6 Activities to Build & Maintain Your Law Firm's Brand

Your law firm’s brand is your unique signature in today’s competitive legal market. Are you doing enough to build and maintain your brand? Here are 6 easy activities you can start now to improve your brand presence across platforms.

What Do We Mean By “Your Brand?”

A brand is multi-faceted, intangible, and extremely valuable. It consists of the public’s perception of your law firm, the awareness the general public has about your firm, and the unique value you offer to consumers who are interested in the particular legal services you offer.

Your law firm’s brand includes these core assets:

The name of your law firm
Your law firm’s logo
The color palette you choose for your logo and website design
Text fonts you choose
Your tagline or slogan, if you have one
The tone of voice and style your website content uses
Other notable design elements that people are likely to remember and associate with your firm

Although there are many sides to your brand, its most important aspect is whatever will compel potential clients to reach out and make contact with your office.

Building & Maintaining Your Law Firm’s Brand

Step 1: Understand Your Brand’s Current Public Perception

To build your brand, the first step is understanding what the current perception of your brand is. Does your target audience perceive your firm as valuable? Do ideal consumers within your niche know who you are and what you do? Do you have a good reputation among your peers? Knowing what people already think about your brand is key to knowing which direction to go in when building and maintaining that brand.

Here are some branding tips for lawyers on how you can get information about the way your target audience and the general public perceive your law firm:

Ask! The easiest way to know what people who decided to hire you think about your brand and marketing efforts is to ask your existing clients.
Monitor your firm name. Set up a Google Alert for your law firm’s name and regularly search social media platforms for it. Make sure you’re up to date on any news or social content mentioning your company.
Analyze customer feedback. Look over all your customer reviews on all platforms and jot down notes about any common themes that appear multiple times. This suggests an issue you may need to address or a product or service you need to highlight.

Step 2: Review Your Content

Next, you should go over your brand’s content to make sure your messaging is consistent with your business goals and the image you want your company to have. Your messaging should convey your company’s unique value proposition (UVP) and the content on your website and social media channels should be clear, concise, and easy for the average user to understand.

Search for your website in an incognito browser to get an idea of the user experience from the initial keyword searches to the contact us page. Notice how quickly you are able to find the information you’re looking for and on how many different platforms your business is represented.

Ideally, potential customers will be able to find you easily with a simple keyword search. Your Google Business profile should be claimed and filled out, and you should have at least a basic account on every major social media platform, like Facebook, Instagram, and other channels that are relevant to your target audience.

Step 3: 6 Activities That Will Help You Build & Maintain Your Brand

1. Run a Brand Sentiment Analysis

Brand sentiment analysis is a method of assessing how people feel about your company or services. Media monitoring programs are becoming the most convenient approach to assessing brand sentiment.

Consistently monitoring the public perception of your brand through monitoring different media outlets is extremely valuable because people frequently voice their ideas about brands they like or dislike on various social media platforms. Because it’s hard to individually look for and analyze every social media mention of your brand, media monitoring can be a great way to automate the generation of brand sentiment data.

2. Acquire Online Reviews

Many customers who are happy with your services won’t make the time or effort to leave an online review. Often, a company that doesn’t actively encourage happy customers to leave reviews will face a disproportionate number of negative online reviews because, traditionally, unhappy people are usually more motivated to speak about their experiences.

While you can’t encourage customers to leave a good review specifically, you can target customers you know are well pleased with your services or loyal to your brand and show them how and where to leave a review. Consider putting up signage in your establishment and sending emails to customers that give them the resources to leave reviews.

3. Measure Your Average Star Rating

Platforms like Google and Yelp give average star ratings to businesses, but they are limited to the reviews on their own platform. You need advanced software to be able to measure your law firm’s average star rating across multiple different platforms, so you have an idea of the overall public perception of your brand.

For example, your star rating on Google could be 4.5 stars, while your Yelp rating is only 3.0 stars. This means your average star rating across both platforms is 3.75. You can add other platforms to this number to calculate your average star rating across all platforms customers rate your firm on. Instead of calculating this figure manually, consider opting for a digital marketing tool that aggregates this information for you and allows you to look at it at a glance.

4. Launch Email Marketing Surveys

You can also get specific feedback from past and potential customers that have signed up for your email newsletters by launching marketing surveys that ask drilled-down questions about how people feel about your brand.

5. Organize Visual Assets

Your media assets are among the most valuable marketing assets your company has at its disposal, and many of the logos, videos, infographics, images, and other branded visual assets you have can be recycled throughout multiple media campaigns. If you don’t already have these organized, now is the time to do it.

As your brand grows, you should continue to keep your visual assets dated and filed somewhere that is easy to access and publish across various platforms. It might seem easy enough to keep just a few assets in a folder on your desktop, but as you create more, these assets can get lost in the shuffle if you don’t have a secure and scalable organizational system. Plus, anything saved to your own desktop won’t be accessible to anyone else at your law firm.

6. Make Yourself Available On Multiple Channels

Ideally, your law firm will meet your target audience wherever they are. This means having a solid online presence across multiple channels. Having a Facebook page used to be enough for law firms, but now attorneys need to be reachable on any social platform where they have an audience.

It’s also important to ensure that your content fits the channel. Your Instagram should have aesthetically pleasing, professional photographs of you, your office, and anyone you work with. Your Facebook could feature advice videos that offer immediately actionable value to your audience, while your firm’s Twitter could feature opinion snippets on recent legal news in your industry.

Step 4: Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo

Last but not least, you should conduct research into marketing tools that can help you do all of the above more efficiently and cost-effectively. Surefire Local’s all-in-one marketing intelligence platform offers solutions for all six of the above activities. Schedule a demo to see for yourself how our marketing platform covers all your bases and more.

Attorneys in particular need locally-focused marketing tools that specifically target the sometimes narrow margin of traffic for their area. Unlike many other industries that have broad target audiences, lawyers tend to have more success using long tail and geotargeted keywords. Surefire Local partners with top businesses, including Google, Facebook, WordPress, Quickbooks, Yelp, and more.

Ready to Build a Stellar Law Firm Brand? Call Surefire Local Today

At Surefire Local, we understand the unique challenges law firms face today when marketing their services online. Our All-In-One platform gives companies a 360-degree view of their critical business metrics while allowing them the ability to easily publish and distribute content across a wide variety of channels. Monitor your brand’s public perception, manage your valuable media, and begin establishing a more solid brand foundation with Surefire Local’s innovative local marketing tools.