How to Evaluate Your Law Firm Brand Health
10 minutes to read
If you’ve ever wondered why some law firms seem to be able to grow at a steady pace year after year while others have to fight for every new client or struggle to bring in enough business to cover their overhead, it’s not due to luck.
It all depends on the health of (or lack thereof) their law firm’s brand.
A law firm brand is just as important as the people who work there, the technology it uses, and the service it provides. It’s the foundation upon which a law firm builds its business.
If your law firm is in need of a brand health check, we’ve got you covered. Read on to discover:
1. Understanding Law Firm Brand
A strong brand allows a law firm to create predictable growth and stability over time. It helps them attract new clients, retain old ones, and provide a clear value proposition that clients can understand and appreciate. It’s the ultimate unfair advantage over other law firms in your market.
All of these factors lead directly to direct profitability, which proves how successful or unsuccessful your law firm brand is. To find out just how strong it is, you can use a variety of metrics to determine how well it’s doing in the saturated and competitive legal industry.
Few attorneys know how to measure the strength and health of their law firm’s brand. Most attorneys don’t even realize they have a brand until they’re stuck undoing the damage done by a brand created by default (rather than by design). By the time that happens, it’s often way too late.
So what exactly is a brand?
A brand is more than just a logo or slogan—it’s your entire identity as an organization. It includes your office layout, your copywriting style, your core values, your client experience — even down to how you answer the phone.
All these things affect how potential clients view your firm, so if any of them aren’t thoughtfully designed to bolster the brand you desire, you’re going to have difficulty attracting new clients. The key to building a solid law firm brand is to create consistency between all of these elements so that everything about your firm presents the same strong message.
So, what are some of these elements of a law firm brand? Let’s look at some of the most important ways you can build a solid brand for your law firm.
Unique Value Proposition
Your law firm’s Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is often the first thing people think about when they hear about your law firm. It makes your firm stand out from your competitors. It’s what makes you uniquely equipped to solve your clients’ legal challenges. It needs to be clearly defined and consistently communicated throughout your law firm’s marketing efforts.
A strong UVP is the core of your brand, so you must be sure it’s easy to understand and clearly articulates what makes you different from other firms. It should be specific and easy to remember. It should also demonstrate why clients should choose your firm over others in the marketplace.
The best UVPs often include the most critical aspects of your firm’s strategy or what makes you different from other law firms in your market. Consider the following questions:
- What matters most to you individually and/or your firm as a whole?
- How is your firm different from others?
- What makes you stand out from other firms?
When defining your law firm’s UVP, it’s essential to be as specific as possible. Highlight the benefits of hiring your law firm and explain why clients should choose you over other options in the marketplace.
2. What a Healthy Law Firm Brand Needs
Knowing what a brand is and cultivating a successful one are two completely different things. Now that you understand the basics of building your law firm’s brand, you can prepare yourself with the tools needed to establish one that truly resonates with your desired audience.
Consistent Marketing
Consistent marketing is the key to building a solid law firm brand. You can build trust, reputation, and authority by repeatedly getting your message in front of your clients wherever they spend their time. Consistently delivering on promises will help establish credibility that allows you to sell more effectively.
The most effective way to build your brand is by growing an audience of people who know they can count on you for quality work. That’s why you must focus on delivering outstanding results first and then using consistent marketing strategies to promote those results to your ideal clients. This will help your audience learn about how great you are at solving problems and delivering on your promises.
Once you have identified your ideal audience, you can leverage content marketing to reach them with relevant information that keeps your law firm top of mind. You need to make sure your law firm’s brand is consistent across all channels so your potential clients remember your firm, connect with your message, and associate you with trusted legal advice.
Diversified Initiatives and Marketing Sources
Diversifying your initiatives and marketing sources is critical to building a strong law firm brand. Diversification allows you to create multiple touchpoints for prospective clients, existing clients, and referral sources.
You can tailor each touchpoint to match your audience’s needs, so no matter how many different platforms you market your law firm, their experience and expectations will be consistent across all channels.
The ultimate goal is not just to give potential clients more opportunities to learn about your firm during their journey from initial awareness through purchase decision, but more importantly to create an emotional connection between them and your business that drives positive associations, direct results, and referrals. This is done over time and with high frequency. That means ensuring your law firm’s brand reaches each member of your audience multiple times to ensure you leave your mark.
The more touchpoints your ideal clients have with your law firm’s messaging, the greater your chance of building a solid brand. Diversifying your initiatives and marketing sources allows you to reach more people on more platforms, which ultimately helps build awareness and leads to more clients.
In addition to diversifying your strategies, you also need to diversify your content. This means creating different types of content for each channel and audience. For example, if you’re on Facebook, create videos that are shared more often than text posts. If you have a blog on your law firm’s website, write long-form posts that go in-depth about topics relevant to your industry.
Creating different types of content for each channel and audience allows you to engage more with your followers. In turn, this will lead to more traffic, leads, and conversions. Before implementing a diversified law firm marketing strategy, it’s a good idea to first conduct a law firm marketing audit. This will allow you to determine what’s working and what isn’t so that you can reinforce the former and improve on the latter.
3. Refreshing Your Law Firm Brand
A good law firm brand doesn’t stay completely static forever — you must know when to evolve to fully reflect your law firm’s progress and to keep the right clients and potential clients interested.
Don’t forget that we live in an era where interests, feelings, and expectations are constantly changing, and by staying up to date with the times, your audience will feel better about investing in a firm that isn’t stuck in the past.
Here are a few factors to examine to determine how well (or not well) your brand is going over with your clients.
Positive Online and Offline Reputation
Your reputation is an essential element of your law firm brand. It results from everything you and your team do, from marketing to customer service to trial verdicts. It’s the people’s perception of your law firm — the more positive, the better. Your reputation is one of the essential elements of your brand and should be a priority for any marketing strategy.
When people think of your law firm, they should envision quality service, results, and whatever else makes your law firm brand unique. Maybe they think of family and safe, secure feelings. Maybe they think of a relentless team of guardians of justice. Maybe they think of a small-town neighbor or hometown hero they can rely on.
Positive brand association will help attract clients and increase referrals from satisfied ones and other attorneys in your area who want to work with someone reputable.
A positive reputation is crucial for any business. While people need to be able to find you online, it’s also vital that they have a good experience when doing so. If your law firm has a bad reputation online or offline, it may be difficult for potential clients to trust your brand and take action — and if you’re going after new clients without an established reputation, you’ll want to ensure that the first impression they get doesn’t make them think twice about hiring you.
Your law firm brand health is a reflection of your law firm’s reputation. It’s essential to monitor this and make sure it stays positive. You can do this using tools like Google Alerts, which will send you an email when your brand name or any keywords associated with your law firm appear online. You can also track brand health on social media channels. Use the tools built into each platform to see what people say about you and your law firm, then respond accordingly if needed.
List Size is Growing Predictably Each Year
One of the most critical metrics for measuring brand health is list size. List size is the number of people who have opted in to receive your marketing emails and the rate at which new subscribers join this list.
A healthy law firm brand typically involves growing your law firm’s list size quickly and sustainably. In that case, you must understand how this metric works to make informed decisions about how fast your company should grow its email marketing efforts.
When trying to grow your law firm brand, you want to ensure it’s growing in the right direction. You need to know whether your marketing efforts are working and how quickly they drive new potential clients into your pipeline. Here are some ideas for measuring your list health:
- How many people are on your subscriber list?
- How many people open your emails?
- How many people click on the links in your emails?
- How many people unsubscribe from your list?
The answers to these questions will give you valuable benchmarks to indicate whether your law firm brand is healthy and growing or not.
Create Predictable Growth and Stability
Studying other brands in your industry and beyond is an excellent way to learn about what makes a healthy or weak brand. You can also use tools like Google Analytics to get data on how people interact with your website and social media pages. Keep an eye on metrics like page views, bounce rates, average time spent per visit, conversion rates, and so much more.
This data will help you get a feel for what people are looking for in your market and how your law firm brand performs. If you find that users are leaving your website quickly or not converting on social media, it might be time to reevaluate your law firm brand with intention.
Final Thoughts
A law firm brand is more than just a logo or a tagline. It’s your promise about who you are and what you stand for. When people see your brand, they should immediately understand what you stand for, why they connect with you, and how you can help them.
Whether providing great service, promoting social responsibility, or helping people with their most challenging problems, your law firm brand can help you stand out in a crowded marketplace. The goal is becoming best known in your market.
Building your law firm’s brand strength is a strategic move that can lead to consistent, annual growth for years to come.
If you’re looking to learn more about building your law firm’s brand while networking with other firm owners who think this way and have built successful businesses with strong brands of their own, we can help. Crisp Coach is a closed-door community of the highest-performing law firms, and yours could join them.
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