Introduction
The most effective way to boost your marketing efforts is to create a buyer persona for your law firm. It can help you figure out who is your target audience. Accordingly, you can personalize their shopping experience. Furthermore, it shows you how your customers engage with your business. In addition, it gives you the opportunity to find out what common challenges they face.
A buyer persona is also known as a customer/ client/ audience or marketing persona. Defining your customer persona helps you create content to better target your ideal customer. A customer persona represents the key traits of a large segment of your audience. Moreover, it is based on the data you’ve collected from user research and web analytics. Hence, it gives you valuable insights into your customer’s problems and the opportunity to offer them a solution.
Buyer personas reveal insights about your buyers’ decisions. For example, certain attitudes, concerns, and specific criteria. Thus, they can provide tremendous value to your organization. For example, they can help everyone on your team:
- Develop a deeper understanding of customer needs and how to solve for them
- Guide service development by creating features that help them achieve their desired outcomes
- Prioritize which projects, campaigns, and initiatives to invest time and resources in
- Create alignment across the organization and rally other teams around a customer-centric vision
A properly crafted buyer persona will allow you to personalize your marketing efforts. Consequently, you will be delivering your target customer a superior experience. Consider these steps when creating the perfect buyer persona for your law firm:
1. Do thorough audience research
Your buyer persona should be based on the existing data. Therefore, collect data on your existing customers and social audience. Consider details like age, location, language, interests, challenges, education, employment, etc. For instance, use Social media analytics, Facebook Audience Insights, and Google Analytics.
Furthermore, arrange a phone call, or communicate with your customers via social media. Moreover, create a short survey and email it to your subscribers to gather information from a larger audience group.
Surveys can help you understand your customers better. In addition, you can derive relevant information without investing much time or effort. The survey could include questions like:
- What kind of content would you like to receive from our brand?
- Do you find our services valuable?
- How can we improve our products or services to serve you in a better way?
2. Locate your audience
Next, reach your customers using the right channels. Start by learning where they already spend time online. Some great tools to help include:
Hootsuite Insights Powered by Brandwatch: Find top relevant sites, hashtags, and authors
Keyhole.co: Find top referring sites for relevant hashtags
Google Analytics: See which social networks appear in your referral traffic report
Another effective way to research your ideal customer persona is to conduct online research. For example, you can track your customer’s social media profiles or any websites they are associated with.
Specifically, Facebook and LinkedIn can help you uncover relevant information about what your customers like and dislike. Afterward, this information can help you fill out your customer persona details.
3. Conduct a competitive research
Conduct competitive research to achieve a better understanding of your market. It can reveal trends in the marketplace and gaps in your marketing strategy. Accordingly, you can use them to your advantage when crafting an ideal buyer persona for your law firm.
Competitive research helps you understand why customers choose to buy from your competitors. In addition, it also reveals how are they marketing their products. Over time, this can help you improve your marketing programs and your customer persona image.
Try useful online tools such as BuzzSumo. For instance, search for top shared content across social networks, including engagement data. In addition, monitor your competitors’ posts and look for patterns in hashtags, post type, and content strategy.
4. Identify customer pain points
Pain points are problems your potential customers are trying to solve. When identifying them, ask yourself the following questions.
- What problems are your potential customers trying to solve?
- What’s holding them back from success?
- What barriers do they face in reaching their goals?
Furthermore, engage in social listening and social media sentiment analysis to find the answer to the questions above. Set up search streams to monitor mentions of your brand, services, and competitors. Consequently, it will give you a real-time look into what people are saying about you online.
For instance, you can learn why they love your service. Or which parts of the customer experience are not working. Next, identify patterns about which groups tend to face different kinds of challenges. As a result, this can further impact your law firm strategy efforts.
5. Identify customer goals
Identify your customer’s goals. Goals or aspirations are positive things they want to achieve. To identify them, ask yourself the following questions.
- What motivates your customers?
- What’s their end game?
Your personas’ goals are important even if they don’t relate specifically to your product’s features. For instance, they can be the foundation of a campaign. Or they can simply inform your next marketing approach.
Social listening can be a good way to gain insight into customer goals. For instance, gather the information from those who are thinking about using your services. Find out what your customers are trying to achieve by using your services. Finally, research the tactics you use to overcome buyer objections when selling your services. Accordingly, use gathered data to improve your marketing efforts.
6. Understand how you can help
Next, create a clear picture of how your service can help. As part of this step, dig deep to analyze the benefits you offer to customers. A benefit is how your service makes your customer’s life easier or better. Ask yourself these questions for each of the pain points and goals you’ve collected:
- How can you help? Answer in one sentence and add it to your persona template.
- What are your audience’s main purchasing barriers? How can you help overcome them?
- Where are your followers in their buying journey? Are they researching or ready to buy?
7. Create your buyer persona
Once you’ve gathered all of the information, think of a name for your persona. This can help you come up with more personalized content. In addition, it will allow you to establish effective communication. Next, include every collected information, such as pain points and goals, age, education, home situation etc.
These details will help you create a more realistic image of your buyer persona. As a result, your messages will resonate better with them. Consequently, it will attract them to you. Afterward, give your ideal customer avatar a face. Browse through stock images and find a picture to associate with him/her. In addition, create a short “life story” for your customer avatar. Don’t forget to describe both who each persona is now and who they want to be.
Consequently, start thinking about how your services can help them get to their place of ambition. Use your ideal customer avatar to connect with your target market. Think about your buyer personas every time you create content or marketing material. That way you will be able to create marketing campaigns that resonate with them.
Click here to download our Buyer Persona template you can use for your firm.
Conclusion
Customer persona can help you understand your target audience better. Accordingly, this will enable you to provide a rich experience to them. Creating a buyer persona for your law firm is an excellent way to boost your marketing and sales strategy. Besides improving your customer service, it drives higher engagement. In addition, make sure to include your team members in the process. For they will provide different information and perspectives. Once you have major key points in place, you can create your ideal buyer persona for your law firm.