Learn some tips on why personal injury lawyers need lead generation to keep costs low while acquiring new clients.
When it comes to lead gen, personal injury lawyers often need to invest hundreds of dollars to acquire each new client. This makes the practice of personal injury law far costlier than areas like family law or estate planning. How much you actually end up investing in lead generation usually depends on the urgency with which you need clients. If you’re a personal injury lawyer, what follows are strategies that you can use, both for fast, short-term turnarounds, and for long-term sales cycles.
Finding new leads in the short term
When you decide to take the search engine route for your advertising, pay-per-click advertising is the primary avenue to pursue in obtaining personal injury leads.
With PPC advertising, you buy advertising to display when people perform searches for personal injury lawyers on search engines like Google. PPC ads in the personal injury segment cost at least $50 a click. You only pay when a searcher actually clicks on your ad, however — PPC advertising can be cost-effective for this reason, and most personal injury lawyers use it. It’s important, however, to have an experienced marketing firm do your advertising for you in order to make sure that you show up only for the most promising searches, and manage to minimize unnecessary clicks.
Finding new leads in the long term
PPC advertising can work well when you need clients in short order, and when you can pay for them. However, investing in long-term lead gen, personal injury lawyers are able to bring in more leads with smaller upfront expenditure. It takes focused effort over a period of at least six months for a payoff to materialize, though.
Target specific audiences
When you advertise on mass-market television and radio shows, you go after large populations, most of whom have no need for personal injury lawyers. What you can do, however, is to narrow down your target audience, and choose to advertise to specific sections of the population who are more likely to require representation by a personal injury lawyer.
Advertising on shows that deal in medical subjects such as physiotherapy and chiropractic can help you get heard by those who have an interest in these services, possibly for reasons of personal injury. It can also help to offer your services as a legal expert to local journalists and bloggers in relevant areas. When they need a quote from a professional, you can be there for them. When you get quoted as an expert source, you get your name in front of readers and viewers who could be potential clients.
Interacting with local motorcycle riding groups, bicycling groups, and the Mothers Against Drunk Driving group on Facebook can put your name in front of a number of people who survive accidents that are the fault of other people. It’s important, however, to not spam these groups when you get on them. You need to find ways to use your legal expertise to contribute positively to those groups and to make discussions on them more meaningful.
Try search engine optimization
Nine out of ten people who look for answers to legal questions use a search engine to find them. Building a website that answers those questions in a professional and friendly manner can help you get the search engines to feature you at the top when people make relevant searches.
Featuring an informative blog on your website can be one of the best ways out there to attract search engine users. As with any major decision, people read up before they hire, or even look for lawyers. Using the blog on your website, or using a social media presence to accessibly answer the most commonly asked questions in detail can be an excellent way to get your website to rank organically. When you offer your audience quality, trustworthy information, they are likely to turn to you when they need legal representation.
Offer a free consultation
While you certainly can get plenty of interest from your target audience when you offer them free, high-quality information, you have no guarantee that those people will actually walk into your office to hire you. Getting people through the door is an important part of signing them up. Once you offer free information on your blog, drawing people in with a free, initial consultation can get them to actually come to you to sample what your practice is like. You have a far greater chance of retaining those people as customers when you give them a taste of the real thing.
Lawyers representing people who experience accidents or injuries have many ways of generating leads. The costs involved in investing in each one of these ways can add up. Personal injury law is a competitive field, however. Generating leads can require considerable investment. It’s important to accept these costs as a given and offer more value to your audience than anyone else, in order to win more business.
If you are looking to increase your client list without spending an abundance of money, contact Broker Calls today at 855.268.3773 and let us help you succeed.