Lawyer Marketing Nightmares: Dirty Tricks, Ponzi Schemes & Backstabbing

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I am Gyi Tsakalakis of Attorneys Sync

Conrad Saam:

And I’m Conrad Saam of Mockingbird.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we are here to help lawyers understand how to navigate all of the difficult issues of marketing their law practices over lunch. Pull up a cheeseburger and join us. Conrad, I’ve got some bad news.

Conrad Saam:

Oh, well that’s a really promising way to start off the show. What’s up? What’s that?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I’m reading this book, Genesis, here’s a picture of it. The book of Genesis. No, not the book of Genesis. Artificial Intelligence, hope and the Human Spirit. And lemme tell you, that’s a very optimistic way that they title this. I think folks should check it out, but yikes. So we’re walking into Terminator World. Is that what you see? Maybe? I told you in the pre-show, my family and I, we all have strep throat, so we’re all sick. I got a light case apparently because here I am recording our legal marketing. But one of the things they talk about is AI’s ability to create superbugs.

Conrad Saam:

Oh, excellent

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You didn’t have that on your ai. Bingo.

Conrad Saam:

Thanks a lot man. Thanks for making everyone so happy.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s going to be cautionary Tale day here at Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, although we laughed because it’s always cautionary tale day on Lja Market.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, if you want to feel optimistic, please, we will take no on bridge if you stop listening to the pod right now.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Alright, what are we really talking about today?

Conrad Saam:

So we’ve got a, we’re kind of newing section. It’s not really news, but we’re keeping it small, short stories. And then we’re going to go into two cautionary tales. One, a pretty shocking salacious gross story about dirty marketing in which he and I love to wallow. And the second is about a question that you got from two different law firms. Gee, what was that question? And what are we going to talk about?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It wasn’t so much a question, it was more of a statement. Yeah. Okay. That we can’t tell where any of these clients are coming from anymore. Give a stay tuned to hear our response to that. But until the a GI apocalypse, what makes the world go round Money?

Announcer:

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, welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. First, some quasi news.

All right, everyone, we’re going to start off with news, one of our friends, and we’re going to offer some commentary on this news from one of a longstanding friend of the pod, Ryan McKean, who took to LinkedIn to talk about some of the dangers of his partnership going badly. And the long and short of it is his former partner, and I’m assuming former friend, has essentially locked Ryan out of the ex firm’s voicemail, says that Ryan is no longer practicing law, and that cases should be referred to the new law firm that the ex-partner is working at, and it gets grosser from there. Gee, you and I have talked a lot about ownership and control, maybe not even ownership, but control of digital assets, pay-per-click campaigns, analytics, CallRail, that type of stuff. But it really extends much further than that, don’t you think?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. I mean, first just my empathy goes out to everyone involved in this mess. I’ve got business partners myself. I know Conrad, you’re the king of your castle, so congratulations to you.

Conrad Saam:

No, but it’s funny, this is not news for anyone. Partnerships are very difficult. I have one partnership in my life that I’ll protect at all costs. And that’s enough. It’s so hard. My first job out in Seattle, I worked for these three partners who hated each other, right? And business partnerships are brutal.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. I think for me, again, cautionary tale day here as best as you can, I think it was posted online, even your best laid plans and agreements and contracts and all the different things you can do to protect yourself sometimes don’t fully protect yourself. But the ones that I think about this off the top of my head in this context are you’re talking about obviously operating agreements, you’re talking about partnership agreements, you’re talking about access levels to platforms and accounts. You’re talking about access to business accounts, whose names are on accounts in the context of marketing. Same things apply, right? There are ad accounts, there are online property accounts. Google Business profiles is one that we see commonly maligned obviously email, email, voicemail, right? All the software,

Conrad Saam:

Interestingly, the control of these things is often owned by whomever set it up

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? It’s funny, we just went through this with our own business, not Attorneys Inc. But one of our sister companies and the managing partner there is like every time I try to call anybody, they’re like, you got to give, gee, call us because gee, set it up. And I’m like, what a great example of this. But to your point, we weren’t thinking about it when I set it up. We weren’t thinking about who else should have access and yada, yada, yada. And so again, good cautionary tale there to be mindful about how you’re setting these things up,

Conrad Saam:

I think is a good time to go back while you are still yippy Skippy, happy, optimistic friends with your partner or partners, let’s make sure that you think about these things and outside of a legal agreement, how are we going to handle the control of these things? Because it is important and it can get really, really, unfortunately gross. Okay. Two other non-New items coming up. Gee, I’m going to see you in Miami two days after this podcast hits the air. What are we doing in Miami?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Dude, cautionary tale. If you’re in Miami for American Association for Justice Winter Convention, make sure you join Conrad and I for the marketing and management seminar that’ll be taking place on morning of February 14th. Our plan is to do a live recording at the Marketing and Management Summit. We would love for you to, if you’re a fan of the show up, ask questions. Maybe we’ll have some swag to throw at you, but we really do love doing these on location. We’ll have at least one hat. So bring your questions and hope to see you in Miami. Looking forward to it.

Conrad Saam:

Here’s the cautionary tale. If no one shows up, we are going to be bantering for 30 minutes and it’ll be a dull recording. But the last time we did these, we’ve done these a couple of times at conferences where we’ve opened up a conference with a informal q and a session. It has turned into really good conversation and really good content for the pod. So if you’re in Miami, would love to see you there. And finally, gee, this is an invite, if any of you are going to the Ilma Super Summit, which is April 29th, and I believe the next four days out in Denver because I adore hardcore skiing, putting together a small group of advanced level skiers for a cat skiing day on April 28th. If you’d like to join us, please find me and I will add you to that growing list.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And hopefully with some luck, maybe we’re recording a Lunch Hour Legal Marketing at Hilma.

Conrad Saam:

I will smooch up to Ken Hardison and see if we can do a live opening. Come on, Ken, for Pulma time for break. Alright, gee, I love wallowing in the muck of digital legal marketing. We also know those longstanding listeners also know that you like it, although you pretend to be above it. Boy, oh boy, do we have a good story to tell? What is going on? Can you give the overview of Stanley Law versus social media? LLCI

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Will ex social media, LLC. So this is just allegations. We don’t know anything about this in depth. This is just posted on LinkedIn and you can, I looked at the complaint. So big grain of salt with all this, but I do think there are a lot of lessons here. So I’m looking at Matthew Munson, post this on LinkedIn, Houston law firm whose marketing agency, blah, blah, blah. I’m not going to go into the details of the people, but this law firm in Houston alleges that unlike traditional marketing campaigns, they’re in his co-counsel arrangement with a firm that would match the amount of marketing spent. This is just my impression from reading this post. Essentially his marketing agency was partnered with a firm in DC that allows for non-lawyer ownership of law firms. So there’s an a BS alternative business structure component to this. But short version is that the allegation seems like it’s, Hey, this marketing agency and law firm didn’t actually match the media and in fact, potentially didn’t even spend the media that they were supposed to spend for this law firm.

And potentially were using dollars that were intended for this one campaign to fund the campaign of a different firm. So messy fraud allegations. And so the point of this is not just to muck Ray here. The point is, is to talk to our audience about how to avoid this kind of situation. And we’ve talked about some of these issues in the past, but I think it’s really important for lawyers to get a sense of what they can do to protect themselves. And I’ll go first and then you can respond to this. But in this particular case, it goes back to what we were talking about the outset, which is access to the platforms and the accounts that the media is being bought in my opinion. Because look, you can have a media authorization that says, Hey, so-and-so is authorized to spend X dollars on my media. But if you don’t have access to the platform, how else can you validate that the media was spent

Conrad Saam:

And what it was spent on?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I mean, even if you’re not going to manage it day to day, I know lawyers are sitting there, well, this is craziness. I don’t have time to go and log into Google ads and check the daily spend and all that. But the point is that if you needed to, you would be able to. And maybe if you’re at a point where you’re questioning it, you’re like hiring somebody to take another look at it. But without access to that, I don’t see how you could ever validate. You could ever do the trust but verify thing without access to the actual accounts that it’s being spent in. And by the way, this brings up, we’ve talked about this a lot. There are competitor agencies in our space forgetting about this lawsuit in particular that they do that they’re like, it’s not your account and you don’t have access to it.

Conrad Saam:

Would you like to name anybody? Gee,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Long time listeners could already know that they couldn’t go back and look some old episodes where this has been discussed. And again, my point here is isn’t to drag people through the mud. This comes up more often than lawyers would like to admit. And that’s the other thing too that we hear all the time is the lawyers, they don’t want to talk about it because they’re like, yeah, I feel I’m embarrassed. So anyway, that’s one thing. What else can they do to protect themselves from this kind of situation you think?

Conrad Saam:

Well, we have an interesting conversation in our mastermind just last Thursday, and it’s the same thing, but this was with LSAs. I mean, this right here was a non-branded kind of behind the scenes lead generation thing that seems to have gone poorly. You can read this. It literally says operating ex social media as a Ponzi scheme, co-mingling funds and marketing campaigns and using the funds of one firm to deliver on defendants obligations to another firm, thus giving the appearance of success. So to continue to obtain funds from more funds. So that’s what this says. This happens all the time. We had this conversation about LSAs. Someone brought this question to our group and the question was, listen, I’m running LSAs, I’ll be curious what you think this person should do. They’re doing really, really well from a cost per conversion perspective and not a cost per lead perspective, but actually a cost per conversion

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Perspective. And how are we defining conversion in this context?

Conrad Saam:

This is signed up clients, signed clients,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Cost per case, cost per client.

Conrad Saam:

So we have a cost per client number that is really, really good for this firm. This is a PI firm that I believe was doing it at cost per clients of $1,100, which all day long,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

All

Conrad Saam:

Well, you don’t have a clue. I mean an LSA, so this is an example of systemically, you have no idea if this was branded or non-branded. And what happened in this instance, the firm didn’t have access to the LSA accounts, they didn’t have access to the spends, they didn’t have access to anything. They just knew through another interface that these leads were coming in and that they were signing up at a cost effective rate. Now, the thing that the group struggled with was twofold. Number one, what is this agency actually doing?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

How are they generating

Conrad Saam:

Cases? Where are these leads? Actually not

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Even cases. Where are these

Conrad Saam:

Cases coming from? Cases. So it’s actually generating cases. They believe it’s through LSAs, but they don’t have access to it, right? They don’t have access to anything. Additionally, if it is the law firm’s advertising because the intake was being done by the agency, by the third party,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Let’s hope they’re real.

Conrad Saam:

Well, were those third party intakes? Were they siphoning off some of the really good cases? Was this turning into a lead generation opportunity to take generic personal injury matters, pick out the truck accidents or the really large matters and then resell those somewhere else? We have no idea. But gee, with those concerns, if this is working from a cost effectiveness perspective, what is the firm to do? What would you do?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I’d be like, show me the receipts, right? I want access to my LSAs. Why?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Because there’s a chance that they’re doing something that actually could be unethical, that I’ll ultimate responsible for paying for. Here’s the easy one. You think that you’re paying this company, right? Are they paying this company something? Yeah.

Conrad Saam:

Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So there’s a financial relationship between the firm and this, whoever the third party is this third party sending ’em cases. What happens if this third party’s going out and going door to door in the hospital being like, here’s this law firm, call him up. You’re on the hook

Conrad Saam:

For that. So you have a John Henson concern.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I have a John Henson concern,

Conrad Saam:

Which is the ethics of knowing what your agencies are doing in order to generate business regardless of the cost effectiveness of that. That is a

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Fair point. I also have a second concern.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, go.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Because I don’t know what they’re doing. I have no reliable way of justifying that this is going to continue to continue at this pace, and I’m completely held hostage by their decision to either raise costs or to be like, Hey, if you don’t continue to play ball, I’m yanking all of this magic that I’m doing.

Conrad Saam:

But that happens all the time.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, it doesn’t. Why does it happen all the time?

Conrad Saam:

Because the vendors, I watched this happen at avo, the vendors who realize that they’re generating a ton of value at a low cost will raise their prices. That happens over and over again.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And that’s what he said last time. But again, but with avo, what you’re getting, you know what you’re getting. Do you? Next episode? Traffic.

Conrad Saam:

Lots of traffic. We’ve got tons of searches.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Anyway, look, I’m not trying to come across self-righteous here. This is our whole DNA is, be transparent about what you’re doing, be accountable for what you’re doing. And there shouldn’t be an issue of hiding, but I see these 30 MV, a thousand dollars a lead or whatever. You see these Facebook ads of the guy in the fancy car and all this stuff, and I’m like, yeah, guess what? This guy might be anywhere from completely fabricated

Conrad Saam:

To

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Solicitation violations to some really gross stuff. We saw examples of this in the mass torts market all the time, people sending texts to kids and stuff, just dirty, dirty stuff. Is that cool with you not to know? Just turn a blind eye because guess what? It’s not cool with the state bar. It’s not cool with the ftc. It’s not going to be cool with state ags. And you can keep getting away with it until you don’t.

Conrad Saam:

And it’s not going to be cool with your bank account if you’re paying per lead for some of that stuff.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, and it’s not going to be cool when you are the plaintiff in a lawsuit that’s like, oh, wait a minute, your case was, they actually are getting cases from it. So maybe not as bad as this, but that’s the whole reason we’re talking about it is because it is very easy to commit fraud against someone who’s turning a willfully ignorant eye to what people are doing on their behalf to generate them business.

Conrad Saam:

So our end advice to this guy in our mastermind group was to go mystery, shop your own LSA and see what happens and mystery shop it with a high-end case, right? See what happens.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

This is another thing. If you’re going to put all of your eggs from media buying to intake to strategic direction, and it’s black box, they’re essentially buying leads, right? Let’s just call it what it is. They’re buying leads.

Conrad Saam:

I mean, that’s why LSAs are,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, they’re an intermediary between the Google leads

Conrad Saam:

And

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Whatever you want to call this black box. And so if you drew a diagram off this, it’s like black box one feeding into black box two.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I mean, but it works. That’s a buyer beware. Well, it works until it doesn’t and it until, you know what reminds me of, well, I don’t even know. It’s way too close to home.

Conrad Saam:

Go, go. Let’s get close to home. Come

Gyi Tsakalakis:

On. I mean, what’s to prevent this third party from just feeding fake leads in cases into the system?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, no, that’s fair. I mean, is that the too close to home part?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. It’s like, boy, oh boy, can I remove that negative review for you because I wrote it,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? Yeah, right, exactly. Alright, hello there. Loyal listener. Did you know that Lunch Hour Legal Marketing has a newsletter called The Bite Sign Up? Did you miss an episode? Do you not have time to listen to a whole episode but need a nudge? Do you want to see some expanded commentary on some of the topics we covered on the show that you might want to learn more about? Sign up for the bite. You can sign up for our newsletter@legaltalknetwork.com slash lh lm email. We will put a link in the description, but we’d love to see you on the bite

Conrad Saam:

When we come back. This comes from two comments that Gyigot from two different clients about how Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing, the message that we’ve been trying to deliver has not landed very well. So we’re going to go back to the well of attribution modeling and how to do it correctly.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we’re back. And as Conrad mentioned in two conversations, separate conversations with two law firms and marketing law firm marketing folks that I have a lot of respect for by the way, that don’t know each other. There was this sentiment, one was more direct, one was a little bit more implied that Lunch Hour Legal Marketing is telling folks to throw attribution out with the bathwater. We can’t, it was kind of tongue in cheek. We can’t tell where clients are coming from anyway, but who cares? And I was like, wait a minute. That’s not what I said. I dunno, maybe Conrad said it, but we wanted to clarify this conversation about attribution. And in fact, it was also a serendipitous, we didn’t plan this, but a law firm marketing director commented on LinkedIn and said the opposite, which is I wouldn’t work an agency that wasn’t able to distinguish client sources by channel. And so we wanted to revisit this topic of attribution. We know we’ve covered this and talked about it a lot, but we’re not saying that attribution is impossible. And certainly, I was just listening to it serendipitously also another serendipitously thing. Wow, serendipitously a lot of

Conrad Saam:

Going on. You have kids studying for the SAT right now

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Always, even though they’re only six and eight, it’s

Conrad Saam:

Quite omniscient of you.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, there we go. A fortuitous happenstance. I’m listening to Chris Walker on revenue vitals who was a big tear down attribution, right? He’s been,

Conrad Saam:

Yes.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So I say that, and he’s not really tearing down attribution. He’s just saying, Hey, let’s actually understand the limitations of some of these attribution systems and really mindset shift from hey, marketing versus sales and marketing versus other functions of businesses. And certainly we see this in law firms all the time. So Conrad, I’m going to stop my rant right there. I want you to help clarify where we’ve been with attribution, why you and I have been talking so much about attribution and what we’ve really been trying to tell people in terms of swinging the pendulum from last click, direct response to, oh, we can’t tell all ships rising with brand.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, so I’m going to try and lay this out. I think there are a couple of really important things to think through here. We do not talk about don’t do attribution. We actually talk about dual source attribution, which is let’s like more attribution than you were getting with just one, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s more attribution.

Conrad Saam:

It’s more attribution. But there’s a reason for that. And I think you need to think through when we say dual source attribution modeling, what this really means. The first thing I think you need to think about is there are lots of clients that come into your firm from what I will call direct response channels primarily. That is pay-per-click and it is LSAs are almost

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Always explain to our audience. I think this is part of our problems. We project too much like everybody knows we’re talking about. When you say direct response, what is that? Walk through a client journey of direct response.

Conrad Saam:

So let’s say I’m going to buy this flower. Okay,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, do you want to do it in the context of law or going to use a flower? Do the flo, we’re

Conrad Saam:

Going to use the flour as an example. I’ve decided that I just pissed off my wife and I’m going to buy her a flower to try and make up to my wife because I said something stupid. It does work. That’s great. By the way, as an aside, everyone should buy more flowers for more people and it’ll be a happier world. That includes your spouse, but it also includes other people. Let’s set aside to buy the flower. I don’t have a flower that I want to buy. I don’t know the name of a florist. I just know that I want to buy a flower, which is amazingly in our example. Here it is, in a gold schlager shot glass.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Amazing

Conrad Saam:

Ha.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Nothing will make your wife happier than a, what is that? A purple daisy and a gold glass shot. It is a,

Conrad Saam:

I don’t know what that is, but it is in a gold. She brought this to me while I was on the phone with a client the other day. Anyway, but let’s say I want to buy the flower. I’m going to look for a flower online. I’m going to click on an ad for a flower and I’m going to buy the flower online. I’m going to check out, that’s direct response in the legal fashion. I’ve just walked on my wife with a pool boy, and I’ve decided instead of a flower, I’m going to hire a lawyer. And I don’t have anyone that I want to talk to because I don’t want to ask for referrals for this very sensitive matters. So I am embarrassed. I don’t know any lawyers names use.

I go to their website. I might look at a bunch of boy lawyer.com, right? That is direct response. I don’t have a brand that I’m looking for and I have an intention to buy right now. And that is very, very trackable. And historically, gee. And I have dealt with people who are like, how did you hear about us Google? Well, in Google, there are a variety of different channels. You have pay per-click. We have local, we have organic, and we have LSAs. We have display advertising. There’s a whole bunch of things that could mean Google. And frequently Google also means the internet or the internet means Google. And so it was really difficult to figure out which of those different marketing channels made me buy the flower. With good reporting infrastructure, you can actually figure that out. And that is a huge portion of the market.

And for a lot of you guys, that is 80% of your growth comes from channels that look just like that. That is especially true if you do not have a strong brand, if you are any new firm, if you spend a lot of money on these types of channels. So it is not unimportant and you can have this very direct one-to-one relationship between this client, these dollars generated by this client coming from this specific marketing channel, which is great, but that is not always the case. Enter omnichannel marketing, which basically means I have a brand, I am in a lot of different places. I’m putting my advertisements in front of people. They see us on billboards, they hear us on the radio. We have a display advertising campaign that is not because I’m looking for the flower, but about flowers in general and why my flowers smell better than everyone else’s flowers.

And the ultimate goal of those less direct, indirect marketing channels is to eventually build awareness and ideally affinity so that when I do want to buy the flower, I’m calling Mary’s flower shop. Two very different things. Because in that case, when I eventually call Mary’s flower shop, you have no idea the different channels that touch that person. You can’t try to understand why that person, a singular reason that that person actually bought the flower from you because there wasn’t a singular reason. And so that’s really, really important. When we talk about dual source attribution modeling, I want every marketing channel to have every new consultation that you have. We should have a last touch. What was the last thing that person did in order to contact us in direct response? That last touch is also the first touch. It’s the only touch. It was a pay per click add.

It was an LSA, it was this, that or the other thing. But we also want to have the how did you hear about us and that, how did you hear about us is the second or dual source that says, okay, how did you hear about us? And oh, you ref the hockey league that my son’s in, or I saw your ads here. And the key to this is it is not a dropdown, which means if someone is filling this out or if you’re using AI to do this, it is not a finite selection of 12 options. It is infinite. I heard you on the radio and saw you on television and your ad keeps showing up on the internet. And I really like the fact that you donate to don’t kick puppies.com because I love puppies. And so you get an amalgam of things that are actually working and that’s why I break these things down differently.

The problem is direct response can be looked at directly and simplistically, this client came from this thing doing pretty graphs or pie graphs or analysis on that dual source that, how did you hear about us? It’s much more difficult and it’s messy, but if you do it, you’ll get a better idea of what’s actually working for you. So my thought here is this is not thinking about attribution. It’s actually about thinking about attribution a lot more and in a much less one-to-one relationship. It requires analysis and intellect and thought as opposed to here’s a pie graph and this is where things came from.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well done. And I want to just highlight a couple things in there. Okay? Because some technical things in there that you mentioned. Example, someone does a search on your name, clicks your ad, your direct response, last click, last touch attribution is going to say PPC. Your PPC agency is going to say, Hey, look, PPC client.

Conrad Saam:

That’s right.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But the query that they used to get there was your name because you coach little league, all these other things. So this is why it’s so important. Conrad’s brought this up many times on the show, but if your agency is just reporting media spend and consultation, so there’s doing simple consultation divided by media spend is cost per consultation. And number of clients from PPC divided by media spend is cost per client. You’re not getting the full picture. And that’s the point. Now, the other highlight thing that I wanted to bring up, we hear this all the time too, is, oh, well the self-reported data is a mess. People get it all wrong. You’re missing the point on that one too. Your goal is not to be like, we are going to hunt down and badger this client to really figure out whether it was Instagram or the billboard or the little league or whatever it is.

It’s just to see that marketing activity show up in your attribution system. And so that’s another thing that people they get wrong is there like this for the birds. Because people will say, Google when actually was something else. And it’s like you’re missing the point. You’ve got the quantitative data to tell you on the last touch. What you’re looking for is, is there anything else that this consumer, this potential client in their mind thought of about you? When you ask them, even if they get it wrong, it’s okay because guess what? That thing that’s in their head got put in their head at some point. And so they’re thinking about it. And that’s what you want to show up. And I talk about this all the time in the context of our business and launch our legal marketing. We’ll see PPC, lead, PPC, lead, P, PC lead.

Guess what they say? How’d you hear about us? Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing, Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing would never show up because we don’t even bid on Lunch Hour Legal Marketing as a term in PPC. And so same context. And then as people know, potential client journeys get extremely complicated. They are not always linear. So it might be search on a non-brand ad. Now you got cookie, now you’re showing up on the website, you get retargeted, now you’re in the retargeting pool. Guess what? Weren’t actually the end consumer. You are referring to a family member. So that family member, when that client eventually comes in, or whoever the representative is, if it’s a death situation, they’re like, I got referred to you by so and so, and all of that other attribution data is totally gone. There is no all that retargeting journey, it just breaks the whole thing. And that’s why this stuff is so important. So again, this is why when I walked into these conversations, I was so taken aback because I was like, we are not saying to throw attribution out with the bathwater. In fact, I like the way Conrad’s saying, we’re saying more attribution.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, yeah. Lots more. I’ll use an extreme example. Back in the day, gee, when we were living in this kind of exclusively direct response perspective and lawyers were doing a lot less offline branding and marketing, it was a much simpler time. One of the reasons that I used to say, Hey, you need to only use this single source attribution model. Where we’re looking at direct response model was people would say, when you ask them, how did you hear about us? They’d be like, oh, I saw your billboard, but we didn’t have any billboards. It used to be an argument that I would make to listen. Don’t ask people. I used to tell people, don’t ask people because they would get it wrong. But when they get it wrong, think about this. If you get inbounds because people think you have a billboard, think about what you can do with that.

Think about the insight that you get out of that. Who did they think I was? Why was there confusion? You can leverage that. That is so amazingly valuable when you start to see patterns like that. I heard you on the radio, you did right? What station, right? You start to get a feel for where people are getting things wrong. And if you are a intelligence, creative and analytical person, you can take that feedback and start being more clever and more effective with your own marketing. So even when it’s wrong, there’s so much you get out of that and it’s so juicy and beautiful.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I’m so glad that you explained it that way because I’m certainly, I told both these people too, I was empathetic because the digital marketing industry trained everybody on this last click attribution thing. A lot of the story went exactly. They tell the same story that you just told. And it’s funny too because now when you see the other side of it, you can’t unsee it and you’re just like, it’ll change everything about how you think about resource deployment for your firm. And I’ll tell you the other thing that happens all the time is that brand building firms, they’ll hire a digital agency and the digital agency will be like, oh look, PPC is killing it for you. Let’s take some of your offline brand building media, buy and put it on digital. And guess what? All of a sudden digital’s not working so well anymore. What happened? What happened? Oh, all those PPC quote unquote PPC leads, they were actually brand leads. People were just clicking on your PPC ad because they were looking at your billboard because you had been building brand and now you just cut off the thing that was driving the PPC leads in the first place and now the cost per client on PPC has gone through the roof and the agency’s like, what happened? I dunno

Conrad Saam:

What happened. And they’ll either be like, what happened? Because they actually really knew what happened. Spend more. Or they’ll be like, what happened? Yeah, spend more money. But that’s a great example. And by the way, agencies, it’s not just PPC agencies who do this and take credit for the brand stuff. SEO, the people who are doing SEO local search, specifically your Google business profile, a lot of that is branded search. A lot of that is branded search. And so having an agency take credit for that. You guys know this because if you don’t know this

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Because you listen to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing,

Conrad Saam:

Yes. If you don’t know this, welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Here’s a slap in the face

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And it takes you full circle. It takes us full circle to the cautionary tale back to the beginning, which is why you have to have access to your search console data so you can actually parse brand versus non-brand queries in organic. That’s the only place you can do it. And you can ask, how did you hear about us

Conrad Saam:

With that? Beautiful. Bringing the back to the introduction, it is time for us to say goodbye. Thank you very much for listening to Gian Conrad Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Hopefully we’ll see you in Miami, Denver, or one of the other many places where we’d like to get out it.

Announcer:

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.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We’ll get better at it. Yeah, we’ll get better because it can’t get worse. There you go. See Positive Mindset.

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