Rebranding Your Law Firm: Tips and Tricks to Update While Conserving Firm Familiarity

Every business owner will eventually decide to rebrand their image to stay fresh and relevant. This is especially true for businesses that have been in operation for many years and may have outdated elements of their brand design that need careful updating. While your law firm’s image may need a facelift, it’s important to know a few simple tricks that can help you rebrand successfully without losing the brand image you have worked hard to cultivate and to find a balance between the old and new. Change things too little, and you’ll quickly appear outdated. Change things too much, and you risk alienating your core audience and losing the brand recognition you’ve gained thus far.

Consider the following tips if you want to rebrand your firm’s website without sacrificing brand awareness. Approaching this process with a sound plan can bring fantastic results, whereas approaching it haphazardly will have the opposite effect and potentially drive business away from your firm.

Review Your Brand Imagery

Humans are visual creatures, and we make strong connections with visual elements in any brand image. People quickly familiarize themselves with specific shapes, patterns, colors, and other visual elements when they get to know a brand. Your firm’s logo and website design likely follow relatively strict visual formats, but it may be time to rethink your visual design if you want to rebrand successfully.

Start by taking a close look at your typographical choices, your color schemes, and how you format your visual content. Think of ways to redesign these elements in more modern ways without completely departing from your original visual design. This will resonate with the audience you have already built and let them know that your firm is still the firm they have come to know so well but that you’ve simply updated your visual image.

Implement SEO Into Your Changes

Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial if you want to maintain brand awareness and cultivate new clients regularly. If you’re overhauling your website, it’s a good idea to take this opportunity to implement some necessary adjustments that will improve your overall SEO results. These changes may include back-end adjustments to your site’s structure, configuring a more intuitive sitemap so visitors can more easily navigate your site’s pages, or even completely redesigning your website’s framework so search engine bots can crawl your pages faster and more seamlessly.

Remember that while rebranding is largely considered visual, and you might want to focus on design elements more than site structure, paying close attention to your site’s construction is one of the best ways to ensure your changes have their intended positive effects. Consult with your site designer and determine which portions of your website require the most attention if you want to improve SEO. Then start brainstorming changes you can implement to rebrand while addressing these needs.

Publicize Your Rebranding Efforts

If you’re going to overhaul your firm’s brand image, you need to let your current audience know the changes are coming before you implement them. If core audience members visit your blog only to discover that your website looks completely different, this can be jarring and make them wonder whether your firm is the same firm they’ve come to know.

Take advantage of your social media channels and send out an email to your mailing list to ensure everyone knows that your website is going to have a new look in the near future. Additionally, make sure your rebranding efforts are consistent across all of your marketing channels. This may require adjusting your social media images, the header and footer graphics on your email messages, and your website simultaneously. Consistency is key for brand awareness — your audience should have a similar visual experience no matter how they interact with your firm online.

Create a Solid Plan

You may have a wonderful idea for a new firm logo, a new website design, or a combination of multiple ideas you want to implement into your rebranding campaign. Take time to carefully develop a plan that incorporates your ideas seamlessly, and make sure your whole team is on board with your proposed changes. It’s not a good idea to start changing things piecemeal without an overarching strategy. If you go this route, you’re likely to encounter conflicts between your newest changes and your earlier ones.

Do not implement any major changes until you have consulted with your team and everyone knows what to expect. If you bring in outside help to assist with your rebranding efforts, make sure they fully understand your vision and your goals. Your development team should provide you with a step-by-step implementation plan, a list of key performance indicators to track the success of your rebranding, and a carefully constructed outline of all of the back-end changes you need to make to ensure your rebranding executes successfully.

Prepare Accordingly With Back-End Changes

If you intend to implement better SEO into your rebranding strategy, it’s vital to consider the back-end structures your changes are going to influence. For example, if you plan to completely rebuild an outdated website from the ground up, you’re going to need to maintain your current site until the new one is ready to launch. Working with an experienced web development team is important if you intend to go this far with your rebrand. If you do not take proper precautions, you could unintentionally launch a partially finished site and ruin SEO for both your old site and your new one.

Once you’re ready to go live with your new, rebranded website, it’s vital to ensure you have a solid redirection structure in place so visitors to your old site will automatically find themselves on your new website. This is a difficult task, as you will basically need to redirect every page from your old site to the most relevant matching page on your new site.

It’s no secret that rebranding a business is very risky and difficult. Done successfully, you can potentially grow your audience tremendously, but any missteps could lead to losing a large portion of the audience you have already cultivated. RizeUp Media offers several digital marketing solutions and web development services that can allow you to rebrand as successfully as possible. We’ll work closely with you to determine the best approach to rebranding your law firm and help you understand every phase of the process. If you’re ready to rebrand your law firm, contact RizeUp Media and find out how our team can help make the process more streamlined and more successful.