Ranking Your Local Competitors – Hot or Not?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam:

Hello, I’m Conrad Saam from Mockingbird and I for about 20 years, held the decathlon record at my college.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Impressive. And I’m Gyi Tsakalakis from AttorneySync. And today I’ve made a delicious lentil and bean and ham hawk soup. Got to try it. Highly recommend

Conrad Saam:

For the spring. Doesn’t this feel like an autumn? Like it’s cold. It’s cold here, miserable outside.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It is cold and miserable out here.

Conrad Saam:

Okay,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

For you folks in the northern Midwest. Yikes.

Conrad Saam:

All right, well, there you go. Zel Bean

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Soup. Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Where Conrad and I, you know, it’s funny, Conrad, I was, as Adam was saying, Hey, say a little something about the show. I went to the website. You know what this show’s all about? It’s jam packed with tips and tricks for attracting more clients and business to your law practice.

Conrad Saam:

Listen, Gyi and I always talk about kind of this similar stuff. There’s always some technology. Ben, we haven’t brought you anything that I would call truly revolutionary for a while until today. Stay tuned until the end of our segment. We’re going to come up with something that Gyi called so esque, even Conrad would like it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s true. And most importantly though, Conrad,

Conrad Saam:

Yeah,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

If I gave you the following options,

Conrad Saam:

Oh no.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Text message, phone call, email, Facebook Messenger, which of those methods of communication is your favorite?

Conrad Saam:

Gyi , is carefully pointing out to you that I’m 50 plus because my answer by proven statistical testing is Facebook Messenger. Don’t call me, don’t text me Facebook Messenger.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m actually apologize because maybe I shared something that you didn’t want to know. Facebook Messenger is the only place that you can get Conrad within seconds. That’s the real Conrad there. That’s

Conrad Saam:

Awesome. You can get Conrad within seconds. That’s what I want. Thanks a lot dude

Gyi Tsakalakis:

If you want to get ahold of Conrad, hit him up on Facebook Messenger.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, at next episode, We’ll be Sharing Gyi’s cell phone.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, what else are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam:

Holy

Cow. We are, as always starting with the news. We’re then going to fulfill a promise that we told you before. How to segment your audience and how to look at important traffic instead of all the garbage we’ve been talking about, why traffic is a terrible metric. How do we look at traffic from a positive perspective? And then I’m not going to give any of this away what I believe to be a great friction marketing approach to destroying relationships and building a few good ones with people within your own market. Stay tuned for something that is really truly out of the box. Let’s go.

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:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Gyi and I are a little hopped up. I’m not sure what it is, but he’s spicy. I am full of caffeine. We are going to start with the news. Hey, Gyi , you and I have given various conflicting directives on AI generated content and SEO, what is the latest coming out of Mountain View?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, this is as reported at Search Engine Land, I think originally reported by ADA from John Mueller’s presentation at Search Central Live in Madrid. Short story, the Google quality raters assess whether content is AI generated. And in fact, specifically there’s a section that talks about AI generated content as receiving the lowest rating. And so what does this mean, Conrad? What does it mean that the quality raters are now being instructed to rate AI content negatively?

Conrad Saam:

Well, I think there are two elements to this. Number one, we have said previously on this pod that most of your content is so Baal that some of the AI content is actually better and therefore we will rank. We also posited that it was impossible to distinguish between AI generated content and human generated content. And I still believe that may somewhat be the case. I know you think when you see it, you sometimes know it, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s the thing. That’s the whole point of all of this. And it’s going to be true with social media and it’s going to be true with all this stuff. If you can tell, if a person can tell it’s not going to help you. If they can’t, it can certainly help you. And so figuring out the difference, I think that’s the whole trick. Look, needless to say, it was funny, I was looking at our YouTube channel shorts the other day. One of our top viewed YouTube shorts is one of my proclamation that we ranked for chat GPT for legal marketing with a completely copy paste job from GPT. And it ranks number one for that query. And I would say if you read that, I think most people would say that sounds AI generated, and yet still it ranks. And so to me it’s like, look, you’re taking a risk if you’re copying and pasting chat GPT to your website, we’ve seen sites get burned for it over and over again. Google’s trying to ferret it out. And so if you’re going to use it, you better not be able to tell and people better not be able to tell. That’s short answer.

Conrad Saam:

So the people who are content developers, David Ado, lexicon, legal content, John Reed Blue seven as well. You guys are probably happy to see this. It’ll be interesting to see how this actually takes place in terms of actual results, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I mean, my thing is go look at the helpful content guidelines, right?

Conrad Saam:

Sure.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think it’s distinguishable. I think you can use the AI and still add in those helpful content items and then it gets very difficult to distinguish.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. Okay. So you’re saying just pure blather from ai, problematic AI edited

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Plus expert.

Conrad Saam:

Yes. Different. Okay. I like it. I don’t disagree with that. Alright, moving on to more stuff about Google TikTok, taking on Google Maps. Talk to me what the major new change with TikTok?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, this is as reported at Tech Crunch if you want to check it out. But TikTok takes on Google Maps by surfacing reviews in the comments tab. And so long story short, it’s like a local review play on TikTok, where TikTok lands in its current issues, who knows? But it is obvious to me, even maybe more so than GPTs, which people might disagree with me about. TikTok is a bigger competitor in this context than chat GPT or any other site. If they can get it right, if they can get local, right? I think Google’s underlying local business data, that’s the thing they’ve got that no one’s got. But could TikTok partner with somebody like Apple still not Google? Could they create their own?

Conrad Saam:

It’s not an unassailable competitive advantage, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s not an unassailable competitive advantage. Well NBA language there. Yes.

Conrad Saam:

Sorry. Sorry. That was

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s good. That’s good. That’s what I’m here for. If they get their issues sorted out, I think they could be the real competitor in this context, right? Local business testimonials, reviews, that kind of stuff. Comments? Comments? Sure about comments.

Conrad Saam:

Hey Gyi , could you comment on paid comments on YouTube?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I will comment on paid comments. This from Brandon Zo on LinkedIn sharing this really we’ll put a link to this. I’ll kind of paraphrase here. He is on YouTube, he’s watching a very popular series surrounded by Jubilee Media and there’s a pinned comment, not a YouTube ad, but a pinned comment from Morgan and Morgan and it’s a direct response ad. It’s a direct response ad with a link. So partnering with the publisher, the creative or the platform, whatever you want to call it in this instance for visibility. Now I saw this and I was like, one that’s really creative. Two, I would love to see the numbers on this. And three, what an opportunity to me, I immediately thought local business play. If you can find videos that your local communities into channels, your local communities into pinning comments there. And I bet you get a pretty reasonable rate for it right now. I mean we were talking, we’d have to assume that it was in some kind of CCP m on views, but it’s not skippable. It’s right there. Strong potentially.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, agree.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But again, I don’t have any numbers on it.

Conrad Saam:

Not yet. Stay tuned. We’ll come back.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Stay tuned. Alright,

Conrad Saam:

Listen, one of the things that G and I like to defrock and talk about and poke fun of is the dirty, underhanded, gross marketing tactics that are undertaken by people in the legal industry. I would thoroughly recommend a listen to Brian Glass’s podcast about his experience he dug deep on case connect. We’ll put a link in the comments if you want to think about and get queasy about some of the ethical concerns around some of the marketing opportunities out there right now. And finally, I’m sad that Ken Hardison didn’t take our bait and invite Gyi to Ilma to record LHLM. I will be in Denver at PMA last week of April. If you’re around, would love to see you. If you want to have dinner, let me know.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’d like to have dinner,

Conrad Saam:

But you’re not invited.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Let’s take a break. Alright listeners, so as we promised last episode, Conrad and I are going to walk through how to segment audiences and it’s really segmenting down to where qualified lead traffic is coming from. But before we get there, as we were talking in the pre-show, it’s really important to talk about what do we mean by qualified traffic in the first place. Conrad, when you start thinking about qualified traffic, where do you start?

Conrad Saam:

Well, the key here is this is someone who might be in the market to hire you and you can build nuances around what that actually means. But this might be one of those examples of where it’s easier to talk about the contrapositive than the positive people who are not geographically in your market, who literally you are prohibited from working from because you are not barred in Wisconsin, are not part of your addressable market. That should not be something that you consider or look into when you’re talking about the success of your site. And the other way I would look at this, Gyi , is what kind of content are they looking at, right? We’ve been very, very critical of the stupid content that exists on some website. You guys have heard us talk about the Brooklyn style pizza ad nauseum for loyal listeners, you’ll remember that. And the site that got a whole bunch of traffic for Brooklyn style pizza and their SEOs were celebrating it and we thought that was a bunch of, and so there’s a content element to this as well. And you’re right, that really is intent. So it’s intent plus geography to me.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, I think that makes a lot of sense. As a starting point, some lawyers might push back and say, oh, well hey, I might actually get referrals or something from out of state depending on the nature of the type of practice that I have. But I think generally I’m with you, most local law firms, the lion’s share of organic traffic is going to be in state, in market, even probably even tighter than that for a really local law firm.

Conrad Saam:

Well, I mean the obvious example of that is the DUI in Las Vegas. I went to Vegas, got fucking hammered, and now I’m at home in Sheboygan and I’m like, I need to hire a DUI lawyer in Las

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Vegas.

Conrad Saam:

But that’s the exception, right? It’s the exception rather than the rule.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And I’m with you on those and I’m certainly with you on intent. And again, this is where things are tricky because if you really want to look at different intent data, you’re really stuck from an organic standpoint. You’re stuck with search console data. Yes, you can say, I assume that this page is ranking and that’s why it’s joining this traffic n ga. But search console is really the only place you’re getting organic query data. And so I’d be thinking about that in the context of relevant intent. And this is also where you segment brand non-brand

And specifically there again, because I didn’t want to gloss over the how tos because that’s really what we were talking about. And so at least from a traffic standpoint, for me if I’m like, look, I want to see qualified intent, I’m looking at non-brand queries, maybe that include maybe lawyer use a RegX, you’re not going to have time to teach you how to do regex, but go look up a regex where you’re looking at, if you’re just in search console, you’re not exporting search console data anywhere. You’re looking at it in the interface, a regex that includes attorney law firm. I’d also be looking for practice specific queries. That’s the way to look at it from an intent standpoint and organic from a query standpoint. But my thing is, and this is good, this is a good starting place. The next level, it’s not that you don’t do those two segments, but I actually want to see qualified consultation traffic. Woo-hoo. Right? Because guess what else happens? That example in Vegas that you use, that shows up because it’s marked qualified consultation. And so you see person called us from Vegas and they qualified. That’s something. Now again, you also get to see that maybe those are one-offs and that 80% is coming from this other thing, but once you segment by qualified, there’s some signal to quality, to your point, it’s one step further in the journey because you’re actually, the firm agrees that this was a qualified lead. That’s really valuable to see.

Conrad Saam:

Well, let me walk that backwards. Let me summarize and then I want to dig a little bit deeper on what you’re suggesting. What I talked about was really kind of an old school GA approach to, I’m going to only look at people in Illinois who are looking at pages about divorce or whatever it might be because the rest of the crap, they’re like, what is this sign and seven things to do to keep your car safe in the winter? No one’s really looking for you anyway, and that traffic is rarely in your state. So I’m talking about kind of looking at that segment. You’re saying build a completely different segment where we’re really looking at people who we have decided to have a consultation with. So my issue with that, the volume that you’re getting out of that is going to be four or 5% of what the other segment actually looks like because you’re not going to, that’s always a challenge for all the

Gyi Tsakalakis:

People. That’s always data scarcity is always a challenge, but I’m not, again, my thing is not to look at it at necessarily scale is to be like, are there any traffic patterns that are emerging that are actually qualified? Is there something there to why these are qualified where some of these other sources, channels, yada, yada, aren’t, or they’re not converting at the same rate?

And I would do one more. I would do one more. I would also do the same thing for actual cases. See if in some instances, maybe not in pi, but in some practice areas, you might actually see some interesting comparisons between looking at it all three ways. Just non-brand intent and location, geography, qualified location, geography, signed cases, geography, and on signed cases. If you can attach actual client value, again, maybe in the family context, maybe in criminal defense context, you can actually get closer to looking at profitability by channel and how that works in the context of location. Because geography can matter a lot for certain practice areas.

Conrad Saam:

So I think I want to glom onto this concept that you talked about, taking that segment and trying to figure out what is unique about them, because you’re kind of looking in the rear view mirror there instead of forwards, what are the things, what were the elements of my marketing? What was the content that they saw that was

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Exactly the messaging, what messaging actually converted?

Conrad Saam:

Yes. This type of stuff is fascinating and I’ll tell you this. If you have a really solid CRM system like say HubSpot, you can look at that historically, so it’s not just what happened in the most previous session. You can actually go back to multiple sessions, multiple marketing channels, we hit them on email. You can have a full picture of who that person is and look at that historically and see what happens. I have an interesting anecdote. I wasn’t thinking about this when we were doing the show notes for this, but I know, Gyi , that if someone looked at our 10 commandments page, which is kind of hidden in our nav, but it’s the why we exist, what we do this for, what we believe in, it’s kind of core values, ethos, fluffy stuff, ethos, reason for being content. If someone looks at that content, actually I don’t know this number, I do know that over a third of the people who have contacted us have looked at that page. That’s amazing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s valuable, that’s valuable audience segmentation.

Conrad Saam:

So it’s valuable audience segmentation, but it also now can influence our content strategy. We should lean more into that type of stuff because it’s important to people. You can then build out your marketing by looking in the rear view mirror of the people who did actually choose to contact you. I really liked that

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We spent more time and I think we wanted to on the definition stage, but I think it was important. Again, we want it to be tactical here. The key here is that you have to have some tool to mark things qualified. Now if you’re a do-it-yourselfer and you’re not sophisticated, yes, you could try to spend a weekend to try to figure out how to do this in a Google Sheets or something, but let save you some time and heartache. Go sign up for A CRM or go call your current company, whatever you’re using for practice management, see what their thoughts are on CRM. But somewhere, the only way this we ever get to this audience segment is that we are keeping track of what’s qualified and sending it back to analytics. If we’re going to do this in analytics, that’s the only way to do it.

So the next step is now you’re into event tracking. And again, there’s a lot of different ways to do this. The way that I’d be thinking about it is event tracking and Google Analytics for through Google Tag Manager, you need to create specific tags for every lead action you want to track form submissions, content downloads. Now those aren’t necessarily going to be immediately qualified leads, but they certainly need to be tracked at that stage because if you’re doing some kind of nurture campaign and they eventually sign up, that all needs to be properly tracked. So this can get complicated, and that was kind of my thing with all this is I’m like, then we got to talk about triggers, event parameters. I think some of this stuff is probably going to be over most folks’ heads. And so when I started to think about this, I think maybe the real value of the conversation overall is to say, Hey, look, if you’re convinced that there’s value in looking at your audience segments the way that Conrad talked about at the outset, go talk to somebody about getting this implemented for you. You’re probably going to struggle to do this yourself, right?

Conrad Saam:

It’s gotten more complicated for sure.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I mean, certainly do it through GA four and tag manager. You think the average lawyer knows how to drop the code snippets in the right spot?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I don’t think so.

Conrad Saam:

Fair point. I just don’t want to come across as, Hey, hire us, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I know

Conrad Saam:

Mean this is stuff, the business intelligence that you get out of this is so valuable or can be so valuable.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. Do you think that we should keep going through this process or do you think it’s better to just be like, you’re right. There’s just no way.

Conrad Saam:

Can you high level this in three minutes?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah,

Conrad Saam:

Go

Gyi Tsakalakis:

High level. We did, we talked event tracking, set up event tracking through GA four via Google Tag Manager, integrate your CRM data with GA four’s data. So you got to capture user IDs, you got to map the fields to your CRM. You got to make sure that the data import in GA four is configured appropriately. Create custom dimensions and metrics in GA four, and then you can create the audience segment. Now you actually create a specific audience segment with their builder tool. Then you’re off and running,

Conrad Saam:

And that’s complicated because you’re taking that conversion data and applying that to GA four. That becomes, that’s the hard part. Think that might be that advanced level of uhoh where most people can’t. But I do think within, you can look at pages, you can look at that intent in geography. I think at a minimum,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So GA four, you can look at geography. So if you’ve connected search consult data to GA four, which that’s a good thing too, I think most lawyers could probably handle that, right? Connect your search consult data, GA four, and then you want to create an audience segment where you can look at, you need to dimensions and metrics to look at the things that Conrad just mentioned. So you’re going to be looking at, you want to be able to filter by geography, probably want to filter at least at the state level. Depending on where you are, you might want to filter at a much more localized level.

Conrad Saam:

If you’re in a state with Ohio with lots of big cities, right? Ohio’s not good enough,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And if you’ve got the search console data, then you can also layer in, Hey, show me impression and click data for only for these non-brand queries to get to filter brand out.

Conrad Saam:

That I think should be within the realm of possible. For many of our listeners,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we’ve talked about this many times, you can also filter by local PAC if you’re using UTM parameters, so you can layer that in

Conrad Saam:

These, what we’ve just talked about are not that difficult,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? What do you think about CallRail filtering CallRail first time callers into ga? Do you think that’s something they could handle?

Conrad Saam:

No. So great way to do it, but again, I’m trying to put this into two buckets. One is your overall traffic, and two, what you’re taking, Gyi , is really pushing stuff back into GA that is conversion based. I think those are two different buckets that are worthy looking at. My biggest thing here is I’m tired of listening to people talk about traffic and how we’re getting traffic and seeing all these traffic graphs of up and to the right. This was really spawned by, we did a review, and I can’t remember if we did this on the pot or not. This was Jonathan Perkins website. This was some conversation going on about Jonathan Perkins. I don’t know Jonathan Perkins, so I apologize, but it was getting tens of thousands of views on their dog bite page. It seems like a good thing, right? But ultimately, there was 15,000 views, 15,000 sessions coming out of India, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A lot of dog bites.

Conrad Saam:

Must be a lot of dog bites looking for lawyers in English about the most dangerous dog breeds for right? It’s just not a thing. I’m hoping this segment will get you further down the path or further away from your agency who’s telling you that you’re doing well because you’re getting a lot of traffic when that traffic isn’t ever going to hire you. And so I think you as an individual law firm can get there with search console data brought into GA four and building filters around that. That is achievable. Hey, listeners, if you want to see what this is like step by step, we have put a video together on Lunch Hour Legal Marketing on Facebook, and we’ll walk you through exactly how to walk through each of these steps.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Can we put it on LinkedIn too?

Conrad Saam:

And we can put it on LinkedIn, because otherwise I’ll never see it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Let’s take a break and we’re back and we have a very nice comment from YouTube from Rick Allen, 9 0 9 9, that LSA isn’t available for lawyers in Canada. Conrad, what would you recommend to Rick Allen? 9 0 9 9 with no LSAs in Canada?

Conrad Saam:

Well, I would campaign for a drop on the tariffs on LSAs that have been implemented by the US government. It’s strong suggestion. I was trying to be,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I don’t know if that will help advertise, advertise

Conrad Saam:

Maybe here you want some nonpolitical feedback. Rick, what you should do is watch and wait because LSAs are a great way for Google to make unreasonable profits. The first mover advantage that we saw in the United States for LSAs was very, very real. And if you’re one of the early movers, it will really, really work out for you because they’re going to try and prove to the market that it’s an effective tool. And they do that by over indexing on the cost effectiveness initially driving a whole bunch of hype and then driving up prices when people aren’t really paying attention.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You know what? I didn’t research this, but I wonder, I wonder if there’s a regulatory issue. I wonder if pay per lead is permissible in Canada, that’s probably maybe Province. Province. Good question. Know the answer to that one either, but that’s maybe someone a shout us out. Well, if you have the answer to that question, head on over to YouTube and drop a reply on the comments and tell us what you know. Otherwise, feel free to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. We greatly appreciate or hit us up on LinkedIn where I would say I spend more time than Conrad

Conrad Saam:

Key and Tony Albrecht are hanging out on LinkedIn while I am out with all of the middle aged 50 plus people talking about where their kids are going to college

Gyi Tsakalakis:

On Facebook Messenger.

Conrad Saam:

That’s right. Alright, everyone, some of you know that I started my career sending a middle finger to the entire legal community as AVOs lead, and at the time only marketing guy, Avvo was very cool in that we rated on a scale of zero to 10, and I believe down towards the zero to three rating. It was like extreme caution. We rated lawyers, if it can be rated,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It will be rated.

Conrad Saam:

That is brought to you by, and I’m blanking on his name, the guy who started Expedia, rich Barton, Expedia, and then Zillow, the founder of both Expedia and Zillow. If it can be rated, it will be rated Rich put his money behind AVO and he put his general counsel, mark Britton at the helm. Actually, it’s backwards. Mark put himself at the helm and then took Rich’s money and put it behind avo, but it was a really fun ride raiding lawyers and I haven’t seen someone do this so interestingly until recently, I got something on LinkedIn. By the way, Gyi , I am occasionally on LinkedIn. This was not

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Look dark social, dark social at work here. Dark social outreach for content promotion. This

Conrad Saam:

Is dark social working. So yeah, I got hit up by John Socha, who is the COO at Heme Law Group and what Hemet Law Group is, they’re a family law firm in Washington State. My home state, not my now home state of Washington. Lo and behold, they rated all of the family law firms in Washington State. They got the people from Clio who did the Clio legal Trends report. They engaged with them and they did mystery shopping of all of their competitors, and they rated their competitors in Washington state, including Elise Bowie family law, who came in at number two and two people who got a zero out of a hundred bogs or Tau and Woods. Rangu and Bratton.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh man. Oh, I’m reading them all off. Yikes.

Conrad Saam:

Well, I mean this is a stir of the

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Pot. Let’s just do the whole, just go through the whole list. Just read off everybody you want to know. Top firm by county

Conrad Saam:

Friction marketing at its best. And I thought to myself, holy cow, this is very interesting and fascinating. So first I wanted to learn more about the actual results, but I think at the bigger picture level, this was a really interesting marketing stunt. Let’s call it a marketing stunt. I’m not sure if it’s a tactic. It’s more of a stunt

Gyi Tsakalakis:

PR stunt.

Conrad Saam:

It is a PR stunt. Now, interestingly,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Edward Bernas

Conrad Saam:

Very conspicuously what? Gyi , what do you think? Which firm was conspicuously absent from their list of third party rated family law firms in Washington state?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I was going to ask you what the authors of the report were rated on their own rating system, and

Conrad Saam:

They’re not on the list. I asked John why you didn’t rate your own firm and he wrote, we didn’t think anyone would believe us if we ranked ourselves clearly, John.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, not if you ranked yourselves first, but they have some objective criteria here. I didn’t go deep on the methodology, but it seemed like there was some objective criteria, what they do with Conrad.

Conrad Saam:

No, it was very objective. And again, they used a third party, they use Clio, which I’m not sure that’s part of Cleo’s business model, so I’m kind of curious as to how that came about. But they did 400 mystery shops and rated firms on responsiveness, thoroughness, consultations, where they offered how that worked is an attorney handling it, availability of pricing information, the services available and the overall experience, and they scored them on those different elements. I thought as a big picture, what an interesting way to torch some relationships with people in your market, but also to build relationships perhaps by highlighting people who do a good job. I mean, you and I get this all the time. We have podcasters who list their favorite legal podcasts and they often put themselves at the top of the list.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So I got an idea here too, by the way. Okay, go. I just scroll down to the bottom of this thing. Go tools of the trade page. We recommend Clio, Haymarket and Smith ai. I wonder if this is a content collaboration genius

Conrad Saam:

Brought to you by these tools of the trade this may be financed by,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I don’t know, it’s still objective criteria. I think it’s, you talk about creative ways to get your name out there and with other identifiable brands in legal pretty strong. But to your point, and this is the question, what’s the impact on local relationships?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, does it matter? It’s fascinating to think, I think. Here’s my take, and I love this. I love friction marketing. I love you guys. Know this. If you listen, if you’ve ever heard me say anything, I’ve torched all sorts of people because I think it is damaging to law firms. That is something that I’ve stood for over a long time. Gyi , you and I are kind of in the same space. What’s the chicken? Who are the people? Lawyers of Distinction is the greatest example. This is chicken zippy. Come on, you already forgot about Zippy. No, I know Zippy, but I couldn’t remember the name of the firm. There’s a bunch of bullshit things, so I really deeply appreciate this building relationships with the high-minded. I mean, there’s a reason that you, and now I’m sounding very self-aggrandizing, but there’s a reason that you and I

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Are competitors first time for everything.

Conrad Saam:

Yes. I would rank myself first on my list of favorite legal marketing agencies.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Me too, man.

Conrad Saam:

No, but there’s a reason that we get along because we kind of believe in this. And so I think this is actually pretty genius and there’s a couple of things that come out of it. One of the best things, and I would encourage you guys to think about this differently, we have told you guys to go mystery shop yourselves, but one of the things that happens when you only look internally is you don’t know how bad you are and you don’t know where there’s opportunities for improvement. So actually mystery shopping your competition at this level of scale, if you want to make your intake experience your overall experience much better, the best way to do that is to undertake a deep analysis of what other people are doing. There’s a ton of competitive information that can make you a better firm. So not just mystery shopping yourself, but mystery shopping your competitors. Now that will piss all the intake people off because they’re going to get a whole bunch of qualified leads that are never going to call you, right? But I think this is really fascinating. Or you just download this report for the cost of it’s

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Free.

Conrad Saam:

It’s free of an email, cost of an email, cost of an email, right? So you’re now stuck in he’s email quagmire for

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Forever. That’ll let you unsubscribe. I’m sure it is a law firm after all,

Conrad Saam:

It is a law firm, so they will do the right thing. I think it’s particularly genius. Gyi k, do you have any concerns about this? You always raise the ethical factor when we’re talking about creative marketing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Off the top of my head, again, I think they’re clear with their methodology and the objective criteria they’re using. They’re certainly entitled to their opinion, their opinion of who the best firms are.

Conrad Saam:

Section

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Two 30, the thing I always wonder is net net. So on the one hand it’s like this is a seemingly authoritative piece that’s out in the marketplace. At least some consumers are probably going to see this. It might be good affinity or brand affinity or brand, at least awareness for hemmet. I don’t know net how rating your peers plays in this particular community. We’ve talked about it in ours. It happens in ours all the time. I guess I’d say net net. I think just thinking about it, I’m like, this is a bold move. It might not be your style, but I think for this firm, with the way they’re presenting it, it’s a very powerful move from a unique creative. I mean, here we are talking about it. The other thing I wanted was going to look up, while I didn’t have enough time, because I have all this two-factor authentication, but is this resource getting linked

Conrad Saam:

To? I’m sure there’s a link play to this. In fact, if you’d like to view the Hemmet report, we’ll link to it in the podcast show notes.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

There you go. Guaranteed to got one link. There’s

Conrad Saam:

Organic link building for you right there. Let me ask you a question. Gyi , I would like you to channel your inner Mark Britain and answer this question. Hey, I’m thinking about hiring Hemet Law Group. Why did you go about rating all of your competitors?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I don’t know what you’re trying to do.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, let me bring Mark Britton back into my head. I spent way too much time with the man a lot more than you did. Gyi , was I what? Dunno what you’re talking about. Easy layup across the place. I missed that. I totally

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Missed it. I don’t know

Conrad Saam:

What, sorry, I should have put this in the show notes. So it looked like we were on the same page. The answer, I asked John what they were doing and he said, I hated seeing people get ripped off because they didn’t know what to look for. If it stops even one more person from hiring the wrong firm, it’ll be the best money I ever spent.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What a kind generous

Conrad Saam:

Offer. Unanimous generous perspective,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But

Conrad Saam:

The right positioning on this, right? We want to just make sure that you new consumer of divorce legal services knows what you’re doing when you’re trying to hire a law firm. And we happen to have written the book and built the algorithm on what it takes to be really good at doing that. And

Gyi Tsakalakis:

By the way, we’re not on this list.

Conrad Saam:

That is problematic.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We have transcended the list. We’re in position zero, but we didn’t want to report position zero because that wouldn’t be fair.

Conrad Saam:

He did say they will put them on their list next year. So this is intended to be, I believe, an annual in

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Depth. Well, and with enough PR around it, maybe it inspires these other firms to up their game in these categories

Conrad Saam:

And make the

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Industry better. Then he accomplished exactly what he was trying to accomplish

Conrad Saam:

There. There’s Mark. I knew you were behind there somewhere. Alright, everyone, you have spent the last 40 or so minutes. Hopefully we left you with something truly inspirational. I loved this last tactic that we talked about.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I like the YouTube comment pin. I think that’s

Conrad Saam:

Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s out there.

Conrad Saam:

So out there, two out. Theres two out there. Brought you by Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Until next two weeks, launch our legal marketing out.

Announcer:

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Conrad Saam:

No one wants to talk to me. They always hit me on Facebook Messenger. Exactly. See you stole my thunder. Great job. Nice job throwing the

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Nice job.

You

Conrad Saam:

Get it. Now I know that was probably my mommy because no one else called me. You get it.

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