Do you know who your best customers are? If you do, can you identify what makes them an ideal customer? How can you apply this information to all your marketing activities to maximize profit? In this post, we talk about creating client personas for your law firm. Here’s what you need to know about these fictional representations of ideal customer relationships.
What exactly is a customer persona?
Often called “buyer personas,” these are fictional representations of your company’s ideal customers based on factual data and research. The concept isn’t just about who is easiest to work with or who you like the most. Customer personas are based on understanding high-value visitors, prospects and customers over time. They should be used to focus your time and resources on the people most likely to convert. An effective customer persona will give you a deep understanding of your most profitable relationships so you can try to attract more leads like them. You can tailor your content creation, marketing messages, sales tracking and more to the right people by building specific customer personas.
5 steps to creating customer personas
It is clear that the personality of the customer is important. In fact, it would be hard to overstate how valuable they are. Creating comprehensive customer personas takes some time, but it doesn’t have to be a terribly difficult process. Most of the process revolves around getting accurate information and finding the best way to present that information to your company. Here are the steps we suggest.
1. Understand the different types of buyer personas
First, you need to know which types of individuals are most useful for your company. Unfortunately, there isn’t really an exhaustive list to choose from. Every organization is unique and that makes their ideal customers unique. HubSpot has a great tool called Make my persona which may generate some different options for you. Generally, businesses have the same or similar categories based on key customer characteristics.
If you need help identifying your ideal client, check out this free guide: A Law Firm’s Guide to Creating an Ideal Client Profile
2. Determine and document the information you need
There are many types of research that can inform about your customers. Things like internal reports, surveys, customer interviews and conversations with your sales team can be helpful. Consider the following:
- Review your contact database to discover trends in how leads are being generated.
- Using form fields on your website and lead magnets to capture important information.
- Discuss leads and customer activity with your sales team to better understand customer behavior.
- Interview customers or prospects with whom you communicate most often.
3. Use your research to find patterns
Spend some time gathering all the information you have received. This timeline will vary for each merchant, but a solid customer persona will require resources. Once you have everything in front of you, start looking for signals that point to certain traits or behaviors. You are looking for specific information about common traits. This can be based on demographics such as age or other key information such as what legal issue they come to your firm for or how many engagements they typically have with your attorneys. Essentially, you need to spot some relationship between your “ideal” (most profitable) customer and certain metrics. This will help you find out who really is the best of the best.
4. Include intangibles in your personas
There are many analytics or CRM tools that can provide much of the data you need. However, chances are there is a bigger picture. Through tactics such as interviews or feedback sessions with your sales team, try to learn more about the motivations, challenges and objections of each personality type. Who are the most motivated prospects on their lead list? What is the type of engagement that ultimately brings the most revenue to your firm? Which area of practice closes deals faster and can you find why? There are various factors involved in building a persona and only some of them are based on numbers – the rest will have to come from a thorough knowledge of your target market.
5. Develop messages for each persona
Take all the information you have and distill it into a statement about your personas: what they care about, who they are, and what they want. Then you need to put it into a format that works for everyone in your company. It’s important to make sure everyone is speaking the same language when it comes to your target audience. Write a statement that serves as something of an elevator pitch where your company is positioned in a way that resonates with the persona. Also, use language that your target audience would be familiar with. It’s best practice to name the different personas you create, and you may even want to find images to help you get a visual (for example, “Personal Injury Paul”).
Take-out:
Creating customer personas allows for more efficient use of your company’s marketing resources. Personas help you target and send messages to people who are most relevant to your business.