Crafting Your Firm's Brand to Attract Ideal Clients

While you know that your firm needs a brand that attracts your ideal clients, crafting one can often be challenging.

What is Law Firm Branding?

Your brand is how people identify and talk about your firm. It is your fundamental identity and the characteristics, values, and attributes that support this identity. It makes up a large part of your firm's public reputation. In other words, your brand is your law firm's personality.

Here is another definition of branding from Kellogg on Marketing: “a brand is a name or symbol or mark that is associated with a product or service and to which buyers attach psychological meanings.” Put another way, a brand is something that raises awareness, connects with the public, and ultimately attracts potential clients to your firm.

An additional way to view law firm branding is to think about how you think of well-known brands. For example, what’s the first thing you think of when someone mentions Gucci or Louis Vuitton? Most likely if you've had experience with either of those brands, what comes to mind is high quality, luxury, sophisticated, and stylish.

In this same way, you will want people to be able to describe your brand in concise, colorful, but very specific



The most vital piece of your law firm's brand is knowing what will compel a potential client to schedule a meeting or call with you.

Why Law Firm Branding is Important

It’s important for law firms to get their branding right. While it's part of how people view, research from Altman Weil reports that well-positioned firms can:

• Improve referrals from current clients
• Attract ideal, desirable new clients
• Recruit better employees and associates
• Get a 10% to 20% increase in premium in fees

Defining Your Law Firm's Brand

While many firms want to jump right in with their marketing the reality that there can be no successful marketing without a clear brand strategy. You need to understand your branding, in order to target your ideal clients and make sure your law firm digital marketing is effective and successful.

Identify Your Firm's Target Market

Your first step in defining your firm's branding is to clearly define your ideal client. Your brand should resonate and attract your target market.



We talk about defining your target market in this article: Defining Your Target Audience for Law Firms. 

Describe Your Firm's Differentiating Factors

If you were to describe your law firm to a group or person who has not heard of your firm before, what would you say? This is a question that your brand should start to answer.

While some people will start with tangible things like the size of your firm, how long you've been in business, where you’re located, and what practice areas you specialize in. But your brand should tell them why to do business with you, not just who, what, and where you are as a firm.

You can show your firm's unique value by answering these questions:

• What makes your firm different from anyone else in your geographic market?
• If I need a lawyer, why should I call your firm?
• Who do you enjoy and want to work with the most?
• What is your message?

Maybe it’s personalized service, 24/7, or it might be decades of experience in a unique field of law that most firms don’t have. Perhaps it’s a reputation for providing truly effective or aggressive defense in a courtroom.

Create Your Visuals

Once you have established how you want to talk about your brand, and what your unique features and characteristics are, you can begin to create your visuals. This would include logos, colors, and fonts.

Your Tone of Voice

Once you have defined your ideal client, and know how you want to talk about what sets your firm apart from others, you can begin to define your tone of voice. Tone provides a voice to the visual elements of your branding.

A few examples to decide on for your firm's tone of voice:

1. Sarcastic or serious
2. Formal or conversational
3. Respectful or irreverent
4. Passionate or factual

Once you've decided on your tone of voice, you will want to be consistent in all of your public-facing communications and content.

Showing Versus Telling

If you would describe your differentiating factors as superior service, experience, or abilities, do what you can show it or prove it with social proof, testimonials, or evidence. What’s your process? What are examples of your work? What do your clients say?

Showcase Your Firm's Experience

Firesign Marketing offers a few ways to showcase your firm's specific experience. Their examples are listed below:

• Bartimus Frickleton Robertson Rader, a plaintiffs’ firm, allows users to quickly filter results by type of matter, from coverage disputes to class actions.
• Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs, a large corporate firm, write case studies that detail the challenge, approach, and result – along with a link to the relevant lawyer bio.
• Brown & Curry, which helps veterans with benefits claims, uses a ticker to show the basics for recent wins: dollar amount, a branch of service, and location.

Gather Client Feedback

If your firm conducts client feedback campaigns and can gather stellar client reviews, put those front and center as part of your branding (and your website.)

Unique Approach to Law

If you are known for an especially effective or aggressive approach on behalf of your clients, or if you have experience in a niche part of the law, you will want to highlight that in your branding.

For potential clients with niche needs, showing a sustained pattern of thought leadership will prove your expertise, and could perhaps keep them from shopping around for other firms.

Avoid Inconsistencies

You will want the entire customer journey to be consistent as they become aware of your firm and begin to interact with it.

That means that if you want to position your brand as sophisticated and savvy, you will want to have a polished website, that showcases these attributes in the experience a website visitor receives while on your website. It will be vital that they get the same experience no matter what way they experience your brand. (Calling your firm, visiting your site on a mobile device, or viewing an ad on social media.)

Putting It All Together

Once you have established your branding, you will want to consistently use your colors, logos, fonts, tone of voice, and social proof in most, if not all of your public-facing communication and content. The more consistent your are, the more you will attract and appeal to your ideal clients, which is the goal of effective law firm branding.