Four Key Elements Of Any Successful Digital Marketing Strategy

Four Key Elements Of Any Successful Digital Marketing Strategy

Tim Fitzpatrick
Is it possible to get real qualified client leads on repeat? The answer is yes. And our special guest today has been helping law firms do this for a while, and today he's going to share some of his is best off so that you can start getting clients on repeat, too. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult. All you need is the right plan. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I appreciate you. Today, I am really excited to have Leonard Scheiner
from Geek Haus with me. Leonard, welcome and thanks for being here.

Leonard Scheiner
Hi, Tim. Thanks for having me.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Absolutely, man. So before we jumped on, you had mentioned you have two home bases, Southern California and Miami. You're in Miami now?

Leonard Scheiner
That is correct, yes.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So how do you determine how you split time? Because I would think Miami is getting to be a really tough time of year to be in Miami because of the humidity.

Leonard Scheiner
There's definitely a weather difference. Being born and raised in California, living 30 years of my life in California, it's different being in Southern Florida, but I feel lucky that I'm able to split my time and I enjoy both locations immensely.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Do you spend specific times of year at each location or do you just kind of like wherever the wind takes you?

Leonard Scheiner
A little bit of both. I definitely like to leave Florida in the summer. It gets incredibly hot here, as we could expect, but the winters here are amazing and so some of it is driven by my personal desire and then some of it is also driven by client work. So I do travel. Not a tremendous amount for clients, but for some of the things that we do, like on site days or producing some creative video photo type content. Yeah, we have to be on location and I have to share that it's my favorite being on location with the client, getting to pull them out of their shell and capture the essence of their personality that most people don't usually get to see.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Awesome. Well, I'm going to ask you some rapid fire questions to get things started here. Are you ready to jump in with both feet?

Leonard Scheiner
Let's do it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
When you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?

Leonard Scheiner
At the dog park or at a botanical garden. There's an amazing one in Southern Florida. Fairchild Botanicals. It's amazing. It's almost like Lotus Land in Santa Barbara. Different enough that I can enjoy both.

Tim Fitzpatrick
And what kind of dog do you have or do you have multiple dogs?

Leonard Scheiner
One dog. It's my single fur baby. 16 pound Pomeranian. So that's really like 4 punds of body and the rest fluff. Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Nice. What's your hidden talent?

Leonard Scheiner
Hidden talent. So I think that I'm a pretty good vegan sushi maker. Secretly.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. Vegan sushi. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Leonard Scheiner
Are we talking about business wise or personal wise?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Either one. It doesn't matter.

Leonard Scheiner
Okay. I think probably it would be personal then, because after we pull off the layers of friends and business and family, we're left with ourselves. And so the best advice that I got was from a dear friend, and she told me, do what always makes you happy. And if it's not making you happy, there's a reason. To tap into what brings you joy. And I have taken that not just only in my personal life, but also in business as well. If there's problems or whatever, I like to address them. We're all on this planet to support and be in relationship with each other. And so find what makes you joy and solve the things that don't.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Love it. What does success mean to you?

Leonard Scheiner
Freedom. Freedom in any respect. Freedom of time, freedom of finances, freedom of heart, any of that brings immense amount of success feeling.

Tim Fitzpatrick
And where's your happy place?

Leonard Scheiner
With my 16 pound fluff munchkin, of course.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes. Now, do you like the beach? I mean, you've grown up in Southern California and living in Miami. Is that another happy place for you?

Leonard Scheiner
I do like the water. It's funny because I don't like to go into the water, but I like to see the water. So I lived in Los Angeles for about seven years, and I think I actually touched the water, the H20, maybe two times. But I would go to the beach place frequently, so we like to see it. And then that's not a far translation to here in Southern Florida, around the Miami area, water all over. You know, you go to lunch or on a bridge crossing water, you're always around water. So I like it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What qualities do you value in the people you spend time with?

Leonard Scheiner
Integrity. I used to enjoy the energy or the excitement of someone, and I still do. But when it comes down to it, it's integrity. Are you your word? Can I count on you? If things go sideways, are we going to work together to figure it out? Really, can I trust you? Yeah, that's what it comes down to, because if you've got trust and integrity with someone, you can work through almost anything.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So I touched on this in the beginning. You're working primarily with law firms at Geico. Just tell us a little bit more about what you're doing. How are you helping them? I know you are working with other types of professional service providers, but a lot of your business is law firms. So dig into that a little bit.

Leonard Scheiner
Sure. So Geek Haus is a law firm marketing agency. There's a lot of agencies out there that will take on lawyers, law firms. But I kind of grew up in law firms in-house in different marketing capacities. And so it's kind of like in my blood, understanding how a law firm operates, not just as a service to the clients. But what is the business model behind a firm? And different types of firms have different business models, so I feel grateful that I've been able to work in and understand the different models that firms use to get clients grow, build authority. So at Geek Haus, you're absolutely right, we are a law firm marketing agency, but we do help some other coaches and experts, business consultants really are defining crux is that it needs to be professional services. So that's really where we help. A coach is providing service from themselves. Even like a real estate agent, they're providing a service of themselves. And so what we do for law firms very well. We can also do that for real estate agents very well and other types of coaches too.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So you have a lot of different services. I'm assuming you're doing website design, SEO, content, social. Are you getting involved in email marketing? Anything up, paid ads, anything on the digital side you're handling.

Leonard Scheiner
Everything you mentioned, we check the box on. So it's based on the client needs. I am a firm believer that I don't want to give you an all you can eat buffet. I want to give you a plate based on what your favorite favorite dishes are. And I only want to give you those. So we've had clients who are looking great and they only need lead generation. And so when they come to us, they've got content, they've got a great website, they've got a great brand and all these things. So we can really hit the ground running and just produce results for them. And that marketing is sometimes it's paid ads, sometimes it's organic, depending on the client who their ideal client is for the firm. And so usually that's the client's goal is we need clients, we need marketing. You're going to help us with that. So let's work with Geek Haus. But as I'm sure you know, far too often the client doesn't know truly what they need because that's not the area of expertise. I deal with that a lot. They're an expert in their area of law and they're not a marketing expert. Right. Law school doesn't teach you how to run a business, how to run a firm. It definitely doesn't teach you how to market and establish authority. Become an expert. It doesn't. So the way that we do that, we take the brand market grow approach. So when a client comes in, typically we're working on their brand. So that can look like the typical brand identity kind of what you see visually. Or it can look at brand identity in the sense of who are you, what's your message and how are you communicating that? So we look at their brand, then we market them, we identify who their client is, their ideal client, and then we figure out a strategy that's going to get those people into their sphere. All while we're doing this, we're supporting them to build their authority. So we're building relationships for them so that they are able to get press. We're building relationships that they can be on podcasts, kind of expanding the gamut.

The Four Key Corners of Any Digital Marketing Strategy

Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. Let's dig into what we're going to talk about today. First is with digital marketing and strategy, I love this question because, man, you got to have strategy before tactics. What are the four key corners of any digital marketing strategy that you guys focus on?

Leonard Scheiner
So I like to take it back to the basics. There are frameworks in place because they work. So the four C's of marketing are customer cost, convenience, and communication. And so I like to look at those or think about those when we're coming up with a strategy for a client. So we'll take the first one customer, which in legal and most professional services, we're calling that a client. Some coaches call that a customer. They're synonymous. So in terms of the client, we need to identify who that is. Right? And I think we'll talk about that in just a minute. But we look at who that client is, because everything we do, someone needs to buy it or pay for it. So we need to gear it to the person who's going to be opening up their wallet to make that investment. And so we need to be serving that one person or that group of people specifically versus what I see most times is I'm a lawyer. I want to do this and operate this way. That's great if you're an artist, but that doesn't really work when you're competing with all the other different firms in your local market or your national market. So first is client. Then we look at cost, right? And this is kind of tuning into what our competitors are and who they are and what they charge. And so we're looking at cost. Are we priced reasonably or do we have a value that justifies our cost being more or less, et cetera. So we look at that, then we're going to look at convenience. So how many steps are there between you right now as you stand and getting a new client? So they likely have to call you, then we have to send them a representation agreement. Then they have to pay us. Do they have to send a check or is it a credit card, like all of these very technical things, but most of the time these are not engineered. And so when I was in house at different firms, this was my primary focus because I was able to be there in person. But I micromanaged that client intake process with such acuity, because if you don't, people will drop out of your funnel, and then you're not getting the same ROI that you could. If they're in your funnel, you better shore up those sides and make sure that your funnel is not bleeding. So we look at the convenience and how a client is coming into the firm and that glide path and make sure that it's easy for them. Let's use DocuSign, let's use credit cards. Let's boom, boom, boom. Get them to be a client.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Can we dig into this real quick? Because I think this is a really key point. Most people, correct me if I'm wrong, I need an attorney, it depends on what kind of attorney it is, but they are most likely not calling one. They're calling multiple. A lot of attorneys just offer an initial free consult. My guess is to really tighten up that funnel, that process has to be super dialed in, and they need to be able to speak to that person pretty promptly. Like most legal issues, they're not going to sit around and wait for a freaking week or four days. They need to talk to somebody. They need answers so that they can figure out what they're going to do to move forward. Is that what you've seen?

Leonard Scheiner
Definitely. It's different in various areas of law, as you would expect. So what you're talking about maps directly to consumer law. Right. Like a bankruptcy firm, a divorce firm, personal injury, of course, the one that we all know because we see billboards upon billboards. In terms of their calling multiple people, yes. So when a client calls the firm, we need someone who's answering that call. It should not ring, ring, ring, go to a voicemail. That's a lost call. Right. That's straight out of the gate we lost. So we're going to assume that someone picks up the phone. We're going to assume also that there's an attorney available to speak with that client. Right in the beginning area of time where there's a lot of tension. If we're calling a law office, we're ready to have that conversation as a client. Right. So if it's Tuesday at 02:00 P.m. And I'm calling, I want to talk to an attorney before 230 P. M. Right? But if I can't, am I ready to have that conversation the next day? Maybe. But I might have reverted back into my I'm uneasy. I don't want to talk to an attorney. There's a attention that is broken when it's not picked up on the first call.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So there's a time window specifically for consumer law where they've really got to be on it. Otherwise they're not going to get the business.

Leonard Scheiner
Yeah. And actually, most heavily consumer firms, like a service called live transfer. So when people are calling from an ad or their Google My Business, GMB or anything like that, we're getting live calls transferred to the firm. So that's obviously best. But then, of course, with convenience, we want to also tap into. Okay, they're calling. But how do we create that relationship? Right. Because how do we make it convenient for them? How do we instill that they can trust us? How do we start? That really getting the client invested in us as the service provider and we do that a few ways. One of them ask the client to send you something. Oh, you got sued. Send me that complaint or, oh, you were in a car accident. Send me the photos. Here's my email or you're in a divorce. Okay. Send me something. Get the client to take an action, to send the firm something, because now they've taken an action. There's a tie into that firm.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, four C's customer, cost, we were just digging into convenience. Fourth is communication.

Leonard Scheiner
Fourth is communication. And why that's key is because most clients, or I'll say most attorneys will have that initial consult with the client. And I hear it all the time. If they want to hire us, they'll come back. That might be true. But what's also true is that sometimes the client just needs an invitation to become a client. And I saw this when we see this kind of on the latter side where they've become a client, and then we send them a bill, right? This is kind of more on the billable business, not the consumer side, but oftentimes people are receiving a bill and they just want an invitation to pay, right? Like call them. Hey, did you see that? Do you have questions? No, we'll get it paid today. Okay, great. Then they pay that invoice. Same thing with law firms on the front end, if we have had that consultation with the client, if they're a good fit, send them the fee agreement, send them the rep agreement, because we want to make it easy for them and we want to communicate that we're ready to take the next step. So that's kind of on the logistical becoming a client side. But beyond that, once they have entered our funnel as the firm, we want to communicate our value to them and our philosophy and our personality and tell them things that they're likely going to have questions about. So think about this. I'm a personal injury attorney. I just spoke with a client on the phone. Maybe they're right. Maybe they're not right. We don't know all the facts of the case. I'm going to ask them to send me something, send me photos, send me the police report, send me different things, too, right? Multiple things. That's even better. But then I'm going to put them on a drip of emails that go out to them every day, twice a day, maybe every other day, depending on a few factors. But we want to be top of mind with that person because they might be calling other attorneys or they might just say, that's my attorney. But we need to keep reminding them, we need to keep inviting them to be a client. So in those emails, we're going to tell them we're going to share with them blog posts. We're going to share with them why we started a personal injury practice. We're going to share what rights they have because there's another side. There's an insurance adjuster who's telling them they should just settle and make it easy. Right. So we really need to serve them as if they were a client, not giving them legal advice, but we need to serve them to a degree where they feel part of the family.

Target Client vs. Ideal Client Avatar: Understanding the Difference and How to Pinpoint Them

Tim Fitzpatrick
So you touched on in the first C customer. How do we pinpoint our target client and ideal client avatars? And by the way, when we say target client and ideal client avatars, are we talking about one and the same thing? Are they different? How do you view that?

Leonard Scheiner
I would say that they're about the same. So you've got a target client, you've got an ideal client avatar. Those are pretty synonymous. In short, it's who are you going after? We could say like a target client. Okay. I want business owners. Okay, great. That's your target client. But if we wanted to break those down, who's your ideal client avatar? Well, it's a business owner who has revenues of 2 million or more, 50 employees or more, and et cetera, et cetera. So it's really dialing into who it is. And so I have the conversation most of the time with attorneys, and they say, we want to serve all business owners staying with the same example. We want to serve all business owners. And so we've heard it before that if we're talking to everyone, we're talking to no one. Right. You walk by a Subway or a sandwich shop and they've got their little sandwich sign out there and it says $5 foot long. Great. Anyone can buy a $5 foot long because anyone needs lunch. That's Subway's model. And it works for Subway. But I'm going to assume that your law firm is not Subway. So we can't appeal to everyone the same way with the same offer or really everyone in general. Right. We have to be niche. So what we do there, what I do with clients is I work with the attorney to really focus in on who that is. I was having a consultation the other week, similar situation. And one of the partners said, we like working with this type of client, but we also take this type of work. It was insurance billing work, right? Yeah. And over here they can get 450, 550, 650 an hour, and here they get 250 an hour. And their bills are heavily scrutinized and they're never paid at 100%. Right. It's always some percent anyways.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So you were like, why do you do this?

Leonard Scheiner
Why do you as a 30 year old firm, they've been lawyers for 30 years. Why are you still playing the game to do lost leading type work in the hopes of getting more clients. Do not do that. I'm going to recommend you do not do that. Please do not do that if you want to. That's your prerogative. Of course, they're in the driver's seat. When I work with a client, I Act as somewhat of a fractional CMO. And so I like to be in that passenger seat with the map. But ultimately, most of the attorneys want to drive themselves. And so I said, please don't do that. Let's instead take our marketing budget, our time, our energy and focus where your billable hour is literally two, three X. That just makes more sense. Right. And it was amazing that I saw this gentleman, this attorney, who was probably in his sixtys, and he was just like, that does make sense. It's like he was taking it. I'm sure you had not thought before, but he was taking that as I'm losing a piece of my pie. Right. And I was there to tell with him, lose a piece of a pie because you can get more, you can get a second pie, you can get a third pie. Better client. So in terms of pinpointing who that ideal client is, get specific. And we're going to take some people, we're going to opt them out of who we're targeting because it just doesn't make sense. Now, if they came and they wanted to be a client, that's a different point of decision to make. But as far as marketing, when we're spending marketing dollars, who are we targeting? We're always going to get people on the fringes. But what's that bullseye? Who is that that we're targeting? And that's all the content, all the design, everything is focused on serving that one avatar of a client.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Everything from marketing starts from that ideal client. If you don't have that in place, then the wheels come off. I want to pull out a few things that you said because I think it's easy for people to miss. One, when you start with the client, what you're doing to help them hone in and pinpoint on their ideal client is looking at their existing customer client base. Right. It is the easiest place to start. I talk about the three power questions. Who do you love working with? Who are your most profitable clients? You just touched on that. And who do you get great results for if you can work with those types of people day in, day out, man, life is good, right. And I think a lot of people, too. When you talk about honing in on an ideal client, all we're saying is who we're going to focus our marketing towards. You're going to get referrals or you're going to get leads that come in that aren't ideal clients. You can choose to work with them or not. It's totally up to you. But we got to direct those marketing dollars towards the place where they're going to get the best return and where they have focus. We just did this for a client whose ideal her ideal clients are veterinarians. And as you touched, it's not just any veterinarian, they have specific attributes. Right. And so we have a very clear picture of what these vets look like. But once you know I'm going to target vets, now you can start to where are they? Where the hell are vets? What associations do they belong to? What groups do they belong to? What podcasts do they listen to, what email list do they subscribe to? All of those things are when you create that list now you have a list of where you can fish, where the fish are, rather than casting a line out in the middle of the ocean hoping you're going to catch something. And that's what so many people miss when we as marketers talk about ideal clients like, why do I need to do this? Well, Jesus, it's because it makes it more effective and it makes it so much easier.

Leonard Scheiner
You got that, I couldn't have said that better. When I first started Geek Haus. So before Geek Haus, I was consulting on my own, and I would work with dental like, periodontists. Right. Like dental surgeons and doctors and experts and authors and celebrities and all of these different people. And it was wonderful because I got to see how marketing works in lots of different industries. And I would never change that experience or train that experience for anything because it gave me such a 360 view. And I realized that if as an agency, if I wanted to have amazing results for clients executed at a high level and really be in relationship with the clients where they had a level of trust, where they were okay with someone else, another agency running the growth of their firm, I knew that we needed to specify we needed the niche. And so Geek haus, from inception, has always been a law firm marketing agency because of that reason. Right. If you ran a veterinarian focused marketing agency and you only worked with veterinarians, you're going to get really good at marketing veterinarians and really skilled at the nuances of how clients and pets and patients come into that practice because you're only focused in that. So focusing is key.

The Importance of Repeatable and Predictable New Client Generation

Tim Fitzpatrick
So let's talk about new client generation. Why does it need to be repeatable and predictable?

Leonard Scheiner
So you brought up referrals before and referrals are amazing. But do we have a lever that we can pull for more referrals, like going to Vegas referrals? No. And so referrals are great. Don't ignore them. They're gravy. We get referrals. I love them. They're the easiest consultations. They're the easiest on boardings that we do because they've got that mutual trust factor from a common person that we both know. And that's lovely. But the lever is what I'm very attached to. So that lever is either ad spend or the amount of cold emails that go out or many different levers. Right? Switches. Some are levers, some are gears, some are throttles. But ideally, we want to have something that is controllable by our accord that we can either bring in more clients, reduce the number of clients coming in, et cetera. So the reason why it has to be repeatable, predictable, and scalable is for that factor. We need a system versus hoping someone refers you.

Tim Fitzpatrick
You can't predictably grow revenue without having systems in place. And honestly, having a lot of businesses that I talked to have built their business on referrals, which, like you said, Leonard, there's nothing wrong with that.

Leonard Scheiner
Great.

Tim Fitzpatrick
But it's not scalable, it's not predictable. And at some point, you're going to hit the ceiling where you're like, gosh. We need to push through this revenue barrier that we have. You cannot do that on referrals alone. You have to start. It's kind of like riding a unicycle, right? If your business is all on referral, you're riding a unicycle. If the tire goes flat, you're screwed. You need multiple lead Gen channels so that you're riding a three Wheeler or a four Wheeler. At least if one of those tires goes out, you're still going to get to where you want to go. It may take a little bit longer, but it's not going to just completely derail you.

Leonard Scheiner
So this is how I explain it to attorneys, right? So I use their language. Whether you're on the plaintiff side or the defense side, on the plaintiff side, you're putting multiple causes of action in there. It's like throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping something sticks right. On the defense side, you've got multiple defenses, and you're going to go in there with multiple prongs to defend your client. So the same applies to your marketing strategy. You need multiple prongs if you're relying solely on Facebook ads or not that there's anything wrong with Facebook ads. But if you're relying solely on one channel, you only got one lever. And that's not a lot of options. And today, especially on the social platforms or just in this world in general, things get shut down, people get banned. It's really unpredictable. So when I'm looking at crafting a solid growth strategy for a firm, I'm taking those items into account as well. So I've had it happen where we launched a firm and we launched them using Facebook ads. And after seven days, the account gets permanently shut. What do you do? You've got a new job and do something different, right? So that's not anything that we did what the client did. It's just welcome to the modern world with social platforms that control a lot.

Conclusion: Four Key Elements Of Any Successful Digital Marketing Strategy

Tim Fitzpatrick
So this has been a great conversation. You've shared some serious value, Leonard. Any last-minute thoughts you want to leave us with today?

Leonard Scheiner
So I share with you, the best advice that I got was to find what keeps you in the feeling of joy. Right. Let that power you. And so I believe that that is true, and that's true for a person, but it's also true in your business. So if you have the clients that are annoying and you don't like them and what have you, and then you have other clients that you love. Look, at that. Pull out your client list, take a highlighter. Highlight the ones that you like and what's the pattern that we're picking up at? The piece of advice that I would leave to the listeners for this podcast is look at patterns in your business. Pick up on the patterns and double down Because if you're picking up on something, there's a reason for that that doesn't happen out of thin air. So pay attention to the patterns.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I love that, man. It reminds me of the quote and I can't remember who said it, but success leaves clues, right? We're just looking for those patterns that have brought us success in the past and we need to repeat it, right?

Leonard Scheiner
If you've been trying to do your own marketing for years or produce your own content or redo your website or do your brand or do anything right, I've been trying to bring in new clients for years and it's just not working. Maybe you're an expert at what you do and you need to find an expert at marketing law firms Because really that's where the rubber is going to meet the road.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So where can people learn more about you, Leonard?

Leonard Scheiner
So we are onlineat gogeekhaus.com and we spell house Haus. The German way. Gogeekhaus.com.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. I love it. If you're an attorney or professional service provider, Leonard obviously knows what the heck he's talking about. Go check them out at GoGeekHaus.com. Leonard, I appreciate you taking the time and it's been an awesome conversation. I always love talking to other strategists. For those of you that are watching, listening, I appreciate you taking the time. If you want to get access to the 90-day marketing plan template that we use for our business, for our clients, head on over to growthmarketingplan.com. All the video instructions, the templates, the sample plans, all the downloads and tools you need to start creating your plan today to start getting results are there. You can also reach us over at rialtomarketing.com which is R-I-A-L-T-O Marketing.com. You can always click on that get a free consult button. I'd be happy to chat with you and give you some clarity on what those next steps should be for where you are to where you want to go. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, take care.