One More Thing from 2022 with Team LISI | Legal Internet Solutions Inc.

As this is the last podcast episode to drop in 2022, we wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on the last 12 months and share that one more thing on our minds as we close out 2022 and prepare for 2023. We talk about goal setting, focusing on the client experience, creating a content machine, and the importance of tracking, understanding, and making decisions based on your analytics. Here’s One More Thing, this week’s episode of LISI’s All the Things podcast. Check it out.

Robyn:

Hey, everybody. Welcome to LISI’s podcast, All the Things, and our special once monthly episode, One More Thing. This is Robyn Addis, chief operating officer and chief marketing and business development officer at LISI, and today I am joined by four of my amazing colleagues to talk about a year in review for 2022, one more thing that we learned as we head into 2023. I’m going to let each of them introduce themselves. Taryn, why don’t you start?

Taryn:

Hi, I’m Taryn Elliott. I am the director of client success and marketing at LISI.

Robyn:

Kristyn, your turn.

Kristyn:

Hi, everyone. I am Kristyn Brophy, director of client strategy at LISI.

Robyn:

Dan, how about you?

Dan:

Hi, everybody. I’m Dan Martin, the director of marketing technology and operations at LISI.

Robyn:

And last but not least, Rae.

Rae:

Hi, I’m Rae Ritter, director of client service and marketing at LISI.

Robyn:

I’m so excited to have this conversation today because I thank, well, I know, that we’ve got a lot of talent and skill, all in this conversation, and I suspect that everybody has something pretty interesting in terms of their one more thing that they want to share for this year. I’m going to kick it off. This year we launched All the Things podcast and it was the brainchild of Taryn and I’m going to let her kick us off. Taryn, what was the one more thing you wanted to share for 2022 with our audience?

Taryn:

For me, 2022 felt like taking marketing from content production to the content machine. We put out a lot more content. We were just looking at the numbers last week, which were really quite staggering, how much more content we put out this year than last year, and so that’s really what I’m taking with me. What I’ve been saying is we go into all these year end things, is that once you start producing content, you could keep going and just keep producing and that’s great. I’m a big proponent of the best content that you produce is the content that you will actually produce, but if you spend a little bit of time upfront, you can really take that from just content production to a full-blown content machine, lots of different platforms, lots of different ways of getting your marketing message or your communications in general out. The big takeaways for me was just do it. It’s never going to be perfect so waiting until it is perfect is just putting off producing it in general, good, not great, great, not perfect, whatever it is. Have a plan, understand what you’re going to do, but really get it to the point that you’re comfortable with it and it’s what you think you want and then just jump right in with both feet.

Another thing that we did a lot in the beginning of the year, and it’s still a work in progress and we’ll take this into 2023 with us as well, we started to systematize everything. I mean, I think it was probably last LISI week, so maybe June of this year, when we sat down and said, “Okay, for every piece of content we produce, what is every single step that we go through?” And we wrote it down and we put it into our process, for us, we manage our processes in Trello, and it’s really helped to institutionalize what we do. We’re constantly making changes to our process, but it helps that anyone can access it and we consistently know what we want to do each time.

With a content machine, though, I also came to know sometimes you just need to extend yourself grace. I was saying one or two times we didn’t quite hit the mark and one of my coworkers is like, “Yes, but 44 other times we did.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s a really good way to look at it.” It’s not always going to be perfect. It’s a lot. We’re really busy.

And finally, it’s okay to retool it. Take a look at your analytics, take a look at what’s working, what’s not, check in every once in a while and say, “What do we need to change?” So for our team, we just did that last week. We talked about all of our content, what’s working, what isn’t, where the analytics were showing good things, and said, “Okay, for 2023, what do we need to do differently? What do we want to keep the same? What do we want to grow and expand?” That was my big thing about taking content from the basic production. Really, the sky’s the limit once you start following the steps.

Robyn:

Yeah. What I’m hearing you say is, you said it, just do it, but it’s also you have to have a plan and iterate on that plan. Would you agree with that?

Taryn:

Yes, 100%. The planning, and that’s what I say when we’re talking to clients who are looking to launch a new marketing initiative, especially one such as a podcast, which is serialized. Sit down and have your plan and not just for the first one, but for the first several. The same can be said of newsletters. The planning upfront is key, but once you do that, jump in and go. It gets easier, I promise, especially for things like video, but writing as well.

Robyn:

Yeah, for sure. And I know what goes unspoken in this conversation is when you and I first sat down in 2020, March, 2020, pandemic is really becoming a thing for the first time, and we had just brought you on board. It’s like, “Hey, we need to be producing marketing content.” We were going from, I’m going to say basically nothing, which is not a hundred percent fair because there was content being produced, but it was haphazard. So to know where we started two years ago to having over a hundred pieces of content of value-driven content produced this year, it’s pretty impressive, but the message that you say is you just got to start somewhere. Just do it. It’s not impossible. Somebody, a lawyer might look at us today and say, “Oh my God, I would never be able to produce that much content.” Guess what? We thought that, too. Right?

Taryn:

Yeah. Well, and that is a really good point. We didn’t start in 2020 from producing zero pieces of content. We started in 2020 having this conversation, “Let’s do one blog post a month. We should do a couple of videos. There’s this thing called livestreaming,” and sprinkling that in. And then 2021 was really like, “Okay, we’ve started content. Let’s pick up the pace and do a little bit more,” so that way, by 2022, we’re like, “Okay, we have the basics down. Now we’re able to grow and expand upon that.”

Robyn:

Yeah, that’s awesome. I happen to know what this next person’s one more thing is, so I think it’s a natural segue into Kristyn. What was the one more thing you wanted to share?

Kristyn:

It was really tough for me to choose a one more thing. I work with my clients on so many digital marketing strategies and tactics and trying to pick between what I learned this year in social media and what I learned in email marketing and content creation and all of these things, All the Things, no pun intended for our podcast, but thinking back on all the things of 2022, my one more thing that I take away from this year is goal setting, better goal setting and project management. It’s okay for my goal and my professional development goal for 2023 to just be to get better at what I’m already doing. I don’t have to have these lofty goals of bringing on a new service for myself or bringing in these new skills that I need to learn. I can just get better at what I’m already doing and the end result will be better for my clients. 2022 is my step into my second year as a service provider versus an in-house marketer and it’s my first full calendar year being a service provider, so I really learned a lot about myself, my project management, how I interact with clients, and how I can better interact with clients. So that one more thing, set those goals and it’s okay if those goals are small because the end result will compact into something bigger.

Robyn:

Right. It makes me think of, I’m sure you’ve seen it, Kristyn, that cartoon where it shows a segment of a step or something like that or segment of the line showing progress and it says, “You are here,” but there’s incremental steps each time. But then when you look at the big picture, that’s when you see the progress over time. And we talked about this when you started, too. I remember saying, “You got to give yourself a year.” You just give yourself a year to figure it out and then we’ll dive into making it better. For what it’s worth, I think you have done an incredible job in doing that. And yeah, I think 2023 is going to be a great year for you to just make it even better than it is now.

Kristyn:

Thanks. Yeah.

Robyn:

You’re welcome. Yeah. Okay. Rae, how about you? What was the one more thing you wanted to add to this conversation?

Rae:

I would say my one more thing isn’t really something that I learned in 2022, but it’s something that I will be really singing from the rooftops in 2023, something that we see in websites and we’re trying to drive home. We are really highly encouraging our clients working on new websites to be hyper focused on the user experience. And one of the reasons that we even bother to say that, because it seems so intuitive, right? Well, what else are you doing? But we find in many law firms that there’s other people talking about what should be on a website or how they want to organize navigation or what a practice area should be called and if we’re not encouraging our clients or law firm clients to focus on their audience, which could be pretty vast, not just their clients but referral sources or potential laterals or other hires, we need to encourage them to lay the foundation for the website in a very hyper audience way, focus on that user side of the website, not just listening to what the person in the office has to say about it.

That’s something that we think about in the design and the layout, and we want those decisions to help guide the site map and other things our design and move forward in that way. This goes back to what Taryn said earlier. Once we build a site, then we need to go back and look at what we did. Is it working? Are we still staying as hyper-focused on user experiences we set out to? Maybe there could be a scenario where you planned for something super simple. We planned for people to click on a certain call to action and it’s not happening. So going back and looking at the data, are folks able to understand the structure? Are they doing what you expect them to do?

Now obviously, we’re going to guide our audience on a site to take certain actions and engage in a certain way with a website, but ultimately, we need to ask questions like, well, what do they want to do on the site? What are they looking for? What are they expecting? And we need to always meet that level of expectations. I think it’s the absolute worst if a person comes to the website and is confused, then they’re definitely not going to stay, they’re not going to engage, and they’re certainly not going to convert into a client on your website if they can’t find what they’re looking for, so I think that’s a big focus that will push in the next year. I don’t think we need to focus as much on what is trendy, more on focused very highly on the user experience.

Robyn:

It’s so interesting to me because I actually think we as an agency, to a certain degree, fell into our own trap a little bit because we are so close to the marketing side of things and conversions and looking at all of those things. I know it’s not necessarily the use case that you’re describing. Somebody thinks they know what somebody wants. We made a lot of decisions for our own website based on testing and experience and analysis and all of these different things. But even we are going through, as you know, what you’re going through right now looking at, is this actually working the way we expected it to and enhancing it and improving things on our website that aren’t necessarily performing the way we anticipated to improve that user experience, exactly as you’re saying.

Rae:

Absolutely. And that’s something else that we drive home over and over again, that a website is never really complete. It’s not a finished product, it’s always a work in progress. And going back and doing that testing is so important. I mean, we put together personas and described a type of a person who might come to the site and what they’re looking for, what they want to accomplish, and then going back and looking at heat maps and saying, “Well, are they clicking where we expected them? Well, it looks like if they’re confused or if they’re not making the behaviors that you want them to take or you anticipate that they take, then where’s the disconnect?” so using and then using that data to make adjustments. It’s a little different than the chart you were just describing, where you’re incrementally getting better. It’s that we’re driving closer and closer to the horizon to get closer and closer to complete, but it really never is totally finished because you’re always making adjustments.

Robyn:

Yeah, for sure. Well, speaking of data, my friend Dan, I’m sure, has something data specific here to share with us. What’s your one more thing?

Dan:

Yeah, absolutely. Building off what Rae was saying, I think that data has become a top three priority in legal marketing departments across the United States, I think, and I think that’s the way it should be today. We have multiple devices that people are using that are connected to the internet. You got your laptops, tablets, iPhones, speakers, whatever, smart TVs. There’s data being created everywhere every second of the day and our clients and even us, internally, are starting to ask more questions of that data, so your analytics and your measurement are more important than ever nowadays. And not just setting it up and forgetting it, not just adding the bare minimum of Google Analytics on your site and saying, “Okay, we’re good. We have Google Analytics. “No, you need to make sure you’re, to Rae’s point, going in and tracking button downloads and things like that.

We saw that Google Analytics actually changed the game in terms of announcing a change to Google Analytics 4, which flipped the way you set up analytics, and I think that opened the door for a lot of other providers who do website analytics to get their name out there, whereas in the past it’s just been, “Oh, well, we just need Google Analytics.” Now, because people are frustrated with the way GA4 is being set up or the way it was executed or just a little bit confused and are looking for something a little bit more familiar, these other providers have started to pop up. I think the other component of this data, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention anything about privacy, right? GDPR has been around for a while now, but here in the United States we have multiple states passing legislation around user data privacy and perhaps there could be a federal one coming down the road in 2023, so making sure that your data is clean and you’re tracking all the things that you need to track and you’re respecting user’s privacy is something that everybody should be doing as we move forward into 2023.

Robyn:

Yes, all of those things, Dan. It’s funny because I got lost here just thinking about, God, what if there is a federal mandate in 2023? Do you think it’s going to be that soon, 2023, from the federal side?

Dan:

I don’t know it’ll be that soon as far as federal, but there will certainly be more states. I think there’s seven now already, so certainly more states will participate in having some sort of policy.

Kristyn:

Oh, we all have an opinion on this.

Robyn:

What were you going to say, Kristyn?

Kristyn:

I was going to say that I think that, this is my opinion, I don’t know anything. I feel like those regulations, such as G.D.P.R., are going to take a lot longer to move at the federal level because when’s the last time they updated the CAN-SPAM Act at the federal level and all of the email spam regulations? It’s been forever.

Dan:

Valid point.

Kristyn:

It’s not really up-to-date.

Rae:

That’s a good point, but if we’re working in a digital space that can be accessed by a person from any place, from any state, unless you’re going to find some way to block your social media, your website, whatever, your podcast from reaching someone in a certain state with those rules, it doesn’t matter. One state that creates those rules is effectively impacting every other state in the U.S.

Kristyn:

Yeah. And I do it as a best practice for all of my clients, for email marketing specifically. I always adhere to G.D.P.R. regulations and C.C.P.A., California Consumer Privacy Act regulations just in case, because you never know. It’s best to go with the most strict than to go with the least strict and get in trouble.

Taryn:

And while I am a big advocate of understanding yourself what everything is, I think that we’re going to see a lot of the major players in C.R.M., email marketing, social media, anywhere where that information is being stored really with their finger on the pulse of what’s happening so that way when they’re rolling out updates to their products, they’re staying at compliance. I think they tend to err more on the side of whatever’s most restrictive seems like the best path forward because they don’t and we don’t want any clients to be caught off guard because it meets the lowest level and there’s several regulations that are more restrictive. So that’s also, I think, good to note it doesn’t necessarily have to be super overwhelming, as long as you understand what your product, how much they’re adhering to the different rules and regulations that are coming state, federal, or even international level, because some of those regulations really impact businesses that might appear to be doing work in the states, but might have a couple outliers internationally.

Robyn:

I’m just sitting here thinking, Taryn, make a note for our content machine in 2023. We definitely have to focus on privacy because I’ll keep my opinions to myself on this podcast since it’s not what we’re here for, but I do think it’s going to be interesting to see how, to your point, some of the people who really are the closest to this, the companies, are actually focusing on this issue and how well they’re doing to address it and stay ahead of it. I’m a little bit of a cynic, so I don’t know that I think that they all are, but maybe they are. I’d love to be surprised.

Taryn:

Well, for law firms, let’s be honest. Law firms are already held to whatever standards of their state bar when it comes to communications with clients and prospects, so this isn’t significantly different. This is just another layer of understanding what you are and aren’t able to do. Welcome to legal, everybody else.

Dan:

And if anybody’s going to be able to understand privacy regulations, it should certainly be law firms reading all the fine print there.

Taryn:

Or it should be. Well, Robyn, we have all gone through our one more thing for 2022. What is your one more thing for 2022?

Robyn:

Oh, lordy. I think my one more thing is, and it’s funny because it’s not meant to be in disagreement with what Kristyn said. I think it’s in parallel to. I think it’s don’t be afraid to dive into big things. Unless you’re living under a rock, if you know me, you know that I dove into Follow Friday headfirst this year and I’m putting together a conference for International Women’s Day 2023, which again, if you know me, you actually might realize that this is outside of my comfort zone to a certain degree, not so much the event execution or planning or orchestration, but just to say, “Hey, I’m going to do this thing. I don’t know how I’m going to pay for it, but it’s going to happen.” That’s what I’m doing and I’m doing, as I close out the year, getting ready to really hit the road running within three months of having that happen in 2023.

Throw yourself into something that feels outside of your comfort zone. I love that image. Two circles, here’s your comfort zone and outside your comfort zone, that’s where the magic happens. I really am trying to live that and embody that. But again, just to tie it into some things that were set on here, I guess to tie a bow on this podcast, you have to not be afraid to jump off the cliff and take a leap of faith and try something big. But at the same time, in the back of your head, you’ve got information that helps drive you in a specific direction and you’ve got experience, ideally, and you’ve perfected and worked to improve how you approach certain things, so think of all of these things as one package. You have to try things from all angles. Does that make sense?

Taryn:

Well, yes. And what I really like about what both you and Kristyn have said in this conversation, I like what you’ve both said on its own, but what I think it really illustrates is that there’s not one size fits all solution for everybody. We don’t do the exact same marketing plans for each of our clients. We don’t do the exact same website for our clients. We really sit down with each client and each project individually to think through, to Rae’s point, about being hyper aware of the user experience. What is it that we need to be doing to deliver the best product to meet the goals of our clients? You and Kristyn both said the same thing in different ways. I think it really brings you back to, what do you need to do in your personal development to reach the goals that you have right now? And sometimes your goals are huge and big and sometimes you’ve just gotten done with a huge and big goal and it’s time to take a step back and really focus on some of the smaller parts that you’ve been implementing so that way, you’re perfecting that before you move on to the next big thing.

Robyn:

Yep. Agreed.

Taryn:

Well, speaking of big things, we have made it to the one year mark of the One More Thing podcast, which is very exciting. Listeners will know that this was my baby and something Robyn and I have been talking about for a very long time, pretty much since I started, so I am personally excited that One More Thing and more broadly, the All the Things podcast, has made it to its first birthday. Join us next year for additional episodes of all of our All the Things formats. We have a lot of exciting new content coming, not just in the podcast, but to our live streams, our written content, our social media, video, as well we say All the Things, and One More Thing, we’ll be dropping the last Friday of every month in 2023. I hope everybody has a great new year and we look forward to seeing everybody in 2023. Thanks for joining us.

You have been listening to All the Things, the podcast from Legal Internet Solutions Incorporated, where we bring you all the things, whether it’s three things we learned, hearing from a legal marketing insider, an ask me anything session, or that one more thing we’ve been dying to tell you all month long, but couldn’t. That’s All the Things. Our next episode will be out in a week wherever you get your podcasts and you can join us for the live events every Friday at 12:30 Eastern on our LinkedIn Channel for our livestream.