Introduction
Brand awareness is a metric that shows the level of recognition of a brand or service among consumers. The greater the brand awareness, the more audiences will be familiar with your logo, messaging and services. Establishing a law firm’s brand awareness is valuable when marketing and promoting your law business. It’s important as it helps you reach a new audience and improve your marketing outreach.
If you can build a law firm brand awareness among your target demographic, you can help your brand become top-of-mind when these consumers are ready to make a purchase. Since customers already recognize your brand, they will be more likely to buy from your business than a competitor’s business.
The benefits of brand awareness
It can have tangible effects on your business performance
This will have a further impact on different layers of your organization, starting with marketing to design and customer service.
Brand awareness campaigns help you build consumers’ trust
Once a consumer bonds to your brand, they’re more likely to make repeat purchases. Brand awareness establishes that brand trust. As a result, customer loyalty has a direct impact on your revenue.
Brand awareness grows brand equity
Brand equity measures a brand’s value and is directly correlated with brand awareness. Positive associations can raise your brand equity. That’s why it’s important to build positive law firm brand awareness. Brand equity describes a brand’s value, which is determined by consumer experiences with and overall perception of the brand.
It makes marketing easy
Brand awareness enforces associations. The brand name connects actions or events with certain products or services. As a result, it is subconsciously encouraging us to replace common words with branded terms.
Brand awareness helps you reach your target audience
Reaching the right people at the right time is the key to success. Brand awareness is an important factor not only in brand building but also in increasing your consumers base. Well-known brands can spend less on marketing and still make sales and increase their consumers base.
How to Establish Brand Awareness
Strong law firm brand awareness is a result of multiple simultaneous efforts that extend beyond trying to get paying customers. Here are some ways to establish a solid brand awareness foundation and make a lasting impact with your audience:
Give your brand a personality
To leave an impact on your audience, you’ve got to define yourself as more than a company that sells services. When you market your services with personality, you will boost your law firm brand awareness. Treating your brand as a person and defining your narrative are the first steps to giving your brand a personality.
The next step would be infusing this personality into your marketing efforts. This is a great strategy when mixing your traditional marketing campaigns with brand awareness campaigns.
Tell a story
Crafting a narrative around your brand humanizes it and gives it depth. It can be the narrative of your founder, the tale of how your business had its first product idea or the story of how your small business made it in this big world. Authenticity is impactful, and it can lead to a big boost in law firm brand awareness. Storytelling is an incredibly powerful marketing tactic, whether you’re marketing services or promoting your brand.
Socialize
Research shows that over 50% of brand reputation comes from online sociability. Being social leads to greater law firm awareness. Therefore, post on social media about things unrelated to your services. Interact with your audience by asking questions, commenting on posts, or retweeting or sharing content you like. Treat your social accounts as if you were a person trying to make friends, not a business trying to make money.
Make sharing easy
Make it easy for your audience to share your content. This could be blog posts, sponsored content, videos, social media posts, or product pages. Word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective way to establish trust and familiarity among customers. If someone sees that a friend or family member is recommending your service, they’ll take notice of that service- alongside your brand.
How To Build Online Brand Awareness
Guest blog for other sites
Research blogs and publications in your industry via Google and social channels. A quick search of education guest blogging brings you this list of education blogs that accept guest posts. Or use platforms like MyBlogGuest and the collection of 500+ sites from BuzzBlogger to aid in your quest.
Make a list of the guest-post accepting sites that your brand is a good fit for. Check each site’s blog content, comments sections and social channels to understand their audiences and how they engage with the content. Make sure that you can provide content that fits into their offerings, while also offering a fresh take.
Brainstorm ideas for blog posts that can include your unique and helpful insights. Make sure they haven’t been covered on the sites you reach out to. Email each site with your pitches according to their submission guidelines. Use these ideas to gain access to an entirely new audience and let the publication you guest blog on benefit from free content from a new industry voice.
Improve your SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to a brand’s exposure online. A well-optimized website will rank high on Google, so the users are more likely to click on it. It involves getting your content seen by search engines like Google and placed on search results pages. Research keywords in your industry and content categories. Keywords are the words that your target audiences are searching to find companies like yours.
When optimizing for brand awareness, focus on incorporating informational keywords into your content. Use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs and Moz Keyword Researcher to find the most important keywords in your industry and among your competitors. Afterward, build content around these keywords. Incorporate your keywords into the headline, body, and image titles of your post.
Start a Referral Program
Referral programs are a great way to spread the word about your brand or service around. A well-executed referral program can bring substantial value to your company and boost your brand recognition. In addition, it can improve your marketing efforts and create a foundation for your brand.
Referral programs can help you reach new customers that would otherwise be unaware of your product. One way to achieve a law firm’s brand awareness through word-of-mouth marketing is to help your loyal customers be your best advocates. A referral program not only increases your reach and the number of people who know your name but also brings that awareness from a source that people trust. 49% of U.S. consumers say friends and family are their top sources of brand awareness.
In programs like that, your existing customers and influential people from your industry niche, encourage others to make a purchase. Once people buy your product or service from their recommendation, they receive a commission, and you get new customers.
Optimize your social media channels
Use social media to gain a law firm’s brand awareness. Social channels make it easy to share content, which means you are reaching a new audience almost effortlessly. However, your message needs to stand out from the crowd to get recognition from your potential customers and existing audience.
The great thing about social media is that they give you a well-functioning platform to broadcast your message. All you have to do is send the right message to the right people at the right time. For example, a social media contest is a perfect way to reach new followers. Ask your followers to tag, share or re-post your content in exchange for a chance to win a prize.
Start a podcast
According to the researches, more than one-third of Americans 12 and older listen to podcasts regularly. Consequently, podcasts play an important role in marketing efforts.
Add a specific value to your consumers’ lives by starting a podcast. Podcasts provide a way to connect with your audience authentically. Instead of blatantly promoting your product or service, podcasts give you the opportunity to educate, inform, entertain or advise your audience and build trust by doing so.
When creating a podcast choose podcast topics that relate to your overall brand message or services. Doing this will help you relate the podcast back to your brand and continue to raise awareness. For example, interview coworkers or film an interesting behind scenes of a client’s case.
Consider which areas your team may be experts in or outside experts you could leverage, and create a piece of content that not only adds value to listeners’ lives but when branded correctly, can work wonders for your brand awareness.
Boosting your law firm brand awareness through campaigns gives you a chance to dabble in marketing and advertising opportunities you’d otherwise not invest in. Consequently meaning new, powerful ways to connect with your audience.
Give something away for free
Give your audience a taste of what you have to offer without the commitment of payment. By giving them access to your offerings can deepen their awareness. Content provides an amazing way to authentically connect with your audience while getting your brand name in front of people. You can create videos, infographics, podcasts, blogs and downloadable guides. For example, offer a subscription service in the form of a free trial.
Use native advertising
Employing native advertising is one of the most effective ways of increasing brand awareness and winning over new customers. Native ads are non-intrusive, easily scalable, and customizable with relevant messaging. You can use a content discovery platform, like Taboola, to increase brand awareness through native advertising. Taboola distributes your branded content — such as articles and videos — across top publisher sites on the open web. In this way, you can launch niche marketing strategies that reach your target audiences and fill the top of the funnel with people who are already interested in your content and products.
Run Social Media ads
By running brand-awareness ads, you can reach new people who might be interested in your client’s brand and even target audiences based on specific behaviors and preferences. On Facebook and Instagram, you can launch brand-awareness campaigns that improve your reach and recall. Furthermore, you can target audiences by categories such as age, location, gender, interest and device. On Twitter, you can launch brand-awareness campaigns by promoting your tweets and paying for impressions instead of engagements. You set your bid amount per 1,000 impressions and Twitter optimizes your campaign for the best possible reach.
Partner with influencers
If you’re having trouble connecting with your target audience, reach them through their favorite creators and influencers. Consumers trust recommendations from influencers more than traditional advertisements or even celebrity endorsements.
Start an influencer marketing campaign by finding influencers in relevant industries and reaching out with partnership ideas. You can do this by simply searching relevant keywords on social channels and locating posts for influencer content.
In addition, search #sponsored hashtags on Twitter and Instagram to see which influencers are already working with brands in your industry. Furthermore, use influencer-marketing platforms like Upfluence and Traackr. Once you find the right influencers, you can gift them free products in exchange for reviews.
Influencers can help you reach consumers, spread your content and build brand awareness, but also legitimize your message with their authority. When choosing influencers, make sure they align with your brand’s core values and have the same target audience as you do.
Sponsor events
Sponsoring events is an effective way to get your brand in front of hundreds, thousands, or millions of people that likely fall into your target audience. From banners to flyers to water bottles, your brand name will be everywhere if you sponsor an event. Sponsoring an event also allows you to pin your brand name on an event that matches your personality, interests, and passions. Meaning consumers will then associate your brand with that event and its aesthetic and character.
Use media listening
The critical element of increasing brand awareness is to be aware of what your potential customers expect from your brand. Building long-lasting relationships will help your brand thrive in an extremely competitive world. When it comes to media monitoring for brand awareness, you should set up at least two projects. One for monitoring the mentions regarding your brand and services. The second project will monitor topics concerning your industry niche.
Use customers’ testimonials
Customer testimonials are a great way to build brand awareness:
- They help establish your credibility as a brand
- Moreover, they drive sales
- They are highly effective and free ads
There’s nothing more convincing than reading success stories from other satisfied clients. Therefore, don’t forget to include your client’s testimonial on your law website!
Implement remarketing campaigns
Remarketing campaigns are paid marketing campaigns where your target audience has already visited your website but left before converting. This is a pro approach to building a law firm brand awareness. The premise behind this technique is that it’s easier to boost your awareness among the people who have already heard about your brand.
The main aim of a remarketing campaign for brand awareness is not to broadcast your message to new audiences but to strengthen your message among your existing potential client base. It takes several touchpoints to convert a client, and a remarketing ad is a perfect one.
Partner with local businesses
Building a global business can be your dream, but you might get more conversion if you focus on the local market, at least in the beginning. Partnering with local businesses to build brand awareness works similarly to cooperating with influencers. You can expose your products to new audiences, which will tremendously help with increasing the awareness of your brand.
How to Measure Brand Awareness
You can divide brand awareness metrics into two subgroups: quantitative and qualitative brand awareness metrics. Measuring brand awareness will depend on your brand awareness objectives. If you are looking to increase brand awareness through native advertising, track metrics such as impressions, click-through rates, and website traffic. If you’re looking to build brand awareness on social media, track analytics contained on each individual social platform.
Most importantly, you’ll want to consistently monitor your campaigns so you can optimize according to people’s interests and behaviors and successfully increase brand awareness among your target audience. Once you measure the campaign, you will know the levels of brand recognition and will know how to improve them.
These metrics will help you understand your brand awareness among your audience and the general public. Tracking these measures will help influence campaigns and stay connected to your audience. Quantitative brand awareness metrics will give you a general understanding of your brand perception online. Qualitative can help you find out how many people are aware of your brand.
Quantitative Brand Awareness Measures
Direct traffic
Direct traffic shows you the number of people who typed in the URL of your website directly into the search bar. Moreover, this number will tell you how much your people visited your website. This is an important metric, as many consumers today discover brands through social media, advertisements, or by typing in keywords related to your brand or product. It’s a valuable metric since it tells you how many people know about your brand and are looking specifically for you.
Site traffic numbers
This number will tell you how much of the general internet population is checking out your content and spending time with your brand.
Social engagement
Engagement can refer to followers, likes, shares, comments, and more. It’s a reflection of how many people are aware of your brand and socialize with it, as well as how impactful your content is. For instance, sites like Sparktoro can give you a specific score for your Twitter impact.
Qualitative Brand Awareness Measures
Searching Google and setting up Google Alerts
Doing this informs you how your brand is being talked about online. In short, it will alert you to any news or mentions by the third-party press.
Social listening
Social listening is monitoring social media management tools for organic mentions and engagement. For instance, who’s tagging your brand, mentioning it in comments, or using your hashtag in their posts.
Running brand awareness surveys
This process involves getting direct feedback from your customers. You can collect valuable information from your audience, for instance – what they think of your brand. You can release surveys through SurveyMonkey or TypeForm and share them on social media or directly with your customers.
Conclusion
Creating brand awareness is crucial not only for start-ups but also for companies with an established position in the market. Brand awareness gives you an opportunity to show your services to a brand new audience. It is a powerful concept that can have a major impact on your marketing efforts, consumer perception and revenue. Therefore, brand awareness marketing should be an essential part of your marketing strategy.
Once you increase law firm brand awareness, you will see an increase in your brand’s core business metrics. Follow these techniques for establishing and building awareness for your brand. Consequently, you will achieve your law firm standout. In other words- you’ll find yourself with a loyal audience that recognizes your brand among competitors. And besides that, choose your products time and time again and recommends their friends and family do the same.