Many companies sell leads to businesses. These leads can fuel their sales pipelines and offer the sales team an opportunity to expand its client base and increase business growth and boost revenues. The same holds for law firms, you can purchase leads for your personal injury law firm. In this article we deal with some of the pros and cons of buying personal injury leads.
The search for leads for your personal injury law firm sometimes does not go as planned, and fewer leads are generated than what your firm needs. This scenario often leads to sleepless nights, a rush to create a new email campaign, and a frantic scramble to produce a quick advert. All these crazy activities just to generate a lead!
While there are many ways to generate leads for your personal injury law firm, buying leads seems like a winning and fast solution. Your firm will get an influx of leads, and your sales team will have their hands full, converting these leads into paying clients.
Not every personal injury law firm will be successful with bought leads. Some personal injury law firms heavily invest in lead generation services. Others believe that buying leads is a waste of money and time.
Buying leads is an easy and fast means to generate new potential clients. It is a short-term solution to get your law firm operational while you work on long-term lead generating solutions such as SEO and content marketing.
There are things you need to consider before deciding on buying leads for your personal injury law firm:
• Is your law firm ready for the influx of new prospective clients?
• What is the best lead generation service for your law firm?
You must have the right expectations when venturing into buying leads. Not all leads are quality leads, and buying leads may be expensive in the long-term. Therefore, it is vital that you can track results to ensure your law firm will not lose money with paid leads.
How a Personal Injury Law Firms Work
Here is a simple story to illustrate how a personal injury law firm works. Bob got involved in an accident, but he was not at fault. As a result, he has to get his car fixed, pay medical bills for his injured leg, and have stopped working while his leg is healing.
The insurance company has been bugging Bob to say that they are willing to settle for half the cost of his medical bills. This scenario often happens to people who have been injured in an accident in which case Bob has three options:
• Accept the monetary settlement of the insurance company.
• Negotiate with the insurance company to get full reimbursement for his medical expenses due to the accident.
• Hire a personal injury lawyer to negotiate with the insurance company.
What option should Bob take? If he wants to accept the monetary settlement of the insurance company, okay, then he gets to go home with only half of what he paid for his medical expenses.
If he decides to negotiate with the insurance company, he runs the risk of getting less than the insurance company’s original settlement, which is usually what happens.
If he decides to hire a lawyer to negotiate with the insurance company on his behalf, he can get the full amount of his medical expenses reimbursed and much more.
How does a Personal Injury Law Firm Charge their Client?
Most Personal Injury law firms charge their clients based on a contingency fee. A contingency fee is a percentage of the final settlement its clients will receive from the insurance company. In most US states, a personal injury law firm gets an average of around 33% of the settled amount. This means, the more significant the settlement amount, the more revenue for the law firm.
It can take years for a personal injury case to be settled, and since legal fees are percentage-based, it can be challenging to find a return on investment for any legal marketing campaign. Additionally, the value of the case is largely based on insurance limits resulting in a marketing nightmare.
If the law firm, on the other hand, ends up on top, the Personal Injury law firm can gain high returns.
Different types of Personal Injury Claims
Personal injury law firms work on various personal injury claims such as:
Auto Accidents. This is the most common claim because it often includes personal claims for personal injuries, which can lead to higher settlements and claim awards. These claims must be filed with the statutory period. Most of the claimants are not at fault. In 2019, over 4.4 million people suffered severe injuries due to car accidents.
Motorcycle Accidents. Mild to severe head injury is the most common result of a motorcycle accident.
Boat accidents. In 2014, there were 4,064 accidents with 2,678 injuries and 610 deaths. The majority of these accidents are due to human error, mainly due to control of the boat and speed.
Slips and Falls. In 2019, over 2 million people had injuries due to slips and falls. This is when commercial and residential property owners’ negligence in terms of standard maintenance and repairs causes injury to a person. It is the duty of owners to keep their properties safe.
Dog Bites. In 2019, about $797,000,000 was paid by Homeowners’ Insurance Companies for injuries due to dog bites. The states impose a strict liability (some dog breeds such as pit bulls are deemed dangerous) and liability on owners who are aware that or have reason to be aware that his dog is dangerous.
Wrongful Deaths. In civil law, wrongful death claims are analogous to manslaughter in criminal law. These claims often arise from circumstances such as medical malpractice, car accidents, and defective products. Victims’ families may seek legal recourse by consulting with medical malpractice lawyers and other legal professionals who specialize in wrongful death cases. These lawyers can help navigate the complexities of the legal system and pursue justice for the loss of a loved one.
Personal injury claims may include medical expenses and loss of compensation due to the injury.
What are Personal Injury Leads?
A personal injury lead is a person who expresses interest in having a free consultation with a law firm to discuss the details of the personal injury claim he wishes to pursue. The lead can get in touch with the law firm through a free consultation form on the firm’s website or phone call.
Lead generation efforts aim to get qualified leads that can be converted into potential clients and ultimately into paying clients.
Ways to Get Personal Injury Leads
The right lead generation strategies can assure your personal injury law firm a steady stream of new clients.
There are millions of personal injury cases every year, and most of these people will need a law firm to help with their injury claims.
Generating leads and acquiring clients with personal injury cases can be costly, especially when compared to family law, estates, and wills.
Albeit expensive, lead generation strategies can create a huge income stream for your personal injury law firm.
The method to use in generating leads depends on how urgently and critically your law firm needs to create new leads and the amount of money, time, and resources your law firm is willing to invest.
Below are some of the best ways to generate leads and get personal injury cases.
Each strategy has its unique benefits and challenges.
Long-Term Lead Generation Strategies
These are lead generation strategies that need investment in time, money, and effort. These strategies need to be created, developed, and nurtured in order to generate quality leads. These strategies, however, can be sustained over the long term.
There are several long-term marketing strategies you can use to generate leads for your personal injury law firm.
Referrals
Word-of-mouth advertising continues to be one of the best sources of leads for your personal injury law firm. Potential leads will always value the good word offered for your law firm by past clients, friends, family, associates, and colleagues.
Typically, the referred lead is already somewhat pre-sold on what you do and have done and why he should hire your services. Conversion rates for referred leads are the highest of all forms of marketing strategies for your law firm.
Advertising
This marketing strategy aims at getting your message across to your target market. Potential leads will get to know about your personal injury law firm through traditional advertising methods, including newspaper ads, billboards, TV, and radios.
To go with the times and to be where your potential leads are most likely to be, you should also advertise your personal injury law firm’s services in social media platforms, online articles and blogs, and online banners, and legal directories and listings (specific geographical location). Lead generation through telemarketing and email marketing are also as effective.
Your marketing strategies should be able to sell your law firm to potential leads. The more powerful and convincing the message you send about your legal services and your reputation, the more personal injury leads your law firm will be able to generate.
The best way to sell your personal injury law firm is to market your firm’s experience, skills, qualifications, and previous cases handle and won. These will help your law firm gain your potential clients’ trust, making it easier for them to decide between hiring your firm.
Content Marketing and Blogging
These create and increase awareness of your personal injury law firms, legal services, and how your firm can help solve your target market’s problems.
Email Marketing
Converting cold leads into warm leads: -a potential lead engages your law firm through your firm’s website or social media accounts. You send marketing emails with more information about your law firm until you have converted him into a paying client.
Social Media Marketing
Connect your personal injury law firm with large audiences through posts, videos, interactions, and Pay-Per-Click ads.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
PPC advertising is one of the most reliable sources of lead generation. With PPC, you bid for relevant keywords that describe personal injury legal services (e.g., Personal Injury Lawyer in San Francisco). Your PPC ad will pop-up alongside organic searches (unpaid searches) when someone conducts a search using your keywords.
The beautiful thing about PPC advertising is you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and is usually redirected to your website. With PPC, you pay for high-quality targeted traffic (people who need your personal injury legal services).
Informative Website
A professionally built website that loads fast, easy to navigate, and attention-grabbing, interactive, and valuable content will attract many potential leads. The relevant content on your website should be informative without including too much information to overwhelm your audience.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO involves processes that ensure your website and web pages will get a high rank in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The higher your website ranks in search engines, the more visible you will get on the internet, thereby increasing traffic to your site. More traffic means more potential leads that can be converted into paying clients.
Customer Reviews
Notwithstanding its importance, online customer reviews are frequently neglected as a lead generation strategy. Potential leads often search for customer feedback and reviews before deciding to hire your legal services.
Make it a point to have your clients post reviews online about their experience with your law firm. Like referrals, potential clients trust online reviews (within your website or on review sites) of past clients.
When potential leads see past clients with positive experiences, they will more likely tend to trust those reviews and hire your law firm.
Managing your own Lead Generation Campaign
Lead generation is essential to your personal injury law firm’s growth because it brings in a steady stream of new clients. There are several marketing strategies, but your primary goal is to acquire as many clients as possible to increase your firm’s revenue.
Lead generation is the first step in acquiring new clients. Leads are potential clients who need legal services. They, however, need to be nurtured and provided with more marketing strategies to allow them to have many reasons to make the decision to engage the services of your law firm.
If your personal injury law firm is not getting leads, you will not get any paying clients. Every customer or client starts by being a leader.
Typically, a person does not immediately decide to hire your law firm’s services by responding to your initial marketing efforts. They wait to encounter your marketing message several times (7 times on the average) before they are triggered and decide to hire your law firm.
When generating leads for your law firm, you need to send your message to your target market. The initial stage of your marketing campaign is to know who your target market or audience is and where they are. You need to have a profile of the type of lead you are looking to generate. You are a personal injury law firm, so leads with family law issues are not your target market and a waste of your time.
Lead generation is the first step in the sales process. It is crucial to managing this step well so you can lead your potential client through the sales funnel until they are converted into paying clients.
The marketing strategies mentioned above should work on attracting your target market and lead them to the various stages of the sales funnel until they finally decide to sign-up as a paying client.
Successfully converting potential leads into paying clients will allow your personal injury law firm to enjoy a significant return on investment on the firm’s marketing investment. It will also enable your law firm to experience impressive growth and increased revenues.
Short-Term Lead Generation Strategies
When you urgently need to generate leads, you can opt for the best short-term=lead generation strategy: Pay-Per-Lead (PPL). PPL involves the process of buying genuinely high-quality or qualified leads from third-party lead generation companies.
Buying personal injury leads can be costly but extremely profitable. Before venturing into buying leads, ensure you have a reliable intake process to maximize conversion rates, and have a high ROI when purchasing leads from lead generation companies.
Buying personal injury from lead generation companies typically yields much faster results than any of the many forms lead generation marketing strategies. Leads purchased from lead generation companies are more quantifiable and tangible than because of its high conversion rate.
In Pay-Per-Lead, you pay a third-party company for every lead they send to your law firm. A PPL company generates leads online in much the same way your personal injury law firm generates leads.
These personal injury lead generation companies typically use SEO, PPC, and internet marketing strategies to drive leads to their website.
• They then generate leads through phone calls, live chats, and inbound contact forms received through their website and online platforms.
• Leads are stored in a list or bucket based on the geographical location and type of legal service they inquired for.
• The lead generation company sells the information of the lead to a law firm for a pre-determined price based on your contract.
With a Pay-Per-Lead service, you pay the lead generation company for leads and not for marketing expenses. The lead generation company takes charge of the marketing expenses and overhead incurred in generating those leads.
The lead generation company will send you emails of the details and contact information of the leads you bought from them. It is now the law firm’s responsibility to follow-up and converts the lead into a paying client.
Many personal injury generation companies will track leads, and once a lead visits the landing page and fills up a contact information form, they will pass on the lead to your law firm.
Some lead generation companies will call and qualify leads before passing them on to you. Other companies will only send the contact information of leads to your law firm.
Some lead generation companies can make your law firm the exclusive recipient of every lead within your geographical location. Other personal injury lead generating companies will sell the same leads to multiple personal injury law firms.
Pros and Cons of Buying Leads
Before signing up with a lead generation company to buy leads, check these pros and cons of the service to determine if it is worth using, and the right lead generation approach for your personal injury law firm
Personal Injury Law Firm lead Generation: Pros
Instant Leads
After you sign-up with a lead generation company, you will immediately receive leads. When you buy leads, you no longer need to go through the process of bidding of relevant keywords with Google Ads.
Google Ads is one of the easiest and fastest ways to get leads; you will still need to deal with keyword volume. You also need to deal with a conversion-prone landing page, and you will need to wait for the contact to be the first to establish a connection.
When you buy leads, you will have cut several steps of paid marketing campaigns to generate leads because leads are delivered to you.
Consistent Flow of Leads
Most lead generation companies consistently and steadily deliver leads because they have several dedicated channels from which they can generate leads.
Pay only for Acquired Leads
You can easily manage your firm’s budget because you will only be paying for individual delivered leads instead of a monthly or yearly flat rate. Overspending your budget is reduced or eliminated because if you are not getting desired results.
Available when You Urgently Need Leads
Growing a law firm often costs thousands of dollars upfront before it can take-off. Many of the marketing strategies take time before you can get significant results. In the meantime, you have an overhead expense to meet, so you need to acquire new clients quickly.
Buying leads allows you to make immediate contact with potential clients who need your personal injury legal services regardless of the cost of your legal services.
Flexible Delivery of Leads
There are numerous ways lead generation companies can deliver bought leads. A lead can be texted to you or forwarded via a call transfer with an accompanying email immediately after the lead generation company generated it.
You also have the choice between exclusive (you are the exclusive owner of the lead) and non-exclusive leads (shared between 4 to 6 or more other law firms).
Some personal injury law firms often choose non-exclusive leads because they are confident, they have the infrastructure to convert the lead into a paying client faster than the competition. Besides, non-exclusive leads cost less than exclusive leads.
You can focus more on the Core Business of your Law Firm.
Lead generation companies use a customized approach to generating leads. This approach helps filter leads, leaving only high-qualified plaintiffs that are more than just leads but already potential clients.
The screening and intake identification processes of the lead generation company ensure it finds the best prospective claimants/clients for you. This gives you more time to focus on your claimant’s case to provide the best settlement amount due to him.
In short, your law firm does not need to worry about where the leads you bought come from or the resources used and strategies implemented to obtain the leads. Your in-house marketing time can, therefore, focus on other marketing strategies such as updating your website for your SEO and converting leads into paying clients.
Easy-to-Quantify Return on Investment
Since your firm only pays for delivered leads, your Pay-Per-Lead campaign is easy to quantify and measure because you know the cost of every converted lead. Your formula can be something like: Revenue generated from leads for (coverage dates) divided by the cost of leads for (coverage dates), and you will get the cost per lead. You can also opt to deduct from the Cost per Lead all soft and hard expenses to get a more accurate ROI for every lead you bought.
Personal Injury Law Firm lead Generation: Cons
Inconsistent Volume of Leads
Lead generation can be an unpredictable activity. Even lead generation companies sometimes experience inconsistencies in their actual generated leads. When on a slow season, lead generation companies usually pay for traffic to generate leads. This results in the lead generation company delivering low-volume and low-quality leads because of the snowballing effect.
More Expensive than other Lead Generation Strategies
Some lead generation services sell for as much as $100 per lead. While it is not as costly as other Pay-Per-Lead ads, it is costly. On average, you will need a minimum of about 10 to 15 leads to acquire a paying client successfully.
Your internal expenses could increase through your efforts.
Regularly receiving information of leads in your email is great, but you will need the human resources to immediately follow-up these leads. You will need to invest in a system that sends automated email responses and hire an intake specialist to handle the influx of leads.
With the additional expenses, you will need to increase your conversion rate of leads to paying clients to lessen the impact of the other costs.
Low-Quality Leads
Paid leads tend to have lower conversion rates than any lead generation marketing strategies. Lead generation companies concentrate on generating large volumes of leads; thus, they make sure to have a strong presence in almost all digital marketing.
They work aggressively by engaging even low-quality leads who do not know what they need as long as they get the contact information to hit the required number of leads.
Low-quality leads waste your time because they tend to have unqualified claims, and you will need to spend more time explaining to them. Time wasted is worst than money wasted.
Contractual Obligations
Most lead generation companies do not offer a trial period where you can sign-up and get the first few leads for free to determine the quality of their leads before deciding to commit to buying more leads from them over some time.
These lead generation companies work on contractual obligations with a large quantity of between 50-100 guaranteed leads for typically a period of between 6-12 months. This leaves you with no choice, especially when you urgently need leads.
When you are not happy with the leads before the determination of your contractual obligation, you may be locked into a contract which you need to pay even for low-quality leads.
How to Choose the Right Lead Generation Service
There are many marketing strategies you can create and implement to generate leads for your injury. The Pay-Per-Lead approach generates leads quicker and faster, so long as you are working with the right lead generation company.
How long do you expect the lead generation company to deliver leads to your law firm?
Before hiring a lead generation company, know how many leads you need to buy. Ask the lead generation company if they can deliver your required number of leads and how long it will take them to deliver the leads.
What lead generation strategies they use to generate leads for your law firm?
The lead generation company you choose should be aggressively using the best online channels to generate high-quality leads for your law firm.
How much does the lead-generating service cost?
Pick at least three lead generation companies and compare their prices per lead. Choose the lead generation service that offers a balance of being able to deliver the number of leads you need, uses the best lead generating strategies with the least possible cost.
Make sure, too, that the lead generating company has a return policy if you are not able to get the results you need for their delivered leads.
Final Thoughts
Buying leads for your Injury law firm from a lead generation company has one great advantage over other lead generation strategies- it can quickly generate leads!
Search engine optimization is the next best strategy, and the best long terms strategy, to generate leads successfully, but it takes a longer time to realize significant results.
SEO does not have the power to influence search engines to speed up the process and make your law firm website have a top rank in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
SEO takes so much time to enable your law firm to generate qualified leads. If you are in a rush to have qualified leads to have more clients and increase revenue, a Pay-Per-Lead service is your best option.
Your Injury law firm will benefit from a Pay-Per-Lead approach to lead generation by choosing the right lead generation company to work with.
SEO provides an exceptional long term strategy.