How To Spend $100K

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam:

This just does not exist in the market. I need cases now that are very low cost. That does not exist in the market. And so if you are in the I need cases now mentality and you need to make a high margin on those cases, you are in a world of hurt because there is no marketing channel available to you.

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. I’m Conrad Saam from Mockingbird and I love wearing flip-flops.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s great. It’s flip-flop season and I’m Gyi from AttorneySync and I totally blanked on what my unique thing is because now I’m thinking of Conrad walking around in flip flops, but I too love flip-flops. We’ll say I’ve solved the future.

Conrad Saam:

I love flip-flops and I’ve solved the future. Okay, well done.One up me this time. Wait till next week. Well,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You’re about to one-up me now because you, my friend, are saving people from bears.

Conrad Saam:

Well, saving is a … That’s an extreme overstatement. But yes, rustling-

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yesterday

Conrad Saam:

Bears. You’re wrestling that. Wrestling Bears. So yesterday- Do you think

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You could beat a bear? Could you beat a bear in wrestling match?

Conrad Saam:

I could beat a bear in SEO or a shark.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Depends on the bear.

Conrad Saam:

Maybe. No, yesterday, one o’clock, 1:30- ish. We got a page out for a injured hiker on a local mountain. Very, very popular. It was probably one of the top two or three local hikes in the Seattle area. And on the way to the … And I’m super grateful that I have my own business because I looked at my calendar and I had enough meetings that I could move. So I was like, great, I’ll go help. And I got all my stuff together and on the way in we got warnings that it was actually a bear attack and they’re very uncommon, but we went in and evacuated and there were three people ultimately who needed help getting out. So

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. I mean, I just can’t help but thinking it’s like the scene and the revenant and you’re fighting a bear and the bear’s on top of you and you’ve got your side arm there defending yourself from this bear. Wow, what a weekend.

Conrad Saam:

Well, it’s not that dramatic. I mean, one of the interesting things that I’ve learned about this search and rescue game is a lot of it is very mundane. A lot of it’s sitting around wait. We waited to make sure that it was okay to go up. There’s a lot of coordination. You’re just like a little cog in the wheel and you just do your job and it was great. It was good. I really enjoy this helping people like this because it gets me outside and it’s a whole different expertise set and it’s a whole different level of responsibility because as you know, and every business owner listening to this, the only thing a business owner ever has to do is answer all the questions that no one else has been able to figure out. And so you have to make those decisions. In search and rescue situation, like you are assigned a job, you’re a cog in a wheel, and someone else is making the hard decisions.

Someone else has been really trained on rescue and you just do your one job and you do it as well as you can. It doesn’t matter what that is. I spent part of

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yesterday- Until Mr. Musk replaces you with robots, it is pretty much doing what the bots cannot.

Conrad Saam:

That is correct.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

In addition to wrestling bears and pandering to our sponsors by wearing beautiful Lomatics hats, what else are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam:

So we’re going to tell you how to spend $100,000 marketing budget. And this is philosophical, but it’s really, really important to think through the prioritization of how to spend $100,000 marketing budget. And then we’re going to answer a user question about his involvement in a local event.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Let’s do the news.

Conrad Saam:

All right, Gyi, we have new data coming out from seranking.com about a core algo update. And interestingly, and bluntly, I didn’t see this. I didn’t think we were going to continue to swing in this direction. Reddit continues to be up. If you don’t have a Reddit astroturfing strategy right now, you are being left behind. And interestingly also, YouTube down. Reddit up, YouTube down. I would not have predicted that. That was not on my cards. I thought we’ve maybe swung a little too hard on the Reddit side, but apparently not yet.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s funny. It feels like in this citation economy, we’ve got the citation stock ticker every week of what citation sources are up and what are down. And I would encourage folks also to take it with a little bit of grain of salt. Remember, this research is published across many categories. What’s happening in your neck of the AI SERPs might not reflect this data, but I think directionally it’s good to keep your eyes peeled about what citation sources are being cited by the machines.

Conrad Saam:

And

Gyi Tsakalakis:

To that point,

Conrad Saam:

Oh,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Go ahead.

Conrad Saam:

Sorry. I know this is the new segment. We keep hijacking news for tactical thoughts.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A big talker.

Conrad Saam:

I like to talk. This is true. The importance of knowing how things change over time and that things change over time highlights the importance of actually being in a lot of different places at the same time and continuing that kind of overall tactical approach. Let’s go back to your next news segment.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And in other news, case status has dropped its legal client experience report and there’s a lot of great information there. You can go, we’ll provide the link to the download. But one thing that I wanted to call out from the report is it’s one of their five key findings. 74% of clients reported being satisfied with their legal outcome, but only 41% of them would recommend their legal team, meaning that three out of four, almost 75% are like, the outcome is actually good, but less than half say that they would actually recommend the team that handled the outcome. Now, some of the lawyers are going to react to that and be like, “Well, that’s because this is a very hard time.” And even though expectations might have been properly managed to outcomes, they’re going to reflect poorly on the lawyers because they think that they should have done better or something.

Now the report suggests that it has to do with satisfaction and whether it’s not just the job getting done, but how you’re getting it done. And we’ve talked about hospitality and service and client experience and I think that matters, but I think that’s an important thing for people to keep in mind in the marketing context that just advertising great outcomes doesn’t necessarily lead to positive sentiment in Google reviews.

Conrad Saam:

And while we’re talking about case status and we’re pandering to Lawmatics, we’re going to pander a litle bit to case status and remind everyone that the speakers at the Case Status CX Summit highly curated, selected and separate from sponsorship dollars. One of the dings that the legal marketing industry and the conference industry has had recently and increasingly so is the extent of pay to pitch talks from the stage. And it’s really important to, I think both you and Ige that we find venues where it is not just a pay to pitch and the case status, it’s literally separate on their applications. You can apply to be a sponsor, you can apply to be a speaker. Those two things are not correlated. So hats off to case status at the same time. Have they accepted your speaking pitch yet, Gyi?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

They have not. And I believe that I was sort of politefully turned down to speak, but we still salute and applaud their good works. And again, I’ve always liked what they’re up to over there because they really do put client experience at the center of the solution that they solve for law firms. And it’s still a massive issue as this report indicates and as many Google Business Profile testimonial section indicate. So find ways to improve that client experience. And finally in other news, we’re going to give a tip of the cap to Microsoft because they have added new AI visibility insights in Bing Webmaster tools. Conrad has his Bing shirt on. Conrad was at the launch party for Bing, as I understand, but that will be a episode for another day. But I wanted to call this out because in contrast to what Google has given us in search console, Bing’s AI visibility insights are seemingly somewhat more robust with intense topics, citation share.

And I think for me, this idea of showing the actual topics, again, who cares what the impressions are if you have no clue what the topics that those impressions are relevant to. I think that’s a tool for folks to check out that are the do- it-yourselfers that want to kind of get a sense. And if you want to hold your agency accountable for visibility in Bing, that’s a tool that they should be talking about too. Let’s take a break. And we’re back. And we are going to answer this question about how to spend $100,000 on marketing wisely. And this came up. So I was recently down in Fairfax, Charlie Mann hosted a networking mastermind meeting gathering. It was awesome, great folks there, but we were going around the room and I was talking about some of the things that we do at Attorney Sync and folks will say things like, “All right, I got this amount of money to spend.

What should I spend it on? ” And their expectation tends to be like, “Should I do SEO? Should I do PPC?” There’s a lot of these false dichotomies between brand and non-brand. And so we thought it might be useful to talk about this about frameworks for how to spend money and really at the risk of saying the obvious how much to spend. I know we’ve brought this up before, but in the best era community, a Facebook ad was being floated around that seemed to reflect suggestions about overall spending by different categories. And I’ll leave it to you to decide if you want to reveal the- Leave it to

Conrad Saam:

Me,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Folks. Yeah, I’ll leave it to you.

Conrad Saam:

Well, this is brought to you by our good friends that are worthy rivals as Gyi likes to call them from SMB team.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay.You

Conrad Saam:

Want the percentages?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Describe what we’re looking at here on the whiteboard.

Conrad Saam:

So we’ve got a whiteboard of a breakdown of a law firm’s spend and they’re calling for 20% of your revenue to be spent on client acquisition, 40% to be spent on basically what I will call operating costs, your team, technology, infrastructure, facilities, et cetera, 10% on what is called answers. We’re going to come back to that, leaving 30% profit. My first question on this was, what the hell is Answers? Turns out that answers is SMB Teams product. So they’re recommending that you spend 10% of your revenue on coaching, I think it is. But the thing here, 20% on client acquisition, Gyi, I think your exposure to this was often talking to large … So in the context of our $100,000 firm, that’s 500 grand in revenue, right? That’s a $500,000 revenue firm, 20%. Oh,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You’re saying if we spent $100,000 as 20%, it’s a $500,000 firm. That’s

Conrad Saam:

$500,000 firm. Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Got it. So yeah, you’re spending 100 on 500.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. So you’re a small firm, right? I think one of the interesting things with our $100,000, how do you spend it is that’s not a very big budget, Gyi. And I think if I recall correctly, your exposure to the chat about these graphics here, a lot of people were like, “Hey, you know what? Our budget should actually be about five to 10% on marketing.” Is that accurate?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. I think some responses suggested that 20% client acquisition was high.

Conrad Saam:

If you’re trying to take over a market in personal injury, 20% is low and you are going to fail at being a top three in your market at 20%. That is just a fact.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You’re going to have a really hard time in a major market for sure.

Conrad Saam:

The other thing is you have a lot of marketing channels that you have crossed off your list because the cost of acquisition-

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think this is the more interesting part of the conversation, right? Okay. So some lawyers will say, they call you up, I need cases now, Conrad, I need cases now. I’ve listened to the podcast and I’ve heard that PPC, LSAs, direct response, I’ve heard that those ads go up, the phone starts ringing now, that’s the fastest high intent, fastest way to cases. So we’re going to say, “So I want to spend $100,000, 100% of my marketing budget on direct response because I need cases now.”

Conrad Saam:

The answer to the I need cases now actually is direct response. The problem with direct response is it generates cases now, which is what everybody wants. So it’s a very expensive marketing channel. And so what you can’t have, this just does not exist in the market. I need cases now that are very low cost. That does not exist

Gyi Tsakalakis:

In

Conrad Saam:

The market. And so if you are in the I need cases now mentality and you need to make a high margin on those cases, you are in a world of hurt because there is no marketing channel available to you.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But let’s really hold us accountable. So I got $100,000. I’m a $500,000 top line law firm. Maybe I don’t need 100% of my … I don’t need all of my cases next month. And maybe that’s part of this too, is we got to talk about like some time horizons. It’s an annual marketing spend, so at least give me 12 months. So it’s like over the next 12 months. And I would still be like, you should be heavily invested in relationship, networking, reputation, maybe you start some digital brand building. And even though it might not put money or put fees in the win column for you in February of that year, you know what? I wouldn’t be shocked if after 12 months of doing that, you’re going to see some upticks in referrals. I mean, let’s hope that you’ve already have some existing relationships and referral sources you can advertise to, but this is the trap to me.

This is the trap. This is why there’s musical chairs on all non-brand direct response channels in terms of agencies and all this kind of stuff because it’s short-term thinking and it causes firms to be stuck in the … We’re stuck with Google. 100% of our cases come from Google and we’re just going to keep doubling down on Google. And by the way, we are beholden to any algorithmic change, platform change, switch to AI, yada, yada, yada, that we’ve talked about a million times. It just doesn’t … You wouldn’t do this with your own personal portfolio. You wouldn’t day trade crypto stocks with 100% of the money that you’re going to invest. I don’t know why you would do it in this context.

Conrad Saam:

So I remember Bill Gurley, I believe he was with Benchmark Capital. He was one of the early board members at Avo, really pushed back against, and I believe he called it the heroine of pay-per-click. The heroin of

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Pay-per-click.

Conrad Saam:

The getting addicted to business generated through this paid platform. So I think that’s really important. I think you’re totally right, Gyi. If you put a 12-month horizon on this and you deliver not a good product, not a good legal product. We talked about this the other day. I actually genuinely don’t care. I do, but from a marketing perspective, it doesn’t matter if you deliver good lawyering or not. Do you deliver good to great service?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, just think about it. Let’s go back to it. Let’s just reiterate what we said earlier in the news. That’s exactly what the case status report essentially says. That’s right. Three out of four consumers are happy with their result, les than half are happy with their legal services.

Conrad Saam:

And that’s the problem is so I’m going to presume that you have solved that problem. The best dollars to spend if you have at least a 12-month horizon are making sure all of the people who are in your world, LinkedIn, email lists, your CRM, your social network, your newsletter list, all of those elements that they never forget about you. And I will tell you, it is amazingly easy to forget about a service provider. And so I think it is really important to go out of your way. We talk about the first thousand dollars to spend, you’ve got $100,000 budget. I can’t come up with a good reason why the first money that you spend, whether you are in massive growth mode or I’m trying to keep the lights on until I retire mode, is not spent in just keeping your brand awareness, if not affinity, but your brand awareness in front of the people who already have an experience with you assuming they already like you, right?

Assuming they already like you, don’t be the restaurant that advertises to people who you’ve given food poisoning to.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. We’re going to say we’re not counting any of … So that goes into your 40%, service delivery and client experience. We’re going to put that in the other buckets. This is 20% straight up acquisition number, $100,000. And this is the thing that I … And Jay Ruane talks about this in his book too, so give a shout to Jay who will be at Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit for a few plug there. Good plug. But you’ve got to compare the $100,000 invested in paid search to $100,000 in gifting to referrals to giving people tickets to sporting events to all the other things that are going to stand out to somebody in terms of like, “Hey, you know what? That person actually cared about me. They’re actually investing in the local community, all that stuff.” Some people divided analog and digital. I don’t think there’s necessarily the lines are as clean as that, but staying top of mind to your point that you already said, to the people who already know, like, and trust you so that they think about you in that key moment when someone in their world needs the kind of help that you provide, they’re thinking of you because otherwise you’re stuck

Conrad Saam:

There’s an inverse relationship between ROI and volume. And what I mean by that is the cheapest cases to acquire, there aren’t a lot of them, but, and I think this is your maga point here, you should put as much of your marketing budget to that group as you possibly can because they have a low cost per. And however, if you are a top three in the market kind of firm, you cannot ignore the marketing channels that represent 20, 30, 40% of the market. You just cannot ignore that group because otherwise your market size is much lower. It means that you need to be able to generate cases at a reasonable cost and it means that you need to be able to turn those leads into cases at a really high rate, but that’s the trade off, the inverse relationship between ROI and volume.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Let’s try to be really accountable here and say, okay, great. You guys shared a lot of great context, great thoughts. Gyi and Conrad, I got $100,000 to spend over the next 12 months. Walk me through my first, I don’t know if you want to do in $5,000 increments or $10,000 increments, but your first $5,000 or your first $10,000 and remember, this is annual. So divide it by 12 if you want to get monthly. Maybe let’s do $10,000 increments just because you’re going to divide by 12, you’re going to be less than $1,000 a month.

Conrad Saam:

Well, I would start by the size of my database and website traffic Because that has a big impact on how much money I spend on two separate

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Things. I got 2000 contacts, 2000 contacts in my database.

Conrad Saam:

You have 2000 contacts.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Mix of former clients, professional network, blah, blah, blah. All the things that you said, people in my periphery.

Conrad Saam:

I’m doing math really quickly in my head here.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Sure.

Conrad Saam:

You can stay in front of that database for $10,000 that year and not just in front of that database, but like very much in front of that database.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

How much money do you want to allocate to it? Thousand a month? 500 a month? I mean, the software alone is going to be, I mean, depending on what you’re using, but I guess tech’s not in this bucket, right? It’s just acquisition. This is just either paying somebody to do the emails. You can always do it yourself, but let’s assume you’re not doing this stuff, right?

Conrad Saam:

It’s not emails. So this is just pure advertising. I’m going to stay in front of you.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay.

Conrad Saam:

Got you. I’m

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Going to

Conrad Saam:

Allocate $10,000 just to stay in front of you. Okay?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m going to allocate- How are you going to database market just database advertise here? Because you’re probably not at, with 2000 contacts, do you have a sufficient number of-

Conrad Saam:

You do now. …

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Contacts for first party audience?

Conrad Saam:

You do. You do now. And that number has gotten a lot smaller. I believe that that minimum threshold is 500 now that you can run through Google.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay.You’re

Conrad Saam:

Looking this up to validate, which is totally fair. But I would 100% do that. Okay. So newsletter. Again, I’m leaning on this data. We’re staying with this very, very finite number of people. I would run a newsletter and I would run that your budget for hitting that audience every week with new content, interesting content. We did a thing on newsletters, I think two episodes ago, how to do the importance of the newsletter from a peer brand perspective, you’re at $1,700 on that newsletter. Let’s round that up to 20. So we’ve now spent $30,000 just staying in touch with 2000 people, okay? Exactly. That is a really big investment on a very, very small number of people that will pay off more than anything else that you do.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s 30% of your marketing budget

Conrad Saam:

30% just

Gyi Tsakalakis:

To stay in front of that group. Yep. And I would say that sounds pretty good. I might even throw some gifting type things in there.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. So let’s put in a … So we’re up to 30 grand. Let’s say we spend another $10,000 pandering to this group. So $10,000 on 2000 people, that’s $50 per person on average. Okay. And I wouldn’t do this on average. Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And maybe you’re not sending all 2,000 of those people a gift, but maybe you’ve got some key referral sources, maybe there’s some other lawyers that regularly get asked or like they’re non-competitive lawyers that refer you cases. Maybe there’s some professionals that tend to be able to refer you. Anyway, it’s people that are in your referral network that you’re going to send gifts to. So now you’re up to 40%. So 40% is 40 grand.

Conrad Saam:

2,000 people. Okay. Yep. Okay. I’m going to add to your gifting, okay I actually want to send that referral thank you gift to non-lawyers. The referral thank you gift to lawyers. So the gifting we were talking about earlier is like, we’ve done this at local chocolates at the chocolates here on Valentine’s Day, something along those lines. Don’t do the Christmas gift, the holiday season gift. We’ve done ad nauseum podcasts on that, but find ways to gift that’s kind of exceptional. And then I would also give the thank you gift. Okay. And what you’re really trying to do here, I will call this out for what it is, I’m not sure we can say this to the legal marketing world, you are bribing people to continue sending you business. Okay You are. Let’s call that up for what it is. Okay?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Again, look, you can call whatever you want. I think it’s acknowledging and being grateful for people who are thinking about you and sending you business. You want to call it bribes, fine.

Conrad Saam:

You would do well in the Trump White House, my friend.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, it’s a difference because I don’t think it’s a quid pro quo, right? I don’t think it’s quid pro quo like a bribe is. A bribe is like, I’m only going to pay you if you send me this referral. And I think that they’re sending you the referrals anyway, you’re just saying things But it’s so key to nurture the relationship. Again, you might say, look, maybe I don’t need $10,000. Again, because we’re just trying to go through how you’d spend the money. The point is whatever, maybe you’re taking people out to dinner, maybe you’re doing a nice referral partners networking event or a nice referral partner’s happy hour or whatever it is. You’re saying thank you and acknowledging and investing. And by the way, you’re getting ideally, in my opinion, get together with people in person, go to dinner. I don’t know if these numbers that you’ve got the suite at the local sporting event box, but if you do, then you’re taking people to sporting events.

You’re taking people out, showing them a good time, building the relationship, experiential stuff together. I think that’s the miss on a lot of these things. And it doesn’t have to be that expensive. It really doesn’t.

Conrad Saam:

So we’re going to put 10 grand into referral gifting and 10 grand into events, networking events, thank yous, et cetera.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. I’d say 20,000 to thanking the people who are sending us business is how I would break it down.

Conrad Saam:

So now we’re down to $40,000 left of our 20% of our revenue budget. Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And now we’re going to get to where the rubber really meets the road, right?

Conrad Saam:

Well, hold on. I got one other obvious one. We’re going to spend, and it depends what our website traffic looks like. We’re going to spend $10,000 on retargeting. I don’t think you’re going to be able to spend that much. If you are a small firm like that, you probably don’t have … But why do we say retargeting? The retargeting is the assist

To make sure that you don’t lose that prospective client. You can also do this with a newsletter. We talked about this the other day. You can have the ongoing newsletter that’s like what’s going on in the business, blah, blah, blah, what’s going in the community. But you can also have that newsletter that is … It’s a drip campaign with a finite number like what it’s like to work with us, how to be … It is intended to turn a prospect into a client. So I think that retargeting and turn … This is the final assist retargeting newsletters. You drop 10 grand on that, that’s money very well spent. Now we’re down to $30,000, Gyi. And so I’m curious what you would spend your final $30,000 on. I’ve got a candidate. Is it SEO?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No.

Conrad Saam:

Why?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Maybe I’ll say this. Maybe it’s … I mean, again, a lot of issues with SEO, but this firm … So I think the first filter that we need to qualify is, does this firm have a competitive number of reviews?

So let’s do the no reviews example, or I don’t have competitive number of reviews example. LSAs and SEO look like this. LSAs, I’m like, probably don’t even waste your … Maybe you can set it up, I guess, because it doesn’t hurt, but you’re not going to spend. SEO, I would be like, should you have some basic blocking and tackling maintenance stuff going on? Should you have a GBP profile like you should? Is that SEO not the way people think about SEO? Should you be doing some local content marketing? Is And this is an SEO necessarily, but hey, I’m going to spend some time and money doing YouTube videos. What do you call that? YouTube shows up in search results and socials up in citations. That kind of thing, maybe. If you can do content creation, that’s I think is my answer is that forgetting about SEO, I would invest the remainder of that money into content creation and distribution.

Conrad Saam:

I like your Google business profile question and reviews. That was one of the first things, but we’re talking about $30,000. You’re not

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Going

Conrad Saam:

To go anywhere with $30,000 in SEO. You’re just not.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So this is what’s important because we say that and you’re thinking you’re not going to compete with bottom of the funnel, high volume, high intent head terms in any major market for that. And I agree with you.

Conrad Saam:

Correct.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Does that mean though that you’re not going to have when people search on your name, want to call it brand SEO? Brand SEO?

Conrad Saam:

No, no, no, no, no. I have two possibilities for this remaining $30,000. One is what I’ll call vetting. If someone looks for who you are, what is their experience? And that can include Google Business Profile. In fact, it frequently does include

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Google- Lawyers of Distinction Trophy.

Conrad Saam:

Lawyers of Distinction Trophy, your Avvo profile. These are all things that may

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Show

Conrad Saam:

Up for your name. Understand what shows up for your name and what that experience is. Understand how competitive your name is. Are you Bill Smith, the attorney or are you Takilaki’s the attorney? Completely different issues. So there’s a vetting process and influencing the results when people are looking for you. Talk about the best way to spend money making sure that they receive a very, very positive experience. And the other one, which you touched on quickly is I would think about whether or not it makes sense to open an office or move an office to a place where my review count actually is competitive. And that new office, that new office, that is a marketing expenditure. The lease for that office is a marketing expenditure. But is there a way in your geographic market to find a place where there is a reasonable volume of people, there are no lawyers nearby and you can start generating business, not a ton of business because it’s going to be a small market on 10 reviews or 15 reviews.

That’s what I would look for.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. I think this is why this is the fun part of this question is I think it’s that last 30,000, 20,000, $10,000, what do you do with it? Because again, the off the cuff is going to be that’s the budget that you’re going to try to use to get some cases.You’re going to pay a premium for some cases in a shorter amount of time because you’re doing all this stuff to invest in the relationships, to invest in the referrals, you’re doing the gifting, you’re doing all that stuff, but you still like next if you need to start putting some cases on the board in month six, seventh, eighth out of the 12 months, there might be some direct response component. My initial reaction is to think LSAs, but without reviews, you’re going to be problem. And so it’s like, are there other direct response channels to be in that aren’t reviews wins most?

Conrad Saam:

So I’ll use, and I think this is a simplistic and inaccurate assumption, but SMB’s numbers of putting 20% of your marketing, 20% of your dollars into marketing, that means you can generate matters if you’re doing 500 grand at a cost of 20% of the value of your cases, which I think is probably pretty low depending on what market segment you’re in, what practice area you’re in. But you’re still only … You got 30 grand, you’re doing a 4X, 5X, maybe, maybe 6X on direct response marketing. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but recognize that you’re talking about an incremental 100, $150,000 best, absolute best case scenario with those direct response vehicles. I don’t hate that because honestly, direct response, I like being in that game. I like being part of that model. So play the game, but direct response is another way that you can go on this.

Just understand that you’re not talking about a massive volume of cases that can be directly attributed to this direct response channel.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The juxtaposition that we don’t have time to do is to compare what we just did. You got $100,000 budget on a half a million dollar firm at 20%. In the back of your head, think, all right, well, what if I’m only a 10% firm? Okay. Now you’re down to $50,000 if you’re a half a million dollar firm or a hundred thousand if you’re a million dollar firm. So you can play with those numbers. But I would like to compare it to what you presented at GLM compared to the eight figure firm because the eight figure firm at 20%,

The mix looks a lot different.This goes to the root of the conversation. It’s not fungible. It’s not the same things for every growth stage. It’s not the same thing for every growth objective. It’s not the same thing for even different firms. Different firms are going to have different expenses inside the firm that don’t look like other firms. It’s not as neat and clean as saying, “Oh, well, this client acquisition cost fits in these neat boxes and channels.” Maybe some of this stuff, because like, okay, I’m just thinking about the execution of some of these campaigns. We didn’t bake anything in for management or execution of any of this stuff. So we’re just assuming the lawyers or someone that’s in the 40% service bucket is going to be like, “I’m managing the email list.” Or we budget a litle bit for email, but sending the gifts out, taking the gifts out, taking the people out, the people are actually the time of the people, the salaries of the people who are actually going to do the networking and the relationship development.

And so again, I think this is the real thing for me that I wanted to demonstrate here is that it’s really, you can’t just apply these standard numbers across the board and be like, “It works.” And it’s not the same. Those same first dollars are not the same as those last dollars and they’re highly dependent on timing and growth phase and so we probably beat this horse to death. So thanks to everybody for playing.

Conrad Saam:

When we come back, we’re going to answer a question about a rodeo

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we’re back and we’ve got a big thank you to Alison Kitchell for leaving this review. My favorite legal business podcast, five stars, this podcast is an educational as it is entertaining. I particularly appreciate as a small firm owner how it helps me understand the broader legal market and the large firm side of my industry, but also has tactical information that I can implement to grow my firm. I particularly enjoyed the recent episode going back to basics on branding. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. Allison, thank you for contributing fantastic questions and thanks for being a listener of the pod. Conrad, over to you.

Conrad Saam:

All right, I have a question for you. This was submitted to me over LinkedIn. We’re not going to talk about who actually asked the question because I didn’t get his green light to do so.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Mailbag.

Conrad Saam:

Mailbag. This is mailbag. So this was the response to a LinkedIn post. I’m going to read the post you and then I’m going to read the question that he asked me. “This is the season where Smith & Jones Injury Lawyers helps sponsors the Father’s Day rodeo in my state. While getting our name out there is always part of the equation, this is one of my favorite events of the year. It brings together a few things I genuinely enjoy, horses, family, friends, and a chance to step away from the day-to-day and just take it all in. There’s also something oddly satisfying about seeing a flag with our firm’s logo moving through the grounds while everything else hums around it. Wishing everyone a Father’s Day weekend free of briefs, filings, and all other loyally obligations. Okay. I saw this and I wrote to Mr. Smith, “You could and should generate a year’s worth of awesome branded content with this.

” And he wrote back, “I hadn’t thought about that. What kind of thing would you do? ” So Gyi, not knowing who this law firm is, but knowing that he likes things like horses, family and friends and a chance to step away from the day-to-day and take it all in, what would you do with this, Gyi? How would you go from

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A project? Does he ride?

Conrad Saam:

I’m going to say yes based on the hat I’m looking at him wearing right now, but I may be painting with broad brushstroke. So I don’t know that he’s in the rodeo.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’d be like, “Sign up. We’re buying tickets for people who want to come to the rodeo. I’d have media coverage of the rodeo. I’d have video and idea.”

Conrad Saam:

What do you mean by media coverage of the rodeo?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Are we

Conrad Saam:

Inviting local ABC station?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Again, if it’s newsworthy and you can get a local news story to pick it up, but I’m talking about my own independent media coverage. I’m going to have a videographer maybe there. Yes. I’m going to have people doing interviews. Who are you going to interview, Key? All of my former clients that I invited and paid for their tickets to come talk about how awesome my firm is.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. So we’ve got former clients. Anyone else that you would interview? This is not

Gyi Tsakalakis:

My road. Yeah. I’d get other rodeo community leaders like who organized … I’d get event organizers. I’d get people that maybe there are influencers in the robeo community that I can do co-marketing partnership types of things, rodeo micro influencers, some of the writers, maybe pictures with some of the other writers, writers with former clients. Really do it up, treat it like it’s an event that your law firm’s doing and then publicize that online and get other people who are … This is the affinity stuff we’re talking about.

Conrad Saam:

So when you say publicize, I’m leading questions here. When you

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Say

Conrad Saam:

Publicize it online, what would you do specifically?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I mean, I’d take videos. Well, I think my biggest thing first is the pre-event stuff is I’d be doing a lot of the stuff we’ve talked about where I’m like, “Hey, we’re going to be at this event. So- and-so’s actually writing ideally. We’re doing a ticket giveaway or maybe we’re doing some kind of contest or something. We’d love to see you out there. Enter to win tickets, enter to win dinner with the writer, something like that. I’m making something up. Great. Sign up here, QR codes, email, sign up for- Where’s the sign up your go- to

Conrad Saam:

Gyi? This is one of your brilliant ideas, tactics. Where does one sign up to get the free tickets?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

On my website.

Conrad Saam:

Or on your Google business profile, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, now that’s the real.That’s the real, real talk. Yeah. Okay. We’re giving away tickets. Search for my firm’s name and look in our Google business profile images for a QR code to enter or to win free tickets or whatever it is. And then of course make a big hubbabulu about the giveaway. Maybe you do some press releases around the contest so you get the local community really jazzed up on it. Maybe you find some other local publications that are covering the rodeo. There might be like a local rodeo website, micro influencers, get them all involved. Then cover the event and then push content, video content on all of your social channels and ideally get the people that are part of the giveaway to submit user generated content being … Maybe they tell what rodeo means to you. Publish that on your website and tag the firm and we’ll pick someone’s best story about their best rodeo story to highlight or to give figures to.

That’s part of the giveaway.

Conrad Saam:

I know I ambushed you with this and I’ve had plenty of time to think about it. So one of the things- Yeah, it’s riffing here. I’m riffing my. I know. I love it. But you guys are all missing this stuff because it is low hanging fruit. It takes time, creativity, but it works. You mentioned micro influencers.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, again, to me, you want to be recognized. So in the sea of build, assuming this is in a major market, we haven’t talked market, but in a sea of billboards and TV ads and radio that just basically say the same thing, the minute someone does a search, a non-brand search, they’re going to recognize you immediately from the rodeo. I saw, oh yeah, that’s the firm that gave us the tickets. That’s the firm that’s the writer. That’s the firm that did that contest, passion about rodeo like we are. And so you become the lawyer of the rodeo community even when people are searching in on- brand context. And this is the omnichannel power because now you are contextually standing out across all of the email, social, search, yada, yada, yada. And you’re recognized for something beyond just like, “I fight hard or I’m the biggest law firm or whatever else it is.

Conrad Saam:

So I’m going to extrapolate a couple of the things that you said. The micro influencers become your marketing staff and it really is micro influencers. It is people who are into the rodeo community in this specific location. You’re not looking for thousands and thousands of followers.You’re looking for people who are genuinely influential in that market and turning them into your cheerleaders. The next thing that I would add on top of this is your organic reach on social media is going to be constrained. It is going to be small. Having said that, it is very easy to find people in any given market who are really into horses, rodeos, cowboys, that type of thing. And I can target those people and then push that content in front of those people. And now I’m expanding my circle of influence. And the final thing that I would talk about is next year when the rodeo comes around, you want to be one of the people that the rodeo relies on to promote the rodeo.

You want to become their cheerleader. And so a month before the rodeo starts, the Father’s Day rodeo starts, you start taking this content that you’ve already pushed out on social media and you recycle it and use it again to promote the upcoming rodeo. It gives you two bites at the Apple and it’ll turn the rodeo into one of your favorite fans.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Love it. And tell people why you love the rodeo. If it’s a Father’s Day story here, if it’s like, my dad used to take me to the rodeo, tell that story, support it with video, get other people to start telling theirs. They’ll create an environment where people want to tell their stories about their relationships with their dads or their relationship with the rodeo.

Conrad Saam:

And it’s the other people making other people shine that is so unbelievably important. And when you play that game, it wins. Now in contrast to what we were talking about earlier, this is not going to turn into clients today. It is not going to create a client right now.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Once someone falls off the horse.

Conrad Saam:

Jesus. Wait. Seriously. Is the Jets putting up Horse Accident Lawyer, right.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Com. No, Horse Accident Lawyer Twitter handle. This is the game right here. You create a contest. We’re going to pay for your rodeo’s thing and buy you dinner. Tell us this is why rodeo is so important to us. It’s a Father’s Day story. Tell us why the rodeo is so important to you. Tag the firm, hashtag whatever the thing is. We’re going to pick a winner from your best Father’s Day rodeo story. I mean, that is money.

Conrad Saam:

You know what? I’ll tell you this true story. This is a law firm I’ve wanted to work with for a very long time. They’re not a client and I mean, this is us being true to our brand. We don’t push aggressive sales on anybody. I remember Jonathan Bell. We finally started working with Jonathan Bell maybe four or five years after I first met him and I’ve stayed in touch very sheepishly and we eventually this rodeo example is going to turn into a client sometime between tomorrow and 2031.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Awesome. And with that, we say thank you to Allison and all of our other listeners. The listeners submitted their question. If you have questions or topic suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. And if you just landed here and have no clue what is going on, go subscribe to lunch hour legal marketing on YouTube and Spotify and Apple and follow us on all of your favorite social platforms. Until next time, Gyi and Conrad for Lunch Hour Legal Marketing

Announcer:

Money makes a money makes.

Conrad Saam:

But what do we mean by this? The higher, oh God gram it. I blew that with my phone rang. So let me explain what I’m talking about.

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