Marketing Strategies for Personal Injury Lawyers: Steering Clear of the 11 Key Mistakes
Injury attorneys need to market themselves to remain competitive. If you’re not actively investing in your online brand presence, you’re quickly going to be overrun by your top competitors in the area. But in such a complicated and difficult field, it’s easy for errors to bog you down.
Bad marketing tactics and rookie mistakes can quickly compromise your ability to generate a return on your investment (ROI). Here’s the good news: most of these marketing mistakes are easy to avoid – as long as you know what they are.
The Biggest Mistakes to Avoid in Injury Attorney Marketing
These are some of the most common and most impactful marketing mistakes to avoid as an injury attorney:
- Spending too little.
Most professionals have an intuition that prevents them from spending too much on marketing; they know that overspending can compromise their profitability. But the opposite situation is also problematic: spending too little. If you’re reluctant to invest in your campaign, it’s going to be easy for your competitors to one-up you, effectively rendering your marketing budget useless. You have to meet a certain threshold to start seeing results (though it’s different for each situation). - Doing everything in house.
It’s tempting to handle your marketing and advertising needs in house. After all, you know your brand well, and your business is probably full of talented professionals. But your firm is made up of lawyers, paralegals, secretaries, and other legal roles – not professional marketers. It’s almost always better to outsource at least some of your marketing needs – especially ones that require specialization, such as PPC ad management or SEO link building. - Choosing the wrong partners.
That said, you can’t just hire the first marketing firm or freelancer that graces your presence. Your marketing partners are going to hold the future of your brand in their hands; accordingly, you should spend adequate time on due diligence vetting these prospective candidates. Look at each potential hire’s experience, areas of expertise, policies, prices, and of course, reviews and testimonials. - Setting a short timeframe.
How long do you think it takes to see the fruits of your marketing efforts? A couple of weeks? 30 days? If you have this mentality, you’re going to be disappointed. The best marketing campaigns tend to unfold over the long term and may not yield a positive ROI for several months. If you pull your budget too soon because of your own impatience, you’ll never be able to reach your full potential. - Neglecting the value of consistent branding.
Top performers in all industries use an omnichannel approach to market themselves, tapping into multiple platforms and strategies to build a bigger, more comprehensive presence. But there’s a catch to this – your brand has to be consistent throughout these channels. If you don’t have a solid branding strategy at the core of all your tactics, it’s not going to work in your favor. - Copying competitors.
You likely have at least one competitor doing well in the marketing world, so why not just copy what they’re doing? It’s helpful to learn from the tactics of your peers, but outright mimicry is a bad idea; it forces you to compete directly with major players while making your messaging seem unoriginal. Instead, learn everything you can from your competition and come up with a unique approach of your own. - Targeting the wrong audience.
Your marketing will live or die by your initial market research. If you target the wrong audience, or if you target an audience with the wrong messaging, the architecture of your campaign is going to collapse. Just because an audience seems like a good fit for your brand doesn’t mean they are – so make sure you back up your assumptions with surveys and hard demographic research. - Targeting everybody.
Some lawyers try to expand their reach by making their messaging as broad and generic as possible. This approach makes some sense on paper; if you target everyone in the world, you’ll have nearly 8 billion potential clients, right? Unfortunately, there are some problems with this approach. For starters, your messaging is going to be seen as generic and irrelevant, meaning it’s not going to convert people as effectively. You’re also going to waste time and money appealing to people who have no real interest in you. Instead of going broad, target a very specific audience with messaging that aligns with their needs. - Focusing exclusively on promotion.
Calls to action (CTAs) are important for pushing people to book consultations and, ultimately, hire you. But if your marketing is exclusively focused on self-promotion and selling, it’s not going to earn you the long-term results you want. Instead, spend some time creating value for your prospects; blog posts, eBooks, and other resources are going to lure more people in and help you establish your reputation. Then, once the audience is hooked, you can start selling. - Never measuring or analyzing results.
Do you know that your marketing tactics are working? Or are you just assuming? Too many injury lawyers never spend time measuring and analyzing their results. Ongoing analysis is the only way to determine which tactics are working and which ones are falling flat; it’s going to be your pathway to long-term success, so you can’t afford to neglect it. - Never experimenting.
It’s hard to know which platforms, messages, images, and CTAs are going to be a hit with your audience. That’s why it’s so important to experiment and analyze your results. If you keep your campaign stagnant and safe, you’ll never get to realize your full potential. Marketing is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. What works for one injury attorney or law firm may not work for another. Therefore, refusing to experiment with different marketing strategies can hinder your ability to find the most effective approaches for your specific practice.
Working With the Pros
Want to avoid these common marketing mistakes? With the help of an experienced partner, you won’t have to worry about them. At Law Pro Nation, we use our signature Case Attraction System to help you market your firm and generate leads – all while boosting your brand reputation. Book a free call today to get started!
