Three Ways to Build Your ACE Brand

At Spotlight Branding, one of our core focuses is helping lawyers build their brand as an ACE – Authoritative, Credible, Expert.

As an ACE, you command higher rates. You earn more referrals. You attract clients rather than spending time and resources chasing them down. You can afford to be choosy about who you’ll work with and what types of work you take on.

If you want to know more about the benefits of creating an ACE brand, take a look at this blog entry. Today, I’m going to share three practical ways you can use your internet presence to make it happen.

Start Blogging. Educational blog entries, like this one that you’re reading right now, are a great way to provide value to your audience while establishing your own credibility and expertise at the same time. We recommend that every law practice have a blog on their website, and that they publish a new entry once per month at minimum. If you’re not sure what to write about, it’s simple – create a list of the common questions, concerns, or misunderstandings that your clients and potential clients have. Then write blog entries addressing those concerns. Aim for 300-500 words and write in language that resonates with your target market. No legalese! Check out this article if you want more information on this process.

Leverage Video. Video is a great credibility tool – as long as you do it right. It’s important that you pay attention to your lighting, your backdrop, and especially your audio. Audio is arguably even more important than the picture quality! While there are a number of different approaches to using video for your law firm, we suggest that you start by creating a Video FAQ library. Take the same approach to your video FAQs as I mentioned with your blog topics above – just answer common questions and concerns! Aim for 30-60 seconds, and again, make sure you’re using language that resonates with your target audience. As an example, here’s a great FAQ library created for a client of ours.

Create a Special Report or White Paper. Include a downloadable report or White Paper on your website and you’ll get two big wins. First, it functions as a “lead magnet” and helps you capture the contact information of people who visit your website. Secondly, and more importantly for our purpose today, it creates instant authority and credibility for you. Simply the fact that the report exists on your website immediately makes you look like more of an ACE. Click here for a short video that I shot recently, discussing the value of creating a report and giving you some ideas of where to begin.

One final note before we wrap up today – these strategies are going to work better if you’ve built a focused niche for your practice. In fact, all of your branding and marketing is going to work better with a focused niche. The more you can move away from being a generalist and towards being a specialist, the better. Check out this article for more on that subject.

I hope these tips give you some inspiration – and if you’d like some help using the internet to create your ACE brand, give us a shout!

 

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Daniel Decker

Daniel Decker is a co-founder and Partner at Spotlight Branding. In addition to helping lawyers stand out from the crowd, he spends his time writing, dreaming up new marketing strategies, and coming up with catchy subject lines. In his spare time, Daniel enjoys playing sports, guitar, politics, and Minnesota sports.