It’s not difficult to find personal injury leads or clients when you use the right strategies and know how to approach the need. However, it will be pretty expensive, especially when you have to implement different tactics and ensure that your effort and investments won’t waste.
The urgency of your need for new leads will dictate your methods and where you invest your time and money.
If you are serious about growing your practice and creating new cases for your company, this is a cost that must be paid. However, we will make sure that you’re able to save as much money (and time) as possible with the methods below.
Prioritize Activities and Expenditures That You Can Measure
Before we get into the details, it is essential to outline a general guideline for marketing and advertising.
If you are a small to the medium-sized law firm, you should only spend 80-90 percent of your marketing budget on activities in which you can measure the impact of cost per case acquisition.
This means that you will be searching for opportunities, activities, and channels that offer various income streams and direct return on advertising spend (ROAS).
In this way, you divide the campaign’s total cost by the number of leads generated.
Obtaining New Leads in the Short Term
You can use the money to purchase leads in a short time period if you need to quickly generate new personal injury leads:
- By broadcasting and advertising with mediums like radio, TV ads, billboards, print, and physical ads.
Although it is becoming less effective in generating new business cases and increasing costs, you will notice that traditional advertising works second-hand with friends, family, and clients, while offering two main benefits.
It can have a significant and immediate impact on the generation of new cases.
The second has to do with long-term effects and marketing inertia. This is a key factor in creating synergistic results for SEO and brand building.
- Lead Generation & Referral Services.
A lead generation company might be a good option if you don’t want the hassles and pains associated with marketing or hire a marketing agency.
Many around the globe offer these services, and it is possible to find reasonable offers when it comes to saving money in the process.
The companies manage their SEO and internet marketing and generate leads via inbound contact forms and live chats.
The lead is placed into a bucket, or list, depending on where the potential client lives and what type of legal services they are looking into.
A local referral service or lead-gen company then sells the information to a law firm at a fixed price. Most companies work with a fixed price, based on the contract they have with you.
You don’t need to worry about marketing costs and overhead. All you have to do is send emails to the lead with their contact information and follow-up instructions.
- PPC & Search Engine Advertising
Paid-per-click advertising can be a significant part of any company’s marketing strategy for acquiring new clients. It can be especially useful for lawyers who handle cases involving personal injury or car accidents.
Just remember this, pay-per-click and search engine marketing (SEM) ads are not always the same thing.
SEM ads are just subset PPC ads. They serve different purposes and can be used in conjunction with each other. SEM ads work best to get clicks from people with high intent.
PPC can be more effective depending on the techniques used, audience targeted, and media displayed ads.
Search engine marketing ads will appear above and below search results in search engines such as Google and Bing.
Google’s AdWords platform is the most used one for this, and many personal injury leads are brought to your company thanks to this tool alone.
Long-Term Strategies to Generate Personal Injury Leads
There are many creative ways to generate personal injury leads. However, we will only be focusing on the most popular and tried-and-true methods to get new clients.
These strategies can be used to make a profit starting in 6 months and continuing for many years. These strategies take time but are worth it if you have the right mindset. Find the right partners, the right groups, and the right ideas, and you will succeed in the process.
It’s like planting a seed and nurturing it. Then, you can reap the benefits of a great oak in the future:
- Participating in targeted communities (or building them).
Advertising to injury lawyers and litigators via mass-media advertising and broadcasting is a great way to reach a large audience.
However, this option comes with a problem because only a small percentage of people you are advertising to actually needs your services.
You can start by narrowing down your target audience and niche. Although the audience may be smaller, it is important to focus on those who are most likely to use your services.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO is one of many ways to generate leads for your practice. Every day, people search for lawyers on Google. In fact, over 90% of people seeking answers to their legal questions use a search engine like Google.
The organic traffic you obtain from this strategy will help you to maximize your money. However, there are options you might want to invest in to maximize the results you obtain with your SEO.
- Write and blog to your target audience.
SEO is more than ranking your website’s homepage or core service pages. It also includes your blog articles and information pages. Your target audience should be treated as a market of savvy consumers.
It’s essential to be informed about what you are purchasing, just as any knowledgeable consumer would before making major purchases.
It’s no different from choosing a lawyer to resolve their legal issues. These aren’t people who go directly to Amazon’s “Buy Now” button.
Instead, they will do their research, read reviews, and determine if this purchase is the right one to solve their problem.
However, what can you write in your blogs?
Answering legal questions is a great way to be trusted by savvy and informed shoppers. This will help you build brand awareness and top-of-mind advertising right before they hire a lawyer.
Make a list of the most frequently asked questions, and then start to write. Begin with the FAQs, then move on to answering specific questions about relevant topics or issues.
Another strategy is to give them value for free (yes, you read that right).
It’s no longer enough to just write 500 words and expect the article to boom when everyone does this nowadays.
It is important to get beyond the basics and be as specific as possible.
Provide them with information that other people would actually charge for, and don’t consider it a way to give your work for free but rather a way to bring more personal injury leads that translate into money.
Besides, if we go back to the SEO part, Google and Bing will rank your articles higher if you do the hard work and add an extra 10-20% value-added information. Your efforts will eventually pay off in new clients and cases.
- Your market presence can be built by building a brand
Building a solid brand presence is key to any company’s long-term marketing strategy.
For it, it is crucial to create a brand that is beautiful and memorable. Policing it and making sure that your advertisers, sponsors, and business partners follow your branding guidelines to the tee is equally critical.
- Becoming a legal authority
It’s not difficult to become an authority in the areas of law you practice. It takes effort and, in some cases, some time.
This can be used in multiple campaigns or independently to reap the benefits. Your ability to build authority can take many forms depending on the ripple effects you want it to have. This will help you stay in touch with past clients, friends, and other lawyers in your area, while it can also help you get client referrals.
Elements and some tips we can give you for this include the fact that every day, newsworthy events happen.
Many of these will be related to the law, and you can use this to your advantage.
Journalists and media organizations are always looking for interesting comments, takes, and opinions on particular topics. Participating in the media can promote your practice and shine a spotlight on your brand in your market.
On the other hand, you don’t need to attempt to reach the media directly or initially.
Blog about newsworthy content for your company’s website or personal blog. This can be shared with journalists and media who might want to mention or quote you.
Blogs can also help you become an authority in your practice areas. People will search for legal answers via Google or Bing, and answering questions in blog format is easy and can rank high in search results for very specific queries.
Through blogging, you can build trust with your audience and establish authority. When people have done their research, they are more likely to find your blog and hire you.
- Pay-Per-Lead
If you ask law firms how much they spend on marketing strategies and ads, most of them will say about 1 to 2% of their revenue.
More like spending, it is investing, but it isn’t too profitable when nearly 4 out of 5 people will avoid these advertisements altogether, which means they aren’t as effective as others would believe.
What does this have to do with paying for leads? This latter option can be more profitable and help you save a lot of money instead of investing in ads on every single platform.
Don’t get us wrong, PPC is worth your time with the right strategies, but if you have a hard time with it, you can choose to rely on this one or combine both of them to save time, effort, and money.
However, there are a few things you must know about paying for leads.
First, there are many benefits to paying for leads. You get contact information directly from people who are interested in hiring a personal injuries lawyer. This is without any marketing or legwork.
This already saves you lots of time and effort, and you won’t have to pick one blindly and know if it is a good option as a lead. However, leads can cost you about $100 each.
Once you have purchased the contact information, you can reach out to the lead to see if they are a good match. Unfortunately, this lead strategy has some downsides.
Multiple lawyers are receiving the same leads. This creates a race for who gets the lead first based on the services offered and conditions as well.
- There is no guarantee that you will have your money returned for the investment in the lead.
- If you offer a 10% conversion rate, it could cost you $1.000 to acquire a client.
- These PPL services can be found on almost every lawyer’s website. This includes Lawyers.com, FindLaw, and Avvo.
Are you unsure if this strategy works for your firm? Again, we recommend giving PPC a try before anything else and then evaluating this alternative. We just want to leave it here so you know it is a very good option depending on how much you can afford it and if it ends up being suitable in the short and maybe long term.
- Social Leads
The best thing your personal injury law firm can do to capture leads in 2021 is to get on social media in a professional sense.
You need to go where your potential future clients are, which also happens to be where over 70% of other lawyers are as well.
This means creating a profile on Instagram and Facebook as well as LinkedIn.
Social media can be used to generate leads for personal injury cases. However, your efforts don’t have to be part of a marketing strategy or directly encourage others to hire your services. Positive interactions with your followers may be enough to get a few leads.
These are some social media tips to help you get leads for personal injuries:
- Share videos and photos that spark discussion and reactions among your followers.
- Target specific populations with targeted ads, particularly those that capture contact data.
- It is important that leads can contact you easily via the messenger app and that you respond promptly.
- Post images of yourself giving back to your community or showing a glimpse of your everyday life to show potential leads you are a great person to work with.
Few people will ever actively seek out a personal injury lawyer. Engaging content on social media can help you attract organic leads instead of reaching out to everyone.
- Referral Leads
Referrals are when someone recommends your personal injuries law firm to a friend, family member, or colleague. The statistics show that more than 6 in 10 people looking to hire a lawyer will get feedback and recommendations from those closest to them first.
This means that you must provide excellent service every time.
It’s a great way for your clients to have great experiences and become future clients by offering them a large payout in the courtroom. To get your clients to refer their friends to you, it’s important to stay in touch with your clients from the past.
Let’s discuss how we can help you do this:
- All clients and leads should sign up for an email campaign to receive the monthly newsletters and updates from the community.
- Holiday gifts are a great way to give back to clients that have helped you generate the highest revenue.
- Send holiday greetings and birthday wishes to your clients. Also, recognize significant events in their lives.
- Let the relationship continue even if the lawsuit is over.
Clients should not forget your name after a professional relationship ends.
If they learn that friends are searching for a personal injury lawyer in their area, the experience with you and their recent emails should motivate them to recommend you.
- Partner Leads
Suppose you meet with potential leads and discover that a firm that specializes in car accidents is better suited to their needs. It is better to leave the case to a qualified attorney than to lose a case that you aren’t capable of winning.
Partner attorneys can be a great referral network to help you both take and give leads.
Sometimes called attorney networking, it’s the act of building relationships with local attorneys from other niches. You don’t have to help someone if you aren’t able to.
Here are some things to remember:
- You should not just give client contact information to other lawyers without obtaining consent from both sides.
- Make sure you are building relationships with top attorneys who will also send leads your way.
- You should only send cases that are worthwhile and that your partner attorney is open to taking.
This partnership is about a reciprocal relationship. Over 30% of people will be referred by other lawyers. This can provide a great source of leads for your company.
- Link Building
“Link building” is another SEO tactic, so we would usually include it in that segment, but we consider it to be a bit complicated, so the best way is to dedicate it to its own section.
When you link build, you try to increase the number of websites that link to your firm’s domain.
If we have a blog, many other websites will be inspired to link to our blog. This happens for major news channels like CNN and the BBC, but it won’t happen for 99% of PI law firms. Instead, you can offer your expert opinion by writing a guest blog for an organization related to the topic.
This is where you want to gain a backlink to both your firm and some referral traffic from the site linking to it. Two caveats are required, much like guest blogging.
- Web admins understand the importance of backlinks and don’t just give links to everyone who sends them an email.
- Link building can take a while
Do you have the time and energy to write cold emails to other organizations to ask them for a guest blog about personal injury law?
These are unlikely to happen. Although link building can be a successful way to generate leads for free, it’s also time-consuming and costly in an industry saturated.
- Rapidly Respond to Your Leads
If you are slow to answer your leads’ questions and queries, there is no way you will get them to sign with you.
If your law firm is slow to answer questions and doesn’t even answer the phone, you are already digging your own grave. Here are some best practices that can ensure your firm has the chance to sign the cases you want.
- Email inquiries promptly answered: Potential clients could be shopping around when they email or use your contact form. All digital inquiries should be responded to within minutes.
- Answer your phone: This service is usually available during normal business hours. However, after-hours calls must be handled. To ensure that leads are answered promptly, sign up for an answering service.
- Be kind to everyone: With a click, anyone can leave reviews. You could get some very negative reviews if you are a jerk. Positive reviews can be earned by being polite and helpful. This will be covered later.
- Register on the most popular legal directories for free
If you search for an attorney using a search engine, you will typically see listings from local attorneys and listings on sites like Findlaw.com and Avvo.com.
Do you appear in these directory listings when consumers click them? You’re probably missing an opportunity, and your brand impression is likely to be lost if you don’t.
When someone searches for an attorney, they will be more likely to contact them if they see their website, high Avvo rating, and are listed on third-party websites. Each one of these can be a touchpoint for your brand.
We would recommend the free directory listings in most cases. Although paid directory listings can provide greater visibility, they are seldom worth the cost.
- Answer common questions online
This could also fall under website marketing, but do clients ask you the same questions? This could be your opportunity to generate leads.
Although many potential clients are searching for head keywords like “car accident lawyer”, the vast majority are entering through a variety of long-tail or informational keywords.
Consider how many people use their smartphones as personal assistants. They might have questions such as:
- “Should you talk to the insurance company following an accident?”
- “I am not in pain after my accident. Should I see a doctor?”
- “My Uber driver was in an accident. What should I do?”
These keywords will help you rank higher in search engines. Answering questions such as these can be done in many ways.
You should answer these questions on your website if you are interested in long-term SEO benefits—only one topic per page.
You might consider answering the Avvo Q&A. Or reviewing Quora.com to see what questions people have about personal injury. If you give a great answer, people will see you as an expert, and they will likely call you.
Give Everything a Try (If It Is Beneficial)
There are many avenues that injury and accident lawyers can use to generate leads and clients.
While different tactics may place more responsibility on them than others, they will generally be charged more than in other areas.
But how do you know which practice and method are the best for your company? Everything depends on how your company performs with the previous ones and finding other strategies that can help you generate more personal injury leads.
We would like to encourage you to give them a try as long as you find other options that aren’t included here to be reliable and trustworthy.
Do your research, take your time, and don’t think one or two are more than enough if you could be enjoying results from others.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Personal Injury Business
All right! So, everything is about building properties and generating leads. But how does the process actually take place? Are there other steps I need to know?
The steps I mention below are what students from our local lead generation program follow to generate leads for businesses like yourself. So I’ll help you see what we do. And how if you join our program, you can simply generate leads for your own business (unless you want to start a side hustle and build a laptop lifestyle business).
Essentially, our lead generation can be divided into four steps:
The first is prospecting. You need to take the time to do market research on a niche (industry) and determine how many phone-driven businesses are there.
Keep in mind that this is local research as you need to know how many companies need leads. For example, you may search for “plumbing services Youngstown OH.”
You will find dozens or even hundreds of businesses trying to get themselves in front of the customers by ranking on Map Listings, organic results, and even Ad.
The second step, building. When you find a niche (plumbing, tree services, a software company, real estate…), you will need to start building your digital properties. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or coding. It can be easy with the right tools.
The third step is now taking time to rank your lead gen website. With the site done, you need to work on SEO strategies and start dominating those Google search results. If you’re new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
To keep it simple, it consists of the entire process of growing a company’s visibility on search engines like Google and generating organic traffic. And remember this, local lead generation is part of the strategies.
Moving on to step four, once you rank the site, you will start getting your ROI and profits. You only need to rent it out to a local business interested in the leads the site generates. You can offer a couple of free leads to their move on with the actual pay per lead.
To review steps 1-4 above, I described it to a normal student who is building a lead gen business to help local service providers generate more calls. But replace the student with you as the business owner. And replace sending the leads to a business to simply siphoning the leads to your personal business.
By the way, fun fact, about 20% of our students in our local lead gen program are actually business owners who went through the program. And they use the skillsets we teach to generate leads for their own business.
An Example of Lead Generation: Home Advisor
You must be thinking, “if lead generation sounds so good so far, how come I haven’t seen any company?” That’s the thing; there are many out there. You just don’t know they are dedicated to it.
HomeAdvisor is one of the best examples you can find on the Internet as it is a top lead generation company that has spent millions building its brand but also earned even more zeros for this same reason.
They started small as everyone else but invested in building their brand awareness to make people who are looking for home services go to their website and find what they need. They are over 75% of people’s first choice when they need those services.
If you don’t get HomeAdvisor that much or need a refresh, users need to submit their information to request a service and get a professional or expert who can provide it.
HomeAdvisor’s job is to share your information, which makes you a lead, with local companies so they can contact you and offer the service you’re requesting. For sharing this lead information, HomeAdvisor gets paid by the companies. This happens for every single lead they send to multiple businesses.
Business owners who don’t have marketing skills or don’t even know how to have any online presence will always rely on those pages to list their services. They will save time and effort, but companies like HomeAdvisor can make them spend lots of money as leads aren’t exclusive (one lead is sent to multiple companies after all).
Using Facebook Ads aka Paid Ad Platforms: Do They Generate Leads?
They DO generate leads. If not, no one would use them.
However, you need to remember two facts:
- Paid ads or platforms can be expensive.
- They don’t generate “natural” leads.
Whenever someone sees or clicks in one of those ads, over 80% of them did it by accident or are trying to close/report it.
Why? Because they aren’t looking for those services. At least not at the moment.
What those ads do instead is interrupt their time on the platforms. Users aren’t there to find companies or businesses unless they are searching for a specific company’s user, and for that, there’s a search bar. This is why it is hard to convert them to actual customers who will show interest in the companies’ services. Also, you’re limited by a budget.
When using lead generation, everything is organic. You aren’t forcing others to pay attention to your business but rather being there when they need you. This is why Google’s organic traffic will always beat paid ads, and the reason companies continue investing in it, which is a lot cheaper as well.
What Is Local SEO?
Don’t worry… I didn’t get it at first either. Following the short explanation, local SEO focuses on scaling businesses’ visibility on search engines. However, this is only for those who serve their communities face-to-face.
What does this mean?
Experts and professionals like painters, plumbers, and dentists (but not only them) offer their services to their local customers. Why? Because they can’t deliver them unless they are located in the same area of their customers.
To make sure those businesses get more leads, you need to rank them locally by claiming the business listing on Google to place them on Map Listings. Local SEO also involves online reviews, citation management, and how you manage your entire online presence in the local area.
If you are going to bet on lead gen, you need to adapt yourself to today’s world: The Internet.
Keep in mind that although traditional channels and methods like billboards, warm calls, and pamphlets still work, they aren’t part of your tools. Whenever someone needs a service, they go to Google and search for it.
“Dentist in Miami” or “plumbing services in Orlando,” etc. And you can keep coming up with services or professionals people need and look for. Thus, you need to make sure you’re using Google to get the companies in front of their clients.
Users will always click on the first search results (those near the top), and many of them will be either Ad links (people paid to place their websites there), Map Listing, and then you get websites. Almost all of them are your goal and where you should always aim to place yourself.
Can My Personal Injury Business Utilize a Local Lead Generation Strategy?
If you want customers, you better know you need it. Following the previous explanation, lead gen is all about placing businesses in front of their customers, choosing them over their competitors.
Put it simply – it’s all about closing deals and having clients for those companies to make money. The main difference with the usual methods companies use for this is how lead generation approaches different channels to get them in the right place of the market to get customers.
Those channels are all focused on the Internet as most people are searching for products but also services across the net. The issue is that the Internet is way too broad, and businesses don’t know how to place themselves. They usually try, but they get one common result: losing money and time.
How Powerful Are Organic Personal Injury Leads from Google?
For companies looking for customers, it’s everything. For you? Pretty much the same. When you build a business with digital properties, you get to make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t a “get started today and get rich tomorrow” thing, but it is HIGHLY scalable, and ROI + positive results are guaranteed. Learning a fairly decent and very needed set of skills to create your digital properties and start ranking them on Google is required.
I have invested in several online businesses over the years, and if there’s something uncertain, whether you will get your ROI or not, even more than the actual profit.
However, this business moved my earnings from five figures a year to a month in ONLY passive income while sitting comfortably at home.
On my laptop. Anywhere. Anytime.
You can look at one of the first sites I built back in 2016, and it continues making me over $1.000+ every month. The best part is that I don’t need to touch it or the rest I’ve built over the years, just like this digital property.
What Makes Lead Generation SO Alluring?
Here it goes: you can work from home.
The main issue with regular business opportunities is how much you need to invest in staff, equipment, or rent to have a place to sell your products or offer your services.
We all know the hassles of traditional businesses that involve regular expenses, which are extremely high. Can you afford it? I don’t think so, and even if you can, is it worth it? Now, it isn’t only about the money. You also need to put in a lot of work, and it isn’t only during the first couple of months or years. Usually, it is as long as you continue running it.
You can save yourself those headaches and bone-breaking tasks and expenses with lead gen since it is more about generating leads with digital channels—mainly websites.
Websites can be VERY cheap to build, and with many tools online, you get to do it in a couple of hours instead of days. Any virtual or digital business is scalable and won’t need constant maintenance.
So, let’s summarize this:
- You save money in regular expenses with traditional and most online businesses as what you need is yourself and digital properties (websites).
- You can bet on passive income.
- There’s no need to hire more people to get started.
- You can generate leads in multiple industries, which allows you to work on any niche you want.
How Can I Get Started in the Local Lead Generation Program?
Anyone can start and learn. That’s the beauty of this business model. I knew nothing about SEO, Map Listing, and everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is all about learning the skills, gaining experience, and deciding to take the step.
Remember that this business model will never get old as business owners are always looking for leads. They need to do business and scale their companies. Why not do the same while helping others and still making money?
You can start with this local lead generation course highly recommended for anyone wanting to grow in the business. It is a close training that will take you through each step and make sure you are able to get your ROI, profits and take control of your life.
You will be added to an incredible lead generation family ready to help you 24/7 when asking questions on the group. Anyone is welcome who’s willing to put in the work. Click here to watch the lead gen webinar.