How to Perform an Authentic Brand Audit for Your Law Firm
Conducting a brand audit for your law firm allows you to determine how your firm is performing from the perspective of your clients. After conducting your brand audit, you should have a better idea of the strengths and weaknesses of your brand, how you can align your offerings with what your clients expect out of you and the perceptions customers have regarding your firm.
The follow is a brief overview of the steps you should take to perform a thorough brand audit for your legal practice:
1. Begin by mapping out your audit process
You should have a framework for how you will perform your audit before getting started. Make a list of all the topics you want to cover and the processes you will use to analyze them. Elements you will may want to consider include the purpose and usage of your website, your target audience, your competitors, how you are positioned in your market, the strengths and weaknesses of your services, legal industry trends and how your services are different from others available in your market.
2. Review the analytics for your website
Certain web analytics will give you a very good idea of how your digital marketing efforts are working. Check traffic trends to see if your website is gaining or losing popularity, or if you are getting a lot of traffic from particular areas.
Your bounce rate will tell you how many people immediately leave after visiting your website, which will indicate you need to make some changes. Page views indicate how many times each page has been viewed. Conversion rates tell you how many visitors act on your site, from sales to signing up for email updates. These are just a few of the most important analytics to view.
3. Get your customers involved
Send out surveys to your current or previous clients to ask for their opinions about your firm and its brand. You can place online polls on your blog or send out questionnaires via your email lists. Ask about their customer service experiences, how easy it is to use your website and why they choose to consult your firm.
4. Test the customer experience yourself
See for yourself what users experience when they visit your website. You should regularly test all your site’s features by using them just as a customer would. This will help you uncover potential problems, and also determine if there are any aspects of your site that could operate more efficiently.
5. Create an action plan after you complete your brand audit
Once you have thoroughly analyzed your brand and have identified areas in which you can improve, make sure you have a plan to act in those areas. Each issue should have a corresponding action. A high bounce rate, for example, could lead you to check the entire website for usability issues to see if malfunctioning or inefficient features are driving users away.
A brand audit is a great way to determine the strengths and weaknesses of your law firm’s marketing efforts. Speak with an experienced legal marketing professional to learn more about this process.
