Branding & Marketing for the Legal Sector in London

As more customer engagement shifts online, London law firms are realising that predictable comms combined with a basic website is no longer sufficient. They need a clear market position and one that’s powerfully communicated through every channel, both online and off.

This all begins with a clear brand identity. But how do we approach the branding process for the legal sector?

Establishing Foundations

Step 1: The Audit

We carry out an intensive audit of your existing brand assets to understand whether you require a minor update or a wholesale rebrand.

Step 2: Market Research

Before generating new ideas it’s essential we gather as much information as possible about your position within the broader market landscape. Not only does this involve a great deal of research into your particular firm (what are your goals, strengths, commercial objectives, key products, etc), but also into your customers. If they are split across a range of audience groups we’ll define clear personas to better understand their underlying drivers and habits. We then assess your direct competition – what other law firms are communicating a similar message to a similar audience? What can we learn from their communications and what do we need to do differently? We should also be mindful of broader factors such as technological advancements and social changes, so that we can paint a picture of how the market is likely to evolve over the next 5-10 years, so that the position your firm occupies is one that strengthens over time rather than slowly losing relevance.

Step 3: Workshops

This is a collaborative effort. It’s not for us to tell you who you are, but rather to help you arrive at your own answers. We do this through a series of intensive but fun workshops, tackling everything from your value proposition and corporate values, to your key product messaging and tone of voice. These can be hosted by us in Henley or another location, or alternatively, we can travel to your site.

Journey Discovery Workshops

There are many components of a brand, all of which we dig into within our intensive group workshops. Some of the elements covered include:

Market Position

With so many law firms competing for work, it’s never been more important to have a clear sense of your position. It may be that you’re a highly specialist firm that works in just one area of law, such as IP or divorce law, or alternatively you may offer a broad range of legal services but to one very specific type of client, perhaps based on a particular sector or some other characteristic. Your position could be built upon one particular route into your audience, be it via a local physical presence or some kind of digital medium. Whatever your position, ensuring it’s clearly defined and understood both internally and externally is the first step of building a great legal brand.

Brand Vision

As important as your position may be, it’s unlikely to inspire action on its own. Prospective customers and employees need a reason to buy into your firm on a more emotive level, which is why it’s so important we’re able to articulate a compelling narrative that defines what you stand for, the change you’re trying to make and why people should care.

Organisational Values

Values are important to any brand, but for a law firm where the vast majority of interaction takes place between individual solicitors and their respective customers, the value framework within which those solicitors operate is absolutely business critical. Ensuring the culture is clearly defined with specific mechanisms in place for embedding those values is essential if you are to turn those values from nebulous words on a page to the genuine DNA of the firm’s culture.

Product Features & Benefits

One of the biggest trends in the legal market has been the shift towards productising what have traditionally been bespoke and often indistinct service lines. Even if full productisation is difficult for your proposition, there is still considerable value to be gained from identifying clear features and benefits, along with a well defined pricing structure.

Tone of voice

Whilst you will never succeed in getting all of your employees to communicate in the same way, there is huge value in establishing clear tramlines that they can follow. Should they be serious or casual? Opinionated or neutral? Bold or cautious? Welcoming or exclusive? Not only is this essential for ensuring your marketing function is representing the brand accurately and consistently, but it will also set some useful parameters for your staff, within which they can let their personalities flourish!

The Visual Identity

Now that we have a clear sense of the brand’s purpose and personality, we’re in a fantastic position to establish how that should manifest itself from a visual perspective, which we can break down into:

• Logo and other iconography
• Typeface
• Colour palette
• Imagery, video and sound

Establishing Foundations

Step 1: The Audit

We carry out an intensive audit of your existing brand assets to understand whether you require a minor update or a wholesale rebrand.

What does all this mean for your future marketing?

This isn’t just about creating a beautiful logo or fancy tone of voice document. This is about shaping every interaction your law firm has with every stakeholder, both internal and external, regardless of medium.

Firstly, it’s key to determine how this brand identity will manifest itself within your content strategy. What are the key content pillars we’ll be aligning all of our content to and what story are we trying to tell? Law firms are thinking with increasing ambition in this regard, as they devise exciting long term goals and strategies for their content. For example, if you’re a law firm specifically working with technology companies, the objective may be to be the most famous law firm within the UK technology sector. You might host events that bring together thought leaders in the tech space and host a regular podcast with some of these influencers.

This kind of content strategy can then feed into all of your channel tactics. For law firms these will almost always include:

Email

Email has a really strong correlation with purchase decisions. What’s more, you can import email data into other platforms, such as social media sites, to enhance your audience targeting.

SEO

Many law firms have spearheaded their customer acquisition with aggressive search marketing campaigns as it delivers a growing compound return over time as every page extends their keyword net that little bit further.

LinkedIn

This is particularly important for individual solicitors as they try to carve out their own unique positions underneath the brand’s umbrella. By networking and sharing great content, they can drive their own business opportunities rather than just depending on the firm to do it all for them.

Offline Marketing

In a world of digital saturation, more conventional channels such as events and physical collateral can carry remarkable meaning and impact, particularly when aligned with your digital tactics. After all, most legal purchases follow a series of touchpoints.

Of course whatever the channel, everything comes down to testing and learning, which is why we report back on pre-agreed deadline performance metrics every week so that we can constantly fine tune and optimise the campaign.