When you think personal injury lawyer marketing, you probably think big competition. There is no secret sauce, but we decided to put together a guide to personal injury lawyer marketing on some of the best practices.
Personal injury is not only one of the most competitive practice areas, it also provides some of the highest return on advertising spend for attorneys.
The more coordinated your marketing effort, the better your chances of succeeding in personal injury marketing.
Today we’re going to discuss many of the important aspects of marketing for personal injury firms, share some stories and provide a step-by-step plan for you to grow your injury firm.
Let’s get started!
The Three Truths of Personal Injury Marketing
It can be tempting to jump right in. Let’s be real – I’m sure you have peers who are making tons of money through their personal injury marketing plans, but I promise, for every successful firm there are troves of unsuccessful ones.
Before you start pulling late nights writing a bunch of content for your website, or start asking your peers for who does their marketing (and if their injury attorneys and doing well they may not tell you), or start to dive into online courses with DIY strategies, it’s important to understand the fundamentals.
You Need a Realistic Budget
The average injury case sees an award of around $53,000.00. Assuming roughly one-third heads to the attorney, that’s $18,000.00 in firm revenue.
Earnings potential is high for injury. Injury firms all around the country know that. Some have been spending serious money for a very long time to capture these cases.
Start by considering what your cases are worth to you. The barrier of entry for an injury firm does vary based on region, but for injury firms is not going to be a cheap venture.
And when the average return on investment sits in the 5x range, it’s not a time to be conservative.
Now, let’s talk about the second most important rule
You Need to Commit
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will your marketing results. You have to commit to the process. You should work with a marketing partner your comfortable with, you trust, and allow them to do what they do best – Building your profile and putting you in the right position to get the cases you want.
Let me reiterate this. Personal injury lawyer marketing takes time. You need to commit to the process, because there will be success in your near future.
Expect the Good, Bad and Ugly
Contacts that is. Injury marketing is a numbers game. You will get a lot of great cases, that’s a fact. But you will also have plenty of bad cases. You will have the people that have a case only in their dreams, telemarketers, spam, and of course people who are just plain nuts sounding.
When it comes to getting injury clients online, you can bet you’ll hear it all.
Volume of contacts is vitally important to the success of any injury firm’s digital marketing strategy. You must be confident in the fact that a little bit of volume will yield the best results, and ultimately allow you to pick and choose the cases you want.
Ok, now that the tough talk is out of the way, let’s get into exactly what goes into the process of marketing a personal injury practice.
A Strong Foundation is Key
It can be tempting to simply try and bypass some of the basics to go right to getting calls and cases. Often client’s overlook the importance of a strong foundation.
There are some fundamentals that every injury firm looking to compete for great clients needs to have.
Your entire strategy will depend on these few components performing at their maximum potential.
A High-Performance Attorney Website
Your website is the cornerstone of your marketing efforts. Your website needs to be informative, persuasive, and attractive. The content needs to resonate both with your brand and with your clients needs.
Your sites technical performance will dictate how well your strategies like search engine optimization, local search optimization, and pay-per-click campaigns, perform.
So if you have an older site that’s lacking the best practices below, it’s time to get an upgrade. The last thing you want is to loose 20, 30, or 40% of your inbound conversions to a poor website. Remember, every legal customer that doesn’t convert is wasted investment.
In general, here are some best practices when it comes to websites for injury lawyers:
- Put your visitors need first
- Include enticing call-to-actions throughout your site
- Prominently display your top awards, verdicts and settlements, and testimonials
- Provide an irresistible offer, like “free consultations” and “no-fee unless we win”
- Include informative yet compelling content
- Focus on marrying technical performance with user experience
- Follow tagging and optimization best practices
- Custom imagery is always better than stock imagery
For the design aspect, always use high-quality, custom photos and build a brand. Your practice area pages should be easily navigable from anywhere on your site. If your firm or lawyers have specific recognition or awards, highlight these on your website.
Make sure wherever your client is on your site they have a clear opportunity to contact you. These are known as call-to-actions. You never know when they’ll decide they need to make the call.
Create or Claim Business Citation Listings
Getting that stamp of approval from major search engines like Google is going to let clients know you are a reputable business. To track potential clients in a specific location, set up a Google Business listing.
These profiles will help customers understand exactly what services you offer, they provide search engines consistent messaging about what your firm does, and they provide 3rd party validation for your practice. Your external profiles should always be consistent with your business information. The listing should include:
- A description of your law practice
- Physical address of your practice
- Types of personal injury cases your firm services
- Your service areas
- Media assets (videos and photos)
- A link to your website
- A phone number for visitors to reach you directly
Although Google is one of the most important free profiles to have for search engine optimization, consider other opportunities to claim free online profiles, such as review sites and your local state bar listing.
Create Social Media Profiles
In this day and age, attracting clients through social media is a useful way to increase your conversion rate. You have to be everywhere the clients exist, and a lot of them are on social media.
Figuring out which social media platforms are best for your law firm can help you build an online social media presence. Some of the most popular networks for attorneys are:
- X, formerly Twitter
- YouTube
- TikTok
Although you can have more than one social media profile, you don’t necessarily need all of them, and depending on your target clientele they may gravitate towards just a few.
You should figure out where your ideal clients are and choose your social media profiles based on that information.
Following legal profiles on Twitter is a great way to engage in thoughtful conversation and show clients you know what you are talking about. Facebook is useful for campaigns and to position yourself as an authoritative business.
An effective law firm LinkedIn page is beneficial if you are targeting an older crowd. Make sure your page is separate from your personal LinkedIn profile.
Get Reviews, and Get Lots of Them
Gaining online reviews from real clients is critical to helping your firm stand out. Not only do reviews push clients over the top when it comes to hiring your firm, they can also dictate some of your marketing options.
On that topic, certain marketing strategies such as Google local services ads rely on reputation to advertise the firm. Few reviews or a poor reputation can disqualify your practice from participating in this strategy. And believe me, local services ads are highly effective at driving personal injury cases.
It’s impossible to avoid getting negative reviews, so don’t get discouraged if you get one or two when the reviews start pouring in. An ongoing stream of negative reviews is likely to turn clients away.
Never shy away from a negative review. Knowing how to handle them can get you points with potential clients. For example, if you respond to a negative client review with an instant solution, lawyer seekers will see that you take the initiative to maintain good client relationships.
If your firm is established and has a long history of helping clients, we recommend using a reputation management platform to help reconnect with these clients and encourage them leave a review. This can automate the process and allows you the opportunity to address any negative reviews before they hit the review sites.
If you’re just starting out and only have a few clients so far, pick a platform and start asking for reviews. It may feel a little uncomfortable, but believe me, people are used to this.
Either way, always make it a habit to ask for reviews at the end of every case, especially when a client is satisfied with your work. The best time to do this is when your handing them a settlement check.
Always be sure to stay in-the-know about your clients opinions of your practice. This can help you not only prevent negative reviews, but also help you gain valuable insight into what’s working – or not working – with your practice.
Don’t Forget Off-Line Marketing
Often it’s easy to get tunnel vision and forget that it’s important to supplement your digital marketing efforts with good, old-fashioned business growth plans.
Grow Your Referral Sources
Spending time networking with other legal professionals is great if you are getting value out of the conversations. You must know where to spend your energy and time on networking if you are focused on brand building.
Create a conversation strategy that leads to referrals because referrals from other attorneys in different practice areas and like-minded professionals go a long way.
The obvious referral partners for a personal injury attorneys are doctors, chiropractors, and other healthcare professionals who can send clients in your direction after they get treated for a car accident injury.
Also, don’t forget your peers! You may specialize in medical malpractice cases, while your good friend wants nothing to do with that. Be sure to foster these relationships so they think of you first when the conversation comes up for a case they don’t want.
Host CLE events, work with non-profit organizations in the community, and educate young lawyers through bar associations. The local and state bar associations usually need speakers, so that’s a great place to start.
Not only will this strategy make you more visible, but sharing information about properly handling personal injury claims can build goodwill within your community.
Learning how to market your brand to build referral relationships with other attorneys is an investment to consider if your goals include business development and growth revenue.
Know Your Audience
Understanding your target client is important, but it’s more difficult in the legal industry than in other industries. A personal injury lawyer should target someone who has been injured, but there is no age range, income level, or specifications for injury.
However, if your services focus on something specific like construction accidents in Brooklyn, you can narrow down your target audience pretty quickly.
Knowing your audience will dictate where and how you advertise to connect with potential clients.
Developing client personas is a great way to identify and understand the needs of your ideal client.
Often when we start working with a firm, the first question we ask is “who do you want sitting in your office asking for your help.”
Consider the types of cases your firm specializes in and what environment injuries occur in the most.
Everything you create for your marketing strategy should serve prospective clients. Always have them in mind when updating your website, writing a blog post, creating an email campaign, etc.
Measure Your Marketing Efforts
No matter how you decide to market your law firm, you need to measure everything. By tracking your efforts, you can understand your return on your investment.
Without data, you won’t know which strategies are driving new cases and which need to be tweaked or scratched completely. Identifying the non-performing marketing tactic will help your strategy succeed.
The only way to find out if you gained more conversions or built up a lot of goodwill is if you look at the numbers.
You can track your digital marketing efforts by implementing website tracking tools or hiring a marketing firm to handle the analytics for you.
Personal Injury Marketing Strategies That Work
Now that you know the steps it takes to market your personal injury law firm, let’s start discussing what types of strategies work best for injury firms.
Both paid advertising and organic brand building are important for success. Building your brand through paid ads and organic methods can be done with digital marketing.
These personal injury marketing ideas can help your firm utilize traditional and digital marketing, paid ads, and organic brand building.
Build a Multi-Channel Presence
A multi-channel marketing approach isn’t something you can overlook. It’s now a requirement in this recipe for success. Between the constantly evolving digital marketing landscape, to increased competition, it’s important to leverage online marketing methods, such as:
- A Custom Website
- Pay-per-click ads
- Local Services Ads
- Local Search Engine Optimization
- Regional & National Search Engine Optimization
- Social media campaigns
At your core will always lie a strong website. From here you can choose the channels you want to target. Multi-channel marketing can get expensive, so it’s important to focus your efforts on a few channels at a time.
Depending on your budget and unique goals, there will be some channels better suited for targeting than others. Start with the channels you will move the needle and then expand to other channels as you see fit.
Target people who are in the “buying phase” of hiring a lawyer.
For injury firms, these are people who have just been in an accident, people who have been released from the hospital after an accident, or people that are experiencing financial hardship after an accident and know they need to fix things.
It’s important that your messaging is consistent across multi-channel marketing, but you also need to be strategic about how the channels work.
Google Ads for Injury Lawyers
Google is going to be a dominant advertising channel for a personal injury lawyer because people typically only look up lawyers when they need one.
You’ll want to make sure your firm is visible on Google searches when an accident victim is looking.
There are three main advertising formats on Google that you can use to increase visibility and gain more clients. Let’s dive deeper into local service ads, text ads, and local map ads.
Local Service Ads
Google Local Service ads are newer ad formats introduced by Google in the last few years and share space directly on top of the search engine results page. Personal injury attorneys with strong online reputations should take advantage of this type of ad because it is not an option for every injury firm.
Local service ads appear on the top of the page on mobile and desktop devices. Compared to other advertising formats, local services ads are highly effective in driving qualified leads to convert.
Before you can create this type of ad, you have to go through Google’s screening process and a background check. The time it takes to get screened is worth it because you can benefit from:
- Budget-friendly advertising
- Only paying for qualified phone calls
- Disputing unqualified prospects
- A quality user experience
Local Service Ads will take content and reviews from your Google Business Profile page (formerly Google My Business) to create the ads. This is just another reason why it’s important to have a complete business profile and to have lots of great reviews.
Text Ads
Text ads are the most common type of Google search ads amongst injury lawyers and are highly effective for personal injury firms. To run successful text ads, your Google Ads campaigns must be strategically set up to find qualified traffic in the right geographic location.
Text ads are the most expensive Google search ads, but might be worth the money to gain qualified leads. Target clicks can be hundreds of dollars for personal injury attorney-related keywords in certain local markets.
To get started with Google text ads, follow these steps:
- Create a Google Ads account
- Complete competitive keyword research
- Study ads and post-click experiences
- Create a list of keywords that your prospects are looking for
- Write compelling ad copy that differentiates you from the competition
It seems simple enough to execute a text ad campaign, but if you want to do it right, it’s recommended to hire a marketing partner who understands Google ads.
Local Map Ads
People looking for legal representation likely want to work with a local personal injury law firm. Google’s map ad listings help drive traffic to your Google Business Profile.
Local map ads work with Google text ads to place your law firm in a Google Maps search. That’s why it’s important to use high-traffic local keywords.
When a local extension is included in a search text campaign, your business profile will show up on Google Maps for relevant keywords.
Prospective clients who click your profile from Maps can visit your website, call your practice, and even get directions to your firm’s physical location.
Rank Higher With SEO
We won’t stop talking about search engine optimization because it’s one of the most important strategies that can organically build your brand. And, over time, it typically offers the highest return-on-investment of any digital marketing avenue.
By now you should know that SEO is the ongoing process of helping a law firm’s website rank higher for relevant search terms and keywords. Gaining leads through SEO takes longer than using paid ads, but it is essentially free.
There are different factors that search engine algorithms take into consideration when organically ranking websites. One of those factors is the type of SEO you target.
Technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO are all components that form an effective search engine optimization strategy for your personal injury law firm.
And, based on the type of strategy, you can target anywhere from your local neighborhood all the way up to national visibility for personal injury searches.
Technical SEO
Google prioritizes user experience by considering how quickly and conveniently your site visitors can find what they are looking for on your website.
To make technical search engine optimizations on your website, you need to consider:
- Speed
- Accessibility
- Structure
- Mobile-Friendliness
- Ease of use
- Indexability
- Security
A safe and fast website will enhance the user experience. Google will know what pages to bring searchers to if your website can be thoroughly indexed.
Some tools can make this process less complicated, such as page insights and speed tests. Running your existing website through the necessary tools can show you where you need to improve.
Without a technically sound website, you won’t be able to execute a search engine optimization strategy that works.
If you want to run your sight through a quick technical SEO test, Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool can give you some ideas of your sites current performance and any recommendations to increase performance.
Local SEO
A user looking for a lawyer is going to have some form of local intent. Google will consider proximity indicators when providing a list of search results.
For instance, if the question typed into Google includes a city or “near me” phrase, the results are going to be different than they would be if the question was not as defined.
Always prioritize local ranking factors to improve search engine optimization. On-page content personalized to the local market and backlinks from regional websites can help with this.
Also, a wide breadth of online profiles with consistent NAP data (Name, Address, Phone Number) can help your site get found locally.
On-Page SEO
It’s fundamental to have content on your website that uses relevant keywords and provides useful information about your personal injury law firm.
Let’s break it down by page.
Your home page should have an overall summary of your law firm so that visitors immediately know what they can expect from your services. This should include a summary of your successes, and really reinforce your firm’s brand and image. This page will link to your practice area pages.
Search engines want to drive traffic to the most relevant pages of a site for search intent, often this will be your practice area pages. Don’t forget to make these pages compelling, as they will often be found in search results for keywords over your homepage.
Having a wide range of practice area pages is important. Visitors use your services pages to understand how your firm is experienced with their specific types of concerns. They’ll also want to know that you are equipped to handle their case.
A detailed About page should contain the firm’s name, business location, attorney profiles, awards, and achievements. You can even include a CTA that leads to your contact page so visitors have that information right in front of them if needed.
Building a blog on your website is a great way to improve on-page SEO optimizations, and in this time, it’s a must for any personal injury firm. Use the blog to create helpful personal injury law content and answer FAQs about common case types.
Make sure your Contact page has all of the information a visitor might need to email, call, or visit your location in person. To compete with other personal injury lawyers in the area, always offer a free consultation.
Many attorneys attract clients this way, but it’s important to be clear if there are any conditions to a free consult. If there is a time limit, for example, state that in your copy.
When creating content on any page of your website, it’s important to simplify the legal jargon. The common person should understand what you are saying without a law degree.
For every page on the website, you also need to include title tags and meta descriptions with relevant keywords.
To create a seamless website experience, interlink pages on your website so that helpful information can be easily found.
Off-Page SEO
Other websites across the web may be representing you through backlinking. Google takes other websites that link back to pages on your website into account for rankings.
Off-page search engine optimization can increase your credibility when done right. To get started with these optimizations, try these best practices:
- Create and manage social media profiles that link to your website
- Write guest blog posts on well-reputed websites
- Get featured in other articles or blogs for your work as a personal injury lawyer
- Gain recognition in the personal injury field by winning cases worthy of the headlines
Building relationships across different networks is a great way to generate organic backlinks and build credibility with Google.
If you continue to write informative and reliable content on your website’s blog, another website might use you as a resource, and BOOM – Backlink.
Keep in mind that benefitting from search engine optimization strategies can take months or even years.
Create Videos
Building a blog is only one content marketing method effective for personal injury firms. Creating video content can also lead to business growth and generate quality leads.
Videos are memorable, engaging, and constantly consumed on social media and the web. Plus, you might just go viral at some point for a really good video.
For a personal injury firm, videos are a great way to:
- Introduce your firm and the people who work there
- Showcase your expertise
- Build viewer trust
- Generate more leads
Start by creating videos that can explain complex legal concepts in terms that anyone can understand. This is a great way to engage people in the local area and position yourself as a leader in the field.
If you want to create video content, make sure your budget is adjusted for it. You’ll want to invest in high-quality videos because these content assets can create a lifetime of value for your personal injury firm.
Shoot a new video once a week using the blog posts you’ve created as an outline for what to discuss. If you have an especially high-traffic blog post, start with that.
Including a video on your landing page, home page, or practice area page is also a great way to boost your conversion rate.
In addition to posting videos on your website, utilize social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok where people are consuming video content daily.
Submit Your Firm for Awards
Clients do like to see awards on personal injury law firm websites, especially if they see them on other lawyer’s websites in the same geographic location.
Pro Bono recognition and national awards for personal injury attorneys mean you are recognized for your role as an industry leader.
Submit your firm and your best attorneys to meaningful and vetted lawyer awards to impress prospective clients.
Take Your Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing Up a Notch
Personal injury lawyers might have a hard time narrowing down their marketing techniques because their target audience is not looking for legal help until they need it.
Using the right marketing terms, steps, ideas and this guide to personal injury lawyer marketing will certainly put your practice on the right track. We know this personal injury lawyer marketing guide is a lot to digest, and that’s why our team is here to help.
At Joseph & York, we focus on law firm marketing specifically helping personal injury lawyers grow their practices. Our marketing agency is dedicated to helping law firms like yours connect with the right clients at the right time.
Connect with us now to set up a brief introductory call.