Increasing visibility and building profile is all about positioning yourself as having a particular kind of specialized expertise, and about distinguishing or differentiating yourself from your competition — those who purport to offer the same kind of thing that you do.
Developing profile involves increasing your exposure to whole groups of people who might play a role in the generation of work in your chosen area. Typically, the groups you will be attempting to reach will include potential clients or potential referral sources, and they can be characterized as your target markets.
The key to reaching target markets is to develop marketing strategy and related communications around subjects of interest to those in your defined target market. Although this seems an obvious point, in developing strategies and preparing communications intended to reach target markets or target audiences, many lawyers overlook the obvious, and make plans that revolve around whatever is of special interest to them — and not necessarily of interest to their target market.
> How the Process Usually Works
In order to make the point clearly, consider some of the most widely used profile building activities employed by lawyers: writing and speaking. Most lawyers approach writing or speaking with a subject in mind that is of special appeal to them. Perhaps the lawyer feels well qualified to publish or speak on a topic that is of particular intellectual or academic interest to them, or it could be that they want to focus on a subject that they know extremely well as a result of their past experience.
Having selected a subject to cover, the lawyer typically sets out to find a way to write or speak on it. That means identifying publications or conferences that might be suitable vehicles for the delivery of the material that has been chosen. But what if the publication or conference that is the right one for coverage of the subject matter doesn’t directly reach the target market? Although one might obtain some personal satisfaction from writing or speaking on a favourite topic, it will be of little to no marketing value if it does not reach the people who are key to developing that lawyer’s book of business.
Whatever the motivation or reason behind favouring particular topics, the lawyer who is selecting subject matter based on his or her own interests, rather than the interests of those who will influence his future flow of work, is making a mistake.
> How the Process Should Work
Properly done, profile-building strategy should start with the clear identification and definition of your target market. It stands to reason that, if you don’t know who it is you need to reach, you likely won’t know how to reach them. The more concrete and more narrowly defined your target market, the better.
Once the target market has been identified, the next step is to determine how exactly to reach them. Ask yourself how you can access them as directly as possible, and as specifically as possible. While it is true that engaging in an activity that will provide exposure to a very broad audience that includes your target market as a subset of the broader audience is better than no exposure at all, the optimal approach involves finding ways to reach smaller, more narrowly defined groups that match your definition of your target market as nearly as possible without spilling over into other groups or markets.
When addressing a well-defined group, your message can be tightly tailored to those you really want to reach, and you will avoid the oft-repeated mistake of positioning yourself as a generalist (someone who won’t garner much attention in these days of specialization and increasingly demanding and discriminating clients).
Find out what associations members of your target market belong to, what conferences they attend, what publications they read, and what sources of information they regularly refer to.
Once you have managed to get a sense for how to reach those in your market, the next step is to find out what subjects they are most keenly interested in. Equipped with this information, the final step is to select a subject that will engage them and catch their interest.
The bottom line is that you need to design your strategy and pick your subjects based on your target market — don’t decide what you want to say first, and then try to find someone who is willing to listen.
Successful marketing is all about establishing yourself as a go-to person on subjects that are of critical interest to those you really need to reach.
Donna Wannop, LLB, MBA, is a practice-development coach (www.wannop.ca) who has worked exclusively with the legal profession for over 20 years. She can be reached at [email protected].