How to Find Your Law Firm’s Target Audience

Date: August 16, 2022

A business cannot succeed without understanding its audience, and for law firms, this holds doubly true. Your law firm has its niche practice areas that give general guidance to what you can do for a prospective client, but there are numerous forms that that client could take, each having their own potential needs. You may not realize that your marketing efforts skew towards only a small portion of your target audience, or that your net is aiming far too wide, and learning more about who might benefit from your services will help you match your practice with your ideal client. 

What Is a Target Audience?

To understand who your target audience is, you must first understand what a target audience is. A target audience is the group of people to whom your skill sets are most likely to be useful and, therefore, the group who is most likely to employ your services. This targeted group might, however, be broader than you would expect, and may be composed of multiple disparate demographics. For example, a family law firm might be anticipating that the majority of their target audience is families with children. However, families come in all shapes and sizes, and the pool of prospective clients may also include couples without children, older couples with grown children, legal guardians of all ages, and more. 

Look At Your Current Client Pool

Learning about your target audience can start at a source very close at hand – your current client population. Analyzing this group can be very helpful in directing your future marketing campaigns. After all, you may have an image in your mind of the client you most regularly serve, but upon an in-depth reflection, you may find that that sort of client appears less regularly than expected. Sorting through and understanding your current clientele may show you certain patterns that can help you focus your efforts. 

A helpful way to narrow down your target audience is to assert the use of social media and other interactive marketing campaigns to be analyzed through Google analytics and other relevant platforms. Who is interacting with your public posts? Who spends the longest time reading through your materials, and which clicks become clients? For example, if you’re an elder law firm, do you most often see older prospective clients on your website, or do you see adult children seeking aid for their aging parents? Knowing these answers can help you focus and allow you to best use your time and energy. Your marketing and SEO teams can be a huge help in utilizing these online tools to understand who is seeking you out the most.  

It may seem counterintuitive to find the largest pool you could possibly be working with in order to find your perfect small piece of the pie. However, looking at the bigger picture with a critical eye helps you narrow your sights on your target audience with more accuracy and focus. 

Brainstorm Who Your Ideal Client Would Be

Understanding that your target audience might be different than expected, you can begin to consider what your ideal client looks like. Defining that client involves analyzing your client pool and seeking out your primary demographics. For example, you may notice a pattern that the majority of your clients are one gender, or one generation or age range. You may have expected your ideal client to be a single man in his fifties, but after analyzing your current client pool, you may find that your ideal client is actually a married woman in her thirties. Armed with this knowledge, your marketing and SEO teams can more accurately angle their marketing strategies to seek out potential clients who are more likely to convert into paying customers through targeted marketing campaigns, social media, and more. 

Understanding Your Demographics and Segmenting Your Strategy

While this may feel like a given, the process of discovering your most relevant demographics through analysis of your current client pool is vitally important for finding, targeting, and securing the ideal client. You understand your legal niche on a deep professional level, and you want to be able to not only operate at the highest level you can, but you also want to ensure that you are reaching your target audience before any competitors do. By finding your most relevant clients’ ages, genders, locations, income levels, and practice-specific factors like marital or employment status, you have a head start on finding and marketing to exactly the right clientele. 

Many law firms have success with segmenting their marketing strategy, which enables them to market towards more than one demographic at a time. After all, your practice may have more than one focus, and you want to ensure that clients across the board can be connected with the right member of your firm. Have your marketing and SEO teams look closely at what information comes back to them, and to sort it out by category to see what patterns emerge. Separating out email responses or survey completions by demographic will give you a clear sense of what is working best and for whom. For example, your social media marketing may target one of your demographics, but your email campaign might be more successful for another. Having this knowledge gives your law firm the ability to adapt and stay ahead of the curve. 

A Trusted SEO Team Can Help Identify And Market to Your Target Audience

At 9Sail, we specialize in helping attorneys like you with their SEO marketing and content creation. Therefore, we know a thing or two about how knowing, understanding, and seeking out your perfect prospective clients can impact your website and the success of your law firm.

We encourage you to set up a free consultation with our team of experts to find out how 9Sail can help you take your law firm to the next level. You can make your appointment by calling or submitting your contact information through our online form. We also offer an audit & blueprint project so that you can get a better idea of your site’s SEO performance.