Branding is the act of storytelling. It is a strategic effort that creates a certain kind of image and perception of your brand into people’s minds.
Human beings are always forming impressions and opinions about things that they come across. Branding is taking charge of this phenomenon and ensuring that you have a say in how people perceive your brand.
Why is Branding Important?
- Helps you carve out a specific image for your law firm brand.
- Improves brand recognition and recall.
- Differentiates you from the rest of the lawyers out there.
- Improves your sales and drives growth.
What Is The Roadmap To Building A Law Firm Brand?
You start from scratch and build from the ground up. Start thinking about the ‘why’ of your business. Why did you choose to start your legal practice? Do you want to change the law, improve lives? Do you want to serve the little man? Is your aim to fight for your clients to the bitter end? The answers to these questions will guide you in determining your brand.
Once you figure that out, we move on to the next steps.
Step 1: Define Your Law Firm Brand
To define your law firm brand, know as much as you can about these three major aspects of your business.
-
- Its core values: Honesty, reliability, trustworthiness
- Its unique promise: Focus on what you can deliver such as availability, creative solutions to complex legal issues, customer service skills, ethical standards.
- Its target market: Be clear on a well-defined target market. Examples include Family Law, Litigation Attorney, Personal Injury Attorney.
This clarity will serve as the foundation stone for your branding, growth, and marketing. Once you have defined your brand, you can tackle the next step.
Step 2: Identify & Research Your Competition
Invest time and energy in learning all you can about the businesses you are up against. Not only do you need their basic contact info (name, founding year, major partners, and market segment, etc.), you must also find out what it is that separates them from you.
Tons of competitive analysis services that are available online can help you with this task. Some of these are:
- Ahrefs: Great for backlink analysis, keyword analysis and paid traffic analysis.
- Ontolo: This is good for competitor data mining. Learn their content strategy and find out which type of content is attracting the clients.
- Keyhole: Used for social media analysis of competing brands. Find out their strategy, get hashtag analysis, monitor mentions, and analyze influencer impact.
Knowing your competitor will help you highlight your strengths in a more perceptive way. It will improve your branding as you will know exactly what to do and what not to.
Step 3: Create Your Legal Brand’s Visual Identity
This step consists of using visual design elements – colors, shapes, and fonts – to represent the critical information you’ve gathered about your business. If your law firm brand is approachable and modern, inviting colors in flat tones with a minimal law firm logo design may be a great fit. Or if your law practice is more traditional, an imposing logo design with earthy tones of color may be more appropriate.
Creating a visual identity helps keep the brand unique, specific and its communications seamless and consistent. Visual design guides will direct when, where, and how to use your logo. It will differentiate between your brand’s primary and secondary colors and will serve as the rulebook for your future branding as well.
Step 4: Keep Brand Communications Consistent
When you talk to your clients, whether it be online or offline, your tone, vocabulary, and style must remain consistent. This applies to your website copy, the tone of your blog posts, the visual design elements of your brand, and even how you answer your work calls.
The intent is to reinforce a singular brand message at every possible opportunity. The more consistent you are in your communications, the more trustworthy you’ll seem to your clients.
To keep your communications consistent, develop brand guidelines. These guidelines will cover every conceivable way your brand may need to communicate internally or externally. And keep your brand message on-point.
Step 5: Market Your Brand
Once you’ve developed your law firm brand, market it every chance you get consistency across all channels. This includes social media, website, ad campaigns, you name it.
But here are the three major ways to set up your legal brand’s initial marketing:
-
- Digital Marketing: SEO, affiliate marketing, paid ad campaigns, and marketing automation.
- Social Media Marketing: Promoting your law firm brand on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
- Content Marketing: Blogging, e-books, podcasts, video making, and infographics.
Don’t worry, it isn’t as overwhelming as it may seem. The more you work on it, the more efficient you’ll become at marketing your brand in a natural, more organic way.
Takeaway: Be Open to Growth & Change
To achieve and sustain business success, you must remain ready to adapt and pivot whenever circumstances demand it. Businesses that aren’t ready to evolve and change, often find themselves pummeled to the ground. For example, if you had to shut down your law firm offices in 2020 and working from home hasn’t been working out, consider joining a shared office space. It will give you a professional working space while still being light on the pocket. The shared resources will also mean shared responsibility, so you’re not under undue pressure to bring in the clients. You can take it slow and build your brand.
