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Kicking It With Staupe: A Legal Marketer

Meet Susan Staupe.


She likes cats. She likes Football. She likes watching cats play football.

Ok, that’s a dream of hers, but the point is Susan knows how to laugh.

The main thing we love about Susan is how outgoing she is. She’s not afraid to meet new people, take on new challenges, or learn and discover new strategies that will help our clients grow their business. Nothing highlights that side of Susan more than NiftyLaw, our project to meet new people, take on new challenges, and discover strategies to help lawyers with their Internet marketing.

In fact, Susan and NiftyLaw are almost twins, except one is a fun-loving brunette looking for a date with a rich lawyer and the other is Susan…

You Come Here Often?

Susan has been involved in the legal marketing space for over 6 years. She has worked with every type of business out there; if they needed a local presence, Susan was getting results for them.
During that time, she worked at FindLaw where she contributed to every team in their search department, including:

  • The First Call Team: She was the first contact a client had with FindLaw. She would gather facts about the client’s target audience and location. From there, she would put together a strategy for the client. She would also make sure this strategy was implemented.
  • The Refresh Team: Susan worked with older clients who had an established strategy and “refreshed” them. She would come up with a new strategy and support content and ensure this was implemented as well.
  • The Diagnostic Team: Susan would consult on sites that weren’t performing as well, offering tactics to turn the site around and get it moving again.
  • The Premium Team: Here is where Susan had her own clients and was in charge of making sure that their sites were producing and the client was happy. She had continuous contact with these clients and monitored their progress, making changes as needed.

During her time at FindLaw, Susan managed or assisted with the legal marketing of over 200 different attorneys and law firms across many different practice areas. We’ll just name a few:

  • Personal Injury
  • Criminal Defense
  • Employment Law
  • Workers’ Compensation Law
  • Social Security Disability
  • Family Law & Divorce
  • Stockbroker Fraud
  • Securities Law
  • Class Actions
  • Whistleblower Law
  • Estates, wills, estate planning etc
  • Bankruptcy Law
  • Insurance Law
  • Real Estate (both commercial and residential)
  • Business Law
  • Digital Rights Law
  • Intellectual Property Law

Susan also put together the SEO training for other SEOs and people who wanted to know about the business that involved an entry level course teaching the basics of SEO, a second course that showed intermediate tactics, and a final course taught that introduced advanced SEO strategies. Susan planned, prepared, and personally taught each of these classes.

But working at FindLaw wasn’t enough for Susan.

She took her experience and started her own SEO company. She always wanted to help small to medium sized firms succeed. The focus of her company was to take those type of law firms and get them the results they needed from their websites.

All of her experience has earned her the respect of the SEO community. She currently is serving on the advisory board for Moz’ new local tool. She is providing valuable feedback, shaping the future of the tool.

She also was recently elected to be the director of events for the MN Search Organization. Her new position will see her bring SEO experts to Minnesota on a monthly basis.

And, if we know Susan, she’ll be rubbing elbows with each one of them, getting them to share their secret sauce to benefit our clients.

We Roll 1-on-1

With all of that awesomeness bundled up into one sweet lady, you might be asking, “So what is Susan doing for NiftyLaw?” Simple: Building relationships. Susan believes there is more to creating a successful marketing strategy than just managing her client’s marketing efforts.

She builds a meaningful relationship with each of her clients, getting to know them, learning what they are like, so she can build a strategy around who they are. Her secret to success is having a one-to-one relationship with everyone around her.

A few months ago, we held the very first NiftyCon, a yearly gathering of every Nifty employee where we talk about the company, what we can do better, and where we are headed. Susan came to Burley, Idaho and made each of us feel like we were the most important person at the conference. She sat down and got to know us. She asked about our lives. We all walked away from that conference feeling we had gained a friend and ally; each of her clients feel the same way.

But its not all lovey-dovey relationships with Susan.

Oh no. She’s a fierce strategist. Rumor has it that she could go toe-to-toe with Bobby Fisher. All of the experience and knowledge that she has gained in her past jobs come to the forefront when she is planning her marketing strategies for clients. She is an unrelenting force of good marketing juju. Having her creating a strategy for you is the equivalent of having Picasso paint your portrait; it’s sure to be original, unique, and bring in a lot of money.

We know this isn’t Picasso, but we’re marketers, not painters.

 

When she’s not creating epic strategies worthy of iambic pentameter, Susan is helping us shape our company policies and direction. She gives us useful feedback on our processes and always asks the right questions to ensure that we are thinking of every possible outcome. She brings a fresh perspective to Nifty.

Some Parting Thoughts

A fresh perspective sums up Susan rather well.

A good marketer needs two things to be successful: a good sense of humor and the ability to see things anew.

Susan has both. Beyond all of the knowledge and experience she has, all of her dealings with lawyers really add yet another layer of insight that Susan brings to NiftyLaw. She knows how lawyers think, what they want, and how to deliver.
And, that, at the end of the day, is what Susan Staupe, and NiftyLaw, is all about.