How Do People Choose a Lawyer: How People Make Decisions
As you gain more experience building your personal brand, you will begin to think about things a little deeper. For example, you will start asking yourself questions like, How do people choose a lawyer. Remember what I said previously: keep your finger on the pulse of your audience and you’ll never be short of new business.
Let’s go into marketing funnels. Funnels are beloved by marketers around the world and we should start thinking of them as we start creating content.
So, how do people choose a lawyer?
With every service that your firm is selling, your potential clients will be going through a decision making process in their minds.
The times at each stage in this process will vary. Some of these decision making cycles can take place in an afternoon while others can be drawn out over years.
But a knowledge of these stages will bring great structure to what you prioritize when your creating content. Keep them in mind and you will convince more and more of your audience to work with you.
Let’s go through each of the stages:
Problem Awareness
This is the first stage and it happens before anything else. It happens in the minds of people. It occurs when someone becomes aware that they have a problem and that they need to solve it.
Some problems are not worthy of being solved, so you can produce content that agitates their pain and highlights that this one definitely needs to be solved.
Attention
The next stage is getting the person’s attention. You can be flexible here in terms of the types of content your producing. Try and think outside the box with content that is entertaining and enjoyable.
While it is hard to pre plan viral content, take note of what is trending on your particular channel and test from there. To simplify it down, you are trying to get some name recognition so people recognise you in their feed.
Interest
Be interesting and you’ll create interest in what you do. This is where sharing some personality will be beneficial. Make people want to follow your career and your journey.
You may lose some of your audience at this level which is okay as not everyone in your audience is a ready buyer. Keep your content both entertaining and educational and you’ll start to create interest in the services you offer.
Decision
You should content some content with the aim to convert. This can be done for example through case studies that have a direct call to action for a consultation if someone is suffering from a similar problem.
To help achieve this, you need to agitate the problem. Rub salt into the wound, what is their cost of inaction? What is the opportunity cost of your audience not resolving this particular problem. Be sure to spell that out for them.
Purchase Action
What type of incentives can you offer to get people to act immediately? Your audience has to respect you and be primed for this to work.
The path to work with you should always be clear. That could involve a calendar system for people to book consultations or just keeping an eye on the inbound messages that come in. It’s important that if people do decide they need your services, there’s no missed opportunities because they didn’t know what to do.
Building a strong personal brand is a long road where consistency is king but having the knowledge of the journey your audience goes on will help a lot.
This blog post is part of our Branding For Lawyers Series. Look out for our next post on it.
