As a personal injury lawyer, you do good work.
But if you want to make more money and thrive in this highly competitive environment, you'll need a plan for attracting more clients.
Obviously, you can't stage more accidents – nor would you want to (we hope…).
But what you can do is implement a strategy to increase your visibility, increase traffic, and eventually land more clients who have suffered personal injuries as a result of someone else's negligence.
Digital marketing is the way to do it.
But unless you got a dual degree in law and business marketing, you may not know where to start.
That's where we come in.
With our guidance, and a bit of help, you can become the architect of your own digital marketing strategy and take your personal injury law firm to a path of consistent growth.
Marketing poses a handful of difficulties for personal injury attorneys.
Everywhere you look, from the billboards on your commute to the ads displayed in your search engines, you'll find ads from personal injury attorneys with cartoonishly serious faces and stubborn insistence that “you deserve compensation.”
Fair enough.
But this makes it hard for you, a competing personal injury attorney with similar, if not better credentials.
· How do you reach your people? You're probably looking for a specific target demographic. Maybe you specialize in specific types of personal injuries, like those associated with car accidents and truck accidents. Maybe you cater to a specific local demographic. Whatever the case, you'll need a strategy in place to reach only the most relevant people to your personal injury practice.
· How do you stand out? It’s one thing to make your brand visible. It’s another to make your brand stand out in a crowd of similar competitors. And in the personal injury field, there are plenty of competitors to contend with. How on earth are you going to stand out and make your message seem unique?
· How do you get value out of every dollar you spend? Anyone can see impressive marketing results if they spend enough money on visibility and placement. The real trick is to get the maximum amount of value out of every dollar you spend. Spending millions on a campaign to generate a few hundred leads pales in comparison to spending thousands on a campaign that generates almost as many.
Digital marketing is a huge umbrella, which is partially why we're so confident in saying that it's the ideal solution for generating new business as a personal injury attorney. Through a combination of strategies in the online world, you should be able to make your services more visible, reach a more relevant audience, and generate more traffic and leads with minimal inputs.
Some of the most popular and effective digital marketing strategies for personal injury attorneys include:
· Search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine optimization (SEO) prioritizes increasing your rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher you rank, the more visible you are, and the more traffic you generate. Developing content, building links, and fine-tuning the technical aspects of your website are the most important tools in your arsenal here.
· Content marketing. As you might be able to already tell, content marketing and SEO go hand in hand; it's almost impossible to see SEO results without good content, and the benefits of your content will increase as you gain more traffic from SEO. The goal of content marketing is to create an inbound stream of interested, relevant people and persuade them to take action when they read about your services.
· Pay per click (PPC) ads. PPC ads are so named because they allow you to place ads, while only paying for the results you actually see. You can place these ads in search engines, social media platforms, and many other places online, capitalizing on very specific types of people with strategically targeted ads.
· Legal directories and referral networks. You're likely already participating in some of the online legal directories and referral networks that exist. If you're not, now is the time to get involved; this is a digital marketing strategy, too.
· Email marketing. Consistent email marketing doesn't quite offer the immediate impact that SEO and PPC ads do, especially in the personal injury field, but it's so cheap and easy to get started, it might as well be part of your digital marketing arsenal.
· Social media marketing. It's free to claim a profile on social media and start posting, so it pays to get involved here as well. It's a great channel for distributing your content, reaching new people, and establishing your expertise.
· Influencer marketing. Similarly, some personal injury attorneys benefit from practicing influencer marketing. The general idea here is to collaborate and work with highly visible people who are at least somewhat relevant to your practice.
Each of these approaches has something to offer and specific limitations. As a simple example, SEO is extremely cost effective in the long term, but takes a while to start up, while PPC ads start up immediately with lower long-term cost effectiveness (at least comparatively).
Accordingly, it's usually in your best interest to incorporate a variety of different digital marketing strategies in complementary functions.
In simple terms? Use a bunch of channels at once.
Why is digital marketing so effective for personal injury attorneys?
· Accessibility. Anyone can get started with digital marketing, even with little to no marketing skills or background. Placing PPC ads and writing online content is instantly accessible, even if you're not immediately highly effective. If you're willing to work with a digital marketing agency (wink wink), you can get access to polished, professional work and a sound, high-level strategy even if you're working with a limited budget.
· Cost effectiveness. The results you get from a competent digital marketing strategy more than pay for the initial costs. Careful planning and a commitment to ongoing fine-tuning entitles you to an impressive return on investment (ROI).
· Strategic versatility. As you've already seen, digital marketing offers practically unlimited strategic versatility. There are dozens of channels and tactics to choose from, and you can combine them in an infinite range of arrays. On top of that, each tactic offers ample flexibility; for example, you can choose to produce content covering any number of different topics using any number of different tones, voices, and persuasive techniques.
· Omnichannel options. If you want to dominate the digital landscape in your personal injury niche, you can take advantage of an omnichannel approach. Essentially, this means taking advantage of many channels simultaneously, relying on the same underlying digital marketing philosophies and architecture to dictate your practice throughout all of them.
· Adaptability and scalability. Don't like the way your strategy is going? Change it. Want to generate 10 times as many leads? Scale up. Digital marketing offers both adaptability and scalability, so your strategies can grow with your business and you'll never be left in a stagnant, unchanging purgatory – unless you choose to stay there.
· Data and analytic potential. We also love digital marketing for personal injury attorneys because of the data and analytic potential. The digital environment means you'll be able to measure hundreds of different variables and compare them at your leisure; you'll instantly be able to recognize which of your strategies are most effective and which ones are falling flat, so you can adjust your approach and budget to incrementally increase your efficiency.
Note that all of these benefits increase with time spent and experience gained.
You might be happy with the digital marketing results you get right away, but you're going to be floored by the results you get after many years of diligent, continued effort.
If you want any of your digital marketing tactics to be successful, you're going to need to abide by these golden rules:
· Get to know your audience. There’s simply no substitute for proper market research. Your target audience is people who need a personal injury attorney, yes, but who are these people? Where do they live? How do they think? How can they be persuaded? The better you know your audience, quantitatively and qualitatively, the better your ads are going to be.
· Differentiate your brand. As we mentioned, there are thousands of personal injury attorneys fighting for digital spaces online – and they’re all advertising at least as aggressively as you are. The solution is to differentiate your brand; there are tons of personal injury firms out there, so what makes yours different? Types of cases? Size? Expertise? Client service? Find a way to concisely communicate your distinct advantages to your clients.
· Create a high-level messaging strategy. All your ground-level digital marketing tactics are going to be limited in effectiveness by your high-level marketing strategy. What is your brand identity and how should that manifest across channels?
· Set specific goals. You’ll perform much better if you have specific goals in mind. What does “success” look like to you? How high of an ROI are you targeting? What are the most important metrics for your success and how much do you want those metrics to rise?
· Go omnichannel. There are too many awesome digital marketing channels and tactics to artificially limit yourself to one or two. If you go omnichannel, you’ll build up a much more robust presence – and you’ll end up seeing much better results.
· Control your spending. In digital marketing, you get what you pay for. You probably understand; if a personal injury attorney is charging a flat rate of $10 for their services, you would advise your clients to be skeptical. But at the same time, blindly throwing money at digital marketing isn’t going to yield the results you want. You need a significant budget, but one that's thoughtful and controlled; in other words, you need to spend money strategically.
· Work with pros (when possible). It's typically a good use of money to work with a professional team of digital marketing experts. While it's technically possible to go to the DIY route with digital marketing, we make no promises for the results you can see on your own.
· Measure and analyze. How can you tell if a strategy is working? How do you know which aspects of your approach to update and improve? Data. You need to measure and analyze everything, and use objective data to fuel your future strategy.
· Adapt. Digital marketing is always changing. You'll have new competitors, new business considerations, new knowledge, and new platforms to contend with. If you don't adapt, you won't see your full digital marketing potential.
There are many legal directories worth considering, but most of them share a similar purpose and offer a similar path to entry. You'll usually have to pay for this exposure, but it's typically worth it to get listed on at least a handful of these directories.
One of the most important strategies for success here is to fully flesh out your profile:
· Your profile picture. People want to see who they're working with! Include a professional headshot every time.
· Your headline. You may have a lot of impressive credentials and a history of winning cases, but some people don't have the attention span to make it that far. That's why you need a punchy, immediately compelling headline.
· About You. Once you win them with the headline, you can detail all those credentials and past experiences. Show off what makes you both competent and unique.
· Videos. Today's internet users prioritize visual content over written content. Regardless of your personal feelings on that, you should include some photos and videos in your profile.
· Reviews. Do you have happy clients? Show off your best reviews and testimonials here.
· Contact information. And of course, make sure you have reliable, up-to-date contact information available for anyone who wants to reach you. Offer multiple communication channels to cater to unique individual preferences.
Content marketing and SEO are complementary and mutually beneficial strategies that strongly synergize with each other. In fact, you'll see incidental SEO benefits just by developing any content.
But you don't want just any content. You want to see the best possible results.
That means you should focus on the following:
· Analyze your top competitors. Spend time reviewing what your competitors are doing. In some cases, you'll want to replicate their tactics so you can leech off of them; in other cases, you'll want to differentiate your strategy to mitigate their influences. In all cases, you can learn a lot simply by looking at what your rivals are already doing.
· Choose strategically valuable keywords. In SEO, your results are going to be fundamentally limited by the keywords and phrases you choose to target. Ideally, you'll select keywords that are high in search volume and low in competition, capitalizing on the biggest stream of relevant traffic for the lowest amount of effort. Sounds like a good deal, right?
· Develop high-quality content consistently. The quality of your content has a massive impact on your results, dictating your effectiveness and optimizing for both relevance and authority – but also influencing what readers think of your brand when they encounter it for the first time. Provide value, be original, engage with your target audience directly, and maintain a consistent publication schedule so you're always putting out new stuff.
· Capture and capitalize on interest. SEO mostly focuses on getting people to your website, but content should also focus on motivating visitors to take action. Aptly named calls to action (CTAs) embedded in your best content pieces can help you do this.
· Build links. Link building is indispensable for any SEO campaign. Links are the only consistently reliable way to build your authority and perceived trustworthiness so Google ranks you above competitors writing about very similar topics. Be warned, however; a sloppy or manipulative approach to link building can actively work against you, so you'll need to use white hat tactics and exercise caution for sustainable results.
· Get local. Many personal injury attorneys benefit from focusing on local dynamics. Local SEO relies on many of the same tactics as national SEO – but it demands some attention to other areas, like optimizing local citations.
PPC ads are a strong foil to any SEO strategy, given their propensity for immediate startup and incredible targeting potential.
Here's how you can get started with some excellent momentum:
· Thoroughly research keywords. Your keyword targets are important for SEO, but they're arguably even more important for PPC ads. Choosing the wrong keywords could put you in front of the wrong audience, wreck your budget, or both. Accordingly, keyword research needs to be your top priority, especially early on.
· Develop a budget and bidding strategy. Do you want to practice automatic bidding or manual bidding? Should you optimize for clicks or cost per acquisition? And of course, if you're totally unfamiliar with digital marketing, your first priority is probably figuring out what the hell we're talking about. If you're feeling overwhelmed at this point, don't worry, it's a bit natural. But once you get into the mix, you'll need to dig deep to develop a thorough budgeting and bidding strategy.
· Start small. PPC advertising is a long-term scientific experiment, and it's unlikely that your very first efforts are going to be efficient, or even effective. Accordingly, you should aim to start small and only scale up once you have some data to work with.
· Refine your copy. Good copywriting is the difference between a game-changing PPC ad and a stale, mediocre one. You'll need to work with experienced copywriters or commit to ongoing AB testing to develop a proper approach and ad copywriting rhythm.
If you want to be an effective personal injury attorney, you should devote most of your time to your practice – and let your marketing be handled by dedicated professionals.
That’s why we’re here.
We help personal injury attorneys like you with digital marketing and client acquisition – so you can focus on doing what you do best.
Ready to learn more? Shoot us a message today!
%201.svg){kind=logo}
.svg)
