Serving Up Super Summit FOMO

Episode Notes

Transcript

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.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing and this is a kind of special summertime lead up to the Summit edition. When you’re listening to this, we should be around 30 days out from the summit and we thought this would be a great opportunity to share some of our conversations at last year’s summit to give folks that didn’t have our opportunity to attend the summit last year and join us this year in Nashville.

Conrad Saam:

Hey Gyi, it sounds like we’re just trying to make people feel bad that they missed last time so that they’ll show up this time. Is that what’s happening here?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We are.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, good, good. I just wanted to call that out.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

This is the Super Summer FOMO episode.

Conrad Saam:

I like it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We’re recording this right leading up to 4th of July, so you’ll get this right after 4th of July. We’ve talked about releasing some of these episodes from the summit to listeners and we really never have done that. And so we saw it 30 days out from the next summit. What a great time to share some of those things. So some of the topics, in case you’re wondering if you’re sitting there listening like, “Oh, what am I going to be listening to? ” You’re going to get clips from our conversations about the AI machine and how to feed the machine, marketing train wrecks that I thought was a really fun one and some of the graphs, marketing graphs that you shared last year that I think are still super relevant today.

Conrad Saam:

I have to be honest, the marketing train wrecks may be less instructive but more amusing than anything else you’ll hear on Lunch Harbor Legal Marketing. I don’t want to say they were mean spirited, but they were funny. They were both.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Contrary to our typical attempts to do deep tactical research, this will be entertaining and delightful. Maybe.

Conrad Saam:

You’re giving gambling advice?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes. All right. Now we’re going to talk trash about law firms.

Conrad Saam:

There are some usable lessons in here, but there’s also some just ha-has.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

This is all you, buddy.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. You guys remember that I’m not a cat lawyer, right? This is a guy who unfortunately had a filter. I believe he was a Dallas-based lawyer. It’s gotten worse because you can now buy bags, pillows. There was a seat with, I’m not a lawyer meme on it, stickers, et cetera. But this was one of my favorite…

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think this is great marketing. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You think this is great? He’s got to get his name on there.

Conrad Saam:

If he was really good. Oh no, if this is 1-800 Advocats.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah.

Conrad Saam:

I don’t think that’s really his name.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, it’s

Conrad Saam:

Not him.This is one of those things. If you had run with this the right way – Lean into it. Be really good. Be

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Who you are.

Conrad Saam:

I’m guessing the guy who couldn’t figure out that he wasn’t a cat doesn’t know how to lean into this well.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s probably right.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. We are digital marketing experts. We are not display experts. So there might be something in this billboard that I am completely missing, but I’m not. This is in and around the Seattle market. These are two Muppets who are sharing their billboard expenditure and throwing two different logos up that are so small, you can’t even read either of the logos. And they do two different things. This is just the dumbest thing I have seen.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Why? Pizza Hut

Conrad Saam:

And

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Taco Bell.

Conrad Saam:

Which are co-located, right? You can go to one of the two, but Pizza Hut and Taco… So let me take your silliness to an extreme. Pizza Hut and Taco Bell are not trying to convince… They’re not fighting a brand awareness campaign. Everyone knows what Pizza Hut and Taco Bell is. These guys, no one knows them and they’re spending half of their budget on something that is at best confusing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Whatever. It’s the scales of justice. The scale.

Conrad Saam:

I know

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That firm. Yeah. I see them all over the place.

Conrad Saam:

That must mean they’re a lawyer, right, Guy?That’s

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What’s going on here?

Conrad Saam:

Okay. This is why you need to run a site colon search. Okay? I did this in real time with this law firm. I believe, if I remember correctly, they’re an employment law firm out of New York if I remember correctly. This is a long time ago. But I did a site colon search in real time on a shared video screen and there were all these foreign characters. If you click into that while you’re sharing a screen with your prospective client, it brings up a whole bunch of porn.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s just a new practice area.

Conrad Saam:

It’s a new practice area. So run the site colon search, find out what Google thinks your site is about. I mean, these guys have been hacked obviously, but know what’s on your website. I see these all the time, like bad examples. I showed you some bad examples of pages that are useless, but knowing that your site has been hacked, et cetera, really, really important. So it can go from bad to words. And when Google or a computer looks at a website and 80% of the pages are about porn and then there’s like 20% that are somewhat related to employment law, what do they think that thing is about?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh, actually it won’t even be that bad. If Google determines their site’s hacked, they might pull it out of the index altogether.

Conrad Saam:

Right. If they know that it’s been hacked, right? But it doesn’t look like this has been hacked because it’s in the index. So they think this is important site. Oh,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It hasn’t hang caught up yet. I promise you that I was going to get the index. The other thing, because we’ll do a litle bit advanced here. Conrad keeps talking about the site colon thing, which is a great basic way to do this.

Conrad Saam:

Basic and advanced. See what he

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Just said there? Get screaming frog. Just pay what screaming frog costs now? I

Conrad Saam:

Don’t know.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Anybody know? Couple hundred bucks for a year. Screaming frog will actually crawl your whole site. So what’s going on here in case it’s not clear, the site call and operator is just telling you what’s indexed in Google, but it’s not showing you a full picture of your site. And the reason you want to do a full crawl is like there might be stuff on your site that’s problematic that just hasn’t gotten indexed yet or that Google actually de – indexed and vice versa. The other thing too that we see all the time, and this is really dirty pool, agencies will embed links to their other client sites deep inside your website. And so screaming frog, you can also not just look at actual pages on your site, you can look at outbound links. So you can see if there are links to competitor websites or other law firm websites buried deep somewhere in your site.

Very, very dirty.

Conrad Saam:

Hey, Gyi, did you just say that if you were a law firm and you created a digital marketing agency, you could use that digital marketing agency to build websites about law and have those websites have links back to your own law firm’s website?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I did not say that.

Conrad Saam:

Wow. Okay. All right, this is dumb. This is super dumb. This is on a client’s site. They used to plug in for their review thing. This is the aptly named Wiggle Law Firm out of Chicago and literally on their own website they say we are zero out of five stars. It stands out. Don’t do that. It’s different. I mean, we talked about the importance of positioning.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah.

Conrad Saam:

I don’t think this is a good one.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We’re not negative. All right, this is a great one.

Announcer:

Oh.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

AI, it’s the best. This is a firm in San Antonio that is using AI to publish pages to its website. From the news article, they say that there were guardrails in place to prevent it from publishing other lawyer names on the website, but yet AI, you know how AI goes. Sometimes it just decides to not follow the guardrails. And so what happened was they published this whole page about several lawyers. Well, here’s the bad news. George Salinas does not work at KRW Lawyers, but when you do a search for George Salinas’s name in Google, guess who comes up? It looks like he does. KRW lawyers. So an unsuspecting legal services consumer who’s looking for George Salinas lands at KRW lawyers and calls KRW lawyers looking for George Salinas. Now, we don’t know exactly what KRW lawyer says. They say it was a total mistake. AI, it’s not our fault AI.

But again, cautionary tale, if you’re going to use generative AI to publish, you better be a human being reviewing it. I hope that’s stating the obvious, but we have clients who’ve literally sent us the call transcript of getting sold on AI and the pitch is you don’t have to worry about publishing it all. We’ll handle it all for you. So I would be careful about that.

Conrad Saam:

All right, everyone. We’re going to get rolling again. This is one of my favorite presentations to give. If you’ve seen me and I’ve given this multiple times, so if you’ve seen this before, my upfront apologies. We do keep adding to it because more and more cool stuff comes out. Gyi and I kind of bond over this concept that a lot of agencies and vendors and even marketing people themselves pull the wool over the eyes of law firms. And so in many cases, what I want to show here are things that like as agencies or publishers or as Google, we don’t want you to really know because the pictures are typically a little bit ugly. So this is going to be super tactical. It’s supposed to make you feel honestly a little nervous about how things are going. The first one was AI. I’ve done a ton of conferences.

I think this came across really well in this conference. AI is important. It’s a big thing. It’s coming. However, and I did this, this is from Q, I think this Q1. Yes. This is our clients in Q1. We looked at all of the lead sources in every different way you could possibly count a lead source and seven out of 18,000 of those leads came from AI. Now that’s changing. It’s evolving. It’s a thing. But if you’re putting all of your effort and all of your eggs into the AI basket at this point in time, that is a really, really bad idea. This was a question and we talked about brand just now, like what percentage of your budget should fall into brand. This is what pushed me over the edge. I used to be a Google fanboy and then I became kind of this Google defendant.

I loved Google and now I hate them and I’m going to show you why. We have been separating and tracking out pay-per-click campaigns, branded versus non-branded pay-per-click campaigns forever. And by the way, if you’re not doing that, your agency is also munging those two things together to make it look like they’re doing a better job at driving leads from low funnel clicks when they’re really just trading on your brand. So that’s why we break these things out because it’s easy for us to lie to you like that. What you’ll see, and let me explain the graph. The blue line is the cost per lead. And I just told you not to use leads, but we’re going to use that because that’s the numbers that we have. The red line is the cost per click for branded queries. So if you go back to 2018, cost per clicks was under Buck and we were driving phone call, form, fill, text, or chat at about $5.

And so at that point in time, we’re like, make sure you’re protecting your brand because this is a very, very low investment. Watch what’s happened. Over time, the cost per click and Google has done this by deliberately conflating Morgan & Morgan with personal injury lawyer. And when they do that, they get people who are bidding on personal injury lawyer at a very high rate to bid on brand terms that would’ve otherwise been a very low rate and they’re driving those costs per clicks up with no increase in value to you. There’s gross. That’s what’s happened over time and check this out. This is the worst slide because Google talks about like, I want to make sure that we’re delivering to our users what they actually want. Well, here’s the conversion rate. It used to be that one in three of those brand clicks turned into a phone call form, fill, text or chat.

It was Merry Christmas. Great. But what’s happening because they’re conflating brand and other brands so you’re not actually getting what you’re looking for, that has to drop down to 12%. So they’re performing worse and worse and worse and worse over time and getting you to pay for that and it’s gross. All right, speaking of gross Google, local service ads. I think this came across with Thomas, but we didn’t spend a ton of time on this and I want to make sure that you guys all know this. With local service ads, this was rolled out in a very compelling fashion. You are only going to pay for phone calls, right? And you heard David Mim talk about people prefer phone calls and phone calls convert better. So you’re only going to pay per phone call. It’s a great mechanism. Everyone got really, really excited about this.

And then Google very, very quietly changed the game. They added brand search. So very quietly, it used to be you were only triggering an LSA for DivorceLawyer Chattanooga, but now you’re also triggering local service ad for your brand.

What we don’t have is any reporting on the difference in those costs. So if someone’s already looking for… We don’t know because there’s no reporting coming out of LSAs. There’s not much we can do with that and it’s really, really gross. And then they were like, “Haha, we’re also going to get you to pay for messages.” And we learned that people don’t really like that consumers much prefer those phone calls and we know that phone calls convert better. So now that lead that is a message is less valuable. And again, we have no idea what difference we’re paying for messages versus a direct phone call gross. And then, and Thomas had a slide on this, so I’m just reiterating what you should have already picked up. Now we’re messaging multiple. So they’re not just messaging you, they’re messaging you and three of the people you hate the most in your market.

And again, there’s no differentiation, there’s no breakdown of the difference in the cost. So we have no idea. This is literally why I dropped out of this game and I was like, “Thomas, you guys figure this out because this is the kind of stuff that like we used to use data and we can still use data in Google pay per click campaigns because they share most of it. SEO, they share most of it, decreasing amount of it, but they’re sharing most of the data. This is like, God help me. ” So it’s really, really difficult. So you’re not paying as much.You don’t know what you’re paying for. Okay. I asked the Boss panel, this is one of Gyi’s favorite things to set me off. He’ll say ROI. I asked the Boss panel if the marketing people have access to revenue, which was really, really important.

The answer universally was yes.

You guys turn your brain off when people like me say ROI, you turn your brain off and most of you, and I don’t mean to insult the… Actually, maybe I do. Most of you do not know how to calculate ROI and agencies usually, usually do not have access to your revenue usually. I think we have access to three of our clients’ revenue. You need the revenue to calculate ROI. It’s part of the formula. And so when marketing people say ROI as a rat law, we’re going to maximize your ROI. They can’t do that because they don’t even know what it is. They don’t even have access to the data to do that. I’m being super mean to this guy, although this is a funny slide. I got to laugh last time I did this. I crossed his name out because I didn’t want to be a complete asshole, but I did leave Seth in there because that’s kind of funny.

Okay. For Seth? Yeah, you should tag Seth on that. Let me tell you how to maximize your ROI right now across your digital marketing, across all of your marketing. Turn all of that shit off and get referrals. Okay. Because you’re not putting a lot of money into it and Gyi will argue that there’s a lot of work and money involved in generating referrals, which is true, but this stuff costs money. So you do not want to maximize your ROI. You want to understand what you’re willing to pay in order to generate a client, cost per client, and get as much of that as you possibly can. But that is not maximizing your ROI. You guys turn your brains off when we talk about this. Also, this is garbage. In 30 days, we did an SEO campaign where we’re getting a three to one ROI. Really?

In 30 days you did something, it had an impact, you brought the client in, you know that client came in because of the SEO change that you actually made. They generated revenue for you and you were able to track that all together. Bullshit, right? This is not a thing. But you guys listen to this stuff and I don’t know what happens. It’s got the emoji search. It’s the emoji, maybe. So what I want from an ROI perspective, what I want you to think about is if you have a small budget, this is so no-brainer. If you have a small budget, you put that money into the stuff that works best and most cost effectively. So your ROI is actually pretty high, but you’re leaving behind a whole bunch of the market because this stuff is expensive. LSAs are expensive. PayPerclific is expensive. Organic is expensive.

And so you’re leaving some of the market behind. The faster you want to grow, the more aggressively you want to grow, the lower the ROI you actually should be comfortable with, right? We don’t want to believe this. I want to find high ROI campaigns. No, you don’t. If you want volume, if you want to take over Dallas, you don’t. You have to be willing to accept clients at a cost per client that is higher than these guys over here who are just trading on their awesome brand. Good for you. That’s fine. But if you need to think about moving your money into those things that have the highest ROI and the ones that have the highest ROI do not generate volume because otherwise someone would have figured out how to monetize that.

And one of the things that has been discussed amazingly and frequently is all the different ways that you can proactively have your firm train the AI machines to understand and learn more about what they want to hear about you and proactively feeding that back into the machine. So I think it is very important for us to talk about why this is going to be so fundamentally different from a marketing in – house marketer or even an agency perspective to determine whether or not it’s doing well. And so if you look at the way marketing has changed over the last 20 years, there was an old, I know half my marketing is wasted, I just don’t know which half. And then that completely changed with digital when we had this direct response thing and you could actually track things and we had amazing vendors like CallRail to tell you where the calls were coming from and which campaign you could calculate things down to ROI, which was awesome.

We don’t have that feedback cycle here with AI. There is a lot of guessing that is going on and there’s a lot of personalization that is going on. So what you’re going to hear from G&I is more speculative than anything else. I just want to call that out. We’re guessing here and anyone who’s pretending that they’re not guessing is full of it, right? It’s just really, really difficult.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So here’s a prompt for best car accident lawyers in Las Vegas and you’ll see a bunch of law firms listed, but really who the best car accident lawyer in Las Vegas is me. And so again, you’ve got to hold people accountable for like, and this goes back to watching that video. When you see this video and how it works, you’re like, “Oh, well, that’s what’s happening there.” It makes a lot more sense.

Conrad Saam:

So by the way, how much time did you put into making that happen?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Two seconds,

Conrad Saam:

Right? Two seconds. You did this morning, I think, while we were having breakfast.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. So there’s no analytics, there’s no data. We are walking somewhat blind. And

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Sorry to interrupt you, but I think there’s so many different issues here with there’s no analytics, right? You don’t know what prompts people are actually using. And we’re trying to do the user behavior research that started to actually ask people like, “Hey, you’re in a car accident, here’s ChatGPT, go nuts and let’s see what you do. ” There are other companies that are trying to model that kind of stuff, but there’s not like a Google search console for ChatGPT yet, maybe someday there will. So you don’t know how people are using it. And even if you did, it’s going to be very fragmented. It’s not keywords anymore, it’s conversations. And even if you knew the basic, the same thing when you think about non-brand lower funnel prompts, like the corollary we have in search, you’re not tracking all of the follow-up questions that they’re asking.

And so what you do have is for most of the major AI tools, you’ve got, did it send me referral traffic? So you can see that actually someone clicked through, which requires somebody to click, which if you go back to that example and you saw David Mims’ data on this, where are you clicking? You clicking into those tiny little Forbes links? No, they’re not. No one’s clicking. So there’s no clicks. So anyway, it all goes into this mix of like take everything with a grain of salt because it’s changing really fast.

What we hear all the time is like when we get the inquiries ourselves, I want to dump everything we’ve been doing and focus on ChatGPT. And I’m like, why? The users aren’t there. There’s no research to validate that you should be dumping everything you’ve been doing. Like you’ve seen ChatGPT show up in your qualitative intake a litle bit, but it’s usually like one out of 10.

Conrad Saam:

So what we’re going to show you now are what we believe and we’re probably somewhat right about this, what we believe are the things that are impacting the AIs in various different ways. And so what I wanted to start with is how do you go about figuring out what is impacting a specific AI for your location, for your queries, like what’s showing up and why? And that’s actually really easy to find. And then we’re going to give you some tactics that we believe we’ve built this into building blocks at Mockingbird where for some of our clients who are really forward thinking, thinking three years out or maybe it’s three months out, what are the things that we should be doing right now? And we’re probably right about 60% of the time. So the good thing in terms of how to research What’s impacting AI is it tells you all of this stuff in here, and this will piss G off because it’s Forbes again, but there’s a lot of Forbes.

There’s individual sites listed, there’s super lawyers up in here, they tell you what they’re looking at and that’s your starting point for research. So someone was asking, I can’t remember who asked the question, but someone was like, “What directories are the important ones?” Well, super lawyers, Avo and Forbes, those were the big drivers of this individual query. Now again, every single time you rerun this query, every different person, it’s going to do it brand new, it’ll do it over again, but you will start to see things that keep showing up over and over again.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And the other thing too that I wanted to make note, because we’re trying to be, if it’s not obvious, overly cautious and disclaiming the stuff’s changing fast, it’s brand new. But really for me deep down, it’s not changing a lot, it’s just changing the reprioritization of various tactics. A lot of this stuff that we’re going to talk about here, it’s really just good digital marketing sense and foundational stuff. It’s good local SEO stuff in general. We know directories play have played a role in local SEO for a long time. Maybe though we’ve deprioritized them because we focused, we thought other factors were more important. And so anyway, I say that because again, this isn’t a baby out with a bathwater moment, at least from my perspective. It’s more about reconsidering tactics and prioritizing things that we think are more impactful, but that’s really not different than it’s ever been.

Conrad Saam:

So the other two that I want to call out as a little bit atypical things we generally think about your bar association profiles important, right? It lets them know that you are an attorney. So that becomes important. Anything local from a director perspective, better business bureau, that type of thing. And then the other thing that’s showing up is Yelp and I hate this, but Yelp’s up there. Most of you guys don’t think anyone uses Yelp and depending on where you live in the country, you may be right, but Yelp is something that is often cited.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Especially Perplexity. For some reason, Perplexity seems to love Yelp.

Conrad Saam:

So we’re talking about feeding content into AI and you heard from Thomas yesterday who went much deeper into this. I want you to see this is from Google itself on their guidelines page. They’re listening to your phone call and message conversations. So sometimes your phone call, it’s that back and forth via messaging and look what they’re looking for, provider bios, service descriptions, special offers, pricing information. They’re telling you what you can feed it. They’re literally telling you what you can feed it. So think about, and Thomas went really deep on this and it was great, but think about the things that you want Google AIO to know about your company or not know about your company, right? Pricing is a question that happens all the time. You guys don’t want to talk about pricing. Do we offer fixed pricing? That’s something that you can feed back in via messages or if you train your intake staff to tell the search engines.

So all of the information that you can feed in do that intentionally. I would be really, really careful with my intake staff about what they are saying and coaching them on what you want to say. And again, they tell you what they’re looking for and that’s amazingly powerful. And I think people are really thinking that through and the amazing breadth of impact that has. It is not LSAs. It’s across the board, right? So SEO is going to become having your intake team doing a great job at feeding Google what Google wants to know about you.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The other one that’s implicit in that, but it’s Google business profiles. I mean, there are so many, they keep adding new features to Google business profiles. And if you think about it, I always try to think of like, okay, I’m Google. I’ve got these new players coming into the market. What do I have, just like we talked to you all about, what do I have that separates me from all of these other LLMs? And their local business data is like their gold mine, Google Maps, Google business profiles. And so I expect them to continue to utilize that. I think Thomas mentioned that they’re seeing it in the full Google business profile listings in AI mode. And so service pages, you can experiment with product pages, posts, all that kind of stuff, that’s all additional ways you can feed the machine. And with that, dear listeners, we come to the end of this episode of Lunch Our Legal Marketing.

Thank you so much for joining us. We really hope to see you in Nashville in August. If this is all new to you, please do subscribe, like, comment and engage with LunchHour Legal Marketing all across the web. Until next time, Conrad and Gyiks out.

Announcer:

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