Target Audience

Posted on | July 10, 2010 | No Comments

When I first started marketing my estate practice, I didn’t think much about my audience. I just picked up the sterile, objective tone of the websites from the BigLaw world that I came out of. I then incorporated similar language into a website and popped it up onto the web. And I wondered why my websites had high bounce rates and didn’t seem to generate much of a response.

The breakthrough came when I started realizing that the people who read my website were–well, people. Not some faceless mass of automatons who would simply buy when presented with an opportunity, but actual people with their breath in their nostrils and felt needs.

No one visits an estate attorney website for fun. They are there because they have a problem (whether actual or perceived) that they are trying to resolve. I realized that my focus should be on identifying those needs and letting the reader know that I could meet them.  When I started writing and designing my site with this in mind, people started calling.

For you to be successful at marketing your practice, you must focus your marketing efforts on the segment of the population that is most likely to result in someone paying you.  You are trying to determine who your services are most likely to appeal to.  You need to know who is most likely to buy your services, where they get their information, and what factors influence their choices.

A knowledge of your target market is not only critical to marketing your practice, but to effectively serving your clients.  Think about this: Your success as an estate attorney depends on whether you are meeting your client’s needs and desires. Over the long run, those who do better at this are generally more successful than those who do not.  If you can’t identify your target market, do you really know whether you are meeting their needs?

Attorneys are perhaps the most clueless when it comes to this concept.  Most attorneys—even most trust and estate attorneys—believe that doing great work with inevitably lead to a successful practice someday.  Perhaps this is a vestige of the old idea that the law is a profession and not a business (nonsense).

For most attorneys, the basic equation looks something like this:  excellent work + time = successful practice someday.  And for some people this may work.  But do you want to wait for someday?  If you are going to step ahead of the pack and build a successful practice now, marketing has to figure into the mix.  And a good marketing plan hinges on meeting the needs of your target audience.

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