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Adam Kerpelman:
Do you use keyboard shortcuts?
Brian Jones:
Some.
Nick Rishwain:
Yes, I do use some.
Brian Jones:
I didn't really think about wanting to know keyboard shortcuts and then I look them up and I can never remember anything.
Adam Kerpelman:
Have you ever in your life had a cheat sheet printed out and on the wall next to your computer?
Nick Rishwain:
No, I still go to Google for it.
Adam Kerpelman:
I actually had a shirt at one point with a bunch of Unix or not, it was terminal stuff on it, written upside down and backwards so you could look down at your shirt and read the shortcut off of the shirt.
Brian Jones:
Only when programming did I ever develop all the shortcuts but even then I couldn't consciously tell you what they were. It was all muscle memory.
Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah.
Adam Kerpelman:
Hey everybody, it's The Data-Driven Marketer sponsored by NetWise. I'm Adam.
Brian Jones:
I'm Brian.
Nick Rishwain:
And I'm Nick.
Adam Kerpelman:
Welcome back for another hang in the data basement. Thanks for joining us. And special thanks to our guest this week, Nick Rishwain, who is the VP of Biz Dev at experts.com.
Nick Rishwain:
That's right. Thanks for having me.
Adam Kerpelman:
From a marketing standpoint, as a badass URL, I want to know how much that cost and/or how long ago did someone buy it if you have it now.
Nick Rishwain:
That's fair. Yeah, it was bought in '94.
Brian Jones:
Wow.
Adam Kerpelman:
So probably at a reasonable price.
Nick Rishwain:
At a reasonable price. And in its current form, it was relaunched in 2000. So even still, it's a great domain name for sure and it's served us well.
Adam Kerpelman:
Well, awesome. And thanks again for joining us on here. Nick is a marketer by trade but also a good friend from many previous startup interactions in the legal tech space, stuff like that. Also, I managed to pull him into my sort of crypto side projects.
Nick Rishwain:
Down the rabbit hole.
Adam Kerpelman:
Talk a lot about crazy down the rabbit hole blockchain things. But yeah, today we're here to talk about the day job. Yeah, do you want to tell us a little bit about your role at Experts and kind of how you got there?
Nick Rishwain:
Yeah.
Adam Kerpelman:
Your background, et cetera?
Nick Rishwain:
So I was actually working in local government before Experts. I had a law degree. They were looking for somebody, preferably JD preferred type of position which I had. And I was looking to get out of government and preferably go to private sector because I didn't think I'd have any skills left if I spent another five years in government which I think was probably accurate. And experts.com is an online marketing platform for primarily expert witnesses and consultants. We search, locate, and assist attorneys in finding experts, experts' pay, annual membership fee to market their services on experts.com. And we've been doing that, as we start to entry level into that or enter into this discussion, we've been doing it for 21 years and I've been doing it for 11 years, since 2010. So kind of the tail end of a bad recession which is when, of course, I decided I'd go private sector instead of the comfy government job.
Nick Rishwain:
That's what we do. So in 11 years of marketing expertise is primarily what we do. Content through our website, through ads, through email, that's kind of been our whole job. Very specific legal vertical which is expanded out into more consulting as well, a wider variety of consultants who just don't do the legal side of it. But probably bread and butter has been serving lawyers. So we kind of have a marketplace where you serve the lawyers as one user and the experts as the other membership.
Brian Jones:
How does one find themselves in the position to have, presumably, a day job but then also be like, "I'm going to be an expert consultant for lawyers and go into court and share my opinion," because that actually sounds really appealing to me?
Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah, I was going to say it's a crazy thing that that market exists. You don't think about it, like people watch procedural dramas all the time and it's like the experts are just there and the lawyers call them.
Brian Jones:
And they just show up on TV.
Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah, there's a whole thing to make that happen and then there's a back and forth about do you want a witness that's going to say the right stuff for your side of the case versus the other side?
Nick Rishwain:
And for any experts who's listening to this, you're not that expert. You're not getting paid to give that advice. You're being paid for your objective opinion but there is. I'll have attorneys who ask me, "This is the answer I'm looking for."
Adam Kerpelman:
You're not supposed to answer shop.
Nick Rishwain:
Yeah, you're not supposed to. And chances are, look, there's plenty of reasons for them to think... Some will say, "No, this is not my case," and others will agree because there's a valid difference of opinion. But how does one get to that, Brian, was your question and it's generally several years. Although this is rapidly changing. But it's generally probably a decade or more of some sort of expertise. You're a doctor who's been practicing an ER doctor for five or ten years so you've probably seen everything that the ER has to bring your way. Maybe you've got residencies and all those things so oftentimes doctors may not even get into it until 15 or 20 years into practice. You've worked for a major chemical company as a chemist for 10, 15, 20 years.
Nick Rishwain:
Generally our... and again, I mentioned that this is changing rapidly especially in the technology space, where some experts are really quite young now. But for the vast majority of over 1,400 areas of expertise, you're generally seeing somebody who's mature in their profession. Oftentimes, it will be a academic as well who studied something in depth or you get the non-academic folks, those who have been in construction for 20 or 30 years that just got all that experience. The kind of famous... Maybe a little dated for the listeners to this show, but the kind of famous example of it is in the movie My Cousin Vinny where she had just worked in a garage for years but there's still very much a need for that what some might call blue collar or they just have experience in the trade and they can still make really great money as an expert.
Brian Jones:
Interesting. So to kind of place the product then, does that pay well? It seems like it would or a doctor is not going to sign up to start doing this.
Nick Rishwain:
Yeah, it pays very well. It pays very well depending on where you're located. It's going to pay less in South Dakota most likely but New York... and it depends on your expertise. Your human computer interface or electrical engineering, your ER docs, you're looking at $400, $500, $600 an hour. Biomechanics and medical doctors sometimes not uncommon for them to have a $10,000 daily retainer for trial. So yeah, it pays quite well.
Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah and it stacks up to a lot of hours because you can't just show up at the beginning of the day and hang around until you get called. [crosstalk 00:08:48].
Nick Rishwain:
And you tell them, you're paying me for the entire day.
Brian Jones:
Interesting. Well, I'll be signing up afterwards.
Nick Rishwain:
Sounds good.
Adam Kerpelman:
So Nick, you gave a great answer. The counter side of your great answer for what an expert is which is what everyone hopes as an expert, legally speaking, you're allowed to call anyone as an expert who has a better than average understanding of the topic and then you ask them a bunch of questions to establish that.
Brian Jones:
To qualify it.
Nick Rishwain:
Yeah, you got to qualify as an expert.
Adam Kerpelman:
So it can actually be a pretty low bar. So it can actually sometimes be a stunningly low bar.
Nick Rishwain:
This really just sadly depends on the judge who is technically the gatekeeper of this. In fact, we've had... On the professional Twitter, I've posted a variety of recent ones where they have sent the case back to the trial courts because they didn't do a good job of qualifying the expert.
Adam Kerpelman:
Interesting. As is true with any guest we try to bring on here, there are a lot of layers to interesting things that we can talk about here.
Nick Rishwain:
That's true.
Adam Kerpelman:
Brian alluded to you guys are working with a tech product that is an emergent need of a fact that exists which is it's hard to find these experts. I know from my experience and growing up in a legal family that kind of once you find the experts you like to work with, you try to keep sticking with them. And then when that guy retires, you're really disappointed because now you got to find a new expert and that's a giant hassle.
Adam Kerpelman:
You guys have a platform, as you described it, it started as a directory but has increasingly turned into what you call a marketing platform. I think maybe an interesting thing to chase is what have you lived through in terms of that evolution because I think it's a really interesting case study as you watch something that... It's also the legal vertical so you're not necessarily looking at the most tech savvy user base.
Nick Rishwain:
Group, right, right.
Adam Kerpelman:
But regardless, the market is pulling a tech solution out of suppliers like you guys who are providing this thing. So you've kind of probably had to get pulled along with the legal marketplace that's going, "I guess this stuff's online now."
Nick Rishwain:
Yeah. I feel like we've tried to be in advance of... Of course, I think we were, 21 years, we would have been far in advance of the legal industry. But yeah, I've been over a decade here and you do see some significant user behavior changes in that time. When I started, we would get the calls or the emails predominantly from attorneys who were in search of somebody and it used to just baffle me because they would just call us to do the search for them. They just didn't understand how to search the site and it was baffling. And that has slowly, slowly, sadly very slowly disappeared over time. The lawyer side of me who wants them to move into the 21st century would like it to go faster.
Nick Rishwain:
And some of this is... We are a stark contrast to the way they used to locate experts and we're not the only ones who do this. We think we do it better than most but it used to be that you would pick up the phone and call a broker who would then add a markup to every single billable hour. But as everybody's budgets have gotten a little bit tighter as they try to do more with less, even though law firms are having record breaking budget years or revenue years, they try and cut out those things where they don't need to be spending additional money. So why am I spending 40% more on each expert hour if I can get the same expert going through experts.com? And I can contact them directly right when I need them, search on the site and find them.
Nick Rishwain:
The two most serious user behavior changes I've seen is the reduction in calls or emails from attorneys because they are searching the site which has required us to alter the data that we provide to our users in their accounts. And the second probably most impressive and certainly for somebody on the cusp of being a millennial but probably a zennial or whatever they call it, most interesting change has been even the experts, the paying customers, our members, preferring to be contacted more by email than by phone which that's been an interesting... and now converting even more to text, although email is still predominant for us. So those two user behavior changes have been interesting a little over a decade.
Brian Jones:
I was going to ask, I think you kind of just answered it there though. But your classic two-sided marketplace, a lot of websites, a lot of businesses work that way these days, people trying to find other people. So it sounds like the experts on the site are the paying customer.
Nick Rishwain:
Correct.
Brian Jones:
And the lawyers or attorneys or legal firms are looking for [crosstalk 00:14:59].
Nick Rishwain:
Law firms, yep, government agencies.
Brian Jones:
So from a structural perspective, I was kind of clicking around the site, it seems like you just want to drive tons of legal traffic to these individuals because there's no business model for you on the lawyer side. The business model is for these people to pay for leads essentially. They're paying you for lead gen.
Nick Rishwain:
They're paying us for lead gen or contact, referrals essentially. They're paying us so that others can find them so that's lead gen, I guess, if you want to break it down to that. They are paying us to help give them a better presence online, some who have no website even today and some younger folks who have no website which is, "I don't want to maintain a website because I'm an ER doctor and I don't have time to maintain a website so I'm going to put myself out on the Internet through somebody who's reputable."
Nick Rishwain:
But yeah, that is it. There are ways to make money off of the lawyer side but our kind of drive has been to reduce the cost of litigation and by doing the way we've done it, it allows us to provide that service for them for a reduced cost by the member pays for their advertising through us or their marketing through us.
Brian Jones:
So who is your primary target with your growth strategies? You got to get both people.
Nick Rishwain:
Yeah. So the primary for our growth strategy... I guess the primary would be you always want more paying customers bottom line. For any business, you want more paying customers. There is an opportunity for you to do that with the lawyers but we found that predominantly, even in Am Law 100s, they want to do that research themselves, not cost the firm that money. So growth strategy, you want to get more leads who are in this probably mature level of their practice who maybe are looking for a change, maybe they operate an independent consulting company and they are looking to maybe work less and earn more because you can do that with the expert witness work, maybe you want to work just a little bit on the consulting stuff.
Nick Rishwain:
Always good to remain active in your consulting business or your actual primary practice, whatever that may be, because you'll get questions about that. But maybe they just don't want to put in the 50, 60, 70 hour weeks anymore and if they can pick up a 50 hour or a 100 hour or a 500 hour expert witness engagement, it could be a pretty significant chunk of money without having to maybe deal with all the other customers that you're dealing with. A lot of people just want to pick up three to six cases a year, maybe one or two cases a year depending, so it can be a stream of income or it can be a full-time business. Certainly, the full-time business of expert witnessing can come back to bite you as Adam kind of alluded to, that this will come back to bite you if you're not still have your hands active in whatever industry you're in.
Brian Jones:
Right. No, that makes a lot of sense.
Adam Kerpelman:
If you appear to be a professional witness, it's something I would use against you in court.
Nick Rishwain:
Yes.
Brian Jones:
I'm a professional expert.
Adam Kerpelman:
To discredit you in court.
Nick Rishwain:
I haven't been in a surgical room in 30 years and I have no idea what robotics they're using in those.
Brian Jones:
It's the not the job title I'm going to really buy when you hand me your business card. "I'm a professional expert."
Adam Kerpelman:
So yeah, it's an interesting... Like you said Brian, it's a two-sided market problem which means that you probably have two separate funnels.
Nick Rishwain:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Adam Kerpelman:
You just mentioned you've got to get experts to sign up but then you also have to get the firms ultimately to come in and hire the experts through your... or find the experts through your platform.
Nick Rishwain:
Right.
Adam Kerpelman:
I guess to back up before we kind of get into the nitty-gritty of funnels and things like that, you mentioned providing data for the customers which I think is interesting. You talked about the transition from being a directory where the main drive of the offering was that you're aggregating a whole bunch of names of experts so that they can [crosstalk 00:19:49].
Nick Rishwain:
And providing them with the referral.
Adam Kerpelman:
Right. Into more of a marketing platform where you're, in some sense, helping the experts market themselves. That has turned them into data driven marketers and so far as those experts are now coming to you and saying, "Well, can you tell me how many people are looking at my profile? Can you tell me where they're clicking?" I'm curious, more specifically, what the emergent data requests are in that context where you take somebody who...
Nick Rishwain:
Yeah, so since our existence, we've always had the ability to track a lot of activity on an individual profile. Not unlike if you check your analytics on your Twitter profile, that kind of thing, impressions. I think the free Twitter analytics is pretty scant on what they allow you to check but it's essentially impression.
Nick Rishwain:
So we do impressions. Any time you have to be able to provide ROI to people who are marketing. If they can't see who's contacting them or that people are actually looking for their services, then they don't know what they're getting if somebody doesn't mention your service. Which is when we had the whole... Where we were in the center facilitating more referrals because the attorneys were contacting us, we have a cloud based system that shoots that referral out and it registers in their account. We can show them, "Hey, this is one of the contacts we sent you." We still have that ability but the user behavior has changed some and more, as we talked about earlier... User behavior change, so more people picking up the phone, contacting the expert directly, although we would track their impressions and their click throughs to their website and impressions by category of expertise and then keyword searches and clicks on their CV and a wide variety of those things, we had to build out some internal proprietary analytics that track the visitors essentially. And you could only track so many that you can identify. Some of it is just if somebody is searching from a VPN or something like that you can't track.
Nick Rishwain:
So we built in the actual... which probably you guys provide some of this data through NetWise where you can actually see who is visiting the profile. And so when you tell them, "Hey, I saw that Reed Smith," or, "I saw Covington & Burling..." Brian, these are just law firm names, Am Law 100 names, Kirkland & Ellis. When you can show them that these are who's looked at your profile, that tells them something. Then they go back and they check their records and say, "Oh, yeah, okay. I do see that we got a contact from them. Okay, I know the right people are looking and that they're visiting our site or your site and our profile and oh, look. I see that they did come over to our website." It's just that we had to make it more backend friendly so that they could... and make this data available to them in their accounts so they can check in real time.
Adam Kerpelman:
The part I love is just that as software eats anything like this, it turns into a data driven enterprise. People don't even think about it that way because they say, "Oh, well, it's likes," or, "It's share," or, "It's Retweets." But what you're watching is the number. You're watching that metric and your KPI and you're watching it increment and maybe not for the good of the world. You're inclined to put up the content that's going to get more of that reaction. In the social media context, it's ridiculous. You're talking about Retweets and stuff. But in the professional context that you're talking about, it makes sense if you're presenting the right profile to be getting the jobs that you want to get ultimately.
Nick Rishwain:
Yeah.
Adam Kerpelman:
I'm curious, do you guys end up helping people at all with their platforms or downstream advice from that data in terms of if you presented your headline this way or your [crosstalk 00:24:25]?
Nick Rishwain:
We do. There's a service component to it even as a SAS product. For a lack of a better term, we still do a lot of the drafting of the profiles. We got a lawyer on staff who's been drafting these profiles for like 15 years, knows what they're looking for, knows what an attorney's looking for.
Nick Rishwain:
So a lot of other directories, they'll just have... and I understand why they do it, they'll have somebody else... They'll tell you to put your profile together yourself and they look like somebody put it together themselves. I get that you reduce that labor but it also doesn't make for a very good appearance. It doesn't help the expert put their best foot forward. It doesn't help it more narrative style. We usually use a more narrative style in the profiles to help them understand what is the most important aspects of their expertise the way we see it and the way we understand it in the legal community. Now, if they know something else, they may want to tweak that and they can do that at all times. But at an entry level, we will draft that for them. I'm sorry Adam, what was the question there? I fell like I went off on the actual service component.
Adam Kerpelman:
Oh, no. That was the question.
Nick Rishwain:
Was it?
Adam Kerpelman:
I was just curious how much... All of this ends up being sort of cascading feedback loops that once the metrics are there and people see the metrics, then they start saying, "Well, how can I improve my profile?" And then it becomes [crosstalk 00:26:07].
Nick Rishwain:
And really I think that it is a great little container of information for them to then go and improve their website. And if they get an idea, they're listed in these 10 categories on experts.com and they thought, "Man, I'm going to be found..." And I'm trying to think of a good example right now. They're going to be all about the accident investigation, reconstruction. That is what I do. That is a very common area of expertise, huge need for it. That's where they're going to be looking for me for my expertise.
Nick Rishwain:
And then you find out based on your categories that look, the predominant searches are coming to your profile in biomechanics. Well, that's good information for you to have for your own website. That's really good information for you to start thinking about where you want to write your articles that appear on experts.com because you've got now some details that you didn't otherwise have and if they're coming to...
Nick Rishwain:
Maybe they want that black box data out of the car and that's where they're... So they're not interested about having you figure out how many feet it was from the curb and how many feet it was from the median but they're interested in the black box data and you're getting most activity there. Well then you probably want to push your marketing on black box data. Maybe you ought to get some blog posts up on your website, have some separate content over on experts.com so that you're not competing having non-canonical information on two different sites, and blast this because now you know that that's where people who are legally thinking are looking for your expertise.
Nick Rishwain:
So yeah, there is downstream from that... We have this conversation with members. We don't actually do that downstream for them on their websites but I try and drive it home any chance I can. Look at all this data. Now, think of what you can do with this data to better market your services overall. You now know how people are looking at your expertise.
Adam Kerpelman:
Right. So that's actually a great segue to the bit about sort of the marketing side of everything you work on. What you just alluded to is the part where you need to bring people in to find the experts and that means that you're ultimately marketing yourself as a good place to find experts. But then also marketing the experts because you have this... Again, marketing's so complicated now. The best way to market your product is to do a thing that... If anyone follows you on LinkedIn or Twitter will see you doing on a regular basis which is publishing articles co-written or primarily written by the experts on a topic related to their expertise that's published through the platform. So it's not just about plop in a directory and then [crosstalk 00:29:12]. You're out there deploying some sort of best practice marketing strategies on behalf of the people that sign up as well. Same thing, like you said. It's not just list black box expertise on your profile, it's also, "Well, we can help you write an article about that and that would raise your SEO, essentially profile for that kind of stuff."
Nick Rishwain:
It's so amazing. So this is one of those scary fun things to talk about when you have a domain name like experts.com. Probably eight times out of ten, if they write an article with a decent title about black box data and auto accident reconstruction, that's probably too general but I'm trying to do it for those who maybe are unfamiliar with this space. But if they have a good title like that and it's tied to experts.com and we publish it on our site, and this is again why we've kind of turned a marketing platform because if they're regularly publishing content through their profile and we can help them adjust those articles, probably eight times out of ten, I can find these articles on the first page of Google in an organic search.
Adam Kerpelman:
That's awesome.
Nick Rishwain:
So yeah, it's really fantastic because we try to put out actual expert, not like those article farms. You guys remember the article farms, right?
Brian Jones:
All you can remember.
Nick Rishwain:
Yeah. Just the trashiest article written by nobody listed.
Brian Jones:
It still dominates when you're looking for good information [crosstalk 00:31:01].
Nick Rishwain:
Yeah. So when we have actual experts with their name on it that we can actually see, that has been beneficial for our members and there's been good information on our site for a long time so if they take advantage of this, it's, "Okay, maybe this comes to your article on experts.com but in that article, it's got your name, your email address, your phone number, and your website and they can find you from that. And then write something separate over on your site. Maybe related but separate content so that you're not cannibalizing the content from two different marketing avenues.
Brian Jones:
It's interesting hearing you talk about what you do for your customers because my head is trying to put your business into traditional buckets of clichéd marketing terms and in a way, you are an agency for individual, small businesses at a massive scale and I'm guessing tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that are experts in your system. In that way, it's really neat how you're helping them curate their brand and you're helping them identify signals in data.
Brian Jones:
Like you mentioned, these people, a lot of them have probably never searched for SEO. They don't know what that means. They don't know how writing an article works with Google. And so you're serving an agency component there but then you're also kind of a platform that sits on top so you have another layer of marketing you're doing for yourselves.
Nick Rishwain:
Yeah. It's a really interesting place to be and Adam will tell you this from the legal side of things, it's a really interesting place to be in anything marketing related. The expert witness things are really slim vertical. The consulting thing really can be massive and that's why we've sold that. We now sell that as a separate because if you've got expertise, any sort of it...
Nick Rishwain:
There's this thing about every expert witness can be a consultant but not every consultant can be an expert witness because not everybody's going to... Your yoga consultancy may not have a need in litigation and that might not be the case. But yeah, you're right. We've had to do a variety of things with marketing so we market to attorneys and we market to experts and strangely enough, we have a wide variety of visitors who come from government agencies and universities, very common as well.
Nick Rishwain:
My favorite ever is when I get a notification that the CIA is searching our site because I feel like they should be able to mask that and not let me know that.
Brian Jones:
Or look it up in their own database or something. Don't you know who the expert that you need?
Nick Rishwain:
Yeah. Is this person not on your payroll already?
Brian Jones:
I don't know if that makes me feel better or worse that they're...
Nick Rishwain:
I don't either. But I also know the United States Post Office is regularly coming to our most visited article ever on certified mail so it is not clear for them at their own office.
Brian Jones:
That one makes me feel good. I feel like the Post Office is just a business that does a great service and I want to help them out.
Nick Rishwain:
Right, right. But they go to an outside expert because they can't even figure out the differentiations between two of their own products.
Brian Jones:
That's hilarious. The other piece here that's really interesting from a data perspective is how... This is the nature of computers but everything ultimately breaks down to an information structure and retrieval problem and then an information exposure and an education component. And you got the side where you're working with your expert customers to help them identify what content... what conceptual buckets do you go into, what information that's relevant from your CV or articles that you've written feed that, and then you, on the other side trying to reach the customers who you're bringing in for them, you're having to expose that information and using all the tricks and tactics of SEO and SEM and teaching them how to analyze that data. It is the nature of what marketing has always been but it's never been so digitized as it is now where you have to conceptually... You're just bucketing and labeling and organizing and structuring information.
Nick Rishwain:
Right.
Brian Jones:
How have you seen... That's a very technical problem in a lot of ways, linguistically technical and topically technical, but then also, at some level, databases and information storage at an IT level. How have you seen the business evolve over time as that has manifested as more and more technical for the business? Like you said, you built your own analytics system.
Nick Rishwain:
Yeah. So probably not unlike other companies we've seen where a lot of our emails came through Outlook and things like that. We still get receipt through Outlook. But probably the main change in the last decade was going from just having a CRM to having the HubSpot style platform which is... We don't have HubSpot but I say that as one that probably everybody recognizes. For the email marketing, for the landing pages, for all the inbound, outbound tracking of who's clicking, who's opening, and breaking down segments because we have a [inaudible 00:37:12].
Nick Rishwain:
We've been in business for 21 years, almost 22 years. We've acquired massive amounts of data in that time. User data from both the lawyer side and the expert side and some random people who come to the site because they think they need an expert but maybe they don't or because one of our articles performs incredibly well and they think that we handle cleaning up their audio, butt dial from a spouse who they're convinced is already cheating. We probably get one of those once a month. It's not what we offer but maybe our member does who wrote that article.
Nick Rishwain:
Yeah. At a certain point, you have to have the CRM interacting with your out-flowing marketing or your HubSpot style marketing platform. You guys know the technical term for what HubSpot is.
Adam Kerpelman:
Inbound.
Nick Rishwain:
Inbound, yeah. And we use it. Inbound, we do a whole variety of those things and it's through massive segments because we have these lawyers. This is one that people never think about. They've got their email list and they're told to use their email list all the time. Make sure to keep that email list going out. If they're not opening it, you're wasting your time with that and you can't just send the same email to everyone. We can't send our member information to lawyers because it doesn't make sense to them. A news letter may be able to go to everybody. But we can't send the same stuff to prospective members as we can to past members or those who may want to renew.
Nick Rishwain:
You have to have segments for that, win-back campaigns and lawyers and educating the funnels just to educate along the line. You see people who build up those lead scores where you're like, "Okay, this person's looking at enough of our stuff that I think they're going to buy one day." There is a whole bunch of that and having that HubSpot style machine is probably...
Nick Rishwain:
For a couple of years when I was here, we had to make sure everything was in the CRM. Now, it's make sure everything is in your CRM as well as your inbound and those two have to be communicating with each other. And the information that you have in there has to be in our database on the site so that we're contacting the right people, the right individuals with the right information. But I think the inbound is probably the largest change, that and putting out our own content, webinars, educational options for members who are generally desperate to hear from attorneys as to how they can improve.
Adam Kerpelman:
So I think that actually gets to maybe a good place to start wrapping up. Which my last question was, we've talked a lot about organic stuff and I'm curious, just from a top-down view, what you media mix is basically when it comes to... because compared to what we deal with at NetWise, we may never reach the domain authority that experts.com is going to have. So I'm curious what the breakdown ends up being between the traditional paid, make sure you're in front of people awareness stuff versus really being able to go in hard on the SEO type stuff and the organic and, like you were saying, all the nurture cycles and [crosstalk 00:41:09] after the top of funnel programmatic whatever stuff.
Nick Rishwain:
Yeah. This probably differentiates from the MarTech kind of background that you guys have where you see a much broader variety of marketing and businesses than I do. I see a huge variety of businesses as far as expertise but the expertise that they're marketing is all very much similar or what they're trying to achieve is all very much similar, the ends they're trying to achieve.
Nick Rishwain:
So I'd say that for a... Hands down, we could not do what we do without that email marketing. Without email marketing, that's where the sales are done, period, these days. Social has led to some sales. Social has been good for brand name, brand authority, visibility, interaction with customers. But without a doubt, the primary thing to driving new customers and new users on the legal side is email. That's where this particular vertical lives. That's where probably most of the experts live. They are still in that space and they kind of do their day to day through email. So that is predominantly our focus.
Nick Rishwain:
Yeah, but then SEO, we certainly do that. Probably less necessary for us because of our organic ranking than for some people with less notable domains, but still a necessity. Had really great branding. Pre-pandemic, I used to love the results we were getting from Facebook ads surprisingly and being able to track those pixels and re-target users through Facebook ads. Not that I noticed that we closed huge sales through Facebook ads, but there was more data to be found. Find out who's clicking over, find out who's interested in that article, is it our target audience? Honestly, Facebook ads, much like Google ads or Bing ads, which I know you guys are laughing that I even mentioned Bing ads.
Brian Jones:
Number two. It's out there.
Nick Rishwain:
It's out there.
Adam Kerpelman:
Well, number three if you count YouTube as a search engine.
Nick Rishwain:
Right. But predominantly it would start with email and then we spent our time down at... Pre-pandemic, I was doing way more Facebook ads than I've been doing recently. I won't even talk about LinkedIn ads because their ad manager is such a piece of shit that I can't stand it. Even though it should be the place for us to be doing our ads. It's just so awful.
Brian Jones:
Poor LinkedIn. I have a lot to say about LinkedIn.
Adam Kerpelman:
That's what happens when Microsoft buys things. But I think what's interesting and it's actually... This literally came up in a meeting earlier today that Brian and I were on as we were working out scaling our marketing machine and talking about metrics and stuff. Sometimes the point of the ad spend is just the data which is kind of what you're saying about Facebook. You said you get a lot of information coming in off of the touches you get on Facebook, although that's not necessarily going to be the platform to close a deal in the type of business that you're talking about.
Adam Kerpelman:
And that sort of creates an interesting thing where if you're trying to justify an ad spend for example, there may not be a concrete link between that and funnel analysis through to an ROI indicator as directly as some people might want. And so it kind of gets to that space that we also like to talk about on here which is as much as we can make stuff data driven, sometimes you're putting the ad money in just to get some more data on that user so you can direct them to other places in the funnel. But you may never be able to say, "That dollar that we spent on Facebook is the reason we got that customer." So things get simultaneously more concrete and less concrete as you start to pull more data into the system.
Nick Rishwain:
But there is the overall and, as Adam knows, I think of myself as a little bit of like a friendly troll and there is the fun, high profile trial taking place where maybe I geofence near the... not on Facebook ads, but maybe I geofence somewhere near because there's going to be the courthouse and I blast them with how to get expert witnesses or I post just an article by one of our members that's a forensic related article and I drive it within a mile of where the courthouse is, just to see. Just to see.
Adam Kerpelman:
By the way, you're following this Holmes case, kind of thing.
Nick Rishwain:
Right. And I haven't done that in a while. In fact, lawyers got in trouble for that. And I wouldn't normally sell something that way but I might put a relevant article within that area just to see what I might get out of that.
Brian Jones:
So many interesting avenues to inform people these days.
Adam Kerpelman:
Unfortunately, we're out of time for this week's [crosstalk 00:47:00] discussion. Yeah, Nick, thanks for joining us. This was great.
Nick Rishwain:
Yeah, my pleasure.
Brian Jones:
Yeah, thanks for sharing everything.
Adam Kerpelman:
A deep dive on a different use case. So other than experts.com, where can people find you?
Nick Rishwain:
@expertsdotcomvp on Twitter. I have the two Twitter accounts. And @nickjrishwain on Twitter. So one belongs to the company and if I'm not the VP, somebody else will so we sort of built it out that way. And those are probably the best. They can also find me at LegalTechLIVE. That's where Adam and I first met was through his LegalTech startup and my podcasting related to that stuff.
Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah, I was going to mention that if you didn't in this context. Definitely check that out. A lot of interesting conversations at LegalTech which is interesting tech sector because it's 10 years behind everything always. So it's interesting to be in a place where all this innovation is happening but no one's using it.
Brian Jones:
It's a great place to be in a way.
Adam Kerpelman:
[crosstalk 00:48:14]. It's very interesting.
Nick Rishwain:
I have this weird thing evidently of finding myself in these very narrow legal niches. I don't know what's going on there but it is.
Adam Kerpelman:
Working it out so far.
Nick Rishwain:
Yeah.
Adam Kerpelman:
Awesome. Well, thank you for joining us and thank you to everybody for listening to another episode of The Data-Driven Marketer. I'm Adam.
Brian Jones:
I'm Brian.
Nick Rishwain:
And I'm Nick.
Adam Kerpelman:
Take it easy everybody.
Nick Rishwain:
Thanks guys.