My partner in the "How to Grow Your Law Practice on a Shoestring Budget" series, Paramjit Mahli, has launched her new blog, Profting with Public Relations. If you haven't already seen it, you should check it out.
Paramjit did a post over the weekend entitled, "Do You Know Who Your Ideal Client Market Is?" This is a key factor in the success of any business development effort, and yet it's too often overlooked. At almost every event, discussion, email group or other forum in which lawyers are discussing efforts to grow or maintain their business and attract clients, the discussion focuses on tools and methods - whether websites, or yellow pages ads, or seminarts, or promotional items are 'good' ways to attract clients. But often lawyers forget that the biggest factor that will affect the success of your efforts to attract high quality clients is how well you target the clients that you want. And that means that specific tools - and specific messages - can work for one practice and can fail miserably for another.
While this may sound obvious, many lawyers don't spend the necessary time it takes to define what kinds of clients they really want, what services they can provide to those clients, and to outline the benefits that the client will receive by working with them. In fact, in my experience, lawyers shy away from these kinds if inquiries because they're afraid that by targeting specific types of clients, and by tailoring their marketing message to those clients, they'll actually lose business. But what they forget is that when their message is too broad, too general and too 'plain vanilla,' they don't capture anyone's attention.
As Paramjit says in her post, the process of gathering and compiling information about your ideal clients doesn't happen overnight, but it's crucial to establishing a good foundation for your business development efforts.
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