Mass Tort Marketing: Building a Viable Strategy From Scratch

Lawyers love mass tort cases.

In the context of mass tort action, law firms can help hundreds, and sometimes thousands of clients pursue similar courses of action against organizations that have wronged them. If you get things right, you could have a steady stream of highly specialized clients, a repeatable approach to save yourself effort, and a path to much greater revenue generation.

But there's a problem.

Your would-be clients may not even know you exist.

In fact, they may not even be aware they have a legal service need.

Long before you start working on their case, you need to make yourself visible. And you need to make your specialization better recognized.

For that, you need mass tort marketing.

In other words, you need to devise a strategy for how to position your law firm in a mass tort case – and how to reach the people who need your services the most.

How do you do it?

The Biggest Pain Points in Mass Tort Marketing for Lawyers

Educated, experienced lawyers tend to be extremely logical, skilled in writing and communication, and creative when it comes to problem solving. These skills can help in the context of marketing, but most lawyers don't have the marketing experience necessary to put together a coherent strategy for marketing their mass tort expertise.

These are some of the biggest pain points that mass tort marketing introduces:

·       High-level strategy. Many lawyers, especially inexperienced ones and ones working for small firms, have a haphazard approach to marketing; they typically spend money frivolously, trying out a variety of tactics to see what works and what doesn't. While experimentation is important, this borderline mindless approach is an exercise in frivolity. Instead, you should have a high-level strategy to service the foundation for all your tactics. This way, you'll be able to use your marketing dollars more effectively – and you'll be able to coordinate all your efforts under a single, philosophically cohesive umbrella.

·       Big competitors. In the mass tort world, you'll likely be going up against some of the biggest law firms in the country. Depending on the size and scope of your law firm, that might mean directly competing with organizations that have far more experience and resources than you do. How can you get an equal or greater amount of visibility in this situation? How can you possibly convince clients to go with your firm if it's smaller and less recognized?

·       Effective spending. You also need to spend money in a way that leads to the greatest possible results. There are dozens, and possibly hundreds of different tactics that can help you promote your law firm and attract new clients. However, not all of them are going to yield the same return on investment (ROI). Part of your job as a law firm marketer is finding the best possible applications for your marketing budget. That means estimating, and later objectively measuring, the performance of each tactic you add to your portfolio.

The One-Two Punch: Two Prerequisites for Mass Tort Marketing

As you might imagine, mass tort marketing can be as complicated as you make it.

There are thousands of little variables to consider, and even more once you drill down into individual marketing tactics.

But to start things off as clearly as possible, you should focus most of your attention on two main pillars:

1.   Your target market. First, you need to thoroughly understand who your target market is and how they make decisions. The better you understand your target market, the more effectively you'll be able to market to them. You'll have a better understanding of which platforms they use, how easily they're persuaded, what types of communications and messages work best for them, and what their biggest pain points are. With a specific outline for your target demographics, you'll be able to reach the right people with the right messages much more consistently.

2.   Your unique value proposition. A unique value proposition (UVP) is a concise description of the problem your business solves, and a presentation of the elements of your business that make it unique in the market. If you can nail your unique value proposition, your marketing messages and advertisements will be much easier to develop and they'll end up being much more persuasive. Your goal here is to figure out why your target demographics would choose your law firm for help – and what makes your law firm so different than the law firms of your rivals.

Market Research for Lawyers

The first step on your journey is probably going to be market research.

After all, if you don't know who your audience is, you won't be able to reach them, let alone persuade them.

Admittedly, it's a bit of a pain. But it's a necessary step if you want your marketing materials to be genuinely effective.

There are two main types of research to practice in the realm of market research: quantitative and qualitative research. You can also pursue research with original research or perusal of primary and secondary sources. All of these approaches have something to offer, so use a combination to fully develop your understanding of what makes your target market tick.

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Quantitative research focuses on numbers and other objectively measurable pieces of data. You can use surveys, census information, and other sources to pull these numbers. Once you do, you can analyze the data to form conclusions about who your market is and how they think. For example, you can figure out what types of people typically take a certain prescription medication and how they feel about that medication.

Qualitative research isn't as precise, but it's equally important. You can practice qualitative research with extended surveys, focus groups, and other approaches that allow you to engage with samples of your audience directly. Here, you'll rely on anecdotes and subjective information to get a better understanding of how these people think and feel.

If you have the resources and experts to do it, you can practice your own research internally. However, most law firms practicing market research for mass tort marketing rely on a combination of primary and secondary sources to gather the information they need. Start with the primary and secondary sources (Census.gov and research groups like Pew Research are great places to start), then practice original research to fill in whatever gaps you find.

By the end of your mass tort market research, you should have a much more thorough understanding of who your audience is. You can even develop customer personas to solidify your assumptions into characters that you can use as models for all your future marketing and advertising efforts.

Differentiating Your Firm in Mass Tort Marketing

Once you have this understanding, you can work on differentiating your law firm in the mass tort marketing world.

Think of it this way. Your clients have options. Why should they choose you?

You need a positioning strategy that shows people not only why your law firm is valuable, but why it's unique in this particular context. Showing them your JD degree and insisting that you're a “really, really, really good lawyer” probably isn't going to be enough.

These are a handful of ways that you can choose to differentiate yourself.

·       Size. Big law firms carry more prestige, and in many cases, deservedly so. If you have a large number of lawyers on your roster, or if you have a practically bottomless pool of resources to draw from, point those advantages out. Conversely, if you have a smaller law firm, that might actually be a selling point; depending on your target audience, they may actually prefer working with a smaller, more approachable organization.

·       Experience/competency. You can also differentiate yourself by demonstrating raw experience or competency. For example, if you have lawyers on your team who used to work for the defendant, you can claim to have some inside knowledge and practical experience that your competitors can't match.

·       Support. People are often uncertain and skeptical about pursuing mass tort cases. You might be able to differentiate your law firm and persuade people to take action with your legal services if you can offer them an unparalleled level of support. Giving people more empathy, compassion, and a genuine human connection can make a big difference.

·       Approach. Do you have a different approach to mass tort cases than many of your rivals? Are you employing a different legal strategy or theory? Reference it and explain why it's advantageous.

·       Results. Results often speak for themselves. If you have a long history of getting clients amazing results, show off those results in your marketing materials.

Mass Tort Marketing: Your Core Message

At this point in your mass tort marketing strategy development, the prerequisites are out of the way and you'll have a solid foundation on which you can build your marketing tactics.

But before you go any further, you should spend time refining your core message and the skeletal structure of your overall marketing approach.

To this end, you can focus on the four Ps of marketing, which you probably learned if you took any marketing or business courses in college:

·       Product. Your product is what you're selling. Obviously, you're selling your legal services. But what exactly do those legal services include? What makes them different? Why do people need them? And why are they worth the money?

·       Price. How much are you charging for your product? You may not want to publicize your fees in your initial advertising, but you should at least be able to justify charging clients for your services – and convince them that it's at least worth moving forward with a free initial consultation.

·       Place. Should you advertise with billboards, paid search ads, TikTok videos – or a combination of all three? Are you targeting people in a specific geographic location? If you already know who your target audience is, it shouldn't be hard to make initial decisions regarding placement. Just keep an open mind, as some channels offer more opportunity than they first seem to offer.

·       Promotion. Next, you'll need a promotional strategy. What messages, images, and other persuasive content elements are going to persuade your audience? What objections do your clients typically have and how can you overcome those objections? Where and how often are you going to circulate your messages?

Narrow and Broad Targeting Approaches for Mass Tort Marketing

You know who your target clients are.

So how do you reach them?

For most law firms, the answer for effective mass tort marketing is to combine both narrow and broad targeting approaches.

Narrow targeting approaches are all about refining your target audience so that your messages reach only a narrow band of highly relevant people. For example, you can use pay per click (PPC) ads to reach people who meet an exhaustive list of demographic criteria.

Narrow approaches are advantageous because they prevent you from wasting time or energy on people who don't need your legal services. They offer an extremely refined, highly targeted approach, but at the same time, they're somewhat limited in capacity and they can be expensive on a per-lead basis.

Broad targeting approaches are all about reaching a very wide audience, often capitalizing on very inexpensive marketing tactics to improve your name recognition and potentially reach people you wouldn't be able to reach through more targeted approaches. For example, you might send physical mail or emails to tens of thousands of people who might be good fits for your legal services.

Broad approaches are complementary to narrow approaches, in many cases reaching people who are practically unreachable through narrow approaches. They're relatively inexpensive, especially on a per-lead basis, and they can be excellent for guiding people through your sales funnel.

The Omnichannel Approach

In the modern era, law firms need an omnichannel approach to be successful.

In other words, you need to practice mass tort marketing across many different channels, including physical and digital channels, as well as traditional and novel channels.

Why?

Different people, even within the exact same demographic cohort, live their lives in different ways, using different channels as they go about their days. If you want to cast the widest net and reach the greatest number of highly relevant leads, you can't restrict yourself to a single channel.

Additionally, your competitors are likely already using an omnichannel approach. If you artificially limit yourself by only pursuing a narrow range of channels, you'll be putting yourself at a disadvantage.

On top of that, each marketing channel has strengths and weaknesses. Using many channels simultaneously is a way of diversifying your portfolio so your results are more consistent.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Recursive Learning

You need good relationships with your clients. It's good for client retention, quality reviews and referrals, and even learning more about your target demographics so you can market to them more effectively in the future.

In pursuit of better customer relationships, you should have a customer relationship management (CRM) platform in place. Similarly, you should also have a consistent, detailed intake process to handle leads as they're introduced to your law firm and as they begin to receive your legal services.

There are many possible approaches here, but any of them are valid as long as you're collecting customer information consistently and in a singular, accessible location. The more data you gather, the more you'll be able to learn and improve your approach.

Data Analysis and Further Improvement

One final note here: it's critically important to measure your results so you can improve your mass tort marketing efforts in the future.

Whatever channels you use, whatever tactics you try, and whatever gimmicky copywriting tricks you mess around with, you should objectively measure your results and compare those results to your spending. The gold standard for law firm marketing success is overall ROI; the higher the return on your investment, the more effective the strategy.

Over time, you’ll eventually weed out all the underperforming tactics in your strategic wheelhouse – and you’ll multiply your investments in thriving, proven tactics.

Mass Tort Marketing: Putting Theory Into Practice

You’ve read our introductory guide, so you know what it takes to develop an effective mass tort marketing campaign.

Unfortunately, this article can’t do the work for you.

But fortunately, we can.

Reach out today for a free consultation – and let us help you get the inbound mass tort leads you need to beat your top competitors!

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