Set your firm up for success with personal injury lead generation.
The ever-growing competition in the personal injury legal industry has made it necessary for firms to rethink and optimize their client lead generation strategies. With a market size of $38 billion and an estimated growth rate of 1.6% between 2016 and 2021 alone, the reality is, personal injury firms who overlook lead generation are missing out on cases.
To attract new clients, you must have a solid marketing strategy with lead generation at its core. Focusing your marketing efforts on lead generation is proven to be costly, so narrowing in on your areas of focus is important to establish upfront.
As straightforward as it sounds, lead generation is no easy task. It is a way to target the right market and encourage potential clients to visit your website and digital platforms. The process is typically holistic, but the funnel ends with providing the potential client with valuable and persuasive information to convince them why they should choose you or your firm.
Are you considering creating a solid strategy to promote your law firm or practice? This is a condensed guide you need to help you get started with lead generation and understand the effort it takes to generate high-value leads.
Personal injury lead generation is the process of finding individuals who need a personal injury lawyer and encouraging them to hire you or your firm.
Today, the most successful law firms invest in entire departments of marketing teams, hire marketing agencies, and pay top dollar for quality leads.
The ultimate goal of the lead generation process is to initiate a rapport with your target audience and generate new cases to take on. We can narrow this down to a five-step process:
To attract new leads and stay competitive in your niche, you will need to establish a reliable and strategic lead generation process. Here are three of the top reasons personal injury lawyers and law firms need to establish a strong process to generate high-value leads:
1. Grow your caseload
When you have quality leads and a streamlined marketing strategy, the trick is to automate your process to reduce the heavy lifting in finding new clients and taking on new cases.
It will take effort to get started, but once it is working, you will just need to update your content and reach to capture more leads.
2. Build credibility and presence
Lead generation is an effective way to build your practice's or firm's credibility and brand. Potential clients will trust you more when you consistently provide them with valuable and relevant information.
3. Uncover trends in your market
You will often collect invaluable insights about the market and your potential clients when lead generation is a part of your marketing strategy. The information you collect will be useful in personalizing your communication with clients, creating valuable content tailored to your client’s needs. The result is the chance to increase the visibility of your firm within your niche and establish yourself as a thought leader.
There are many ways of generating leads for your personal injury law firm or practice. We can broadly categorize these techniques into two: paid and organic. While paid lead generation can help you bring in more leads in a shorter period of time, organic and inbound efforts allow you to slowly nurture your prospects
Paid search is often considered a gamble for personal injury firms because the industry is particularly competitive. This is where digging into your PPC strategy comes in. PPC refers to “pay-per-click,” a marketing method where users pay a search engine like Google to host an ad at the top of a search query, sometimes making it look like natural or organic content to the searcher.
As the name implies, paid search is paying the search engine company to place a link to your firm on top of the first page of search results. Search engine providers use an auction system to determine which ads to show. Your ad will have a clickable headline, a brief body, and a link to your landing page.
One thing to keep in mind is that you will need to consistently optimize your PPC ads based on their performance and the searcher’s intent. To generate clickable PPC ads, you will need to think about what keywords your prospects might be typing into the search query, how your competitors are conducting their strategy, and what areas you want to target.
A helpful tip for personal injury firms, in particular, is to leverage dynamic keyword insertion to personalize your ads and use keywords that help attract the right leads. For example, your firm might specialize in taking on specific personal injury cases, like car accidents. In this case, you would want to make sure to include “car accidents” in the copy of your campaign in tandem with your firm’s location or any other information that sets you apart from the competition.
A thoughtful PPC strategy that optimizes headlines to attract the right kind of leads will help you resonate with your prospects and yield more quality visitors to your website that want to learn more about your firm and specialty.
A landing page specially built for lead generation is different from a click-through landing page. A paid landing page is a standalone pay-per-click page that is used alongside marketing campaigns such as AdWords or Bing Ads and serves as an information page for visitors clicking a paid ad.
An important factor of creating a valuable landing page is to narrow in on the specific benefits your firm offers to clients. Maybe the campaign is focusing on a particular niche within personal injury such as motor vehicle accidents. You will want to use a landing page that aligns with the messaging on your paid ad and asks your lead to perform a specific action, like filling out a form to speak with one of your attorneys or directing them to a phone number to directly call your office.
Creating a valuable landing page will complement your PPC strategy and nurture your potential leads to connect with your firm. In fact, creating a landing page specifically for your paid ad campaign will help your ads rank higher in Google and help you bring in more traffic.
Paid social media marketing allows you to invest in advertisements on a social media platform to target users based on their profiles and interests. This is a potent approach to gathering quality leads as you can combine paid lead generation with content marketing.
To generate the most value out of paid social media, your firm will need to decide what prospects you are targeting, what they need, and how you can help them. For personal injury firms, generating content that evokes a sense of trust, like testimonial quotes or even question and answer videos with attorney’s will demonstrate your level of expertise and help potential clients put a face to a name.
Organic lead generation, also known as natural search, is optimizing your firm’s website to appear on top of the search results. This is often referred to as search engine optimization (SEO).
Unlike paid search, organic lead generation is based on the searcher’s intent and the value your content provides. Other factors such as your site’s quality of links and domain authority, the prospective client’s search query, and their location affect search engine results.
One of the most effective and affordable personal injury lead generation tactics you can use is content marketing. This marketing technique focuses on creating valuable and useful content targeting specific keywords and relevant topics your prospects might be looking for. Content marketing is optimized to generate a seamless experience for readers, whether it provides videos, images and content that can be easily skimmed.
You’ll want to focus on the topics that your prospects might be looking for, like ‘Steps to file a lawsuit’ or ‘What to do after an accident or injury.’ It’s important that you not only balance thought leadership with current events. Another option is to ask your firm’s leading attorneys to write guest blogs regarding their specific area of practice or quick tips for prospects. This is a great way to not only establish credibility but make your content a bit more personal.
Building authority is one of the most important factors to create a worthy content marketing strategy. You will have to know what keywords your firm would like to tackle, how your prospects might be using these keywords in a search query and why it matters. It’s also worth noting that once you publish a piece of content, you should continue to track its progress over time and update it as needed.
Over time, generating a holistic content marketing strategy with articles that interlink to one another is the key to an effective strategy. This method will help search engines like Google crawl your website more effectively and bring more leads to your firm.
The trickiest part of email marketing is actually getting visitors on your website to input their contact details. This is where your content marketing strategy will also come into play.
Content marketing is an important piece of an effective email marketing strategy. You can leverage in-line CTA’s, pop-up forms, giveaways, and newsletter offers throughout different pages on your website, including blogs. Depending on where the visitor inputs their information, you can segment their information into different lists to generate email content that would resonate with them the most.
You can leverage email marketing to not only generate new leads but keep existing clients in the know of updates from your firm and special events.
Any social activity that does not involve a paid promotion is organic social marketing. If your firm or practice already has a social media presence, you are already halfway to making organic social media lead generation work.
Anyone can post on social media, but make sure you are intentional about what you post. It’s important to note that social media posts with videos have about 48% more views than those that don’t. Using video can help prospects get a look behind the faces of your firm, who they are, why they care and why they should trust you.
Similar to your blogs and content, you may want to cover topics that engage your audience, instead of providing passive information that doesn’t provide an opportunity for engagement. Options include hosting a live Q&A with attorney’s covering topics like Topics you may want
Using your social posts as leverage to direct prospects to perform specific actions like filling out a form or directing them to a landing page will help you generate more leads. The trick is to include specific (CTA’s) clickable links in your stories or including a link in your bio.
An optimized and well-thought-out social media plan that takes into account the different levels of your marketing funnel and ideal customer profiles (ICP’s) will take your platforms from average to engaging and visual.
Each step you take in personal injury lead generation, whether paid or organic, is an opportunity to bring in prospects and attract new clients. The key is to be diligent, patient, and thorough. You will also need to learn a lot about the dos and don'ts of lead generation and try different techniques to find those that best work for your firm.
At the end of the day, lawyers like you are not experts in lead generation and marketing. That’s why CASEpeer is here to help you track your campaigns and marketing efforts. We strive to provide your firm with resources, expert support, onboarding, and unlimited free training. So you can focus on what you do best.
CASEpeer is the leading cloud-based case management solution built for personal injury attorneys and their firms. With a turnkey solution tailored for the unique needs of personal injury law and backed by industry-leading support, your firm can onboard and hit the ground running that day. Gain visibility across your entire firm’s operations, from case management and calendaring to employee performance, pipelines, and profitability. Built around the feedback of successful PI law firms nationwide, CASEpeer provides everything your PI firm needs to succeed.
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