Personal injury lawyers are typically very good at what they do.
If you could have a steady stream of new clients, you’d never want for more billable hours or revenue.
Unfortunately, even if you have an excellent reputation, new leads don't always come walking up to your doorstep – and there's a lot of competition in personal injury law.
Understanding this, most successful personal injury lawyers adopt some sort of lead generation, marketing, or advertising strategy to generate new leads and create that steady stream of clients on their own.
This isn't easy. And it isn't free.
But exactly how much does a personal injury lead cost?
And is it worth the money?
We're not going to make you read the whole article if you're just interested in a flat number.
So here's the bottom line.
The cost of a personal injury lead usually varies from $100 to $350. We’ll explore the hows and whys of this figure later.
For now, let’s crunch some superficially gathered numbers.
The average personal injury settlement, nationally, ranges from $17,756.62 for soft tissue injuries to $161,958.19 for severe injuries and death. The overall average is $75,000.
Obviously, some of these numbers are inflated by exceptionally high payouts in rare cases. But if you're making a third, or nearly third of the settlement your clients receive, each new client in your business is going to generate tens of thousands of dollars of revenue.
There are some other factors to consider here, such as how many leads you're able to successfully convert, your area of practice, and your ability to negotiate higher payouts. But generally speaking, the cost of a lead is more than worth it; you're essentially paying a few hundred dollars for tens of thousands of dollars of new revenue (on average).
It should be obvious why attracting new clients to your law firm is a good thing.
Every new lead is a possible new client, and every new client generates revenue for your business.
If you can turn this into a consistent enough practice, you can calculate the exact ROI of your lead generation efforts. There are some other costs to consider with lead generation, such as the time costs of doing research and working with partners to achieve your strategic goals. But generally speaking, the costs are minimal compared to the results (as we estimated in the previous section).
It's also important to compare this to the state of your business without any lead generation strategy. This is a challenge, since we're working with a hypothetical counterfactual – and because many personal injury law firms have lead generation strategies even if they don't call them by that name. Technically, any kind of referral program you have and any branding or marketing efforts you make can be considered part of your lead generation approaches.
Still, if you're not actively contributing toward concentrated lead generation efforts, you're leaving massive sums of revenue on the table, and you're allowing your biggest rivals and competitors to gobble up those proceeds uncontested.
In short, lead generation and broader marketing strategies are incredible investments for personal injury lawyers that tend to pay off many times over.
Of course, your results partially depend on the quality and focus of the lead generation strategies you use.
Good lead generation and marketing strategies depend on a solid foundation of coherent branding. Your law firm, and you as a lawyer, should have a recognizable, consistent brand across all channels. That brand should be differentiated among personal injury lawyers and should speak directly to your target audience.
Additionally, you should have a robust, multichannel web presence in place. At the center of this web presence should be your website, which should be highly polished and informative to make a good impression on newcomers.
It should also have a number of dedicated, specific landing pages meant to appeal to specific streams of traffic. This way, you can appeal directly to new leads discovering your brand and visiting your website for the first time. Landing pages are also important for analyzing data so you can refine your lead generation and conversion optimization efforts in the future.
With those pieces of the puzzle in place, you can shift your attention to specifically generation strategies that allow you to build traffic streams from several sources simultaneously.
These are some of the most popular channels for lead generation among personal injury lawyers:
· Directories. Many personal injury lawyers go immediately to legal directories, of which there are dozens. These are highly prominent channels where you can pay to have your lawyer profile posted and promoted. People looking for legal services can conduct a search for their area, refine that search based on whatever criteria are most important to them, and eventually reach out to the lawyers who seem like the best fits. Obviously, there are advantages to being listed in these platforms, but you'll pay a recurring fee for the privilege. These services are also largely hands-off; well you can certainly optimize your profile pic and bio, you aren't going to have much control over who searches for you or how they reach out.
· Referral networks. Personal injury lawyers also network with other lawyers to build de facto referral networks, with flexible terms. For example, you might have an arrangement with another lawyer in your area to send them leads when you're overworked, so they can send you leads when they're overworked. In many cases, you'll agree to a mutually beneficial referral fee, but it's also possible to make and receive referrals only on the basis of friendly favors. These are excellent additions to your lead generation efforts, but without additional support, they probably won't be able to multiply your revenue, especially at the firm level.
· SEO. Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best marketing and lead generation strategies for personal injury lawyers. As the name suggests, this is the practice of optimizing your web presence so it ranks higher in search engine results. Using a combination of quality content, link building, and technical optimization, you can eventually make your web pages rank higher for keywords and phrases that your clients are searching for, like “best personal injury lawyer in [state].” It takes some time to build up the authority necessary to climb the rankings in these pages, but if you're willing to remain patient, this is one of the most cost-effective strategies for generating recurring, qualified traffic.
· PPC ads. If you want faster results, you should consider pay per click (PPC) ads. With these digital advertisements, you'll only pay for the traffic you generate, and you can finely tune the parameters you used to generate that traffic, ensuring that only the most qualified people reach your website. The biggest platform for PPC ads is arguably Google, but Facebook, Bing, and other platforms are worth considering as well.
· Social media. New personal injury lawyers often gravitate to social media, despite not knowing how to best use the platform for lead generation. Claiming a profile and posting is free, making it a no-brainer addition to your lead generation lineup. But if you want to build a following and create a bigger stream of traffic to your website, you'll need to be thoughtful and strategic about the content you produce and how you engage with your followers. Given the competitive landscape here, you'll need to be strategic and creative to be successful.
· Email marketing. With all the technologically advanced platforms at our disposal, email seems antiquated by comparison. However, email marketing is a strategy with an incredibly high ROI, due to its low costs and nonexistent barriers to entry. If you can build a strong email list, you can see incredible results.
· Retargeting. Retargeting ads are also effective, reaching people who have already visited your site with digital ads that follow them across the web. Sometimes, leads are on the fence or they're torn between two personal injury lawyers, and these retargeted ads can be the difference between losing them or winning them.
Throughout all of these channels, you should focus on:
· Traffic filtering. More traffic is good, but quality is more important than quantity in lead generation. Think of it this way; would you rather have 100,000 people visit your site with no intentions of using you as a lawyer, or 10 people visiting your site who are desperate to find an attorney like you? Across all channels and throughout all your lead generation efforts, you should integrate traffic filtering to filter out people who aren't relevant or valuable to your organization.
· Conversion optimization. Conversion optimization is the process of tweaking and tuning a web page or other digital platform to encourage a specific behavior, such as scheduling a free consultation with you or providing their contact information. If your traffic stream is massive and highly qualified, but your landing pages aren't optimized for conversions, the value of your leads will plummet. Ideally, you'll maximize your conversion rate in addition to generating more traffic and more qualified leads. You can start by writing a persuasive, catchy headline, and tuning your page to load as quickly as possible; you’ll need ongoing experiments to improve your results further.
· Intake optimization. You should also think about intake optimization. In other words, you need to make sure you can receive leads quickly, gracefully, and in a way that maximizes their chances of working with you. Responding to inquiries promptly, offering clear and transparent information, and giving people a sense of connection and comfort can all help you here.
It's also possible to pay for services that generate leads on your behalf. In this type of arrangement, you'll usually agree to a fixed price per qualified lead, and your partner will send you a reliable number of leads every month (or other fixed term). This takes a lot of the guesswork and strategy out of the equation, but will also likely increase your bottom-line price per lead generated.
One of the most effective paths to optimization here is finding a way to decrease the average cost of a personal injury lead. Already, the equation is favorable from an economic standpoint, but if you can decrease your costs further, the benefits become even more exaggerated.
So what influences the cost of a personal injury lead?
These are some of the most important factors to look at:
· Lead exclusivity. In some arrangements, leads are exclusive; they are sent to you and you alone, and you can decide how you want to handle them. In other arrangements, the lead pool is more competitive; leads are sent to many lawyers and law firms simultaneously, and they must compete to appeal to that lead. As you might imagine, exclusive leads are more expensive, while non-exclusive leads are somewhat less reliable.
· Lead quality. You also need to think about lead quality. If you're paying a lead generation agency or a marketing agency, you'll likely spend more money to get more qualified, more relevant leads for your business. If you're doing the work yourself, you should know it takes much more time and effort to ensure optimized traffic streams to your landing pages. You may even want to go through a next step of lead qualification, which can cost you even more, but greatly increase the likelihood of converting the leads you keep.
· Geographic location. As you might imagine, costs vary across the country. If the price of everything is more expensive where you live, you can expect the cost of lead generation to be higher as well.
· Injury type. Certain types of leads are more valuable to personal injury lawyers than others. Someone who suffered a grievous injury under egregious circumstances is going to be much more valuable for your firm than someone who skinned their knee after tripping on a small rock in a grocery store parking lot. In most cases, the cost scaling is reasonable here, and the bigger, more valuable leads are more than worth the extra investment.
· Buying vs. generating. As we mentioned earlier, if you're paying for leads generated by someone else, you'll probably pay more per lead than you would managing your own strategy. Of course, this assumes you're able to manage a lead generation strategy competently on your own; in many cases, personal injury lawyers attempt their own lead generation tactics to save money, but end up falling short of the results they want.
· Agency dynamics. Lead generation and marketing agencies often have unique styles and independent ways of running things. While there are some dynamics that are common across the industry, some agencies have a much more intensive process with more touch points and more ongoing communication; you'll usually pay for this additional support. More minimal agencies offer lower prices, with less support overall. Both ends of the spectrum are worth considering.
Lead generation and conversion optimization are nearly two components of a complex marketing ecosystem that can lead your personal injury law firm to success. Now that you better understand the cost of lead generation, and the dynamics of marketing and revenue generation in personal injury law, you can begin or advance your journey to greater prominence and success in this arena.
Are you struggling with lead generation in the personal injury space?
Are you just trying to earn more clients while keeping your expenses in check?
At Law.co, we’re here to help. From high-level strategy to ground-level execution, we can give you the resources and support you need to beat the competition.
If you’re ready to get started, contact us for a free consultation today!
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