you have the best solution to what they need

The 4^th ingredient of our P6 growth recipe is tied into how you are perceived by the people you are targeting (who have a need for what you are offering).

We’ve just crossed the halfway mark of learning about the 6 ingredients in the P6 lead generation strategy. If you need a refresher, check out the last few blog posts to get back up to speed.

Let’s use our employment attorney scenario to identify ways we can take advantage of these perceptions and see if we can turn them to our advantage.

There are two major targeted audience segments an employment lawyer can immediately identify at the beginning of an audience segmentation analysis review.

The Employees who get terminated (or need protection while employed)
The Employers who hire and fire people they employ.

Often employment attorneys will represent one of these two segments of clients and gain a reputation as an Employer side or Employee side firm.This is an important distinction because how clients think of your services is part of their decision making process when they hire you.

And if they think you sit on both sides of the fence, that reputation may not be as compelling to a person who just got fired that wants a lawyer who specializes in suing companies for wrongful termination.

What’s important for lawyers to think about is what could be lurking in clients’ minds during the decision making process of which lawyer to hire. If you do straddle the fence and you want to win more business:

Then you can play it up in your marketing copy by saying we know what employers are thinking because we also represent employers, and/or
You can reverse it as well if you are pitching an employer as a client and say “we know what employees are thinking about …”

Can we learn anything valuable from knowing that employment lawyers have multiple sets of client types?

If a law firm represents people in the food services industry like waiters and cooks, C-level executives of restaurant chains, then its website should boast about industry expertise and be perceived as a market leader representing the full range of employees.

The more granular you can be in your web copy (through blog postings for example) about your industry experience, the more chances you will have to both drive more leads (from search rankings) and close those leads due to your perceived industry authority. This of course assumes you have a good website too.

This is pretty serious stuff when it comes to marketing and establishing the authority of your “brand identity” online.

If you have messaging on your site that talks about providing legal services to restaurants, food distributors, farms, and other types of companies along the food distribution chain, it gives your firm the air of superiority over other lawyers who might be competing for similar clients but don’t have as much to say to back up their credibility.

With smart web copy, you can expand your perception from servicing just restaurants to the entire food industry. Your content messaging strategy should include videos, client testimonials and digital media.

When we review this 4^thPERCEPTION ingredient of the P6 success formula which suggests that your customers must believe that they need or want what you have to offer, we have a lot to talk about.

Want to Get Inside Your Customer Perceptions?

Let’s use a case study to see if it helps illustrate this ingredient of the P6 campaign.

Jim, a manager of a restaurant chain in Louisville, Kentucky, has been fired.

Jim then uses Google to research if other people have been terminated in similar circumstances (or even terminated by the same company).

He types in different sorts of keyword phrases such as “manager of Burger King fired for bad reason” in Google and Bing.

In the search results (and the PPC ads) he finds listings directing him to different websites with relevant content inside blog posts, case studies and even videos on YouTube.

Jim starts reading these stories and watching these videos (did you know in certain cases 70% of people would rather watch a video than read something).

Jim starts to feel empowered as he gets more educated about what it means to be fired and what he could possibly do about getting compensated for it (or getting his job back).

Jim discovers blog posts from an employment law firm (e.g. www.KentuckyRestaurantLawyers.com) that talks about its history of successes in suing restaurants that wrongfully terminate employees.

A person like Jim – who does not have a personal connection to a lawyer (let alone an employment lawyer) – is likely to take that very encouraging step (but an easy step if the website is designed well) and reach out through the site to ask for more information.

Jim might call the number (that is supposed to be discernable on all pages of the website),

Fill out a form to explain his issue, or

Drop a message via a social channel like Twitter or Facebook.

This is not a wildly fantastical scenario.

This is one of the very effective and consistent ways that website marketing or digital branding efforts bring businesses new clients and new customers.

To tie this all together, what you need to do to engage people is use your website content as a vehicle to describe the pain they are going through and how you have addressed that pain for other people in similar circumstances. This accomplishes two things:

It helps other readers see that someone else was able to articulate the pain they are experiencing. And this drives people into the perceptions continuum where they are able to see that they need help for something they are now better able to define.
It helps these same people see that you have experience and that you might be able to help them.

At this point you are 2/3 of the way through P6 and here’s what you have accomplished so far with visitors to your website that have stuck around.

Targeting audience segments that have a perception they need whatever it is you are offering to them.

We described how you can write articles, blog posts, and case studies and make videos that highlight people who get wrongfully terminated and the legal services they needed.

We talked about how this Kentucky law firm did these things to attract employees who have been terminated like Jim.

They have landed on your page and figured out you offer services that seemingly provide solutions to pain[s] they are experiencing. This leaves you with two remaining challenges – how do you convince people you are better than other providers; and, how do target people that will pay for your work.

Click here to read about the 5^th ingredient of the P6 where you demonstrate why your company should be preferred over another company.