Think about the last time somebody recommended an accountant or a lawyer to you. They almost certainly said something like “go and see Sarah, she sorted ours out and she’ll tell you straight”, and the firm Sarah works at came up afterwards, if it came up at all. Professional services have always been bought person first, and personal branding for a practice is really just making sure the person people are recommending is the person they find when they go looking.
I wrote back in August about what referred clients find when they search you, and the short version is that most of them never find the person they were told about. A big part of the reason is where firms put their effort.
Nobody hires a logo
When a firm decides its marketing needs work, it very often starts with the firm as a brand, a new logo and a tagline about trusted advice, and then a website rebuilt around both that talks about the firm in “we” from top to bottom. None of that is wasted exactly, and a firm that looks careless loses people for that reason alone, but nobody has ever picked an accountant because of the kerning on her letterhead.
The “we” problem is worst in small practices. A firm with four people writes its website as though it had forty, because “we” sounds established and “I” sounds small, and the principal ends up as one tile in a team grid, the same size as everybody else with the same two lines underneath about years of experience and a passion for client service. Somebody looking at that page has no way of telling who runs the place or what she’s like, and the person their friend described is in there somewhere, about the size of a postage stamp.
What personal branding means for a practice
Personal branding has picked up a reputation it doesn’t deserve, mostly from the influencer end of social media, and I get why principals hear the phrase and pull a face. For a professional services firm it means something much more modest. It just means the people clients actually deal with are easy to find by name and easy to recognise once they’re found, and what they publish sounds like the way they talk in a meeting.
Done that way, personal branding comes down to a principal who’s willing to be the visible face of work they’re already doing, which is most of what our content and video work for firms is built around, and the ring light can stay in the shop.
Google is looking for the person as well
The sceptical partner in the room usually comes around on the search side of it. When Google updated the guidelines its search quality raters work from in 2022, it added experience to the things they assess, meaning whether a page shows first-hand experience of its subject. A page that clearly comes from a named practitioner, with her photo and her background sitting right beside it, reads differently from a page that comes from nobody in particular, to a person deciding who to ring and more and more to the systems deciding which sources to show. Most firms never think about that side of personal branding, and it doesn’t cost a cent.
Where personal branding starts
Start with the principal’s own page on the firm website, because it’s the page most likely to turn up when somebody searches a name, and on most sites it’s also the weakest page there. A real photo taken this year, and a few paragraphs in their own words about how they work and who they work best with, including something only they’d say, whether that’s why they got into this or the thing they wish every new client knew before the first meeting.
Then check the LinkedIn profile that sits underneath it in the search results and make sure it’s the same person in the same voice, so somebody looking into a recommendation finds one consistent human being instead of two half-finished ones. Neither job takes long, and both make every referral the firm already gets land a little harder.
The quickest test is to read the principal’s page out loud and ask whether your best client would recognise the person in it. If it could describe any principal at any firm in the country, that’s where your personal branding needs to start.
If you’d like a second set of eyes on it, I do a free visibility check where I go through your page and your firm’s site the way a prospective client would and send back the first three things I’d change.
