Lawyernomics

Identifying Your Target Audience

January 27, 2012 Legal Marketing, Practice Management
By Mark Britton

When it comes to marketing strategy – online or offline – I counsel lawyers to identify their “target audience.”  A “target audience” is simply a group of people most likely to buy your legal services.  The better you have identified this audience, the less marketing money you will spend.  It’s that simple.  Still, lawyers will often say to me, “I’m a lawyer Mark.  I barely have time to eat lunch and now you want me to identify my target audience?”  My answer is “of course.”

I offer this possibly condescending answer because I’m really not asking for much.  Lawyers who already have a practice have a good sense for their audience, but “a good sense” only takes you so far.  It’s like the casual golfer:  They may be a natural athlete and be able to hit some nice shots; but they will never be a great golfer because they haven’t done the work to understand the mechanics of the game.  Understanding your target audience is a fundamental mechanic of your advertising game.

Moreover, if you already have a practice, identifying your target audience is mostly just playing to your strengths.  You market where you already have cases rather than trying to build a whole new practice.  To help you play to those strengths, let me offer some simple approaches to identifying your target audience:

• Start with Segmentation:  Rather than thinking of your clients by practice group, try to segment them into *practical* groups.  Irrespective of practice-group ownership, sort clients into industries, geographies, product types, stages of life, or whatever practical grouping your client base offers.  The larger your firm, the more important segmenting becomes, as practice groups are often horrible at collaboration.  Additionally, the more finely you can segment your client base the better.  For example, it’s great to market to small business owners; but, if you can identify a segment of immigrant-Chinese-owned textile businesses in three metro areas, your chance of successfully marketing to similar clients increases exponentially. 

• Show Me the Money:  Which segment drives the most revenue for your firm?  If a particular segment drives a lot of revenue for your firm, you should probably focus more marketing dollars on it.
  

• Show Me the Profit:  Revenue is a great first cut, but profit is an important refinement.  Revenue and margins often line up, but not always.  A certain segment may be keeping the firm very busy; but, if it’s driving little profit, then maybe it shouldn’t be a marketing priority.  Don’t get me wrong, a high-volume, low-profit practice may be the way to go, it’s just a question of where you spend your marketing dollars.  In a perfect world, you want to target your marketing spend on the highest-margin business.

• Don’t Forget You:  Ask yourself, “What is my favorite type of matter?”  Typically, you favor a matter because it is interesting to you.  Some will say that they favor a matter because they are a subject matter expert, but such expertise is really just of function of interest.  The more you are interested in something, the more you will be naturally drawn to and excel at it.  This “You” portion of the equation gets harder with larger firms.

• Eye the Competition:  Ask yourself, “Who is my competition and why?”  This is another exercise in divining the types of cases that are important to you, rather than simply copying the competition.  Those that you consider competitors are often trying to take matters from you that you want.  What are those matters and why do you want them? 

With proper distillation using each of these concepts, you will find that you have a small number of distinct client- and matter-types that are particular important to you and/or a firm.  This is your target audience.  How you approach that audience is a subject we will discuss in future posts, but just identifying the audience is half the battle.

If you have read this far and this all still seems too hard, then please hire a marketing consultant.  I’m happy to refer solid marketing consultants that can help.  Just don’t be the casual marketer.  Also, don’t forget Avvocating on May 3rd and 4th.  The entire conference revolves are legal marketing and we have a great line-up of experts coming to share their knowledge.  I’d love to see you there.

Be Targeted!

Mark (a casual golfer, but never a casual marketer )