BluShark Digital  0:00  

Ladies and gentlemen, tonight’s spotlight shines on the rising stars of the legal world, where young firms, bold ideas, and smarter systems take center stage, standing tall at the intersection of law and leadership. He’s the digital strategist, the legal growth architect, the man with the mic, make some noise for your host, Will McCreight, and today’s guest proof that modern law isn’t about working more. It’s about working smarter. Welcome Tifiny Swedensky, the game is changing. Let’s get you in it. This is legal currents with Will McCreight,

Will  0:43  

Welcome back to another episode of the Legal Currents Podcast. Today, I have a very special guest joining us, somebody I think very highly of, Tiffany Swedensky. Tiffany is the founder and CEO of Sharp Cookie, a fractional CMO and marketing agency specializing in the legal space, as well as the host of the Sharp Strategies Sweet Success podcast, and author of the Legal Marketing Strategies newsletter. Tiffany has over a decade of experience in the legal industry, including an in-house marketing director position. She was the lead digital marketer for the Great Legal Marketing Group and a very impressive online following helping hundreds of firms collectively separate themselves in the extremely competitive space that is the legal industry. And on top of all of that, she also has a name that spellcheck attempts to autocorrect every chance it gets, which we were just talking about. Tifiny, welcome on.

Tifiny  1:37  

Thank you so much. I really appreciate I feel really good about myself after that introduction, because it’s always, it’s always a little ego boost to hear somebody talk about like you, I don’t feel like I’m that cool. But, you know, I guess, I guess we try.

Will  1:51  

Yeah, well, you know, and as somebody who works with, like, a variety of different, like fractional CMO people, to some capacity, there are a good handful that I think very highly of you are one of those, and we’ll get more into it. But you know, really, the way that you approach things is something that I very much admire, and the information that you look at, but I guess before we even jump into any of those questions, you have a very cool background, pretty interesting, certainly, somebody who started out with a lot of just that hands on experience, very self starter, even back to those days of kind of taking some online classes, which I read a little bit about, or maybe, like some YouTube videos, stuff like that. Tell me a little bit more about that. I’d love to hear a little bit about your background in kind of the Sharp Cookie company that you created in your own words.

Tifiny  2:46  

So I guess, like, as far as, like, how I got started in digital marketing, I so I graduated college with a bachelor’s degree in communications and marketing, actually kind of late. I think I was 27 when I finally finished my degree, and we had just me and my husband had just moved to Virginia, and it was really tough finding work, honestly for me, like I really didn’t have any work experience. I was in healthcare. I was doing a lot of healthcare work, you know, when I was in school. So, you know, this career transition and the best I could do at the time, I was working as, basically, like HR admin for a tech staffing firm in Virginia. And this was after I spent like three months looking for a job, and it was awful, like I didn’t have very many callbacks. Felt like nobody wanted me. It was very disheartening. And then I got started with this recruiting staffing company up here in northern Virginia, and they were just hiring people hand over fist. And some of them, you know, they they didn’t have college degrees, you know, maybe they had like, a high school degree. Some of them, they just had, like, personal experience with, like, technology and website development. And it inspired me. I was just like, oh, like, I’m gonna, I’m going to learn, you know, web development, you know, that’s a in demand skill, like, obviously, like, what skills I had, you know, weren’t much, but, you know, if I got into web development, like, I could, you know, get a better job in marketing. And so that’s what I did. And it was like, w3 schools was a site that I used to learn, like, you know, HTML and CSS, the basics. And really, just like, used YouTube and the internet to, like, learn, eventually, like JavaScript for a while, like, I was doing stuff with MySQL databases. I did take, like, a class in PHP, and, like, learned a lot of that in college. I had like a I learned a lot of data analytics, and so that definitely helped. And finally, finally, it was able to get a job in marketing, and that’s when I was hired at Great Legal Marketing as their digital marketing specialist.

Will  4:52  

Yeah, awesome. Okay, and I’m glad that I was wasn’t too off the mark with some of the classes that you mentioned. I heard that on Vicknair’s Podcast. I’m glad that that was accurate, and definitely is a great example of the fact that you can really learn a lot of these things yourself if you put the time and effort into doing so. Also an interesting kind of origin. It sounds like you really more so start out on the dev side of things, which is a bit different than a lot of the people in this space here, and it’s something that is super valuable. But I’d love to hear a little bit more real quick before we dive into it, about firms that you typically work with now.

Speaker 1  5:31  

So when I started working with Ben Glass, Great Legal Marketing, Charley Mann, I got like a super crash course in law firm marketing, personal injury marketing, and back, you know, 2015 it doesn’t really feel like that long ago, but it was still like, very much different in terms of like, digital marketing and the tools that we had. And so, like, just through them and attending the GLM conferences and, you know, Ben has a mastermind group that he still runs. And in those groups, like I was mainly listening, although I can’t help but not shut up sometimes, but just like learning, like what, you know, these attorneys who owned a law firm, what they what they feared, what they were interested in, how they are running their businesses. How are they doing marketing, most importantly. And so basically, I took that knowledge and said, like, and I still, I love Ben, like, we’re still fairly close, and just started my own company. And at the time, like, 2021 I think is when I did it, maybe 2022 a fractional CMO. It wasn’t like, new, new, like, I had heard about it on podcasts and stuff, but it was, it was new to the legal industry, and so, you know, it kind of fit with what I knew and what I wanted to do. So I just really, you know, kept with personal injury attorneys, although now, like, I’m working with family law attorneys, estate attorneys, mostly personal injury, though, and then, you know, mainly working with those firms that are want, like, to grow like, want marketing structure, and then want to get to the stage where they can hire like, a full time marketing director or a CMO. And I see is like, what I do is kind of that middle option, you know, that firm that’s committed enough that they’re going to invest money in marketing to and they want to get to that, that eventual point.

Will  7:30  

Yeah, shout out to Ben and Brian, of course, shout out to Charley. And I think that is maybe actually where we met for the first time was back at one of the GLM summits little over a year ago? Yeah, I think so, and certainly something right that every firm owner needs to start thinking about is marketing. At some point, if you want to grow scale, if you want to bring on, you know, additional staff and attorneys, right, we need to bring in the cases to support that. So I guess the first question I’d be curious to hear your insights on, right, if you’re sitting down, you’re speaking with somebody for the first time, right, trying to understand, you know, a either are the both of you a fit from a partnership standpoint, or maybe you’ve already decided that, and it’s okay. What’s step one? You know? What is day one look like for you when you’re starting off in a new partnership?

Tifiny  8:25  

So a lot of times I work with firms that have somebody who can help with marketing execution, and so a lot of times it’s meeting their teams. And the firms that I start working with, like, we don’t have, I you know, they don’t have big teams, like, most of the time they have, like, somebody offshore who they hired to help with marketing, or somebody like an assistant capacity. I mean, if we’re just getting started and they’re at that level, you know, we just start with the teams and kind of training, because that person is going to be in charge of basically executing on a lot of the stuff that we do to implement marketing. And so it starts with training. But the next big thing, the thing that I do, that I get really hands on, is looking at their tools and their systems and their data. And, you know, marketing these days, even if we’re doing like referral marketing, even if we’re doing community marketing, you know, there’s a heavy tech end where we’re doing data transfers, moving contacts from one CRM to another system, tagging, tracking, making sure all that information is accurate. And you know, that’s the thing that most law firms. It’s really rare that I step into a situation where I’m just like, Oh, you guys are you guys got all this set up perfectly, and everything’s being tracked great. And so usually, like, my first month or two with clients is you know, kind of unscrambling or getting everything organized around their back end systems, as far as, like, what we’re tracking, our KPIs, our marketing metrics, and making sure people flow smoothly from one system to another, and we’re following up with them. I mean, honestly, it’s just the kind of the backbone of the marketing department, that whole tech and data stuff.

Will  10:25  

Yeah, you know. But it can’t be stressed enough, the importance of that as somebody who works kind of on the flip side, that structure right even just the ability to collect the right data, understand the right data, is huge, because that is something that an agency is also going to be able to benefit from. It’s something that’s almost non-negotiable, right? Making sure that you have some sort of data in place there. And so that is certainly a great step one. And I think another benefit here, really to bring on, like a fractional CMO, is, you know, the ability to really learn from some of these things that you’ve seen throughout the years, right? And marketing is kind of an ever evolving space, especially in today’s world, but you know, I’m curious to hear from you about some of these things that maybe you picked up in your years of experience, and how sort of that background and really just that experience of seeing all of these different things has helped shape, you know, the way that you might look at some of these first opportunities early on, or things that you might look at?

Tifiny  11:31  

So part of what makes me efficient as a fractional, at least I, what I hope makes me efficient is we save everything. You know, if we do a marketing project for one client that gets saved as examples or a reference point, if we are ever going to do something similar with another client. And so I’ve just amassed a lot of these examples of marketing projects that you know we just use to kind of rinse and repeat for some other law firm, and it takes a lot of legwork out of the law firm to actually like, plan the marketing and how it’s going to go and what steps do we take? It’s just like, here it is, kind of in a nicely wrapped bow, or at least, I hope that’s how it’s interpreted. And then when it comes to like, what we do like, if the firm has their tracking set up and their systems are set up and everything’s flowing nicely, we usually focus on three marketing plans each quarter, like, we’re implementing new things each quarter on top of some stuff that the marketing team will do, like, on a weekly, monthly reoccurring basis. And those things are probably pretty familiar to people who follow marketing, like email newsletters, consistent social media activity, updates to Google business, photos, data review, KPI review, we do these things like on a reoccurring basis, and a lot of the reporting myself and my team do just because I love the data. I just truly do. But like email newsletters, social media posts, you know, that’s what you know, the marketing team, their teams, you know, generally do. And then each quarter, we implement three marketing plans for the law firm, and those marketing plans we’re focusing on referral marketing, authority building and then lead generation, because those three categories, a lot goes into them. Referral marketing is the most important because it’s the most cost effective, and if you do it right, it can scale, particularly if you’re getting referrals from your former clients and you’re adding people to your marketing list and just getting more referrals from them. We also focus on lead generation, because we need to build, like, funnels, entry points, um, and just generally, like, go after leads and try to just immediately create some sort of lead flow, and then Authority building, like crosses over a lot with SEO and digital marketing, because we’re trying to build up their online profile. You know, I don’t do SEO. I let the SEO companies do their thing. So what like we and what I as a fractional CMO, try to focus on is what we can do internally that’s not strictly digital marketing or what the SEO company is doing that might include like a press release cadence or getting reviews, doing like a marketing campaign, where we’re going after more reviews and getting more reviews, anything that’s going to elevate just the brand presence of the business, and then what’s within the client’s budget, naturally?

Will  14:50  

Yeah, all of the non negotiables, right, and things that need to be established early on. And I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the idea of kind of process oriented goals versus outcome oriented goals, right? And some of the things that you you spoke about, right, it sounds like are really first and foremost needing to establish the right processes, making sure that we have everything in place that is obviously different than an outcome oriented goal. We could have all the right processes in place. Doesn’t always guarantee an outcome, but they need to be there. And so how do you find that balance early on? Of you know, we almost need to think of this as doing the right things consistently in order to achieve those outcomes. Or, you know, are you more focused on the outcome itself? What’s the balance there?

Tifiny  15:37  

Well, so we are focused on the outcome, like we are tracking KPIs, and the ultimate goal is to get more leads. And that’s why, you know, we look at data and we try to say, like, where are there increases, decreases, where can we invest more money? But like, the outcome is sometimes detached from what like a marketer would actually do so, you know, email newsletter, for example. You know, that needs to go out each week because we’re nurturing an audience who could potentially refer us cases. Can we tie an email newsletter to an ROI? No. I mean, I guess we could, but we’d be dealing with wacky numbers at that point and trying to link. You know, this person referred us the case, and they received our email newsletter, but they first heard about us on LinkedIn. Like, who gets the credit? You know, it becomes a muddy attribution nightmare, so you can’t, you know, tie an ROI to an activity as simple but as necessary as an email newsletter or a social media post. Just another example, you know, LinkedIn. Lot of attorneys use LinkedIn to generate more referrals from other attorneys. You know, you met somebody at a bar conference Association. They followed you on LinkedIn. They see your post each week. They refer you a case in two years. You know, again, what gets the attribution the event you attended or LinkedIn? Is it 50/50? Maybe. But you know, you know, we get too granular when we start trying to track things that way, and it ends up taking, you know, as much time that it would be to implement a new marketing idea. So, you know, instead of trying to tie like, all of the little activities to ROI, you know, there’s some level of like, we just have to accept like. This is what marketing teams do. And, you know, unfortunately, like, it’s kind of a message that’s unpopular, because everyone wants, like, the quick wins, like everyone wants, like, you do this and you’ll get X amount of cases. But you know, it’s, it’s muddy, like, marketing attribution is muddy, and when we’re doing things like nurturing a referral audience,  it’s just so detached from that, like n number, and so part of what’s a challenge for me as a fractional CMO is explaining to law firms, like we’re doing this, you know, to get this outcome. But it’s not like, you know, this is going to give us cases next week. And, you know, a lot of them like, you know, they start to kind of get the bigger picture as we start doing all of the marketing activities. And it does work, it generates cases downstream and sometimes quicker than, you know, we’ll project for them. Just because I try to be conservative. I mean, an email newsletter, I really am a huge proponent of something simple that every law firm can do to get more referrals from their marketing list. You just have to be adding people to your marketing list.

Will  18:32  

Agreed, agreed, yeah, and with that idea of the newsletter, right? Something that, and I, actually, I hear this more frequently regarding the website side of things. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts on both fronts. You know, how do you find that balance? Or, how do you recommend finding that balance of these tried and true elements that have been staples for a long period of time, but also balancing the idea of creating that unique, firm identity right? Or approaching things in the way that you know allows the firm to separate themselves from all the other newsletter emails that firms get. Or do you find that that’s not as much of an issue.

Speaker 1  19:14  

As far as like, how to get, like, a unique voice and a unique identity that comes from either the law firm owner or the law firm’s leadership team. you know, so they’re, they’re setting core values like they’re, they’re setting the tone for how they want to be represented. Now, the question I thought you were asking when you when you started talking, is, like, you know, how do you like, let’s say, like, a website, for example. Like, how do we say, like, how important a website is to brand. I mean websites even outside, even if you’re not doing like traditional SEO, like you’re not like publishing content, getting backlinks, your website is still tremendously important, even if it’s not a lead generator, because it’s the thing that people use to justify hiring you. Yeah, I’ve told this story before, but, like, I’m not, I’m not bragging, but it’s part of the story. Like, I was on a weight loss journey last year, lost a lot of weight, and it started with me hiring, you know, basically a getting with a nutrition coaching program. And it wasn’t cheap. It was cheaper than Ozempic but it wasn’t cheap. So, but I learned about her on social media. I followed her for a while. I visited the link in her bio, and just from that, scheduled a consult with her. Did a consult, received a fee agreement, effectively, you know, just an agreement for services. And that point was the point in which I looked at her website at all. And you know, you know, there’s not a lot of data backing out my point here, but that’s how a lot of people do it. You know, a lot of people backwards justify their decision making. And so if they call a law firm, your intake team picks up. They do the intake, you do the consults. You send them a fee agreement, they’re going to look at your website at that point, they’re going to make sure they want to hire you, because it’s a lot of money that we’re talking about, and at that point, your website plays just this huge kind of conversion point. And so it’s complicated and it’s nuanced, but like, you know, even outside of like, traditional SEO, the website’s just unbelievably important, and it does traditional SEO. So I don’t know if I fully answered your question, but I do my best.

Will  21:28  

I think it’s, I think you’re spot on. And I’ll also say I feel like an asshole for sending two boxes of cupcakes. After all, hopefully they were, they were, you know, enjoy it. I think you mentioned maybe your daughter, right?

Tifiny  21:43  

But I totally knew them. I, you know, I met my goal. I met my goal so I can, I can eat a cupcake now. I’m good.

Will  21:50  

Love it. Love it. But no, I think you’re spot on. I think people oftentimes, and I still talk to firms somewhat regularly, more often than than most people would think, I’m sure you’ve seen this on your end as well, where they may not even have a website, and it’s just those ideas of a first impression, right? We don’t know how many people we’re losing because they’re trying to find us. And our website is, you know, looks like it’s 30 years old, right? Or maybe it doesn’t exist, period. Even people who maybe have an @gmail.com email address, right? Like these are things that don’t always strike the right. First impression, I think, on the website side of things, I’m curious in particular, to hear your thoughts on. At least for me, something I hear frequently is when we’re looking at building a website, they say, Hey, I don’t want the old scales of justice, right, or the traditional, you know, photos on the court, steps. And not to say that those things are good or bad, right? But the idea of even maybe call to actions ways that that things you know typically maybe help convert, but also trying to have that unique feel you know, are those things that you look at when, when you’re working with a partner early on, do you advise them? Hey, like these things we know work, or hey, we want to do things in the way that you want to be perceived, or somewhere in between.

Tifiny  23:11  

So Well, I always default to what the business owner wants. And so if I have a business owner who doesn’t want his face out there because he doesn’t like the way he looks, then I’m not going to push it. although I will try to coach him into thinking he’s more attractive. So we can’t do that stuff like that doesn’t happen. I’m just giving you a hypothetical. But like for me, when it comes to images or video or any media, you know, stock photography is the worst. City skylines are okay, like, I’ll tolerate them. Scales of justice, you know, that kind of the cliche imagery. Yeah, I don’t like that. But the absolute best, like, for me, like, the gold standard, is team photos, office photos, because, like, people want to go to your site, and if they don’t see, like, any team photos, they really don’t have a picture of who they’re working with. Are they real people? Like, what do they I mean, what do they look like? And when you have those up, it helps really build trust. And it sounds rather kind of unremarkable as an answer, because, like, we’re asking people to get dressed and look good so we can take a team photo so like, everyone can see our images on the website. I come up with this a lot with people who aren’t the leadership team or the business owner. You know, some people don’t even want to associate themselves publicly with the business, like they don’t want their social media mentioned on our social media. It’s, you know, sometimes it’s weird, but like team photos are really what people want to see, and things that can’t be copied and pasted. That’s, that’s generally, my rule of thumb is like, if it can be copied and pasted extremely easily by anyone else, let’s not do it, and you can’t copy and paste a team photo. You can’t copy and paste an office photo that will always be unique to your brand. And so that’s, you know, talking to images. That’s, that’s generally my guidance.

Will  25:11  

How do you feel about the idea of, you know, using whatever your team is to your advantage? Something that I hear very commonly is, you know how? You know, maybe firms being like, Oh, I don’t have a huge team, right? I’m not a Morgan and Morgan. And usually my response is great, like, let’s use that to our advantage. But I’m curious to hear how you feel about, you know, that approach, or if that’s something that people should care about at all.

Tifiny  25:39  

I mean, any human photo is better than than none. And you know, I work with firms that they have a huge team, but they don’t want to feature the huge team on the site. They only want to feature the attorneys. And that’s fine. I’m just looking for real people. And you know, I’ll take an AI photo. I mean, don’t love it, but, you know, I’ll take that. But you know, people aren’t necessarily looking for the right size of law firm. They’re looking for somebody who can help them. And sometimes generating the impression that you are a smaller firm is beneficial, because people generally prefer sometimes, you know, not everyone, but there are a lot of people who prefer working with a small local business over a big corporate one. And so it’s actually a double edged sword, you know it. You know, them having a small team is going to repel people who want a big law firm, which, you know. Think about it realistically. If you have a small team and somebody is going to hire you that wants to work with a big law firm, and they hire you anyway, they’re just going to be unhappy because they’re not getting, ultimately, what they wanted. You’re better off, like repelling that client who would have been happy somewhere else with a big firm, like a settlement mill, like a Morgan, a Morgan, and then, you know, displaying your small team that will attract the people who want to work with somebody small, local, who might get personalized attention. I have a story about this, but I’m gonna save it. I’m save it for another day. But I mean, you know, a small team isn’t necessarily a disadvantage. And you know, I some people get hung up on that, though, I think.

Will  27:20  

Agreed, I think, and I love that point that you made about finding the right audience for you as well. Right? We don’t want somebody to be working with us like ultimately, if they don’t want to be working with us, that’s going to create whole other issues on top of that. So I couldn’t agree more. And one other question that I had for you, that I was I was, I was thinking about was just when we’re looking at, and it’s similar to the last one, right? The idea of, in marketing, all of these, you know, bright and shiny objects that come along, versus the idea of things that are really going to make an impact, you know, when, when new things become available, and AI, is probably beyond the point of that bright and shiny object, but still maybe a balance of both, right? How do you differentiate people, or almost slow people down at times, if needed, when we’re trying to decide, is this something that’s worth pursuing, or is this just something that looks really nice, but it’s not something that we expect to make a significant impact?

Tifiny  28:22  

Um, I mean, you brought you brought up AI, and, like, a lot of people kind of gravitate toward it, because it’s the new thing. And also, a lot of people have been coached, like, if you don’t embrace it, you’re going to be left behind, which I don’t think that. I don’t feel like that’s fair enough. AI is really cool though. Like, AI is a tool that I use every day. I couldn’t run my business the way I do without it, not necessarily because it does writing for me, but it had it like, automates and does all those tremendously cool things. But like, you know, I’m so like, when firms ask me, like, about AI and AI marketing, they primarily want to know how to rank an AI. And the honest to God truth is, I don’t know, so I’m not going to advise you on that. But I wouldn’t buy into like aI wholeheartedly without looking very carefully at what you’re buying, because there are just so many scams out there, and I myself have experienced like two failed AI implementations where somebody was going to come in and set something up, couldn’t make it work, and a lot of times it wasn’t even actually AI. And so there’s just a lot of BS out there, and if you reach for the things that sound cool and like, I don’t know, like, a sneaky I don’t know that’s not the right word for it, but if you found something like a hack, if you found something that sounds like a hack, yeah, yeah, shortcut, it’s probably BS. And then, like, think about it. Think about it like this, the average recommended PPC spend for a personal injury attorney going after car accidents is $20,000 a month. Some people recommend 5000 Some people recommend 10,000 but you know, realistically, it costs anywhere between 2000 to $3,000 to get a case from Google ads. If you spend $5,000 you might get a case one, one once a month or something, right? Um, so $20,000 or, you know, you could send an email newsletter from a CRM that’s going to cost you $1,000 for the whole year, um, and you can send quarterly gifts to a tight group of referral contacts, maybe 20 people, and that’ll cost you vastly less than what you would spend in PPC and net you a higher quality lead at a lower quality or higher quality lead at a lower cost per case. So, like, if you want to, if you like, if you’re, if you’re trying to spend money, you know, just because you want to, because you want to test something like go after the shiny object, but like, if you do that and ignore the foundations, like, it’s not going to help you. It really isn’t.

Will  31:10  

I couldn’t agree more with with that idea, and it that reminds me of what we were talking about earlier, which was the process oriented versus the outcome oriented. You know, I hear very commonly, I’m sure you do as well, right where people, they want those very quick results. And maybe, yes, PPC is more of a snap of the fingers thing, but it also creates those challenges where, if you’re scaling on the idea of all of your leads coming in through paid ads, that is a very, you know, exponential scale of spend as well, rather than using it as maybe a cherry on top type of thing. You know, are there any trends that you feel like people are chasing right now, outside of AI that you think may slowly disappear, or, you know, conversely, anything on top of newsletters that are kind of those boring, unsexy trends that are probably going to continue to be impactful.

Tifiny  32:02  

Um, so I think, and, well, okay, like, if you don’t like my answer, you can just cut it. Like, I’ll just just give you that out. But I don’t feel like the traditional SEO model is working as it exists. I feel like, you know, the traditional, like content, you know, model that we’ve been running for years, that, I mean, I used to write content, it doesn’t hold as much value unless you’re writing something like truly unique and new, and then you’re doing it with Thought Leadership. You’re doing it in a way that can’t be copied and pasted, going back to that kind of rule. And so, you know, if you don’t have, like, practice area pages or location pages or case, you need those like, you still need those like, I’m not, you know, I’m not telling you, like, dismantle your website or anything. But like, do you need to publish? Do you need to be the 1,000th law firm to publish what to do after a car accident in your state? No. And so if you, if you can focus on, like, as a law firm owner, like, you know, building the foundation, like getting your website, making sure the pages that we need are up there. All of the ones I mentioned are important, plus some, you know, there, there are other very important pages I like to see on a website, but like blog and but I the nuance is like, I myself publish a blog weekly, like twice a week, on top of my podcast on top of something else, and I’m talking about me and my business at this point, and all of it’s like, unique and new. Nobody else is writing this stuff. And I, you know me as a business owner, I get a tremendous value from that. But the the old school blogs know, and that’s where I feel like a lot of companies are pivoting towards more of those Authority building activities. Like a lot of people may have heard of E, E, A, T, and I always miss 1e but experience, authority, trustworthiness. What is it?

Will  34:11  

Experience expertise, authoritativeness, across yep, yep, yeah.

Tifiny  34:14  

They’re all kind of mean, the same thing. But yeah, I always forget one of the E’s. You know, all of that, like, you know that can’t be supported by little blog. And I don’t even like having marketing assistants write blogs, even though it’s something easy for them to do. I’m just like, now, let’s make something for social media, because it’s not, it’s just not the way we do things anymore for websites. At least, I don’t think.

Will  34:40  

I actually agree with that, and for us, typically, every right, every situation, is different. But blogs are not the way that we recommend utilizing content right and even beyond everything that we’re talking about here. Yes, they may bring people into your site, but they’re probably not heavy conversion focused people, and so you’d rather find a smaller quantity, but that quantity be the right quality of people. And even beyond that, you know, before you’re doing any of these things, I usually want to make sure that we have, like, a Google Business Profile very well built out, because that local element is also something that people can usually do a lot more with on their own right, if we’re talking about bang for your buck. And that kind of leads me to my next question. You know, the audience here, and a lot of people listening to this, really trying to figure out, you know, how can I use my time as effectively as possible, whether it be newsletters or, you know, just going to, you know, local organizations. I’m curious to hear your thoughts if, let’s say, maybe you have two hours a week to spend on marketing, but it’s something that you want to do. How would you recommend using those two hours?

Tifiny  35:50  

Have two answers, I think, like one, and the big one is reviews. Nobody is more effective at getting reviews for a small business than the business owner. Nobody is a better salesperson than the business owner. I mean, maybe you have somebody who’s really good at signing clients, but like, nobody can sell you quite as good as you. And so, you know, the business owner has a tremendous amount of leverage in asking for reviews and getting them. You know, huge success. I’ve seen this across different firms. And, you know, there are some law firms I work with, you know, the business owner, they themselves got like, 400 500 reviews. And there’s nothing more valuable you could do for your online self than those reviews, right? And then outside of that, like, what specifically requires the business owners time. You know, what’s always hard for me to get that I’m that I’m always thirsty for as a marketer, is just unique content. So like, if you like to write, like, write something, if you’re more comfortable doing video, do a video. if you want to do none of that stuff. Like, I guess, talk to me and we’ll figure out, like, what kind of content that you can make. One thing I do with some of my clients is we’ll schedule a video like a video call like this, I’ll record it, transcribe it, and we’ll use it to create a GPT that passively writes in their voice. I don’t want to oversell GPT here, but you know, if you have like, the person’s own words, you can get a relatively good GPT, right? And so we’ll use that to write for them, and we also, I treat it as an interview. And so I’ll ask them questions like, you know, what’s a case that you worked on that really changed the way you thought about something? And, you know, we use the video interview as video content. And I, one of my clients, we just actually posted one where we asked them kind of a similar question. And so, you know, use your time to get reviews and make stuff that nobody else can make, and say the thing and tell the stories that nobody else can tell. And most business owners, I feel like have a few.

Will  37:57  

That review piece hits hard for me in particular. And I would even go as far as to say that with those reviews, the inability to get them is going to hold back a lot of these other efforts, even if you’re ranking in the local pack, if we don’t have reviews, and we’re going up against two other firms in that local pack that have 2,3,4,5, times the number of reviews that You have, we’re probably not going to convert upon that in general. So that’s, that’s usually my answer, and the content side of things, it’s interesting, you know, building out that custom GPT, that’s, it’s it. That’s a great idea. And ultimately, it’s figure out the right way for you. But you need to figure it out and have that process, because those processes are going to make a huge impact. You know, as someone who works with firms, right? And, you know, works with them as they grow and as they scale, you know, I think that one thing I’m curious to hear you speak about is the that idea of risk, right, and finding maybe the right balance of risk. I think that oftentimes attorneys are trained to minimize risk, but at some point growth, you know, requires some, some bit of risk. Where do you see lawyers, oftentimes overthinking things, or maybe, you know, the inability to make decisions, ultimately holding them back or or keeping them at some point of stagnation?

Tifiny  39:19  

Intake, for sure, if you’re, if you’re going to invest in marketing any amount, like if you’re, if you’re going to start doing an email newsletter, you’re, you’re just going to try to start bringing in leads. You need somebody who’s doing really, really well at handling your phones. And I did, like, a limited case study myself, where I called during lunch hour. I waited until lunch hour. This is why I feel like people scored really poorly, and I picked a random city in the US, I called the top 12 law firms in Google business, not a single one had a real person except one, except one, one had a real person. Pick up the phone, but they forwarded me to voicemail. The others just forwarded me to voicemail. And you know, I mean, I could have been anybody, I could have been a potential client, I could have been whatever, but that phone was sent to a voicemail, and people get really comfortable saying like, well, we check our voicemails, and it’s like, yeah, but I called 12 firms that day, and not a single one called me back within 10 to 15 minutes. And if there’s at least one other person in your market who’s willing to pick up the phone and do the intake, then they’re getting the lead. They’re getting the case. Because when people are calling law firms, they’re probably going to hire the first person who responds to them honestly. So if you’re trying to bring in more leads, you’re trying to do any kind of marketing, you need to that person handling phones like needs to know how critically important it is to pick up, to respond immediately, to follow up, to double dial call. You know, if somebody submits a form, call them back more than once. The first time you receive a phone call from an unrecognized number, what do you think it’s spam? Second time you think it’s serious, so double dial and, you know, I just know too many law firms, you know, who have somebody running intakes who will say, like, I don’t want to annoy somebody, or like, well, they’ll call us back, you know, and all these assumptions that aren’t necessarily malicious, but just absolutely cripples your case. Sign up rate and you know, the firms that sign the most cases take intake seriously. The client I have who’s grown the most, like just hand over fist last few years. Like our hack is basically like, we pick up on every phone call, and if we don’t, that’s a problem, and we respond to every message within minutes. And it’s no simple feat. You know, many interlocking systems create this experience, but you know, if we didn’t have that, we wouldn’t have signed nearly as many cases as we have, because we’re, we’re the first law firm that picks up the phone. So, yeah, that’s, that’s my big thing.

Will  42:09  

I think that’s so important. Do you how do you feel about secret shopping? And it sounds like you are an advocate of secret shopping and kind of secret testing intake. What would you say you recommend for firms to consider when maybe thinking about that and doing it to themselves.

Tifiny  42:26  

I mean, Secret Shop yourself, sure, but I guess maybe this is me being super pessimistic, but just never assume it’s perfect. I mean, nothing we do is perfect. There’s always something we could optimize, always something that can be improved. So, you know, don’t mystery shop with the mindset like, we’re going to ace this. You know, mystery shop with the mindset is like, we’re going to find a problem, we’re going to solve it, and then the next time we do this, we’re going to find another one and solve it, until we’re signing as many cases as possible. And I myself don’t like train or train intake teams are like, really, like, I’m the data person. Like, I look at the data coming downstream, and if it looks wrong, like, that’s when I’m like, Okay, guys, like, what are we doing here? But, you know, it’s just, it’s just so important to lock in on that stuff. And I forgot, I kind of forgot where I was going.

Will  43:19  

I agree. It’s an uncomfortable exercise always, because everybody wants to think that they’re doing it well. But when you’re spending 1000s of dollars, right? We talked about how much people would spend on a, you know, PPC case, you’re spending 1000s of dollars, you better make sure that you are going to get that case if it falls into your lap, because there’s no automatic Hey, you missed this one. Here’s the next one, right? It’s, it’s not always going to work like that. So I definitely agree. I also say, you know, Secret Shop, other intake out there, if you think you’re great, Secret Shop your own, and then secret shop, you know, whoever you consider your biggest competitor, or secret shop of Morgan, and Morgan, right? Not just calling, but also Secret Shop the forum. See what that looks like. Because that is, that is an important thing to remember. Did you have something there no last question for you. I’m sure that you’ve seen horror stories when working with firms, whether it be just existing processes or maybe even, you know, vendors that other or that the firm is working with. Without going into too much detail. You know, are there any things that people should look out for, or any, like, crazy stories that you found that you want to share? Is just like, Hey, be cautious.

Tifiny  44:31  

Well, I brought up earlier, like faith failed AI implementation and, you know, and this is true for any business, no matter what you’re really shopping for. But, you know, never forget the sales team, as the sales team and the development teams, the development team, and when you’re dealing particularly with like small companies, I mean, frankly, companies like my own, you know, they’re trying to bring on new clients. And you. Know, maybe they don’t have a developer on staff, you know, maybe they’re going to get the contract and outsource it to somebody who doesn’t quite understand what’s going on. Or, even worse, you know, they’re promising something that chatGPT told them could be done when it couldn’t be done. You know, I mean, trying to not get into any specifics, but you know, you the their proposal is a plan created by chat GBT that couldn’t function, like it’s just broken fundamentally. And, you know, it looked cool, you know, it looked impressive, but you know, when you get into the details, it’s just like this system doesn’t connect to this system at all and never could. So what are we talking about here? And so like, you know, I feel like it’s safer to deal with a bigger company that has, like, people on staff, systems. They know what they’re doing. They’ve handled problems in the past. But you know, when you’re talking to somebody who’s smaller, who particularly selling AI tools, like I just was pass at this point on any deal that looks like that. You know, because AI is not like a magic bullet, it can’t just make things happen. And people, I feel like, even the people who are selling it, don’t fully understand, like, how it works. And so you just end up with these weird deals for…Anyway, like I have seen a few, unfortunately, yes, be skeptical of AI tools. That’s the summary there.

Will  46:26  

Do your homework. I also, I always encourage people, like, talk to, like, a couple different people in whatever space you’re looking at. Don’t be afraid to ask to, like, meet the people that you’re actually going to be working with on a day in, day out basis. Like, make sure you feel comfortable. And also, you know, remember to take a step back if they’re promising the world for, you know, $1 right? Make sure that you look at how realistic that is. And that comes kind of in just talking to multiple people, I feel like, so appreciate all the insight. Tiffany, you know, last thing before we jump here, tell everybody you know where they can go, how they can find you. I think you offer tons of great information on LinkedIn. So, you know, go ahead and plug all the ways that people can learn from you.

Tifiny  47:10  

Yeah. Well, if you, if you go to LinkedIn, that’s really easy. My name is spelled Tifiny swidden ski, I won’t it’s Sweden Sky, if you really want that help. And I’m sure notes

Will  47:25  

Try and switch that. Yep, yeah.

Tifiny  47:29  

So, you know, look me up on LinkedIn if you click view my newsletter, unless I change this, but if you click view my newsletter, it’ll take you to my sub stack. That’s where I publish my weekly newsletter, my podcast. And you can see I, you know, I put out a bunch of free stuff. And you know, if you want to, you can sign up and get basically an email newsletter for me whenever I publish something new. And if you’re interested and want to talk with me, probably the easiest way is visit, talk to tiff.com 1f and that’ll take you to basically a page where you can visit my website, schedule a consult, call me, whatever, and yeah, that would be the easiest ways to reach out to me.

Will  48:14  

Love it. Can’t, like I said, Tifiny. Can’t thank you enough. But also think very highly of you in the way in which you approach things. And you know, it’s, it’s always great being able to, you know, work with firms where you’re at the helm with with them, because I know it’s going to be a great partnership. So really appreciate you taking the time to jump on and definitely encourage everybody to reach out. And we will catch you on the next episode.