How to build a personal injury law firm marketing plan

A well-designed personal injury law firm marketing plan can help personal injury lawyers and law practices reach more potential clients and leverage lead generation efforts to get new clients.

While you don’t have to hire an agency to oversee your marketing efforts, it’s not as simple as setting up a few profiles on popular social media platforms and hoping prospective clients will find out about your legal services.

Get started with this personal injury law firm marketing guide, complete with a marketing plan template and a list of top personal injury attorney marketing tactics you can use.

What should an effective law firm marketing plan include? [A template]

An effective plan must consider who your target audience is, their needs and the unique selling proposition of your services. From there, the plan should specify the channels and marketing tactics you plan to use to connect with potential customers. Use this template to get started.

The four Ps of marketing

Start your marketing plan by considering the four Ps of marketing, AKA the marketing mix:

• Product: What specific legal services do you offer your personal injury clients?

• Price: What are the rates you charge for your services?

• Place: Where do you offer your services?

• Promotion: What marketing channels and strategies do you plan to use to reach your target audience and convert them into new clients?

Target audience analysis

Who are the clients your law firm typically serves? This most likely includes victims within a set geographic practice area who are dealing with particular types of personal injury, such as car accidents, medical malpractice and product liabilities. What services do they need? How can you meet their needs?

Marketing objectives

What business outcomes do you want your law firm marketing efforts to drive?

• Top of the funnel marketing: Raise brand awareness among your target audience
• Middle of the funnel: Increase lead generation (get more phone numbers and email addresses from prospective clients that you can reach out to for free consultations)
• Bottom of the funnel: Support business development (get new clients, new contracts signed, etc.)

Marketing metrics

Establish the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter the most to your law firm and align with your stated marketing objectives. For example, if your goal is to raise brand awareness, you’ll want to monitor top-level metrics, such as overall advertising, social media reach, impressions and website visits.

If you’re more focused on lead generation, then your key metrics might include improving conversion rates and keeping the cost per lead at a certain amount to optimize your marketing budget.

Marketing budget

How much is your law firm planning (or willing) to spend to support your marketing strategy? This will help you prioritize which marketing tools to invest in and how much you can spend on advertising, such as pay-per-click ads (PPC ads), versus how much you want to allocate to the costs of creating content marketing and keeping your law firm website up and running.

Marketing ROI

Most marketing efforts involve upfront costs, but over time, whatever you spend from your marketing budget should result in new business development that brings more money to the law firm. A solid marketing return on investment (ROI) to strive for is a return of $5 for every $1 spent. Keep track of your efforts and ensure you’re generating a strong return.

Top seven personal injury marketing tactics to add to your law firm’s marketing plan

Law firms attract clients by investing in and optimizing owned, earned and paid marketing channels. Prioritize your online presence (your owned channels) first. Then expand to earned channels (such as social media platforms and online reviews on lawyer review sites. Lastly, add paid channels (advertising) to the mix to drive attorney lead generation volume up as needed.

1. Build out an online presence, starting with a law firm website

Your law firm website is one of the first legal marketing efforts you should focus on. That’s because 94% of online consumers say they search for local businesses online monthly or more often, but 28% of small businesses still don’t have a website.

A high-quality website design helps you grow brand awareness and improves attorney lead generation efforts.

2. Optimize your website’s SEO rankings

Have a law firm website already? Great. But how does it rank in Google Search and other search engines?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing strategy designed to help websites appear at the top of the first search engine results page (SERP). SEO is one of the most critical online marketing efforts to consider because referrals from search engines account for more than half of the web traffic small businesses generate.

Check out Broadly’s law firm SEO guide to see how backlinks, keyword research and other marketing tactics can improve your local SEO strategy.

3. Leverage a solid content strategy

Adding thoughtful content marketing to your personal injury practice’s website is one of the most impactful strategies for improving your local SEO, according to the experts at Google Search. They recommend blogs or video marketing content related to keywords your target audience is searching for when looking for personal injury law firms.

4. Expand to other digital marketing channels, such as social media marketing

While many prospective legal industry clients use search engines to look for personal injury practices, don’t forget about those who use social media for search and discovery.

Just like you want your law firm website to show up in local SEO, you’ll want your law firm’s social media accounts to appear in results when people look for personal injury attorneys on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Yelp and Facebook. Be sure to:

• Add information about your practice area to your profiles
• Showcase your personal injury attorneys on staff
• Share your content marketing via regular updates
• Highlight your favorite client testimonials
• Include your phone number and link to your law firm website
• Make it easy for social media followers to schedule a free consultation

5. Nurture relationships with leads and existing customers via SMS and email marketing campaigns

As you grow your law firm website traffic, it’s important to convert those new visitors into leads can engage with. Add lead generation landing pages to your website with a clear call-to-action (CTA) — such as to get a free consultation or to schedule a call back from one of your attorneys — incentivizing users to sign up. This form should capture your potential clients:

• Names
• Contact information (phone number, email address, etc.)
• Area of interest (what legal services they’re contacting you about)
• Opt-in (permission) to receive marketing campaigns via email/SMS from your law firm

Once you start generating leads, you can set up automated marketing campaigns to encourage new leads to schedule a free consultation and to follow up with leads after their initial consultation to discuss the next steps.

6. Monitor and optimize your earned channels

Your earned channels are the marketing efforts others contribute to and promote brand awareness for your law firm on your behalf. One of the most common forms of earned marketing is online reviews on social media platforms and search engines.

Reviews are critical for lawyers because most online consumers (95%) read them as part of the evaluation process and consider which entities to do business with. Respond to all of your existing reviews, both positive and negative, and ask past clients to write reviews on your behalf to strengthen your online reputation and increase conversions from people reading online reviews.

7. Consider paid channels

When you want to accelerate your attorney marketing efforts to get a higher volume of phone calls, website traffic, email marketing subscribers or free consultations, organic efforts alone might not be enough. Personal injury practices that need to step up business development have a range of types of paid advertising to choose from:

• • Online marketing options, such as PPC ads on platforms like Google Search and social media that are targeted to customers looking for law firms in your practice area

• Traditional advertising options, such as billboards and ads on TV and local radio and in print media

Run a few small marketing campaigns and test which channels yield the highest results at the lowest cost.

Get more personal injury clients by partnering with Broadly for your digital marketing

Broadly is a trusted technology partner for law firms across practice areas, offering advanced solutions for online marketing for attorneys.

Want to see how we can help you create a top-performing online presence with a modern website design, strengthen your online reputation and improve your lead generation efforts?