Content Marketing for Law Firms: Get More Personal Injury Clients

Want to unlock scalable growth and break free from depending on referrals and paid ads? These goals are common among personal injury firm leaders. Building a healthy pipeline of personal injury clientele is challenging, especially for small teams and solo attorneys with limited resources. 

Content marketing could be the key strategy you've been missing. Successful content marketing helps personal injury lawyers attract, educate, and convert an ongoing stream of high-value clients. Many firms, possibly your competitors, are deploying these initiatives and realizing the benefits. The National Law Review reports that the average mid-sized law firm spends $2,000 to $10,000 monthly on content marketing.  

Explore the tenets of effective content marketing for lawyers now with this guide. We cover the information necessary for implementing a growth program that works for your personal injury firm, including content types, launch steps, and popular tools.  

What Is Content Marketing for Law Firms? 

Content marketing for law firms involves sharing information that's interesting and valuable to prospective customers. Unlike traditional marketing efforts, content marketing is:  

1. Focused on building authority over selling: Content marketers publish blog articles, social media posts, graphics, and newsletters that tell stories and answer questions. Traditional marketers produce brochures and ads with explicit sales messaging. You can pair both strategies for powerful results.
2. An inbound strategy: Inbound marketing programs attract leads or prospects to your firm. For example, you might publish an article that brings people to your website because it answers a common question about personal injury law. This differs from outbound marketing strategies like paid social media advertising, which reach out to prospects proactively. 

Content marketing can promote your personal injury law firm to a range of client types, from casual information seekers to those needing a lawyer now. Producing and sharing high-value information can bring more visitors to your law firm's website and social media channels. It expands the firm's reach, generates leads, positions you as a thought leader, and improves your ability to convert leads into clients. 

Why Content Marketing Works for Personal Injury Lawyers

Content marketing is an effective strategy for personal injury lawyers for several reasons. Personal injury law is complicated, and processes can be lengthy and cumbersome. Educating prospects on the personal injury process creates opportunities to build trust. These prospects may be under extreme stress, they may be managing through pain or grieving for a family member. By providing answers and information, your firm can stand out as a trusted resource in a crowded, competitive market. 

A primary outcome of content marketing for law firms is more traffic to your firm's website.  Search engines like Google index the content you publish and share it when people ask relevant questions. For example, someone in your city might ask Google, "Can I sue for falling in a parking lot?" Google responds with a list of websites with high-quality answers. If your answer appears on that list, searchers click through. You now have a prospect on your website and the opportunity to gain a new client. 

Optimizing your website to receive more traffic from search engines is called search engine optimization (SEO). You do not pay for these visitors individually as you would for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. SEO can be a powerful, cost-efficient way to gain new personal injury clients.  

Best Types of Legal Content to Create

You can create several types of content for your law firm website. Popular formats are defined below, with links to examples for each. 

• • Blogs: A blog is a website or section of a website that is regularly updated with informative articles. Blog articles cover topics that are relevant to your clients and prospects. See the following examples of blogs from personal injury law firms:
    • 15 Things to Know When Hiring a Personal Injury Attorney in Florida
    • How Do Personal Injury Lawyers Get Paid? 

• • Podcasts: A podcast is a serial digital audio program that can be downloaded or streamed. Like a blog article, each episode has a theme or topic. Iacobelli Law Firm covers demand letters, injury settlements, contingency fees, and more in its Personal Injury Law Podcast. 
  • eBooks: eBooks are digital publications that can be read on a computer, tablet, or smartphone. They are often in PDF format and can contain text and images. Personal injury firm Norden Leacox offers a free ebook on the personal injury legal process to website visitors who provide their email address. 

• Research Reports: Research reports are investigations into a specific topic. They might include original data, statistical analysis, and well-documented conclusions. Aulsbrook Injury Lawyers in Texas offers a research report on social media's role in personal injury case outcomes.  

• Videos: In content marketing, videos are short films that entertain or educate your audience. They can be published on YouTube or your personal injury firm's website. Baggett Law Personal Injury Lawyers uses short videos to answer frequently asked questions.
• Social Media: Social media content encompasses posts to social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X. See how Raphaelson Levine uses Instagram to share client testimonials and case results. 
• Website Pages: You can publish helpful content for law firm websites as unite and interactive pages, rather than as blog articles. This strategy works well for evergreen content that remains relevant for a long period, while blog articles are ideal for timely topics. See these great examples of personal injury lawyer websites.
• Infographics: Infographics are visual representations of information. They often use statistics, charts, or graphs to simplify complex concepts or data. An example is this infographic describing common car accident injuries, published by Premier Law Group.

The Business Impact of Content Marketing

Your content efforts do far more than provide brand exposure for your firm. In time, your content can efficiently deliver an ongoing stream of high-quality prospects. The end game is measurable law firm growth. 

The return on your investment (ROI) in legal content marketing typically starts low and builds over time. As you expand your firm's content library, you should see improving traffic and conversions—even as you hold the cadence of new content steady. This is quite different from paid advertising and cold outreach campaigns, which often cost more and produce less as time passes. 

Primary content marketing outcomes include more traffic from search engines, an increase in qualified leads, and the positioning of you personally or your firm as a local expert in personal injury law. 

Boost Online Visibility With SEO

The practice of SEO is heavily reliant on content. The more you publish content for your law firm website, the greater the opportunity for your firm's website to answer the queries your prospects are typing into search engines, such as: 

• How to make a personal injury claim after a car accident
• What to do if you slip and fall on ice 
• How to deal with an accident at work 
• What damages can you claim for personal injury 

As you create more content, you should gain visibility with search engines, which drives more traffic to your website. 

Attract More Qualified Leads

Answering commonly asked questions in blog articles, podcasts, videos, or infographics attracts leads at every stage of their decision-making process. For example, an article outlining steps to take immediately after a car accident may appeal to someone who hasn't yet searched for a personal injury attorney. A separate article describing the top questions you should ask while interviewing a personal injury law firm will be interesting to prospects who are closer to selecting a lawyer. 

Once the prospect is on your website, you can use calls to action (CTA) to encourage deeper engagement. A CTA is a short phrase that asks the website visitor to do something. Common examples are subscribe now, download our free ebook, or contact us to learn more. You can use a short command combined with a visual element, such as a button, to direct your prospects to share contact information. 

The sharing of personal information is a conversion, from anonymous website visitor to identified lead. You can then follow up to encourage the next conversion, from lead to client.

Build Trust and Authority

Blogs, ebooks, research papers, and podcast interviews differentiate you from the competition by showcasing expertise and authority. Demonstrating these qualities online often improves your lead conversion rates and increases referral business. It may additionally lead to speaking opportunities or invitations to write for other blogs or websites. 

How to Launch a Winning Content Strategy for Your Firm

Even with no marketing experience, you can launch a winning content strategy for your personal injury law firm. Follow the four steps below to establish a framework to guide your content creation efforts. 

1. Identify and Understand Your Potential Clients

Content is more effective when created for a specific type of client, such as a car accident victim or someone injured using a defective product. To identify and describe your target client types, consider creating personas. 

Personas are fictional descriptions that include demographics, goals, motivations, or experiences. You can also name your personas to personalize them and facilitate marketing discussions. Instead of discussing car accident clients generally, you can discuss Jasmine and what motivates her to choose a personal injury lawyer.  

Here are four example personas your personal injury firm might create: 

1. Jasmine: Car accident victim, age 29. Jasmine’s injury prevents her from going to her job as an office administrator. She feels not in control of her life and has trouble sleeping. She is anxious about her finances. She craves security and a return to everyday life.  
2. Gabriel: Bicycle accident victim. 55-year-old community college professor. Gabriel can work, but he has had to adjust his schedule to attend medical appointments. Formerly an animated, dedicated teacher, he feels less motivated. He wants justice for the driver who hit him.
3. Roberta: Medical malpractice. 47-year-old housekeeper. Roberta is severely injured and in near-constant pain. She likely won’t work again. She is angry and grieving her former active lifestyle. She wants to punish her former medical team and prevent anyone else from having her experience. 
4. Walter: Slip-and-fall. 68-year-old retiree. Walter is now wheelchair bound, unable to play his once-weekly golf game with friends. He is confused and upset about his injury and the rapidly rising medical bills. He worries that the comfortable retirement he worked hard for is now uncertain. More than anything, he wants to enjoy his retirement with financial security and a healthy lifestyle. 

You can use what you know about existing clients to help you flesh out these personas. Once you tap into each persona's worries, questions, fears, and motivations, you can brainstorm relevant topics and define the tone needed for gaining trust. 

2. Outline Your Content Marketing Strategy Goals

Goal-setting keeps your legal content marketing focused and allows for measuring results. Consider defining two sets of measurable, time-bound goals. One set will cover outcomes, and the other will establish productivity requirements. 

1. An outcome goal is to set five new consultations monthly by year-end. 
2. A productivity goal is to publish four new pieces of content monthly for the next six months. 

Content marketing effectiveness builds over time, so your starting outcome goals should be conservative. As your ROI takes shape, you can raise the goals accordingly. 

3. Conduct a Competitor Audit

SEO and content marketing for lawyers are competitive strategies. You will see better results if your content is more thorough, thoughtful, accurate, or engaging than your competitors'. 

A competitor audit helps you understand the baseline. You can conduct an informal audit in five steps: 

1. Identify your direct competitors. Research competing law firms that serve clients like yours. You can find these competitors by searching Google for phrases like "personal injury law firms near me" or "car accident lawyers." 
2. Review competitors' websites. Note how often they publish content, what topics they cover, and which content formats they use. Also, review how the websites use CTAs to convert website visitors into identified leads. 
3. Review competitors' social media channels. Review each channel, noting the frequency, topics, and tone of the posts. 
4. Search for competitors by firm and partner names. Searching for the firm or the firm's partners by name can reveal content published on other websites. For example, the partner may have done a guest interview on someone else's podcast. These activities can provide ideas for your legal content marketing plan. 
5. Review competitors' content activities for gaps and opportunities. Note areas where competitors haven't adequately covered topics or left key questions unanswered. Look for ways to fill gaps and improve on their efforts. These are your opportunities. 

4. Plan Your Content Calendar

A strategic content calendar maps your content opportunities to topic clusters, personas, keywords, funnel stages, and publish dates. Let's define these elements: 

1. Topic clusters are categories of content. These can align with your client personas, but they don't have to. It's best practice to organize topic clusters under one main page—called a pillar page—on your website. For example, you might have a pillar article describing car accident liability claims. From this page, you can link to articles covering cluster subtopics like property damage and passenger injuries. This organization method encourages deeper engagement as visitors explore your firm's website. 
2. Personas are the descriptions of your client types, as explained above. 
3. Keywords are commonly used phrases people use to search online for information about personal injury law. You can use free keyword tools like Wordstream or Ahrefs free keyword generator to research these phrases. 
4. Funnel stages define the phases of a prospect's research process. These are commonly defined as awareness, consideration, and decision: 

• • Awareness is early in the information-gathering process. Content targeting this stage should assume prospects are not ready to hire a lawyer. They are researching their options and learning the landscape. Educational blog posts, videos, and frequently asked questions can support prospects in this stage. 
  • Consideration is the middle stage of the sales funnel. In this phase, your prospects make comparisons and decide what qualities they want to see in a lawyer. Your content supports consideration by demonstrating the qualities that define your client experience, such as professionalism and communication. Email sequences, educational resources, and free consultations are appropriate in the consideration phase. 

• • Decision is the last phase when prospects commit to engaging with your firm. Face-to-face interviews, client testimonials, and case studies can encourage clients to choose your firm over a competitor. 

The table below shows how to incorporate these elements into a simple content calendar.

For maximum efficiency, also plan on repurposing your content across different channels. This is a smart way to generate social media content for law firms. Use key takeaways from your articles to write compelling and interesting social media posts. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT can help with legal marketing here. You can also create infographics from blog posts and share them as free downloads. 

Tools to Make Content Marketing Easier for Lawyers

Developing content and managing the leads your content generates can be time-consuming. Fortunately, there are free and low-cost technology tools to support you. Two essential technologies for personal injury firms are content management systems, legal CRM, and lead management applications. 

Content Management Tools

Content management systems (CMS) provide a simple framework for creating, organizing, and publishing content on a website or blog. They are designed for people who do not have coding or technology experience. 

Popular CMS tools for personal injury law firms include WordPress, HubSpot, and Wix.

• WordPress is a free CMS used by over 40% of all websites. WordPress users have access to thousands of compatible applications, called plugins, that support SEO optimization, automated social media publishing, and more. 
• HubSpot is a paid CMS that integrates content publishing with performance tracking data, sales, and customer service features.
• Wix is another CMS with free and paid options. 

Legal CRM & Lead Management Tools

Your content marketing efforts will bring visitors to your website. To manage those visitors and promote conversions, you will need a legal CRM and lead management application. Legal CRMs use CTAs, forms, and automated workflows to collect contact information, manage follow-ups, and schedule consultations. 

The best legal CRMs integrate with your case management software. This integration eliminates double data entry when leads sign on as clients. The application uses the information already collected to create new client files automatically. An example is CASEpeer, the #1 legal CRM for personal injury law firms. CASEpeer's robust feature set includes integrated marketing, lead management, client intake, case management, document automation, and more. 

CASEpeer Helps Personal Injury Firms With Lead Tracking

CASEpeer is a case management platform designed specifically for personal injury law firms. The platform has built-in lead tracking tools, so firms can easily manage leads generated by content marketing. With CASEpeer, you can centralize lead intake, tracking, and follow-up to ensure no lead slips through the cracks. You can also get unparalleled visibility into content marketing effectiveness. Personal injury firms that do content marketing can ensure maximum results from their efforts by using CASEpeer for lead generation and tracking. 

Schedule a CASEpeer demo now to see how the application converts your website visitors into leads and leads into clients.