Do you Have a Brand for Your Law Firm?
What is a Brand?
Originally, a brand was literally just that. The term comes from the practice of branding cattle in order to mark them as yours. Esseantially that’s what branding still is. Creating a mark on your procuct or service that distiguishes you from others in your field.
Creating a brand for your law firm is one of the most important steps in your marketing plan. It’s the keystone off of which all the rest of your marketing is built. Essentially your brand is your firm.
So how do you go about creating that brand? We’ll break down the essentials here but building a brand takes time and effort.
What Do You Stand For?
The first thing you need to do when creating a brand for your law firm is to detail what you stand for. This may come in the form of a detailed mission statement, or it may be a single sentence or phrase.
For years the basis for Google‘s brand was to “index all the world’s information.” This is what drove the work they did, how they saw themselves, and how they interacted with the world around them.
What is the basis for your brand? What is the one area that you focus on when reaching out to your clients and your network? How do you define yourself?
Who is Your Ideal Client?
If you haven’t yet, you need to create an ideal client persona. This is the person who, if they walked through the door right now, you’d drop everything and get to work helping them immediately.
If you haven’t yet, focus on the type of person you want to work with. Are they from a particular area? Do they have specific interests? Is there a distinct problem they have that they need your help with?
Be as specific about your ideal client as possible. The more specific you can be, the more definitive your marketing will be.
What is Your Story?
Part of creating the brand for your law firm is telling the story of that law firm. It’s not just about how the firm started, it’s also about how you and the other attorneys chose the law. It’s also about the other people who work with you and how they came to the firm or became part of your network.
Telling your story does more than just pass on information to your clients, it makes a personal connection with them. There is a reason the most popular podcasts are interview shows. People love to know about other people and how they got to where they are. They also like seeing similarities between themselves and the people they choose to work with.
What Are Your Clients’ Stories?
The final way to build a brand for your law firm is to tell the stories your clients want to hear about themselves. Nike has sold billions of dollars of shoes and apparel by telling their customers that they’re athletes. Starbucks sells coffee on the promise that the drinker is unique.
Neither of those things is true of all customers, but it is accurate in those clients’ minds. Those are the stories your firm and its brand should be telling as well. What is it about your preferred clients that in unique to them? How do they stand out?
Connect with your Clients
Take what you’ve created here and start building your marketing off of this platform. The most important thing you can do is to actually create content on a regular basis. Your brand is your guideline, but it’s not the end-all be-all of your marketing efforts. It’s merely the platform you jump off when you go to create that content.
