It Really Is Brand (Told You So!)

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I am Gyi from Attorney Sync and I am tired.

Conrad Saam:

And I’m Conrad Saam from Mockingbird and I like to make bad dad puns. I dreamt I was a bicycle and I woke up and I was too tired.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we don’t just talk about being tired and making dad jokes. We also talk about legal marketing and totally irrelevant news items. Wow.

Conrad Saam:

By the way, for those of you listening, we scrapped over what we had in the news items and Gyi has gone out of his way to make sure that our news items are only relevant to legal marketing and not just the TMZ of the legal world. So you can think him for quality.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, no, we put it to you. We put it to you, dear listeners. If you want TMZ legal stuff, shoot us a message we want to hear from you. But when we say TMZ, we mean like salacious legal things like lawyers behaving badly, which I feel like you don’t care about, but maybe I’m totally wrong.

Conrad Saam:

Listen, I just sent you one in this chat. It is some dumb schmo who created an AI lawyer and tried to use the AI lawyer in court and you can watch the judge lose her mind.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, that one people actually might want to actually watch. So I guess I stand corrected. But Conrad, it was great to see you this week. I got to see you two days. We had a mini road trip. We were at Great Legal Marketing Bootcamp and a seat at the table presented by Vista Consulting. What a week it was and that is why I’m so tired.

Conrad Saam:

Well, I’m sorry you’re tired. We also spent a ton of time in Washington DC traffic. God bless you people who live in that area and have to get anywhere on four wheels. We did not do a great job with that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But what are we going to talk about today?

Conrad Saam:

All right. As usual, we are going to start with the news and then we’re going to kind of go back to school and go over the foundational concepts of brand advertising, foundational terms, foundational economics of brand advertising. Gyi and I have been talking so much about the importance of brand. It’s time to go back to school and get into the brand advertising. And then I’m really excited to share these with you, the dear audience. We’ve got some recordings of people and their perception and response and the importance of brand as they are searching for a lawyer. And it’s validating, this isn’t I told you so moment, it’s validating why Gyi and I have talked so much about the importance of brand.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Drop the base.

Announcer:

Welcome to Lunch Our 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 Launch Our Legal Marketing. Let’s do the news. Archie, what is going on with advertising? We’re going to talk more about advertising soon and ChatGPT.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

ChatGPT ads are here for the masses. You probably heard that ChatGPT ads were very expensive and they’re asking advertisers to spend $200,000 a year, but that is no longer the case. ChatGPT ads are now available on both CPM and CPC buying options. We’ll talk CPM in the segment and they are suggesting starting max bids of three to $5 per click and CPM campaigns default max bid of $60 per CPM. So we’d love to hear from you if you’re advertising on ChatGPT for your law firm and what kind of results you’ve seen.

Conrad Saam:

Max bids of three to $5 a click.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Sounds

Conrad Saam:

Great. Is this generic or is this legal? We’re going to get into this later, but this is not. Generic. This is generic. Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, and maybe they’re three to $5 today, but

Conrad Saam:

You just wait. Listen, if y’all can get yourself some CPC rates at three to $5 a click, I would do that all day long unless it’s for the term law and order or lawyer jokes.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right. We don’t know anything about

Conrad Saam:

Anything. We don’t know anything. In terms of

Gyi Tsakalakis:

How they’re doing targeting yet. In other news, Google has deprecated FAQ markup, meaning for all these years we’ve been talking about how FAQs, you can dominate your search result real estate by doing FAQ markup and they’re no longer going to be able to do that. There’s lots of reasons for this. We’re not going to dive too deep to this as a news item, but if you’re paying your person to do FAQ markup, you might reconsider the prioritization of that.

Conrad Saam:

Well, Gyi, I know we want to kind of scoot through the news quickly, but we have been hearing from a lot of digital marketing GEO experts about the importance of markup in FAQs for GEO optimization. There’s a redundancy right there, but are they full of crap?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No. I mean, again, it’s still I’m big on schema, but I’m not going to get here and try to justify it through like, “Oh, check out ranking factor and all this stuff,” because there’s really no ranking factors here anymore, but you can make fun of me for saying that. But the issue is it’s being oversold. It’s being oversold. I still think it’s a good practice, but again, adding markup to a page is not a leading tactic to be able to generate cases for your firm, period.

Conrad Saam:

And if it wasn’t working for SEO, do you think it’s going to work for GEO?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Again, nice to have. I’m not sitting here telling you got to go strip markup from your pages, but it’s just if marking up FAQ pages makes up 25% of your marketing budget, then you’ve got a problem.

Conrad Saam:

All right. It has been at least four episodes since we said Reddit. What’s going on with Reddit and Google Business Profiles, Guy?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Breaking news reported by our good friend, Aaron Shaw again. I think Darren’s starting to become the very sort of Julio Canada. But he gives credit to Valentina Vaseleva. I apologize if I pronounce your name wrong, Valentina, but I want to give you credit. Okay. How do you pronounce it?

Conrad Saam:

I have no idea, but you did.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Anyway, I think that the big headline here, we’ve been talking about this. Google is using social in the GBP listings. I think as we go into ask maps and all this kind of stuff, you’re going to start to see more of these social results in the ecosystem of local and Reddit threads and subs are showing up in GBP profiles. And so be mindful of that. And again, I think if you’re like, “Hey, what’s the takeaway here?” Yeah, that should be part of your mix. Finding ways to participate in local conversations and monitor local conversations on Reddit, I think it has value, but not AstroTurfing.

Conrad Saam:

All right. And finally, we’ve got this email. I don’t know that this is everybody wide, but I’ve certainly had multiple versions of this email sent to me. This is Google. As of July 1st, your call recording settings will default to yes if you have not made a selection. What does that mean? That means if you have not chosen proactively to not record or to record all of your inbound calls, Google is going to start recording them as of July 1st. So I’ve got tons of problems with this. We do believe in recording things in CallRail, for example, but that’s a company that’s on your side. It’s not necessarily Google who may or may not be on your side. So you’re receiving this message because your Google Ads account currently has the call recording setting as unselected. Unselected call recording settings will defaults to yes starting July 1st, 2026.

So just be aware, make a proactive decision about this. Don’t not know what is going on. Let’s

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Take a break.

Conrad Saam:

So Gui, you and I have talked a lot about brand, but not necessarily enough about brand advertising. So the rest of this first segment, we’re going to talk about some of the foundational understandings of brand advertising and I’m going to go through some of the key elements that I think we need to understand the balances of. The first is CPM. Gyi, can you tell the dear audience what CPM stands for and why it’s so important with brand advertising?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Cost per thousand impressions, so dollars you pay for every thousand times your ad appears.

Conrad Saam:

And that ad can show up in very different mediums. And so for example, the impression of a tiny little ad, a tiny little static banner ad is not as valuable as someone watching 45 seconds of you on video and there’s everything kind of in between. So you have the medium that goes into driving what those CPMs are. Another major factor for impacting the CPM is targeting. We’ve talked many times on the pod about not boiling the ocean and the more targeted your audience is, which means I’m not trying to hit everyone. I would like to hit people in this demographic or people who live in this area or people who like motorcycles or people who are in this wealth demographic. The tighter your targeting gets, the higher your CPM goes. And the other element of targeting that becomes interesting, it’s often based on the value that you are looking for.

So for example, if you are a family lawyer looking for high net worth individuals getting divorced in an area, those CPM rates for finding those types of people are going to be much, much higher. And then we have the concept of frequency and frequency caps. And so the frequency is what I like to think about this very simply is how often does an individual within your targeted market se your brand? Is it once a month? Is it once a week? Is it once a day? Is it 10 times a day? And so you may want to inundate people who are very close at the low end of the funnel repeatedly as kind of a direct response vehicle, but you don’t need to hit them repeatedly for the next 365 days. And conversely, if you are just doing a brand awareness campaign where you just want to let them know who you are, having them see you on the regular but not every day but repeated is super, super important.

And a lot of this Gyi goes back to the concept of not boiling the ocean and having people see repeated impressions of the same thing before they even remember what it is. And that rule, I believe, I can’t remember what the … Do you know the research whether they came up with seven before you even remember something, you have to see it seven times. It’s an old marketing research number.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

My sense is that just based on the representation that seven is out of total media consumption is probably a lot lower now than it was whenever the seven was the rule. But my big thing is this, I talked about this at the Great Legal Marketing Bootcamp. To me, this gets into this concept of showing people ads at different stages of their journey and ideally this quote unquote omnichannel approach, which is your system of advertising is aware that this is the first time this person has been exposed. Now this person’s seen this ad. And so your ads build on each other. So you start with awareness and affinity and you move them through with expertise, content, case studies, client testimonials, and all the way down to the bottom of the funnel where you’re getting closer to direct response ads. But to me, to your point, if you just show the same ad over and over again, people are going to get fatigued.

They’re not going to want to do it. Now there’s got to be continuity in their journey. That’s where the ads become the most effective.

Conrad Saam:

I think there definitely has to be brand continuity. I mean, we talked about this just the other day, so it’s got to be very clear where this is coming from, but that drip, drip, drip of this is who I am, this is who I am, this is who I am. Even when the creative changes, Tagline should stay the same, logo should stay the same. It should be very clear who you are. How many times do we talk about lawyers who are like on their intake, it’s like, “We hired you because of your billboard, but we don’t have a billboard.” That’s because of the lack of brand continuity, I think. But ultimately for Migue, in most situations, building brand awareness among a finite audience instead of the entire audience, that’s a way to stretch a budget to do effective brand building within a smaller market in a huge market by only targeting a small market of those people, ideally with whom you have brand affinity.

And then after that, I mean, the funnel suggests that there are multiple kind of complex layers of when someone is making a purchase decision. I think in legal, it’s a two-part funnel. It’s brand awareness affinity and then I need to hire a lawyer or I think I need to hire a lawyer. I’m in that mode. Unlike SaaS companies where there’s typically a long research cycle and a long research phase and where you can kind of walk through all of these elements, I think by and large you are dealing with something that is kind of binary. It’s either no one like me or now it’s time to buy.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

My thing is that everybody is over indexing on direct response. The people that are doing brand are doing very generic brand campaigns. People like us have been educating people that awareness really isn’t as valuable as it’s been purported. And again, my answer to all of this is like right now based on the macro factors, we just came back from a seat at the table, we listened to all this private equity and we know national advertisers are coming in the localized, the hyper local brand campaigns that have baked in affinity, that’s what I’d be shifting media dollars towards, maybe not necessarily away from direct response, but if you’re 80% direct response and 20% hyper local brand, I’d be working to flip that on its head. And obviously that depends on where you are in your growth journey, but that’s been the message that I’ve been really trying to get out there because to me, that’s how you compete.

It’s your local people that see you doing things in your local community, put advertising dollars behind that.

Conrad Saam:

So Gyi, one of the things that you were talking about that I think is really key to remember here is when most law firms and law firm owners think of brands, we start mentally with offline television, radio, billboards. And the problem with that is unless you are a top three player in the market, you probably do not have the budget to reach the entire market. And most offline is a reach the entire market medium. And so most of you feel that brand work, brand advertising, brand development, brand affinity is beyond your reach because you can’t afford it. And so the reason that we are so excited about brand from a digital perspective is I can take that massive market. I can identify a small portion of that market, which means I have a much lower budget. Even though if it costs me higher per unit to reach those people, my overall absolute budget is much smaller and therefore I can do this branding play.

And furthermore, when you have a very, very tight and constrained target, instead of building brand awareness, you know who I am, you can actually start building brand affinity. You like who I am because you’re targeting that message to what is important to that specific audience instead of trying to be all things to all people. And that’s why you and I have been beating the brand drum for so long because it doesn’t require that massive kind of unattainable investment if you are a five, six, seven, eight in your marketplace.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s right. And again, just saying this in a different way, but the same idea to really drive this point home, we tend to think of brand campaigns as being purchased or measured in this idea of CPM. And so we start thinking like, “Oh, I’m going to evaluate this campaign based on reach.” And the point that Conrad’s trying to make is that less reach is actually more effective in a converting to qualified consultations and clients. So you show an ad that resonates more because of the affinity to less people and it drives more business as opposed to we want to measure this by how many people does it reach because we want to reach everybody. And so I think that’s the key tactical takeaway that we want to get out there on brand.

Conrad Saam:

And the other part of that when you’re talking about reach is also frequency. What you’re really trying to do is to get a small population saturated with your brand so they know and like who you are and that’s what you can do with digital that you really can’t do with offline.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And again, I think that the more you talk targeting, the other big part of this is messaging. And so if you have a generic message that looks like everybody else’s message, whether it’s online or offline, you’re not going to get the same impact from those brand campaigns because again, with brand, in addition to just a recognition or familiarity, it’s like, do you have recognition and familiarity in a context that really resonates with your audience? And so again, the more specific your messaging is aligned with your targeting, the more effective those campaigns are going to be. So a

Conrad Saam:

Couple of the thoughts along this. One of the other pieces that I think is important to think about is done well, that messaging, that brand to that very finite target is seen across multiple mediums. It’s neither SEO nor pay-per-click advertising. It’s not just display ads. It is display ads. It is also stuff that you might see on YouTube. It is also stuff that you might get OTT. It is also stuff that you might see on social media and it is trying to blanket your target across different platforms. You can do that with what is called programmatic targeting and that basically means I’m looking for this type of person and I’m going to get that brand with consistent creative across multiple mediums in front of that same target. Now, Gyi, what are some of the things that impact CPM rates can vary from sub $1 to over $70.

What are some of the things that impact those CPM rates?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I know many of the kind of a general, and it’s not always true by the way, but I’m going to make a general kind of statement here. The platforms will charge you more to do more specific targeting. And there’s kind of two ways to think about this. One is reach is kind of like lumber, buy in bulk. The more you buy, and this is why again, we talk about national players and national brand campaigns on a cost per thousand basis on a CPM basis can be lower than if you have a super targeted limited geography, limited demographic targeting because the platforms are going to raise the CPM rate because they’re going to argue, well, this is a more valuable targeting methodology for you and they’re not making as much money because you’re not running it in front of as many people. And so they’ll say some things like buy in bulk.

But I’ll say it, I’ve seen opposite examples of that and so it kind of depends, but I think that that’s kind of the general starting point is that because they’re selling it on, most of these campaigns are on cost per thouan, they’re talking about we frame around that. We frame around pricing on cost per thousand as a function of the targeting.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. So I’ll use a simple example. Let’s say you are trying to get your law firm in front of general counsel at Fortune 500 companies. The best way to find those people is on LinkedIn. Everyone wants to get in front of those people. And so the auction to be in front of that very, very finite, high value client is very, very high because everyone wants to be there. And so that’s a case where there’s really, really finite targeting. You have a very, very small population and a very, very high value in that population. And so those CPMs look really, really high. On the flip side, if you want to hit people who live in Texas and that’s the extent of your targeting, much easier to put your brand in front of people who happen to be in Texas with no other qualifications. And that’s essentially why there’s this massive range of it’s probably a hundred X range from low remnant inventory, which is basically stuff that no one else is willing to buy to extremely highly targeted campaigns on something like a LinkedIn.

LinkedIn tends to be the most expensive from a demographic targeting perspective. I found that to be the case.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, and then we’ve been focused on platforms, but if you think about other publishing options or advertising options, if it’s like GC magazine, so you’re trying to target general counsel and general counsel reads this magazine, well, guess what? Because of the medium itself, that will drive ad rates as well. And so again, just back to the same thing, that the platform believes that they have a valuable audience of listeners that will greatly impact the ad rates.

Conrad Saam:

So here’s another thing on platform or medium more accurately, your tiny little display advertisement is not as expensive as your 30-second YouTube video that you only pay for if someone watches all the way through versus audio, different display, different video. So there is fundamentally a different cost to the different values of those mediums. And so you need to think through all of these things. It doesn’t mean that you should do one instead of the other. Again, I’m going to go back to this concept of multiple platforms, multiple mediums, but consistent brand in front of a very, very finite targeted audience.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

When you get smarter about this, what you start realize, because this is what we were talking about at the GLM bootcamp, but there’s a distinction between multi-channel and omnichannel and it seems like nebulous. And when people think of Omni, they think of, “Oh, I’ve got to be everywhere.” But really there’s a key difference here. Multi-channel is this idea that Conrad’s talking about of being on multiple platforms, right? I see your ad here and then it’s reinforced because I see it on a different platform, different medium, I see it on my device, I see it in my community. But oftentimes we see that they’re not really coordinated efforts. There’s awareness and often there’s affinity, but omnichannel is the switch to now my media buying is going to be informed by other channels. So I’ll give you an example. It would be like you have an offline media that has a dedicated branded URL on it, so it’s distinct from your website maybe.

And then when people go to that site, it can be a smart site that pulls up specific information based on the user’s location. So that would be like a more of an omnichannel type of thing where on channel is informing another. Another might be like driving to email. And then you know when someone clicks on a link in an email, you show a very specific ad that’s related to where they came from and the thing that they were interested in. They see a YouTube video on a specific subject and then you get them to click onto something else and they’re retargeted with ads that are informed by the subject matter that they watched on YouTube. And again, that’s the stuff that really changes the impact of cost per qualified lead conversion rates. And this is the challenge because, and we’ve been talking about this, you’ve been saying this a lot, it’s this shift from like sources to touch points.

And the problem is that you buy these campaigns on CPM, but you really want to, and it’s very difficult and very fuzzy and not great, but you really want to evaluate them on cost per qualified consultation and cost per case. And so that’s why hearing those sources or touchpoints come up in intake is so valuable. And this is why we’re jumping up and down about all this stuff because now all of a sudden it’s not just straight up like, oh, I’m evaluating this based on reach and my price per though impressions. I’m evaluating because, and we’re going to play in the second segment, you hear people say things like, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen your TV ad or I saw you at the local community event or there’s something in your messaging that really resonates with them that exists in that media so that you can validate that that’s part of those client

Conrad Saam:

Journeys.” Okay. Two other targets that I think are very, very important. I would make sure that you’re trying to advertise to your database, blatantly obvious. Just stay in front of those people. Now frequency becomes different and the other one is retargeting. Stay in front of people who are on your website, right? Very obvious, but I’ll use this to demonstrate the concept of changing frequency. The people who have just been on my database, I want them to see my brand four to 10 times a day for a week and then I’m going to give up. So it’s a very, very concentrated advertising campaign because you’re basically using this branding as an assist to what it almost becomes direct response. It’s like a capture of the client who didn’t hire you

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Also segment that database. So you’ve got referral sources, people that are regularly referring you, professional referrals, they should be segmented and then you can show specific brand advertisers about referrals, right former clients, different message, right? Maybe it’s a client appreciation or that we’re so grateful for your business type of messaging, but that’s omnichannel because you’re like, I’ve got them in email and I’m showing ads across these different platforms that are contextualized for where these people are, whether it’s their legal service hiring journey or their relationship to the firm. I’m going to a conference, I want to advertise to other people at the conference. And so I’m showing messaging across channels like, “Hey, going to AAJ, say hello.”

Conrad Saam:

Right. So that’s like the difference between the retargeting group and your CRM, different messaging, but also different frequency. The people in my CRM, I don’t need to hit them 10 times a day, I want to hit them 10 times a month with different messaging. So this is so, so unbelievably. Same brand, different messaging. These things become important. All right, when we come back, Gi and I are going to share with you some recordings about the importance of brand that’s really going to hit. This is recordings from normal consumers. This isn’t stuff we’re making up. It’s recordings from normal consumers built out of our near media research that talks about, and it’ll just show you how important brand actually is. If you’re not convinced, stay tuned.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we’re back. And as you know, as a loyal listener, we love to celebrate our worthy rivals, especially when they leave us positive reviews podcasts. No fluff legal marketing five-star review from our good friend, Chris Dreyer, who is the founder of Rankings, which is a very worthy competitor in our space. And so thanks for dropping by, Chris. The Lunch Our Legal Marketing podcast delivers no fluff insights for law firms that want real growth. Gui and Conrad, keep it sharp, fun, and focused on what actually drives cases perfect for those who value execution over Erie. Be like Chris and leave us a positive view. Thank you so much, Chris. We do appreciate it and drop us a comment on YouTube or Spotify to get into the conversation.

Conrad Saam:

By the way, I was going to say most of the time when Gyi says worthy rivals, he means it in quotes with sarcasm. You just don’t get that inflection, but I’ve known him long enough to know that I don’t think he feels that way about Chris.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I don’t. All right. So as Conrad promised, so let’s set this up. Conrad mentioned that both Mockingbird and AttorneySync have currently an exclusive partnership with Near Media. It’s half consumer research, half user behavior studies. And so what’s happening here is that Near Media goes out and they work with one of these user testing platforms and consumers across the country will be prompted with, “Hey, you were in a car accident or a friend or family’s in a car accident and you think you need to find a lawyer, go forth and start your journey and make sure as you’re doing this search for a lawyer, that you talk about what matters to you and what you’re thinking Thinking as you do it. And so we want to play some of these for you, because we found it extremely valuable, but it’s really impactful, especially in this context of brand and direct response.

So here we go. User behavior number one.

User #1:

Personal injury, lawyer. I tend to not look at the sponsored results. I’m not really sure why and I don’t tend to look at them by map in these situations. I’m going to go all the way down. I don’t even hide. I just scroll all the way down here. I do like Reddit as a source of opinion and this seems to be the Charleston subreddit, which is where I live. So I’ll probably click there first. This was from two years ago. Take it with a grain of salt. This person looks like they were also in a rec. This guy says avoid the big names.

Kid Law and Taylor Anderson. Smaller firms do a good job. Okay. I like giving you some names. Slavin Law Offices. So I would probably search those. Kid Law. Taylor Anderson’s smaller firm. So I’d go back here and I’m probably Kid Law. Okay. Looks like he’s in James Island, Simler Anderson Law Firm. It’s 507 Sabana Highway. That’s a little closer to me. That would be easier. And then he said one more. They said Slavin Law Offices. This one’s a little harder to find and this was two years old so it looks like they don’t exist anymore. I think at this point I would probably call this Taylor Anderson. They’re closer and I would start there.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

How about that, Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

Okay. Gyi, there were a bunch of really fascinating things that came out of that now and I’m jotting down notes as she’s speaking. There were a couple elements that were really impactful in how she was making her decision, but one of them was recency. So the content that was two years old for her was so old. It didn’t even matter. She went right past that. It was really important for her that the law firm was close. She literally says that would be a lot easier. And she also liked size and not the size matters that Morgan & Morgan is trying to pitch. She’s talking about the value of smaller. We haven’t seen this or heard that often, although we always talk about the importance of local, but being that small local firm, she’s giving you an opportunity to say, “Hey, yes, we’re better than size matters.” The other thing I think that was really fascinating, Gyi, at a meta level, you and I talk about omnichannel marketing as if it is multiple different touchpoints in time.

And what she was doing here, she was running multiple different channels in the same session. She used Reddit, she used Google Local, she used organic results, she used social. There were a bunch of different places where she was looking in the same exact search. And at the end of that search key, what happened? She did a brand search for a firm that she had not been referred to. We often think about, “Oh, those referrals, those brand search referrals come from other people. ” In many cases, and well, in this case, as an example, it came from her omnichannel research in one session, but she then did a brand search and was going to contact the firm that was local, smaller and recommended. She was going to contact that firm by Google Business Profile. Now, if you are at a agency that does not care or has the inability to understand this, they’re going to take credit from an SEO perspective for that lead.

And what happened, what you heard in real time, this was a lead capture perspective from Google Business Profile, Google Local Search. It was not a lead generation. The demand was generated elsewhere, but Google Local was what she actually used to contact the firm. And so this is, again, why we talk about the importance of touchpoints as well as omnichannel touches.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s right. And again, the big takeaway in the context of direct response and brand here is that her journey began as a non-brand search. It began as a direct response demand capture search and evolved right before our eyes into a brand search. And so this is the gold in terms of understanding these journeys because if you don’t see this, if you don’t understand that people use the web this way, use these different touchpoints this way, you end up optimizing yourself into a box. And so just to give you a sense of how this conversation goes, that we’ve heard so many times is that to Conrad’s point, the SEO company’s like, “You need to invest more money in SEO. All these leads are coming from SEO.” And so you stop doing brand activities, maybe you stop doing community events, people aren’t talking about it on Reddit as much, and then all of a sudden the numbers go down.

And again, I think it’s important too. We cherry-pick these recordings to illustrate some of these points. I don’t want people to walk away from this and be like, “Oh, Conrad and Gyi just proved that Reddit is the place to go AstroTurf because everybody’s on Reddit.” In fact, a lot of the research actually does not support that, but it’s really important that the real message here is to understand how these things work together and that these journeys are often not linear like the marketing people would like to tell you. Let’s play another one.

User #2:

Okay. So I want to find, I guess, a personal injury lawyer in Jasmo. So I’m very familiar at least through advertising with Morgan & Morgan. I know they’ve been around a long, long time. I don’t know that that necessarily means they’re any better. I’m also very familiar with Farah and Farah in terms of just having seen their advertising. I like that they’ve been around for 40 years over 40 years. I like that they offer free consultations and you only pay if they win. Gosh, honestly, I think I would go with Morgan & Morgan or Farah and Farah just because they’ve just been around for so long and they both have a good reputation. So Morgan & Morgan’s got 4.5 stars. I will say that Dan Newlin has never heard of Dan Newlin, but he’s been around for a long time too. Oh, wow. Baggett Law has five stars, 14 years in business.

Honestly, I think I would go with Farah and Farah. I think I would probably call them at least first because they do have that free consultation. They do have a good reputation. They have been around forever. 4.8 stars. Yeah. I think that I would do that.

Conrad Saam:

All right. So to be continuitous to take the theme from the last one and extend it to this one, what you didn’t see if you were just listening to this as a podcast was a constant scroll within Google search results across a variety of different results within the SERP. And so what’s happening in this situation, you hear her thinking, “Ah, she’s scrolling through. She’s reading stars. She’s calling them out. She’s trying to find out how long people have been around.” But while she’s doing that for you podcast listeners, both of them did their research on the SERP page through different mediums, paid, unpaid, organic, local, et cetera. And she’s looking for cues. She’s actually going through this doing research, zero click research. She didn’t click into anything unlike our previous visitor, but she was literally doing her research with one source and that source was all of the different things that are feeding in through Google Serp.

And again, this goes right back to the importance of omnichannel as well as she knew, she picked the one of two, she narrowed it down quickly to one of two firms with which she had brand awareness. She happened to pick the localized firm. She didn’t enunciate why it was fair and fair instead of Morgan, but that’s the local firm. Fascinating.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And that’s the key that you mentioned there at the end, which is in a non-brand search context. And this is why even we were talking about this when we were traveling together because a lot of times we think about this unaided brand awareness stuff and you ask somebody, “Hey, can you name a lawyer?” And they can’t. However, when they see a list all of a sudden the firms that are familiar with, they start remembering them. That familiarity comes back, “Oh yeah, I know Morgan and Morgan. Oh yeah, I know Farah and Farah.” And that is I think so important for people to understand. And again, same thing. I’m not sitting here. Counter is not sitting here and telling you, you have to go build that kind of saturation brand with offline media buying like those major players do, but finding ways to become more familiar, that is the key because you’re thinking on bottom of the funnel, non-brand direct response, and actually even in those contexts, brand plays a large role in how consumers actually make the choice.

Conrad Saam:

So this goes back to business school marketing 101, 401, 501, whatever they call your first marketing class at a graduate school level on business and hopefully it shows up in undergrad as well. This is the difference between unaided and aided brand awareness. So let me just get out what those definitions are because this is part of what NearMedia does. And I think it’s really important to get both of those in your radar. Unaided brand awareness basically says, tell me the name of a law firm, any law firm, right? And that is unaided brand awareness. Aided brand awareness is, here’s a list of law firms, which ones do you know? And what’s happening to the searcher in real time is they’re getting an aided brand awareness test, which basically says, “Here’s the SERP results, here’s a bunch of law firms.” And what you heard this user essentially enunciate and prove is that I didn’t start with anyone.

She literally started with personal injury lawyer. There was no brand that she was looking for and then she remembered who they were after those brands start up. So this is a aided brand awareness test and it just goes again to show the value of that brand.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s right.

Conrad Saam:

You got another one for us?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I do.

User #3:

I’m going to look up injury lawyers. They didn’t say what location, so I’m going to use Louisville, Kentucky. Okay. Darryl the Hammer has always been, I actually know of this person and he’s very good. We have several good attorneys in the area. Sam Aguilar is supposed to be good. Kaufman and Stingers or whatever it is, Stiggers, whatever and Harrison. But I think I would first probably contact WeWin.com, which is the Hammer Isaacs. He is very good with injury and accidents and he’s very good at getting money back, especially when someone is going to take extra time to recover. He tries to make sure that they’ll be totally covered while they do it. I believe that’s someone I would contact.

Conrad Saam:

Holy cow. Okay, this is amazing, dear listener, and I’ll tell you why. He has no idea if he’s very good. No idea. And I will tell you this, even after she hires Darrell Isaacs and he does his job, she will not know whether or not he has done a good job if he’s very, very good because was he great at lawyering? Her ability to evaluate his lawyering or the firm at Darrell Isaac’s lawyering is zero. Even after you consume the service. And I’ve used this example all the time. People want to say, “How do you evaluate lawyers?” It’s impossible. And I’ve been doing this for over 20 years now. I don’t know any of my clients if they’re good at lawyering or not. I have no clue. In the same way as if you had knee surgery, did the surgeon do a good job? Well, your knee hurts, but you could walk.

Is that a very good outcome or not? I don’t know. You got $2 million in your recoveries. Was that very good or not? I don’t know. They do not know. And what she’s equating here, which is human nature and unbelievably lazy is the quality of work correlated to awareness of the brand.

Just think about how dumb that is. I’m not picking on this lady, but you guys, by the way, you guys all do this outside of legal. You buy things with what you are familiar because you assume that it is well done. And so kind of shocking, right? But again-

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Kind of shocking.

Conrad Saam:

He is cherry-picking these things. She thinks Darryl Isaacs, he is very good. First of all, Darrell Isaacs is not going to work on your case, but he is very good because she knows who he is. Amazing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Familiarity and reputation like that is the game here. All right let’s do another one. This is a fun one.

User #4:

I’m searching for a local personal injury lawyer. I’m on a page with results for personal injury lawyers near me. It shows two sponsored results. The Sam Bernstein Law Firm and the Goodman Acker Law Firm, both of which I have heard of before on television. There’s also an ad for Morgan & Morgan and there are other results for different local firms. I’m scrolling down the page to find a local lawyer who can represent my family member in the legal action against the person who caused injury to them. I’m continuing to scroll and I’m just seeing a lot of repetitions. I’m going to click on the page for the first non-sponsored result for a lawyer that I’ve heard of. It’s Coney Bear Injury and Accident Lawyers.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

All right, really interesting one here. That was great.

And this is my backyard. So I’m very familiar with this area of the SERPs. A couple things that stand out for me on this one. Again, this is an example of one of these users that is looking for a non-sponsored result. So people that are paying for advertising for this particular type of searcher, if you’re PPC only, you’re not even in the consideration set. And again, recognized from TV several of the firms, but chose a local law firm that she was familiar with that was showing up in the non-sponsored results. And again, that she knew someone that she was specifically looking for familiarity and scrolled the entire length, she recognized too. And she expressed, I think, the challenges that Conrad alluded to and that we hear from legal services consumers all the time is like, “How do I tell the difference? These all look the same.

It’s just a bunch of the same things.” And if you weren’t watching the recordings, you’re listening on the podcast, it’s title tags optimized for city personal injury lawyers, one after another after another. And it wasn’t until the on that she recognized that she chose. And so again, SEO agencies saying, “Look, it’s SEO. SEO is driving this for you. ” And it was the brand familiarity once again.

Conrad Saam:

100%. The other thing that I note, Gyi, in all of these, nobody went to ChatGPT, Claude, blah, blah, blah. It’s a start with Google. It’s a research on the SERP and it is a contact. I think she was a good one to end up with because she basically says, I wrote it down, I’m going to click on the first non-ad result that I’ve heard of. That was her criteria, right? Fast is right.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We got one more to do.

User #5:

So I’m going to look for legal services to help my friend who’s engaged.

Conrad Saam:

The search query has legal purposes for injured in accident.

User #5:

So here we’re just showing a bunch of different options. Say top ranked to be more specific. Top 10, that’s right. He seems very popular. I’ve seen him in a lot of ads.

Conrad Saam:

So that was Mike Morse for those of you listening. Again, what you’re not getting here is this person just scrolling through the SERP results, click through to Yellow Third Results, please. Going back to Google and redoing a brand query or the person that he recognized, which was Mike Morris. So click through from that original serve page onto Yelp, found Mike, and then went back and did a brand query for Mike Morris.

User #5:

Wow, that is a March though. So overall, I think I’m going to go with that. I think I’m going to go with Mike Morris Law Firm. What stands out to me is how much money he has want from these types of lawsuits.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So a couple things that I observed from this one. The first is that scrolled right past the AIO, scrolled right past the one box, the premium real estate that the local SEO people focus on. Getting that one box to appear. So the one box where people don’t know is the big branded map pack. It’s not even a map pack. It’s just like it’s your Google business profile showing up as the only box on the right hand side of the page for the non-brand query. Michigan Auto Law had the one box. Michigan Auto Law was the first listed in the AIO. And for Mission Auto Law was also the top organic results, or one or two in the organic starts because Yelp was right there. And this user, one, seemed to be going around a little bit, didn’t identify any brands from the SERP. Clicked on Yelp.

Also point out modified their query to make it more specific by a pending top ranked after the initial query. So again, this isn’t a single search, click, call. It’s search, revise my search for top rated, click into Yelp because it’s Yelp, they can use the superlatives, right? Top 10 best law firms in my area, clicks into Yelp, recognizes the firm from advertising in Yelp, goes back to Google and does a brand search on the firm’s name, misspells the firm’s name, but Google knows, shows Morris’s website, clicks through, sees $2 billion on the website and makes the decision. I mean, fascinating stuff.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. Again, my big takeaway from all of this has been the extent to which the SERP result is your research. A lot of research is being done there and there’s multi-channel research. This was directories as a marketing channel. I was lucky I got to learn this industry in a directory, but I’d spent at least a decade crapping on directories after I left because they overcharged and under delivered. This is the most generic of all directories, Yelp, which God helped me try and get reviews on that thing, right? But it works. Directory, Yelp tends to perform better the closer you are to California. This is out in Michigan. This is not a Yelp heavy market. Yelp ultimately is what made this person’s mind up. I click through Yelp and then go back to Google, do more research. So research, research, research, research, research, this direct response, “I need to hire a lawyer right now.” We have talked about it kind of simplistically having one marketing channel because you think, “All right, I want the pencil.

I’m going to look for the pencil. I’m going to click on the ad for the pencil and I’m going to go and buy the pencil at pencil.com.” That’s not actually how it works. It’s I’m going to actually do research on the pencil through multiple query in real time with this search engine, frequently skipping over advertising, but not always, frequently skipping over advertising and then it becomes that direct response. But that direct response is frequently captured by Google Business Profile, by branded query in this case, a brand query that went to Google Business Profile.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And by the way, what else does research just like this? LLMs, right? This is fan out queries, multiple sources, fan out queries, and creates an experience based on what it finds from those fanout queries based on what it believes is the response to your prompt. And so I think watching this in real time is super valuable to drive home these points against cross platform and people will say, “Oh, well, pretty soon it’s going to be agents doing all of this workforce and all of this research for us.” Guess what? The agents do it the same way. They are pulling multiple queries from multiple platforms, from multiple sources, from multiple media and it just drives home this point that the idea if you are going to be a single channel direct response investor, you are going to continue to pay an increasing premium for those clients because you’re not really understanding that the way that people are finding you is impacted by all these different both advertising strategies, marketing strategies, platforms, locations, sentiment, reviews.

It all works together. And we’re out of time, unfortunately, but thank you for dropping by for this edition of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Please, if you’ve just landed here or never have heard of us before, subscribe to Lunch Our Legal Marketing, leave a review. We’d love to hear from you reach out on all of your favorite platforms. Until nice time, Connor and he is signing off.

Conrad Saam:

Happy Mother’s Day.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Happy Mother’s Day.

Announcer:

Thank you for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. If you’d like more information about what you heard today, please visit legaltalknetwork.com. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts and RSS. Follow Legal Talk Network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Conrad Saam:

And if you’re just remembering that it’s Mother’s Day, you are a terrible person. I

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