Building Blocks For A Successful Legal Service Positioning and Marketing (Principle 2)

Welcome to Building Blocks For A Successful Legal Service Positioning and Marketing principle number 2.

In our last post, we focused on how you MUST identify your ideal client. I hope you answered the two questions we gave to help you do just that. If you didn’t, I suggest you close this post right now and click here to view that post and answer those questions.

Why am I insisting you do this? It is simply because it’s such an integral foundation that must be laid before you can proceed to attract your ideal clients. But if you have actually answered those questions, then you can proceed with this next step.

Principle #2: Create a Compelling Message

How do you create a compelling message your ideal clients are powerless to resist?

When you are creating a compelling message, your goal is to attract just the right person and make them stop and say, “Hey, that lawyer is right for me.” So let’s discuss exactly how you go about doing that. The perfect place to start would be what is called the USP. What is a USP? It’s simply an acronym for Unique Selling Proposition or Unique Selling Positioning/Position. Your USP should make this question easy to answer for your ideal client…

“Why should I do business with YOU as opposed to any and every other Lawyer available to me in your claimed area of specialization?” The question on your mind now will be, how can you get your own USP?

Here it is…

There are paths to crafting a good USP. However, the best USP’s are always – at least in part – driven by the target market that has been selected to receive them. Think of this as positioning and differentiation in the marketplace. It goes without saying for ANY business owner to do this task of developing a USP. Therefore, I don’t think that the Lawyer running a Law Firm should be an exception.

Note that, there is a very strong tendency to mix up a USP with a slogan or catchphrase. In many cases, you see it in businesses that are unwilling to actually
have a point of differentiation.

So you see big Firms who, for a variety of reasons, are unwilling to actually try and differentiate themselves, their slogan is big, broad, fuzzy, warm, feeling and therefore sort of meaningless – what you could call vague generalities rather than meaningful specifics.

They are unwilling to say, for example, a real estate Lawyer, “We will guarantee you won’t lose your property before you get the chance to sell it.” Slogans are almost always YOU-driven, not CLIENT-driven. You get stuff like “We’re the oldest”, “We’re the biggest”, We’re the smartest”, etc.

There are a variety of ways to come up with an appropriate USP for your practice, but that’s for the next post. It will be too much stuff for this post. However, for the next few days before our next PLF series, I want you to start thinking of that question I mentioned earlier…

“Why should I do business with YOU as opposed to any and every other Lawyer available to me in your claimed area of specialization?”

To make it more valuable and fun too, come up with a minimum of 3 options and, put them in the comment section and we will see if you have really understood what this post is trying to achieve. Next time, I will show you how to ACTUALLY come up with your own killer USP.

To Your Success!
Mayowa Johnson

Legalpedia