Identifying Your Target Audience: Why And How
How A Target Audience Helps Lawyer SEO And Content Marketing
Lawyer SEO is such a viable Law Firm Marketing strategy because it attracts users who already have an interest in legal content and services. So when someone Googles "Personal Injury Lawyer" or "Can I sue my boss?" your pages are hopefully there for them to find. In short, SEO lets you market yourself to people who might need a lawyer, and that's better than promoting yourself to someone who doesn't intend to hire one.
What's A Target Audience?
A target audience is a group of people who can be potential clients of your law firm. They are usually defined by similar demographic characteristics: age, sex, gender, location, educational level, and economic status.
For Example:
If your firm handles living trust and estate litigation, you're probably looking for (but are not limited to) any of the following clients:
Working individuals from the ages 30 and up that have high-valued estates that need to be divided among their children.
The children of an old or deceased individual who are looking to challenge or settle a will.
Caretakers of children too young to forward will challenges.
As a law firm, defining your target population can help you plan and design strategic marketing moves catered to people most likely to respond to your content and legal services.
Why Define Your Target Audience?
Knowing who your target clients help you plan for the right marketing strategies to employ. While it's important that you reach as many people as possible, marketing yourself to people who—more often than not—are ready to hire you saves your law firm time, effort, and marketing resources.
After all, no one wakes up one day and finds a lawyer or a legal guide unprompted. The people who search for or "Google" the keywords you optimize for have a need that needs to be fulfilled, and that need can be addressed by either basic legal knowledge, instructional content, or hiring your services.
As a result, before deciding on your message and how to convey it, you must first determine who your recipient will be. It is harder to convince an uninterested individual to read your content, heed your CTAs, or hire your law firm.
What's Your Target Market vs. Target Audience?
Your target audience is a subset of your target audience.
For Example:
Suppose your law firm primarily works with Employment Law. Here's how your target market and target audience are different:
Target Market
Employees or workers in California
Target Audience
Newly hired employees
Pregnant employees
At will workers who were fired illegally
Victims of workplace discrimination
This means that your law firm has a larger target market but focuses on a specific target audience. For example, you might want to market your firm to mothers in the middle of a custody battle, victims of a DUI instead of defendants, or property owners who are defendants in a Slip & Fall case.
Remember: You can also apply this concept to individual blogposts and pages. For example, your law firm might be marketing itself to a broader target market. Still, you can write blogs, publish articles, and build landing pages that cater to different target audiences.
3 Ways To Identify Your Target Audience
1. Base It Off Your Offered Services
To identify your target audience, the easiest way is to consider the unique demands that your law firm caters to.
In short, what are the things people hire you for?
Do they want you to get out of a DUI charge? Do they need you to oversee your wills and estate? Do you usually work with parents in divorce and custody cases? Do you work with individuals who have suffered catastrophic injuries from someone else's negligence?
The more demographic information you can provide about your target audience, the more effective your marketing ventures will be. If you're still learning or don't have the time to do extensive market research, basing it on the people most likely to need your services is a great start.
2. Market Research
If your target market is more specialized, it's crucial to collect information about your clients so you may restrict your emphasis. However, market research doesn't have to be overly complicated. If you don't have the time or advanced tools to do so, you can always just perform any of these basic methods:
Surveying current and past clients
Checking your reviews
Audit your site for traffic and conversions
Look at the type of content that's performing well
Audit your blog and identify the best performing posts
Audit your landing pages
3. Interact With Your Audience
Increasing your audience engagement allows you to observe and get a feel for what your audience thinks about your content. Here are a few different ways you can interact:
Respond to comments on your blog
Write back to emails
Respond to Google Reviews
Reply to social media interactions
Leave contact forms on your website
Create polls and surveys
Interacting with your audience can clue you in on the content they like. These interactions can also give you data on who your audience is, what they do, and what they need from your law firm.
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