Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
If Throwing Money Isn’t the Answer, What Actually Works? | Conrad Saam and Gyi Tsakalakis pt. 2
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
So if throwing more money at marketing usually backfires… what actually works?
That’s where this part of the conversation goes.
Part 1 was about thinking differently. About stepping back and realizing that most lawyers aren’t struggling because they picked the wrong tactic… they’re struggling because they don’t have a clear way to evaluate what’s working in the first place.
Now we get into the messy part.
Gyi Tsakalakis and Conrad Saam start breaking down how marketing actually plays out in the real world. Not the clean version you hear on stage. The version where attribution is unclear, data can be misleading, and even “good” campaigns can quietly fail.
They talk about Google, agencies, AI, and the constant pressure to chase the next thing… and why that mindset usually leads to wasted time and money.
But this isn’t just a teardown.
There’s a shift that happens in this episode.
You start to see what to focus on. What actually matters. And how to think about marketing in a way that connects back to the kind of firm you’re trying to build.
It’s not simple. It’s not neat.
But it’s honest.
If Part 1 helped you see the problem more clearly, this one helps you start figuring out what to do about it.
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. 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.
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Boot Camp Invite And Setup
SPEAKER_05Hello, my friends. Welcome into another episode of Light Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and build the kind of practices that they actually like showing up to. More and more important to the building of a successful law practice in 2026 and beyond is effective digital marketing. You know that, I don't have to tell you. Today's episode is part two of two of a discussion with Conrad Somm and Geese Lakis that happened back at the Great Legal Marketing Summit in 2025. And the reason that I'm running this episode out now on April 28th is that Conrad and Gear coming into my office along with a slew of other expert digital marketers on May 6th to help us and help you at the Great Legal Marketing, Digital Marketing Boot Camp, May 6th in Fairfax, Virginia. I'm recording this intro on April 20th. And at the time, we have four tickets left for sale. We're only allowing 20 firms into the room, four tickets left on April 20th. Hopefully, by the time this releases on April 28th, we are sold out. But in case we are not, and you are local to Fairfax or can get here within the next eight days, and maybe you've had a spot clear on your calendar, we're going to be running this boot camp in my office May 6th from 9 to 5 in our Penglass Law Training Center. And if your digital marketing is stagnant, if your qualified leads and signed cases are stagnant, then this is the place for you to be. You can grab your tickets at GLMbootcamp.com. If for whatever reason May 6th doesn't work for you, or if we are totally sold out, I am sorry. And you will have to continue to get your digital marketing information from podcasts like this. So this is a discussion on all the little things that you can do in your law firm to incrementally get 1%, 1%, 1% better. And over time, those small changes lead up to big gains. And you too will be growing a multimillion dollar successful law firm on the back of digital marketing and analog marketing and great follow-up and great teams and great lawyering. You do have to do all of the things in 2026 and beyond. So without further ado, Conrad Salm and Guy Sakalakis.
AI Needs Qualified Case Data
SPEAKER_01And so I think this whole data thing, like if you're going in that direction, like right now, a human operator, if you've, if you say you've got like, I don't know, $10,000 a month to spend on Google Ads, a human operator with experience running campaigns for lawyers will beat an AI operator of that $10,000 spend purely because of the experience versus the data scarcity issue.
SPEAKER_02That's right.
SPEAKER_01But am I still trying to take as much advantage of the technology as I possibly can? Like, of course, and in order for me to do that, I have to be feeding the machine the qualified lead, excuse me, qualified case data. Otherwise, I would stay away from this altogether. Because again, it's the same as it's always been. Google makes it very easy to open an account, makes it very easy for you to spend money, makes it very, you know, if they call you up and say, hey, your salute, the fix to your bad campaign is to spend more money. And it's like, no, you you actually have to tell, you have to actually be like, this is what these are qualified cases, these are actual cases. If you don't have that in place, you are, you're, you're in a you're in a car, you're in the trunk of the car with Google driving blind.
SPEAKER_02And this is a fascinating problem, and I want to go too deep on this, but like it's a fascinating problem with the data because different agencies of different sizes are approaching this very, very differently. And I was super fascinated to hear this at Clio last week. Clio is very clear that they do not share data between accounts. Okay. And so Scorpion, when we interviewed Scorpion, also, and I don't believe this, but they say they do not share data between accounts, okay? Which makes no sense to me. Because if you want to run a $10,000 budget and you're running 500 divorce law firms, you want all of that data put together. So in a in a week, you can learn something. If you're running a $10,000 ad spend, you can't learn anything in five years, right? So you actually want the data across all those things. So I believe there is value, and I will say this. There's value in a Scorpion because there is data that they have across all these elements. They say they don't share data between, but that like that is so dumb, I don't believe it. Clea was very clear that they don't. But there is absolutely value. What I really want law firms to have is I want them to have access somehow, privately, but somehow, to the success of other people's data so you guys aren't starting from square one every single time. And that that's the fundamental switch.
SPEAKER_03I promise there's going to be a question, but when I started my firm four years ago, I listened to Hunter Garnett, Huntsville, Alabama, by the way. I listened to every episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, and I think it was the single greatest advantage that I had.
SPEAKER_02Thank you, Hunter. By the way, that's how to do a case study. We did not outside. Thanks. Outside example. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it. We will get you on camera in a moment.
SPEAKER_03I appreciate you interrupting me because I could get emotional talking about it to be candid with you. And um I took a trip to Seattle and I asked to have coffee with Conrad, and he gave up a whole day chauffeuring me and my wife around. So through both those things, I have an implicit trust in y'all's services from a competency and integrity perspective. Unfortunately, before I had the budget to hire either one of you, you're both in my market now. So no big deal. But I I here's my question.
When To Judge PPC Results
SPEAKER_03Assuming that I have total trust in a marketer's integrity and expertise, how long do I run a campaign without looking at at it to determine whether it's successful or not? And specifically, I'd like to know a pay-per-click campaign.
SPEAKER_01I love this question.
SPEAKER_02So repeat the question, Conrad. How long should I run? I'm going to be generic and uh we want to get to the specific. How long should I run a marketing campaign, specifically a pay-per-click campaign, before I evaluate whether or not it's effective?
SPEAKER_03I'd like to interrupt you assuming, and and this is like assuming a really legit company, like total trust, not some snake hole salesman.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So you got you got intrinsic trust. And so, and this is my this is my thing. Like, to me, trust is like the table stakes. You gotta start. If you're if you're working with a company you don't trust, like fire them at May DLA. So I always say this. I'm like, trust is just to be have a seat at the table. And then the trust, you've got to have accountability coupled with that trust. So my response is is like, one, thank you uh for listening, two, thank you for your trust. And three, even if you trust us, and I say this all the time when I'm on stage, you know, I I tried to allude to it even in like when we were doing the uh intro to this conversation. Just because you trust me, you still have to hold me accountable for alignment on whatever the result that we're trying to achieve. And so let's dive into the specifics of like a pay-per-click campaign. This is why this context matters a lot. So I'm even going to take it deeper. Are we talking about a non-brand direct response, pay-per-click, search ads only campaign for a local PI lawyer? And if we are, then I'm going to say, okay, what is the what share of voice are we talking about? Are is this a campaign that is like capturing 1% of the total non-brand local click share in the community? Because if it is, it's going to take a long time. You're only going to get a you're going to get you got a couple clicks tricking trickling in every month. Now, you might, and this is the thing that's about PI that we all know, maybe you'll get lucky. You know, it's a sluggers league. Maybe, maybe randomly you open a campaign up, you open an account up, you start a campaign, you bit on some, you bit on one keyword, you ran the ad, and somebody with, you know, it's a the biggest case of your career happens to click on that ad and convert and hires you. Now, let me tell you, that's not happening. But you might, you'd be like, look, the first month they generated clicks, that click turned into a case. On the other side of the coin, you're like, okay, let's talk about someone that's like a market dominator. They're like, I'm going to try to capture 100% of non-brand relevant click share in my community. Uh, I have all the other attributes that would go into conversion. So, you know, uh, and in fact, I'd be thinking about I would really be thinking about this in the context of LSAs, but I know you asked about specifically about Google Ads. But you should expect results really fast. You should be seeing, and when I say results, that's their thing too, that we have to be aligned on are what results mean. Are we talking about leading indicators of success? Like, are we talking about uh qualified consultations? Because again, there's many people that are doing searches that are searching on queries that are relevant to your practice, that they totally make sense for you to be bidding on, but maybe there's no case there. Or maybe they didn't choose to hire you, maybe they didn't sign the retainer, maybe they went with a lawyer down the street. But you'd expect a campaign that is trying to capture much higher share of that market to be showing leading indicators of success a lot faster. And in fact, I'd be like, you know, if you're not generating on a campaign like that that's like maximized for share of voice, I'd be thinking like 30 days, we should be seeing some qualified uh leads. And I would also be saying, though, like, let's talk about what's the cost of those qualified leads are. And so anyway, I'm not trying to dodge, but it really depends on what share of the market you're capturing that's going to impact the time. And we and we get clients all the time. They're like, look, they're like, I trust you. I love what you guys are doing. I want to hire you to do Google Ads. We'll be like, great. We'll be like, what's your budget for Google Ads? $1,000 a month. I'm like, you there's better ways for you to spend your $1,000 a month than on a pay-per-click campaign. That's my response to that. Because there is an inflection point of like, if you're not trying to capture enough, you're really at the craps table. You're trying to throw dice to be like, I hope that that click comes in. But if you know, if I'm just gonna just keep numbers round, let's just say you're in an environment where it's $100 a click, you're getting 10 clicks a month. It's gonna take a lot. So, and then if you're if you're if the where this is working assessment is uh a case, you know, you're you're you're guessing. Like you got you got 10 clicks a month for 10 months, you got 100 clicks. Like hopefully in 10 months you've got one of those uh qualified consultations that you're seeing in there turns into a case. I don't know, I don't know if that's really a direct answer to your question, but that's the context. Like it really does matter about like what share of voice you're trying to capture, what your budget is, what's your marketing message? Is it competitive? Do you have enough, do you have a competitive number of reviews? How many of you are you converting? But my thing is going back to the root of the issue is the people you're working with, you should be talking to them about this every single month. Hey, we just ran $10,000 in media. What are you seeing? What are the leading indicators of success? Are we moving in the right direction? And the responses shouldn't be things like, well, we increased impressions or you got a bunch of clicks. You got to be talking about it in terms of these business metrics. And really it starts with to me, it's like qualified leads. And that might not return be a return on ad spend, but it's a business metric that you can see that you're heading in the right direction. And that's the conversation that should help to grow trust. Gee's hinted
Budget And Statistics Reality Check
SPEAKER_01on the math side.
SPEAKER_02This is 100% a math question. The the the variable, this is it's the wrong question. It is not how long should I run this? It is not how long I should run this. And you get, I do not know why stupid agency people do this, but they're like, well, we need two months before we can evaluate whether or not it's statistically relevant. They don't need two months, they need $200,000 or $300,000, right? Amazon, one of my friends used to run Amazon's homepage, right? I live in Seattle, so I don't have any friends who don't work at Amazon. She used to run Amazon's homepage. They would run for four minutes in the morning, for four minutes, what is the homepage gonna look like today? And they knew the best homepage to run in four minutes worth of data because they have a ton of data. But if you're running a $5,000, you will never learn anything ever.
SPEAKER_01Well, you could if you're in a click environment that's like a penny a click.
SPEAKER_02In legal, you cannot learn anything for $5,000 a month. You just can't. The answer is the answer is infinite because by the time you've got enough data to actually learn anything, everything has changed, right? So Josh was talking about at that $3 million. They learn error something every day. They have data every I'm pulling, I have no idea. I don't even know who the client is, but like I know I'm right about this because they're running $3 million a day and they're doing it the right way. You can't run three million dollars and not do it right. They know every day that this ad is just a little bit better than that ad. Look at all the people in here. If we wanted to determine whether or not men were taller than women, you couldn't do that with a data set here. You need to go interview 10,000 people because the variability is not that big. If we wanted to look at mice and elephants, you need you just need a small amount of data to figure that out, right? Which is bigger. This is a data problem. And and don't listen to agency. I used to do this with pay-per-click. Well, we used to do this as an interview, especially with pay-per-click people. The interview question would always be how long do I need to run this in order to get statistical relevant data? And I don't know why, but like agency people always say two months. They always say two months. That's so stupid, right? Well, you need to run two. Because then once the lawyer was like, Can you do this in two months? I don't I don't get it. But it is it's not a time question. It's a it's a it's a revenue question. It's a budget question.
SPEAKER_01I think the other thing too that uh, and I know this is kind of going not being responsive to the question, but the the other challenge that we see all the time is is like somebody comes to us and they're like, I want to do pay-per-click. And I'm like, okay, let's talk about this, you know, let's do the math. And they're just like, yeah, we don't have the budget for that. And and and the issue is is that it's like going to the doctor. Like I keep using this analogy, but like if you go to the doctor and you're like, I want this drug. And the doctor's like, you don't need this drug, you need something else. And you're just like, well, I'm just gonna go a different different doctor. You're creating this environment where the agency people are gonna sell you what you're asking for. I, in fact, another wordly rival I had a conversation with recently.
SPEAKER_02You're so nice.
SPEAKER_01And he's like, and and I'm like, what are you uh talking about with AI? And he's like, Well, you know, we're selling it to them because they're coming, they want it. And I'm like, Well, how are you doing like cost per? He's like, Well, of course we're not doing anything like that. And I'm and it's so it's the same problem. And so to me, like the fix here is like you have to come to the table with like this open mindset. And and the trust is important, like, and that's why it always comes back to the trust thing is like the starting point. And you want to be listening for things like they're telling you things that are that are not in the agency's self-interest. They're just trying to tell you like the right information to do. And it's not always like spend more money with the agency, um, just like Google, because now you know the agency, and and again, this is something I always laugh about. These agencies are out there, is like, I'm a Google Premier partner. And it's like, well, guess what? You want to know why they're a Google Premier Partner? Because they're riding shotgun with blindfolded Google driving to the bank.
SPEAKER_02Do you do you know who got kicked out of the Google Premier Partnership Program? Because we didn't they they kicked us out because we stopped accepting their recommendations. Right? And the recommendation always smelled very close to spend more money. Like, fuck that, right? Like, you have no idea what my clients want.
SPEAKER_01Anyway, so so the point being, like, come to the table with a I I'm not looking for PPC. I'm looking to do this with like, and again, Ben said
Diversify Channels And Share Metrics
SPEAKER_01this at the start. It's like, okay, and you have to have these conversations with your agency. Like, what are you trying to build? Like, what kind of firm are you trying to build? Uh, where are you in your gross trade? What are your different uh time horizons? You know, what are you trying to do over the next 10 years? I don't know if there's any traction or EOS people in here, but you know, what's your three year? What's your one year? Like, and then let the good agency they'll be talking about like, okay, let's take a diversified approach to hit short-term, intermediate, long-term goals. It's gonna be a diversified media approach, it's gonna be a diversified channel approach. We're gonna integrate channels, that's another thing too. That's a huge miss is like good it resonates because we talk about like specialists and niching and all this stuff. And so you're like, all right, these are the PPC people. And it's like, but if the PPC people aren't doing things to integrate the data and campaigns that they're running with your social media spend, with your email, with your first party audiences, with your organic, like you've got this myopic view, and you're on you're and you're in sadly, especially that that non-brand PPC viewpoint, you're in this sliver of the marketplace that the cost is just going through the roof. And that's the only tool you've got in your arsenal. You're just like, I'm just running PPC. And so your cost per acquisition, even with the best PPC people in the world, it's gonna continue to go up because we saw what that came out with the Google antitrust. Like they're arbitrarily raising the price of clicks. So you've got to really so anyway, my thing is come to the table with an open mindset, be willing to share. That's another big thing that we run into all the time. They're like, hey, I want to hit a target cost per uh client of this. And like, well, where are you today? Well, I'm not telling you that. I'm trying to do a 30% top line revenue growth over the next 12 months. Okay, well, where are you at today? Well, I'm not telling you that. And it's like, you're, I mean, what would you you want us to just make some numbers up and model things off of like HRES and SEM Rush? Like, sure. But you're gonna it's gonna be an unreliable thing. So come to the table with an open mindset, fair, um, and then diversify. That's my other big thing. Is like, if you've got it's just like uh investing in anything else. If you've got everything in a single channel, you are have a single point of failure. If that PPC campaign, whatever, Google makes a change, whatever happens, some you're beholden to that one thing. And it's a thing that the um you know the cost is continuing to go through the roof on anyway.
SPEAKER_02I don't want to scare people out of pay-per-click if you don't have a have a large budget. So let me be clear on this. The answer, and I think I speak for both of us, the answer is to piggyback on other people's data who are not direct competitors. That is the key, and you do that through an agency who works with exclusivity. That's that is my read on this. If you ignore pay-per-click completely, you're giving up 20 to 30 percent of the digital market.
SPEAKER_01Well, if and I'll tell you this again, our research uh shows with the stuff we do with near media. If there's an LSA on the page, the LSA commands the lion share. It commands more than Google business profiles, it commands more than local the traditional organic, it commands more than Google ads. We could spend a whole thing talking about LSAs too, because everyone's like, yeah, I'm frustrated with LSAs. I know you've got feelings about LSAs, but LSAs is in a non-brand search environment. Uh that's they're commanding the overwhelming majority of click and conversion market share.
SPEAKER_00There's another question over
Small Firms And AI Visibility
SPEAKER_00here. Yeah, hi, I'm Colin Rahm Rhymes with Somm, attorney from Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. I wanted to follow up on what you were talking about earlier about variability in AI search results. And to me, I run a small personal injury law firm in Mount Pleasant. And so competing in the traditional SEO, trying to get on the first page of Google is very difficult because we have a very competitive market. But when you talk about variability in AI results, I see some opportunity because it's not always going to be dominated by the big players. And so what do you suggest or what recommendations do you have for a smaller solo law firm? Should we go out and just start producing non-SEO optimized content just so AI, the LLMs, have more information to ingest to learn about us as a firm where we're not trying to appear on page one of Google, but we're just trying to get more information to the LLMs.
SPEAKER_02Kind of rephrase the question. So how do I play in AI, right? I'm a small firm. How do I play in AI?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and my answer is largely so first I'm gonna go back to this keeping perspective. Like, again, I wouldn't put all your eggs in the AI basket, and there will be potential consequences. The condition of the question is like, I don't really care about SEO. I don't really care about Google because it's too competitive anyway, and I'm not gonna be able to compete there. And so like this pr this AI presents an opportunity. I think that's true. But there are gonna be trade-offs, right? Because if you do some of the things that you might do to try to gamify to take advantage of the variability, whether it's flooding the zone with new content, there's gonna be consequences in other channels. I still come back to the same thing for maybe, and and may and maybe this is my uh limited thinking, but I just keep coming back to this idea of like, it's not worth cutting off your nose to spite your face. Like I'll tell you the uh the answer to the question on the research that we've done on users on AI. Only 2% of the respondents to the uh research that we've done said that they use AI for a lawyer lookup. Less than 2%. So like, yeah, AI is a thing. It's rapidly adoption rates going through the roof. The other side of that coin is that people are using it heavily for legal research. I think the question is is like, what percentage of those legal research AI users are you gonna convert into clients? Um, anyways, I'm it's I'm I'm I know I'm giving a lot of context because I I do think it's important because I don't want to mislead. Like, what can you do to actually show up in the AI more? It's a lot of the traditional SEO stuff showing up in, you know, again, I I'm I'm a local thinking person. So I would be like, get your firm name to show up on legal, local legal directories, local pages of legal directories. So, and again, well, how much, you know, I'm there organically, should I spend? And I'm like, it's hard to say because like there's obviously a cost to it, but the way that the LLM works is based on the training data that it takes in, it's like how for this prompt, what's the most likely answer that this person's looking for? And it's gonna, and part of that is based on how prominently your firm shows up in the next two words that are part of the prompt. So, you know, if it's South Carolina car crash attorney, if your firm name shows up around South Carolina car crash attorney content in directories, on local news sites, on other local sites, that's what it, the machine's gonna be like this associate. I'm seeing the association, I'm gonna list that firm. And that's why we see there's a huge overlap between, it's not a one-for-one, obviously, but there's a huge overlap between what show what's you find in Google and what is found in the LLMs. And so again, I hear you. I think it's I think it's wise to be like on it, like, hey, this might be an opportunity for us, but it to me, it's still a small percentage of the total game plan opportunity from a business generation standpoint. And the thing I worry about is, and we see this all the time headline SEO is dead, Google's dead. By the way, Google's had their best quarter last quarter, Google's not dead, and again, and I'm Not even pushing Google. Google's expensive and it's super competitive, but I'd be like, let's lean in on some of these others. And we haven't even talked about this, but this is the other big miss that and it's funny because we always end up talking about this stuff. Like, we are so focused on non-brand demand capture, do demand generation. I would be instead of trying to like figure out how to show up more in LLMs, I'd be like, how can we get more people that know about my firm in my local community that are thinking about me? Because when you talk, look in a world of unlimited resources, do all the things. Great, of course, but you don't. You got limited resources of time and budget. And so you're like, how much of my budget and time am I carving out to like flood the zone in LLMs when guess what? Even today, only 2% of people are doing it. Now you might be like, well, Gee, you even looked at the adoption curve of LLMs. Like eventually everybody's gonna be using Chat GPT and not Google. That might be true. But what percentage of your budget today are you dedicating to doing that over what time period? So anyway, I that's not very helpful in terms of like how do I rank in LLMs. I'm very much of the viewpoint that it's still about showing up in larger percentages of the corpus that the tool is using to make those relevance connections, which is very much a part of the traditional SEO idea. It's just more about like Conrad was talking about, you might shift your reprioritization where it's like, you know, maybe our focus on like link building isn't as big of a deal for us in uh LLM land. And so we want to be publishing on third-party sites. Um, we want to be publishing in uh you know places like Reddit, Quora that we know the LL that are that are prominent uh citation sources for the major LLMs. You know, go to profound and look. Um certainly I think it's worthwhile to do, even though not from a one-for-one like rank in it, but like if you've got prompts that you believe people are using, because again, they got to qualify with that. So you got keywords that you think people are using to search for lawyers in ChatGPT, go look at the sources that ChatGPT is showing you as sources for those prompts. Largely it's gonna be a directory as you're probably gonna see competitor websites. But if there are opportunities for you to show up, to have your firm's name show up on those citation sources, that's what I would be focusing on.
SPEAKER_02Um we've taken a little bit more proactive but speculative on this. And I think we work on these building blocks where we have these kind of standard things that we do for local or for pay-per-click, or and we've added one for AI. The caveat that we have with AI when we talk to clients about this is this is speculative at this point, right? This is a maybe. And we only really talk to clients for using this building block for two reasons. Number one, that they have a long-term vision for what where where their growth needs to be, that they're not thinking about keeping the lights on today, right? Because that money, if it is about keeping the lights on today, that money can be spent in 30 places beforehand. Um but the and and and you're realizing that this is all going to change. But within those building blocks, and I'm gonna get this roughly right because I didn't build them. Uh it's my team internally. You're basically so so you're looking at more than one. So we've lived in this world where it's Google, Google, Google. There's one, there's like then there's this thing called Bang, but like it's really all about Google. You're really talking about multiple AI AI, right? So there's multiple LLMs that you have to optimize for, each of which has has a panoply of things that actually influence it. So many of those things that influence those LLMs don't even apply to uh the legal industry. Like NerdWallet, right? Like NerdWallet is actually a big impactor on some of the LLMs. How do you do that as a divorce lawyer? I don't know. It'd be interesting to figure out. Publish on NerdWallet. Publish on NerdWallet where you can, right?
SPEAKER_01About being the best divorce lawyer when right like it's things like or you know, you talk about economic cond the economic factors that go into divorces.
SPEAKER_02So if you can get onto those platforms, play the game. Uh Yelp, Reddit, the directories are very real. I've I you know I started this with saying like I learned my career at Avo, and I thought for a long time it went to internet brands to die. And then AI came along, and turns out like the directories are fascinating to other LLMs. And what I would recommend doing is looking at when you run those queries, what does show up? Right? Avo has tended to show up a little bit more, but it's more than Avo, right? I don't want to just push that old brand. Um what are the directories that keep showing up consistently over and over? Run run 20 searches, right? And the same directories will pop up over and over again. Does Yelp show up, right? Or does Yelp not show up, right? If you're in California, it's more likely to show up than if you're in South Carolina, for example. Does that actually have an impact? So do that kind of first-person research. There's a content element to this, there's a technology element to this, and then there's that web of who you are. And the key here is this is more about the web of who you are, all of the other places that cite you than it ever has been before. That used to be measured in links, but now it's really much more citations and references.
SPEAKER_01Get your uh other lawyers to uh write uh 10 best lawyer lists on their website and list you. Honestly, if you can do that, it'll work. I promise you.
SPEAKER_08But of course, I thought you said no promise at all.
SPEAKER_01But that that is how stupid this thing is is that if you show up on enough 10 best lists on citation sources that it's actually using for those queries, it is maybe a promise is too strong, but it's very, very likely that you will start seeing yourself showing up more.
LLM.txt Hype And Education
SPEAKER_02Hey Ghee. Yes, Conrad. Can you explain to our listenership why creating an LLM.txt file. It's fine. It's just like can you create any other TXT file. Explain them what it is and why this is bullshit.
SPEAKER_01Well, there has been a I'm gonna give the more judicious response. Very nice. There has been a theory that you can create this LLM.txt file on your site to help train the LLM about what you wanted to know about your firm. And it's not a standardized protocol. Some people have been saying they've seen it work, and I'll tell you what they mean when they say that. And other people are like, go ahead. Aaron Powell Why did you say it's not any standardized protocol? Aaron Powell Because the the there's the the LLMs aren't like go out and find the LLM TXT file on websites and use that data to train the model. That's not what's happening.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell So this is an old SEO thing where you had a robots.txt file where you could tell Google what you wanted it to look at, what you didn't want it to look like, how it worked. It was a protocol. You would follow it. It was agreed upon and it was it was used between the different, frankly, Bing and Yahoo and Google back in the day. But at this point in time, this is just an empty text file that lives on your on your site that's called LLM, right? And it doesn't do anything.
SPEAKER_01So again, I'm like this. So look, having an LLM.txt file on your site is not gonna hurt you. You can go ahead and do it, especially if you're uh there's not a huge cost to you to do that. The problem, of course, is like everything else, there are consultants that are like, yeah, we're gonna create this LLM TXT file for you. And it's only gonna be like $10,000. And it's like, uh, you're gonna create a text file on my website for $10,000. Anyway, and so what they'll what a lot of but many of them will do is they'll prove to you that it works because they'll put something in the LLM Txt file that doesn't exist anywhere on your site. And they're like, well, obviously the AI is using the LLM Txt file because this is the only place that exists on the site. And it's like, but that's true of any page on your website. You can create a you know pig.txt file, and when the LLM finds that, and if you put information on that page, it's gonna uh end up showing up. And so again, it's like it's a if you wanna like you're it's a speculative thing, so you want to try to do it and it's low cost to you and it's a less than one percent of your marketing budget, like fine. I don't there's it's not gonna hurt you to have an LLM Txt file. It's all about the expectation of is this LLM TXT file that I paid $10,000, whatever you pay for it, that's significant. Is it actually gonna do something that is, or is it going to do what the person is purporting it's going to do? And so that comes back to Hunter's point about like trust. People that are trying to sell you stuff, if they're if they contextualize it with like, look, we don't really know. We I read a blog post and it said LLM TXT files, like do a thing, and we're gonna add one to your website, and there's really no risk to it, but I'm not making any promises to you. Like, great. You know, not I don't doesn't really matter to me. On the other hand, if they're like, this is the magic bullet to show up in AI, I'm like, you know what? You're not is that building trust, trust neutral, or eroding trust? Like those are the things, the three questions I always ask myself.
SPEAKER_02The problem is it builds trust because you guys don't really understand it. And we say these things like lm.txt, and you're like, I'm lost. I'm just gonna trust these guys. What I wanted to do before this, and I didn't have time and I didn't coordinate with Ben and Brian, I wanted to trade an LM.txt file on great little marketing.com that was about, you know, Brian Glass is the world's renowned number one unicorn trainer. And we could have sat here and used Chat GPT and asked them who the best unicorn trainer is in the in the world, and that would have shown up because it's so ridiculous, right? And that would have cost us all of 10 minutes of time. And agencies are using this to try and show that they understand and can guarantee AI results, and it's bullshit.
SPEAKER_01And this is a goes, it goes back to this ecosystem because we see the headlines, like we see the news reports, you know, chat GPT adoption is going through the roof, and um, you know, there's opportunity. This is like fresh, you know, digital soil for us to plant our flags. And so that creates the industry.
SPEAKER_06Digital soil to plant our flags.
SPEAKER_01You know, I don't know. Um and so that so the consultants come in and they're like, we'll fill that gap. And so and it's like, again, uh what's the fix here of this ecosystem? It's gotta be some education. You've got to learn about how this, I mean, there there's a lot of ways to learn about this stuff. I keep coming back to this video of this guy, it's like a three-hour video, and I'll I'll make sure that uh it's circulated so that everybody knows what I'm talking about. But you gotta understand the underlying the only cure is education. And I know that's frustrating because you're like, I'm trying to run a law firm. It's hard enough for me to do all this stuff, but this is that's the only way to break the cycle of feel like because again, I know there are lawyers that are sitting in here, they're lawyers we talk to every day, and they feel like they're getting burned. And this is why digital marketing, the industry itself has such a bad reputation, is because they're people are getting misled. And the only fix is to educate yourself to a certain degree so you come to the conversation with some ground understanding so that you can suss out, like, yeah, you're overselling this to me. It's my two sons.
SPEAKER_02All right. Next question.
SPEAKER_04Thanks for the show, guys. Uh Joe
Reviews Beyond Google Without Annoying
SPEAKER_04Blasco from right here in Alexandria, longtime listener, first-time caller. Thank you. Two questions, if I can remember them both, and you've sort of touched on the one already, and that's just this general concept now with the proliferation of AI, that you need to get your content out in many more locations than you did before we had AI out there, that the LLMs are looking in more places. And in that context, uh to uh react to the uh podcast that I listened to on my way in here this morning, the suggestion was made that you should be uh posting reviews on many more sites other than Google. I think the it was conceded that Google's still primary right now, but they were talking about Yelp and Facebook, Avo, maybe maybe a couple of others. In that context, and this may be outside of you all's wheelhouse a bit, but do you have any technique for dealing with clients who are going to be annoyed when they're asked for a second and third and fourth and fifth uh uh review? So that's my first question. The second question has to do with one of the earliest SEO techniques that I heard about uh back in the olden days, and it seems like SEO's been around long enough that we now have olden days, and that's this concept of nap consistency, that you your name, address, and phone number needs to be consistent everywhere. And in particular, and I will tell you, I've already addressed this question to other sources, and I get uh answers all over the place, so it would strike me as par for the course if you guys are diametrically opposed on this. What would you think about um firm that has a phone number that's been consistent for a number of years, and now you redo your website and the website vendor wants to put a tracking number on that website. Uh, is that going to be helpful or not helpful?
SPEAKER_01Great questions.
SPEAKER_02Great questions. Repeat the questions. Which one do you want to hit first? Let's do reviews. So the question was we've been encouraged to get reviews on more than just than just Google. Well, hold on, we got to answer questions. Sorry, coffee. Coffee. Yeah, take that away from him. Give you some orange juice. Go ahead. We've we've been encouraged with AI to leave reviews on more than just Google. Do we agree with this or not? And what would those other sources be? And then how do you deal with annoying? How do you not annoy clients by asking them to review you on multiple sites? So do we agree?
SPEAKER_01We agree.
SPEAKER_02We agree.
SPEAKER_01We agree you should uh diversify reviews. But again, this goes back to the same problem. In a world of unlimited reviews, everybody would be like, yeah, round robin, we can send people to reviews, but we don't have unlimited reviews. In fact, it's really hard to get reviews. Clients don't want to do that, clients that even want to decide they don't want to do it. We don't want to annoy our clients, all this kind of stuff. So what should we do? Again, where where I sit today is if you have if you have a competitive number, this is my this would be kind of like my framework. I'd be like, do I have a competitive number of reviews in my local market? So like lawyer down the street that's showing up in the local pack, uh, do I have a competitive number of reviews with them? We actually another thing we have a lot of research on, which I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, so I apologize for that. But there's kind of like a threshold number of reviews that you need to have with a score for you to even be like part of the consideration set. So if you s if a consumer sees three options in a local pack, there's a threshold number of reviews you've got to have before they even consider you in the context of the I don't know what the number is. I don't know. Okay, I don't need to be. It's at a it's in the near media data. Anyways, point being that if you have a competitive number of reviews, you met that threshold. I would start to say, okay, we got to put some of these other sources into the uh the mix. And I would be focused on uh it depends, but here's some top sources I'd be thinking about. I would be thinking about Yelp for sure. Yelp tends to show up a lot. I would I would do what Conrad and we talked about before, which is I would look at some of the citation sources in the chat GPT for for prompts that I believe people are using, which again, it's not a one-for-one on Google Search Console data, so it's not the same thing as search, but directionally, things like uh practice area plus lawyer plus city, look at the sources that come up there. If you see Avo showing up there, if you see other directories showing up there that allow for reviews, I might put some of those into the mix. But in terms of annoying clients, like, yeah, that's a real thing. Like, I don't have a great answer for you on that. I mean, you get clients that like want to sing your praises and they're like, they're active, they've got, they've already got profiles on a lot of these other review sites, and they're like, I'll I'll spend my whole, you know, maybe you take them out to lunch and be like, hey, just write reviews for me. Do you get a lunch or something? I don't have a great way to solve that issue. And in fact, I think it's it's it's more important that you don't give that client a bad experience. And so like there's so much nuance in like trying to figure out whether they're even a good candidate for that. But none of to me, none of this stuff is worth annoying clients and giving bad experience. And again, I'll sell to the same thing. We're all so we we all have it in our heads that like most legal services consumers are going and looking for lawyers on this non-brand direct response journey. And it's not true. At most, about half are, maybe half. And of those half that are doing the non-brand direct response journey, your brand, like how you, if if they recognize you, is going to be much more of an influence on whether they choose you than if you get an additional review or show up in an AI result. And so I keep coming back to this thing of contextualizing it. I know it doesn't, it doesn't help you directly uh answer the question, but for me, it's more of a priority not to annoy a uh former client instead, because guess what? The value of that former client leaving a review so you show up in AI is so much less valuable than them staying on an email list, getting messaging from you and referring another case to you. And so I would never hurt that uh relationship with that former client was another part of that review thing. But but there's no question, reviews and testimonials, all of our research, same thing, top of the list, most important thing that legal services consumers look at. It's totally sympathetic to trying to get more reviews. There's no question that uh reviews are a big part of the mix from an LLM standpoint. And if you think about it, it makes sense because all these sites that are all about lawyers, the page is all about local lawyers. It's got, you know, your Poughkeepsie car accident lawyer page. It's all about Poughkeepsie car accident lawyers. And the LLM's like, these lawyers, it's it's crawling this data. This firm's name's got all of these reviews on it. It's more likely that that's a good uh response to the prompt. And so, yes, reviews, it's super hard. Don't piss off clients.
SPEAKER_02I'm gonna disagree with Ghee. Great, but he's gonna come over to my side here because he already agrees with me. He's right. I don't think you should ask him to review on multiple sites. I mean, that is at best gauge, right? And you're you're gonna lose that cheerleader and you want the referral, right, down the road. So I don't like the idea of being like, hey, can you please cut and paste this to Avo and Yelp and blah, blah, blah. Yes, reviews have an impact on AI. They're also really, really hard to get. And so I would use my reviews right now in today's environment to continue to build out the strength of my offices from a local search perspective. So you'd stick with Google? I would stick with Google and I would look at I am now going to open an office in North Poughkeepsie or Poughkeepsie suburbs or this out of the other thing. We've got all like this, might we call it the centipede strategy, but I believe from a client development perspective, you are better off conquering another suburb where there's no competition with five or six reviews because there's no other lawyers within 10 miles and there's a population center there that you can serve with a small number of reviews than throwing something up on Yelp and crossing your fingers that sometimes, you know, they're going to show up in the in the AI results. Totally agree with you. See, I thought I could bring it up. And you might bring it over with me. I would push local hard. Reviews are hard, they're a huge asset, and and the best way to put those to work is in expanding your geographic footprint.
SPEAKER_01And again, back to this just to validate that point again, and the percentage of people who are going directly to an LLM to do a lawyer lookup search, which is where the reviews matter the most, is still a fraction. And again, you might be like Gee, you're full of it, Google's dead in a year from now, no one's ever gonna remember what Google was. And you might be right. And it's still right now, like it's the way that the technology works, it's not, you're not guaranteeing yourself anything by taking these super valuable reviews and taking them to this thing that's gonna be of a probabilistic chance that you show up in it.
SPEAKER_02Now, you may not want to push people away from Yelp or push people away from Avo if that's what they want to use. We we we really used to change this. We we've changed our perspective on this. It used to be find out what's showing up, and then I I still remember when the reviews started showing up. Like the reviews on Google Business Listings didn't exist. It wasn't a thing, Google Business Listings didn't exist, right? So like this has all evolved. It went from a wide array of places to get reviews to only working on Google, right? And now I think it's opening up a little bit. But like if you're strategically pointing that asset somewhere, it is 100% around building your local search business. Question. Next one. The nap question. Oh, we had another question. You went for two for one. You got a BOGO. All right. Nap
NAP Consistency And Tracking Numbers
SPEAKER_02consistency. Hey Gee, what is nap consistency? And should I be concerned about my new agency who wants to put a tracking phone on my on my website? Classic. This is classic. This is a retro question, but it is the second time we've had this in the last two weeks. Yep.
SPEAKER_04So uh for folks playing along and I will say if I can interject, we went the tracking route a few years ago for a while, and I found that people who knew us were calling the tracking number because they would just Google us rather than find the phone number some other way. And so the tracking number was of questionable validity in my mind.
SPEAKER_02So that's that is a separate question which we're 100% going to address.
SPEAKER_01All right. So uh back in the day. What is it what is Napky? So NAP is name, address, phone consistency. A long time ago, the machines relied heavily on the machines are basically like pattern recognition machines. So what they're looking for is like we're gonna trust data that is more consistent because it's more reliable, right? So if you've got your firm name, same address, same phone number, and that's showing up all over the place. The machine's like, this is reliable data. I can I can rely on this. I'm gonna show this business's data more uh frequently in my answers to relevant queries. Um and by the way, this is largely what the LLMs are doing as well, and this is why it's back. So for a long time, it was a very high in the local search ecosystem. The NAP consistency was really impactful in showing up in local results. And so we used to say things like you've got to go to all of the places your business is listed online and make sure that that name, address, phone is the same everywhere. Like inconsistencies show unreliability of data to the search engine. And so therefore it's gonna be less likely that you're gonna show up.
SPEAKER_02And so And it was dumb. It was everything from like ST instead of street, right? Like it was really, really dumb. And there were also hundreds of them. Hundreds.
SPEAKER_01There were, and there were, you know, it would be like every business directory. It'd be like local business directory.xyz, and you'd be like, hey, uh, we run searches on firm names to see if it was showing up anywhere in Google Results that there was a different address or a different phone number because it was like a real problem. This kept us employed for a while. It did. Then the machines got smarter and they said, hey, look, like, yeah, nap consistency on major data sources still matters. But in the grand scheme of things, like the dial on that is like dialed way down. And so um a lot of the people in the local SEO community were like, you know, look, yes, you want to have nap consistency on your major uh directories, especially vertical directories, so like legal directories, um, your major general business directories like Yelp, you want it to be consistent, you want it to be consistent across the web, but you don't really need to worry about all these hundreds of sites. And really, I don't know if maybe there's 50 or something like that that are that are really um meaningful and even contextualized against things like links, uh, the nap consistency issue didn't seem to be as big of a deal. This is all re emerged because to the point that either whether I can't remember if it was a podcast or if it Consultant, but they're like, you know, look, um, we are going the nap consistency thing is back, and that's largely because the directories are feeding the LLMs. And so the uh and the way that the technology works is that they're still thinking like reliability of data is somewhat based on the consistency of that nap information. And so there's like this been like we've been joking that's like the uh revenge of nap and revenge of directories uh coming back. Uh and there's so and there's some truth to that. I mean, look, I I think that the on the major sites you do want to add it, but let's talk about tracking numbers. On your website, one of the one of the places that nap consistency is important is that it's on your actual website because that you know, Google's like, okay, and the LLMs are like, all right, this is the business. They've got this nap on their uh website. The reliability of the information on this website, does it match all of this information across the more general business directory ecosystem? And here's the easy fix. You hard you hard code the nap on your website and you use a JavaScript over the top of it that does dynamic number insertion. And so when the machine comes, it's still reading that hard-coded, usually with structured data markup. So that's very reliable. You're telling the machine that, but your primary call to action can be really whatever you want, but really probably should be some kind of, in my view, it should be a dynamic number. Like we love CallRail. And so you're gonna say.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Are you not gonna take the opportunity to endorse one of our sponsors? Thank you, CallRail, for bringing us this question.
SPEAKER_01Yes, we love CallRail, and CallRail is one of these tools that does dynamic number insertion, so it populates a tracking number, but still maintains NAP consistency. Then you ask about, like, okay, well, what about tracking numbers on third-party sites? And certainly I would not do tracking numbers on all these primary data sites. Like, I would not have a separate tracking number um like hard-coded on my uh legal directories across all because I'm like, I want to track phone calls from the specific legal directory. Many of the legal directories, though, have switched to a dynamic number insertion thing. So they've got the local number hard-coded. And like 15 years ago.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Like I mean, this is not new technology. So like like any directory that is trying to get you to spend money with it knows this game, and they also want to be able to prove that they're actually sending you phone calls. And they know that if they don't have dynamic phone numbers, that they won't get any smart advertisers. So all of the directories that take advertising I'm I'm sure I'm wrong about this. Most of them. Most of the directories, I will say all of the directories that will will um take your advertising will be able to demonstrate a tracking phone number for you, but they will show to the um search engines what your actual NAP phone number is. And this, I mean, this has been I I did this when I still worked at AVA, which I left in 2013. So like this is this is old old stuff.
SPEAKER_01And Google caught onto this too. So in Google, that what I consider the best practice, I think Conrad agrees, but um, I'd love it if you disagreed. Um, true local phone number as an alternative number in your Google business profile. And you use a call tracking number as the main number. And so therefore you now you can the the number that shows is the call tracking number, but from a nap consistency standpoint, your local number's there, so it doesn't screw that up. But you raise this the final point, which is a really good question, which is is like, hey, people that I know, they they didn't find me on Google. There's like somebody, it's a former client, and they're looking for my number. And so they search my name and my Google business profile comes up and it's got a call tracking number. And so like that's the number that they us that they call end up calling. And so then you could you get this uh question of like, well, how is this? Well, I don't know if this is where you go, and this is where I go as a marketer. I'm like, all right, we've got this attribution issue now because this referral source, this former client, use my call tracking number. So my data is showing Google Business Profile call. And this is to me is why the intake thing is so important because you're like, your CRM and your quantitative and qualitative intake data should show this is a former client. It doesn't matter what phone number they call anymore, because we know that they are a former client. They've already known us. Like, this isn't a non-brand local SEO client. It would only be that case if they called that number and you asked them, like, you know, how did you hear about us? Or who do we thank for referring us to you? And they say, nobody, I just did a Google search. Then you're okay, now you've got that uh call tracking number plus your qualitative data that says, yeah, look, we don't, we've never heard of your firm before. And those two now I would say, now I'm gonna put that in the bucket of a local, you know, quote unquote local SEO client, if that if that's the issue.
SPEAKER_02But it's even so this is like gee's being nicer to agencies. And this is a really important aggravating thing that agencies do. They lump local search and SEO, and our local search and organic search are two fundamentally different things. And you're right, a lot of people, when they get referred to your firm or they know your firm, or they're looking it up because of TV or whatever it might be, Google Business Profile is what is typically the way that that lead is captured. It's not generated by Google Business Profile or your local SEO efforts. It is captured by those efforts. And what crappy agencies do is they will report on that as an SEO lead, right? It's not even a lead from Google, it's not a digital lead, it might be a referral. But they're they're they're deliberately conflating these two things because it makes them look like they are doing a really, really good job. And so if you are trusting your agency and they're not breaking out organic and local, like they are 100% taking credit for stuff that they are not doing. And even if they do break them out, to Guy's point, even if they do break them out, it is so important for you to understand was this a someone who was already calling me, was this a branded query or was this a non-branded query? And the only way to get to that with Google Local is through that qualitative, how did you hear about us? And so the problem is we're lazy and we we like we like making you pretty pie graphs to tell you where all these things came from. The reality is if you do that with an automated system, and AI may be changing this a little bit and it can, but if you're doing it with a traditionally automated system, we're over-emphasizing the value of Google Business Profile and generating new business for you that didn't already know about you. And that's what just grates on me because that's where you guys get taken advantage of.
SPEAKER_01And so then we so we go, let's go. So we went deep on that. Let's go first full circle. Again, I know a lot of times we do this stuff and people's eyes glaze over. So you're sitting there and you're thinking to answer the question, like, do I use call tracking numbers or not, guys? Like how important should I be worried about and app consistency? And it's like everything else, it's a trade-off. And so my view is that the value you get out of accountability for your marketing efforts, both the investments you're making with agencies or the time you're spending yourself, or if you have an in-house person that's doing this stuff, the value you get from the data for call tracking numbers is more valuable than the risk that the call tracking numbers in this context create. And I also recognize that it could potentially create attribution issues with the LLM, because if the LLM picks up a call tracking number, you know, it's gonna show, like in your data, it's gonna say if someone calls, so someone opens Chat GPT up and they call a tracking number that the LLM got from Google, there it's gonna screw that data up and it's it's still on net net. It's still worth it because consider the alternative. The alternative is that you don't use any call tracking numbers. Now you have no idea because you're not gonna uh asking, as many of you know who have probably done this, asking somebody how they found you and expecting them to answer like, I did a Google search and clicked on the local pack and used a non-brand query to find you is not gonna happen. A lot of them are gonna say the internet. A lot of them are gonna say Google. And you're and and they're you're gonna be and this we get this pushback all the time. It's like, well, qualitative attribution data is total garbage because people just they don't even remember how they found you. And it's like, that's not the point. You're asking about whether they how they knew you in the real world. Was it because they were referred to you? Was it because they were a former client? Yada, yada, yada. So uh net net to me, the short answer is that call tracking data is extremely more valuable than the trade-offs that are created by not using it.
SPEAKER_06Do we have one more question? Janine.
Podcast Ethics And Evergreen Content
SPEAKER_06I want to thank you guys. This is the deepest dive into digital marketing we've ever done. We've gone two hours. You've been fantastic. Your questions have been fantastic. I think Janine, you'll have I think you have the mics, you'll have the last question. And then, you know, we'll take a break. And if anybody wants to do a hot seat, we can do that. Brian and I need to sort of end our work here at about 1130 because we start an hour after that with the main event. But we're happy to hang out. I'm sure you guys you guys have done a tremendous job. Well, thank you. I worked really hard.
SPEAKER_01You've been a great audience. Like the quality of this always depends on the audience, and we're super grateful uh for you all.
SPEAKER_06Janine.
SPEAKER_08Uh good afternoon. Um, my name is Janine Clark. I'm from Maryland, and I have a family law practice. So I've been sitting here listening to you all. I've I've obviously followed you on your podcast. You all have a successful podcast. Thank you. Thank you. So my question is, though, for those of us that are considering jumping into the podcast pool, is there ever a concern about you giving out information during the podcast that could be considered an attorney-client relationship?
SPEAKER_02So the good thing for me is I went to business school, so I have no ethics. And so I pass all the ethics question on to Ghee.
SPEAKER_01Well, this is what I always say about this. And you can if you want to ask a follow-up if I'm not hitting the point that you're trying to make, feel free to help shape the conversation. But the best podcast stuff has nothing to do with you talking about clients or law practice or anything. And and and truthfully, the best marketing more broadly is that. This comes up all the time. People are like, you know, I'm worried. I lost my thing. You know, I'm worried about like I'm giving legal advice or client relation. And it's like totally valid valid if those are the things that you're talking about. But again, I would just double down on this idea of find things to talk about that are interesting. People will people know what you do. You can, you can simply at the you can have a byline that simply says your name. You know, I help families uh navigating divorce issues at the front of the podcast and at the end of the podcast. People will know. But the whole meat of the podcast is talking about maybe it's things going on in the community. And and again, on the uh so the attorney client thing, I think it's pretty easy. You just don't even talk about real cases, clients, anything at all, uh, if you want to totally avoid it. I think uh generally speaking, though, if you're just like giving informational stuff about like, here are some things that are common issues that we see families dealing with in the divorce context. Here are some things that you should be sharing my experience, but not talking about anything specific. I think you're safe there. But again, what percentage of your podcast is going to be that stuff? It goes back to like what's the question? What's what's the purpose of the podcast? If the podcast is to be a resource for families who uh might be considering hiring you, I think there's a lot more like I you know what I would do? I'd have family therapists on the podcast. I would have counselors on the podcast. Yeah. I would have the other people who serve your audience from a different angle, you know, let them be the stars of the podcast.
SPEAKER_02And yeah, 100%. Like that, that that's genius because it's Thanks, man. And then and then they are going to become your cheerleaders. Like, we haven't played the drinking game of when we say Josh Hoddes, you have to take a shot here. But like there's a man in the who does an amazing job at bringing people from around his area and giving them exposure. And what happens when you do that is they turn into your cheerleaders. Morris Lillienthal's not here, but like he's done that in Huntsville, Alabama extremely well. There's a bunch of people who are doing this. I like this idea. The other thing I want to mention with podcasts, we have, I believe, a misperception that they have to be timely and that this is about subscription. There is evergreen content that can be about your firm that does not apply to almost anyone right now, at this moment when you're recording it, but that you can go back to. Just like old blogs are valuable, old podcasts can be voluble. And so there's this concept around evergreen content that I don't want to, if you are thinking about pot doing podcasts, if you're going to go through that effort, having like, hey, you're you're dealing with this specific child custody issue. I recorded, you know, 12 minutes of me talking about this specifically. Let me send you that. There's tons of value in that. Um it's less a it's less a new business effort and more of a closing the existing business effort. But it's I would think about both of those. But I like what you talk about.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and and and think about from a local referral relationship standpoint, like a lot of people that are uh serving that I, you know, again, if you find people that might not even be clients, but you know, maybe there are uh blogs in your local community where uh people that have gone through divorce publish about that, share their story, have them on the podcast to share their story. Um, because again, it's just it's you want to have content that is gonna resonate with people that are dealing with a lot of the same things. Maybe they just want to listen because they're like, I want to know other people are going through this because this is horrible. And it's like I want to hear somebody else's story. You don't have to even worry about the attorney client stuff at all. And and in fact, again, that's the kind of stuff where like that's if you're talking about your expertise about what you do, you're really speaking to a segment of the audience who's like ready to buy, like they're in market, like lower funnel. Like that's a very small segment. I want to cat, I want to go above the funnel, as we've been talking about, um, to to capture more audience that of people who are like, I'm not, I'm not ready to get a divorce, but like we're in counseling and I'm not that happy. And I like want to like and I want to hear some more stories about this and some experience shares. And oh, there's this podcast in my local community where people are sharing those things. And if I took all of this out of context, what I would take away is Conrad said, old blog posts are valuable. I never would have thought I would have heard you ever say anything like that. Why? Because you're in all in the like blogs are dead and kill all the content from blogs.
SPEAKER_02I I know I literally just got mad at my people because we we pulled down the zippy the chicken article. You know what? That's very sad. That was a mistake. That's very sad. That was a mistake.
SPEAKER_06You'll see Zippy the Chicken this afternoon.
SPEAKER_02All right. Well, thank you guys very much. One more question. Then we have time for one more question. One more. All right.
SPEAKER_07I stumbled
Firmwide Podcasting And Personal Brands
SPEAKER_07in here. Good morning, everyone. Steph Wood, I'm marketing and intake manager for Park Ziggler, we're a multi-comprehensive firm down in Virginia Beach in North Carolina. And we just launched our first in-house studio. So we're very, very excited about that for podcasting, sharing, and also providing just a lot of virtual experiences for our clients and potential new clients. What would you guys think about the idea of the actual firm being podcasts? And it might be something you've already spoken about, so forgive me. But having the firm podcast and then having the attorneys be the guests on that podcast and someone from the admin team sort of running that podcast, such as myself in the marketing, and let it be more of like a forum of that evergreen content. Is that a concept that you think might would rock?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Repeat the question. So the question is can and then want to make sure that I've got this correct. So this is a question about your question. What what would what would you think about having the content of your podcast really be generated by multiple people within the firm? Lots of people having attorneys, paralegals, et cetera.
SPEAKER_07And it that flows right with what we did. We launched a new individualized social media initiatives and attorney-specific initiatives. So we have 14 attorneys and each one has their own specific marketing initiative.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_01I like that, by the way.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. I I uh listen, I don't know your 14 attorneys, and I'm gonna besmirch the audience right now. Most of you guys are terrible at podcasting, being on video. I I joke like I'm not good at many things. I like yammering, right? But most people don't really have that. And and attorneys get so uptight about it being perfect that nothing ever happens. It's awful. I've been building content with attorneys for two decades, and it's by and large, it is terrible. And I could be wrong about your fortune, and they may all be right. But the pro the problem is you're gonna have Barney who sucks and doesn't realize that he sucks, right? And you can't, and you're like, this is Barney that we just do not want to like put out in public because he just he was terrible, but like he doesn't get that. You're gonna have to deal with those. I would hate like that's sorry, and I know it's your idea, so I don't mean to be crapping on it, but like I would hate to be in the job of making 14 attorneys look amazing on video. That sounds like a belly flop waiting to happen. Yeah. So but like if so I'm just saying, like, a lot of people have a face for podcasts, right? Um I I would be really I would I would not want that job.
SPEAKER_01I I would I might um again, not knowing anything about it, I would, I would start, I would like kind of like soft launch. I'd be like, we're gonna try this thing. If it doesn't go well, we're not gonna actually release any of these episodes and just see. And you might even have out of the 14, maybe some of them will be stars and you see and you kind of take you you uh mitigate some of the blow that Conrad's talking about. I love the idea though, if you have attorneys that you can that can create content, whether it's audio content or social media content, like we all know people hire lawyers, not law firms. The more you can humanize the practice, if you've got attorneys who can do it, I think it's a great idea. I think statistically, like, yeah, having 14 do it well is gonna be uh tricky. And I would say this ask people, show some of the episodes to people before you launch and get feedback because what you don't want to do is to fall in this trap of like, I mean, obviously is the awkward stuff Condra is talking about, but a lot of times, like you have an idea and you run with it, especially in podcasting where like the value of it is a little bit tricky to ascertain. And so, like, you're doing this thing because what happens is that the attorneys would be like, uh, especially if they don't like it, oh, I gotta do this thing again. Why are we doing this again? Whose idea was this? Like, it's not even working. And so, like, it's you're trying to mitigate some of the impact of that. But if you have some out of those 14, you have a couple that are really good, focus on those and and run with those and just be like, hey, you know what, we decided that, you know, not Bart Barney's out, but um, you know, these other people are are still in. And um, anyway, see my inkling is that you think at least some of the lawyers might be good at this. And so I I think it's a I think it's great to try to get the lawyers to create content if you can. Because I'll tell you that that is the that's a competitive advantage, frankly. If you've got a firm where you've got lawyers who can put stuff into the world where it's them and their personal brands, it's much more effective than trying to just focus on the logo or like the things the firm's doing in the community. If Conray talks about having the face of the firm, like if you got a couple good faces of the firm, that can be really valuable.
SPEAKER_02So a couple thoughts. There's a great man in this room who told me that you can't send turkeys to Eagle School. Okay. So I like the idea of finding your eagles and actually having them contribute, but I I think the concept of shoehorning a bunch of turkeys into video content is not a good idea. Here's the other really nervy problem with this. You start building someone's social media profile, I've watched this happen multiple times. You build their profile, you spend a lot of effort, and then they leave. And now you have created your enemy. And I've watched this happen too many times. The most stable thing that I can have is a very public face of the firm who doesn't do any legal work and a bunch of introverts who suck on camera. Right? That is the most stable firm that you can possibly have. You the you have like you have you have to know that they are committed. Right. And and and you're probably 80% right in that certainty.
SPEAKER_06It strikes me that it's going to be the host, the person asking the questions is probably gonna be the most influential about whether this can be successful or not. How about a big hand for Gui and Conrad? Thank you. That was really awesome.
