Your law firm should invest in personal injury lead generation for a number of reasons, which will be discussed here. Personal Injury Lead Generation can help you get cases now, while also building your local footprint and referral base for the future.
First off, you’ll get more cases! Let’s start with the big, obvious one first… personal injury lawyers are in business for 1 reason – to settle personal injury and auto accident claims. Everything else is secondary to that, because without personal injury & car accident cases to settle, there’s nothing else to talk about. All marketing efforts, paralegals, intake staff, expert witnesses, rent, meetings, legal research, etc, etc etc, all goes away if there are no cases going to keep the wheels turning. By investing in personal injury leads, you can virtually guarantee (big disclaimer that you’re working with a half decent personal injury lead generation company, the leads are exclusive, you have an adequate intake staff/process in place, and you’re not looking for incredibly catastrophic or niche cases in other areas of law) that you’ll always have a steady stream of quality leads coming in, regardless of google algorithm changes, competition spending more money on advertising, your website conversion rate dropping, or referral sources drying up.
Build Your Referral Network Through Personal Injury Lead Generation
Ask any of your lawyer buddies where most of their PI referrals come from, and chances are they’ll tell you that they come from former clients. Going back to the reason above, the fastest and generally most cost effective way to get more clients fast is to partner with a personal injury lead generation company and leverage their existing marketing efforts, since you’re bypassing all the ramp up time of content, ad copy & bidding, conversion optimization, etc. By doing this every potential client you get from your lead generation efforts becomes a potential referral partner as well.
Build an Email List and Social Media Community
You’ll also build up an email list and social media presence faster than you would have otherwise: Full disclosure: no matter how good you are at converting personal injury leads into clients, you’ll never convert half of them over any extended period of time. The best converting firms MIGHT convert 30%-40%, and those are going to be the outliers. Much more realistically you’ll be closer to 20%. But there’s still a ton of value in the other 80%, insofar as those people are now made aware of your firm, have likely had a good conversation with someone on your staff, and if you’re doing your job, even if it’s not a great fit for you or for them and nothing comes of it, they’ll leave that interaction with a good impression. From there, these are people that are now in your “universe”. Ask them to opt into your newsletter, friend them on social media, etc. These are now people who can become clients down the road or refer you to friends & family if they need the services of a good PI attorney in the area for a slip & fall or dog bite case.
Faster Results Than Other Marketing Efforts
Investing in personal injury leads is the most immediate, low buy-in way to grow your law firm. Legal marketing is hard, and expensive. Using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to attract more personal injury clients takes a lot of time, patience, and a ton of investment. TV, radio, billboard, and any form of internet advertising is REALLY expensive. Not only do you have to pay for the click or space, you also have to create good advertisements so you stand out in a crowded space and then have the website and conversion optimization in place so that your ad spend and creative costs aren’t wasted by sending those people to a crappy website without clear calls to action and solid messaging. By investing in personal injury leads, you can leave a lot of the expensive, tedious, and time consuming part of the process to companies that have been doing it for a long time and have all the resources in place to handle all the moving parts of generating the leads, leaving you more time to focus on settling cases and growing your practice, not to mention enjoying life a little bit.
That’s certainly not to say that investing in other forms of marketing aren’t worthwhile, they definitely are and at times are a better long term option than buying legal leads. But early on it’s a great low buy in way to get started, and for the more established firms it’s a great addition to the bottom line, additional branding plan, and expansion of the base of referrals. So, assuming getting more personal injury cases is on the agenda, consider investing in PI leads.