Is Your Law Firm Marketing Actually Working?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam:

Alright everyone,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Hold on. Yeah. This is Gyi Tsakalakis with Attorney Sync

Conrad Saam:

And this is Conrad Saam with Mockingbird. I am in dangerous close proximity to the sun with my bald white head. We’re hiding out in Miami. What’s going on, Gyi?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We are here for the American Association for Justices’ Marketing and Management seminar in beautiful Miami. We’re at the Fountain Blue fantastic seminar today and we’re going to talk a little bit about some things that were talked about and some some questions that were asked and run you through it.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, I would recommend if you have an opportunity to get out to the next day J event, please come join us. We’ll be here next time and it’s a great time and they have it at a great venue. So what do we cover today, ge?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So we talked about how do you know when your marketing is making you any money? We ran through budgeting and objectives, key performance indicators, really engaged audience too. We had a lot of really great questions. What were maybe a couple of big takeaways you thought that you heard from either, whether it was questions or things that we covered today?

Conrad Saam:

Well, one of the things that we started out on is, hey, Gyi, how much should I be spending on my marketing? What’s the answer to that classic,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

As much as you can. No, we try to talk about the different phases of growth, what your objectives are, and I thought your slide on the different investment levels based on what your objectives are really important. Why don’t you walk through some of those different phases of growth? So

Conrad Saam:

I think when we think through phases of growth and your marketing budget, you really have to think about, I’m investing today’s profit into tomorrow’s revenue. And the harder, the faster, more aggressively you want to grow, the more you need to be willing to lean into those marketing channels that are actually a lower return on investment. They have a higher cost per acquisition because that’s where a lot of volume is. Great examples of that include LSAs, pay-per-click advertising. You can walk away from those channels, but if you’re looking for volume, that’s where a lot of the volume actually is. But in embracing those channels, you also have to understand that your ROI is fundamentally going to be lower. So for the firms that aren’t going to try and grow as aggressively as others, staying out of the higher cost per client channels in favor of lower cost per client channels makes a ton of sense. I think in many cases we kind of fail to acknowledge that you gave a great data point on why was 30% a key number for you when it comes to cost acquisition,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Especially we’re here at a plaintiff trial lawyer show, and so when I think about plaintiff trial law practice, a lot of it is lawyer to lawyer referral. That’s the reason that a lot of people come to a lot of these shows is to build bridges and referral partnerships with other law firms. And today’s market, 30% to 50%, you’re paying for a lawyer to lawyer referral fee. And so that’s a good guidepost for me is that if you’re going two things that I’d like to think about in this context. One is your cost per acquisition for a case has to include your referral fee. That’s just part of what you’re spending to get that case. Not to mention that you’re also paying to nurture that referral relationship. So the cost associated with going to the conference or taking people to dinner, if it’s a speaking thing, if it’s a paid speaking thing, all those go into that bucket as well. And so if you’re talking about your direct response marketing where that’s not at play, you should be willing to spend up to anything you’re doing better than 30 to 50% on cost per acquisition is a win, right?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. And this is just basic business and I think when you step back and think about it, it’s so obvious and yet we fail to do that on so many occasions. We also talked about, and I know we’ve talked ad nauseum on this podcast about this, but brand versus non-brand. So what do we cover with that?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So important that you’re segmenting your brand versus non-brand qualified consultations and clients. And we talked about this even as we were prepping for our conversation this morning, but I really like the way we framed this out is you’ve got your direct response budget that you can track very tightly. That’s search, click, call hire. Your quantitative analytics data is going to inform that client journey. You should still be asking, in my opinion how you heard about us. The second bucket is going to be, and the more to me is the lawyer to lawyer referral bucket because of all the things we just talked about in terms of the fees and stuff. And then you’ve got this other bucket. And so my attitude on the other bucket is again, it’s like we’re getting, so the agencies want to take credit for everything. The marketing people want to take credit for everything. And it’s true in the other bucket, it is going to be more of like the tide rises all ships, but not in the non-brand direct response. And so segmenting by brand versus non-brand in both search console data and PPC data, comparing your quantitative data to your qualitative data. So someone clicks on your ad quantitative data saying PPC, but they’re telling you that they got referred by a friend.

Conrad Saam:

Making

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Those comparisons between quantitative and qualitative is so important to understand and to hold your marketing people accountable for the metrics that matter.

Conrad Saam:

So we talked about two ways that agencies trying to take advantage or at least maybe not take advantage, take credit for stuff for which they don’t. Well,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

They want take credit for everything

Conrad Saam:

Of course, up until the right baby. That’s right. No, so first was in pay-per-click, where unless you really have segmented out your brand versus non-branded queries, your pay-per-click numbers are going to be completely meaningless because of the fundamentally different economics between branded queries with very low cost per click cost and very high conversion rates compared to non-branded queries which have very high cost per click rates and very low conversion rates. And so you munge all that data together, you get a big murky bunch of nothingness. So very, very important. Some agencies unfortunately try and take credit for the strength of your brand by putting those two things together and refusing to give you access to your own campaigns, which if you’ve been listening to this pod at all, we think is absolutely insane. Another thing that we talked about in terms of brands trying to credit, trying to claim credit for stuff that happens offline is Google business profile. So you do a lot of work in the community, maybe you’re a TV advertiser, maybe you billboards, the brand query is searched, Google business profile comes up, you get that contact that is not organic traffic rights.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s right. And that’s why it’s so important to ask the question either how did you hear about us? How did you find us? Or who do we thank for the referral? Those are so important to be able to distinguish because you’re going to, you’re going to be able to segment, if you use UTM parameters, you’re going to be able to segment brand non-brand impressions and clicks in search console. But if you want to connect it all the way back to clients, you’ve got to ask the question so that you understand, hey, this person, they’re not coming. They came through our Google business profile, it’s showing that they came from an organic search, but they’re telling us that Bob Smith referred them to us so that those brand activities are doing are actually helping you grow as well.

Conrad Saam:

So one of the things that we talked through that I thought was really interesting, we touched on this a little bit, was dual source attribution and the importance of having that automagic stuff filled in on automatically. But how did you hear about us as not being a dropdown list, not coaching the witness? Why is that so important, Gyi?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, generally speaking, you’re creating bias, right? Anytime you present to somebody on a survey with some options, they’re going to be pigeonholed into those options. And there’s all sorts of ways you can think about this statistically, but you really want to understand in the potential client or the qualified consultation or the client’s own words, how they think that they found you, even if they get it wrong. Because again, even if they did a search and clicked an ad, if they’re saying, I got your name because of X, that’s the thing that you want to be focused on and comparing to how their journey progressed. So they might be both. It might be that your qualitative data is saying, Hey, I got referred and your quantitative data is saying that you’ve got, this came from a paid search click. And both of those things contributed to this client coming on. And you should understand the relative value and cost associated with both of those.

Conrad Saam:

And I think it’s not just the both. It’s also what we talk this omnichannel marketing. I’m touching you with billboards, with television, with the web, with social, with my community engagement coaching, the kids’ soccer team, whatever that might be. If you have a dropdown, you can pick one

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s right

Conrad Saam:

And it’s a fallacious.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

None of those things will be in there.

Conrad Saam:

None of those things will be in there. And so really, really important. Now, the problem in doing this is it makes our job at creating pretty graphs difficult because it’s murky, it’s fuzzy. You don’t actually know exactly how to create that pie graph with 10,000 different things. What’s your take on that?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, it is harder, I’ll say that. But there’s all sorts of things you can do to visualize the data. And again, my point is that especially for the qualitative data, whether you’re using technology like CallRail or some other transcription service or fireflies or something, there are technologies that can assist you in teasing out that referral source. But even think about it, for our own business, an active campaign, we’ve got reports that are just filters by certain referral sources names, and so that just populates a graph of how many times was so-and-so named as a referral. That’s a very easy thing to do. But yes, it does take a little bit more work. It’s totally doable. And I’m not so focused on the, I think the biggest thing here is mindset shift. You’ve got to get out of this mindset of like I’m trying to track every single contact to a direct response channel versus I want to see what marketing activities are showing up in my qualitative and quantitative attribution.

Conrad Saam:

And I would say one of the most valuable things you could do is instead of trying to go to your end of the quarter, this is our review of this marketing channels overall actually, and here’s a graph that reflects that. The process of listening in or reading the transcripts of how did you hear about us? You’re going to pull nuance out of that. You may have referral sources like I really like Gyi or Gyi mentioned you in passing, or Gyi said that he hates you. Right? There’s nuance that you get out of that. And if you are in charge of managing the intake function and knowing how your marketing is performing, going through that messy process of listening in or reading why people are connecting with you, there’s so much nuance that you pull out of that. I think it’s invaluable to not do, given the amount of money you’re probably spending in marketing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Absolutely. And you said another big buzzword in there that we talked a lot about today,

Conrad Saam:

Buzzwords

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Intake, and it’s so interesting to hear from attendees how they’re kind of all over the map, and this goes back to defining the identity of your firm, but some lawyers, they’re like, I’m answering the phone, and they believe that they’re giving the best experience to every single person who contacts their phone. I thought an interesting thing was, do you even know? Are you sure?

Conrad Saam:

Well, you were very polite to the guy who asked the question. There was someone in the audience today who was like, Hey, I answer the phone all the time and I close 90% and I closed 90%. And then Gyi asked him if how he knew that and he didn’t know.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, you

Conrad Saam:

Were polite of

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That. Yeah. What I was saying is are a question that everybody should be asking themselves is are you actually tracking the number of people who you’re not answering the phone for? Okay,

Conrad Saam:

This is a really important, I think we talked about intake and managing intake and your marketing, all these elements. I think one of the mistakes that agencies make and law firms make is focusing on what they know,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? Hammers and nails.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. You’re focusing on, I know we got this client. Where did they come from? Let’s make sure we get that right. To me, a really good intake manager operations person or CMO is going to spend her time getting into why didn’t this client, this prospect turn into a client? What happened? I’m going to go unravel the things that we missed instead of reporting on the things that we got. And a bunch of things happened around that. Just the process of doing that, you were going to learn a lot about where you have missed opportunities was this, did it take us two days to get back to this person? Did they send us an email that balanced? Did we not call them back? You’ll learn a lot about where you have these missing opportunities in your firm. The other thing that happens is as a manager, a leader in a company, if you’re sniffing around that stuff, people are going to want to make sure there’s not as much stuff to sniff around. That’s right.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What gets managed, measured,

Conrad Saam:

Whatever, what gets managed gets done. I believe that’s Peter Drucker, but I could be wrong.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s close enough.

Conrad Saam:

No, but this is the point. We talked a little bit about this. There’s so much discussion about intake. There’s so much discussion about the successes, but this needs to be managed. It needs to be managed by someone with power, not just the person who’s been running your intake longer than everyone else. It needs to be managed by someone with power, who can hold people accountable, who can look at improving metrics. Even things like, we talked about this as well, the answer to the phone rate. What is our answer to the phone rate? Most of you don’t even know that. If you know it, you’d want to tick, tick, tick, tick, tick that up, and you can only tick that up by starting out knowing what that number is

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A hundred percent. And the other thing that’s kind of implicit in what you’re talking about and understanding how this client journey occurs and managing to it is, and I’m being curious to see where your thoughts are on this, in my opinion, you have to have CRM in place because CRM is how you actually understand pipeline and client journey. And we pulled the audience to show of hands, I was kind of surprised it was kind of a mixed bag at best.

Conrad Saam:

Mixed bag suggests it was about 50 50. I think we were closer to 15 to 20% running CRM.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And I was kind of surprised by that.

Conrad Saam:

If you are going to invest in coming to Miami to learn about marketing and growing your firm and you don’t invest in a CRM system, go slap yourself in the

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Seat. See, this is so thank you for that. And this really hits back to this point about if you’re going to Miami and you’re thinking about your firm as a business, you’re here to meet referral sources to learn marketing. That should be in your p and l as an expense, it’s going to cost you a lot more to do that than it’s to spend the money for a year on most CRMs. Look, you want a HubSpot, maybe it’s close, but the point being is you’re willing to make

Conrad Saam:

HubSpot.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I know I love HubSpot, but I’m just talking. People don’t think about the travel and the referrals and the relationship nurturing in the PMM and L in the context of their overall marketing and business development plan. And so they’re like, I don’t want to spend a dollar on technology, but I’m willing to spend a hundred thousand dollars on all this other stuff without even understanding If there’s all this other stuff that you’re doing is actually even the problem. You might identify that the problem is the bottleneck in your intake process that has nothing to do with filling your pipeline more.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. Yeah. React to this statement. If you were growing your law firm and you don’t have a CRM, are you really growing your law firm? Do you really mean it?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You’re growing by accident. You’re growing by accident. You might be growing incidentally to it, but it’s funny because this came up when we went down to Atlanta to Mike Mogul’s podcast, the Game Changer podcast. Game attorney. Yeah. Game changer attorney podcast. I don’t see how you can take your business seriously if you’re not willing to make these investments in the things that help you understand if what you’re even doing is working. I just don’t, you can tell me about how your client service focus and your client experience, you don’t even know. You don’t know that you might feel like you are. You’re like, oh yeah, I answered the phone. It’s like, no, you’re not. In fact, and you know what? We see this all the time is in negative reviews, didn’t answer the phone, never followed up the Clio Legal trends report. Same thing. It talks about, the biggest challenge is firms aren’t even following up with people who are interested in their business. And the lawyers are sitting the other side of the table saying, I’m closing 90% and I answer all the calls. Why would I ever outsource that to anybody else? Because I’m the best at it. That’s the disconnect that we’ve got to stop.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, there was quite a lot of conversation about should lawyers be doing intake. And it was interesting to see the pushback on this. However, and we didn’t really focus on this during the talk, but it did come up tangentially, the elevate when you feel the slightest bit of resistance in intake, elevating to someone in, and any of you who have ever bought a car at a dealer knows what this is like. Let me go get the manager, right. This is the positive Karen version of escalating sales. Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

They’re going to hate that comparison. So

Conrad Saam:

You’re

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Not any,

Conrad Saam:

We’re going to escalate to Karen the lawyer. No. But coming up understanding that when you’re in a sales situation at the first point of resistance, elevate and bring someone else in. There are elements to that that we’re just not thinking about. And if you’re doing this on your own, you’ve probably never thought about it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s right. Again, another theme that came out of it today is, look, there’s a lot of different ways to grow a successful law firm, but there are trade-offs. If you are going to be the lawyer who answers every single call, you need to accept that you’re going to miss some because you’re going to be in court, you’re going to be working on cases, you’re going to sleep. You’re not answering the phone at night, you’re out to dinner with your family. You can accept that. On the other hand though, in my opinion, if you’re spending considerable amount of money on digital marketing, you want to be an aggressive growth firm. Like in your slide, if you want to be a market share dominating firm, your time is not best spent doing intake. And there was a lot of medical malpractice lawyers that brought up, Hey, look, we do, 90% of our inbound inquiries are turnouts. And you have to ask yourself as a frontline screener, is that the best use of your time? And the other thing that I always say is, is that the best experience for the potential client? Because guess what? A lot of you lawyers are not even that good. You’re not showing empathy.

Conrad Saam:

You

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Don’t have the patience. You’re asking three qualifying questions and you’re like, move along

Conrad Saam:

And you’re in the middle of something else.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You’re doing something. You’re at motion call, right? Right. So anyway, so it’s not a given that you are, that the lawyer is the best person to do intake. We should certainly be designing around client experience and we should be thinking about what we want our firm’s identity to be. It’s a much different practice to try to scale a firm and do volume than if you’re like, Hey, look, I’m very happy doing great work, nurturing some referral sources and missing calls because I’m doing intake. Those are just two different business models.

Conrad Saam:

Yep. A hundred percent. What else did we cover?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We got a little bit into the weeds with some of the things. I think one of the great questions was how do we hold our marketing people accountable? It’s a classic one for Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Yep.

Conrad Saam:

Some

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Of the common themes that came up, I was big on no long-term contracts. I was big on delineating between leading indicators of success and performance metrics. You had a couple ideas.

Conrad Saam:

I’ve got leads instead of console consults instead of leads, stop reporting on leads. Because as we know, 83% of the leads that we generate aren’t actually leads. They don’t turn into consultations.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s right. And so raw call numbers, raw live chat requests, certainly traffic. Another one that drives me nuts is this top line traffic reporting where we know that there’s brand queries in there. We know there’s out of market inquiries in there. We know that there’s bots in there and still we see online on social media, our competitors putting up these charts of up into the right. And it’s even worse than that using third party data. They’re not even using the actual analytics data.

Conrad Saam:

Well, so hold on. This is really interesting. We didn’t talk about this, but I know what you are referring to and even who you are referring to.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, it is not just one person. There’s many people that do this.

Conrad Saam:

The who’s to go back to my New Jersey route. The who’s, who’s the plural of who, the who’s. No. One of the things that is very, very common that we’re seeing right now is these agencies posting, they’re up into the right traffic graphs. The nuance that is missing is what is that traffic for and where is that traffic from And disavow yourselves from the agency led misperceptions that traffic in and of itself is a good thing, right? Traffic does not necessarily make the phone ring. Sometimes it does, but the focus on, I really like showing the counterpoint to this where we drop traffic, we actually drop page count and inbound leads and therefore consultations actually turn because there was so much wasted, useless traffic for things that no one is ever going to hire you for.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s right. So if you want to post charts online, let’s see your organic non-brand client growth, qualified consultation growth, and in your geographic market. In your geographic market, well, you’d like to think that if it’s qualified,

Conrad Saam:

Hopefully

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s coming up. But again, the big things for me are oh, and the cost per acquisition. Because if you don’t see, you might be able to generate cases at a loss all day

Conrad Saam:

If you

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Don’t have a sense of what the cost per client is, the cost per acquisition of those. Those are the charts that I want to say. So hey, for digital markers, you’re listening to this, go ahead and post that. Good luck and good luck. And with that, unfortunately we’re out of time because you are on your way back to Denver.

Conrad Saam:

Well, I see that you chose a really terrible backdrop. We’ve got the corner of a, we’ve got, by the way, if you heard the planes going by while we were recording, we apologize. It’s gorgeous out here. There’s the ocean. There are beautiful people getting a cancerous suntan. There are palm trees. He chose to put us in the corner. I didn’t

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Want to sweat. I didn’t want to

Conrad Saam:

Sweat. I’m working a suit. But anyway, thank you for tuning in. I’m headed off to go skiing with my fam. You are headed off to go six in with my fam, your fam. Yes. So Gyi and Conrad out for the next work week. We’ll be back next time with more from Gyi and Conrad. Next time we will not be together. I don’t think that’s probably right. So it’d be great to see you resume. Likewise. Good to see as always. Go blue. Go blue. Money. A money a yeah, money a round.

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