If Your Audience Doesn’t Hear You, Are You Really Marketing?

Feb 18

A version of this article was originally published for The Legal Intelligencer here on Feb. 14, 2024.

Image of multiple seats in green wall and the title of the blog

Tap, tap, tap! Is this thing on?

Does it sometimes feel as if your marketing is falling flat? You’re putting out insightful content —blogging or writing articles. You’re speaking on panels and giving presentations. Perhaps you’re a regular presence on LinkedIn, commenting and even posting a few times a week.

Still, you don’t seem to be getting any traction and certainly not any clients or work from your efforts. It’s discouraging.

If you’ve got the marketing blues, I have some good news. Your marketing probably isn’t “wrong”; it’s just not reaching the right audiences.

At its most basic, your marketing objectives are to establish your expertise (through your content), enhance awareness (with the right audiences) and build trust (with those who make or influence the hiring decisions).

If your marketing is focused on showcasing your knowledge, skills and experience — your expertise — but it isn’t consistently reaching or engaging the people who would hire or refer you you’re missing two of the three critical marks.

In other words, your messaging might be great, but you’re sending it out into the universe and hoping the right people pick up your signal. It’s time to fine-tune the transmitter to the right frequencies.

Here are some tips to help you do that.

Define and refine your audiences

This is the first and most critical step. And that plural is not a typo. Your marketing likely needs to focus on a number of different audiences, and balancing where you put your time, money and content among those audiences is determined by your practice and your business development goals.

Broadly, your audiences for marketing and business development purposes fall into four categories: clients, prospects, referral sources and influencers of those first three. That last category, which can be quite large and diverse, includes those who directly or peripherally influence legal hiring decisions — consultants and advisers, company boards of directors and procurement departments, legal and industry associations, and third-party ranking organizations.

Your audience categories may overlap somewhat. Your clients could also be prospects for more work — for you or others in your firm — as well as referral sources. Lawyers and other professional advisers who may refer clients to you may also play a direct or a peripheral role in the legal hiring decisions of those clients.

To home in on your audiences, think critically about your practice. Who are your best clients (or the clients you want to attract)? Client personas — detailed descriptions of your ideal clients — can help you define and refine the various audiences you need to reach.

How do your clients typically find you? Overall, hiring for legal services remains very much referral driven, at least at the beginning of the search process, for most clients. Who are your best referral sources? Consider other conduits that might feed into your client pipeline, including legal, business and industry groups or associations. Does your practice or firm get good prospects from your website, traditional or digital advertising, or social media?

Beyond how they find you, consider how your clients typically hire counsel and the factors that play into those decisions. If you represent organizations, who typically does the hiring — a lawyer or someone else in leadership or management — and is there a formal process?

Finally, your business development goals will impact both the audiences you want to be in front of and their priority in your marketing efforts. If you’re focused on getting more and better work from existing clients, they should be a priority audience. In fact, for most practices and firms, providing content to current clients should be a key component of client service as well as a marketing strategy. If you’re focused on attracting new clients in an industry or sector you already serve or expanding into a new market or adding a new practice area, you’ll need to research the key audiences to connect and engage with in those spaces.

Deliver your content to your audiences

Enhancing awareness and building trust require that you get in front of your target audiences consistently and over time, either by delivering your content to them where they are looking for information or by bringing them to where your content is. Your most effective content strategy likely will combine elements of both of these methods. It will also depend on the resources you have, such as a website, a client relationship management (CRM) or email system, and social media, as well as any marketing and technology help available to you.

Where your audiences overlap, so might your content delivery methods. Clients and prospects in the same industry or sector will likely be looking for information and resources in the same places, whether that’s industry publications, associations or conferences. You may — or may not — find your best referral sources in those spaces too. Similarly, you’ll be able to deliver content by email more directly to your clients as well as prospects and referral sources for whom you have contact information, but you’ll need other avenues to expand your reach to those with whom you don’t (yet) have a direct connection.

A real-life example

We recently worked with a lawyer at a regional, multiservice firm who wanted help marketing his white-collar defense practice. His clients tend to be individuals, and they span professions and industries. Most do not engage him for repeat or ongoing work, and due to the extremely sensitive nature of the allegations brought against them, they also tend not to be referral sources. While his firm has received client inquiries from their website, they are typically not for white-collar defense work. Most of that work comes through referrals from other lawyers, both in and outside the criminal defense bar.

Our lawyer client is a talented writer who had previously written for both regional and national legal publications. He wanted to leverage his well-deserved reputation as a skilled defense lawyer and his expertise in criminal and constitutional law by publishing more of this kind of substantive content.

Our challenge was to get that content in front of his target audience: other lawyers who could refer work to him.

Using his firm’s website to publish his articles was an option, but we couldn’t rely on organic traffic alone to bring the right readers to his content. He would need to build and manage an email list to deliver his articles directly to his audience — a fairly onerous task that would provide limited reach. Instead, we developed a content marketing plan that used LinkedIn as his primary content channel. He already had connections with his primary audience, and the platform provided the tools and technology not only to publish his articles but also to expand his reach beyond his immediate network. Phase 1 of the plan included messaging his connections to let them know he would be publishing regular content through a monthly LinkedIn newsletter, conducting targeted outreach to expand his network, and developing an editorial calendar of monthly articles covering a mix of topics in constitutional law, criminal defense strategy and client relationship approach. We also created a new LinkedIn profile for him.

While the strategy is still in its early stages, our client is already seeing results, including expanding his network, attracting hundreds of subscribers for his newsletter, and receiving positive feedback on and engagement with his articles.

Audience-focused marketing is efficient and effective. It can help you deliver more of the right content to your clients, prospects and referral sources, boosting visibility and engagement, and ultimately bringing in more of the right clients and the right work.