Effective Law Firm Branding Techniques
The Basics of Law Firm Branding
Branding for law firms encompasses much more than what most people consider branding to be for other industries. In law, it’s easy to see how the term has expanded. Nowadays, the term "branding" refers both to the visual aspects of marketing – logos, color palette, typeface – as well as the internal and external messaging that your brand is associated with.
The point is, branding encompasses a whole lot more than the visuals. While many people continue to call it a logo, on its own, a logo is not much of a brand. It’s merely the face of your law firm.
Branding is the essence of your law firm’s marketing strategy. It drives the look and feel of every piece of collateral that has your law firm’s name on it. It dictates the language you use with clients. It determines the types of content you produce, how you talk about your areas of practice, and how you interact with the industry in person and online. It is how you think about your firm’s mission and vision, and how you prioritize your goals. It influences the experience you offer your clients . And, perhaps most important, it is what makes up the perception of your law firm and differentiates you from the competition.
Branding for law firms goes beyond simply identifying what you do; it helps close the gap between what you offer and what makes you different. It sets your organization apart from one like it. Authentic branding lets you establish trust and builds loyalty so clients choose you time and again, and send their family and friends to you when legal needs arise.
The law firm brand is defined by far more communicative aspects of the firm, such as:
Law firm branding is arguably more important that branding for other industries. All businesses are focused on selling a product or service, yes. But only law firms are in the business of selling the most expensive and most risk-laden of services. Law clients need to feel 100% confident in their decision to hire a firm, because the client is investing their lives in the practice area they need you to help draw them out of. Because you are all about professional services, being all in on your branding is even more of a risk-reward strategy than it is for most other businesses.
The Role of Branding in the Legal Industry
Branding is not just about having an attractive logo or a catchy tagline. It’s about creating a relatable and approachable personality for your legal service and then establishing that image in the minds of prospective and current clients. An effective brand tells your clients who you are and why they should hire you over other attorneys and firms. Consumers expect branding, and it’s something you need in order to compete against other legal practices.
To further explain the importance of branding in legal services, we’ll consider some of its main components:
Branding is vital to how you build your reputation and attract clients, so it needs to be at the forefront of your marketing strategy. Yet many law firms still aren’t taking their brand seriously.
What makes branding important is that people are naturally drawn to organizations they can relate to. For consumers that means businesses that share similar values. Once they identify with your firm, they’re more likely to work with you out of a sense of loyalty.
Establishing a Strong Law Firm Brand
The first step in building a strong brand identity is to develop a logo that effectively represents the firm’s personality and values. The logo should be simple, yet memorable, making it easy for clients to identify the firm at a glance. Selecting the right color scheme is also crucial, as colors evoke emotions and can influence client perception. In general, blue and black are safe choices for law firms, as they convey trustworthiness and authority. However, it is important to choose colors that align with the specific focus area of the firm. For example, a more creative firm might opt for a brighter palette to showcase their innovative approach.
Typography is another integral component of brand identity. The chosen fonts should be easy to read and align with the image of the firm. While the firm may have a primary font for headings and titles, it’s essential to select a secondary font for body copy that complements the design. Furthermore, careful attention should be given to font sizes and spacing to ensure consistency across all platforms.
In addition to color, typography, and logo design, the overall visual style of a law firm’s marketing materials should be cohesive and consistent. This includes the design of letterhead, business cards, website, and all other collateral. All images and graphics should match the firm’s branding style, reinforcing the identity across various mediums. By ensuring that the brand identity is consistent, clients and prospective clients will begin to recognize the firm more easily, leading to greater loyalty and a stronger overall brand.
Clarifying Your Distinct Legal Service Offering
Articulating your unique value proposition (UVP) is a critical step in effective law firm branding. It is through your UVP that potential clients come to understand what differentiates your law firm from other law firms, and hopefully, in that understanding, choose to hire you. It is how your legal marketing collateral arcs from general information to specifics about your law firm and the expertise your lawyers possess. It is what makes it crystal clear that your firm is uniquely qualified to fulfill their legal needs.
This is where specialization becomes even more important because even within a niche of a market, it is easy to have lots of competition. Therefore, focusing on a specific area of expertise that address a unique need of a specific target market better than other law firms do becomes of utmost importance in defining your UVP.
Once identified, and put into practice, there are many opportunities for you to share your firm’s unique value proposition with your target markets – on your website, via your social media channels, in your public relations efforts, in speaking engagements, in email and traditional marketing strategies, and possibly even with client gifts.
The question then becomes: how can you best define your firm’s unique value proposition and communicate it in a way to the target markets you are trying to reach?
One of the best ways to set your firm apart is to focus on the specific legal needs of your target market or markets:
Does your target market have a unique professional need that your firm addresses better than other law firms do?
Does your firm have a team of attorneys with years of specialized experience to resolve tough issues in such a way as to make the experience easy for your client?
Do you have a proven track record dealing with a unique legal issue?
Are there specific problems your target market must deal with that your firm helps them proactively avoid the issue? Is this why your clients choose you?
Can you demonstrate that you provide personal service tailored to your client’s very specific needs?
Can you show that your law firm is passionate about the work you do and go above and beyond for your clients?
It is this type of exercise that helps your firm set itself apart from other law firms.
It is not likely that you will be the only law firm serving any one of your target markets. And this is especially true for niche markets. So the more you can identify the service and products you provide to a niche market, the better equipped you will be to clearly differentiate yourself from your competitors. Outlining specific issues your firm is better at resolving than competing law firms is a good start, and then, putting together the messaging that succinctly describes these attributes will result in unique value proposition statement(s) for your firm.
If there are specific target markets you’ve identified for your firm’s services such as physicians, franchisees operators, multi-generational businesses, high net worth families, bio-tech firms and the like, then again, conducting an exercise of really mapping out the issues a representative client in your target market would face, is invaluable in defining your firm’s unique value proposition.
Utilizing Online Platforms for Branding
Digital platforms can be of great value in enhancing and promoting your brand. There are several ways your law firm can leverage digital platforms to enhance your brand and promote collaboration across teams:
Social Media
Social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram allow you to keep your followers up to date on your news and accomplishments while offering the opportunity for interaction through comments and shares. You can facilitate your social media efforts with a social media management tool that allows you to easily view and interact with your timeline, schedule future posts, and analyze your metrics.
Website Branding
An attractive and functional website is essential to brand building in today’s competitive environment . Your website gives clients and prospects a first impression of your firm and must reflect the professional image you want your brand to portray. A carefully developed website design that includes branding elements such as colors, logos, and taglines, copy that displays your personality, and well-organized menus that display your firm structure and services, all play important roles in your website branding.
Directory and Listing Sites
Online lawyer directories such as Avvo are attracting increased attention from legal consumers. It’s important to claim your listing, review it periodically, and polish its presentation to make sure your firm branding is displayed accurately and relevant to your service offerings.
Law Firm Branding Case Studies
Effective Branding Strategies for Law Firms
To learn more about the strategies and results of effective law firm branding, we surveyed small and mid-size law firms (between 10 and 150 lawyers) and interviewed two of the professionals involved in successful branding efforts at their firms.
Cases:
Firm A: Centralized Brand Strategy and Guidelines
A firm that focuses on a single line of legal services – patents. The firm has about 25 attorneys and has had a centralized branding strategy for over 10 years. Their logo, tagline, fonts and colors are well defined as is the messaging in their practice areas. Their web site is also aligned with the brand guidelines. All of their printed materials are consistent with the brand offering practice area overviews and attorney bio’s that are written in the same style and voice. The graphics suport the brand as well.
Firm A believes in the power of branding and it all works together to build awareness and credibility in the market. Branding helps them stand out from the competition.
Firm B: Decentralized Brand Strategy and Guidelines
A firm that offers multiple lines of legal services to a diverse number of clients. The firm has about 120 attorneys and has not had a centralized brand platform but is now in the process of developing one. However, they do have brand guidelines in the form of design elements and colors that the office administrators use for brochures and printed materials. In addition, they have recently updated their website to have branded content to enhance their search engine optimization and ability to convert visitors into clients via forms and direct contact with their attorneys.
Firm B believes that branding is important because it helps with consistency and allows them to present a unified message to the public. Since they are just starting the branding process, they don’t have enough experience with the process yet to fully comment on the effects of branding.
Our Conclusions
Very few of the firms surveyed had a clear brand strategy and guidelines. Most relied on the firm’s administrators to use their judgment about the logos, fonts and colors and even the messaging in the materials they were creating for the firm.
As evidenced by the two cases that we’ve highlighted, what’s more important is having a "brand champion" that will enforce the brand. In the case of Firm A, their centralized brand strategy is implemented by their marketing professional. In the case of Firm B their multiple brand pieces are being overseen by their Marketing Committee.
What we learned from the surveys and interviews is that a law firm needs a brand strategy and guidelines and an individual in the firm, either a marketing person, an office administrator or a board member, needs to be designated as the brand champion to enforce the brand to provide consistency and help grow the law firms reputation.
Branding Pitfalls to Avoid
Branding mistakes can be the downfall of your law firm in helping you attract new law clients. One of the most common mistakes is having inconsistent messaging. Branding your law firm means the precise words you use to describe your legal services, the types of graphic imagery you use for your website and print marketing, your social media posts and the tone and voice in your blogs. If you are using different messages or images, it confuses your potential law clients. A consistent message ties all your vastly different marketing tactics together. For example, if you are an estate planning lawyer you want to bring in cheap legal marketing leads that look for someone they can trust and who can help them out with low estate planning fees. This means you may want to focus on creating a trustworthy image online and in your ads . You would want to use these images and tone in your social media ads, your website, video, and emails to create a common thread throughout all your legal branding strategies.
Neglecting your law firm’s online reviews is another common mistake. The amount of reviews and the quality of the reviews your law firm generates has a powerful impact on your brand as more people go to online reviews to determine who they want to contact to become their attorney. Some of the sites that carry the most weight are Avvo, Super Lawyers, Google and Yelp.
Another area that many law firms are remiss with is in updating your branding materials. A common mistake is thinking you do not have to update your website, videos, and social media marketing campaigns once you have set them up. But this is thinking in the past. Technology is ever changing so you want to stay current to maintain your online presence as well as using effective tools for searching in mobile apps and getting found.