How to Create a Client Avatar - and Why

There’s no way your business can service every person who needs a lawyer. You need to narrow down your marketing toward people who need the legal services you provide. But who is your ideal client? How does your law firm reach them in your marketing efforts? Creating a client avatar is one way to understand your firm’s ideal client demographics so you can tailor your marketing efforts to appeal to your ideal client.

Avatars are not new - top businesses rely on perfect client profiles as an effective marketing technique to improve their understanding of their ideal customers. Client avatars (also called client profiles or buyers personas) are a great tool for creating a result-focused marketing strategy to market your law firm’s services to the right audience.

I once had a client tell me their ideal client is a millennial mom. My response was, What kind of millennial mom?

• Career-focused with a corporate job who attends soccer games after work?

• A stay at home mom who is also the soccer team mother?

• An online entrepreneur with a global network and a flexible work schedule?

• Lives in the suburbs, the countryside or the city?

• Has an income of $50,000 - or $250,000?

These millennial moms are clearly not the same - and the same marketing strategies may not appeal to them - but they might!

What Is a Client Avatar?

A client avatar or customer profile is a detailed description of the perfect customer for your firm’s services. An avatar depicts your target client and how to craft a marketing narrative that revolves around your clients’ needs. 

I recently saw a great Instagram post that shows why creating a client avatar is so important - and not as easy as it sounds.

An ideal client avatar should provide a clear picture of:

• who your ideal customer is

• what they look like

• where they live

• their priorities: what’s important to them

• their personality, habits, interests, aspirations

• their personal life, family, career, goals, even politics or religion in some cases

• where they live online

This tool helps you to visualize your ideal client and develop marketing strategies that reach and speak to their legal pain points, goals and needs.

5 Steps to Create a Client Avatar

Below are five key steps to help you create client avatars for your law firm:

1. Identify Your Ideal Clients
   Before profiling any client, you need to know who you want to work with. You need to determine who is your perfect client, and who you want to focus your marketing efforts on acquiring. This will help you save time, money and resources by focusing only on your ideal prospective clients, not any prospective.

2. Research The Demographics and Psychographics
   Researching and understanding your client demographics and psychographics helps you understand your clients and why they need your services. Studying their demographics will also help you identify and classify them based on their age, gender, income, habits, location and any factor relevant to your law firm.

3. Identify Your Client Goals, Values and Challenges
   Every client has a goal in mind. These goals may be value-driven, depending on your client’s needs and wants. They also have a list of dislikes, fears and challenges that you should know before proposing how your services can solve their legal issue.
   
   As a business, you want to profit by helping your clients reach their goals and addressing their pain points. To do so, you need to invest the time to learn your clients’' short-term and long-term goals and how they align to your services.

4. Understand Your Client’s Decision-Making Process
   Once you have defined your ideal clients, you'll want to invest more time in learning their decision-making process:
   
   • Why do they choose one law firm over another?
   • What qualities are they looking for in a lawyer?
   • How much can they afford to pay for legal services?
   
   This is crucial, considering your firm can’t offer a "one-size-fits-all" solution to every client who needs to hire a lawyer.

5. Provide A Solution
   Once you have a client avatar in place, it is time to see how your services will solve a potential clients’ problems. Evaluate your offerings and establish whether you have the legal time for those clients.
   
   For example,
   
   • If your ideal client is a high-net-worth professional with a demanding career, is your law firm available nights and weekends?
   • If you’re targeting accident victims who were injured on the job, does your law firm offer no-fee upfront legal services in exchange for a percentage of the damages awarded?
   • If you provide family law services, do you offer full divorce legal services, or do you not provide divorce mediation?

It’s up to you what services your law firm provides - but you need to ensure your marketing targets the clients who need your services.

Why You Need Client Avatars for Your Law Firm

Your law firm probably needs several client avatars - and your law firm likely has more than 1 service and more than 1 ideal client for that service. But how can you create a marketing piece that reaches all your ideal clients? In short, you can’t.

Tip: You can make several client avatars for each of your ideal clients, and create marketing campaigns - blogs, social media posts, emails, podcasts, etc - that reach each of your client avatars.

A good client avatar will help you target your ideal client and be more effective in marketing. You won’t blow your advertising budget targeting the wrong audience. Other benefits include:

• A client avatar helps you determine which platforms your customers are spending time on so you know where to target your adverting messages.

• It will help you develop and deliver better products and services because you know your customers’ needs, behaviors, and concerns.

Some Final Thoughts…

A client avatar will help target your legal marketing a lot more efficiently. It will help you move from talking at people, and instead focus on talking to an individual in a language they understand that explains how your law firm can solve their legal problem.

Do You Need Help Creating Client Avatars for Your Law Firm?

There are many templates and worksheets available to create client avatars. And like other content marketing efforts, creating client avatars takes time, and you will need to adjust your avatars once you determine how well they work, and as your law firm’s services change. Think of it like keyword strategies - an ideal keyword strategy in 2020 may be outdated and useless in 2022! The same applies to client avatars: your ideal client evolves and changes over time.

SEO My Law Firm can help your law firm research and build your client avatars. Contact Catherine to discuss how we help grow your business - and your profits!