Growing your Law Firm is a complex process, requiring hard work and optimizations, from effective and empathetic litigation to digital marketing and the right intake you need to be on top of everything. One of the vital elements is planning and knowing your law firm’s ideal client, your desired buyer persona.   

No matter if you’re handling your Law Firm’s digital marketing in-house (or by yourself) or you’re working with an agency, you need to understand where the potential lies in your market and what’s the best client persona you can target. The first step to success is planning, knowing your target audiences, and your objectives. In this article, we’ll guide you through the process of identifying the critical steps towards creating your buyer persona, and we’ll help you take the first step towards a long-term winning strategy. 

  • What’s working for others might not work for you.

Let’s start with the basics. Each digital marketing strategy is unique, and several factors contribute to its planning and success. As you might imagine, what works for a retailer probably won’t work for a law firm, but that’s not just it; every law firm is different, based on individual characteristics such as location, demographics, practice area, and other contributing factors.

  • What’s a buyer persona? 

A buyer persona represents your law firm’s ideal prospective client. It’s not a real client that you’ve dealt with in the past, but rather a semi-fictional prospect that you’d desire to sign as your next case. To create it, you should look into your historical data and identify the key elements that drove your success as an Attorney. It might include case type, age, demographics, interests, buying patterns, conversion method, and location. The whole idea behind creating it is to understand your opportunities, develop long-term strategies to attract such cases, organize your marketing segments, and spend your marketing dollars on marketing activities with the right segmentation that can bring value to your Law Firm and maximize your ROI. 

So who is your ideal client, you might wonder. Take a step back, review your data, and before making any decisions for your marketing strategies, be in the know, don’t just go for what used to work some years ago or what works for a competitor. 

  • How can you create your buyer persona?
  1. First, look at your Law Firm. Where are you located? How are you handling your intake? Can you work with Hispanic clients? What are your practice areas, and what are the cases you had your most significant successes? Do you have digital procedures in place (e-sign, virtual consultations, etc.)
  2. Then move to your former clients’ demographics. Is there a gender preference? What about age groups? Are they English speakers or prefer to be assisted in other languages (Spanish, for example)? Where are they located compared to your physical offices? What’s their educational background and their income range? What’s their family status? Do you know any of their other interests or affiliations? 
  3. The next step requires a more in-depth analysis of your former clients’ behavior during their journey with your Law Firm. How did they find out about you? Did they convert through the phone, form, or live chat? Do they use social media, and how active are they on each platform? Are there any commonalities or differences in the personalities of your best clients? Did they go through any life-changing experience? What were their goals and desires? Did they communicate openly with you or tried to hide some parts? We understand that all these might seem somehow intrusive, but it’s all data that you’ve already collected in a way or another, and you need to use it to create your ideal buyer persona. 
  4. Finally, single out their pain points. Why did they reach out to you? What kind of problems did they need to solve? What were their main stress factors and their ultimate motives? 
  • Let’s look into an example of buyer personas for Law Firms.

Our first example will be a Personal Injury law firm located in Elizabeth, NJ, and has offices in Newark, NJ too. We will first review the internal processes. The particular law firm has gone entirely digital, has an established bilingual intake, and has had its biggest successes with clients involved in car accidents. 

Then we’ll look into the demographics. The first we see is that Latinx dominates both locations. Here, we already have our first opportunity for the law firm. Is this justified by the volume and significance of cases coming from Hispanics? If yes, we should look at what the Attorneys are doing right, while on the other hand, what they’d need to change. A consistent percentage of clients coming from this particular demographic might be a signal for marketing efforts such as PPC for PI attorneys, an effective and empathetic intake process, and extra targeting with specialized content or PI Facebook Ads. 

The buyer persona isn’t complete yet, though. To fully understand it and create it, the law firm must distinguish more crucial characteristics and pain points by looking at the particular past cases. Did the clients have any initial objections? These could be a hesitation to hire an attorney, a need for an educational process to understand if they have a valid claim, the communication methods (phone, emails, text messages). Additionally, it could be a free consultation, emotional support, trust, no fees unless the law firm wins the case. 

  • Now that the law firm has gone through the complete process, it can create its buyer persona and Ultimate Value Proposition to build its marketing activities.
  1. Use your Law Firm’s buyer persona to target your ideal prospective clients through Facebook Ads. The days that Facebook was only about organic posting are long gone, not that is not essential, but Facebook Ads give you opportunities that you shouldn’t overlook. With its Audience Targeting, you can create targeting segments that fulfill your prospects’ profiles and give you chances to get in front of them at the right time. 
  2. Create your content strategy for your buyer persona. Starting from the language of your content to your tone and supportive photos/videos. It can be your Attorney bio, your practice area pages, and articles, and blogs. 
  3. Use the Display Network to show your ads to your ideal prospective customers. Display Ads can be an excellent opportunity to build brand awareness targeting your buyer personas with the various targeting options for remarketing and retargeting. 

Tip: If Hispanics contribute to your buyer persona, your Law Firm must run Google Ads in Spanish. 

What are the key takeaways?

  • Your buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal client. 
  • It allows you to understand your best prospects and uncover their potential for effective targeting through digital marketing for Law Firms. 
  • You’ll need to look into your capabilities, historical data about clients, and the local developments.
  • Use your buyer persona to enhance your UVP, and target your ideal prospective clients through content marketing, Facebook Ads, the Display, and Search Network.