As you develop a personal injury law firm, understanding specific marketing strategies for your entity size and structure can play a crucial role in business development. The reality is that the legal field has plenty of opportunities for your team to make its mark, but if you are not approaching it the right way, you might be wasting time and money on inefficient marketing. 

We’ve developed a handy guide to what personal injury law firm marketing plans might look like and how you might implement these best-fit practices to help you generate a lead funnel for your firm. Read ahead to make sure you’ve got all the latest insight on how to create a law firm strategy.

What is the Work of a Personal Injury Law Firm?

As a for-profit hierarchy of lawyers, partners, and associates, your firm should always be looking to expand reach and/or revenue. Legal practice has some notoriety for being cutthroat, and the underlying ethos of acquiring clients certainly is. However, the overt portion is humanizing: your firm gets to play to skills and strengths, highlight involvement in local communities, and keep work from dragging as you grow your clientele. Put even more simply: you know the quality of your business and how helpful it can be, but if your potential clients don’t, it can be disastrous. In this sense, marketing plays a critical role, as law firms often provide secondary services such as consulting to maximize profit.

In order to best serve your clients and brand, we recommend that law firms specialize. Being an authority in a niche will provide significant value for a law firm, as the legal field has a designed universe of nuance. Creating a distinct separation between generic representation and expertise can be highly conducive to attracting top talent and clients while generating repeat business.

What is the Difference Between a Law Office and a Law Firm?

The main difference between a law office and a law firm is slightly more than semantics (though as legal professionals, everything is semantics). A law office is much more generic in the sense that it represents the housing of practicing lawyers. Past that, there can be a diverse range of structures, business intent, and varied plans for law office marketing.

With a law firm being specifically designed to profit while partners and associates maximize their reach, there is a much stronger focus on marketing techniques and business partnerships. The inherent competition intra-firm and between rival firms demands that you must be well ahead of multiple marketing funnels. 

When it comes down to it, your firm and its employees are most likely going to be spending most of their time and talent recruitment on legal professionals. This means that as you look to stay ahead of the curve for local and digital marketing trends, it might be well-worth your while to invest in marketing education for your in-house team, or outsource entirely.

Marketing Strategies for Personal Injury Lawyers

1. Build your Brand: This seems so obvious and like a generic part of marketing, but too many law firms (and companies in general) don’t think about how brand generation truly works. Your brand is what your company stands for and how that translates to the perception of employees, other businesses, and potential clients. You can then leverage youst brand via recognition campaigns such as radio, TV, or PR pieces.
   
   If your brand is reputable within a specific style of law, or you are known as the personal injury firm that helps out in your local community (for example), your brand will be augmenting whatever level of performance your firm puts out. If you can combine a strong brand with repeated performance, the marketing of it should be extremely valuable.
   
2. Find a Niche: Demonstrating authority on a subject is one of the best ways to separate your firm from the pack. If you create a foundation of expertise in an area of need, there will be a better ecosystem for referrals, leads, and conversions. In many ways, finding a niche will help define your brand and allow you to market creatively around it.
   
   When it comes down to it, if you are working in a specific field like motorcycle accident representation (for example), you want to be known as ‘the motorcycle accident team’ or whatever will colloquially bring your firm to the front of mind for people. A niche will help you create this experience easier than generalization.
   
3. Become Focused and Efficient at Digital Marketing: The digital age of business is upon us, no matter what your product or field of work is. For a law firm, having great SEO, a user-friendly website, and a full set of data-driven metrics to improve upon each quarter is going to be vital for growth.
   
   While we understand that not everyone has been brought up using internet marketing tools or social media, you need to be devoting a great deal of your marketing time and budget to digital marketing. The more time and capital you invest into digital marketing proficiency, the better returns you will get over time.
   
4. Grassroots Campaigns: While we just brought up the absolute importance of digital marketing, grassroots efforts can be a great way of getting yourself local clients. Here’s the catch: grassroots doesn’t have to exclude digital marketing, and it should be included in your campaign portfolio. You can easily mix boosted or targeted ads with specific messaging in with local donations, fundraisers, or mixers. Ultimately, it comes down to truly connecting with your local market, building business relationships, and letting people create a passionate referral system for your niche.
   
5. Hiring the Right Lawyers: After working with many law firms over the years, we’ve learned that hiring the right lawyers is a huge part of successful law firms. Your lawyers need to be prepared to answer legal questions (even if they’re outside their practice area), help direct them on cases that the lawyer can’t take on, and make sure they’re communicating with each customer in a timely manner. When the right lawyers are not hired, we’ve seen a track record of negative reviews and bad reputation on the brand which can harm the next potential customer’s decision. 
6. Solid Intake Processes and Procedures: When the intake process is not efficient, we’ve seen missed opportunities with potential cases. An example of this may be when your intake personnel are too busy and miss a phone call. When you’re spending advertising dollars on your brand, you want to make sure that every phone call is answered and the person answer the call is empathetic and ready to take action for the customer to feel satisfied. When you have a poor intake process or staff, you will run into more missed opportunities and more marketing dollars down the drain.
   

There will always be a large human element of marketing, and the most successful firms are the ones that learn how to leverage their best strengths into a blend of branding, analytics, and connecting with their intended audience.

How Can Law Tigers Help Your Personal Injury Law Firm?

At Law Tigers, we have decades of experience in growing our firm and advising others on the best way to create a healthy marketplace. We cut our teeth representing motorcycle riders because our team was passionate about it, and it turned into our most successful niche. Now, our brand is ‘the motorcycle law experts,’ and we have developed a brand and marketing strategies around it.

Our marketing strategies have helped our member law firms increase leads and high-value cases. If you are looking to develop your personal injury law firm’s marketing strategies and increase qualified leads, we’d love to discuss membership opportunities in your area. Reach out for a free consultation today so we can take your law firm to the next level.