A Remarkable Attorney Bio Starts with Positioning

Here’s an eternal truth about marketing: the narrower your positioning, the easier it is to market your firm.

Legal marketing is no exception to this rule. Let’s take Quinn Emanuel as an example. Their homepage headline reads, “A global force in business litigation.” This message is extremely narrow and highly effective. It’s marketing gold.

Most law firms’ offerings are too broad to write such an impactful headline. A typical firm sells dozens of different services to clients in a variety of industries. With so many constituencies to please, most firmwide marketing messages get watered down to meaningless. Although narrow positioning is challenging for most law firms, they can still reap the benefits by applying niche focus to attorney bios.

Benefits of a Narrow Focus

A lawyer has truly niche positioning if they can say in one sentence, “We offer X service to Y clients.” Once you’ve narrowed your world in that way, you unlock multiple benefits.

• Clearer messaging. Narrow positioning allows you to make your marketing message relevant to your specific audience, making it more compelling, and more likely to be read.
• Wider geographic reach/better margins. People are willing to go outside of their geographic area for a service provider that meets their exact needs. And when people are willing to travel, it also means they are willing to pay more.
• Word of mouth. Referrals flow more easily to lawyers with narrow positioning. As a result, well-positioned lawyers spend less time and money on marketing.
• Brand authority. Clients are more likely to trust lawyers who demonstrate deep expertise in solving their specific problems.
• Delivering more value. Focusing on a specific market or type of service allows lawyers to understand their clients and their problems so they can walk into any engagement with solutions in hand. This makes for easier sales and happier clients.
• Less competition. A well-positioned attorney can effectively eliminate large swaths of their competition. For example, if you’re an attorney specializing specifically in Brownfields law, it’s fair to assume that you have an advantage over other attorneys, even other more general environmental and land use attorneys who do not have such a narrow focus.
  

The Importance of Attorney Bios

Before we delve into how to apply niche positioning to bios, it's essential to understand why we are focusing on bios. This article zeroes in on attorney bios because the bio is, without a doubt, the most important content on a law firm's website. According to a study of our client’s websites, over 56 percent of all traffic on law firm websites occurs on the bio pages; in fact, the percentage may be even higher. In simple terms, the bios are where visitors are going. There is no better place, other than perhaps your website’s homepage, on which to focus your attention as a legal marketer.

Two Key Elements of a Great Attorney Bio

There are two key elements of an effective, narrowly focused, bio.

1. Establish a niche focus. The first step is to have an attorney pick a niche. Ideally, that niche will be narrow enough so that anyone visiting their bio can understand in an instant what their expertise is, who they do it for and what makes them different from everyone else. Generally speaking, narrower is better. For example:

Weak positioning: “Corporate Lawyer for Technology Companies”

Better positioning: “Securities Lawyer for Tech Companies Seeking an IPO”

Best positioning: “Securities Lawyer Specializing in Reverse Mergers and SPACs”

The first example is weak because “corporate law” and “technology companies” are very broad categories. No business executive will read that descriptor and instantly say, “This is the lawyer I’ve been looking for.”

On the other hand, a company looking for a lawyer to help take their company public using a nontraditional vehicle––such as a reverse merger or SPAC––will want to speak to the person with the best positioning, as expressed in the last example.

One of the greatest benefits of this focused approach is the ability to command higher fees. Clients recognize the value of specialized knowledge and are often willing to invest in attorneys with proven expertise in their specific area of need.

2. Substantiation. Simply claiming to be an expert in a specific area of law requires more than just a catchy headline. Clients expect evidence of expertise. There are a variety of ways for attorneys to support their claims of expertise.

• Proprietary data. Share original research that contains valuable, actionable data that clients want. For example, a report on the probability of various legal outcomes or a database that demystifies a web of overlapping state and local laws.
• Proprietary methodology. Explain your process improvements that allow you to produce better results at a fraction of the customary price.
• Compelling thought leadership. Articles and blog posts are a great way to substantiate your positioning. Ideally, these pieces should speak to specific experiences in your practice niche.
• Emerging trends. Addressing big issues that are just emerging in your target market communicates your understanding of their issues, enabling you to see around corners that others cannot. It also helps if your insights and advice are so novel and compelling as to clearly demonstrate your formidable skills.
• Case studies. Demonstrate your expertise by describing how it plays out in specific client situations. Case studies become particularly valuable when they showcase your approach to resolving a particular client’s problem. Be mindful, of course, about confidentiality before you reveal information about individual clients’ cases.
• Testimonials and awards. Leverage third-party endorsements that support your expertise claims. Client testimonials and recognized industry awards serve as powerful proof of your capabilities.
• Custom bio pages. Create specialized subpages within attorney bios to spotlight unique skills or experiences. This technique allows you to differentiate individual attorneys and highlight their specific areas of focus.
• Recent victories. A collage of news headlines that highlight legal victories can not only show successes but also signal that the attorney’s activities are timely, active, and relevant. Again, be mindful that confidentiality rules may prevent you from sharing information even if it is publicly available.
• Content teasers. Sidebar widgets and teasers within the bio, or on other website pages, can be used to draw attention to an attorney’s newest and best substantiating content, which would otherwise be buried deep within the website.

Content Is Key

To successfully adopt a niche marketing strategy, attorneys must develop a significant amount of reputation-enhancing content. This content will support their claims of specialized expertise and help justify their premium billing rates.

To achieve these goals, the content must be easily accessible. The most effective way to do this is by making a lawyer's bio a complete repository for all their reputation-enhancing content. From over 20 years of experience building websites for law firms, we've learned that the more easily accessible the content is, the more likely it is to be consumed.

Unfortunately, most law firm bios aren't built for content marketing. Reputation-enhancing content is often stuck deep in the “Publications” or “Multimedia” sections of the website, where very few visitors actually go. Sometimes good content is buried in a long, undifferentiated list because most websites don’t have a way to draw attention to the newest and best content.

Lawyer bios don’t need to work this way. They could be structured to help differentiate attorneys by elevating their content in two ways.

Enable content to be consumed right from within an attorney’s bio. Most attorney bio pages offer a subpar user experience because they have been designed to constantly push visitors to other sections of the website. For example, if you click a news item on an attorney’s bio, most law firm sites send you away from the bio and into the website's news section. We call this the “ping-pong effect” because it forces visitors to bounce around the website to read a lawyer’s content.

The most advanced law firm websites avoid the ping-pong effect by allowing visitors to read the full text of articles, news items and blog posts without having to leave the bio. This encourages visitors to stay on the attorney’s bio and read additional reputation-enhancing content. This makes a lot of sense because website visitors do not like ping-ponging around a website. Keeping them on the bio or practice page makes it easier for visitors to get the information that firms need them to see in the quickest and most efficient way possible.

Tease content from every page. Cutting-edge marketing websites are built with content teasing tools that automatically promote "related articles," as well as related events, case studies and blog posts (among other content). The objective is to keep website visitors engaged with your content for as long as possible. The more information they consume, the better they understand the value a particular attorney offers.

A well-designed website will include content teasers in strategic locations, such as the sidebars and bottom margins of each bio or practice area page. This is a powerful way to increase visitor engagement. That’s why content-rich sites like NYTimes.com, the Harvard Business Review and Deloitte.com are full of "Suggested Content" teasers and "Most Viewed" lists.

There are many benefits of advanced content teasing, including

• A fresher site. Today’s advanced content-teasing tools automatically promote the site’s newest, most relevant content to keep your website feeling fresh and relevant.
• Cross-selling. Your website can cross-promote content from related services.
• More page views. Visitors are prompted to read more of your newest and best content, which allows them to better understand how you can help them achieve their goals.

Focus, Focus, Focus

If your law firm is like most, having narrow marketing positioning for the entire firm is difficult, if not impossible. However, you can reap many of the tremendous benefits of narrow positioning by applying niche marketing concepts to individual lawyers or practice groups.

Focusing on a niche allows lawyers to deliver clearer, more compelling messaging to their target clients. When this is paired with a well-structured bio that features substantiating content––and site functionality enables you to highlight the attorney's expertise––the advantages are significant. Page views increase, and most importantly, the lawyer stands out from the competition and is well-positioned for long-term business success.