As a lawyer, you’re well aware of the importance of timely marketing. Many people don’t plan ahead to need a lawyer; instead, they discover suddenly that they’re in a legal mess and need to make a decision quickly. In order to more effectively position your firm to catch the attention of potential clients, try utilizing persona-based marketing. This simple strategy can transform the way you look at marketing for your law firm and create a more effective interaction that will influence the way you do business in the future.
What is Persona-Based Marketing?
Persona-based marketing starts with developing clear, quality personas that describe the ideal clients for your business. The more clearly you define each persona–and you may have several, depending on your firm and the type of law you practice–the better you can market to each individual persona.
Developing Personas for Your Law Firm
As you develop the personas for your firm, there are several things you want to know about your ideal clients. This includes information like:
- Approximate age
- Gender
- Income
- Family size
- The type of job held by your clients
- How much basic legal knowledge is held by your clients
- The types of legal concerns your clients have
The more specific your personas are, the better you can shape your marketing efforts in order to more effectively reach the specific individuals who make up your client base.
As a family lawyer, for example, you might shape a buyer person for a woman in between the ages of 40 and 45. She’s a business professional making between $50,000-$75,000 per year who is in the process of getting divorced. There are 2-3 children and considerable assets to be divided as part of the divorce process. While she has little personal legal knowledge, she has friends who have gotten divorced in the past, and they’ve given her information about the process. Knowing all of these things about your target will help you shape advertisements, content, and information that is designed for her.
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Using Your Personas
Once you understand your personas, you want to shape your marketing to reflect them. Ask yourself what your client’s pain points are. For example, in the case of the persona named above, her key concern might be making sure that she has primary custody of the children or with being able to keep the house. A different type of client persona–one who lacks children–might be more concerned with fairly dividing financial assets.
Consider the questions keeping them up at night: their worries, their fears, and the things that they’re turning to search engines to answer in the middle of the night when they can’t sleep.
Next, use that information to develop your marketing efforts. From your basic website design to the blog posts you write, emails you send out, and advertisements you create, your personas help shape every aspect of your marketing efforts. You want to create effective content that will appeal to your specific client personas, solving their pain points as you answer their questions and provide them with peace of mind as they’re waiting to contact your office.
Persona-based marketing has the potential to transform the way you market your business. The better you know the clients you most want to bring into your business, the better you’re able to shape your marketing efforts–and the more likely you are to attract the specific types of clients that you really want to have.
If you’re marketing to high-end clients who have been accused of high-level crimes, you’ll have a completely different setup for your website than if you’re helping your clients challenge traffic tickets or deal with the repercussions of petty crime–and persona-based marketing will allow you to shape your marketing accordingly. If you need more help building your personas, contact us today to learn how we can help you transform the way you look at marketing your legal practice.
