Personal injury law firms are marketing in one of the most competitive spaces which makes updating and optimizing their advertising to meet the needs of today’s prospective clients more important than ever. Despite a majority of law firms (54%) lacking an annual budget, most law firms spend about 2% of gross revenues on marketing related expenses. Personal injury lawyers, however, spend substantially more to market themselves because of how competitive the space is. In fact, some personal injury law firms spend upwards of 15-20% of their annual revenue on marketing.
While personal injury law firms are well known for marketing on benches and buses, today’s digital marketing landscape gives everyone — including small or solo firms — the ability to connect with new and returning customers. Though it may feel overwhelming to compete for consumer attention on social media and search engines — especially against firms with more money to spend — anyone can improve the success of their digital marketing with the right preparation and strategies.
The modern consumer moves quickly and relies heavily on search engines and their mobile devices. A study by iLawyerMarketing found that:
- 86% of consumers would use Google as their primary source for researching a lawyer to hire
- 53% of consumers would use both mobile devices and computers during their research
- 50% of consumers spend less than a day researching before contacting a lawyer
In order to stay competitive and grow your law firm, you need to adopt digital marketing tactics that draw potential clients in and give them the information they need quickly and easily.
Let’s take a look at what personal injury attorneys can do to maximize their marketing budget and outclass the competition.
Build your marketing toolkit
Before spending your first digital advertising dollar, you need to set yourself up for success with the right tools. Every personal injury practice should have the following information as part of their marketing toolkit:
- Client personas
- Marketing strategy
- Tactical plan to achieve the strategy
Let’s look at each of these important building blocks in more detail.
Develop personas
Personas help you identify and understand your ideal clients and take advantage of the powerful audience building tools available to you through different digital marketing channels like search engines and social media. While you probably know through experience who your ideal clients are, it can be helpful to answer the following questions and put your insights to paper.
Who is your ideal client?
Take stock of the types of cases your firm specializes in: from car accidents and medical malpractice to slip and falls and product defects, there are a thousand ways for someone to be injured, but those injured people are not all the same. Your ideal client will be determined in large part by local demographics and environments — and adding depth to each of your clients in key areas is critical.
For example, if you’re a personal injury lawyer in Florida, you might specialize in amusement park injuries. What are the most common traits of people who attend amusement parks and what locations are the most common places for these injuries to happen? Knowing the answers to these questions can help you tailor your advertisements and create compelling calls-to-action down the line.
Since almost all personal injury attorneys take cases on contingency, this exercise is also a valuable opportunity to see which case types drive the most revenue. Knowing the average revenue from each type of case can help you focus on the niches that will have the highest return on advertising dollars.
What challenges can you solve for prospective clients?
The point of advertising is to convince prospective clients that your legal services can solve their legal pain points — even if you can’t medically solve their pain. Oftentimes, personal injury attorneys are fighting to ensure their clients can get the compensation they need to cover large medical bills, along with the needed recovery time. Your marketing should help educate prospective clients about the process and show how you’re uniquely qualified to help them get the compensation they deserve.
Where do your clients consume information?
While search engine results are commonly a leading source for consumers to discover personal injury lawyers, the different clients your personal injury law firm supports might not all share the same preferences. For example, a strategically placed billboard by a hospital advertising your medical malpractice services might get the attention of a recent patient. But to reach potential clients – you might consider promoting your firm on daytime television as injured people may be home from work channel-surfing.
It may take some trial and error to test different channels, but knowing who you’re targeting is going to make that process much simpler and more data-driven.
Set goals and a strategy to achieve them
Your law firm marketing strategy should be based on your overarching business objectives. If one of your business goals is to increase revenue by a certain percentage, break that down into how many new clients you will need and even further into how many calls, forms, and consultations you will need to end up with those new clients.
Every business development objective should be broken down into marketing objectives that will help your personal injury law firm meet those objectives. When you know what your marketing objectives are, you can determine which marketing tactics you’ll employ to achieve them. These can be mapped out simply to help you visualize what you’re doing and why.
Once you’ve developed these objectives and tactics, you can turn your attention to the marketing funnel, also known as the buyer’s journey. You need ads and content that meet people where they are. These are generally broken up into three stages: top of the funnel or awareness, middle of the funnel or consideration, and bottom of the funnel or conversion.
For personal injury attorneys, these stages may be fuzzy. Oftentimes, your clients are injured and need representation fast to start the process of fighting for compensation, which means they might very quickly go from becoming aware of you to converting into a qualified lead. It is still important to provide content geared towards each stage of the funnel so potential clients can fully evaluate your law firm. It’s also vital to raise awareness of your firm before the client needs your services, so that will be an important consideration as well.
What tactics should you use at each stage of the funnel to communicate with current and potential clients? Here are some ideas:
Stage 1: Awareness
In the past, personal injury law firms effectively used billboards and TV ads with catchy jingles to grab people’s attention in their local community. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and organic social media marketing are today’s version of those billboards and jingles and they’re much more targeted and cost-effective. Use these tactics to generate brand awareness and associate your firm with certain keywords (“slip and fall accident lawyer,” for example) and to establish yourself in the digital iteration of your local community.
Stage 2: Consideration
The consideration stage is where you give consumers a reason to contact you. To do so, you want to establish authority through thought leadership in your area – and build trust while doing so. In all likelihood, people looking for your services are already frustrated by the process of getting help and fair compensation. For example, an ebook detailing personal injury cases from start to finish makes a lot of sense to get interested consumers to engage. To scale further, ebooks dedicated to the areas within personal injury that you focus on — such as “Understanding wrongful death cases from start to finish” (or automobile accidents, etc.) — is one way to connect with motivated, prospective clients.
Use clear and human language to help prospective clients quickly understand or solve their issue. By setting yourself up as an accessible and trusted authority with your content, you’re much more likely to drive them into the conversion stage.
Stage 3: Conversion
At this stage, you’re actively trying to drive consultations that can turn into clients. Throughout the awareness and consideration stage, your messaging has focused on ensuring potential clients are familiar with your firm, and recognize you as an authority in the area of law you practice. At the conversion stage, your objective is to prompt users to fill out a form or pick up the phone to set up a consultation or appointment with your firm.
It’s important to note that clients might convert at any time. Make sure it is easy to call or fill out a form for a free consultation wherever consumers are engaging with your content — on your site, on social media, etc. For personal injury consumers in particular, they’re more likely than others to contact an attorney or law firm as a first action, 5% higher than average consumer rates.
Make a plan
Now that you have a marketing strategy aligned to your business goals, what do you actually need to _do _to carry out the strategy? In today’s marketing landscape, that means having a well-functioning website and being active in the channels that matter most to your clients.
To determine what channels and tactics will be most effective, the best place to start is by using your personas to understand what channels they’ll most likely be on and what types of legal marketing messaging they will be receptive to based on their unique circumstances.
For legal referral service Lawyer Connection, figuring out which channels were performing and which ones weren’t has been a critical component of their marketing strategy. After several years of honing their marketing based on insights from call tracking as to what channels and ads are working, they’ve more than doubled their inbound call volume for the attorneys they work with.
Digital marketing vs. traditional marketing
Personal injury law firms have often used traditional marketing activities like billboards, direct mail, and radio/TV ads to great effect – and each of these channels are present throughout the marketing funnel. Digital marketing activities like creating a website, using digital ads, search engine marketing, email marketing, and social media can reach more targeted audiences and allow you to scale up as far as your budget can stretch.
Many firms will want to find a mix of both traditional and digital marketing activities to support their growth. But for personal injury law firms, search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical source, with one study finding that online marketing, including organic search results, were the best lead source for 90% of personal injury law firms.
Personal injury attorneys pay a premium for digital marketing, however. Competing for keywords associated with high-value cases and locations like “dallas truck accident lawyer” can command costs-per-click over $400. That’s why it’s important to create organic digital marketing strategies alongside paid digital marketing strategies.
Lead generation
Lead generation refers to using marketing tactics to book more consultations that eventually turn into clients. Lead generation can be done across all stages of the funnel and across all channels, but bottom of funnel activities are where hot leads typically convert.
Since personal injury clients most often are looking for local representation, you want to focus your lead generating activities (ebooks, webinars, etc.) on your local area and in the niches you serve. Building your lead gen engine with the right content and calls to action is important, but you will also want to make sure you have a good system to track and manage the leads.
If you generate a lot of leads, but don’t manage those leads properly, you’ll end up letting qualified leads, your hard-earned marketing dollars and case revenue get away. Make sure you have a lead management system that helps you track all your leads in one place, so you can easily identify quality leads and respond quickly with the right messages and offers.
Mockingbird, an agency that focuses solely on the legal market, used call tracking to measure how well their lead generation efforts were working for a client. They were also able to see that what wasn’t working — and needed to be fixed — was the law firm's own internal lead management process. Read Mockingbird’s story here.
Use your website to generate (the right) leads
A law firm’s website is the backbone of any digital marketing strategy; it’s the front door of your firm–where you build your brand, control your message, and create compelling experiences. Your website is where your prospective clients determine whether your law firm is the right fit for their case and whether you are the right fit for them. It’s no surprise then that 51% of law firms say website optimization is their biggest online marketing challenge.
To be optimized, your website needs to reflect the niches you serve in the personal injury space. A client who got injured at work will connect with a page on “Injuries at Work,” but not necessarily a page on “Slip and Fall Accidents.”
One thing personal injury law firms need to address in their website is mobile optimization: that’s because 62% of personal injury consumers use their mobile phone to conduct a web search regarding their legal need, 10% higher than the average. Mobile-optimized websites (and content) can make the difference between being contacted or not, as injured people often are searching and calling in the moments after an accident looking for advice many miles away from a personal computer.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a marketing tactic that helps law firms get traffic from organic search results in search engines like Google and Bing.
For personal injury lawyers, it’s important to have a website and web pages that communicate your focus areas. Research has found that 91.7% of law firms ranking on the first page for personal injury lawyers in their city focused solely on personal injury and civil litigation. That means that search engines prioritize websites from law firms that are specific to personal injury law over general law firms that happen to do with personal injury cases. Landing a top result on the search engine results page (SERP) is no happy accident, but rather the result of a well-executed search engine marketing strategy.
Another key part of SEO marketing for personal injury law firms is the use of local SEO. Search engines value search intent, and locations in search terms indicate high intent. Thus, searching for “personal injury lawyer new york,” you’ll notice that the top organic results all include “New York City” or “NYC” in their search result titles.
To be effective in organic search, you need to employ an SEO content strategy that creates landing pages for the terms associated with your niches and where you serve your clients. For example, if you’re a personal injury attorney that focuses on car wrecks, you should have web pages that include related terms and the city or area you serve.
For example, someone might search for “car accident whiplash portland,” and one of the top results is titled “Portland Whiplash Injury Lawyers | Car Accidents” with a direct CTA (call to action) in the copy. This is essentially a location page – you can create one for each of the locations you serve and your most profitable services – that conveys to search engines and users alike that you serve clients in that location in the given focus area.
SEO tools
SEO tools can help you improve your website performance while providing insight into keyword research and analytics. The Google Search Console is a go-to resource to ensure your SEO marketing is actually driving traffic to your site. You can also use the Console to test whether your website passes Google’s Mobile Friendly Test, as up to 63% of organic searches in 2021 originated from a mobile device.
With so many tools that can be effective for personal injury lawyer SEO, focus on your goals and use the tools that help your firm achieve them with ease. Don’t get distracted by “shiny gold objects,” but rather create processes and stick to the tools that facilitate those processes.
Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) utilizes paid ads to drive traffic to your website. There are a variety of different SEM tactics and platforms that often work well for attorneys, such as pay-per-click (PPC), Google Ads, local services ads, and the Google Display Network.
Search Engine Marketing relies on you choosing the keywords — the phrases consumers enter into search engines — to compete on the ads that show up in those searches. When you Google “construction accident attorney las vegas” you’ll notice the first results are the sponsored “Google Screened” boxes, highlighting local lawyers and their Google Business review ratings. These top spots are called local service ads — a new pay per lead (PPL) feature reserved for verified businesses that bid on a given keyword.
Personal injury cases make up some of the most competitive and costly keywords in the US, according to Search Engine Watch. Their research states that 20 of the 25 most expensive keywords are legal-realted -- including the most expensive one by far. For example, the number one most expensive keyword when they did their analysis was “best mesothelioma lawyer” at $935.71 cost-per-click. Use SEM tools to find keywords that have good volume (the number of people searching) and a cost-per-click in your budget.
The best way to know if your law firm’s SEM/paid search is working is to review your key metrics in Google Analytics and your call tracking dashboard. If your campaign targeting “Camp Lejeune water contamination” isn’t turning into calls and form submissions, start by reviewing the messaging and design of your ads and landing pages. In personal injury marketing, it’s important to strike the right tone, since you’re marketing to people who have likely experienced traumatic incidents. Run A/B tests and experiment with different messages, calls-to-action, and the design of your ads and landing pages.
Many injury victims are looking for information fast. One way to take advantage of a prospect’s urgency is with ad extensions, such as a phone number or an additional site link that can help your ads perform better at no additional cost.
To help clients like JC Law improve their paid search performance by more accurately attributing which ads were driving leads, their marketing agency combined call tracking, call recording and customer relationship management (CRM) software. Since implementing this new system, JC Law has optimized their paid search performance enough to decrease ad spending by 20% while maintaining and improving new lead counts.
Content marketing
Content marketing is the creation of marketing materials like tipsheets, checklists, long and short-form eBooks, webinars, blogs, and more that provide value to your prospect, lead, or client. Personal injury law firms should focus their content marketing strategy on creating content that helps consumers understand the niche areas they specialize in.
To create an effective content marketing strategy focus on creating repeatable processes and achievable goals — a blog or Facebook Live session a week, an eBook a month, a video every quarter — and start with your highest-value case types. If medical malpractice suits drive the most revenue per case, create content related to that topic and associated keywords.
Any content you produce should be geared towards your audience’s needs. To figure out what topics will be most relevant to your audience, gather voice of customer (VoC) data, such as feedback from client interviews, engagement surveys, call recordings, and reviews. Cross-reference those sources with relevant highly-searched queries and use this information to inspire your content themes.
Email marketing
Email marketing is a low-cost tool that can be highly effective for law firms. You can update your entire customer base with updates or you can create targeted emails to promote specific content to a select few prospects.
Personal injury attorneys can use their email marketing channel to nurture prospective clients with blogs and eBooks that walk them through the personal injury case process. This is a great way to turn someone who's interested in your services but not ready to commit to the legal process into an active client.
Email is also great for building long-term relationships with prospective and former clients. For example, if you’re a personal injury law firm specializing in injuries resulting from faulty products, you can create a monthly newsletter to keep your clients up-to-date about product recalls along with helpful tips. While it may not be a direct call-to-action, people will find value in knowing about issues with products and how to protect themselves and their family — and it will keep your law firm top of mind if the need arises. Since referrals play a key role in sourcing new business – email is a great medium to make the ask from former and current satisfied clients.
Too many people unsubscribing can flag your emails as spam. Make sure you are sending content that is relevant and valuable at reasonable intervals.
Social media
Social media can be a valuable and effective tool in your marketing toolkit, and every personal injury law firm should use it to some extent. While there are a lot of different platforms — like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and more — you don’t need to be on all of them. It’s better to choose one or a select few where your ideal clients are most likely to be and establish your social presence by sharing relevant content, engaging with your audience, and generally trying to be approachable and helpful.
Personal injury lawyers have found success with social media on sites like TikTok. If you’re looking to reach Gen Z or Millenials, you could use short videos to educate users and answer legal questions about what to do in a hit-and-run or what to do in the case of a cancer misdiagnosis – for example. Use your expertise to create engaging content and build an audience leveraging the world’s largest stage.
Like search engine marketing, social media marketing comes in organic and paid varieties. Organic social media lives on your various feeds and is shared to your followers and is a low-cost way to engage prospects. It can take a while to gain an audience, but authentic and informative niche content often performs well organically.
Paid social media posts are promoted to a certain audience that you specify or by paying influencers to promote your services on their accounts. Paid social is a cost-effective way to reach large audiences compared to other traditional media channels like TV ads, but the price can go up quickly based on the audience characteristics and size you select.
For most personal injury law firms, the most effective approach is often a combination of organic and paid posts that takes advantage of the content you’re already producing.
Measuring your marketing performance
It is vital to measure your marketing performance so that you are spending your marketing dollars as efficiently and effectively as possible. According to Clio’s 2021 Legal Trends Report, growing firms are twice as likely to be using reporting tools as shrinking firms. Marketing analytics like call tracking, Google Analytics, and other marketing software your law firm uses can help you measure performance.
Personal injury law is one of the most expensive industries to market in, so measuring the impact of every dollar and improving conversion rate optimization is critical. Compile quarterly or monthly reports based on your marketing tactics and use these to evaluate what’s delivering a high return on investment (ROI) and what’s not. It truly is a differentiator in a competitive marketing environment like personal injury law.
One of the most important and complicated things marketers can do is to correctly attribute leads to marketing activities and channels. You need to connect the display ad you ran for “medical malpractice Tucson” to the call you received from a prospective client to give credit to that ad, and that requires technologies and strategies that tie together these disparate channels.
When you’re able to understand which marketing activities work together to create new clients, it is a game-changer for your law firm. For example, at Whitehardt, a full-service marketing agency for law firms and attorneys, they leveraged number pools, or unique phone numbers that can be assigned to each ad or campaign, for their PPC landing pages and organic search listings. This allowed their clients to accurately match each call with the marketing channel that drove it as well as the associated search keywords.
This type of call tracking data helps personal injury law firms understand which ads and channels are best for generating awareness and bringing in their ideal customers. It can also be used to further optimize campaigns and hone their content marketing strategy. Attorneys can also use Form Tracking to track forms alongside calls and view a simple, seamless timeline for every contact.
Market and advertise your legal practice effectively
For your personal injury practice to thrive and grow, you need a steady stream of new clients. Your marketing strategy will depend on your firm’s capabilities, ideal clients, and your overall business goals. By staying close to your own case specialties in the personal injury law field and committing to a marketing strategy that meets your prospective and former clients’ needs, you’ll find success marketing your firm.
When done right, marketing builds awareness about your personal injury law practice, brings new clients in the door, and generates the case revenue you need.
CallRail helps you market your firm with confidence. Start your free trial today.
