My dad texted me the other day informing me that Caitlin Clark is appalled by her rookie contract compensation and has formally committed to play in the EU. I hadn’t heard anything of this nature, so I asked him to forward the source of this shocking news headline. This is what I received:
120k views — that kind of virality is no joke, but do you know what is? The channel breaking this news is entitled “MGTOW Dating 304 – Reactions.” Clearly the authoritative source we all go to for breaking coverage for anything sports-related. If you take a few moments to look at some of their more popular videos, the titles and thumbnails are all eye-catching and divisive, simply engineered to get as many people as possible to view and comment in a bout of cognitive bias and self-affirmation.
There’s actually very little news about any connection between “Caitlin Clark” and “playing in the EU,” but the one source we can (hopefully) entrust to officially clear the air of this supposed shakeup in the sports world comes from a subdomain of USA Today, which I think is OK enough to lean on for this fabricated dispute.
When I mentioned this to my dad, citing that the YouTube channel is devoid of anything reputable or reliable, he responded with a half-acknowledgment, which made me wonder: With information continuing to come at us from every angle—meaner and quicker than ever—how do we even trust sources of information nowadays?
Why Should You Trust Me? Why Should I Trust You?
The relationship between law firms and their marketing vendors has historically been unique, often marked by contention for decades. However, over the past five years, there’s been a noticeable shift. It seems like this period marked a turning point when agencies began to excel by becoming more consultative, transparent, and specialized in delivering consistent results and a positive client experience.
Law firms often have an inherent distrust of legal marketing agencies—and for good reason. Historically, arrangements were likely one of the following:
- The agency was unresponsive and condescending but provided results and felt like it was a necessary evil to retain an agency so the law firm would grow.
- The agency was unresponsive, condescending, AND clearly too expensive, but it provided results. Again, I felt like retaining an agency was a necessary evil so the law firm would grow.
- The agency was responsive, personable, and fairly priced, but it provided literally no value to the law firm, all the while stringing the law firm along for months on end with promises and concessions.
- The agency was a complete black box, and the law firm had no idea what was going on at any point.
I don’t think these problems are as widespread among established agencies, but with a surge of new agencies competing for market share over the past 3-4 years, it raises a crucial question: How can anyone truly determine which agency is “trustworthy”? More on that later.
As they say, trust is a two-way street. We’ve turned down law firms with ratings on their GBP of less than 3.5. We’ve gotten a heads-up from the previous agency that the client was “toxic” and to be wary of invoices being covered. At first, this seemed like the musings of an agency bitter about the departure, only for them to be seemingly precognitive in nature several months later. The means we use to vet for trustworthiness in a client and a news source are likely not very different.
Navigating the Claims of Being “The Real Deal”
After examining the advertising of lawyers, those offering MMM services, and the services of our competitors that didn’t live up to the hype, we’ve identified the qualities that tend to undermine the reliability and trustworthiness of these sources.
Sensationalist
“You won’t believe this one trick that got this law firm 100 more cases in 3 months!”
What’s notable about this claim is that it’s possible it actually did happen—once. Representative of what it takes to replicate this continuously for multiple practice areas and geographies, it is likely sensationalist and, frankly, anomalous.
The parallels are there, and though I don’t want to associate dismissal of creative tactics with extreme skepticism, I think most of my agency peers and close client relationships have similar sentiments of aggressive yet realistic expectations and the high improbability of any “one thing” changing the trajectory of a law firm or an agency. We know it takes consistency and dozens—if not hundreds—of incremental adjustments to sustain long-term success. This mindset alone creates enough dismissal of the “one trick/hack” not to pursue the hype.
Urgency/Alarmist
“If you don’t get on this new trend, your competition will leave you in the dust.”
This sentiment carries the same supposed gravitas as sensationalism. Any business failure to take action or grow will eventually have long-term deleterious consequences. If we jumped at every immediate opportunity that presented itself, we’d be completely fragmented in meaning and vision, leading to a significant imbalance in priorities and the distribution of time and resources.
How we manage opportunities and trends is thorough and calculated. For example, with AI, we knew the first and obvious iteration would be content, the next would be SEO research, and then eventually automation. We didn’t react immediately to content simply because ChatGPT produced poor-quality results, no matter how sophisticated the prompting. It wasn’t until a few iterations of ChatGPT that we could rely on it to produce supplemental content that was relatively close to what we consider the low end of human capabilities, as far as our team was concerned.
I’ve communicated to our SEO team over time the paradoxical nature of doing SEO, and here are some high-level takeaways:
- An SEO must be both proactive in addressing SEO issues and patient in letting SEO adjustments play out over time.
- An SEO must always be privy to changes in trends and emerging tactics, and absolutely fastidious about execution of fundamental best practices.
- An SEO must quantify progress, interpret objective data such as analytics, and be creative in strategy and execution. SEO is both an art and a science.
I try not to quote myself too often, but quite some time ago, I stated that all AI has done up to this point—early 2024 when quoted—is “expose how content the average marketer was with mediocrity.” That proved true as burnout became common in advertising and marketing communities due to the low standards set by the overwhelming volume of messaging and marketing copy we’ve seen throughout the year.
In an example of actual urgency and shifting into an opportunity quickly, when we audited our lead sources at the end of 2022 and saw the ascent of local and GBP, we started assembling a local-only team to focus only on these optimizations, which has paid off tremendously for our clients for almost two years at this point.
When urgency becomes self-serving (i.e., “If you don’t get on this new trend, your competition is going to leave you in the dust. Good thing we do it, so you should work with us.”), the presentation of urgency almost immediately becomes moot. Read the industry and ask your network if those particular approaches or strategies are truly an opportunity. It is very rare that one agency has figured out an approach that is completely revolutionary and not intercepted by any other agencies unless they give it a distinctive name—like “GEO” for “Generative Engine Optimization”—which supposedly addresses AIOs, or “AI Overviews,” that currently can’t be manipulated in any way.
Longevity
The last few years have seen an increase in the volume of boutique agencies (< 10 employees) that are methodically taking market share one one-millionth at a time with their client base (< 30 clients). They’re your ex-Find Law ex-Morgan and Morgan ex-Scorpion ex-Justia crowd that had success to a degree in their field there but are rolling the dice with the break-off agency approach. Though technically, there isn’t any reason to assume they aren’t capable, and a good portion of them are doing a decent job, many haven’t approached their pivotable ages of 2 or 3 years, and in an industry where you need stability and a proven track record of long-term client relations, some of the fledgling agency still feel like fly-by-night operations when compared side-by-side to the agencies of 10+ years.
Reputation
Simply put, what do people have to say about this agency? We can look at reviews for both agencies and law firms, but we know that times are changing with the legitimacy of verifiable sources.
Typically, if there is a huge ascension for a law firm or agency, someone’s getting screwed along the way, or corners are being cut. This isn’t always the case, of course, but if we know our industries as well as we think we do, we know that often, someone’s back was the stepping stone required to get to the next level.
Data-Driven/Opinionated
Tied into the sensationalist/alarmist repertoire, strategies that aren’t substantiated by data aren’t typically worth looking into. Claims and case studies based on opinion or conjecture aren’t reliable.
Here’s a hypothetical but realistic conversation:
“We got 100 cases from this one trick!”
“What was the trick?”
“We joined Facebook groups, posted, and got reviews for our clients on GBP to enhance their social validation.”
In this hypothetical, we’re completely in the dark about all of the following:
- What kind of Facebook groups were involved?
- Was it the attorneys themselves or someone posing as a community member?
- What was posted? Was it textual or visual? Was it informational/educational or advertising? How often?
- How many reviews, what kind of reviews, what was the review velocity, and how long did it take?
You can almost look at all of this like a press release – if you can’t establish the who, what, when, where, why, and how, you’ll never get approved.
Work/Life Balance?
I once had a client say of their previous agency, “They were pretty good to work with, but man, did I hate seeing their owner constantly on vacation and showing off all of the exotic places he was traveling to.”
Maybe this type of vanity and overt display of success and/or hyper-success may work with some people, but it normally doesn’t mesh well with us. We think the most successful people are those who don’t have the time or vanity to show off. If the display of wealth and power is what serves you best, we wouldn’t be a good fit.
Gating Information
Our core value is being forthcoming and willing to provide high-caliber content and information without gating it with a marketing tactic. Being thought-leading is everything—if we wanted to hide information with a pop-up or other necessity for information, we’d just say, “Being thought-leading after you provide your phone number and email.”
How You Can Be the Real Deal and Be a Pillar for Your Community and Beyond
It would be easy to say the “real deal” is simply doing the antithesis of the aforementioned sins, but it’s more than that. Many of the characters I’m alluding to attend many speaking engagements, publications, podcasts, videos, and much more. In fact, many times, they’re even more visible than what I consider to be “legitimate” sources. In my opinion, the reasons for this are typically:
- Because the information is often thin, self-serving, and sensationalist, they normally don’t mind repeating the same information and creating a surplus of content as it doesn’t necessarily have to be keenly helpful or supported by research, surveys, or other data.
- These are agencies that thrive from lead generation and business development from these sources alone, rather than word-of-mouth and referrals from keeping their heads low and developing the most important lead source that any professional services business can grow from.
- These agencies represent a single personality, which needs to be matched by an especially large ego.
Nevertheless, these would be a handful of ways to garner credibility in the age of questionable information and thought leadership.
Published/Speaking Engagements
It’s more about the “what” and the “where” here. It’s one thing for an agency owner to spend time educating clients on the foundations of marketing and advertising, operations, and creating a strong internal team. It’s another of the speaking engagements aimed at other agency owners, boasting about how much they’ve grown their businesses by profiting from you for years.
Perhaps that works for some, but these wouldn’t be the speaking engagements that would further develop trust with those looking to serve.
Unfortunately, with publications, it’s becoming easier to produce swaths of mediocre content with AI. Couple that with ghostwriters who have been used for years, and you have a book for the sake of being a book and not much more. There are two ways to address these potential gaps in publications: seek endorsements to verify legitimacy, check reviews for the book, and read 5-10 random pages online to ensure the writing’s voice and effort appear genuine.
This all being said for this section, no, I am not a published author (yet), so I don’t have a book to sling at you. But when I do (and I do have a core manuscript), I can guarantee that it’ll be several months of painstaking writing and editing, with half of the content being purged at the end during a bout of me saying to myself, “What the hell were you thinking when you wrote this?”
Straight Information with a Discernible Tone
Be honest, forthcoming, and enthusiastic about your willingness to help. There is no legitimate reason to withhold information at this point; not only does it come across as untrustworthy, but it is also a complete deterrent, considering there are so many other sources of information people can look into nowadays.
Community Expectations
You offer a crucial service that can deeply impact someone’s quality of life depending on the judgment, but this isn’t a pro bono venture in its entirety. Charging for legal services is a capitalist venture, so the firm’s representation, besides making money and legal outcomes, is an important consideration. Consumers look for professionals such as lawyers and doctors to have another level of contribution to communities, such as donations, charities, sponsorships, and scholarships.
Why Choose Market My Market?
Trust can be hard to find in a world saturated with information and noise, but at Market My Market, we focus on being straightforward, transparent, and committed to your success. We provide clarity and accountability through detailed reporting, real-time updates, and clear communication. We’ve seen the pitfalls of sensationalist marketing tactics, and we’re dedicated to consistency, using data to drive your growth without gimmicks or short-lived trends.
Our commitment to transparency sets us apart. We don’t hide behind vague promises or secret strategies. Instead, we create customized 30-60-90 day plans so you know what we’re working on every step of the way. With a focus on real results, we help law firms grow steadily and reliably. Let’s start a partnership built on trust. Call (800) 997-7336 or visit our contact form to learn more.
