Marketing your legal practice can be daunting. Lawyers are constantly bombarded with emails claiming to immediately place them on page one of Google or to generate innumerable leads with ease. Each inquirer claims to have the “secret” to your law firm’s marketing needs. To make matters worse, giant entities that crank out hundreds, if not thousands, of law firm websites per year reach out to you, claiming to act in your specific best interest. Your gut instinct is probably telling you that these snake oil “secrets” and cookie-cutter marketing recipes aren’t the best plan of attack. Your gut is right.
So How Do I Really Stand Out?
In a saturated field like law, perhaps the most important thing to realize is that there is no single tactic or method to stand out from the crowd. Your region and competition must be researched and analyzed, and your unique brand (or firm) must be fully understood prior to creating an effective digital marketing campaign. Though each project requires a different approach and each has unique needs, I’ll quickly walk through a ground-up branding and marketing scenario for a law firm as an example of what a real project might entail.
Build A Brand
Your firm is a brand, and it must be treated as such. Just like Nike, you want your firm to be recognized, memorable, and to stand out amongst the crowd. Nike doesn’t advertise the same way as Adidas, its website doesn’t look the same, and it takes care to strategically market itself differently. Like Nike, you need to differentiate yourself from your competition in order to shine and stand out as the unique, individual brand that your firm is. Below are the five phases we use in order to transform a standard law firm into a timeless brand.
Phase 1: Research and Strategy
Though this phase is often neglected, it is perhaps the most important part of building a brand and creating an effective marketing campaign. In this phase, we do thorough research to understand the unique pathos and ethos of your firm. We also research your firm’s competition, locally and regionally, plotting ideas on how they can stand out amongst the heard. If a potential client visits 20 websites of different lawyers around your area, you want to be the first one he thinks of later. Your website needs to stand out on a pedestal compared to the rest, and it needs to be memorable. Which brings us to our next phase…
Phase 2: Design
Now that we’ve researched and strategized, it’s time to work on designing your brand. Using the information we’ve gathered, we design the necessary assets (be it a logo, website, business cards, or all of the above) to create a cohesive brand across platforms and mediums that clients will always remember. We pay special attention to capture the truth and originality of your firm, visually and strategically conveying what makes you you.
Phase 3: Video
In the legal field, this is possibly the best way for you to stand out. Having a professionally produced video will put you in small, elite company. Very few lawyers are recognizing the value of video work, but that will soon change. Professional video production is a great way to be at the forefront of your industry.
For example, think of the lawyer commercials you’ve seen. They probably all go a little something like this: a poorly lit, generic scene with a lawyer talking at you about how much money he’s made for his clients, or some other generic slogan of his or her field. Queue a cheesy, cheap graphic and a pixelated logo. End scene. No one will ever want to watch that again, and few people probably made it through the whole video.
Instead, we create cinematic, engaging brand videos that work in conjunction with our websites, and can be used on all social media platforms or as stand-alone advertisements. We avoid the cheap tropes that command the industry, and offer a way for firms to express their individual nature in an engaging audio-visual experience.
Phase 4: Development
In this phase, we combine what we designed and produced into one cohesive, Search Engine Optimized website. We pay careful attention to strategically target the copy for rankings, understanding where we can surpass competitors. The video is integrated in a visually stimulating, yet non-obtrusive manner, urging audiences to further interact with the site.
Phase 5: Marketing Your New Brand
Once again, this phase is unique to each and every firm. However, to offer a condensed brief, this stage may entail social media management, content creation, paid search, recurring videos, social media advertisement, back-linking, and more. All of these tactics are most effective when you have a unique, cohesive brand and a strategically optimized site. Thus, though this marketing phase is crucial, the first four phases mustn’t be neglected when trying to build a unique digital presence and stand out among the crowd.
Conclusion
Each project is different. This five phase plan is an example of what a ground-up branding and marketing solution may look like, but each will have unique needs and circumstances. Be weary of those who rush to provide quick, easy solutions, and understand that for your firm to stand out, it can’t be doing the same thing every other firm is doing.