Tasty Tactical Tidbits || Don’t Call It a Rebrand

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I am Conrad Saam from Mockingbird, and I have broken my front left tooth five times.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay. How have you broken your front left tooth five times.

Conrad Saam:

Once you break it once it’s like it’s weaker it forever.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I see. Well, I’m Gyi Tsakalakis from AttorneySync and I love oatmeal.

Conrad Saam:

For those of you who are loyal listeners, you’ll note that, Gyi, really there’s more to, I promise you there’s more to Gyi than his love of roasted beets oatmeal, but he keeps bringing up food.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. Alright,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What else do we talk about besides my lunch?

Conrad Saam:

Well, as the name of the title suggests, this is Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, the podcast where Gyiand I go back and forth talking about the latest and greatest in legal marketing and we are really, really excited. I’d like to note for everyone that we’re looking at the back to school season, Gyi, are your kids ready to go back to school?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, my wife and I are ready for them to go back to school. I think that some days they wake up, they want to go back to school. Some days they don’t, but we are so excited for back to school season.

Conrad Saam:

This is a great time. Lawyers, I promise this would be tactical right off the bat. This is a great time to give back to their community. Lots of people are doing backpack drives, lots of people are helping teachers. Teachers, I’ll just make this political statement. Teachers should not be using their own underpaid money to buy school supplies. Enter law firms. What is our keynote for the launch? Our legal marketing summit, Cassidy Lewis doing?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes, we have got to give a plug to our friend Cassidy Lewis at Cooper Hurley Injury Lawyers. If you want inspiration for campaigns to run, especially during back to school, go check out what they’re doing. You can go to their website, but I think it’s even more exemplary to go look at their Facebook page. They’ve got a vote for schools, they raise money for local schools and they do user-generated content and votes for local residents for the schools they’re doing. To Conrad’s point a back to school teacher, Amazon wishlist, giveaway. I mean, this is the stuff that really ingratiates yourself to your local community, doing well by doing good. Great stuff, applaud them. And I think from a tactical standpoint, folks check this out and do you want to learn more about stuff like this? How to pull this stuff off? Come to Lynch our legal marketing summit because you can meet Cassidy and ask her your specific questions about how you can do it at your firm.

Conrad Saam:

Really good stuff. Alright, along with really good stuff, we’re going to be sending you more really good stuff. We are going to start off with the news. We’ve got a packed juicy news segment today. We’re then going to be sharing pearls of wisdom, previewing what’s going to happen from the speakers at Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit. We’re just going to tactically drop five brilliant little ideas. And then after that we’re going to talk about again the rebranding disasters that law firms make. Let’s go Money makes

Announcer:

And welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, teaching you how to promote market and make fat stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, the place where we don’t do any political news. So you do want to tune in? Let’s hit the news. Alright. I promise you a juicy and mildly salacious. Can you be mildly salacious? Gyi, I don’t think so. I think those are not.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You’re the NBA here. It’s not possible Conrad. So you tell me,

Conrad Saam:

Gyiz, you did use some great SAT words. You used exemp, which I thought was a good SAT word earlier, trying to keep up man ape rebranding as 8:00 AM We are going to use Ape’s rebranding as an example in our second segment later on during the pod. Another thing that came out, Google, and I thought this was really fascinating because we were really successful with this for a long time and it’s going to be interesting to see how this kind of shakes out. Google is ending manual language targeting and my bias here, gi, I am curious what you think about this. They’re basically going to be using AI instead of signals to determine language and intent. And it used to be, and I thought it was an upside for sophisticated advertisers like Attorney Sync to be able to figure out the nuances of how to appropriately present specifically Spanish language content, but not always just Spanish to the right audience at the right time in the right way. And that is going away. I’m kind of bummed about this. Do you have any perspective on that?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, the bigger narrative here is the taking away control from the human operators who run these campaigns and turning it over to ai. The promise is that the AI is going to do a better job if that actually works out. I think that’s the big question. And for the sophisticated firms that have been deploying, if you got historical data on how you’ve used language settings, I would keep a close eye on how that impacts performance of those campaigns and accounts. Did it improve or did it go down? And when I say performance, I don’t mean clicks and pixel fires. I mean are you actually converting more value from your media spend?

Conrad Saam:

Can I just read behind your lines here that you think the AI is not going to be awesome or Google is going to use this as a way to get people to waste more money on campaigns that they didn’t want to do or is the answer to that? Yes,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think a little bit of both of those, and I’m doing this custom GPT segment at LHLM summit and I’m telling you the ai, even with very tight guardrails, I mean we keep talking about all these examples of the AI going rogue, it still goes rogue and I can’t, again, maybe it gets there, but today is it going to do a better job? I don’t know TBD, but the point is it doesn’t matter. I think the thing here is more of a heads up. If you’re listening to this and you run paid media campaigns, keep an eye on those campaigns that are multi-language because it’s going to have an impact.

Conrad Saam:

And I promise salacious this is a little good. You and I have talked a little bit about private equity in the legal market. I note that my most recent social media post about private equity in the legal market, we have Azeem from Herringbone Digital, which is owned by Trinity Hunt private equity firm, well-known private equity firm. We actually invited him to speak at the Ontario Legal Marketing Summit to talk about PEs view of legal. That post got a lot of attention. One of the things that he talked about is the ugly and the positive side of private equity and on the map. So full disclosure, competitive agency to Mockingbird and Attorneys Inc. On the map has been around for a long time. We actually, if you go back into the archives, you’ll remember we both mocked them for writing up inaccurate reviews of our respective agencies. Actually, I’m not sure, were you on that list? I’m not sure that you were. I think you were offended that you weren’t.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, I think I was on the list. In fact, I’m going to search right now and just see,

Conrad Saam:

Okay, so on the map, one of their strategies was to write what I will call inaccurate reviews of their competitors from a pure SEO perspective. But they were one of the agencies that is very quietly taken on private equity and we found a bunch of agencies that have been purchased by PE and have kept it really, really secret on the map was one of those. Law Rank was another one, but they’re kind of imploding Christop, who is a very nice guy, resigned and literally resigned publicly. I heard about this about a week ago, but he resigned very publicly about an hour before we started recording today, they director of SEO, I want to believe his name is Victor Perez. He resigned fairly publicly about a week ago. So that’s kind of the ugly side of private equity. My understanding is that there’s a bit of turmoil at the agency and that is driven by the PE folks. I think as ZE would say, that that’s probably a cost cutting approach where they are trying to maximize profit off the bat by cost cutting and we’ll hear more from the ze at launch our legal marketing summit about the good and the bad of private equity.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I can’t wait to hear that talk. I mean my biggest thing too, and I have no idea if this is a situation with on the map, but when I think of pe, the thing that always comes up is, is that despite everybody’s best intentions and efforts, the founders lose control. You don’t do the deal and retain full control unless you’re Mark Zuckerberg. To me, that’s the big issue and that’s the thing that I’m most curious to hear Azeem talk about is how do founders still assert control? Because once they lose control, it’s a different business and for good and bad, right there were talk about there’s lots of resources and lots of reasons why these things can be good for companies and customers. I’m looking at this thing because we’re talking about on the map and resignations of CEOs. That’s the publicly stated thing. I wonder how much of that is, is that the CEO doesn’t have the same kind of decision making power when you’ve got sitting on top of it? Just speculation. Who knows?

Conrad Saam:

Okay, well we’ll see what happens. And finally, and this also breaking news, Google Local Service Ads is launching a new verified badge. So I’m going to read this. This literally came in again breaking news as we were getting the show planned out. I’m literally going to read this out to you because I think it is fairly fascinating and instructive. We are simplifying our advertising badging by launching a single badge for all advertisers. Your LSA profile will display this badge along with specific verification checks you’ve completed offering more transparency, Gyi, they’re offering more transparency to consumers. Discontinuing all local service ads badge including Google, guaranteed Google screened and license verified by Google. This is effective on October 20th as part of the change. This is interesting. The money back guarantee associated with the Google badge will also be discontinued. Now, the money back guarantee never applied to the legal industry, but clearly that is an issue for LSAs outside of the legal industry. And as usual, no action is required from you all. Eligible advertisers who have completed the LSA verification requirements will automatically earn the new Google verified batch. So there’s nothing you need to do and they’re opting you into all of this anyway. So new change, less guarantees and simplifying.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, to try to play devil’s advocate a little bit here, they’re trying to consolidate the different badges and verifications. There were a couple floating around, but the irony is that because the big conversation, I think even the last episode that we talked about was they took the verification badge away. And so everyone’s like, wait a minute, this is so weird. You’ve got these LSAs, there’s no more verification. So I’m actually kind of relieved that they’re bringing that back. Now, my biggest issue with it is, and this is the thing, you can’t scale this, but basic licensing the state bar’s basically doing that, but verification and all these other descriptors that they use, it implies that they’re vetted and you’re not really vetted. I mean a lot of these LSA guys that are up there, they’ve got lots of fake reviews, so it’s not like it’s a vet, really all that vetted. And so I think that that can be misleading to consumers and that’s the thing I take on Bridge with. But as a marketer for law firms and people that support law firms advertising, it’s a very effective and powerful tool, which I think we’re going to see more data come out of in our, as we have this joint thing with Near Media who will also be at Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit. I think there’s going to be some interesting stuff to talk about there.

Conrad Saam:

For those of you who are playing the drinking game of every time we plug Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit, I’m pitching. I apologize to your, I’m pitching liver.

Alright, we have a favor to ask of you. During our last episode, we did an interview very bravely from Clio and Scorpion where we grilled them on the value to the end law firm about their sole marketing relationship. Now, there were a couple of things that were asserted during that call that I have questions on. And we would love if anyone would like to anonymously and quietly share with us your reporting back from Scorpion. We’d love to see that transparency about keywords. We would love to see the branded versus non-branded campaigns and economics broken out or not as it may be the case. But if you could contact Gyi or Conrad, you can find us on LinkedIn, DM us quietly. We would love to sit down with you and have a look and we will of course keep this as anonymous as possible. Let’s take a break

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we’re back. And if you can’t tell, I am fired up for Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit, and today we are going to drop some tactical pearls. We know not everybody can make it, so we wanted to share some of the love. And so we’re going to drop a bunch of tactical pearls from some of the Ignite clips that are going to be presented at the summit, but we think that listeners would benefit from these and get something out of them. And so I’ll shut up and let’s roll ’em.

Conrad Saam:

Elise Buie from Elise Buie Family Law. She’s someone who I heard speak regularly about the importance of culture, not just speaking publicly about it, but actually really, really living it. So I was very surprised to hear her answer to this question. So managing marketing as a business owner, what is one of the most surprising things that you have seen that’s working?

Elise Buie:

I love that you asked what’s working is data. Digging into data, knowing your numbers, not letting your gut rule the day on anything. And really looking at the numbers because I’m just such a numbers person and sometimes my marketing person will be like, oh, well this is working. And I’m like, really? It’s actually working? And when we dig into the numbers, the real story comes out. And so I just find it easier to run it with good data.

Conrad Saam:

How much of your mindset has to be either cynical or analytical depending on how you want to cut that, about the data that you’re receiving from vendors in order to get to the business metrics that really are important to you?

Elise Buie:

I mean, I think it has to be highly cynical and analytical because I have definitely had vendors that give me numbers. And I mean, if you are a little bit of a student of statistics, I mean, you know can play with numbers. Do you know what I mean? Yep. They can give me numbers that look great, but when I dig in and really look at them, it’s like, okay, these are a bunch of vanity metrics that have nothing to do with anything and I don’t care. But I think that, and obviously I don’t mean to knock on marketing vendors, but I think many of them know that they are dealing with busy professionals who didn’t really like math, like statistics wasn’t their thing and they aren’t going to dig in. And I think a lot of lawyers buy into the vanity metrics.

Conrad Saam:

David Mihm is one of the leading minds on Google local results and has been from the very, very beginning. I met David a really, really long time ago. He passed off the local survey rankings factor to Darren Shaw and now works for a company called Near Media. Near Media has partnered exclusively with AttorneySync and Mockingbird to provide really, really in-depth research into how people choose a lawyer, specifically in this case personal injury law. So listen from David, what is the one thing that firms consistently get wrong when it comes to their marketing?

David Mihm:

Yeah, so I’ll give you, it’s a bit of a nuanced answer, but I see very few firms doing this well and doing this the right way, and that is understanding how Google interprets a particular practice area or a particular case type. And the reason that that’s so important is if you look at the results, if you do a search, anybody can do this. If you don’t have to be a marketer to do this, a managing partner, a person just getting started in local search, go to Google, type the keyword that you’re most interested in, type a handful of related keywords. So if I say car accident lawyer or auto accident attorney, those are all kind of in the same bucket of terms. What are the page types that Google is returning? Are they returning pages that are targeting a state, a metro area, the specific city that you’re searching in?

Who’s ranking with what kind of content for that particular phrase? And that should tell you how you need to structure your website for that particular practice area. And way too often I see firms saying, I have 12 different offices across a given metro area. I don’t want to create 12 different auto accident pages. Won’t that be duplicate content? And the answer is maybe right. You have to look at the kinds of results Google is returning. If they’re showing a different page in Hillsborough, suburb of Portland near where I live versus Gresham versus Lake Oswego, then guess what? You actually need to tell Google, Hey, we do auto accident law in all three of those markets. It’s not enough just to mention, oh, we do auto accident law on your three location pages. Generally Google is looking for deeper content to a specific geographic area.

Conrad Saam:

One of the things that’s really important from an SEO perspective is naming and we spend a lot of time thinking about naming and DBAs, et cetera. Eric Pelton from Pelton Associates is a trademark firm out of false church Virginia. And he answered my question really, really carefully about what’s frequently the tension between marketing names and the importance of trademark names. Have a listen.

Eric Pelton:

It’s going to be hard for a law firm to stand out if they don’t use a name that is either unique or suggestive or provocative. If you use something really generic as your name, marketers might love it if you call yourself Texas Injury Law, but we know every injury law firm in Texas is going to use that phrase for search engine purposes throughout their website everywhere. So it’s going to be really hard to stand out and it’s going to be really hard for people to remember who to call. There’s that law firm, they don’t have a name that really resonates that you’re going to look for specifically a trademark lawyer friend of mine, Joey, his law firm is called Indie Law, I-N-D-I-E. That’s unique. It stands out. There’s not going to be another one.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, what’s the one thing a lawyer should be doing from a trademark protection perspective? What’s the obvious first step

Eric Pelton:

Obvious thing to protect your brand is to file, to register your core creative branding elements with the US Patent and Trademark Office. The cost is not extreme. It’s a great return on investment.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, Casey Byrus put in over seven years as the director of marketing at Dilu Tree Law Group and now as the COO and marketing strategist at our own firm by Signature Touch.

Casey Byrus:

I think the best and worst channel that you could possibly go on is actually social media. I think that as using it as far as grassroots marketing and really leaning into your local community, especially using things like Facebook groups, there’s tons of mom groups, there’s tons of local business groups, things like that is really, really powerful. But if you’re trying to just go viral, anybody can go viral if you’re just offensive enough. But that doesn’t really bring in business either because in southwest Florida, we’re not hiring the viral law firm out of New York City, so it’s the worst and best network you could go for.

Conrad Saam:

How should a law firm look at evaluating which social media channels they should be involved in and which they should avoid?

Casey Byrus:

So if you’re using a platform where you can pre-schedule post, I would say just do all of them. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel necessarily, but don’t expect to blow up on Instagram or blow up on TikTok. They have a very specific following. So if you’re not catering to those things, you’re not going to see a huge return. However, if you’re already posting on one platform, just post on all of them. It’s not that difficult to just add one more thing. But if you really want to make an impact, the way you speak to Instagram, the way you speak to Facebook and the way you speak to TikTok are very different.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So now that you’ve heard those nuggets from the Ignite Talks, I encourage you to head over to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing dot com to sign up for the conference. Early bird pricing did expire on August 22nd, but you can still use Code podcasts today, only August 27th to get $150 off, which is essentially early bird pricing. So if you already bought your early bird ticket, it’s just going to take you back to your early bird price. Anyway, we’re grateful for those early bird subscribers. For folks that have not bought their ticket yet, we’re going to give you one last chance at early bird pricing today, August 27th

Conrad Saam:

And hey, Gyi, I’ve actually done the numbers. There’s only 50 tickets left, so I’m using that sales concept of scarcity. There are only 50 tickets remaining. We would love to have you, but we’ve only got so much room.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think there’s actually less than 50 left. And with that, see you in Vegas and let’s take a break.

Conrad Saam:

And Gyi, we started the new segment with the APE rebranding to 8:00 AM I have concerns about this. This does not seem like a really great idea. 8:00 AM means essentially nothing. There’s also no continuity in this. It’s not an extension. It’s not an evolution. It is a complete rebrand. I remember the Coke and new Coke disaster because I’m over 40 years old and that was problematic. It seems oftentimes that when people rebrand, there’s a lot of excitement around this, but the real end result is confusion. I know you’re speaking at the APE Conference, so I don’t want to put you on the spot to badmouth them, but where’s the upside here, dude?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So I’m going to take the other side of this. Look, I think there is a point to be made about continuity and this platform unification. I think one of the challenges for folks that aren’t APE has a bunch of different logos in their portfolio. The top of the company just ape in general, it speaks to payments. And so I do think that an idea of trying to come up with a unified, we’ll give a link to folks at Law Next bot AmbroGyimakes this point too, is this idea of unified corporate identity. And so having a unified corporate identity under payments only, that seems rather restrictive and they’re marketing a new beginning. So in our previous episode I’m talking about this, your whole point is that the brand, knowing the brand is the whole value of it. And when you change that, you’re basically hitting the reset button.

It’s like Memento, now you got to start back over. At least that’s the way that I was interpreting what you were saying. But I don’t know. My big thing about it, and again, it’s also created Buzz and pr and as you mentioned, I’ll be speaking at Kaleidoscope in Austin and I would encourage folks to get down there. I think they’re going to do a great conference for me. Does it make sense to do this two weeks before the conference? I mean, there’s arguments both ways. And as we were preparing for the show, and even in my own trying to promote the conference two weeks before the show, I’m going to search for the new brand and I see there’s 48 other eight ams on LinkedIn. And so to me that was the biggest drawback. And again, it’s easy to be Monday morning quarterback on this stuff, but you certainly don’t want to make it harder for folks to find you, right?

Conrad Saam:

I want to bring this to law firms and we’re using this as an example, as if it’s a law firm. It’s not a law firm. We talked about there are multiple brands under Fin Pay. I don’t see that as any different from having multiple lawyers underneath a law firm or even doing multiple practice areas. But why start over? I don’t for the life of me understand why you would start over. Now there’s a problem in the initial naming. Finite clearly means transactions. So again, to tie this to law firms, if you are, and I’ll use this example because it’s been so clear in the Seattle market, if you’re Bradley Johnson who has spent millions of dollars in the Seattle market branding one 800 D-U-I-O-A, that is the brand that people know and you then want to staple personal injury on top of it like he did, it doesn’t work. See,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think that’s a great analogy. I think that’s what this is. They’re switching from, they’re like, yeah, we still do DUI, but we’re bigger than DUI. Now how do we have a brand that just speaks to DUI?

Conrad Saam:

Well, I get, so I’ll use the internet brands. I will say something nice about internet brands first,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing, first

Conrad Saam:

Breaking news. No. So most of you don’t know who I’m talking about because internet brands is an umbrella company over a bunch of different brands that have stayed consistent from the beginning. Ava was a part of that. There’s a whole bunch of other brands that have existed. What they didn’t do is they didn’t take one of those brands and try and turn it into something else. They maintained the value of the brand. And internet brands, for better or worse, is about sucking the value out of these existing brands. And they know that by rebranding anything, they cut a large amount of that

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Value. So again, I love that you use this example. So what did they do? Martindale Avo?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Good branding exercise there.

Conrad Saam:

But here’s the difference. It’s not called Coffee Cup, right? There’s still an understanding of what Martindale is, and if you turn Martindale Avo or Martindale or AVO into Coffee Cup, people are like, what the hell is this thing? Right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And so again, just to give the counterpoint again, and I don’t love this part of this whole exercise here, but they are doing this, sub logos are still going to exist, but there’s going to be 8:00 AM law pay, 8:00 AM my case and so forth. But the issue that you raise in the context of the law firm, which I guess again, this is a show for law firms, it does make a lot of sense because the consistency and your message alignment, that’s important. You can’t be, I mean, we talk about this even with in the context of Google business profiles, you can’t be Detroit injury accident lawyers and then be categorized as another practice area. It just creates so many issues. It has to be a consistent, all the way from the name of the firm to what you do to who you serve. There’s got to be consistency there. I think. I

Conrad Saam:

Agree.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And I think this is the exercise. I know you’ve got a brand refresh coming up, and so maybe we dovetail into talking about refreshes versus rebrands, but there’s, you’re just recognizing there’s a huge trade-off to coming up with a new brand. I think when you balance those things, sometimes the arguments four actually outweigh the arguments again. But I do think it’s important for listeners if you’re thinking about a rebrand or if you’re thinking about a merger or thinking about it at being acquired, that you’re really thoughtful about how you go forward with this stuff because it does make a huge difference. And it’s not as simple as like, oh, we’re just going to come up with a new name. There’s a cost to that, especially if you’ve invested in brand historically, you’re basically tearing that entire real estate down,

Conrad Saam:

Which in my opinion is almost always a miss. We’re recording this on August 20th. By August 21st, my long awaited new website will be up. And boy oh boy, has this been a cobbler’s, kids have no shoes kind of thing. Our website has been outdated for at least four years.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, let’s talk about your brand refresh journey. So when you started thinking about doing this, what were the whys? What were you thinking? Was it the, you’re like, our website needs to be improved because it’s not reflective of what we want it to be today. What were the reasons to even start having the conversation?

Conrad Saam:

It’s a great question. I think there are two elements to this. The positioning was solid, and the positioning is like most agencies lie to you. We are no bullshit. These are the things that we do and how we do them and why we think about them. That’s content that had been evolving over time. But very bluntly, the visuals were dated, man, it looked dated, it looks old. And I can’t remember when this existing version of the site was first done, but it was probably, it’s at least seven years ago. And it just felt dusty and old. It was like lawyer sell is service. And people look at different cues as to whether or not you do a good job with your service. And none of that has anything to do with the practice of law. And your website is one of those cues that people use to determine whether or not you deliver great legal work, which is dumb because they’re not correlated at all as all of you have complained to me who say that I’m the best lawyer in town, but why doesn’t Google rank me better? So you get this. And so we were not pushing a forward-leaning sophisticated image, and our clients are forward-leaning sophisticated clients. And so it was dissonant.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Got it. And again, you used the term refresh versus rebrand and certainly not a rebrand. You’re still operating under Mockingbird. So are you changing positioning or is positioning remaining the same?

Conrad Saam:

Positioning remains the same. So I’m going to bring this back to lawyers position needs to be something that’s consistent. Values need to be something that’s consistent. Messaging needs to be something consistent. And this is why I think changing a brand, even if we’re talking about should we go from Murphy and Smith to Murphy, Smith and Jones, that is problematic because by definition it injects instability and lack of consistency in your world, which you just cannot live with. And so for us, positioning stays the same. Messaging stays the same. We needed a new visual. And by the way, you guys too, like many law firms, if your site’s five years old, it probably looks like it. So are you losing some conversions because of that? Yeah, you might be be right.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I think the other thing, in addition to just the freshness and the visuals part of it, and again, give a plug to this in your media stuff because this stuff comes up in it. Like what matters to legal services consumers? I think oftentimes what happens is a couple different examples. The first one is the kitchen sink example. The firm tries to do everything on the homepage. It’s like every award and recognition, every attorney bio, every client testimonial, they’re trying to do too much. And so it’s lost by that. And I think that that’s part of this conversation about branding and websites and messaging and positioning. You can’t do it all. It’s overwhelming. And two is that it’s really, when you’re talking about webpages, it’s what are you going to prioritize because you got that top of the fold, you got that masthead. I don’t know where you are on the sliding banners these days, but I’m not big on those.

And so you have limited real estate and you have to prioritize. And so I think some of the stuff that comes out of the near media research is talking about what are the things law firms should be prioritizing top of the page, first thing, primary calls to action. There are certain triggering keywords that matter a lot, especially in the PI lawyer context. And so sometimes those things just get lost because we haven’t thought of it in a while. We haven’t updated our website in a while. We weren’t really thinking like this. Our firms actually evolved from a business standpoint. We didn’t have mission, vision, values, positioning, and we’ve never really deployed that new way of thinking to our website

Conrad Saam:

At the risk of sounding like we’re plugging near media too much. I’m going to plug near media a little bit further. Talk to me and Gyi, if you’d like access to these studies, most of the time when you are engaged in redesigning a website, and we’ve done probably, I dunno, in the hundreds

Gyi Tsakalakis:

More than you’d want to,

Conrad Saam:

More than I care to count, it’s driven by gut

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And it’s

Conrad Saam:

Often driven by the gut

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Of ego of

Conrad Saam:

Whoever has the biggest voice in the room. And you’re wrong. I hate to tell you you’re wrong and the research will tell you how you are wrong. So I think it’s really important as we think about these things to make sure that as you’re doing redesigns and refreshes, and I’m not going to say rebrand, I think you need to think really carefully about a situation in which you would proactively want to rebrand. But if you’re working on a refresh using research to make sure that you are designing this for the things that people actually care about that are going to turn them into a client’s super, super key. Otherwise you guys, you’re just guessing it is a creative process driven by research.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think the other thing that I think about in this context, and we might’ve talked about this in the last one, but it’s a heavy lift because it’s not just your website. You have got to go find every single place. If you’re using a new logo, if you’re using new imagery, if you’re using new whatever, and you got to go update it, you got to update all your social media profiles, you got to update all your email signatures, you got to update all sorts of, if you’re using offline collateral, and I hope you didn’t do your brand refresh in the middle of a print newsletter that you’re sending out because you just wasted a bunch of money. But it’s a second point on your point about the permanency of the brand and that you’ve already established this brand. The consistency is so important. I mean, it creates confusion.

If you see, this is how mindless I’m using the internet. If someone changes their LinkedIn profile picture, even just the color of the background, all of a sudden I don’t recognize them for a split second. And so it’s so important, and to Conrad’s point is that you’re considering all these things. I even think about my own experience. Jeff and I have talked about rebranding attorneys sync many times. A lot of folks don’t know this, but when Attorney Syn started, it was much more lead generation. We weren’t a digital marketing agency in the way that we are today. And you should have heard the conversations about our branding exercises. I mean, we were almost, blue Cheetah was one of the examples that remarkable that it comes to mind from 2007. And it’s silly now when you think about it. But I come back to, and I use the same point that you make, which is attorneys think there’s brand search traffic for better or worse, even though attorneys think may have zero meaning of anything to do with marketing, I mean it’s got attorney in the word, I suppose. What’s the point? Why would we make the switch? And I think now that I’ve framed, it’s really you have to have some very, very compelling reasons to make the switch and what those compelling reasons are. I think we’ve covered some of those, but it’s really got to be like, we have to do this. Not like I feel like doing this or I don’t really like our brand. It’s got to be something really compelling to go through this process.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, everyone, thank you for joining us today, spending a little time. Just a reminder, if you are getting to the end, if you listen all the way through the podcast, you have till the end of today. If you’re listening to it on the day that it came out the 27th to join us with the early bird pricing at luncher league of marketing.com, use the code podcast. I hope to see you there. If you have any questions, we would love to address them on our next episode. Say goodbye to your kids. Don’t cry when you drop Junior off at college where he needs to be.

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.

Conrad Saam:

Welcome to Lunch hour.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What’s the name of this show?

Conrad Saam:

I don’t know, apparently.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Where are you? Where am I.

Continue Reading