3 Common Law Firm Brand Myths Debunked

Competition in the legal industry is getting fiercer by the day. Thanks to technology, law firms are now investing in digital marketing more than ever in a bid to win the attention of clients.

Only the elite outshine the crowd, and that’s where branding comes in. Orbelo defines branding as the process of creating a positive perception of a firm. Proper branding distinguishes a law firm from the rest.

Both starting and experienced lawyers have equal branding opportunities and the potential to get their piece of the pie. No matter where you are on your marketing journey, you will be able to build your brand and gain the competitive edge you need to excel.

This article debunks the top law firm brand myths and discusses how you can discover your own law brand. Read on.

Myth 1: You Can Refine Your Brand

You would think your brand depends exclusively on the image you want to portray as a firm, but there’s truly so much more that goes into it! The brand-building process takes time, as well as awareness of what your clients think about you. 

Why? Well, your brand arguably depends more on your clients than on you! What your clients think about your services and your firm, is what determines your brand as a law firm and its place in the market. Building a positive reputation by continuously offering exemplary legal services and promoting your brand as such is what will make your brand shine all the brighter.

Myth 2: Your Business Assets Are Your Brand

As appealing as your company logo is, it won’t be the one thing that will influence your business brand. At least not on its own – the same applies to your other law firm assets. No matter how meticulously planned out and designed they are, what will ultimately give your brand the shine and polish you want and need is the added customer service package.

This is not to say the investments in your assets aren’t worth it – the more cohesive the individual elements of your brand are, the better! Just don’t forget to give the experience you offer your clients the same care and attention. 

Myth 3: People Constantly Think Of Your Brand

We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but, no, your brand is not constantly on your audience’s mind. Indeed, the average consumer tends to ignore marketing. To put this into perspective: When was the last time you thought about any specific brand for more than a few minutes at a time, except for when you are in the process of making a purchase?

With as much competition as there is in the legal industry, firms have to become increasingly inventive to make their brand shine through. In addition to the aesthetically pleasing aspects, the more social proof you have to offer, the better! 

Though your audience may not be daydreaming about you, if all of the puzzle pieces are in place when they need legal assistance, there is a higher chance that your name will pop up when it matters the most. 

How to Discover and Build Your Brand

Here are great strategies that you can apply to build your legal brand:

Talk to Your Clientele

The first step to knowing your brand as seen in the eyes of your potential clients is to get first-hand information from your current clients. They are the main players in the process of building your brand, and so, it’s imperative to understand what they think of you.

You can collect the information through surveys, questionnaires, or face-to-face communication. Some of the questions that you can ask them to include:

• Why did you choose to work with us and not our competitors?
• Is this the first time you are hiring a lawyer?
• Are you content with our services?
• Would you recommend our law firm to other people? If no/yes, why?

Get Everyone On Board

The more united you are as a firm, the more coherent and solid your brand will come across. This, in turn, also makes growing your brand a more fluid process. 

In order to ensure this firm unity, reinforce the law firm’s culture. Make sure all internal communications are shared transparently, your values as a firm are clearly defined and followed, and keep tabs on how the firm’s clients are cared for by all partners. 

Maintain Brand Consistency

The final step to put the brand of your law firm in place is to maintain consistency. Here are some sure-fire tips on how you can do so:

• Create an excellent website for your law firm
• Utilize social media for marketing
• Create an appealing logo for your law firm
• Create business cards and distribute them to your clients
• Tell your clients to give you feedback, and recommend your business to other people 
• Pick an appealing color scheme for your law firm
• Invest in marketing and promotions

The key here is to make sure you’ve got your vision for your brand decided on, to then build upon it through various marketing strategies and other activities. If your brand is already built from the get-go, you will be less likely to make changes to it in the mid-term and possibly confuse your audience.

Conclusion

The world is rapidly changing, and this also applies to legal marketing. The law firms that are willing to change and maintain brand consistency will always be on the winning end. (You’re already ahead of the game for taking the time to read this guide!) 

Do you need help with law firm branding? Feel free to reach out to us. Our team of digital marketing experts will assess your business needs and help you create the right strategies to grow your brand.

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Useful Insights into the Past, Present, and Future of Digital Marketing for Law Firms

Marketing for lawyers used to be the classic referral and handing out business cards. But the internet and technology disrupted everything. Suddenly, everybody had a website. The competition went from the law firm on the other side of town to a pool of them online.  But lawyers were still apprehensive about marketing and there’s a good reason why.

Nobody calls lawyers for fun. If anything, every call that goes through a law firm is a distress call. To many lawyers, marketing was equal to putting up a billboard on the Cross Bronx Expressway flaunting your skills. It’s almost like saying, “I’m waiting for your life to go south so I can make money out of you. “

But as the internet created infinite options for prospects, law firms slowly embraced digital marketing. Let’s talk about the past, present, and future of digital marketing to help you see what really counts.

The Past of Digital Marketing

 

There has been a long-standing tradition of upholding trust and the law above all else in the legal arena. Lawyers view themselves as thought leaders, trustworthy, expert, and caring-legal guardians who have clientele and not customers. From this standpoint, marketing seems like merchandising-nothing short of devaluing the legal profession.

Legal marketing in the 50s and 60s was unheard of. The law even banned some forms of marketing-with little resistance from lawyers. In the 70s a law firm called Bates from Arizona challenged the status quo. They put an ad in the local daily. It resulted in the disbarment of the lawyers and a suit against the State Bar of Arizona. The Supreme Court ruled that the restrictions of advertising and other forms of marketing were antiquated rules of etiquette. Law firms started marketing their services and even hired in-house marketing teams.

The newfound freedom later found its way into internet marketing in the early 90s. However, users could not share much with the Web 1.0 platform. In the same decade, the internet evolved, providing clickable banners. Yahoo and Google also launched along with search engines that enabled law firms to improve their rankings online.

The entry of Google, MSN, and Yahoo Web search engines blew up the internet in 2006. The year saw 6.4 billion in traffic in a month as a result of these engines.

However, legal digital marketing soon experienced hiccups in SEO ranking. Outsourced marketing companies sometimes played dirty to improve ranking including using black hat SEO.

By 2016, legal firms were not only creating websites but also actively pursuing digital marketing. In the same year, research by Bloomberg reported that 68% of lawyers and marketers bowed to internal pressure to grow revenue, 43 percent to the pressure of seeing other businesses succeed, and 41% to client pressure to get alternative billing methods.

Legal Digital Marketing Today

Legal digital marketing has evolved massively with AI making it easy to track ads and measure ROI. Ideally, law firms wrap their marketing strategies around value, content, analytics, multiple channels, SEO, and focusing on the client needs.

The value bit of the marketing strategy is meant to give clients value. The target of the value principle is to show clients that the firm understands their plight, has what it takes to help, and is trustworthy.

Websites are standard today with 86% of law firms reporting that they have a website.  Ideally, websites are the online representation of a law firm. They reflect its persona through the colors, text, and tone of the content found there.

This content is geared to improve SEO rankings with the help of keywords. Content could be blog posts, web content, videos, infographics, and text. CTAs with statements such as Get a Free Consultation or Find a Personal Injury lawyer is popular for generating leads that turn into clients.  56% of law firms with more than 100 employees use video marketing.

According to the American Bar Association, 41% of all firm sizes use email marketing and Facebook(30%)

With the pandemic restrictions, more law firms are cashing in on live stream features on social media. Lawyers hold live Q&As or hold webinars to discuss hot button topics or give advice.

The Future of Legal Marketing

If the COVID-19 crisis has taught us anything, businesses don’t seek legal services-people do. These people have needs and some have changed completely courtesy of the pandemic.

The pandemic may stretch longer than we think. Content will still be important. Current statistics are already hinting at just how important online content will be. The problem is creating content that your clients need versus what’s trending.

Users are putting more effort into content consumption, reading writings on thought leadership, getting advice from videos, and then listening to a podcast to learn more. People are consuming this content all at various stages of their content-funnel journeys.

To examine how well you’ve been doing on content ask yourself these questions.

•       What do my clients want?
•       Can they comfortably say my law firm is right for them?
•       Which content can help them stem their fears about an uncertain future?

A relevant attorney will not only be good at applying the law. They’ll also care for their clients.  Their marketing strategy will be largely built on content that solves their client’s problems.

For most attorneys, getting content marketing right starts by learning these crucial things about content marketing.

• Get a Podcast for Your Firm. Podcasts are in high demand. They add depth and personality to your content in a way that text cannot. It also makes you relatable. People have a habit of hiring people they think understand them.
• Leverage video Content. Video is an excellent way to show clients your personality. Thanks to tech, every video doesn’t require a video crew to hack. But you can hire a professional video production company to use on your ‘About Us’ section.
• Get to the Point. Make a habit of getting to the point at the top of your content funnel. Even with a higher demand for online content, attention spans are still extremely short.
• Be Crystal Clear. Target a niche group for your thought leadership content, and say who it’s meant for in the headline, opening, and whenever you share it.

Who We Are

We focus on law firm marketing, providing strategies that fit the unique facets of the legal field in a competitive market. That way, you can focus on providing value to your clientele. Request a custom quote here today. 

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Core Web Vitals: Google’s Next Big Update

Are you ready for Google’s next update?

 

Come May 2021, the Google algorithm as we know it will change – again. Though the search engine undergoes near-constant updates, the vast majority go under the radar. The upcoming core update, however, is one that will potentially impact your SEO efforts if all of the boxes aren’t checked off. We have compiled a checklist for you to assess which areas you may need to optimize in order to avoid any negative effects. 

 

Before we dive into the nitty-gritty, however, let’s clear up the key terms. What exactly are the Google core web vitals, and how are they evaluated? 

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core web vitals are a set of metrics that quantify elements that make up the user experience. They’re there to ensure only websites that have both great content AND an awesome user experience rank in top positions, which, in turn, makes sure that: 

1. Ranking websites are more likely to have qualified traffic and, hence, converting visitors.
2. The search engine’s reputation as a reliable information provider is preserved. 

 

Specifically, the newest Google core web vitals update revolves around the new SEO ranking factors that focus on:

• How quickly the page loads
• Whether buttons or text move about on the page while it’s loading
• How quickly the user can interact with the page upon landing on it.

 

You can check how your site is doing on all of these metrics on Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, Chrome DevTools, web.dev’s measure tool, or Web Vitals Chrome extension.  

Page Load Speed (Largest Contentful Paint LCP) 

Have you ever landed on a purchase confirmation page, and as you went in to tap or click on that last Purchase button, it suddenly moved, and you ended up canceling the whole thing? 

Or while doing research and in the middle of reading a paragraph, everything shifted and you lost your spot… 

We’re willing to bet that if this has happened, you clicked right off and looked for a different site to do business with, or research your topic on – or at least vowed to never return once you’ve finished your task. 

Through this update, site owners are being pushed to improve on this specific issue – and for good reason! It’s true you want to evoke emotions when someone visits your site, but annoyance is definitely not one of them. 

So, what is considered a good CLS?

• Good: 0.1
• Poor: 0.25
• Bad: over 0.25

Making sure your page elements are maintained stable will grant you a lower CLS score and keep your site users from getting frustrated. On the flip side, having your users relearn where buttons, images, and fields are is a bad idea, and the more things move around on your page as it loads, the higher your CLS will be – and the more agitated your page visitors will be. (No bueno.) 

 

Page Interactivity Speed (First Input Delay FID)

Imagine walking up to someone you think is attractive, interesting, and worth your while, and you ask them a question. Now imagine them staring back at you, reactionless and responsible for a solid 5 seconds (or more!). Awkward, right? 

This is how visitors feel when they go onto your site and they try to interact with it (by clicking on a button or a link, accessing the menu bar, etc.) and nothing happens for milliseconds on end. 

What is considered a good FID score?

• Good: 100 milliseconds or less
• Poor: 300 milliseconds
• Bad: over 300 milliseconds

You would probably walk away from the reactionless person who only had a blank stare to offer, right? The same thing applies to visitors clicking off of unresponsive sites, so the crisper and faster the responsiveness of your page, the better for everyone involved!

Why are Core Web Vitals such a big deal?

Google has hundreds of different ranking signals, so whether you’re doing a little better or not that well on individual signals will likely not impact your performance dramatically. However (you knew there would be a caveat), when it comes to user experience, things like a slow loading time or an unstable page can have an outsized influence on the likelihood of capturing a user and guiding them down the buyer’s funnel. 

According to a Google study, websites that meet the minimum requirements for each of the 3 core web vitals have an abandonment rate 24% lower than those that don’t. Think of it as gaining 24% more traffic without doing much more than simply cleaning things up a bit on your site. So here’s to creating a delightful user experience to complement the great content you already have and go after those leads!

 

What can you do to prepare?

Optimize Largest Content Paint

• Remove any non-critical third-party scripts.
• Preload important assets, such as above-the-fold images, fonts, and critical path CSS/Javascript 
• Set up asynchronous loading so that media loads as a user scrolls down your page.
• Optimize and compress images. You can also convert them into lighter formats, like JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, or WebP

Optimize Cumulative Layout Shift

• Preload fonts so they have a higher priority in page rendering. 
• Include width and height attributes on media elements (video, images, GIFs, infographics etc.).
• Make sure ads elements have a reserved space.

Optimize First Input Delay

• Remove any non-critical third-party scripts.
• Minimize (or defer) JavaScript so that it is only executed when needed.
• Break down long-running Javascript code into smaller, asynchronous tasks.

 

 

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