Why Law Firm Marketing Starts With the Ideal Client

Most lawyers today understand the importance of a solid law firm marketing strategy. So underperformance isn’t due to lack of effort. The problem is that they jump into things before deciding who their efforts are supposed to reach.

Lawyer SEO, paid search, social media, site redesigns, full rebrands: all of these need a clear target audience to be truly successful. 

Without defining your ideal client, you’ll end up with broad messaging, unfocused content, irrelevant traffic, and leads you don’t actually want.

This step should be done before you start any new campaign. So whether you’re starting a new law firm marketing strategy from scratch or want to tighten your existing approach, I’ll explain how to handle all of this below. 

What is an Ideal Law Firm Client?

Your ideal law firm client is a person who your firm is genuinely built to serve well. Your definition may include:

• Legal problem that needs solved
• Value or complexity of the issue
• Client’s location
• Why they’re seeking an attorney
• What that prospect values when choosing a firm
• Whether their expectations match your firm’s actual approach

Lots of firms make the mistake of simply using their practice area alone in this definition, which isn’t nearly enough. Two personal injury firms can serve very different clients. Same goes for two different estate planning attorneys or business law firms. 

An ideal client isn’t necessarily the wealthiest possible client or a fictional “perfect” client, either. 

You’re trying to define the type of person who lands on your site or calls your office and everything just clicks from there on both ends. 

Why Generic Targeting Doesn’t Work

When law firms try to target everyone, they end up reaching nobody. That’s the reality.

So if you’re currently marketing to “anyone who needs a lawyer,” you need to go back to the drawing board and really niche that definition down to something much more specific. 

This generic-style marketing is easy to spot because the firm’s message is essentially interchangeable with everything else out there. If you can remove your firm’s name from your website or marketing materials and everything still fits if you replace it with another name, then that’s a red flag that you’re doing it wrong. 

Yes, you may have decades of experience, offer personalized service, and go to bat for your clients. While this may all be true, it doesn’t give a prospect a reason to choose you over someone else.

In addition to letting quality prospects walk, broad campaigns that target everyone often generate leads from the wrong people. So you end up paying for:

• Cases outside of your preferred scope
• Matters below your target value
• Leads from the wrong geographic area
• Prospects with unrealistic expectations
• Searches that match intent but don’t have any interest in actually hiring you

More traffic and more leads aren’t always a good thing.

Your legal marketing campaigns need to result in money flowing into your firm. Otherwise, it’s just noise and friction that’s getting in the way. 

How to Identify the Clients Your Law Firm Should Target in 3 Steps

This is actually easier than it sounds. Just borrow themes from current and previous customers where things worked well. You can do this in three steps:

Step 1 – Review Recent Cases You’ve Handled

Pull a manageable sample of clients from your archives over the last 6-12 months. Then start pulling all the ones that resulted in what you’d consider “desirable” clients.

Ask yourself which clients:

• Were financially worthwhile
• Best fit the firm’s expertise
• Communicated well and cooperated effectively
• Produced the strongest outcomes for your firm

At the end of this exercise you should essentially have a pile of cases that you could point to and say, “We want more of these.”

Step 2 – Look for Meaningful Patterns

Now with your shorter stack of cases you want more of, you’ll want to identify any common characteristics between them. For example:

• Type and severity of the legal problem
• Desired level of attorney involvement
• Ability to meet the firm’s fee structure
• Decision-making concerns
• Referral source
• Urgency

Is your ideal client someone who has a huge problem they need solved tomorrow? For some firms, the answer is absolutely. For others, that’s a nightmare client. 

You may also learn that your ideal client’s first contact with your firm is a phone call instead of an online form. That’s significant, and should be built into your definition. 

This is much more valuable than building an “ideal client” around shallow demographic details. And the answer is going to look a little different for everyone. 

Step 3 – Recognize Poor Fits Too

It’s just as important to call out the types of clients or cases that create problems for your law firm. You just have to figure out what specifically was the reason why it was a poor fit. 

This could be tied to budget, expectations, communication style, location, or something else.

But you want to make it clear the types of clients that you don’t want to be targeting marketing-wise. Though this doesn’t mean you’ll be ignoring them altogether (more on this later). 

How the Ideal Client Shapes Your Entire Legal Marketing Strategy

Once you know who your law firm is trying to reach, nearly every piece of your marketing plan becomes a lot easier. 

• Website messaging is specific to the client’s problem, concerns, and priorities.
• SEO targets the searches most closely connected to cases the firm wants.
• Content becomes more useful because it actually answers questions clients ask before contacting an attorney.
• Paid ads focus on services, locations, and services most likely to produce qualified leads.
• Landing pages set expectations for who the service is for and what the prospective client can expect next. 

This doesn’t mean that every page or campaign needs to target a hyper-niche audience. It just means that your decision-making throughout all marketing efforts should be tied to a clean understanding of who you’re trying to attract. 

Use Your Intake Process to Validate Your Ideal Client (and Adjust as Needed)

With everything in place and newly refined campaigns running, you should be connecting your marketing to what happens after a lead comes in. 

Track whether the campaigns are producing the types of clients you want.

• Legal matter
• Lead source
• Qualification score
• Whether the firm accepted the case
• Reason for rejection (if applicable)
• Consultation outcome
• Value of client once signed

The idea here is to create a feedback loop between what’s actually happening and your desired outcomes.

Your marketing defines and targets the ideal client. And then the intake data says whether that definition is accurate and if the campaigns are reaching that audience. 

The important takeaway here is that you can’t assume all of your initial assumptions were correct. Over time, you may realize that a different type of case converts more consistently or delivers more value. So your strategy should revolve around actual results instead of being tied to a client persona that you invented. 

How Multi-Practice Firms Should Handle This

Firms covering multiple practice areas probably won’t have a single ideal client that fits the entire business. So don’t try to force this definition, as you’ll be faced with the same generic marketing problem we discussed earlier.

Instead, define an ideal client for each major practice area or service.

Your ideal personal injury client likely has nothing in common with your ideal estate planning client. These people are dealing with totally different outcomes, searching for different information, and evaluating lawyers with very different priorities. 

Each practice area landing page should be treated as its own mini homepage for that service, written as though it could stand on its own as the only thing you offer. And you should have different pages for each ad vertical you’re running. 

Defining an Ideal Client Does Not Mean Rejecting Everyone Else

I also want to quickly clarify that your ideal client is just a marketing priority. It doesn’t mean that you’re ignoring cases or prevented from working with anyone outside of a narrow definition.

You still have the freedom to take an unusual case from a different referral source or matter that falls outside of your scope. If it’s good for your firm and makes money, go for it.

This scenario is completely different than spending your time and budget trying to attract those types of leads.

The purpose of defining your ideal client is just to concentrate your resources on where they are most likely to produce results. But other opportunities that just happen to come in can still be worth handling. 

Final Thoughts

The most successful law firm marketing strategies don’t start with SEO, more ad spend, or a brand new website. Nothing will move the needle if you don’t have a clear definition of who you’re trying to reach.

And you don’t need to create a complicated 20-page client persona to get this right.

Just look at the cases that have worked for your firm and identify what those clients had in common. Then use that information to guide your marketing decisions.