Most, if not all, personal injury lawyers understand the importance of legal marketing. Very few, however, develop and implement a concrete marketing strategy. Rather, they employ a piecemeal approach, focusing on whatever seems like it is working at the time. Some SEO optimized blogs. Maybe creating and frequently posting on a Facebook page. Or perhaps one or more sponsored listings on legal directory platforms.
While these personal injury lawyer marketing strategies may yield results, firms lack any insights into the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. Many have no predetermined marketing budgets, and those that do have no grasp of their client acquisition costs or campaign performance.
The most successful firms develop specific and measurable personal injury lawyer marketing strategies. In this article, we will explore some important things to consider when developing your firm’s marketing strategy.
The Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing Dilemma
Every personal injury lawyer faces a dilemma when it comes to marketing. Time is a lawyer’s most precious resource. It is hard enough to keep up with the work that lawyers are paid to do. So, when it comes to generating personal injury leads, lawyers must decide whether to sacrifice time and handle marketing themselves or invest capital to hire professional marketers to do it for them.
Many lawyers make the mistake of underestimating the amount of time required to perform marketing tasks. Personal injury lawyers must first educate themselves on effective legal marketing strategies. Then they must plan their campaigns. For instance, setting up a pay-per-click advertising campaign requires a significant investment of time to research keywords and write compelling ad copy.
From there your legal lead generation strategies must be implemented and their performance continuously monitored to determine whether campaigns yield positive results. While investing your time rather than capital may seem like a win-win, growing your firm with minimal spend, there are some hidden costs to this approach.
Personal injury lawyers that hire marketing professionals can typically scale much quicker. By going it alone, you are sacrificing long-term growth potential. There is also the issue of predictability. Personal injury income streams are highly irregular. The work you put in today will not pay of for some time, if at all. If you slip in your marketing efforts because you are too busy, you will likely encounter a corresponding dry spell down the road.
Perhaps most importantly, investing time to generate personal injury and auto accident leads chews up precious time that you have for completing legal work. Inevitably, this costs you money.
That being said, there are really are no right or wrong answers when it comes to the time versus capital legal marketing dilemma. The important thing is to carefully weigh the costs and benefits of each approach and make the best decision based on your needs and resources.
A Comprehensive Approach to Generating Personal Injury Leads
Modern legal marketing strategies should align with the customer journey. The days of scanning through the Yellow Pages to find a personal injury lawyer are long gone. Potential clients shop for legal services on many different channels. The trick is to approach your marketing efforts from the point-of-view of your clients.
Start by analyzing current and former clients. If you do not have any analytical data to refer to, try your best to come up with reasonable estimates. How did most of them find out about your firm? Were those cases profitable? How much did you spend to acquire those clients? What was the overall lead quality from those channels?
Then put yourself in the shoes of a potential client. How would you go about choosing a personal injury lawyer? What is important to you? What types of information would be helpful? How could a firm improve your experience?
Once you have identified potential marketing channels, prioritize them based on past experiences and your research. Determine how much you can reasonably invest in marketing each month. Calculate the potential return on your investment (ROI). While ROIs vary by industry and campaign execution, the following are some useful statistics:
- Investing in email marketing has one of the best yields with an ROI of 122%.
- Those who use blogging as a marketing tool are 13x more likely to experience a positive ROI.
- Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional methods, with 72% of marketers reporting improved engagement.
- Google Ads generate an average of $2 in earnings for every $1 spent.
Allocate your budget among each of your marketing channels. Note that even if you elect to handle your own marketing, paid media strategies like Google Ads and Facebook Ads will require monthly investments of capital.
Finally, take the time to write out your marketing plan. Doing so will provide clarity by requiring you to define and document your goals, your strategies, and will increase accountability.
A Brief Note About COVID-19
The legal industry has historically been immune to external pressures calling for technological change. COVID-19, however, has changed this. According to a recent Forbes article, “There is a growing body of evidence that the discrete, incremental changes in the legal industry forged principally in the aftermath of the global financial crisis are accelerating and coalescing into a more full-blown transformation. It’s still early days, but law’s legacy barriers – entrenched models, self-regulation, and culture – will no longer protect it from broader, more powerful pan-industry change.”
This does not mean that you should panic and completely abandon your existing processes. Rather, you will want to stay up to date on how consumer preferences and needs are changing. Research the latest legal marketing trends and be sure to continuously analyze and adjust your personal injury lawyer lead generation strategies to align with the customer journey as the world transitions into the “next normal.”