or something like that. So don’t boil the ocean like Conrad said. But maybe there is a smaller business group that’s got professionals in your community that are active in that, like to do stuff together like Mastermind and that kind of thing.

Again, would I spend the five grand on that? Not as, I probably wouldn’t spend it as a subscription, but would I take people out to games? Would I pick up happy hour? Would I take people to dinner? Absolutely. I think that’s probably the best way, especially if five grand. This is your whole budget. That’s the other thing that we talk about this all the time here on LHLM. What percentage of your budget is this? Five grand. This is a hundred percent. This is all of your money that you’re going to put in marketing. I’d be doing a lot of relationship networking, sponsorship type of things.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, you talked about content and SEO and I kind of bad mouth and by the way, it hurts me. I kind of barf every time I say bad things about SEO because I love it so much, but building content for your, not boil the ocean approach, building content around whatever group that is with the express perspective of generating people who are looking from within that group, whatever it might be. Don’t care building content around that. I’m 100% from an SEO perspective, that is unique opportunity for you to stand out. While we’re talking about websites and content, if your website’s garbage and you’ve been around for 10 years and it’s dated, you are losing clients because of that. If you are getting referral clients and you’re being vetted online and your website says, I cannot afford a website or this looks like garbage, you’re losing clients. So a website redesign, if you’ve been around for 10 years and you haven’t touched it in nine years, that is probably a good use of your funds. And finally, you’re not going to win in your city with 20 reviews in personal injury on local. You’re just not right.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The only reason I said it is for brand people searching on your name.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, so this is where I went with this. You also, and we don’t know Jimmy, who we’re philosophically speaking about, Jimmy has a lake house. It’s about 45 minutes outside of 2 million city. That’s like a sleepy lake house. There’s no lawyers there. There’s nothing going on. There’s a small community. Boy, oh boy. If you get five or six Google reviews near your lake house, there is an office nearby. You take that five grand, you’re going to spend $500 on an office somewhere. It doesn’t cost you much. That is a marketing expense, by the way. That’s not a bad idea. I kind of like that idea. So don’t try and win downtown, but that Lake House, lake Sheboygan, I like that Little Lake Sheboygan.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Love that idea. I’m going to throw it in there. I think you’re going to disagree with me on this one. This is why I’m particularly fond of it.

Conrad Saam:

Write content about your competitors’ names and why you are a better choice,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? You’re going to spend ad money or whether it’s social or you’re going to do direct mail. Again, depends on the community and not trying to boil the ocean here, but you’re advertising directly to referral sources, not to necessarily clients. So I’ll give you an example of what I’m talking about. Custom audience campaign or a very, you’re on LinkedIn and you’re like, I’m going to advertise only to lawyers at firms of small size law firms that have this type of practice that are in this location, and I’m going to do a video ad that’s saying, Hey, I know that your clients, sometimes they’re looking for a recommendation on a lawyer. I want to let you know we’ve been doing this for 5,000 years. We fight so hard for you. No, don’t do that ad creative, but

To position yourself as somebody in their community and ideally to Conrad’s points. If you can do this in a way where maybe you’re in a shared private group that’s around an affinity audience or something like that, or you just send a direct mail piece. I mean, you’d be surprised. Again, Zig in versus when other people aren’t zagging. You send a nice handwritten letter to somebody. I called it direct mail, but even just a handwritten letter that costs money. It could cost hundreds of dollars. You don’t necessarily need to do a $5,000 a month, but that’s another one that I would kind of flip it on its head and say, Hey, in addition to the networking, in addition to the dinners and dinners to the in-person interaction, how can I get in front of my referral sources in my local community through paid social ads, direct mail or other creative ways? Maybe it’s YouTube advertising, maybe there’s a YouTube channel that the local community’s all on. Maybe you’re put ads there.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, I got another one, but I’m going to keep it for my clients. We just keep going. You and I are just going to riff on brilliance.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, you’re saving your best stuff, so well

Conrad Saam:

Hold on. We got to shoot, I, I’m going to give you a quick one.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Alright.

Conrad Saam:

Every month pick a local business that you are going to promote. Yes, you’re going to spend $5,000,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You win. This is the best idea,

Conrad Saam:

Okay? You’re going to spend, I will use Valentine’s Day in February. You’re going to spend $5,000 promoting Mitzi’s chocolate check and you’re going to go out of your way to get people to stop buying stuff from CVS and Amazon. You want them to go and work with Mitzi and want to buy their chocolate from Mitzi. So pick one business locally every month and market the crap out of them and put your five grand into that. That’s what I would do.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And create content assets around it in a variety of different ways. Put paid promotion behind it. Yes, short version is be the ad agency for another local business.

Conrad Saam:

A hundred percent. And it’s all about supporting your community. That’s what I would do.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I love that. That’s exactly what I would do too. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you haven’t subscribed to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, please do subscribe. Check us out across the internet and join us for office hours. We’ve been having a blast, this office hours concept. Yeah, we hope to see you there. Bring your questions. We’d love answering specific questions. Until next time, the in Conrad for lunch hour legal marketing.

Speaker 3:

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