Home Legal Internet Marketing Brand Development

hand holding a lightbulb Whether your law firm has been around for decades or only a few years, brand development is a constant element of your legal Internet marketing strategy. Your brand says who you are, what you are capable of, and how you can help your clients.

Do you want to appear formidable in the courtroom or are you a compassionate mediator during custody disputes?

Do you run a nationally recognized law firm that only takes on the most challenging cases or do you run a boutique firm that gives each case the attention it deserves?

Answering these questions is key to marketing your firm to potential clients, but if you are not sure what makes your brand distinct, then you need to work with an experienced marketing agency. SLS Consulting, Inc., helps facilitate and foster brands for attorneys to help them reach new clients online and offline. We can develop your brand through professional photos, captivating graphic design, precise language in your content, and carefully planned interactions on social media. Our goal is to make sure who you are, what you do, and how you can help is reflected in all of your marketing material.

If your law firm needs help developing its brand and reaching new clients, call SLS Consulting, Inc., at (323) 254-1510 to speak to our in-house marketing team.

Translating Your Company's Message

At SLS, we ask our clients to think of their law firm brand as a translation. You may know what you do on a day-to-day basis, but your future clients need to know what sets you apart from the hundreds of other lawyers in your area. So, in a sense, you are speaking another language and you must translate your message to fit the "language" of your clients. When you start thinking about your services and your law firm from the perspective of the client, you can develop a better idea of your selling points.

For example, you may know how to use a blood-spit motion to invalidate a chemical test and get your client’s DUI charges dismissed – but what does that mean, to the client? Many firms get lost in the technicalities of the law and forget that they are marketing themselves to everyday people.

Instead of going into heavy details about cases, you should consider highlighting successful case results, client reviews, certifications, and awards that showcase your firm’s capabilities. A tagline like “Over 100 DUIs Dismissed and Counting!” can go a lot further than digging into case law.

What's in a Brand?

But translating your brand starts with knowing what it is. Many lawyers come to us with decades of experience but little understanding of what makes their firm unique or how clients view them. Others spent years in one practice area and wanted to expand into new areas, such as Bottlinger Law, L.L.C., and needed to find a middle ground between what their firm was and what they wanted their firm to be.

An easy way to identity your brand is to ask how you landed clients in the past. Client testimonials can be a great resource for determining how you presented yourself during a case and what stuck out in your clients’ minds. You can also look back to your first meetings or calls with clients. Had they met with other attorneys and not felt respected until they talked to you? Do clients ask a lot of the same questions? What do you do to answer them?

Once you understand how you started bringing clients into your firm, you can spot the key elements of your brand. From there, you should consider drawing on what makes you stand out compared to other firms and what image you want clients to think of when they hear your name.

Let the Personality of Your Law Firm Shine

When we are onboarding new clients, we like to ask them to think of their brand as their law firm's personality. Why should someone hire you? What makes you different from the law firm around the corner? Our job is to help you answer these questions and highlight them in an engaging, effective, and informative way on your website and social media profiles.

SLS Consulting, Inc. believes that your brand should shine through every aspect of your online presence. From the type of font on your blog to the coloring of your logo to your tone in Facebook posts – all of this should be influenced by your brand. Your brand has to speak for itself.

The main ways that SLS highlights clients’ brands is through:

  • Web Design: Your legal website design must be customized to the philosophy and mission of your law practice – no one else's. Photos, images, slogans, layout, color schemes, and navigation must all be specific to your law firm, telling visitors what makes you unique, and how you help people by providing quality, incomparable services.
  • Social Media: Whether you are sharing case results on Twitter or shouting out local events on Facebook, your brand should remain consistent on every platform. If your brand is properly represented and interesting, more and more people will be drawn to what your law firm has to offer. Social media profiles and pages create brand advocates who not only care about your services but shout your praises because of their pleasant past experiences with your company. Additionally, social media allows your company to show a more down-to-earth side of your business. Social media is the ideal avenue to humanize your brand, which will create a stronger connection between your firm and its fans.
  • Content: Visitors to your website are looking for immediate answers to their big legal questions when they need it most, and the pages and blogs that make up your site need to answer their questions quickly and efficiently. But beyond being informative, your content should highlight what makes your firm unique and why a user should contact you. When developing content for your website, you should always think of the information you provide as the bait, while your branding, tone, and language are what really bring the fish in.

There may also come a time when you need to defend your brand through reputation management when faced with negative reviews or comments. If you've been effectively branding your company, any damage control should be much easier to implement.

Let’s Start Small – And Then Go Big

Brand development is a high priority at SLS Consulting, Inc., as it sets the foundation for everything we do for our clients to help them reach the top of search results and stay there. We‘ve worked with many clients who simply wanted to land the biggest cases in their field, but to get to that stage, we need to understand what makes your firm unique and how to best market to your target audiences. This all starts with our onboarding process. From day one, we try to learn everything we can about our clients, from how they operate in the courtroom to the way they talk to clients, so that we can showcase them against their competitors. Moving forward, we keep their brand in mind whenever we are planning social posts, updating an attorney biography, or designing a landing page.

Since 1999, our team of legal internet marketers have helped attorneys build their brands and get ahead of their competition. We encourage you to read through our case studies and reviews to learn how we have helped clients just like you. If you are ready to get into the details of building your brand, and to learn the difference it can make for your law firm on- and off-line, call us today at (323) 254-1510 for a free case evaluation.

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