If you’re a solo lawyer, or a personal injury lawyer with a small or large law firm looking to expand your client base, then chances are that you’ve explored your marketing options, both in traditional media and online spaces. Marketing for personal injury involves many unique challenges and opportunities, though the digital marketing tactics and strategies that you’ll be well-served by implementing may come as a surprise to marketing newcomers.

Let’s take a closer look.

Understand the real needs of your prospective clients

To serve the audience better with your marketing content, you have to know the issues that potential clients are actually concerned about — not just the issues that you think they may be concerned about. Generally speaking, injury victims have basic questions that they need answered before they decide to sign on with a personal injury attorney. Addressing these concerns effectively can significantly improve your client acquisition efforts.

These questions include, but are not limited to:

• How much compensation could I receive for my injury?
• Do I have to sue? Or is there some other way that I can receive compensation?
• How long will my dispute take to resolve?
• How much will it cost to hire a personal injury lawyer?
• Will my dispute be made public? How might this impact my life from a professional and personal perspective?
• What happens if I lose the dispute?
• Can I handle my legal dispute on my own? Or do I have to hire an attorney?
• What are the advantages of hiring a personal injury attorney?
• What are the differences between working with a smaller law firm and a larger law firm?
• I’m worried about personal details of my life coming out in the dispute. Are any of these details protected from investigation?
• How will my immigration status be impacted by my lawsuit?
• And more

Developing a Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing Strategy

Developing a personal injury lawyer marketing strategy is crucial for attracting and engaging potential clients. A well-planned strategy can help personal injury lawyers establish their brand, build trust, and generate leads. By understanding the unique needs and concerns of personal injury clients, lawyers can create targeted marketing efforts that resonate with their audience. This involves a combination of traditional and digital marketing tactics, tailored to reach potential clients at various stages of their decision-making process.

Identifying Your Target Audience

Identifying your target audience is a critical step in developing a personal injury lawyer marketing strategy. Personal injury lawyers should focus on understanding the demographics, behaviors, needs, and concerns of their potential clients. This includes:

• Age: Personal injury clients can range from young adults to seniors, each with different concerns and communication preferences.
• Location: Personal injury lawyers should focus on targeting clients in their local area, as proximity often plays a significant role in a client’s choice of attorney.
• Interests: Personal injury clients may be interested in health and wellness, law, and personal finance, which can inform the type of content you create.
• Pain points: Personal injury clients may be experiencing physical pain, emotional distress, and financial difficulties, and addressing these issues in your marketing can build empathy and trust.

By understanding their target audience, personal injury lawyers can tailor their marketing efforts to effectively reach and engage with potential clients. This targeted approach ensures that your message resonates with those who are most likely to need your services.

Allocating Your Marketing Budget Wisely

Allocating your marketing budget wisely is essential for personal injury lawyers. A well-planned budget can help personal injury lawyers maximize their marketing efforts and achieve their goals. Here are some options for allocating your marketing budget:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): You can try allocating some of your budget to SEO. This ensures your personal injury website ranks well on search engines, making it easier for potential clients to find you.
• PPC (Pay-Per-Click Advertising): You can try allocating some of your budget to PPC campaigns. These ads can drive immediate traffic to your site and generate leads quickly.
• Content Marketing: You can try allocating some of your budget to content marketing. High-quality blogs, articles, and videos can establish your authority and provide valuable information to potential clients.
• Social Media Marketing: You can try allocating some of your budget to social media marketing. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn can help you reach a broader audience and engage with them directly.
• Email Marketing: You can try allocating some of your budget to email marketing. Regular newsletters and updates can keep your audience informed and engaged.
• Other Marketing Efforts: You can try allocating some of your budget to other marketing efforts, such as affiliate marketing or experimental campaigns.

By allocating your marketing budget wisely, personal injury lawyers can ensure that they are using their resources effectively and efficiently. This strategic approach helps in maximizing the return on investment and achieving marketing goals.

One major personal injury marketing challenge: most people in the general audience do not have any active disputes

From a personal injury marketing perspective, promoting your services to a general audience can be challenging for personal injury law firms, because you’re dealing with two functional issues:

1. Most people in any given general audience do not have an active personal injury dispute for which they require your services; and
2. Personal injury issues tend to crop up spontaneously. There is no rhyme or reason to it, nor would the injury victim expect it to happen. So they would have no reason to follow or consume your marketing content until they actually get into an accident which could give rise to a dispute. Content about other legal practice areas (i.e., employment dispute issues) may be of sufficient general interest to appeal to users even if they don’t have an active, ongoing dispute.

To target prospective clients, then, you have to accept that a significant portion of your audience is not necessarily looking to “convert” into an inbound lead. Increasing your content’s visibility will rely more on appealing to the general audience of curious users who might find something so entertaining, informative, or controversial that they will reshare your content to their friends and family. Developing a robust content marketing strategy can help in creating engaging content that appeals to a broader audience.

This exposes the content to a broader audience (wherein some percentage of that audience has an actionable personal injury claim, and could therefore become a client). The strategy — leaving aside the search engine optimization aspects — is to create personal injury-related content that will appeal to general audiences, even if they do not have a normal reason to be following a “legal” account (i.e., they don’t have an actionable claim).

There are many different personal injury lawyer marketing options

Personal injury attorneys looking to market their legal practice have a number of different options for personal injury lawyer marketing, both in the traditional media sphere and online. Consider the following non-exhaustive list:

• TV/radio/newspaper/magazine advertising
• Content writing for your law firm website (i.e., blogs/articles)
• Photo/written content for social media
• Video content for social media (long-form and short-form)
• Paid advertising on social media
• Paid advertising on search engines / other websites
• Email marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• And more

These options can significantly enhance your lead-generation efforts.

For example, if you’d like to provide regular newsletters to a loyal base of followers, then email marketing is an excellent choice — though you’ll have to “earn” their email signup first (there’s a two-step conversion before they become an inbound lead as a prospective client), before you can target them via email marketing content.

What sort of marketing options you engage will depend largely on the budget/resources available to your firm, as well as your particular marketing goals. For example, like many law firms, you may not be willing to invest the time and effort necessary to build a sustainable social media brand online. Fortunately, there are many other marketing options available to you.

Perhaps you would prefer to spend more money per inbound lead, but get your content in front of a set number of users — using paid advertising on social media, your content will get a specified amount of impressions, guaranteeing that you will reach an audience that could potentially convert into prospective clients. This isn’t a sustainable solution, of course, but if you’re simply looking to get immediate results (i.e., a flood of inbound leads), then it may be better than building up your organic social media brand from scratch.

Building a Strong Online Presence for Personal Injury Law Firms

Building a strong online presence is crucial for personal injury law firms. A well-designed website and online marketing strategy can help personal injury lawyers establish their brand, build trust, and generate leads. In today’s digital age, potential clients often turn to the internet to find legal services, making it essential for personal injury law firms to be visible and accessible online.

Creating a Modern and Optimized Website

Creating a modern and optimized website is essential for personal injury law firms. A website should be:

• Mobile-friendly: With 62% of personal injury consumers using their mobile phones to conduct web searches, it’s vital that your website is fully responsive and functions well on all devices.
• Fast-loading: A slow-loading website can deter potential clients. Ensure your site loads quickly to keep visitors engaged and reduce bounce rates.
• Easy to navigate: A website should be easy to navigate and provide clear information about the law firm and its services. Use intuitive menus and a clean layout to enhance user experience.
• Secure: A website should have an SSL certificate to ensure that it is secure and trustworthy. This not only protects your clients’ data but also boosts your site’s credibility and search engine ranking.

By creating a modern and optimized website, personal injury law firms can establish a strong online presence and attract potential clients. A well-designed website serves as the foundation of your online marketing efforts, providing a platform to showcase your expertise, share valuable content, and convert visitors into clients.

Marketing topics to help sell your law firm’s services to prospective clients

Many lawyers (just beginning to market their services online) don’t realize what prospective clients would actually like to know that would set their concerns at-ease and would make the lawyer’s offerings stand out from the crowd of other solo lawyers and personal injury law firms competing for their attention. Addressing these topics can improve your conversion rate by making your services more appealing to prospective clients. As you explore a breadth of legal marketing topics for your content calendar, consider prioritizing the ones listed below.

Explain how negotiations work at a basic level

As an attorney at a personal injury law firm, you understand that the large majority of personal injury disputes are resolved through a settlement agreement — not at trial.  Unfortunately, the general public does not realize this basic truth, thanks in large part to decades of popular media (TV shows, movies, books, etc.) that paints most litigation as a dramatic court-oriented conflict.  At least some of your content should talk about settlement negotiations and their importance to most real-world personal injury disputes.

We encourage you to explain the settlement negotiation process and some of the opportunities and challenges that the client is likely to encounter as you navigate through this aspect of litigation.  Marketing doesn’t just have to be persuasive — it can be informative, too, and in educating the prospective client, you build a great deal of legitimacy, authority, and trust, which can help drive conversions (i.e., inbound calls). Educating clients about the negotiation process can also enhance client retention by building trust and transparency.

Cover the potential damages for personal injury clients in detail

One of the most common questions and concerns that prospective clients have (in the context of personal injury firms) is what sort of compensation they can expect if they were to move forward with litigating their dispute. Though — obviously — you don’t have the sort of information necessary to reasonably speculate on the damages they could be entitled to receive, it’s worth talking about damages more categorically. In discussing the potential damages, perhaps the main concern you’re trying to overcome is whether litigating the dispute is “worth it.” After all, the client doesn’t want to go through all the hassle of litigation without a result that justifies it.

Explain how damages work, and what losses they could potentially recover for through litigation, and provide examples so that they have some clarity on the range of damages that are accessible given the variety of factual circumstances in a personal injury dispute. Examples are particularly relevant, in fact, as they move the discussion away from vague “legalese” and into real-world scenarios that are easier to understand for the general audience. Providing clear information about potential damages can significantly improve client satisfaction.

Do make sure not to guarantee (or imply any guarantees) about damages. Make sure that the audience knows that the compensation they receive could vary greatly and that there is no certainty as to the outcome. Guarantees could constitute a violation of marketing and ethics standards based on your State Bar (and could result in fines), so exercise caution in that regard.

“Working up a case” is something worth talking about

Personal injury clients are most often disappointed by their attorney treating them like “just another number,” and not with the level of care, investment, and effort that they expect from a professional.

In the personal injury practice, especially, public perception of attorneys is rather low due to the sometimes dehumanizing ways in which larger law firms process claims — a larger law firm may have a marketing funnel set up in such a way that they prefer to quickly settle a client’s claim for $25,000 in a few weeks, as opposed to “working up” the case to $100,000 and settling after six months. While the client may prefer the latter outcome, the former is quite a common occurrence. Assuring clients of your commitment can enhance client engagement and trust.

Prospective clients want to know that if they hire you, you’ll be willing to “work up” their case to its maximum potential — that you will secure the best possible outcome for them. When communicating what you can do for the audience (in your online marketing content), don’t forget to assure the audience that you are ready and willing to work up claims. They should know that you have the capability and the interest in investing the resources (and efforts) necessary to access compensation that represents the true value of their case.

Contact Walker Advertising for Helping Growing Your Firm’s Client Base

Whether you’re a solo or small firm lawyer or are part of a larger firm with plans for expanding your client base, it’s important to invest in marketing solutions to hit your revenue and client growth goals. Here at Walker Advertising, we can help. We operate a number of popular attorney networks — including our Los Defensores and 1-800-THE-LAW2 brands — through which firms are able to access leads for various legal claims.

The leads we acquire through our various online marketing efforts — from social media marketing to targeted web ads — have been pre-qualified by our team so that you aren’t hassled by a flood of leads that are simply not relevant or actionable for your purposes. By accessing these quality leads, you’ll be well-equipped to select the best ones to grow your firm business.

Contact Walker Advertising today to connect to a member of our team who can explain how our legal networks can help your firm business thrive in this ever-changing digital marketing landscape.

We look forward to assisting you.