The Art of Online Persuasion: Converting Browsers into Clients for Your Law Firm with Tifiny Swedensky
Jan 16, 2024
Brian Glass
Unlock the potential of retargeting strategies with marketing guru Tifiny Swedensky, who joins us to shed light on how law firms can keep their brand in constant view of prospective clients. Tifiny, leveraging her deep experience from Ben Glass Law and now at Sharp Cookie Dev, navigates us away from the pitfalls of a rigid content calendar to the dynamic world of Facebook and Instagram campaigns. Listen in as we traverse the landscape of digital touchpoints and learn how ease of setup and strategic thinking can transform your firm’s visibility and client engagement.
Imagine a world where your firm’s marketing reaches beyond high-intent Google searches, tapping into the rich tapestry of Facebook’s detailed targeting options. We discuss the contrasts between Google PPC and Facebook PPC, focusing on the precision of Facebook's algorithms that home in on user interests and behaviors. This episode is a treasure trove of tips on optimizing ad sequences, navigating the legalities of digital marketing, and maximizing campaign effectiveness to captivate potential clients at every stage of their decision-making journey.
As the role of fractional CMOs gains traction within the legal marketing sphere, we explore how this innovative approach can perfectly suit law firms teetering on the cusp of needing, but not yet ready for, a full-time marketing executive. We examine the multifaceted responsibilities of these part-time powerhouses, from steering in-house teams to liaising with external agencies. Before our insightful session draws to a close, don't forget to mark your calendars for the upcoming Facebook retargeting webinar, and swing by sharpcookieadvisor.com for a deeper dive into the strategies that could elevate your law firm’s marketing game.
____________________________________ Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
Unlock the potential of retargeting strategies with marketing guru Tifiny Swedensky, who joins us to shed light on how law firms can keep their brand in constant view of prospective clients. Tifiny, leveraging her deep experience from Ben Glass Law and now at Sharp Cookie Dev, navigates us away from the pitfalls of a rigid content calendar to the dynamic world of Facebook and Instagram campaigns. Listen in as we traverse the landscape of digital touchpoints and learn how ease of setup and strategic thinking can transform your firm’s visibility and client engagement.
Imagine a world where your firm’s marketing reaches beyond high-intent Google searches, tapping into the rich tapestry of Facebook’s detailed targeting options. We discuss the contrasts between Google PPC and Facebook PPC, focusing on the precision of Facebook's algorithms that home in on user interests and behaviors. This episode is a treasure trove of tips on optimizing ad sequences, navigating the legalities of digital marketing, and maximizing campaign effectiveness to captivate potential clients at every stage of their decision-making journey.
As the role of fractional CMOs gains traction within the legal marketing sphere, we explore how this innovative approach can perfectly suit law firms teetering on the cusp of needing, but not yet ready for, a full-time marketing executive. We examine the multifaceted responsibilities of these part-time powerhouses, from steering in-house teams to liaising with external agencies. Before our insightful session draws to a close, don't forget to mark your calendars for the upcoming Facebook retargeting webinar, and swing by sharpcookieadvisor.com for a deeper dive into the strategies that could elevate your law firm’s marketing game.
____________________________________ Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
lawyers. Try to make marketing really procedural. We're going to write this many blog posts a month. We're going to do this many social media posts. We're going to try to make it like a checklist, right, I hope.
Speaker 2:
I'm not calling you out, no, this is exactly. You're talking exactly to our problem. How many? We need an agency that posts three things a month? What if there aren't three interesting things to say in a month? Hey guys, welcome back to the show. Today I have an old friend, tiffany Swadansky, the former marketing director at Banglass Law and Great Legal Marketing, now out on her own as a fractional CMO offering wonderful web development, seo, ppc, retargeting and whatever the hell else you could want to market your law firm services to solo and small law firms with her new company, sharp Cookie Dev Tiff. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:
Thanks for having me on. I guess this is my first time.
Speaker 2:
I hope I didn't create any new practice areas for you in that introduction.
Speaker 1:
No, although I should say like Sharp Cookie Dev is my URL because I couldn't get sharpcookiecom. I'm still working at that one, actually. But yeah, I do a lot in the tech space tech particularly tech marketing space and I wanted to come on and talk with you a little bit about the retargeting stuff that I've been doing with Facebook and Instagram, because these campaigns are really easy to set up and a lot of law firms are just sleeping on the opportunity.
Speaker 2:
So Tiff is known in our world as the marketing guru and the digital master to solo and small law firms. And when you say retargeting to Facebook and Instagram, there are maybe not many lawyers in our group, in our circles, but many lawyers worldwide who are going to say I don't know even what you're talking about. So let's take a step back and just define for us what is a retargeting campaign. Is it different on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube? And how does all that work?
Speaker 1:
So, essentially, like anytime, you feel like you're being followed around by a website, a brand, that's most likely retargeting. So if you are looking at purchasing a leather satchel which is something I just made up feel like I could have come up with a better example but you're purchasing a leather satchel, you go to leather satchelcom and then for the next six months, leather satchel adds images everywhere. That's retargeting. And essentially, it's where, when you visit a website and the website pixels you and what that is doing is communicating with and in this instance, we're talking about Facebook and Instagram. It's communicating with Facebook and Instagram that you, as a user, visited this site and gives Facebook the information to continue showing ads to you, and that's retargeting.
Speaker 2:
Explain this to me like I'm a five year old, so I go to a law firm's website and the law firm's website does what to mirror to my computer.
Speaker 1:
Formerly called Pixel, but essentially it senses that you're there on the site and usually we're visiting a website within a browser like Chrome and you're probably logged into Facebook on Chrome. Most likely you visit a website. Facebook senses that you're on this website because the owner of the site has pixel view and then, because Facebook is, you're already logged in. It just knows, like Ryan Glass visited Ben Glass law on this date, this date, and so it stores that information. Now we as advertisers can't see that information, like I couldn't see if you visited my website.
Speaker 2:
You can't see the other five websites that I went to the competitors that I might be comparing you against.
Speaker 1:
No, can't see any that I can't see your name, can't see your email, so all of this is a private exchange. So Facebook knows you visited the site and Facebook is allowing us to show ads to you.
Speaker 2:
This is back to that adage where if the service is free, you are the product Facebook totally free to use, but then all of your data is being sold as advertising data to big marketing machines and all the way down the line to solo and small law firms. So how would, how are you advising law firms to use let's just use Facebook retargeting in their marketing? What steps do they take to set this up? And then, what's the best way to implement something like this in your firm?
Speaker 1:
It's honestly really easy. And then, first, though, I want to start by saying Facebook and Instagram. We're talking about retargeting. It's pretty interchangeable. When we're doing ads, we can do ads on Facebook, but we can also do ads on both.
Speaker 2:
It's the same pixel, it's meta, right, it's all parent company anyway. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
Okay, I'm surprising.
Speaker 2:
I'm surprised they're sticking with meta, but anyway, so same parent company and so roughly the same platform, same pixel for sure, and so that knows that you've been there. And then so from a technical perspective, like how hard is it to set up one of these campaigns versus setting up like a Google AdWords or other style of paperquake campaign?
Speaker 1:
Look ads housed under Facebook business or meta business. It's generally really easy to work with, really easy to set up. The big differences between Google PPC and Facebook PPC a lot of it comes down to the targeting Beyond, like retargeting, which is what we're talking about. Facebook has more detailed information about what you're interested in, your demographic information, your household information. Google also has that information about you but it doesn't let us, it doesn't give us as many ways to target somebody with that information, to target them with ads. So for Google, google is a lot of like high intent marketing, so like when somebody types in lawyer near me. That's when we're doing Facebook or, I'm sorry, google PPC, but with Facebook it's different. We're targeting by interest, demographics and then also doing this retargeting bit.
Speaker 1:
And it's pretty simple to set up Effectively. You have to create a pixel. They're being called data sets now, so I'm using the terms interchangeably, but it's a pixel. So you set it up, you install it on your website easier than it seems and then you'll set up essentially an audience in Facebook business. And what you're doing there is you're telling Facebook I want to create an audience of people who have visited my website within this timeframe, within this location, and you can refine that, harvey like. And then, once you have the pixel installed, the audience set up, you're going to do some other things, like set up some conversion goals again, really simple to do and then you'll set up an ad campaign and then you can almost immediately start showing ads to people who have visited your website, certain sections of your website, or have reached certain goals and actions. So it's really cool.
Speaker 2:
How am I paying for that? So it's, I imagine it's not by the click.
Speaker 1:
It is pay per click? Yeah, so it. But you can. You have different settings there within the ads manager so you can say I have a cap how much you want to spend, but it ultimately comes down as pay per click. You're not necessarily paying for impression.
Speaker 2:
I figured it was going to be by impressions, because it's, and so, as a marketer, is it an awareness campaign or I'm trying to convert a lead that has gone somewhere else?
Speaker 1:
It's not an awareness campaign. Retargeting tends to be more precise, so if you have somebody visiting like car accident pages on your website, you'll want to show them like the easiest, simplest thing to do is to show mats for the car accident ebook or a webinar or some other sort of free resource and then show them that, send them down that funnel, get them to engage further with your content, your resources and hopefully ultimately get them to call. It falls between Google, ppc. We're trying to get people to call awareness campaigns. We're just trying to get them to remember our name. This fall somewhere in between, but really close to the bottom of the funnel.
Speaker 2:
How does the cost compare on a Facebook retargeting campaign versus a top of funnel Google paperclip campaign?
Speaker 1:
The difference is astronomical almost literally Some of the biggest marketing agencies for lawyers in the United States. Right now they don't recommend going into Google PPC for less than 20k a month. Facebook retargeting you can run a campaign for $10 a day $5 a day. It's cheap because it's only showing ads to people. If you set it up this way you visited your website. So it's going to be more expensive if you get a ton of traffic, but generally for most of your average law firms it's really cheap.
Speaker 2:
Can I set it up for somebody who's vidded somebody else's website?
Speaker 1:
No, not really, unless you pixel it, which would be sneaky.
Speaker 2:
So I would have to go into the back end of their website, drop a pixel in there, and so I can't set one up. So if you've gone to my competitor now, you're going to see my ads about why my competitor sucks that. I can't do that.
Speaker 1:
I know that'd be funny, though you can be sneaky.
Speaker 2:
I've developed a new business you and I can start. That'd be fun.
Speaker 1:
You can do something like that actually within Google. They have some targeting parameters where you can put in like a competitor site and say I want to show ads to people visiting pricebenewitzcom and actually build like an ad platform that way, but not on Facebook.
Speaker 2:
Because you can buy some. You can buy the keyword for somebody else's name of their law firm right.
Speaker 1:
It's not even just about buying the keyword, like in the performance max campaigns. You can actually go in and say like how do you want to target people? I want to target people who visit and you can list websites.
Speaker 2:
Interesting, interesting.
Speaker 1:
Now it's not as precise as like a retargeting campaign is like what we're talking about Facebook, but you can do it. I've certainly done it before.
Speaker 2:
And so are these, and you can run these retargeting campaigns without having to do PPC. And so again to your point about being a more precise target. That you're hitting it's because it's somebody who's already engaged in some way, shape or form, with your business. They've either been on your website or they've. I guess they've been on your website, that's how the Pixel got there, but now you're showing it to them again. And so for a law firm, for what I do, for auto accident law firm, what period of time are you telling clients to continue to run this retargeting campaign?
Speaker 1:
So I've maxed it out so you can go up to. It ranges from 30 to 180 days, so 30 is the minimum, 180 days max. Typically all of my retargeting audiences are doing the max, so we're showing ads to people who visit our website half a year ago.
Speaker 2:
And how sophisticated is it. Are you showing maybe a different ad to somebody who's clicked on that ad and come back to my website, or clicked on the ad and done? The next thing that I want to do, are they then seeing a second or a third visual ad the next time they're on Facebook to continue to get them to engage with me?
Speaker 1:
I'm not sure you can segment somebody based on how many times that they visited your website, although that is interesting to think about. You can get really precise in segmenting what types of pages they visit and where they live. So you can set up a retargeting pixel to pixel somebody who's within your state visiting a certain page on your site, but it wouldn't pixel them if they were in a different state. But as far as their behavior I'm actually going to check into that because that's a good idea I don't think we can do it.
Speaker 2:
And then last question on this topic is once somebody has converted, once they become a client, is there a way to stop paying to show that particular person an ad? In other words, is there a okay Facebook? This person has done what I wanted them to do. I want to stop paying to show them this stuff.
Speaker 1:
So that gets into be more sophisticated. But yes, we can do that. Actually, when I was working in doing a lot of the Facebook marketing for the Great Legal Marketing, what I did was we would show ads to people who visited the website also just people who were lawyers on Facebook and then, whenever they became like a member, we actually had an automation set up to where, when they became a member, they were added to the audience in Facebook for GLM members and that removed them from the retargeting campaign. Now that gets to a level of sophistication that maybe most people can DIY. But yeah, certainly possible and you can do some pretty cool stuff when you start to like segment audiences that way.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and then I imagine you could also create a lookalike campaign to the people that have made their way into your audience. It doesn't make an awful lot of sense for auto-accident, but if you're running like a trust in a state's practice or a small business practice to harvest either old people or entrepreneurs and put them into the funnel and create a lookalike audience, a market of those people, that's interesting.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, lookalike audiences. It's hit or miss really Because, as you've already identified, it works well for some groups and not others. The retargeting campaign works great for somebody who's visited the website. They're interested in car accidents, but you couldn't base a lookalike on them, because people who get into car accidents are everyone. So, yeah, it works for some things, not as well for others. For retargeting, we're generally not using the lookalike audiences unless you're peeing in on a certain niche demographic group.
Speaker 2:
All right, we're going to keep going, but before we do, if you're listening and this sounds like super cool and sexy and a great way to acquire new clients Tiff is going to be running a webinar workshop later in January and before I screw up any of the details, I'm going to let her launch into exactly when and where it's going to be.
Speaker 1:
So it'll be January 26th. That's when I'm going to do the live workshop to the people who can sign up to attend. Of course, I'll make it available to people who can't be there live after the fact, but January 26th I'm going to record a general workshop on how to set these up, what your ads need to look like and basically what you can do to enhance like a retargeting campaign. I'm also for everyone who's going to attend, I'm providing like a set of step-by-step guides and materials. It's actually putting the finishing touches on those today, but they'll take you through the process of creating one of these, installing it on your website, creating conversion events and setting up the ad campaign, and it's all at its most basic. It's all very simple and very easy to do and most people should be able to set this up, I think.
Speaker 2:
All right, and we will make sure that we link to that registration page in the show description so you could check that out. It's going to be, I think, wildly beneficial to the people, the law firms that attend or send their marketing directors to attend, and so that's where I want to go next. And so you've launched this fractional CMO business and I think fractional kind of has become the new IT word, right, cfo, fractional COO, ceo, cmo, and it's become like the consultancy for firms that aren't large enough maybe to have a full-time C-suite person in-house. But I think there's a lot of confusion on the buying side of the market about what exactly that role does and what we should expect from somebody who's coming into that role, and then when we would need to make the transition from I have a marketing assistant or I have somebody that knows a little bit, but I really want to acquire a much higher skill set person to either oversee my assistant or run it for me. So tell me, tell us more about what the hell a fractional CMO does.
Speaker 1:
It is really buzzing and actually it wasn't my idea to start out doing fractional CMO stuff. I was going to start out doing digital marketing stuff but somebody asked me about it and I was aware of the concept and said, sure, because I'm very offline like that, and so what a fractional CMO does really varies from fractional CMO to fractional CMO. There are a lot out there who really they're basically consultants. They'll talk to you, they'll help you set strategies, they might help you hire people, manage people, but it's all very high level. Some of the fractional CMOs that I would listening to podcast about other fractional CMOs a lot of them they won't even work with your team. They'll bring their own teams, their own networks of vendors and people and essentially become like a mobile, like marketing department for a law firm. But that's to say, it's highly individualized based on the person.
Speaker 1:
For me, like what I'm doing for a lot of my clients, one I'm focusing on a law firm that has some like in-house talent, like at least one marketing employee, because it's hard to do a lot of the stuff that's super, super effective without some sort of living, breathing person within the office, namely like referral marketing stuff, mailing, assembling things and even just like networking with the law firms team. I can't do those things. I don't think any fractional CMO can do those things, unless they're just actually your marketing director. There needs to be some of that and there needs to be like a marketing budget. You need to have a marketing budget. For me.
Speaker 1:
I'm focusing on law firms that are in between, that place where they have some marketing team but they're not like experts, they're marketers and they're really good, but they're not that level.
Speaker 1:
And then, but they're not yet ready to hire like a full-time CMO or marketing director, or maybe they've just had like bad luck and they're just need somebody to come in and help set up their teams. Again, speaking only for myself, I never intend to work with my clients forever. At some point, hopefully, they'll get to a point where they will be able to hire that full-time in-house expert talent and I can move on to go working for another law firm. That's the goal for me, because I hopefully, if I do my job, they're going to continue to grow to get to that point. So I'm focusing on the law firms that are in between. They have somebody, they have at least that one person. They have marketing budget, they want to get started. They want to get the marketing systems working fixed. They want somebody to set it up who knows what they're doing and then, down the road, bring that full-time person in.
Speaker 2:
That's the life cycle of law firm marketing directors. I think generally the people that we and speaking for all solo and small law firm owners, now the people that we hire into these positions are younger. They're not highly skilled people, or they're highly skilled but in one area, and we ask them to do a broad swath of things, and really they could benefit from having somebody who has the broad swath of knowledge but doesn't either have the inclination or the time to be the one who's implementing all of the steps in the marketing program. And then ultimately, if you keep your director or assistant for long enough, they do develop that set of skills. But most of the and I'll say young people, most of the young people that come into these jobs, just aren't capable of doing a whole lot beyond canvas and basic video editing, very basic SEO, and even SEO now is being almost uniformly outsourced to some agency, although that's a life cycle too, like you end up at some point paying so much for the agency that you might as well just bring that expertise in the house.
Speaker 2:
I don't know. So I think the difficulty that many lawyers have is the communication gap between us and our marketing directors and the agencies that we speak to, and so having somebody who's a subject matter expert in those areas is just so incredibly important to bounce ideas off of. But, to your point, like you don't want to be the one putting the stamps on the envelopes and making sure that the mailing campaign gets out the door. So what have you seen that works well and what doesn't work well for lawyers working either with marketing directors or outside vendors?
Speaker 1:
Generally, what works well is if you either of all the personalities like of lawyers marketing their businesses, you end up with a spectrum of personalities. The lawyers who are really like totally hands off usually end up with a marketing employee who does the same things but there's no growth. And then you have somebody who's like super involved, micromanaging.
Speaker 2:
Let me ask a better question. In the year and a half of running the business, are there problems that you see come up again and again between agencies and marketing assistants and law firms?
Speaker 1:
So a lot of the problems. Honestly, the boring answer is it's communication, because the SEO company, like you say to them I want this new page on the website and they go through a process of design and setting it up and then ultimately like they need some feedback from the law firm and we get something back and it's like halfway there, but to the attorney, who expected to see a finished product, it's just this is a disaster and what do you mean? Like you need stuff from us. It's that communication gap that's always been an issue, Because expectations are high on both sides.
Speaker 1:
And so it's important to just like talk and just be candid and but like a lot of the patterns that I see between like lawyers and the rest of the marketing team and the firm, it's it's a lot of just communication stuff. Like we, there is like a knowledge gap between like lawyers and marketers and there's like a communication gap and then also marketers work, I think, fundamentally different than lawyers and law firms do Like I a lot of the stuff you do for personal injury and I'm Hopefully not putting words in your mouth.
Speaker 1:
It's very procedural and so, like lawyers, try to make marketing really procedural. We're gonna write this many blog posts a month. We're gonna do this many social media posts. We're gonna and try to make it like a checklist right, I hope. I'm not calling you out.
Speaker 2:
No, this is except you're talking Exactly to our problem how many. We need an agency that posts three things a month? What if there aren't three interesting things to say in a month? What if there's seven? Like, how do you bridge that gap? So I think you're exactly right about that. So what's the solution and how do you solve that?
Speaker 1:
First, I think it's education, which I hate to say, but it's understanding. Only about half of marketing is procedural like that. The other half is spontaneous. The other half is One and done. We do this once and don't have to think about it for three years. It's it's not exactly fixed and rigid, and we do have to have schedules for some things, like how often are we gonna look at that retargeting campaign and see when it's working? Like how long, how often are we gonna look at our SEO numbers and to what frequency?
Speaker 1:
Some of it's procedural, but for the most part, like you need to be lean and willing to pick up things, finish a project and then drop it and move on to the next thing. And that's a mindset shift for attorneys who are just used to like, in those cases, taking those boxes, moving things forward, and so I think that's the big difference. And so, like when we're talking about lawyers dealing with these SEO companies, like the idea of technical SEO, that's like a one-and-done project. Yet I think a lot of people still have it in their heads.
Speaker 1:
Okay, what are the three technical SEO things you did for me this last month? Nothing. Oh, you must be a bad SEO company. No, it's just they're done with the technical SEO stuff and that's the thing. If more lawyers could embrace the idea. It's not all procedural, like I don't have to know exactly Beat by beat what my marketing employee is doing because they might be working on something new you know they never done before. That would be a game changer for me, because that's kind of part of the thing I'm trying to do always is helping bridge that communication gap.
Speaker 2:
I'm not really easy to blame marketing, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:
I know this now phone calls are down must be the websites fault, like how much local outreach have you done to your referral sources? Or are you going back and listening to the phone calls that are coming in and making sure that your intake team isn't screwing them up? And I think the problem, one of the problems with marketing is lawyers. We really expected there to be number one a close feedback Loop, and number two and number two a good cause-and-effect loop. Right? Okay, we changed this part of the website and then five more people called and that just doesn't exist, right, when you have a sprawling website with hundreds of pages and and you get excited, tiffany, about oh, I added three backlinks this last month and I'm like I don't, that's cool, but the phone didn't ring anymore. So this tightening up that feedback loop and figuring out what is actually working, it's just not a single variable thing, which is what makes it so difficult to figure out why you want climbing in the rankings and so much of marketing.
Speaker 1:
Just to add to, it is seasonal. That's one of the nice things about being in the position seeing inside so many law firms is there's very much a pattern to like when we Get calls. It rides along with holidays, it rides along with seasons and across, like all five of my PI law firms, calls are all gonna be down in the week after Thanksgiving, the two weeks after Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1:
But, that's what's nice being in my position, because I can confidently say to all of them it's fine, it'll be back up next week, but it's funny you guys are. All law firms are more alike than they all probably think they are, and even when it comes to their marketing Apartments, they're all very much alike.
Speaker 2:
My favorite two weeks of the year the week right after the kids get back to school and the week right after the Christmas holiday in New Year's right, because that's when all the phone calls come, all the problems that people have been putting off because they're on vacation or because their family's in town.
Speaker 2:
Now I got a deal with my car accident case, so it's a hundred percent seasonal. One of the things that I started doing years ago is keeping a almost like a restaurant book, like Week by week, looking at okay, this week last year, how many phone calls came in, how many clients did we sign. And now, like when the phone doesn't ring, it actually is the week's problem, it's not yours and it's not the marketing's. Yeah, september's cool, all right. So as we bring this to a close, we're gonna remind people that you are hosting the world's greatest Facebook retargeting webinar on January 26 and we'll have the link in the description below, and if you're a GLM tribe member, you're gonna get several emails from me notifying you when this is going to be, because we want to Make everybody better at marketing, because being better at marketing helps us make you better at business and us making you better at business Helps you reinvest in more marketing? If, where can people find out more about you and your business?
Speaker 1:
Visit sharp cookie dev devcom. You'll learn the state of my website as it is. I heard a great quote recently is like you're not a small business owner if your website isn't a little bit cringe. But but if you can go to my website, you'll probably see something about the workshop that I'll be doing here in January and you can sign up for my newsletter list. Recently started sending out little weekly newsletters that I hope everyone likes and yeah, so that's reading a letter about me.