How to get personal injury clients? I’ll show you the best way to get personal injury clients and compete with other personal injury lawyers’ advertising.

I’ll also show how you can compete with other personal injury lawyers with large advertising budgets while you’re using a much smaller advertising budget.

How to Get Personal Injury Clients With a Small Advertising Budget

Use the following advertising media to get personal injury clients using a small advertising budget:

1. Google Ads
2. Holiday cards and birthday cards
3. Re-design your business cards

You’ll notice I left out online lawyer directories like Avvo and FInd Law. That’s because online lawyer directories were not cost-effective years ago and don’t work anymore.

Keep reading to learn more about how to get personal injury clients using these types of inexpensive advertising media.

How to Get Personal Injury Clients With a Large Advertising Budget

Use the following advertising media to get personal injury clients using a large advertising budget:

1. TV
2. Billboards
3. Radio
4. Google Ads
5. Holiday cards and birthday cards
6. Social Media
7. SEO for your law firm’s website

Keep reading to learn more about how to get personal injury clients using these types of advertising media.

The Two Most Important Strategies to Get Personal Injury Clients

These are the two most important aspects of any campaign to get personal injury clients, no matter whether your advertising budget is small or large.

Before you search for how to get personal injury clients, you need to plan how to compete with other personal injury lawyers. You need to begin with these two strategies:

1. Create a brand
2. Use cross-channel marketing and advertising, but choose which ones to start with

How to Create a Law Firm Brand

You can’t get a lot of personal injury clients without a brand. Unlike every other business, law firms were not allowed to use a trade name or brand, but now they are.

Law firms can now use a brand name or trade name instead of a law firm name like Franckel & Plevy, LLP. That was the name of our personal injury law firm, but we changed our law firm name to 1-800-HURT-911, LLP.

We can’t brand a name like Franckel & Plevy. It’s boring and not readily recognizable or memorable. I like my name, but no one else cares.

It took Jacoby & Meyers over $100 million in repetitive advertising to brand their law firm’s name, and that was 40 years ago when it was a lot cheaper to advertise. The day they stop advertising, people will forget their names.

Take some time and pick a great brand name for your law firm. A brand name is one that isn’t a generic word or phrase. In fact, you can’t brand a generic word or phrase.

Think of some iconic brand names as examples. There is no such thing as a Pepsi. Federal Express was too generic, so it became FedEx. Likewise, there’s no such thing as a HURT-911 or a 1-800-HURT-911.

The best brand name is one that stands out immediately and is instantly recognizable, even though it has never been seen before. A brand name that is impressive sounding or looking will create instant branding.

What’s instant branding? That’s when someone thinks they’ve seen your brand even when they haven’t. An example is 1-800-HURT-911®, which creates instant branding.

A good vanity phone number can create instant branding. Forbes Magazine says vanity phone numbers generate brand awareness, and when used as a prominent feature in ad campaigns, it will let consumers “get to know you at a fast pace.”

When you come up with a few possibilities, run it by 10-20 people from different walks of life.

When you decide on a brand name for your law firm, trademark it. A trademark will protect you against another law firm trying to stop you from using it.

Even better, the trademark symbol ® is a brand in itself and signifies the importance of your brand to potential clients. 1-800-HURT-911® looks more impressive than 1-800-HURT-911.

Using a trademark symbol ® in your Google Ads title improves the click-through rate and conversion.

Tip: Create a brand name for your law firm that has a matching domain name available. When you register your new domain name, forward the domain name to your existing law firm’s domain name so visitors will end up on your website.

Alternatively, if you don’t already get a lot of visitors to your law firm’s website, create a new website with the new domain name and move your content to the new website. If you do that, make sure to create a 301 redirect from the old domain name to the new domain name.

If you’re interested in using the 1-800-HURT-911® vanity number for instant branding, give Phil Franckel a call 7/days/nights to see if your state or territory is available.

Use Cross-Channel Marketing and Advertising

Cross-channel marketing or advertising is simply using more than one type of advertising media. For instance, advertising on TV and billboards, rather than advertising on TV only or advertising on billboards only.

Combining different types of advertising media is far more effective than using only one type of advertising media, but only if you advertise a brand. The more types of advertising media, the better it works.

Colling Media says, “By being on multiple channels, your organization expands its reach significantly and builds brand awareness even among individuals interested in purchasing through different ad platforms. Eventually, this improves your business’s reputation and makes it more likely that consumers will discuss your business and increase chances of conversion.”

When to Use Billboards for Lawyer Advertising

While Cross-channel advertising is far more effective than advertising on only one type of media, some types of media can be used alone while others should not be used alone.

For instance, you can be successful when advertising only with Google Ads, but you should never advertise only on billboards.

This is because personal injury lawyers need direct response advertising that should be enhanced with branding. Direct response advertising is when you advertise a message and expect a response, such as a phone call from someone injured in an accident.

You will get calls from people injured in an accident when they see your TV commercial, but you will not get calls from people when they see your ad on a billboard. This is because billboards are solely a branding tool, but billboards are the most impactful branding you can get.

Combining billboard advertising with your advertising on TV will substantially increase the number of potential personal injury clients you will get from TV alone.

The same is true with radio. Combining billboard advertising with your radio advertising will substantially increase the number of potential personal injury clients you will get from radio alone.

Billboards will even increase clicks on your Google Ads as long as you have consistent branding on your billboards and Google Ads.

Tip: I recommend using billboards or radio only if you have a vanity phone number for personal injury lawyers or a strong brand. You will brand whatever you put on a billboard, so avoid making your photo or name prominent. See examples of great and bad lawyer billboards and examples of radio advertising for lawyers.

But what if your personal injury law firm doesn’t have enough money in the budget for TV and billboards or even one alone?

TV Advertising for Lawyers

TV advertising is available on broadcast TV (think network TV), cable TV, or streaming. The most cost-effective for personal injury lawyers is broadcast TV, but broadcast TV is also the most expensive.

Broadcast TV is not only the most effective but the best TV shows for personal injury lawyers are only on broadcast TV.

Broadcast TV reaches the most number of people with only 210 broadcast TV markets (called a DMA) in the U.S. Cable TV reaches a far smaller number of people with 10,000 cable TV markets in the U.S.

An easy way to understand the out-of-pocket cost vs. the cost-effectiveness of advertising on TV is to compare the cost of advertising to the cost of hamburger meat.

Buy hamburger meat at 7-11, and you might get a 1/2 lb package for only $4. At a supermarket, you might get a 2 lb package for $6, and at Costco, you might get a 10 lb package for $20.

But as you spend more, you get more at a lower cost. The hamburger meat will cost $8 per pound at 7-11, $3 per pound at the supermarket, and $2 per pound at Costco.

If hamburger meat were TV air time, TV commercials would cost more at Costco but at a lower cost per lead or potential personal injury client.

The Best Way to Advertise on TV With a Small Budget

The best way to advertise on TV with a small budget is not to use cable or streaming TV, which is much less expensive. Instead, you can start with TV advertising on broadcast TV overnight when it’s much less expensive.

I had a lawyer advertising 1-800-HURT-911® only on billboards (against my advice). He had two 48 ft. billboards and twenty 24 ft. billboards but only got a few personal injury cases in eight months. But that created a lot of branding, and when he added TV advertising overnight for only $2,000 per month, he got 12 cases per month. That’s what billboards do for TV advertising!

If you’re advertising on TV overnight, you’ll need a great call center, but you also need a great call center during the day.

You can also start with different types of inexpensive marketing media.

Inexpensive Advertising Media for Lawyers

There are many types of inexpensive marketing media for lawyers, and you should use several of them. Below are a few types of inexpensive marketing media for lawyers.

How to Get Personal Injury Clients With Business Cards

The least expensive marketing media for lawyers is your business card. Redesign it!

If your business card is professional-looking and looks like every other lawyer’s business card, it won’t stand out. Throw them out.

Re-design your business cards so they don’t look like a lawyer’s business card. And give it out to everyone everywhere. I redesigned my boring law firm business card and gave it to cab drivers, cashiers, and everyone I came into contact with. I built a personal injury practice with 135 clients, just with my business cards.

I had a business card to get general personal injury clients and another business card to get motorcycle injury clients.

How to Get Personal Injury Clients With Greeting Cards

Holiday cards and birthday cards are one of the most cost-effective types of advertising media to get personal injury clients.

However, as with all types of advertising media, it’s crucial to design it right. Most personal injury law firms use horrible greeting cards that won’t do anything. See examples of the right way and wrong ways to design holiday cards and birthday cards.

How to Get Personal Injury Clients With Google Ads

Probably the most cost-effective advertising for personal injury lawyers, with either a small or large budget, is Google Ads. Google Ads is also among the least expensive advertising for personal injury lawyers.

Google gives higher priority and a lower cost per click to advertisers with ads that both get more clicks and convert more leads (Google knows when a lead becomes a conversion). Your much smaller Google Ads budget will let you compete against the largest personal injury law firms.

Creating a brand for your law firm is just as important when using Google Ads. It’s our brand in the Google Ads title that gives my law firm more leads with a higher placement and a lower cost per click because people will click first on a brand name.

Use a Google Ads Manager to have a well-designed Google Ads campaign. A well-designed Google Ads campaign makes a difference.

I recommend a minimum Google Ads budget of $2,500 to $5,000, depending on your market. $5,000 is a better starting point.

How to Get Personal Injury Clients With Cause Marketing

Cause marketing is the most effective type of marketing and is used by most Fortune 500 Companies. Cause marketing can be done very inexpensively.

What Is Cause Marketing? Cause Marketing for lawyers is a marketing campaign promoting a cause your clients believe in. Read more about getting personal injury clients with Cause Marketing for lawyers.

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