To attract the right clients, you need to understand their needs and preferences. Creating client personas for your target clients will help you connect better to develop business. Get started with these 3 steps.
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Your target audience should be at the forefront of your mind when making law firm marketing and business decisions. It should frame the way your firm delivers its services. If you think your target audience is everyone who requires legal services, you’re missing out. In fact, your target audience is much more defined than that. Using client personas, you can dig deep into who your target audience truly is.
The Importance (and Limits) of the Client Persona
There are a staggering 1.34 million lawyers within the United States alone. With client personas, you gain a competitive edge, as you clearly outline who your ideal client is, what they’re looking for, and how you specifically can help define your niche service and audience. As you inform your marketing message, you make it more relevant to those you’re choosing to reach.
Your personas have a great impact on how you market your services. You’ll be able to connect with potential clients and referral sources in conversation, and those connections will remember you and your message.
Client personas have limitations, so plan to cover a range. Narrowing your view to understand depth is uniquely valuable, but also a liability for blindspots. A single persona can never represent full intersectionality. And if you focus exclusively on a typical persona of a privileged person, you won’t make inclusive marketing decisions. Don’t miss opportunities to serve individuals by limiting your information with a single staple persona. To make sure your message speaks to the range of human diversity, you need to consider the differences.
BUILDING YOUR CLIENT PERSONAS
Building your client persona is critical for your success, whether you’re a large law firm or a sole proprietor. To get started, you can follow these simple steps to create your first client persona.
Step #1: Start With a Name. It may not seem like an important step, but your persona needs a name. A name makes an otherwise simple marketing tool seem like a living, breathing part of your team. And it helps you make an even greater impact with each marketing effort.
Step #2: Explore Your Persona’s Demographics. At this step, you’ll begin to see how your persona will affect the way you communicate your services. To get started, gather your persona’s:
- Job title
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Household income
- Family lifestyle
- Education level
Step #3: Clarify Your Persona’s Goals, Challenges, and Values Next, outline your target client’s goals for the near and distant future. Clearly detail their challenges and what’s getting in their way of making progress. List the values they care about. Be specific and try to observe their real behavior before taking them at their word or putting yourself in their shoes.
Create as many as you need. For every persona you create, discuss how your services can best serve their needs, creating a unique marketing message for each.
Improve Your Law Firm Even More
The client persona can take your marketing strategy to new heights. However, it’s only the beginning. To discover where your firm could most improve, take the Lawyerist Small Firm ScorecardTM assessment today.
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