Ever wonder how a philosophy student ends up revolutionizing digital marketing for law firms? That's the intriguing story of Gyi Tsakalakis, our guest and the brain behind AttorneySync. With a candid look at his own unexpected journey from trial lawyer to marketing maven, Gyi shares the lessons learned from his brief legal career and how Stoicism prepared him for the digital trenches. His insights illuminate the path from skepticism to embracing innovative strategies, tailored specifically for the legal industry, where ethics and effectiveness must go hand-in-hand.
This episode peels back the layers of SEO, PPC, and social media, revealing how these tools can be woven into a cohesive framework elevating law firm performance. Gyi emphasizes the necessity of clear success indicators and the importance of adjusting marketing strategies to the firm's growth stage. As we unpack the importance of integrating offline conversion data into marketing analysis, listen closely for stories that highlight the power of brand recognition and engagement through non-digital and digital means alike.
Wrapping up, we explore the fine art of generating referrals and maintaining visibility in your community—digital and otherwise. Gyi imparts the essence of cultivating authentic community relationships and building a digital presence that keeps your law firm top-of-mind. We also tackle effective link-building through genuine community engagement rather than dubious SEO tactics. For a comprehensive guide to navigating the digital marketing landscape as a law firm, this conversation with Gyi Tsakalakis is not to be missed.
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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.
Want to connect with Brian?
Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
Connect on LinkedIn
Ever wonder how a philosophy student ends up revolutionizing digital marketing for law firms? That's the intriguing story of Gyi Tsakalakis, our guest and the brain behind AttorneySync. With a candid look at his own unexpected journey from trial lawyer to marketing maven, Gyi shares the lessons learned from his brief legal career and how Stoicism prepared him for the digital trenches. His insights illuminate the path from skepticism to embracing innovative strategies, tailored specifically for the legal industry, where ethics and effectiveness must go hand-in-hand.
This episode peels back the layers of SEO, PPC, and social media, revealing how these tools can be woven into a cohesive framework elevating law firm performance. Gyi emphasizes the necessity of clear success indicators and the importance of adjusting marketing strategies to the firm's growth stage. As we unpack the importance of integrating offline conversion data into marketing analysis, listen closely for stories that highlight the power of brand recognition and engagement through non-digital and digital means alike.
Wrapping up, we explore the fine art of generating referrals and maintaining visibility in your community—digital and otherwise. Gyi imparts the essence of cultivating authentic community relationships and building a digital presence that keeps your law firm top-of-mind. We also tackle effective link-building through genuine community engagement rather than dubious SEO tactics. For a comprehensive guide to navigating the digital marketing landscape as a law firm, this conversation with Gyi Tsakalakis is not to be missed.
____________________________________
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.
Want to connect with Brian?
Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
Connect on LinkedIn
Before you spend money on trying to attract these advertising clients, you better have a lockdown intake system and a client experience system, because all that ranking or ad dollars that are generating calls is going to do. It's going to do one of two things. It's either going to create a situation where people are having a bad experience, in which they go online and talk about their bad experience. You got negative reviews. You're going to end up with potential clients falling on the floor. They've already moved on Free from the legal chain. Brian and a team of pros talking about the hustle and the real life woes.
Speaker 2:Hey guys, welcome back to the show. Today we're talking with Guy Sakalakis, the president of AttorneySync and master of all things digital marketing. Guy is also the co-host of the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing podcast. Did I get that right? Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.
Speaker 1:Nailed it. Thank you, lhlm, lhlm.
Speaker 2:Guy, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Thanks, brian, so great to see you today, and thanks again for the invitation. I'm really looking forward to this chat.
Speaker 2:So, you and I, I was doing a little bit of research on you, and we have a couple of things in common. Number one we both majored in the least worthwhile thing to do philosophy unless you're going to do what we did, which is go to law school philosophy, unless you're going to do what we did, which is go to law school.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I tell people all the time I am so grateful that I found philosophy. I found it super valuable personally, but, as you mentioned, not a huge market for professional philosophers outside of academia.
Speaker 2:I got asked once in an interview a summer of my first year after law school who my favorite philosopher was, and I was stumped on that question, like no. I got asked who is the leading philosopher? And I'm like it's 20, 2008. Like I have no idea. But now everybody is back to reading the leading philosophers from Greece. Everybody's back to Stoicism and I know that you're big on Stoic philosophy and Marcus Aurelius and all of that. So when you decided you were going to study philosophy, did you know that it was completely unmarketable?
Speaker 1:That's a great question.
Speaker 2:I had a hunch.
Speaker 1:You know I started as a computer science major, but this was I'll date myself a little bit here. You know late 90s and computer science majors. You know we're studying motherboard architecture. You know we're doing some basic algorithmic stuff, but we're primarily you're getting ready to go code and C++ rhythmic stuff, but we're primarily you're getting ready to go code and C++. And so when I saw what that prospect looked like at the time and there was this promise of this exciting future, but I was like this just isn't for me and so I'm kind of scrambled and was like, hey, what am I interested in? Choose your own adventure. But I didn't really think that far ahead. I didn't know I was going to go to law school. I think I overly romanticized the practice of law, which we could talk about too. But it was kind of a natural thing that, you know, coming out of that and this is like 2002, 2003-ish.
Speaker 2:I was the opposite. I knew that I was going to go to law school, and so at the time I thought well, it doesn't really matter what I study, so I'm going to study something that's interesting, which is philosophy. Then, of course, as I was interviewing for jobs in law school, it became abundantly clear I should have majored in some hard science or business or something like that, and then had some transferable skills to practicing as a lawyer. But let's talk about your brief stint as a lawyer. So you got out and you were a trial lawyer for about two years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, barely. I am reluctant to even call it a career. It was very short. There were parts of it I loved. I was in a small firm, baptism by fire. I was very grateful I was taken in by who's actually a very important mentor in my life Still we remain friends but he was also my offensive coordinator in my high school football team. He was a plaintiff's lawyer and so I went and worked for him. I'm going to go work for my O-line coach, my offensive coordinator. It's going to be great and it was.
Speaker 1:And I sat in a bunch of trials, I was going to motion hearings, I was doing all the stuff lawyers do and I liked it. And part of the story is that I was tasked with, hey, what should we be doing for marketing? And so I'm talking to a lot of lawyers and I still get this question, albeit a lot less. But people would say I guess it's less of a question than just kind of a skepticism about the internet. And people would say I don't think that people are going to use the internet to hire lawyers like us and that kind of stuff. And I was just like that just can't be right. And so that kind of became.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't say it was like a dare, but that was the impetus for starting Attorneys Inc. I partnered up with another friend of mine who had experience in internet marketing outside of legal services, and I just kind of saw it's like what's available is not great and I just kind of saw it's like what's available is not great and I think we can do a better job. And you know, and treat it, treat our clients the way that we would treat clients at a law firm right, like you know, let them know what's going on, keep them informed, transparency, accountability, and so you know we don't always get it right either, just like anybody else, but that's been kind of. That was kind of the ethos for making the leap to entrepreneurial endeavor and agency. I had no aspirations to do that Year was that when you made that change, 2007, 2008.
Speaker 2:So 2007 and 2008,. I was in law school, I was working as a content writer for Tom Foster at Foster Web Marketing, and so I also was at the forefront of this, and back then the whole thing was like write a 750-word article about what it means to have pain and suffering, right, and I had clients for Tom in probably four or five different states, and I can say this now I was writing basically the same article but find and replace, you know, virginia and North Carolina and Texas, and the world has changed since then. The world of digital marketing has gotten harder and harder and harder for people who are trying to pump out content, because it used to be like just write content, just pump it out, just get as many articles as you can. And I'm fairly confident all of Tom's clients at the time were like we're tied together in some um, uh, what now would be a black hat linking scheme, Right? Um, but that is the world that you came up with with attorney sync.
Speaker 1:It is and, uh, you know, I've seen, you know, I always tell people I'm like you know, look, you got Google's guidelines. This is what Google says to do and not do. You've got some experience with what's actually working If you've been doing this, like we know that this is working and sometimes those things are at odds with what Google says.
Speaker 1:You know, risk tolerance and you know, and strategic imperative in terms of timing. You know I'll talk to lawyers that'll say you know, look, I don't even know if this is going to be a practice area in two years. So let's go nuts now, even if that means, you know, pushing the Google guidelines envelope. And I know I do the best to try to like, say, like, here's, here's my view of this. These, the cons, these are potential risks of various things. Here's what we see working, what not working.
Speaker 1:But I don't take a huge uh, you know, I certainly don't want to participate in things that I believe violate uh, attorney ethics guidelines and we and you know we don't purport to be experts on that, but I certainly, you know I'm reminding folks regularly about rule 7.1 and really all the rules that pertain to communications about lawyer services. But I look at myself as more kind of an advisor. Like here's what your options are, here's what we've seen working. Here are some of the risks and let's match that up with what your business objectives are, because everything else it's like that's the other thing that agency folks and really everybody businesses in general get run afoul of, is they start doing all this marketing stuff, but it's like where are we going? What are we trying to actually accomplish? Anyway, that was probably more than you wanted.
Speaker 2:And really that's a very lawyer-like answer right, I mean that's a counselor-esque answer.
Speaker 2:It's like I'm going to walk you through all the risks of all the things that we might do, and then and then we're going to take what, what I appreciate about what the work that you do is. We're going to take your actual objectives and we're going to match the tactics to the things that you want to achieve. And, okay, if that's a practice area that's going to go away, then we can pop something up. That's, um, that's different and we could take some more risks over here, but that's a very lawyerly risk calculation approach that is unique, I think, to you, because I've talked to many, many SEO and digital marketing partners and none of them have said anything like that. So have you found that your background as a lawyer has been helpful to talking with lawyers and then to acquiring clients?
Speaker 1:I think so. I mean, it's funny too. I play this down because I know there are other lawyer-turned-SEO folks that really play that as a key selling point. Look, I think it enables me to have some more common language with lawyers, and certainly marketing a small law firm resonates, and it's something I have a lot of experience with. But I don't think that necessarily, being a lawyer, I mean maybe you could say I'm a little bit more familiar with the rules of professional conduct, which I think is an advantage, but usually it's vice versa. I'm like being a lawyer is a knock on me in a marketing context, and maybe some of that is, you know, I think I tend to, because I kind of have.
Speaker 1:I come from both these places, being an entrepreneur, so you know, maybe a little bit more risk tolerant, but to me it's more about the calculated risk or the informed risk. You know, just like we would talk about in any professional setting, whether it's law, you know, going to a doctor, you know your doctor is like here are the options, here's what I'm thinking. But, um, you know there are risks with all this stuff and it's making those informed decisions. But I, the other thing that always comes up in these conversations, which you uh hit on too, is defining it in business terms. Right it Content, quantity or quality and backlinks and technical fixes and Google business profile.
Speaker 1:If you can't talk about, if your agency or your marketing director, whoever it is, can't talk about those things in a business context, you're likely to gonna have a bad relationship at some point, even if it starts out great because you're gonna as a customer of those services. You're gonna be starts out great because you're not as a customer of those services. You're going to be asking yourself, like I'm spending this much money, I know how much I'm spending. How is that translating into value? And you know it's not always like last click direct response. You know search ads, but if you can't, if you can't have conversations about how these strategies and tactics tie to value, I think you got to reframe the conversation At AttorneySync.
Speaker 2:are you kind of doing a little bit of everything in terms of LSA and PPC and SEO and any social media? Do you manage holistically that for your clients?
Speaker 1:We try to. We think that there's advantages to having it under a single integrated kind of framework. But we do work with plenty of clients that will say hey look, so-and-so is handling our paid search, So-and-so is handling this for us. And I try to approach these conversations with where can we add the most value for you now? But, to your point, these things work together a lot better. And so if it's disjointed, or if one agency is running a certain game plan and another agency is running a certain game plan and they're not communicating, they're not sharing data, there's a lot of missed opportunities. And so we tend to see the law firms that integrate. They tend to get a better result.
Speaker 2:Well, I think exactly what you just said about that multifactorial attribution, where you know somebody maybe clicked on your website, but then or maybe they heard about you from a friend Right, and then they went and checked out your website, and then they went and made sure that you had some social media, and then they went and saw watch three of your videos on YouTube and then and then they you're retargeting ad followed them around the Internet and that's when they finally clicked the call button, right.
Speaker 2:You. Well, I have no idea which one of those five things is really what made you pick up the phone and call me, um, and? And at the end of the day, you're going to tell me I got your name from a friend right. So that, I think, is the. That's the challenge of being a small firm lawyer in 2024 is that you have to be everywhere, or it feels like you have to be everywhere, and then you talk to some of these digital partners and they're talking about UTM parameters and page refresh speed. It just goes whew and it's like why do we not just go?
Speaker 2:I don't know sell cars or something, so talk to me about what lawyers need to know in order to make good decisions about SEO partners.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the starting point which I'm going to keep hitting on this probably the whole time you're going to be you're going to be sick of maybe hearing it, but is holding, agreeing, aligning, whatever accountability term you want to use on what success looks like and and different phases of the journey. Right so, and I'll give you a couple of different examples so your brand you're you're fresh out of law school, you want to hang your own shingle. Or maybe you've been practicing a little while, but you're fresh out of law school, you want to hang your own shingle. Or maybe you've been practicing a little while, but you're just considering making the jump to running your own business. Short term, your resource allocation should be heavily loaded into relationships, networking, referrals. Now there's ways that digital can support that right List building, but heavy in a competitive market, going after non-brand what we marketing, people would say non-brand organic search queries.
Speaker 1:That should not be part of your short-term game plan. Maybe, if the economics are right, maybe you've got some advertising short-term, but again, people talk about this and SEO is a long-term game. Well, yeah, if you're putting all your eggs in the SEO basket, you have to support your entire practice. On non-brand, low funnel head-term searches. You better wait. You're going to be waiting a long time.
Speaker 2:Let's just unpack that so that I make sure that I'm understanding. So you're saying if I'm new and starting out, I have no business trying to rank for auto accident lawyer near me?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you might start planning some seats for that. But if your expectation on return or even and that's the another thing too I always talk about is like leading indicators, right. So ultimately you've got to be measuring marketing time and dollars as getting some kind of multiple return on the investment you're making. Now, pi, that's tough right, because the time between an open case and getting paid can be years, sometimes yeah, can be certainly months, a lot of times. And so then you start talking about other leading indicators, open case files, and then you talk about more leading indicators from that. You know maybe qualified consults, and then you come leading indicators from that as you start saying things like you know traffic and maybe calls and some other leading indicators. But anyway, then I want to compare that, though, to someone who is already established in a competitive space. You know, maybe they already have some pretty decent positions. It might make sense for them to make a heavier SEO investment, because you know one, probably that the investment might be bigger, but they already have some equity built up in a site that you don't need to be spending the type of money you would if you were starting out to get some results. So anyway, that's what we try to do, is we try to pair up where success standpoint. That should help dictate what we should be putting in front of you and shaping our strategy and what roles we play. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
Speaker 1:Well, I was going to say to kind of round out the answer, and I'm sorry I get a little long-winded with this stuff, but the other thing that I'd be talking about are things like what you're going to do. We do month to month agreements. I know some people like to do longer term agreements, but again, my attitude is, if I'm not communicating value every single month, like that's, accountability is on me. Now, that value might not be return on investment on day one, but we got to be showing you what we're doing, why we're doing it, why that has value. And then the other thing that we talk a lot about is, like anything else, let's talk about forecasts and expectations. For all the time and money that we're spending, like you know, you should be able to say you know, at least come to an alignment on what growth and success look like, as they relate to SEO specifically. But you've got it. You know to me, you've got to have the systems in place to track it appropriately too.
Speaker 2:It's funny, cause one of the notes that I made is I was getting ready for this is you came from one industry where a couple of bad apples have given everybody else a bad name a trial lawyer and now you're in another industry where the exact same thing is true and I noticed that you and Conrad on Lunch Hour Legal Marketing you guys spend a lot of time hunching at the bad actors in your industry in terms of make sure that you, you know, no, no lengthy contracts, make sure you actually own your content when it comes back out. And you know all of that comes out of the fine laws and the scorpions and and whoever else where where you have these problems. And I'm just curious because I know that those were major names 10, 15 years ago and maybe, maybe sooner. But every once in a while I talk to somebody who's evaluating a fine law contract and I'm like how are they still in the sea of options? How are they still coming up as a viable purchase?
Speaker 1:Well, I'll say this and I really try not to cast aspersions I'm sure we could. Probably, if we looked real hard, we could find people that would have positive things to say about anybody. But I'll tell you this the thing that I keep coming back to, that I'm always astonished by, is that whoever you're using and we see this, and we're in a lot of Facebook groups, I'm sure you're seeing this too you know someone will post who do you like for this thing, and you'll get a bunch of different responses. And the issue isn't to me, isn't and it's not helpful to be like this person. I mean, like, if you're starting your journey, like maybe you need some options, you're starting your journey like maybe you need some options, the more helpful thing is to talk about how we define success, because a lot of these, a lot of these companies, they'll self-filter. No, we do a three-year agreement, right? Okay? Well, these guys are talking about month to month. Or even if you do a three-year agreement, okay, let's talk about what expectations of success can I have over that three-year time period? Oh, well, we're going to do X number of pieces of content for you. Well, that's not an assessment of value for the firm. Do we have a baseline of how many calls you've got today or how many calls you need over the next 12 months, and what's the conversion on your calls to actual cases and that kind of stuff? If they're not willing to talk about that stuff, it doesn't matter what their name is. And so that's what I'm always surprised by, because there's so much great information. I know you do a lot of great work.
Speaker 1:There's so many people out there that are trying to talk about their experiences and how to help navigate some of these waters, and I'm still but then I'm also empathetic because and you and you, I'm I'd love to hear your perspective on this too A lot of these folks, you know they're spending all their time practicing law, trying to run the shop.
Speaker 1:They don't have a lot of time to go vet this stuff or learn the basic. You know, hey, how do we even start talking? You know marketing budget. I don't even know how to read a P and L. You know Um, so that that's where I think it comes from. And so it makes it really easy, because the lawyers are like you know, they're a good lawyer, they got some good, they've had some good cases. That's some good wins. They know they want to do spend some money on marketing, but they have no idea even how to start to have the conversation about how much to spend, what to do, how much they should be involved versus hiring somebody and all that kind of stuff, and so that that makes it easy for somebody to come in and just yeah.
Speaker 2:That's exactly and and frankly, we're in kind of a hard spot having I've got five lawyers, now I've got 15 staff, um, and it's kind of the badlands of growing a firm, because when, when you're solo and you have very little staff, you really don't need all of the digital market, you don't need to be paying for all the digital marketing because your overhead is so low that if you get, especially in PI right, where the right case can spike your year one way or the other, but you don't need to spend your time really learning that you can do it all on network marketing and on on having some social media where people can go and just check that you're not a mutant Right, um, and then, if you're, if you're a mega firm, you can spend all the money in the world. You know 20, $30,000 a month on SEO. But if you're in the middle and you've still got to be practicing law, sometimes and I practice, honestly, it was probably less than 25% of my time now is spent actually doing anything that has anything to do with, uh, lawyering, um, because I'm spending so much time trying to learn marketing and trying to learn how to run a business and read a PNL and understand cashflow, uh, and so this really it's a tough, tough spot um to be in, because then then it's like, uh, you, the overhead is really high with all these other people, um. So, yeah, I I'm empathetic to, to the lawyer clients who were out there and you guys you and Connor, do a great service to the market and there are a number of other people out there shouting the same thing into the void, and so we were talking a little bit before we got on about your own attribution of okay, where do my clients come from?
Speaker 2:And is lunch hour legal marketing? Is it a waste of people tell you that they found you and they wanted to talk to you and hire you because of the, effectively, the public service YouTube channel and podcast that you guys are running. So how do you think about your use of hours and dollars when it comes to putting out content like that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great question, and a couple of caveats here, because I wouldn't be doing my advisor lawyer internet marketing thing if I didn't have some caveats. But the first is that my business is B2B. Right, I'm selling to law firms dual source attribution and some things in the it's. It's the audience is more b2b, but it's refined labs. Um, chris walker is doing great stuff. Uh, in terms of talking about this in a more holistic way, I think there's a lot of applicability to law firms that are, you know, even b2c law firms. But I think it's important to say that because there might be some some distinctions might make between how I do this and you might do it for your law firm. But I'll tell you this I think Conrad would support this too You've got to be able to be collecting both quantitative and qualitative attribution data, and what I mean is quantitative is web metrics, right, it's Google Analytics, it's Google analytics, it's conversions, maybe it's CR.
Speaker 1:Ideally it's offline conversion import. So your CRM data and your front end marketing data are married. So you can say things like this person followed a linear path, click, call, client and we know the keywords that they came in on. Great, and that's that's what marketing people have been training everybody to do. You know this is the, I always say, the answer to John Wanamaker's riddle. Like we know which half of our money is generating business. But the problem is is that it's too. It's limited, and so you gave a client journey. That's an example.
Speaker 1:But for me, if I all so, we were just. We were talking about the lunch hour legal marketing. So in my CRM we have a field in our form. It says how did you hear about us? I'm not saying that's the best way to do it, I'm not saying that that's right for law firms. I really like the. Who do we thank and I tend to be do it more during an intake than necessarily. You know you might lose some on the front end if you don't have it in a form. But you got to test, like, how much that impacts conversion, yada, yada, yada. I put it in our form and I see Lunch Hour Legal Marketing pops up all the time and then I cross-reference that with our quantitative data.
Speaker 1:So you know we capture web analytics. You know we got search console data and then you compare the two. We got search console data and then you compare the two and you see that someone that listens to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing is coming in from an organic search query or they're coming in from something else. Or sometimes they might even get it wrong. And people will say well, that's the whole problem, you can't rely on this qualitative data. And it's like no, they're not wrong, that's just their perspective of how they thought about you. And so you got to contextualize that data, compare it to your analytics.
Speaker 1:But the thing that kills me all the time is I see lawyers say you know, I tried this thing, whatever it was, and it didn't work. And I'll be like how do you know it didn't work? Well, we never you know our attribution system never showed podcast. Well, of course it didn't, because that's not how they found you. And so people will make they'll make media buying decisions. They'll make AdWord campaign changes based on just the quantitative. They'll cut offline budgets. So people will say I'm cutting my billboard budget, I'm cutting my TV budget because it's not showing up in my attribution data. And I'm like are you tracking how many times someone searches your name a month and how that's grown right? Are you tracking brand traffic in both ads and in analytics? And are you asking right, because that's where that's going to show up and I'll tell you for us, even though we've experimented with a variety of different advertising and marketing and we do SEO for ourselves We've experimented with a variety of different advertising and marketing and we do SEO for ourselves.
Speaker 1:Those like conferences, tech show, lunch hour, legal marketing, being a guest on other podcasts we talk a lot to lawyers about that. It's like get involved. It's old school stuff but there's just a digital component to it. Right, it's get active in your local community. If you've got local podcasters that you can be a guest on their show, go be a guest on their show. That's the stuff that we see show up time and again and lawyers are seeing it too. Private Facebook group I was in this private Facebook group. I was referred to you by someone in a private Facebook group. That stuff's happening more and more and you drew a.
Speaker 2:B2B and a B2C distinction, um, and and I think for people that do what I do, for auto injury lawyers or criminal defense lawyers I think that's a valid distinction, because the the inciting incident to hiring a lawyer um is often a very short period of time, but for lawyers who are doing family law or estate planning or tax or something like that, it's a much longer sequence.
Speaker 2:And so, having that information out in the world, you are going to have somebody, especially for something like estate planning, right, you're going to have somebody that brushes up against you so many times and might watch all of the videos on your YouTube channel while they're trying to figure out do I need to hire a lawyer or should I just go to LegalZoom and do it myself? Right, and so having that information that's out there in the world, that I do find that it's different for what I do, because it's just. It just seems to be so fast, and the number of cases that we have lost because they called us once and then we you know we missed a call or whatever went to our answering service and by the time you called them back three hours later, they'd already hired somebody else. That'll drive you nuts.
Speaker 2:And then it's like well, why should I spend another dollar on digital marketing until I fix the guy? We got to answer every phone call that comes into the office, right? That, I think, for many of us is that that's the biggest problem is you have to get back to people so, so quickly, and I never wanted to be one of those lawyers that signed people up over the phone without you know. Just have the intake staff, just send the retainer and then we'll figure out if it's a good case or not. But it's almost getting there with some of those lower um, with lower level crisis Now, catastrophic injuries. Those people, they're not calling you from the hospital, right, it's weeks, months later and they're almost always coming via referral from somebody else that they trust.
Speaker 2:So there is no, and on that, on that um qualitative scale is, like my best cases are coming from referrals and we talked about this over LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago. Like most of my money comes from referrals from other human beings and you said well, how much time are you spending tracking your dining spend and your hours that you've done? I have no idea. But all I do know is that most of our cases and the vast, vast majority of our money comes from referrals from other people. And the last thing that I'll say before maybe I'll come back and ask another question.
Speaker 2:We did exactly that a couple of years ago. We were convinced to shut off our spend for our monthly newsletter that goes out to clients and to referral sources because we had no attribution on it. And do you know what happened? Nine months after we shut it off? The cases all dried up. We were every month we were sending this Arisa long-term disability postcard with like our win of the month right, and it was going to social security. Disability lawyers and workers conflore all of our best referral sources.
Speaker 1:We were convinced that that was a stupid spend because we couldn't track it, and the cases all dried up nine months later. So that's a huge insight, and the other thing that I'll add to that is where your digital spend in that context is best spent is staying top of mind with those referral sources, and so, whether it's a print newsletter which I love, by the way, I get at least two from you guys and folks if you're not on their newsletters, get them. They're great and they're great learning the contents really good and it's a great example of how to do it. But that's where people should be. It's not the direct response stuff, right, it's the how do I put content out there and put some? Maybe I'm going to put some media buy behind it to promote things that people actually want to consume, lists that they actually want to get on, because that is where you're really going to find your gold, and this is the thing. We love to hear your thoughts on this too.
Speaker 1:But I am always so surprised by, uh, referral partners. They forget about you and they forget what you do and you think you're like how, I know you. You've been referring business for years and it's like oh, you know what I just forgot? And that's why you got to be in their inbox, you got to be in their social feeds, you got to be in their mailbox, um, and so again. That's why social feeds, you got to be in their mailbox, and so again. That's why that's why this whole idea that everybody's always trying to create this false dichotomy between referrals and advertising, and I'm like no, no, no, no, no. You need to advertise to your referrals.
Speaker 2:Guy who works in our building who had had a medical condition and was going to make a disability claim, which is what we do, and we have a sign out front of our door it says injury and disability lawyers. He called us about his case. You know how he got our phone number. He called a firm in California which showed up first on Google and said I have a claim in Virginia. Who should I call People? As much as we think people know and understand what it is that we said I have a claim in Virginia. Who should I call people? As much as we think people know and understand what it is that we do, they have no idea, yep.
Speaker 2:And even your own, your own clients. You know how many times lawyers have you have you had a case where, uh, the person has been in an auto accident four years ago and they can't tell you who their previous lawyer was. And sometimes they won't, they just don't you know. Because my next question is always why aren't you calling that guy or girl again? But sometimes it's just that they don't remember, right. There's people come in and out of our lives and we don't remember who we use or what we use them for. So yeah, so give us some methods for staying in front of our referral sources in a digital sort of way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think some of the easier ones and again, I a lot of caveats here. Let's. Let's just say you're a local PI firm, you serve a local community. You got to be active in local in the local community. So that means the local events, the local. You know.
Speaker 1:Private social media groups, you know every city has some kind of. You know the marketing. People say affinity group. But if you're say you know you're into, say you're into soccer reffing, right, for example, you know talk about those interests, support those groups. You know I've seen lawyers do a really nice job of local scholarships and making contests out of scholarships, speaking engagements at local schools and so. But all that stuff has a digital component to it and maybe you do. Some of these lawyers are doing like the subscribe to get a free Uber Lyft on New Year's, that kind of stuff. But it's staying in front of people for the kind of thing that they want, that there's some value to them. You know it's not. It's not a firm newsletter, right, it's not always the like. Uh, here's the latest change in personal injury law, that 10 things to do after your auto accident.
Speaker 1:Right, you know, um, it's what would, what's valuable to them, and then creating an offer around that. And again, I know you do this, and so anybody that's here that's not listened to what Brian's doing go check out what he's doing, because it's exactly what you should be doing. But it's support, it's digital support for those traditional local marketing strategies. You know, maybe it's pick your favorite restaurant. If you're a community that has a lot of like local food places supporting local businesses because they're going to share that on their social pages, you can do promotion money around it. But that targeted promotion money can be very targeted based on your community.
Speaker 1:You know, if you're doing these kind of campaigns on LinkedIn, you can actually pick other professional services or use a. Ideally and we can spend a whole time talking about this it's a custom audience based on people who have opted in to receive messages from you, because then you're just showing to them on social media as well. But that's the kind of stuff that I see that does really really well. You got to create an offer. It's got to have meaningful value to them. I love, I love when it's local, if you serve a local community and then support it with digital.
Speaker 2:That's the thing is and I've been telling our people this, like, it's always got to be something that somebody would be on social. It's got to be something that somebody else would be willing to share, right, and it can't be about auto accidents Every once in a while, sure, but not every post can be about. Because here's what happens and LinkedIn is a great example, right, people spend all this time posting their super lawyers awards or celebrating 10 years or I got it, and that's all that they ever post, and then they go. Well, this doesn't work, right? Well, no, because you're only ever talking about you. They ever post and then they go. Well, this doesn't work, right. Well, no, because you're only ever talking about you.
Speaker 2:You have to be giving things that other people think is valuable enough that if they share it with somebody else, then it'll impart some value to them and it'll show everybody how smart they are. I mean, that's the whole virality of all of this stuff on the internet. And, yeah, you can put your you know how to select a DUI lawyer or how you know tips for negotiating a custody group, put that stuff in there. But unless people are going to share your content, then the audience is going to say the same size that it's always been.
Speaker 1:I think that's right and it's also, you know, inherent in what you just said, with everybody sharing the super lawyers things, If, if everybody else can do it and everybody else is doing it. You know, maybe that's part of your background, uh, presence, but you got to also find something to do to stand out Like, what is it? That's good? Because, guess what, my, I got super lawyer after super lawyer after super lawyer in my feed. Super lawyers, table stakes what are you going to do? That? That's going to make me be like, oh yeah, you do that and that's super cool. And I next time I have a case, I'm going to send it to you.
Speaker 1:And who's the audience? Right Cause, what motivates if you're, if some of your audiences referrals from other plaintiff's lawyers, what motivates those plaintiffs, those out of state plaintiff lawyers, to refer to you? Right, that's a different motivation than what motivates, you know, a non-plaintiff lawyer in state you know, maybe there's some overlap there, but they're evaluating you in a totally different way and a lot of people this is the thing people hate this one. But sometimes people just refer to people that they like and that they trust and that they know in their community, and it has nothing to do with super lawyers, badges or how great your marketing is. But you still have to remind those people Right, and those are the ones that they're the ones that are most likely to refer to you.
Speaker 1:So that should be the lowest cost per acquisition. But you still got to make some kind of investment in it and you don't have to necessarily track every single dollar like that. But my big thing on that is at least big picture factor in your networking. Maybe you take the cost of actually servicing clients out because you have to do that anyway, so we don't have to count that one. But if you're spending a membership in a professional organization or you're doing paid speaking, sponsorships, networking events, you should take that big bucket and put that against something. Because so many lawyers say oh no, referrals are free, I don't have to spend any money on referrals. I'm like you're taking people to dinner, You're flying out to go catch an AAJ event. That's not free. That's more expensive than your SEO for the month sometimes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and and the other thing that lawyers don't do a great job of is figuring out what incentivizes the person making the referral right.
Speaker 2:Um, because sometimes, sometimes it is this person is the best, in my view, is the best lawyer for your kind of case sometimes, um, but typically, if you're in a contingency fee practice and there's a referral fee coming back, it's's like hey, every three months this person told me what was going on in the case. And number one it's just good customer service for the guy that's referred you the case. And number two, it's giving you another opportunity to stay top of mind with that person Instead of sending you a check 15 months later when the case is over. Now you've gotten the check 15 months later, but you've also gotten four letters from me with the update on the case and nobody else really is doing that. There's only a handful of lawyers who I know. Whoever sent me any updates on cases. You send a referral out and it's kind of a black box until sometimes maybe you get a check back. So it's not hard to be better at handling that customer service relationship than everybody else.
Speaker 1:So much of it's execution right locked down intake system and a client experience system, because all that ranking or, you know, ad dollars that are generating calls is going to do. It's going to do one of two things. It's either going to create a situation where people are having a bad experience in which they go online and talk about their bad experience. You got negative reviews. You're going to end up with potential clients falling on the floor. They've already moved on, you know you're not. There's no follow-up process, and so your cost per acquisition is going to end up with potential clients falling on the floor. They've already moved on, there's no follow-up process, and so your cost per acquisition is going to go through the roof. I mean, if you're not answering the phone and setting expectations and making clear what they can expect next, whatever your intake process is, stop spending the money on trying to generate clients, like everybody's so heavily loaded on the acquisition part and so under resourced on intake and client experience. And gosh, it's just so much waste in there when you're doing that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you took the time to study your CRM and recognize how many $15,000 fees you missed just because you didn't get back to somebody in time, or because the staff waited seven days instead of three to call them back, or whatever your follow-up sequence is, it would make you sick, and so watching the holes in that bucket is critically, critically important. I'm going to talk to you about one more thing, guy, and in this local search and hyper-local referral arena, I've heard you talk about local link building, so let's spend just a couple minutes talking about how would a lawyer go about getting links from local organizations. That would be important to Google for the ranking factor, but also, you know, in a in a way, that Google isn't going to see it as a link building scheme.
Speaker 1:Totally great question. So link building is hard and hence why it seems to be so effective, and I always feel like I put these disclaimers at the outset. But you can go research Google's guidelines on links and the short version is is that Google's advice to all of us is create great content, and links will just come and anybody who's done this long enough it sounds like the advice that old lawyers give young lawyers do good work and the cases will come.
Speaker 1:Right, it's not untrue, but there's a lot more to it than that. And so Google has a policy about not paying for links and this is what's created this whole. I get the emails. I'm sure you get the emails. I'm sure people listening get the emails. You know, domain authority, 75 page rank, 75 guest blog posts and all this kind of stuff has created this entire cottage industry. Don't do any of that. But here's a trickier one. I go and sponsor my you know, a youth T-ball team and as part of that sponsorship, their website says hey, thanks to our sponsors, so-and-so law firm, and they put a link on their website Is that a paid link? Google would? Google officially would probably say yes, it is, and you should mark it as no follow and all this kind of stuff. And I will tell you that those kinds of links seem to still move the dial a lot. You know what's the risk level on those? I tend to think pretty low, because I think it's a PR nightmare for Google to say we're penalizing sites who are sponsoring youth little league teams, but I've seen them penalize scholarships.
Speaker 1:Now the thing about scholarships is people, lawyers, abuse them, right they're. You've got, you know, you're trying to just get all these edu's but a local scholarship that's promoting local you know high schools or maybe people that are. You know certain communities that might be underserved. You might make an effort to support those communities. Maybe there's a local community or local affinity group that you're really into Say you're into biking, and there's all these groups. Now, those groups, they might have sponsorship opportunities, they might have content, contribution, co-marketing opportunities and some of those, at least, will have opportunities for you to get a link back to your site. That's what I'm talking about and it works really, really well.
Speaker 1:The other big misconception is that it's this volume game and I will tell you a couple really good local links seem to move the dial a lot. Again, I'm not a search engineer, I don't work on Google's search quality team. All I do is I say, hey, here's a link we got for this client. How does it seem that impacted our rankings?
Speaker 1:And those topically relevant links and locally geographically relevant links from local businesses, from local news sites, local schools, local municipalities, sometimes like a municipality website will be linking to something that that resource doesn't exist anymore. And you just reach out and say, hey, we recreated this thing, whatever it was, whatever site you were linking to is no longer there, you can get it on our site. Um, those generate links local. If you get coverage in a case, uh, that local news coverage, uh, those links and it's some. Some journalists now are anti-link because all the SEOs have ruined it for everybody. Uh, but if you can find opportunities where like that, where there's a local news site that's linking out or a local blogger, local journalist, that's what I'm talking about and there's a million ways to do it, but that seems to work the best, I'll tell Google.
Speaker 2:But I just did this after hearing you talk about it on another podcast. We were sponsoring the T-shirts for my kids' elementary school fun run and we'd already paid for whatever the t-shirt was and I said to my wife could you just talk to the PTO people and see if they'll put a link on the PTO website? So we got that sweetorg backlink See.
Speaker 1:And the other thing I always try to contextualize for people is if you're getting links as an indirect benefit to supporting a cause, doing some good work in your community, maybe even getting in front of a, an overlapping audience, and you get and then you follow, you know the link is like the third in the list, you're going to avoid many of the pitfalls. Right, it's when you start responding to emails being like guest posting and private blog networks and you know sites that aren't relevant at all. That's where, that's what Google is really looking for. And so I say, just take all those traditional notions marketing notions, relationship and reputation, local building stuff and just add a link component where it's appropriate, like the example you gave.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Well, guy, thank you very much for coming on today. There are a million ways that people can screw up their digital marketing and you uncover where all of the potholes and landmines are on the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Podcast, so people should check that out. You are very active on LinkedIn and you and I go back and forth on marketing and SEO and follow-up tactics. Where else can people find you?
Speaker 1:You can go to our site too, attorneysynccom. I publish from there time to time. We're on most of the major social. But the good thing about my very unique spelling name if you just type in my name, usually you'll find me all over the place. I love talking about this and I'm grateful, brian, for you having me on here and keep up the fight and the good fight yourself, because I know you're putting out a lot of great information. So thanks for the invitation. Yes, sir, I appreciate it.