10 Personal Injury Marketing Tips for Law Firms

Personal injury law is competitive and client acquisition is expensive. Keep reading to learn about 10 ways to effectively market your personal injury law firm.

What is personal injury marketing?

Personal injury marketing is the action of promoting and selling legal services to acquire more clients for a personal injury law firm. Examples of marketing include paid advertisements, SEO (search engine optimization), content marketing, email marketing, branding, and website design.

Why is marketing for personal injury attorneys important?

Marketing for personal injury law firms is important because it helps a firm get more paying clients. The bottom line of any personal injury law firm is to increase revenue and marketing is a key business activity that helps achieve this goal. Without an effective marketing plan, despite how qualified and skilled a legal firm’s personal injury lawyers are, the firm won’t reach its target client base and growth rate.

10 marketing tips for personal injury law firms

There are many types of marketing your firm can invest in, and finding the right marketing initiatives to focus on is not an easy task. There are multiple factors that determine whether a specific type of marketing is a good choice, such as your marketing budget, growth rate, specific target audience, and more. 

In this list, we’ve outlined 10 marketing tips that are effective for personal injury law firms. These should give you a good place to start if you’re finding it challenging deciding what to invest in.

1. Publish evergreen blog content

Blogging for lawyers is a popular form of marketing due to its low cost and large potential ROI and scalability. “Evergreen content” is blog content about topics that are consistently relevant. An example of an evergreen blog topic for a personal injury law firm would be “When should you hire an attorney after a car crash?”

Unfortunately, car crashes occur on a regular basis, but this also means people are consistently searching for the help of attorneys with experience in these types of cases.

Creating blog content around these types of topics means that you can build up a library of content that people are frequently searching for, and therefore, increase organic traffic to your website from search engines. This is the advantage of covering evergreen topics over topics that are temporarily popular, such as those found on news websites — the traffic is more regular and predictable. 

The process of creating blog content is relatively simple but can become increasingly challenging when you start to create content at scale. The process generally begins with keyword research, to identify good keywords to write about. Keywords are considered “good” when they are non-competitive (relative to your domain’s authority), and have a search intent behind them that is closely related to the service you sell.

The next step is to write the content (which should be written by a lawyer). Then comes fact-checking, editing, proofreading, and finally, optimizing the content for “on-page SEO factors”, such as metadata, internal linking, and alt tags, to ensure that can be understood by both search engines and users.

2. Try PPC advertising

PPC (pay-per-click) advertising is another effective way to market your personal injury law firm. This form of paid advertising involves bidding on specific keywords. You are then charged each time a user clicks on your ad that is shown in Google search results, hence the name per-per-click.

The benefit of PPC advertising is that you can quickly get results, as you don’t have to wait for your pages to get to the top of search results, as is the case with organic SEO. The downside is that this requires greater financial investment upfront. It’s usually best to have your campaigns created and managed by a PPC specialist who understands how to interpret data on Google Analytics and optimize your campaigns.

An example of a keyword you might bid on is “personal injury San Francisco”, which has an approximate CPC (cost-per-click) of $35. This means you will pay approximately $35 each time someone clicks on your ad. The goal is to then convert enough users into paying clients so you receive a positive ROAS (return on ad spend). 

Let’s say you receive $100,000 from a client after a successful case and it required 50 clicks from advertisements at a $35 CPC to get this client. In this case, it cost you $1,750 for a return of $100,000. Anything over a 4:1 ratio — $4 revenue to $1 in ad spend is considered good — which is entirely realistic for the lucrative nature of personal injury cases.

3. Improve local SEO

Local SEO is the process of optimizing your website for local searches. Local SEO is particularly relevant to personal injury marketing as clients generally look for firms within their geographic location. Therefore, it’s important to optimize your website to appear high in search results for local keywords that potential clients search for. An example of a local keyword is “Boston personal injury lawyer”. 

The current top result for this keyword is Kelly & Associates Injury Lawyers, and that’s the case because they have optimized their website for local SEO.

There are several things you can do to optimize your local SEO. The most important by far is to create a Google My Business page. Google My Business is a free and easy-to-use tool that creates a profile for your business allowing you to manage your online presence across Google in search results and maps. Here you can list important details about your firm, such as opening and closing times, contact details, and a link to your website.

Once your Google My Business page is created and filled out completely, the next step is to focus on acquiring as many Google reviews from clients as possible. The more reviews you have the better chance you have at having your firm’s website appear at the top of search results.

Other measures you can take to optimize your local SEO include:

• Building backlinks and citations to your website.
• Optimizing your pages for on-page SEO.
• Creating a location-specific about us page or create location-specific landing pages if you offer your personal injury services in multiple locations. 

4. Optimize for mobile

The majority of searches on Google happen on mobile devices. Google also predominately uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. This means that you should ensure that the mobile version of your website is “mobile-friendly”. You can find out whether your website is mobile-friendly by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

If your website is mobile-friendly, then you have nothing to worry about. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, then there are several steps you can take to ensure it is. 

The first and most important step is choosing a mobile-response theme or template. This usually solves the problem as the theme you use is built for mobile. If you’re using any modern WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Wix, or any other web builder template, it should automatically be mobile-friendly.

There are other measures you can take, such as stripping back your content, making images and CSS as light as possible, changing button size and placement, using a larger more readable font, and eliminating unnecessary popups.

5. Track everything

With any marketing initiative, it’s important to understand what’s actually providing you with an ROI. This applies to anything, from PPC ads to blog content and social media. It’s important to set up marketing campaigns in a way that allows you to understand what is helping you achieve your marketing KPIs.

For example, many websites publish blog posts and then get more inquiries on their website after receiving traffic. But few website owners have attributed new leads to specific blog posts. You can do this by setting up goals in Google Analytics and tracking the first blog post a user read before contacting your firm. This is one of many examples of “marketing attribution”. 

The benefit of tracking attribution is that you can  more confidently invest resources into specific marketing initiatives that are generating a good return. The same principle of attribution applies to PPC ads, email campaigns, and so on. It’s important to track everything so that with every dollar you invest into marketing you understand what the return of that dollar is.

6. Engage clients with video

The majority of businesses are using video to market their brand and for good reason. Video is more important than ever, and clients are expecting videos on your website, social media, and in search results. Video can also be beneficial for SEO, as people search for personal injury-related topics on YouTube, not only Google. So you can optimize your video for SEO to receive organic traffic.

Here’s a good example of video marketing for a personal injury attorney.

Remember to create videos with a high production value, meaning you’re using a good camera and microphone, and have someone speaking on the videos that has a clear voice and can explain complex legal topics in a simple and digestible way without using excessive legal jargon. Keep your video content conversational, short, and direct.

Whenever you create video content, whether it’s for a YouTube video or a shorter video on Facebook, be sure to end with a clear call to action (CTA).

You can also use videos to record client testimonials to share online (with their permission of course). This is a great way of displaying social proof and building trust with potential clients. Nothing speaks louder than positive remarks from current or past clients. People are far more likely to trust what they say about your firm as opposed to what you say about your own firm.

7. Take advantage of email marketing

Email marketing is a great way to build a following and have direct access to a customer or prospective customer’s attention. There are a few key reasons why law firms should use email marketing. It’s cost-effective, it can help generate referrals, it’s traffic that you “control” and “own”, as opposed to a list of followers on social media which is at the mercy of algorithm changes.

There are many different ways to “do” email marketing. One way is to create drip email campaigns. This can be nearly fully automated. As implied by the name, these emails are dripped, every few days or weeks, in a timed sequence. The drip starts once a certain action occurs, such as a user signing up for an ebook, webinar, or guide. An example of a drip campaign could be over 10 days with 4 emails. This drip campaign then walks a person through what to do in the event of a specific type of injury, helping them understand specifics about insurance, court appearances, and then a call to action for a problem you can help them with.

Other forms of marketing material you can include in emails are:

• Newsletters, which help your brand name stay top of mind and provide regular value to your readers.
• Discounted offers.
• Webinars.

8. Develop your brand identity 

Branding is a key part of a successful marketing strategy. Remember, branding isn’t just about creating a fancy logo and then forgetting about it. Branding is about developing core principles and a message your law firm stands for. It’s a mission that people then associate with your identity that you want to convey to clients and prospective clients. Think about things like what your law firm stands for, what do you believe in? What makes you different? What do you do better than any other firm?

Once you have clear answers to these questions, you can consistently incorporate this brand messaging into all of your marketing efforts to make them more successful.

Branding is all about consistency. It takes time to build a brand, but if you consistently stick with a core message you believe in, with time, you’ll build a strong brand people remember and resonate with. 

9. Don’t forget about social media

Social media marketing is an important marketing tactic for any personal injury law firm. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram aren’t only for funny videos, they’re a valuable and necessary digital marketing tool for any business, and personal injury firms are no exception.

If you’re new to social media marketing, then you shouldn’t try to master multiple social media platforms. Start with one, build a following, and after you’ve gained traction start expanding to multiple platforms. Facebook tends to be a good place to start.

The key to success on social media is consistent posting. Decide on a posting schedule, get specific about it (e.g 3 x per week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 9 am EST), and stick to it. An easy way to stay consistent with your social media content is to schedule it in advance on specific days and times. This way you can set up your social media content a month in advance and ensure you stay on schedule. 

Try to post various types of content — sometimes articles, videos, short updates. This way you can quickly determine the type of content that resonates best with your audience and gets the best results. One of the best approaches to determine what to start with is to do a competitor analysis. Have a look at what similar and successful firms closest to your business model and geographic location are doing, and share similar content to them. 

10. Build a beautiful website

Today, having a well-designed and user-friendly website is essential as it helps establish your firm’s credibility. A beautiful website, that’s sleek, modern, easy to navigate is always going to beat an old, slow, and outdated website, even if both firms in question are equally skilled.

While a good website can be “expensive”, it’s well worth investing in. Think about it. If your firm is making $5M per year, and an incredible website costs you $30K, it’s a no-brainer. The difference between an old and slow website and a new and modern website could help you get hundreds of additional leads, which will easily pay for the initial website investment. 

Furthermore, a good website helps with multiple other aspects of your marketing, including SEO, and conversion rates from paid advertising. Consider PPC ads. You may have the best PPC ads in your local area, and people click on them, but after landing on your website, they lose trust and you lose credibility because of how your website looks, meaning you convert less of them into paying clients.

While there are plenty of free themes you can use on website building platforms like WordPress, if you have the resources, it’s always better to hire an experienced web designer or web design agency to build a website that will wow your clients. After all, your website is the cover of your business – and as they said, people judge a book by its cover. 

The bottom line

Investing in marketing for your personal injury law firm will be one of the best decisions you make. Just be sure to pick the right marketing initiatives and track everything you do. The stronger your marketing, the more leads you’re going to get, and the more revenue your firm will receive. If don’t want to build an in-house marketing team, there are plenty of places where you can outsource marketing.

Hopefully, this list of tips has given you a good place to start. And remember, if you need anything written for your personal injury firm’s website, such as web pages and articles for your blog, Writing Studio’s here to help!