Speaker 1: 0:05

Should I still be using a software as a service? Landing page service. Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. Today we are once again talking about landing pages. We've talked about landing pages a few times before and while I'm going to repeat some of that in this episode, make sure you go back and check out our previous landing page episodes so that you're up to speed. Some of these are subscribers only, so go ahead and subscribe so you get access to those episodes, and you're going to get access to the new subscriber only episode on the first Monday of every month. But if you're like any of the other attorneys listening, you've probably asked yourself is that monthly subscription to lead pages or Unbounce, Is it worth it? Is it really still worth it once we've been testing for two years? Let's get into it.

Speaker 1: 0:49

So first we're going to start with why these SaaS landing page services. Oh, and I'm going to call these SaaS from now on, instead of saying software as a service 14 times in a row. Let's start with why these services like Leadpages became so popular in the first place. It's really not hard to see the appeal and if I breeze through some of the names of these products kind of quickly, I'm going to try and put links to all of them in the show notes, but again, I suggest running this through something like MacWhisper and having it do some notes for you. But these platforms things like Leadpages, Unbounce, HubSpot's landing page system they were built to make creating high converting landing pages easy and fast, even if you don't have a tech or development background.

Speaker 1: 1:32

First there's the drag and drop functionality. This is key. This is a lifesaver for non-technical users, like, really in a lot of ways, myself even. It makes it easy to move elements around the page, tweak designs and preview mobile layouts without writing a single line of code. Sure, I can code, but it's just way easier to do it this way. And for legal professionals or just busy people in general, fiddling with HTML is not what we want to be doing. So this drag and drop stuff is huge.

Speaker 1: 2:02

And then we have the pre-built templates. Forget drag and drop, it's already ready to go. And these aren't just any templates. When we're talking about lead pages, we know that they're optimized for conversions because you can sort them by the conversion data that's going to those pages Lead pages. Lets us use that information to decide what's going to work for us. And when we look at these templates, we're going to find layouts that are designed to specifically capture leads, do consultation bookings, do downloads of eBooks or guides. These ready-made tools have already been tested and fine-tuned and they're ready for us to pick up and then use that easy drag and drop thing to make them our own. And then there are the built in analytics and AB testing tools.

Speaker 1: 2:44

Different platforms have different versions of this, but they all have something, and most of them allow you to build something on top of them. And these features let you track performance, experiment with different things like different headlines, images, calls to action, and usually with just a couple of clicks we can see different variations of our page and which one resonates the best with potential clients. And this is all important because for us, even in an industry like law, where it's really not that critical to be fast a lot of the time, we do want to be fast enough to stay ahead of our competition. When we're launching something that's time sensitive too, that's really important to move quickly on, and these platforms allow us to hit the ground running, and we don't need to wait for a web developer or someone more experienced than us to just okay, let's put our text together and get going. And there are a couple of other benefits, like the integrations with things like Clio, Grow, CRM systems, Zapier. All of these things make it really easy for our landing pages to flow directly into our pipeline, saving all the manual data entry hassle, making sure we don't have anybody slipping through the cracks. But the main thing here is that these integrations because they're being used by all the users of these platforms they're ready to go for us and these services can be really beneficial for, basically, businesses like ours, because they're fast, they're flexible and they're built with conversions in mind. These are the main things that we care about when we're trying to get started with our marketing.

Speaker 1: 4:12

But there's a serious question, especially if you have moved beyond that stage of starting out with your marketing, If you're getting a little bit beyond that, and really even if you aren't getting beyond that, there are some disadvantages, some little drawbacks, and especially for established firms that are looking to scale marketing efforts. Look, let's just take a closer look at the potential pitfalls. The subscription model is convenient at first glance, but it can become a pretty significant expense over time. Most landing page services were charging somewhere between $35 and maybe $150 a month, and that does sound pretty reasonable, but we have to think about the long-term picture. After two years, at $100 a month, we've spent probably enough to build a custom-built solution, even if it's just HTML and JavaScript, that is exactly tailored to our needs. That doesn't come with the ongoing fees.

Speaker 1: 5:07

With certain elements of campaigns, it can become really obvious where these recurring costs can start feeling more like a drain than a worthwhile investment, especially when the platform's capabilities can you know. In some cases they can feel a little bit limiting, and that's because sometimes, when it comes to customization, it's a little bit of a sticking point. Saas platforms offer templates that are designed for general use. They might be, you know, something that's designed for a fitness e-book and we're repurposing, you know, to align a little bit more with our brand's tone and identity, but it's not exactly perfect. So we might be trying to force fit our firm's messaging into a one-size-fits-all mold and after a little bit of testing we could figure out. Like you know, we know a certain amount of information about what we want to do and, okay, I think we're ready to go for for something custom. And some of the platforms I'm not going to name names, but while they do promise ease of use.

Speaker 1: 6:00

Sometimes, when you're trying to do something more advanced or do something that's a little bit breaking the platform, let's say, that requires some technical skill. And if we want to add a unique feature, integrate with a niche tool that isn't directly integrated with the platform, that could mean hiring a developer, defeating the whole purpose of what we're arguing is a user-friendly service, and I don't want to scare you on that point, but it is a real concern that at a certain point in our development do we have to hire someone, who's more expensive than if we had done this in a custom variation on our website. But look, this really isn't the biggest issue here. One of the biggest issues when it comes to SaaS products is ownership. This is a big downside. With SaaS, we are renting our landing pages. If the platform shuts down or decides to raise their prices or we decide to switch providers, we could lose access to everything.

Speaker 1: 6:52

Migrating our content it's possible, and migrating it from a platform to HTML can usually be a little bit easier, but the reality is it's cumbersome most of the time and in a lot of cases it just requires starting from scratch or, at the very most, copying and pasting a lot of content over and this just disrupts momentum and it's frustrating when it comes to controlling the assets and the marketing strategy. Long-term, the ownership of the platform and the ownership of your pages is something to think about. Don't get me wrong. These SaaS services are a great starting point. They're really good for brainstorming, they're really good for getting a project going. But when you get a little bit more established, when you get a little bit more into a rhythm, they might be tough to align with your long-term goals.

Speaker 1: 7:38

But if these SaaS platforms like Leadpages, Unbounce which again I think are fantastic and I do like using, but there are just downsides and we need to be aware of them and if they aren't meeting your needs, look, don't worry. There are a lot of alternatives that offer really good flexibility, control and solve most of the issues we have here when it comes to long-term value. So here are some of my top options to consider Some of the things I really like doing. Number one if you've talked to me before, you know I like WordPress and WordPress is great A custom solution. It's one of the most popular alternative because WordPress is a totally custom solution.

Speaker 1: 8:16

Obviously, we've talked about the drama in the WordPress community and there's a lot of stuff going on with WordPress, but the reality is it is a self-hosted platform and whether you're working with a host or you're hosting it yourself, you are not constrained by the limitations of a SaaS platform and you own those pages outright. And that scalability is a major advantage. Whether you need a single page or a dozen, WordPress can handle all of it without requiring a larger subscription tier. You can do a million pages if you want to. The only recurring costs are for the hosting and maybe a premium theme or plugins and a lot of the time. Those are actually one-time fees, so they end up being a lot less expensive than a SaaS platform.

Speaker 1: 8:56

Over time and plugins like Elementor, Beaver, Builder, WP Bakery, which is my personal favorite, they bring that drag and drop functionality to WordPress, making it a little bit more user-friendly even for non-technical users, and I would love to say that these tools are going to allow you to create these highly customized professional pages that fully align with your firm's branding, without the ongoing fees of SaaS service, without any strings attached. But there is a string attached here, and while we can get a lot of things done with WordPress fairly easily, you will find very quickly that it's hard to make things look perfect on WordPress without having a developer fine tune things. But there are a lot more options for that because WordPress is such a huge community. And that brings us to our next tactic, which is hiring a freelancer or an agency. Because, look, most of us as firms we really don't have the in-house resources to hire a person to create this. So hiring a freelancer off of something like Upwork is a really great option. Or hiring an agency While it's a little bit more expensive, you usually get a little bit more hand-holding and you don't need to lead the project as much yourself. These professionals can design and build pages that are exactly tailored either to what you say you want to the freelancer or to your actual needs. Often when an agency is involved Not knocking freelancers, but they just take more management and sometimes in marketing, it's good to have professionals involved and this ensures that every element, from the visuals to the calls to action, that just the entire content of the page it's all supporting your marketing goal or whatever it is you're trying to do with that page. This approach is going to have a higher upfront cost than just going straight to WordPress yourself, but the results look I don't want to get into a whole discussion about ROI, but long-term, compared to a SaaS subscription, especially when the pages are built for long-term use. I really like this strategy and to support it we can even use AI tools, so things like Jasper Writesonic, even just ChatGPT itself. We can use AI to streamline copywriting and these design processes and they can help us generate compelling headlines, calls to action, all that marketing jargon and even sometimes page layouts, depending on the product, and it takes a fraction of the time it would take manually and you can just clean it up, make sure it's what you want and send it off. These tools are particularly useful for firms that are launching new campaigns frequently, or even just for small firms, because they're a fast, cost-effective way to generate fresh, optimized landing pages without having to do a lot of thinking about it. You can just get an idea, clean up the idea and see if it works.

Speaker 1: 11:36

And lastly, I want to talk about the hybrid model. This is really what I recommend. I tried to say this at the top of the alternatives, but what we want to do is start with a SaaS landing page. This is either for anything time sensitive or where we're still experimenting and once we transition to a rhythm or something a little bit more stable. Then we can rely on the custom built pages for the long-term or the higher traffic initiatives. Higher traffic initiatives are good because the SaaS pages may have a traffic limitation. This allows us to have the best of both worlds we get the speed when we need it and we get the control when it matters.

Speaker 1: 12:11

But that hybrid approach the reality is that's sort of the best option. There isn't a really good, one-size-fits-all option for this, and whether you're sticking with a service or moving to a different service or moving to a service alternative, it totally depends on your firm's needs and resources. So I've asked Chad GPT to help put together a decision-making framework for this. A couple of questions that we can ask ourselves to decide whether or not we should switch or we should move, and I think what it's put together is pretty good. Obviously, your mileage may vary with this, but let's start here.

Speaker 1: 12:48

How frequently are you launching new campaigns? If your firm runs multiple campaigns each month, the cumulative cost of SaaS subscriptions might outweigh their convenience. Alternatively, infrequent campaigns might make SaaS a practical, low-maintenance choice. So that's a pretty easy answer. If we're launching really frequently and we have tons of different stuff going on, then SaaS might not be a good idea because it's too expensive. But I can also say on the flip side of that that if we are launching really frequently and we have the resources to move things to a longer term solution, then SaaS is a good place to get that started and our developers can recreate that in a long term solution on WordPress or on our other website provider. So I might disagree with that a little bit, but I do think that the question is the right question to be asking.

Speaker 1: 13:35

Number two is do you need advanced features like A-B testing or rapid deployment? Number two is do you need advanced features like A-B testing or rapid deployment If these tools are central to your strategy? Saas platforms can save time and provide robust analytics that would otherwise require additional plugins or development. And here's one of ChatGPT's little hallucinations. Again, I absolutely agree with this question Do you need advanced features like A-B testing or rapid deployment? If so, SaaS landing pages could be a good option for you. Yes, that's absolutely true. As far as robust analytics, I definitely think that varies from platform to platform. I would absolutely urge installing some global analytics so that you can get information from all of your traffic everywhere and see the whole picture rather than pockets of the picture. But I do agree with the question and I think SaaS pages this is exactly. The cool thing about them is that the A-B testing software is usually built in, because we've lost access to things like Google's Optimize. There's been changes and there's still cool tools out for A-B testing there, but when it comes to doing it for a landing page, just having it all built into the software really is the easiest way to do it in my opinion, and it doesn't require a whole bunch of other stuff. When it comes to actually building the pages long-term, different story. But for A-B testing and quickly setting up pages so we can test ideas, absolutely, SaaS pages are great for that.

Speaker 1: 14:54

Number three does your firm's branding suffer due to template limitations? If your pages look generic or fail to reflect your firm's unique identity, it might be time to explore a custom solution. Consistent and professional branding can set your firm apart in a competitive market. Yeah, I guess I agree with this. I don't know if I would put this number three. I think there are a lot of things that could be limitations. Is your firm suffering due to limitations of SaaS in general Because this could be a traffic limitation. It could be that you need more pages for different objectives. But, yeah, it's definitely common that the customization just doesn't really stretch to the point. We need to reflect the firm accurately and in a lot of cases, I do think it's more of an issue of, okay, let's just fit what we can into it and use colors that people trust, because that's really what we want to go with on landing pages anyways. But at the same time, there are definitely design things and more and more firms are being very design conscious. But there are things that we want to do on landing pages that the landing page services just don't really support. So, yeah, if it's suffering due to template limitations, well, you may be investing a little bit too much in paid advertising or whatever you're using landing pages for.

Speaker 1: 16:09

But I do think this is a good question to consider. But I would broaden it a little bit. Are you having a challenge related to the limitations of the platform more broadly, whether that is flexibility, cost testing, lots of different things? I've had issues with particular platforms about tracking, where they weren't tracking things through to providers accurately, and that's a big issue as well. Let's move on to the last question, number four how much are you willing to invest in long term solutions?

Speaker 1: 16:36

Custom built landing pages and WordPress sites require a higher initial investment, but eliminate ongoing subscription fees. Consider the total cost of ownership over time and I would agree with this. I don't know if we really need this question, but it is a good one. You do need to think about the cost of the SaaS service versus the cost of creating those pages long-term. Ultimately, with a SaaS service, if you use it long enough, it is going to be more expensive than the custom solution. But the ways to fall into that trap really kind of only require negligence, so we just won't even go there at the moment. But yeah, it's something to think about. For sure, If you are really rapidly trying to scale things, then getting that rhythm going with creating the long-term solutions is probably worthwhile. It will bring costs down, but long-term it's just a cost-benefit analysis here, or really a cost analysis.

Speaker 1: 17:30

How do we determine whether or not the landing page solution is going to cost more than just going ahead and building it ourselves? And a lot of the time it's going to be that hybrid situation where, hey, we do need to test quickly. We want these features, but at a certain point we're going to know, hey, this is what basically works and we just need to adjust a few things every now and then, and we don't need to be paying X number of dollars per page for that, when we could be paying X number of cents per page for that. So for some firms I will say SaaS platforms look, they remain a really smart choice, especially if you're a small firm. You don't have tech support, your resources are really limited. $50 a month for a few pages is great.

Speaker 1: 18:10

And the simplicity, the accessibility of these tools can help us focus on what we're actually trying to do, whether it's deliver legal services or some other marketing, while keeping this element of the marketing manageable and quick, Because we really don't want to spend too much time screwing around with the technology of landing pages when we could be focusing on what the content of the page is itself.

Speaker 1: 18:32

And SaaS also works really well for the short-term campaign kind of stuff, whether it's a holiday campaign or something related to a disaster.

Speaker 1: 18:41

In the unfortunate situation where that occurs, we can get a page spun up quickly, reviewed, check out the content and then deploy it Wherever it is. We need to deploy it without the significant setup costs or the time or all the kinds of things that come with going to developers and having to try to speak their language. So, whether you're building a marketing team that is built to be nimble or you're building a marketing team that is built to be a behemoth of client acquisition, these platforms are a really great tool, and I don't actually want to say you should or shouldn't be using them. Actually, you probably just should and then you need to evaluate when it's time to move on, and those questions that ChatGPT generated for me will hopefully help create a framework for when it's time to move out of the SaaS platform. Lead pages, unbounce, whatever it may be, but ultimately that decision's up to you. I'm going to keep using these platforms and I'm going to keep transitioning people into HTML landing pages, but for today, that's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out RosenAdvertisingcom for more Thanks.