If you’re looking to optimize your marketing efforts, one of the most important things to do is to identify your target audience.
Having a clear vision of who your ideal clients are is the first step in gaining those clients through online marketing. Marketing yourself is expensive, and you don’t want to waste valuable time and money on marketing to the wrong people or in the wrong place.
We want to help you ensure that your marketing efforts are focused and effective; it is important to focus on:
Who Are Your Current Clients?
It would help if you were compiling basic data on your current clients in order to create a general demographic for your firm. Note the age, gender, and location of all past and present clients and see what kind of patterns appear.
Are you a criminal defense lawyer in a college town? Do you primarily handle cases for students at the college who’ve gotten in trouble with the law?
Are you a personal injury attorney in a city known for terrible traffic? Do your records tell you that the majority of your cases are car accident cases from people who drive frequently?
These kinds of general statistics are essential in developing base data from which to build off.
Once you have your primary data, you can dive deeper and look for new patterns such as income levels, occupations, education, hobbies, and more.
Who is Your Ideal Client?
Define those demographics: the age, gender, and location of your typical clients. Taking the time to do the research can help specify your target audience before spending your hard-earned money on marketing efforts.
You now have your target demographic, and the next step is to determine what the primary issue is for that audience. If you are a truck accident lawyer, you may think that your audience would be people that have just been injured in a truck crash. However, maybe your ideal audience is the group of people who drive every day who are at risk of getting in an accident: those with long commutes or people who travel for work. That group of people has a higher risk of getting into an accident due to their increased time on the road. That demographic faces uncertainty of safety and wants to know who to call if that time ever came. That, right there, is your target audience and their primary issue.
Where to Find Your Ideal Client Online?
To reach your ideal clients online, you’ll want to take the data you’ve gathered and advertise on the platforms where they are most likely to spend their time. While paid advertisements on Google are still effective because they reach people when they search for specific relevant keywords, they don’t allow you to select who sees your ad based on the behaviors or demographics you’ve identified.
Social media platforms allow for much more targeted advertising. However, you have to understand your target demographics and advertise on the right platform. Right now, it seems that older and middle-aged adults are on Facebook, while college-aged adults spend more time on Instagram. A younger audience has increasingly abandoned those platforms for newer, music-based social media platforms like Tik Tok (which aren’t ideal for advertising legal services).
Keep in mind that not every platform will reach the right audience for your firm, or might not be the right format for advertising your services. Choose the right one that gives you the best opportunity to showcase your firm before people who will actually hire you when the time is right.
Interested in growing your firm’s online presence? Call us at 888-868-9941 for a free consultation on how to identify your target audience.
