Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing - A law firm is as effective as future injury cases for continuous growth, which requires a solid online marketing plan that is supported by offline strategies.
Personal injury firms require a clearly defined marketing plan to ensure that it is able to bring the leads or cases. It doesn’t matter if you’re an individual car accident lawyer or a reputable injury company with multiple lawyers. The market is highly competitive. Market.
Finding out the things that work is a great starting point, regardless of whether you’re just beginning or looking to revisit your current marketing strategy to address issues.
The main things you should concentrate on are understanding where your clients are (physically and online) and how you can reach them, as well as how to define what it takes to be a winner.
The issue with the current State of Personal Injuries Law Firm Marketing
Many personal injury firms need to be marketing in a different manner.
The four most common issues that we see injury firms committing wrong are:
- Too much attention on them and not enough attention to their clients
- An absence of commitment and focus on one strategy
- Each channel should be treated as one (check-the-box marketing)
- More focus should be placed on capturing demand rather than creating it.
Instead of bouncing around on the hamster’s wheel of trying to accomplish everything with marketing, you should look back and examine your understanding of what it is to promote your personal injury company.
Problem #1: Not Enough Focus on Clients
Legal marketing needs to be updated and in touch with clients to emphasize the lawyer.
The majority of personal injury firms are selling a “me me me” message. The clients you treat for injury don’t really think about you that much. They’re interested in how you can help them.
If each lawyer is skilled, experienced, and educated in the same way, there’s nothing different in convincing a potential client to speak with your firm over another.
Donald Miller’s Storybrand concept is crucial for lawyers to grasp. In the classic story of the hero’s adventure, the hero takes on challenges or encounters obstacles but ultimately achieves the goal of success.
When you market the personal injury service, many of you are the hero. Your client should be the main hero, and in the role of their lawyer, you’re their guide, helping them along the way and helping them be successful at the final.
Problem #3: Check-the-Box Marketing
The second most threatening behaviour is the failure to concentrate on a single approach, method of operation, or an array of tactics that are in line together.
Because of the numerous marketing options available, countless personal injury firms try to cover all bases and only achieve tangible results from some of them.
Doing more than one thing at a time can spread your efforts too thin.
In terms of strategy, it is essential to create a clear plan and stick to it long enough for it to be successful. If you are constantly shifting your strategy more than every year, you’re either making a mistake or need a solid plan in the first place.
After you’ve established your plan, you’ll need to identify the channel that will allow that strategy to generate results for your company and then master it.
For new companies to market, there should be one channel. For firms that are more established, it is best to add a channel only after you’ve gotten the hang of the first.
Practical Example
Acme Personal Injury Firm Acme Personal Injury Firm is marketing to find new clients for nursing home abuse cases. The firm is posting posts on the Acme brand on Facebook and Instagram, sending out an email once per month, posting blogs on their website, paying for clicks with Google Ads, and running some TV ads during the day.
They’re receiving instances and leads, yet they need to figure out what’s working or what’s not.
- Email – They have an impression that the newsletter’s email could be performing better since very few people access it, and even those who do rarely click on any of the links within.
- Social Media – They need to figure out how social media is going. They receive some comments and likes from close friends of the company but nothing more than the initial. People rarely interact with them in any meaningful way through a post on social media.
- SEO – They see tons of traffic to their website. However, only a tiny percentage of visitors complete a form to be categorized as an actual case (less than 2 per cent).
- Google Ads — They’re definitely getting leads through Google Ads, but only one out of five have a good case to take, and the costs are getting very high.
- TV — We’re still determining how well the TV ads are working since they’re difficult to track. They ask their clients what they know about the ads during their intake, and some clients have mentioned the TV advertisements they show, so that’s an indication of success.
What’s wrong with this scenario we presented earlier?Are they making use of the incorrect channels? Are they employing the wrong strategies? Do they need help finding a simple method of tracking outcomes?
– No.
The main issue is that there needs to be a plan of action.
Each of the strategies and channels above is suitable for law firms (though it is rare to find email to be effective); however, it is only with an established strategy.
We stated that they aimed to find new patients for nursing home abuse cases, but that isn’t an approach. The strategy is a high-level plan of how to obtain those cases by using the channels and techniques.
If the company has been posting hyperlinks to blog posts via social networks (never do this as it’s a waste of time because of the censorship that social media platforms force on the user) or awards and accolades they’ve received recently, as well as general office content there’s no reason to wonder why the company’s efforts aren’t paying off. All of this has nothing to do with bringing on more instances of nursing home neglect.
They should be putting up information and providing information to people about things such as how to choose a suitable nursing home, signs that issues are occurring, speaking about statistics on abuse across the nation and in the area as well as hosting live Q&As with the community in order to answer questions, and so on.
This is also true for their blog posts. If they’re writing about general questions regarding abuse in the nursing home, it is excellent for traffic from the Top of the funnel; however, content that focuses on particular issues people face when they suspect that a loved one may be in danger will attract an even more significant percentage of their intended readers and lead to higher conversion rates.
Alongside that, they should concentrate on finding out which avenue they are able to gain momentum on, then removing the other channels and then putting another one on when they’ve got the hang of execution on the initial.
Problem #3: Check-the-Box Marketing
Every advertising channel has its distinct method of execution. It is only possible to apply the same approach to some channels. What you can do on your blog will not translate to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, TV, etc.
Making something public in the interest of doing it or creating a PPC campaign because you think everyone is doing it is not a smart move.
The most common cause of check-the-box marketing is companies that email marketing campaigns.
Most people want to be separate from the personal injury lawyer’s email list for newsletters.
Email is a viable option, but it could be a better return on investment for firms that run PI. The average reader will only be interested in grave issues like the death of a loved one or catastrophic injuries in the point that those events have impacted their lives.
Additionally, marketing on social media is another area in which the majority of us spend a lot of time.
A good example is sharing an insider’s view of your office, which could help to make your brand more human; however, it’s not likely to be the turning point that causes an injured party to contact you for legal advice. A lot of time spent on posts that vanish quickly from your social media feed hinders your ability to achieve higher results from other tasks.
Problem #4: Favoring Capturing Demand and Ignoring Generating Demand
A customer is more likely to contact you immediately following an incident. Your company should be prepared to meet the demand.
Many lawyers believe that way.
Demand capture and lead generation strategies are crowded. When someone begins seeking your services, it’s already competing with other businesses in the marketplace.
Businesses that have a too narrow concentration on-demand capture typically have to live and die according to the attribution tools they use. It does not take into account other non-attribution factors in business, such as the power of word-of-mouth marketing, which is also known as “dark social. In certain instances, dark social media may have an even more significant impact.
Overly focused attention to demand capture can show an excessive reliance on calculating the ROI for every marketing effort. This can cause tunnel vision for your marketers, who are focused on actions that result in false vanity metrics.
What’s the point of visiting websites or the growth on social media if they don’t result in new customers? Also, it’s impossible to monitor each marketing activity.
As Chris Walker points out, every company should think about the best way to shift from lead generation to demand generation. Focusing on generating demand, you will be able to win people over before they are even aware of your competition. This can be achieved by delivering Top of line content that aims to educate people and let them know that you exist, regardless of whether you’re on social networks, on your website (via the organic search engine) or the community events, news and other channels on which people who aren’t looking to purchase products spend time.
There are three methods to tap into the potential of demand generation:
- Find the appropriate metrics. One example is qualified pipe revenue.
- Pipeline Revenue: For lawyers, Qualified Pipeline Revenue refers to what you think your cases that are currently in process are worth.
- Define what “lead” is (someone who downloads your PDF is considered a contact but not an actual lead). A lead is a person who contacts your company in any manner, requesting an appointment with you or to use your services.
- Make sure to scale your marketing campaigns only after you’ve established the quality of your offerings and value proposition are in line with the needs of your target audience (service-market suitability).
Vital Principle: Marketing Serves the Business
Only develop or implement a marketing strategy once clear objectives are documented for the company. Establishing business goals is essential to understand how marketing relates directly to the desired outcomes.
Here are a few examples of the established business goals for law firms that handle personal injury:
- We want to boost our company’s revenue by 20% this year.
- We want to expand to five cities in the next five years.
- We are looking to expand the size of our team by adding two associates, both of whom have caseloads of X at any one time.
- We are looking to expand into trucking accidents, earning four new cases for 18-wheelers this year.
If you need help deciding which goals you should set, begin by identifying the company’s most pressing issues. Understanding the current challenges being faced by the business will enable managers to determine the most crucial priority area.
For instance, if the phone rings but with the wrong types of leads, the solution is not to increase the number of calls. Instead, the goals should be aligned with the goal of obtaining a more significant proportion of qualified leads’ telephone calls to the firm.
Marketing initiatives that increase lead quality are the only solution to overcome the business issue.
Strategies that encourage unfit prospective customers to “opt out” before placing a call could be successful in addressing this issue.
For instance, personal injury marketing campaigns that are geared towards this goal might be focused on aspects such as:
- The idea of naming “ideal” kinds of injuries that cause enough damage to be substantial.
- They are directly requesting medical bills in dollars.
- Focusing on specific types of high-value crashes that the firm has had success with, such as accidents caused by drivers who drink.
Elements of Effective Personal Injury Marketing
Suppose you want to be successful in a personal injury-related marketing strategy. In that case, it is essential to keep collecting insights through clients’ research, adjust your strategy, develop an official budget (that is constantly evolving) as well as write down your marketing plan and select the best method and approach that are aligned with your strategy in order to meet your objectives.
Continuously Collect Insights via Client Research
The more you know about your potential clients, the better you are able to connect with them using the language they are familiar with and can use. Researching clients in a continuous, qualitative manner is crucial. Quantitative research can be helpful in providing a complete picture. However, qualitative research can assist in improving your strategies and make your message more appealing to your intended customers more effectively.
When conducting a qualitative study, please get rid of the notion that it’s a questionnaire you mail out to previous customers. This will only yield a few results.
Instead, it would help if you took your time in deep one-on-one discussions with your clients or individuals who could have become your clients but then decided to go with a different law firm.
These conversations are beneficial to understanding what your client’s thoughts are and what elements are the most important to their decision-making process.
If you’re like many personal injury lawyers, knowing the right questions to ask is something that comes from something other than the beginning when starting with qualitative research on clients. Take a look at the Mom Test The Mom Test, a great book on marketing for products with transferable tips for how to better ask questions as a service provider, too.
Take notes of these conversations and then transcribe them later because you’ll be able to accumulate commonly used phrases, difficulties, and additional ideas that you can use for your marketing.
Dial in Your Positioning
Many businesses, as well as personal injury attorneys, need to correct the mistake of positioning wrong. Based on the advice of an expert, April Dunford Positioning “defines how our offering is the best in the world at providing some value that a well-defined set of customers care a LOT about.”
Positioning defines who you compete against, who you are competing with and how you will compete against them. It also explains the market you want to dominate.
Positioning is also an array of assumptions people base their decisions on the way in which you’ve explained what you’re doing. If you’re doing it right, you’ll have a wealth of data derived from your positioning. If you don’t, your customers will make a lot of false beliefs about what is unique about you. Organized messages need to be fixed.
There’s no shortage of nifty fill-in-the-blank formulas for marketing that attempt to distil precise positioning statements. What is the reality? Marketing is not mab-libs.
The majority of positioning statements go in the middle of the spectrum. They’re either stuffed with too much jargon, with too much language, or they need to be more complex and unimportant.
Here’s the formula that nearly every company has employed to create a general positioning statement:
- Serving (target market) The (insert company name company name here) serves (adjectives to explain what makes the company distinct.)
The final result for each declaration written using this formula is generic.
Compare the two Personal Injury Positioning Statements:
- We offer a dedicated service for those who have been severely injured in car accidents.
- We offer thoughtful, focused negotiation representation for victims of car accidents by providing access to the resources of a professional.
On first inspection, the two appear identical enough.
However, the first option does nothing to help position the company. Shouldn’t every PI lawyer claim to offer “dedicated service” anyway?
The second one goes deeper into the subject matter, stating the resources of the company that yield an effective outcome on behalf of the clients. The statement also suggests that a solution may only sometimes require a trial, which makes this firm stand out from other firms.
Establish a Formal Budget
You may need help to create a formal budget since marketing is a fluid field. Your marketing budget must have an established baseline, but it should be able to allow for expansion and contraction according to the need.
The baseline can be used to plan the goals of your business. Disseminate your knowledge about SMART goals, too. James Clear blew that conventional notion of goal-setting to pieces through his work Atomic Habits.
If setting specific deadline-based goals was all you needed to accomplish them, a lot of people would continue their resolutions to start the new year just a few weeks into January.
These are straightforward suggestions for set goals, but they require more effort to create the necessary systems to track the outcomes. The aim is just the result, and those systems comprise the steps that dramatically increase the likelihood of reaching this target.
If you’re planning to write the most famous American novel, don’t abandon “Write Novel” as an assignment in your project management system or calendar for every day.
Instead, you’d agree to a system that will be supportive of that result, like:
- Engaging a book writer coach to conduct weekly call-ins to keep track of your progress
- Making a scene-by-scene outline prior to writing
- Writing for the beginning 20 minutes each day, writing
The system is able to break down that larger target into smaller parts. Goals are only used to set the direction, while systems are essential for actual advancement.
In writing this, you must determine the way you’ll evaluate success. What does winning mean?
Establish a Documented Marketing Strategy
Your business’s constraints will determine how you market. This includes:
- Money available to invest
- Time
- Awareness of what makes great marketing
- Staff
Be aware that an effective strategy is a long-term plan that is likely to remain the same over the next few years.
Techniques may be more fluid, however. They may (and ought to) alter based on new information and should be guided by the question, “Does this tactic help me achieve X goal laid out in my marketing strategy?”
Although a strategy may not be as flexible as other tactics are, it shouldn’t be put in a drawer and forgotten.
Keep revisiting it frequently to ensure that your strategies and channels are aligned with the plan.
Select the Channel and Tactics that are in line with your strategy and Budget.
Channels are a distinct aspect of your marketing; however, they can be easily confused with strategies.
Channels are the areas where you can leverage your marketing strategies. Channels can be found in places such as LinkedIn and billboards, as well as radio or word-of-mouth emails, Twitter, TikTok, and many more. These are the locations where potential personal injury clients will visit and also where you can increase the brand’s recognition by using marketing strategies.
The strategies to use for your marketing campaign include Facebook ads and posts on social media, influencer marketing, web content reviews from customers, and search engine optimization. They’re the way you make use of channels to communicate your message to your intended group of customers.
The channels you decide to use for your marketing strategy are based on two factors: where your customers are located and how they are consuming information, as well as where you are able to execute an action successfully. The second aspect includes considering your marketing budget.
When selecting channels and tactics, review the marketing strategy. What are the best methods to achieve the objectives of the plan? What are the resources you have that can contribute to the most practical combination of channels and strategies?
Don’t commit to an everyday TikTok video if you’re aware that the lawyer most likely achieves success with short videos and won’t have the energy, time, or desire to keep up with the creation of regularly updated content.
It is crucial to be consistent.
The most effective strategies let you accomplish several things at once by leveraging the flywheel effect and stack expansion in the future.
Find strategies that regularly engage prospective customers and get valuable qualitative feedback from them at the same time. You can then use the information you gather to integrate into your marketing strategy when you are preparing to build your efforts.
Accelerating Growth for Your Law Firm
Growing Your Business by Stacking Multiple Marketing Channels
As previously mentioned, it’s best to add different marketing channels after you’ve got a handle on at least one. After you’ve successfully mastered one market and a single message with one channel, you’re now ready to layer those results.
Remember that what worked on the first channel may not necessarily translate into an increase in conversion rates on a different one. It’s painful to discover that you need to revisit and refine your strategies for the new channel; however, it’s worthwhile. If you attempt to apply the old approach, it will cost you money and time.
Setting Your Law Firm Marketing Budget
Resource Management
Implementing a successful marketing strategy requires significant expenditure of time, money and resources. A group of people is essential to be successful in a law firm’s marketing strategy.
If you’re like many personal injury lawyers, begin with an inventory of the marketing strategies you’ve got and then think about the ways in which they could be sourced out. The idea of hiring one person to perform the task of a multitude of individuals is a recipe for disaster. However, that’s the way it usually goes when you make your first hiring as a marketing director.
Let’s begin by tapping into agencies and freelancers for the initial marketing campaigns. This will maximize the Budget and provide information that can be utilized to expand and scale later.
Marketing directors are the ideal future employees for your law firm; however, you’ll require an internal person to manage all the details. The person you hire should be an integrator and coordinator, above all else. For the majority of law firms who are making their first forays into marketing, there needs to be more money to pay for a salary for a marketing director, and there are additional costs associated with hiring agencies or freelancers for execution.
It’s a huge error to hire someone who is planning to spend all of their time in marketing as well as not spend enough time managing the other members of the staff. This can lead to a failure in marketing initiatives. It also causes frustration to other people who are working on your marketing since they’re not allowed to use their talents since the marketing director has to “do it.”
If you hire someone initially as an associate or marketing assistant and later make a director, ensure they receive the appropriate training to transition into a strategy and delegate mode.
For personal injury lawyers like you, the costs of internal staffing typically exceed the outsourcing cost in the long term. Use your marketing director’s expertise to oversee the methods and channels. However, it would help if you relied on the assistance of outsourcing marketing experts to complete the task.
Resource Planning Checklist
The amount and the way you invest is contingent on the current state of your company and the amount of revenues you must support all-encompassing digital marketing efforts.
A law firm that is new and has a small budget could use freelancers or small agencies to implement marketing strategies. It could be:
- A specialist in search engines to ensure your website has the most basic search engine optimization (SEO) on the page and also that your Google My Business page is optimized for local search engine optimization
- A copywriter who can assist in the draft
- A social media administrator to produce and distribute content for channels such as LinkedIn.
- A web developer who can create an efficient and fast web-based layout
- A marketing expert for email to create an automated email campaign that will collect testimonials
- Pay-per-click (PPC ads) service (also known as a performance marketer) to execute campaigns using PPC to generate more leads of high-quality
The most experienced freelancers will charge an hourly rate per month or a flat amount for an engagement with a small scope. You should expect to pay at least $50 per hour as a minimum.
In certain instances, an in-house part-time marketing services assistant can manage budgetary limitations while performing basic tasks. It can be employed in lieu of freelancers based on the skill set of the person or even in conjunction with freelancers. In-house hiring will likely be cheaper on an hourly basis than for freelancers. However, this worker will require consistent work over a lengthy period.
In time, it will become necessary for a majority of personal injury lawyers to hire a marketing director who can help implement these strategies and analyze the results of those strategies. Based on the job description, a great legal marketing director is paid about $60,000 in smaller regions and up to six figures in larger cities.
If marketing initiatives succeed, that base of growth can be used to create new opportunities for investment in marketing that will improve outcomes. Some examples include:
- A Personal Injury Marketing Company can carry out regular, monthly tasks to boost the rankings of your law firm’s website with a particular SEO strategy. If you decide to go with this method, look for an agency that can provide SEO services to lawyers. You should expect to invest 10k or more per month to get the most effective outcomes.
- A public relations firm that helps spread awareness about awards and community initiatives and increase your presence on the internet. Plan to invest at the very least $2000 per month.
- A social media company that will assist in the execution of paid advertising campaigns. You should expect to invest at least $2,000 in ad spending.
- One marketing agency can handle several marketing campaigns simultaneously. Costs vary depending on methods and channels.
Retool Your Marketing Efforts Now
If you’re only beginning or need an update, you’ll need an injury lawyer firm that has a marketing expert to assist. Revolts Inc has earned its reputation as a top provider of SEO solutions.
Make yourself your next Revolts Inc successful story, and elevate your SEO efforts for your law firm right now by making an appointment for a no-cost consultation.
