Law Branding | 1-800-DIVORCE

Your target divorce clients are swamped by too many local divorce lawyers. Ironically, the law firm ads of those divorce lawyers make all of them look and sound alike. There is very little law branding involved in divorce marketing.

If you doubt that, have your spouse or a trusted non-lawyer friend conduct market research for you by simply searching online for “divorce lawyer [name of your town].”

Ask that person to conduct divorce marketing research for a minimum of 15 to 20 minutes, looking at GMB, Avvo, Google Screened and at least 5 or 6 individual divorce law firm websites, and then to report to you their main impression of what s/he faced as a putative divorce consumer. S/he will report confusion and indecision.

Complete Homogeneity of Divorce Marketing = No Law Branding

The pervasive marketing problem for modern divorce lawyers has become that all available divorce marketing outreach lacks any law branding and makes them completely homogenous with all other local divorce lawyers.

Divorce marketing on Avvo, FindLaw, GMB, Yelp and all of the mass-lawyer directories make all lawyers look alike within their payment categories – whether free accounts or paid. Those mass-lawyer finders permit no law branding by any divorce lawyer on their platforms.

If you also use a digital legal marketing agency to handle your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and/or Pay-Per-Click (PPC), none of your SEO or PPC ideas or tactics, including your written content, is proprietary to you. All will be duplicated and “sold” to other divorce lawyers just as the content of other divorce lawyers will be “sold” to you.

Any good divorce marketing ideas or tactics are passed around to all of your local family law competitors – either by your own conflicted digital agency or by other digital agencies that use various paid tools to locate any divorce lawyer marketing gains.

If the me-too mass-lawyer platforms and the cut-throat legal marketing agencies are the totality of your divorce marketing outreach, which they are for most, your divorce marketing contains no law branding and provides you no distinction and no competitive edge.

Your target clients’ perception of you is delivered to them by Avvo and your digital agency, not by and through your own self-interested law branding strategy. You should never delegate any portion of your firm’s family law marketing strategy.

You are being branded by others and the returns on your divorce marketing investments are equalized across all local divorce lawyers for the benefit of the business model of others, not yours.

If You Don’t Stand Out, You Have No Competitive Edge

The fundamental purpose of your divorce marketing should be to make your law branding stand you out from the local divorce lawyer crowd. 

In fact, if that is not your purpose in placing your divorce marketing, stop running divorce marketing. You’re wasting your money.

Running divorce marketing in order to appear like all other local divorce attorneys is not a winning law firm marketing strategy for anyone.

To Succeed, You Need To Develop a Competitive Edge – But Only If That Suits Your Strategy

Bear in mind that this has absolutely nothing to do with your competitiveness in the actual practice of law. This refers only to a competitive advantage that exists in the minds of your target clients at the critical time in their hiring decisions and as a result of your divorce marketing and positioning strategy.

Competition In divorce marketing means beating your local competitors to more target clients to the extent that you experience escalating success and your competitors escalating failure.

Successful competition in divorce marketing also makes you a better divorce lawyer as you get more clients as a consequence of your competitive success in divorce marketing and law branding.  When people do something more often than others, they tend to be better at it. It’s why what you do is called the “practice” of law.

Your clients benefit indirectly from your law branding and divorce marketing success. You benefit directly from your law branding and divorce marketing success by positioning yourself to scale that success. And so it goes in an upward spiral of success. Or so it should.

Yet many divorce lawyers today find competition with their colleagues distasteful, perhaps even marginally unethical.  That’s essentially their problem. If you choose not to be competitive in an industry that is naturally and beneficially competitive, there are consequences of that decision. We would urge you to reconsider, but not too much. People should determine their own fates.

The Mechanics of a Competitive Advantage in Law Branding

Divorce consumers don’t hire a divorce lawyer because that lawyer’s law branding blends in.  They are looking, at least in the first instance, for a unique and distinctive divorce lawyer who, above all else, stands out in his or her law firm ads. You must be seen and you must make some type of resonant law branding connection.

At that point in the funnel, divorce consumers are subconsciously ready and willing to attach great perceived abilities to the first local divorce lawyer who stands out and provides them with a spark of resonance or a comfort level associated with a well-known and regarded law branding.

Google calls these micro-moments. You must engineer a sequence of them into your law branding sales funnel

You should also realize that you will never at any point win clients by telling them you are “aggressive” or “compassionate“ when some other lawyer only told them that she is “dedicated to your success” Unprovable puffery is not the source of a competitive edge. Target clients don’t care what you think of yourself and don’t believe you anyway.

You win family law clients only by ALLOWING them to believe that you are the one distinctive lawyer who should handle their cases. You cannot convince someone of that ONLY by standing in line with the rest of the lawyer-crowd or by unprovable claims.

Homogenous law branding is not competitive. It’s weak and needy. It’s not a successful marketing strategy for any divorce lawyer.

Instead, you must show your target clients what they want to believe and are ready to believe are the benefits of hiring you – through your law branding.

Provide your target clients with incremental law branding perceptions of you that enable them to believe what they already want to believe. People infrequently believe what they are told about others by those others but they never doubt what they conclude themselves.

Provide them with tangible reasons to believe you. Show them.  Don’t tell them.

Law brand yourself apart from others in a manner that does not allow your competitors to duplicate your law branding or positioning.

How Do You Develop a Competitive Advantage?

1-800-DIVORCE automatically stands you out. It’s an exclusive. And it’s the best family law brand in the world. It provides an automatic spark of resonance.

US consumers of all products and services instinctively know that a brand assures higher quality than a product or service without a brand, even though they may not understand why.

Divorce consumers seek the comfort level of such a law brand available locally.  1-800-DIVORCE is a reason to believe you. 

1-800-DIVORCE proves to your target client through law branding, without your saying a single word about yourself, that you are an impressive, distinctive, unique, competitive, business-savvy, experienced, cost-effective, creative and thoughtful problem solver. You know – just in case she might actually be looking for those qualities in someone to handle her future legal and economic interests. 

Target clients also understand that 1-800-DIVORCE is a referral funnel for you and that you must perform well for them in order to get their referrals. 1-800-DIVORCE adjusts the balance of trust and power between you and your clients to assure a good result for ALL. They like that.

And no competitor will be able to duplicate your law branding, website, content, FB page, videos, SEO or PPC!

Top Secret: Google counts 1-800-DIVORCE as a word, NOT a number.  Therefore, you will be the only local divorce law firm that can use its phone number in the title of your SEO or PPC ads. Nice!  Game Changer!!

If you are ready to gain a reliable and ethical competitive advantage over your local divorce lawyer competitors for as long as you dictate, we’re available to discuss the opportunities with you at 1-800-PETEROH or by your completion of the availability web form below.

If you are not so ready, please understand that is not a problem for anyone else. Your continuity of action will be essential to the competitive advantage 1-800-DIVORCE will provide to one of your local divorce law firm competitors.