Knowing your customer is as essential in legal services as any other market. It can shape everything you do, both when acquiring new business and in how well you provide a service.

This factor is something that can easily be overlooked. Often, the idea of categorising clients in order to tailor your services to their specific needs and wants might be restricted to those with obvious special requirements, such as people with disabilities.

A more holistic way of looking at the matter is to think in more broad terms about your wider target market. Any well-directed marketing campaign – such as one using content marketing, email, social media or a combination of these – will focus on the characteristics of the customer base.

Marketers are familiar with the concept of the ‘buyer persona’ – a representation of the most common relevant characteristics of the people in the target market. This may include features such as age, income, profession, nationality, gender and much else.

It is important to have this in place to market your firm effectively, but this can also dovetail well with the service you provide.

For example, suppose your firm deals with a lot of overseas clients. Clearly certain nationalities will feature in the buyer persona, which is central to the marketing side, but it also provides obvious clues to the kind of service you need to provide.

For instance, if the persona shows up that people of a particular nationality tend not to speak English well, the provision of well-translated documents can be made a priority.

Another example might be a professional whose working hours mean they find it hard to get time to meet during the normal day, and thus require strong online communication, or flexibility over meeting times.

These are just a couple of examples of how solicitors and barristers can know their clients better, gain insights through more focused listening and feed this back into the strategy for attracting more clients.

While buyer personas may be a marketing term, it is not some abstract theory. It is a real, information-led insight into your customers that can help you take your service to the next level, delighting your customers and ensuring their lasting loyalty.

By Charlie Britten, BeUniqueness.co.uk.

Image from Pixabay.