This Digital Marketing Firm Wants To Be A Part Of Your Team

Seth Winterer was chugging along as a top performer at a large marketing firm when he decided there had to be a better way.

He realized the price of growth is often paid by the clients, so he founded Digital Logic in Shreveport, Louisiana, a digital marketing firm less concerned with scaling up and more concerned with bringing its proven methodology to smaller law firms in the most integrated way possible.

As shown by numerous case studies, Digital Logic’s approach gets results.

For example, WeedenLaw, a two-attorney criminal defense firm in Denver, increased its organic website traffic by 400 percent after becoming a client.

Above the Law recently chatted with Winterer, Digital Logic’s CEO, about his vision for the ideal marketing firm.

ATL: Tell us about your background.

SW: In 2004, I became one of the early employees of an online marketing company that grew to about 2,500 people. In 2010, we went public on the Nasdaq. The company is still going today.

When the company was smaller, I could make more of a difference for my clients and get things done fast. We had a great ride, but I decided to shift gears. I left because there were so many situations where a client had specific needs and I felt the company had lost its ability to truly customize its services. Everything would have to go through a lengthy approval process. With more and more silos within the different divisions of the company, the process got longer and longer. I always told myself that if I wasn’t having fun anymore, and not delivering the level of performance needed for my clients, I would do something else.

It was also a new chapter in my life, my first son had just been born and I wanted to be there when he started walking. It meant a lot to me to have that time with my son.

When the time came, I looked at some corporate job offers. They involved traveling a lot and required always hitting your numbers. I said, “I’ve done this work for 12 years. It’d be just as easy to do it myself and take whatever approach that I want to take that would serve the best interest of my clients.” I wanted to take what I’ve learned about marketing success and client service models to create something new that would be successful and grow, without sacrificing ethics or clients’ best interests.

ATL: Did the business climate lead you to believe you had a good chance of success?

SW: Well, I was the top performer at the last company by far, for a long time. Not just in sales but in both client and team-member retention. I didn’t consider it a bet or a risky move for me to start my own company, where I’d be doing a lot of the same things that I’d done before.

ATL: What was your central vision for Digital Logic at its outset?

SW: I like creating jobs in our local economy because it’s a positive impact on the local community. We do not outsource our work. We only have 14 people at our company, but everybody works in the office. We focus our hiring on people who are eager to learn and love to win. Our proven methodology gives us an edge, but our people give us an advantage.

My vision was to help law firms grow and expose them to what’s possible with content marketing, SEO, and paid online advertising.

ATL: Having worked at both large and small marketing companies, what do you see as the key differences?

SW: I think anytime you’re working with a company that has tens of millions of dollars in funding, it’s easier to hire faster and scale up at a rapid pace. The challenge with that growth is that silos form within the company, which separate the company from the client and create a machine.

This can limit your relationships with clients and limit you from becoming as connected to your clients’ businesses as you can with a smaller company. The challenge with bootstrapping a new company is that you need to see far enough ahead and become even more creative with your marketing.

That was a big challenge for us, but it forced us to focus on business outcomes for our clients vs. task completion.

ATL: From the small law firm and the solo-practitioner perspective, what do you see as the relative advantage of each model, big marketing versus small-firm marketing?

SW: Just like in law, people constantly evaluate whether they should choose a big firm or a small firm and, of course, there are advantages to both. For now, we’ve chosen to operate as a small marketing firm, but with outcomes people often assume only a large marketing firm can achieve. In reality, the opposite is true. A smaller marketing company brings more of a grow-together model.

If Digital Logic gets an opportunity to work on a certain type of case, we can move fast to create tailored content. We’re skilled enough to take immediate action and we’re nimble because we’re small. We can change on a dime when we need to. Which happens all the time with smaller law firms.

We have clients who do MDL cases, so, if a new class comes up, we can deploy campaigns within 24 hours versus having to schedule it for the next month.

We can talk to the client and say to our people, “Hey, we need to do X, Y, and Z for this client. Drop what you’re doing and let’s get this live tomorrow.”

ATL: Do most of your clients hire you for discrete projects or are you more a full-service marketing company?

SW: Definitely full service. Usually, we’ll begin by rebuilding the client’s website. We prefer to build all these in WordPress. That way, if we need to make an update, publish something, or change pages, anybody on our team can use our technology stack within WordPress to make sure the product is consistent across the board.

Our monthly marketing services are where we’re publishing content for search engine optimization (SEO), for online firm discovery. We also run a lot of Google ads for law firms and that really gets the phone ringing for them quickly.

ATL: It takes effort to craft a good Google ad. Is that another component of your service? To make sure the ads are designed in an effective manner?

SW: Yes. We handle a lot of ads for law firms on Google and Bing. A lot more goes into it than just writing an ad. It includes keyword selection, bid prices, testing ads, testing landing pages, and campaign optimization over time once you start gathering the data. Our clients have had a lot of success with running paid search ads on Google.

Also, a little over a year ago, Google Local Service Ads came out. The model is guaranteed cost per qualified lead and that’s been a game-changer for our clients.

It’s been incredible to see where some of these solo folks started compared to where they are now. In their first year, before they worked with us, maybe they’d do $100,000 in billing. We’ve got a criminal attorney in a decent-sized city. She finished the year with $1.3 million in billing after we started working with her. With her, we can take some of the credit, but she’s one of the best attorneys I’ve seen.

ATL: Would you call your approach more holistic as opposed to the task-driven approach?

SW: Yes, it’s holistic, but it’s also a proven methodology. I know with certain big marketing companies they’ll do four blogs for law firms and post a few things on social media. It’s a task list with no strategy behind it.

Everything we do is more intent-driven instead of task-driven. The work revolves around business outcomes for clients instead of putting up five blog posts without having real goals.

ATL: Who is your ideal client? What can you do, specifically, to help them find more success?

SW: It depends on the practice categories and what the opportunity looks like. We’ve got a couple of solo practitioners as well as firms that run up to 25 or 30 people.

Even with our direct outreach, our client profiles, we really don’t go after those 200-plus-person law firms. We don’t pursue them, but if one were to come to us, we would evaluate the situation.

With small firms, we can make a much bigger impact relative to their previous revenue.

A recent study by the Hinge Research Institute shows what digital marketing can do.

In 2020, when everything was shutting down, the firms that managed to grow were the firms that accelerated their marketing efforts. One of them had a marketing budget that was 27 percent of revenue, about 48 percent more than the non-high-growth firms. And the majority of these high-growth firms focused their marketing budgets on doing law firm SEO and paid search ads.

These things work, and we at Digital Logic try to over-deliver for our clients. When I first got into this business in 2004, we’d have to convince clients that people use Google. Now it’s like, “Okay, everybody uses Google. Right?”

If you want to help your law firm or business grow, and the studies say that successful firms spent 27 percent of revenue on marketing activities — and the highest-return marketing opportunities are SEO and paid search ads — then you probably want to put your money there too.