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.
Content marketing for law firms involves sharing information that's interesting and valuable to prospective customers. Unlike traditional marketing efforts, content marketing is:
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.
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.
You can create several types of content for your law firm website. Popular formats are defined below, with links to examples for each.
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.
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:
As you create more content, you should gain visibility with search engines, which drives more traffic to your website.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
A strategic content calendar maps your content opportunities to topic clusters, personas, keywords, funnel stages, and publish dates. Let's define these elements:
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.
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 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.
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 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.