One of the best things you can do for your law firm is to develop a strong, consistent brand. With brand development comes name recognition, brand authority, and brand reputation. What follows is more traffic, more clients, and more income. The best way to approach this is to learn the most effective brand development tips for lawyers. Once you have this information, you can develop digital marketing campaigns that will give you the highest possible return on your investment.
Let’s get started!
What Is Law Firm Branding?
Law firm branding doesn’t just happen. It requires deliberate actions using a series of proven, dedicated branding processes.
Branding is the process of creating your company’s identity. It is deliberately crafting the way you want your law firm to be perceived and recognized by everybody, not only your clients. Your brand is the first impression you make on people who come into contact with your firm or see your firm online.
Branding is developing the way your firm looks, its mission statement, your message, logo, colors, fonts, all your written and digital content, and everything else related to your firm. These elements are what help people instantly recognize (and trust) your law firm. Everything should be deliberate and consistent across all mediums.
Why Developing a Brand Matters
Branding is what helps you build name recognition, brand trust, and brand authority, and branding is what will help you build client relationships. Once you have built a trusted brand, you will have a significant advantage over your competition. It will also make it easier to gain more clients because your firm is now a recognizable and therefore trusted brand.
The Benefits of Law Firm Branding
- Develop brand name recognition, authority, and trust.
- Build a powerful brand identity.
- Help distinguish your firm from the competition.
- Make it easier to promote your firm.
- Consistent law firm branding locks in your firm’s resilience.
- Build client loyalty.
- Branding gives you credibility making it easier to gain new clients.
- Give your law firm an identifiable purpose and potentially a strong USP.
- Law firm branding could increase your firm’s commercial value.
- Positive branding attracts exceptional talent.
- Branding gives your firm social influence.
Now that you understand branding and how it can significantly change your firm for the better, let’s move on. Next, we will go over how to effectively brand your firm.
The Most Effective Brand Development Tips for Lawyers
Here are some of the most commonly used brand development tips lawyers use for branding their firms.
1. Define What Makes Your Firm Unique
Defining what makes your firm unique is the best way to help your firm stand out from the competition. Do you have specific industry experience, do you participate in and help improve and advance your community, do you offer related services that aren’t offered by others, do you have a unique perspective or way of doing business that others don’t?
Find the things that make your firm stand out then build on them. Use your USP to create your taglines, website copy, informational videos, content, and all your other marketing materials.
2. Evaluate Your Competitors
Look at your competitors’ websites, social media pages, and other content, or use a tool that can analyze your competitors’ websites for you such as Surefire Local or other online competitor analysis tools. What are your competitors doing that’s working, what’s not working, what keywords and phrases are they using and ranking for, what are they missing, what are their vulnerabilities, where do they actively participate online, and anything else you can learn. You then take that information and compare it to your firm’s own strengths and weaknesses.
Next, take what you’ve learned and make it better than your competition, offer what they don’t offer, and find new unique ways to use that information, so you can grab your potential client’s attention.
3. Identify Your Ideal Client
If you want to properly market and advertise to obtain new clients, you will first need to identify your ideal client and build client personas, so you know how to proceed. What are the characteristics of your current clients?
Look at your current client base and identify all their positive characteristics. Which clients pay the most and why, which ones pay consistently, which of your legal services are the most used and why, and which clients do you enjoy working with and why. Once you have compiled this information, you can use that data to find similar clients.
4. Use Compelling Messaging
To create compelling messages, you will first need to learn the wants, needs, challenges, values, pain points, etc. of your target demographic and ideal clients. You can do this by visiting the social media pages where your target demographic hangs out and participates. Look at the comments they are making and the questions they are asking. Do you see any trends or unanswered questions? You can also survey your current clients to gain insight into your messaging.
You should also use clear, concise, compelling messaging that is simple. And always use language your audience is familiar with. Avoid industry jargon, technical terms, and acronyms that could alienate or confuse them.
5. Create a Professional Logo
Create a professional logo or have one made for you. Make sure the colors, fonts, and messaging all match your branding. Develop an attention-grabbing logo. Doing so will make it easier for people to instantly recognize and remember your firm.
6. Be Consistent
It’s extremely important to be consistent across all your offline and digital assets. That includes your website, social media pages, content messaging, videos, images, and any other marketing collateral you develop and publish. Your messaging needs to stay true to your brand voice and motto, your colors, fonts, and tone. Everything must match consistently; otherwise, you will confuse your audience and possibly lose them to your competition.
7. Be Authentic
The one thing everyone looks for in a lawyer is trust and the best way to gain trust is to be authentic. If you show fake concern or pretend to care, people will notice, and it will be reflected in your online reviews. Therefore, when branding your firm, do your best to portray an authentic picture of yourself, your staff, your beliefs, and what your firm stands for.
8. Engage Your Community
Create an atmosphere where your current and potential clients can engage with you and each other. This will help build a community bond. This bond will result in more loyal client relationships, as well as the potential for more word-of-mouth referrals. This applies to your website, social media pages, forums, review sites, etc.
9. Create Valuable Content
If you want your audience to actually read and share your content, you must create high-quality valuable content worthy of such. This content could include educational content in the form of articles, videos, infographics, eBooks, etc.
Whatever content you create, just make sure it’s interesting, relatable, and if possible, written about topics and content that can’t be easily found anywhere else. You want to be viewed as an authority in the industry. The best way to do that is to provide people with information and education that hasn’t been repeatedly rehashed or information that can be easily found online.
10. Build a Reputation
There are many effective ways to build a positive brand reputation.
- Focus on building a recognizable brand.
- Create a brand story.
- Engage with your online reviews and testimonials.
- Actively participate on social media.
- Create shareable content.
- Offer freebies, discounts, or other high-value assets.
- Keep your promises and do what you say you’ll do.
- Be transparent.
- Maintain consistency across all your digital assets.
- Deliver exceptional client experiences.
- Participate and contribute to community programs.
- Manage negative feedback effectively.
- Incorporate SEO best practices.
- Advertise, be present, and engaged where your ideal clients spend their time.
Now, we have a treat for you! We are going to show you how to reduce the time you spend on marketing tasks by using a proven system managed from a single dashboard. Surefire Local!
What Is Surefire Local?
Surefire Local is a business intelligence marketing software that is available at a fraction of the cost of other online tools and is significantly cheaper than using an agency to do the things you could easily do yourself. The Surefire Local software helps you manage your most important digital marketing activities all from one platform.
Build Your Law Firm Brand with Surefire Local
Building your brand is an intentional systematic process and the Surefire Local platform can help you perform and manage many of the tasks needed to do just that and more.
Surefire Local can help you do the following…
~ Enables you to send review requests via text message and email. Then it helps you post your responses to those review requests.
~ Helps you create, schedule, and publish content to your blog, social media pages, and your Google Business Profile. This is a real time-saver!
~ It enables you to share photos and videos across your online presence.
~ Maintain consistency when it comes to the information found online about your firm such as your name, address, phone number, special offers, etc.
~ It can help you increase your local search rankings with an optimized website.
~ It helps you measure engagement, so you can determine what your audience is most interested in.
~ It helps you send targeted email campaigns, so you can more easily foster client relationships.
~ It helps you determine brand sentiment with a word-cloud graph that reveals frequently used words found in your online reviews.
And so much more!
What’s Next?
Request Your Surefire Local Platform Demo Today!
We hope you found this information about Brand Development Tips for Lawyers helpful and hope to hear from you soon!