If you want your personal injury law firm to succeed as a business, you need to have a marketing plan in place. Without clients, you won’t have a personal injury law firm for long. Having a personal injury law firm marketing plan can prevent stagnation and keep a healthy influx of clients coming through your doors.
Not all personal injury law firm marketing plans are created equally. The best marketing plans are holistic and cover multiple channels, like OppGen Marketing’s personal injury law firm marketing plans and packages. Contact us for more information about our marketing plans.
Traditional Marketing Channels
Traditional marketing channels can be successful, especially when done at a local level. Here are a few traditional marketing channels you may want to consider as part of a marketing plan — of course, you don’t have to go with all of them. Pick a couple you think would be most effective for your personal injury law firm marketing plan or consult with a marketing agency for expert advice.
Billboards
Billboards can be found in several places: highways, small towns, and big cities. They’re meant to grab the attention of people driving past them, and for a personal injury lawyer, that can be a good thing! If you know of a busy street or intersection where accidents tend to occur more often than others and there’s advertising space nearby, try putting out a billboard with your personal injury law firm’s contact information. Should someone find themselves in a car accident nearby, they’ll have a better shot at contacting you for assistance.
Newspaper and Magazine Ads
Print isn’t dead, and newspapers and local magazines run print advertisements. With newspapers, you may even be able to get a press release published by contacting the newspaper editor. Smaller papers can’t always fill the local newspaper up with local news due to budget constraints and smaller staff, so many smaller newspapers take press releases and publish them. However, it’s important to send the press release over in a timely fashion. Some news days are busier than others, which means the press release might not make it if it’s not planned for publication for days (and in some cases, weeks) in advance.
Mailers and Fliers
Mailers and fliers are yet another form of print advertising. While some people tend to see mailers as junk mail, it’s still something that can grab their attention. Sometimes the first thing people need is the name of a business and making sure they at least see it can give your law firm visibility.
TV and Radio Ads
Local TV and radio ads are channels you may want to consider for advertising your personal injury law firm. Partnering with a small local production studio to create a TV ad or television spot may be more reasonable and more effective than you think.
Event Sponsorships and Volunteering
Sponsoring a local event or volunteering or fundraising is a great way to get your personal injury law firm’s name out into the public. It also shows you care about supporting the community and various causes. Do be careful about which causes you decide to raise funds for or sponsor, especially if it’s potentially divisive. But for the most part, showing your law firm cares about the community does more good for your business than bad.
Digital Marketing Channels
While traditional marketing channels are still relevant, it’s more important than ever to go digital. The technology available makes targeting the right audience at the right time so much easier than it’s ever been.
Search Ads
Search engines like Google and Bing have advertising space on search engine result pages (SERPs) with ads that look similar to the organic (meaning unpaid) search results for various keyword searches. These ads are known as search ads, or sometimes are referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) ads due to how the costs for these ads are incurred (that is, you only pay when someone clicks on the ad).
Search ads are only displayed to prospects under certain parameters, such as prospects’ location
Unfortunately for the personal injury area of law, it’s much harder to run a successful campaign unless you have a large marketing budget. Depending on your location, it can cost over $930 per click for personal injury PPC ads.
But you shouldn’t give up on PPC entirely. There are other strategies you can attempt with PPC search ads. One such strategy? Creating high-quality ads and bidding well can result in lower costs per click (CPC).
Local Services Ads
Despite the high CPC Google search ads have for this industry, you shouldn’t give up on Google Ads as a whole. More recently, Google has started offering local services ads. These ads are not open for all businesses, but luckily personal injury law firms are among the growing number of businesses that can utilize these ads.
Local services ads are similar to search ads in that they only appear when prospects in certain locations search for a specific keyword (or in this case, a relevant service). Unlike search ads, they don’t charge on a per-click basis; instead, local services ad charge per lead. One extra perk of local services ads is that if a lead is no good, you can request a refund from Google.
Social Media Ads
Paid social media ads can also be of use to your personal injury law firm and certainly should be considered when creating a good marketing plan. Facebook in particular is a great digital marketing platform since you can use users’ data for targeting highly specific audiences. You can target who sees your ad based on location, age range, sex, interests, and groups, among other things. The types of ads and ad placements are also flexible and affordable, being less costly than paid search ads.
SEO Strategy
In the industry of personal injury law, you can pay nearly $1,000 for a single click on a Google search ad. For many smaller personal injury law firms, those kinds of numbers aren’t sustainable for their marketing budgets. That’s why we encourage personal injury law firms to consider a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy with a local or regional focus. Even though it is a digital marketing channel, we’ve decided to include it as a separate section because we firmly believe an SEO strategy is a must for personal injury law firms.
The goal of SEO is to have your law firm’s website rank higher on SERPs for certain keywords.
If your law firm is the first result on the first page of Google for a relevant search, prospects are far more likely to click the link to your firm’s website. For example, let’s say a prospective client who was recently in a car crash doesn’t know what they need to do. So they might search using a keyword or phrase like “what to do after a car crash.” Google takes prospects’ locations into account when they search, so if your law firm is located within a certain radius of this prospect’s physical location and happens to have a blog on a relevant topic, it’s more likely the prospect will find your law firm and contact you for legal assistance.
This can be done through creating robust, in-depth content focused on specific keywords; having a fast and well-organized website; creating listings on Google My Business and other relevant directories; by sharing links to your site on social media and encouraging reviews from clients. The combination of these items can boost your SERPs position and bring in more clients over the long-term. Though SEO takes longer than a paid search campaign does to bring in leads, it’s well worth the investment of your time.
For personal injury law firms in particular, SEO can be lucrative — and it’s also a strategy that doesn’t necessarily require any payments to Google or Bing.
Lead Attribution
Proper lead attribution is a must. Failing to track leads puts your personal injury law firm at a greater disadvantage than you’d think. Tracking leads gives you valuable data on where the leads came from, which can help you decide where you should be investing more of your time and marketing budget.
For example: GBM Law, one of our personal injury law clients, had worked with a marketing agency that did not track leads, and was struggling with its marketing campaign. OppGen had no problem making sure lead attribution and lead tracking was put in place.
As a result of OppGen’s personal injury law firm marketing plan, GBM Law experienced an influx of clients while also seeing a 54% decrease in cost per lead.
A Great Marketing Agency
If you need help formulating a marketing plan for your personal injury law firm, look no further than OppGen. We’ve been able to change the game for personal injury law firms, such as our client GBM Law, a Columbus, Ohio-based personal injury law firm, and we know we can do the same for you.
Contact us now for more information about our personal injury law firm marketing plans and packages.
