Target Audience for Law Firms

Lawyers face a tight market and a negative public perception of their profession. So how it is possible to overcome these challenges and still market your law firm?

When developing a marketing plan, you have to determine your target audience (who is going to be your buyer). Let’s put emphasis on the target audience and why you should know who is your target customer? Knowing your ideal audience helps you plan all the strategies and actions to reach to your customer. You will understand which are the channels you should be present on, what information they are interested in and gain more information regarding their interests.

Now we jumped a step ahead because you need to know what information you should analyze to define your buyer persona. A target audience, much like a target market, is the group of people that can be interested in your services.

To perform customer research we can break consumer’s profiles data into 2 distinct sub-categories: classification variables and character variables.
Classification variables can be:

• Age
• Education and literacy
• Employment status
• Gender
• Household size
• Household type
• Income
• Mobility
• Race and ethnicity

On the other hand, character variables can be beliefs, attitudes, objections and/or motivations.

The next example is going to illustrate better what we are trying to explain.

Let’s say you are a law firm specialized in criminal law and you want to understand your potential customers. We have created the profile of Rebecca she is a marketing executive. We have defined some of the classification variables such as age, occupation, location and income. On the character part we can see her personality, what does she value when she considers hiring a service provider, which are her fears and problems. And the most important, what factors are going to influence her decisions. Now she might also have some objections such as why would she need a lawyer, or how expensive it is?

When planning your online presence, you can provide all this information to your customers because you know who they are, what is important for them when hiring a law firm and what is going to make them decide which law firm they will select for their case.

Now, where can you find all this information? Here are a few tips for gathering customer information:

• You can interview old clients.
• You can offer a bonus to potential customers to give you 30 minutes of their time for an interview.

In essence, you need to interview as many people as possible. Remember your goal is to build 3-4 different personas so around 20 interviews is a good target to shoot for.

Now you know why is important to define your target customer, what information you should research and where you can find them. Below you can find the links to templates that will help you craft the perfect buyer persona for your law firm.