Market Segmentation for Law Firms

You have spent time and money to create the perfect marketing strategy but here is the problem, you haven’t done enough research about your customer. You want to get the name of your business out there but is so easy for a message to become lost, confused or completely ignored. This is why segmenting your target market is crucial.

What is market segmentation?

Is the process businesses use to divide their target market into smaller segments of people that share similar characteristics to optimize their marketing, advertising and sales efforts.

How would you start identifying the target market for your law firm?

There are three steps you can follow:

1. Identify why a customer would want to buy your product/service.

In this step, you could define for instance what features your product has and what benefits bring to your potential customers

2. Segment your overall market.

You will want to serve as many people as possible from your target group. But this is just not wise. You want to create an effective marketing campaign that promotes your service or product to one type of customer and speaks directly to them.

3. Research your market.

You can use different methods to collect data through surveys, interviews, industry reports. Gather as much information as possible to narrow down your target market.

There are different approaches you can use to segment your market. But first, you need to know the four types of market segmentation:

Geographic segmentation:

This segment is based on a predefined geographic boundary. Depending on your services or product differences in interests, values and preferences can vary dramatically throughout cities, states, regions and countries. For instance, for those firms specializing in real estate or wills, building awareness within a geographic area can be extremely beneficial. You could try targeting by state, city and country, but segments such as school district, voting district or where people work can also help you determine the geographical position to target.

Demographic Segmentation:

You can divide a market through variables such as age, gender, education level, occupation and more. This is the most common strategy used by marketers This features can be especially helpful for lawyers who specialize in practice areas such as class action suits, discrimination or criminal cases.

Psychographic Segmentation:

When you perform this type of segmentation you focus on the intrinsic traits the target customer has. Psychographic traits can range from values, personalities, interests, attitudes, conscious and subconscious motivators, lifestyles and opinions. In certain practice areas, clients can consist of entire organizations. In this case, you can segment your customer at the organizational level (in this case one cal look at the law firm’s culture, value, mission..) and on the individual level, you can define segmentation characteristics of owners, manager or decision-makers.

Behavioural Segmentation:

You can break down the way customer go through their decision making and buying processes. Attitudes towards the brand, the way they use it and their knowledge base are all behavioural examples. For instance, this can be really interesting for lawyers working in areas of products liability or matrimonial law.

It’s time to put what you’ve learned to use. Below is a template that will help you do that.