Myth #2 You Need to Build a Brand to Have a Thriving Law Firm

The second biggest mistake I made in my law practice was spending money on “branding”. The biggest mistake I made was discussed in my last blog post.

First of all, let’s discuss what branding is.

As defined in Entrepreneur.com: Definition: The marketing practice of creating a name, symbol or design that identifies and differentiates a product from other products.

Investing money in creating a logo and then spending money on having that image displayed everywhere is a big waste of time and money for small firms like you and me. Yes, branding is important, but you can create your brand without spending any money. Read my Free Special Report “3 Marketing Secrets to Law Firm Marketing” to learn more.

When you spend marketing dollars you need to make sure that for every dollar you spend -you are at least getting two in return. We do not have the luxury of having Wall Street money to spend millions of dollars on a marketing campaign. Let us be clear, Coca Cola or Nike have very different agendas – than our firms. Therefore, do not copy their type of brand advertising. If you hire a marketing consultant that wants you to spend money on this type of traditional “branding” ask whether this will DIRECTLY generate revenue for your firm. I do not want you to go broke spending money on advertising that will not get clients.

Why do I want you to ask this question?

I made the mistake of spending thousands of dollars on “branding”, because I followed the advice of a well-intentioned consultant. The consultant’s first recommendation was the following: “You should invest in developing your brand”. At the time I knew very little about marketing and trusted the consultant. After all the consultant had a MBA and I had a JD. Well, what I did not know at the time is that an MBA is trained to do traditional branding campaigns. They are not taught Direct Marketing.

Unfortunately, at this time I did not even know what Direct Marketing was (read below to learn about the goal of Direct Response Marketing). So I spent the little money I had in creating a beautiful logo. I spent thousands of dollars on beautiful letterhead, envelopes and labels. Afterwards I realized that these pretty logos and stationary were not going to directly get a client to hire me!

After studying gurus such as Joe Polish, Dan Kennedy and Brendon Bruchard, I learned Direct Response Marketing.

In contrast to Branding, Direct Marketing’s goal is to create a message that will directly get your client to take a specific action such as schedule an appointment or order your free special report. When you are starting your marketing campaign do not worry about your logo because no matter how pretty your logo is, your logo alone will not be the catalyst for your ideal client to pick up the phone and call you. However, the headline in your ad could make the difference between 0 or ten clients a month.