How to create a content marketing plan for your personal injury firm

Legal practitioners can use many tried-and-tested marketing techniques to drive brand awareness, build trust, and generate leads. 

Lawyerist found that content marketing from law firms brings in three times as many leads brought in by paid search efforts, like Google’s pay-per-click (PPC). 

Not only that, small businesses—including small and solo practitioners—with blogs see 126% more lead growth than those without. 

The bottom line? Law firm content marketing generates conversion rates six times higher than other methods.

We’ve already covered the benefits of content marketing for personal injury law firms, so we’re jumping straight into the strategy and execution of content marketing. 

How to build a content marketing strategy for personal injury firms

Your online presence should be at the core of your firm's marketing strategy. To run a successful digital marketing campaign, you need to offer valuable information that answers your intended audience’s questions, resonates with their pain points, and aligns with their dreams. 

Before you start writing content, make sure you have clearly identified your intended audience. From there, you can use a simple working formula to streamline content creation for your marketing function. 

The content must be relevant, fresh, and invigorating. To see the best results, focus your content around your intended audience – whether text, images, or videos – and then optimize this for search engines.

Follow these four steps to create a world-class content marketing strategy for your personal injury legal practice.

1. Identify and understand your potential clients

The foundational strategy of content marketing is to establish brand and product awareness by educating your prospects on the relevant questions they’re asking. 

Your firm’s content marketing will work best if it’s created for a specific kind of person. For personal injury law firms, your persona might include people (or family members) of those injured in car, bike, or truck accidents, injured on the job, impacted by defective medical devices, and more. 

We recommend putting names to your ideal client personas to keep track of who you’re talking to. You can also use numbers (Persona 1, Persona 2, Persona 3, etc.) to make sure you’re communicating the right information to the right people. 

Examples of personas at your personal injury law firm might include: 

• P1: Car crash 
• P2: Bike accident 
• P3: Medical malpractice 
• P4: Slip-and-fall
• Etc.

For someone hurt by a defective medical device, your content should include steps around who can help, what to, and potential outcomes of these case types. 

Developing personal injury personas

An easy way to guide the content creation process is to create personas for the target audience. A persona will define the characteristics of the target client based on the profiles of your existing client base. Content marketing works best when your firm targets people who fit the same profile as those you already serve.

A person seeking the services of a personal injury law firm is most likely to be in pain or distress. Therefore, your content strategy should understand the client's emotions and include them in the persona profile.

Creating personas for the target client will go a long way in helping shape the medium of choice to present the content. The most straightforward is publishing blogs with posts they will find helpful and presenting content in videos and ads.

The content created for marketing purposes should also consider how the potential client should reach the firm. It should make it easy for anyone to call, email the firm, request consultation, or fill out a quick evaluation form on a web page. 

It’s easy for the firm to follow up with them and formalize the onboarding process.

1. Outline your content marketing strategy goals 

Your firm’s marketing team must develop a regular content calendar to get the most out of your marketing efforts. Posting frequently improves visibility and search engine rankings, and posting irregularly makes your content harder to find on search engines. 

Start by understanding your content marketing goals, such as generating more leads, winning more clients, or booking more consultations. You can also target multiple goals within your content marketing. 

For instance, you could aim your content marketing efforts at signing ten new clients every month. Whatever your goals are, make sure they’re practical and quantifiable, with a detailed plan of action on how you’ll achieve them.

Don’t get discouraged if you’re not seeing the results you hoped for immediately -- content marketing takes consistency and more time than paid marketing to deliver an ROI. Still, once you’ve created a regular cadence for publishing blogs, you’ll be closer to your initial goals and build historical data that makes it easier to reach targets. 

1. Plan your content calendar 

Once you’ve identified your personas and goals, it’s time to build a tactical approach to achieve this. This requires a content (or editorial) calendar that must encompass multiple considerations: 

• Keyword focus
• Funnel stage 
• CTA 

Let’s break these down more. 

Keyword research + focus

Search engine optimization (SEO) keyword research is an integral part of content marketing. Since you’re creating content around searcher keywords in Google, Bing, and more, content writers must understand what questions potential clients ask. 

Content must often be aligned with the exact phrases users input when searching for services like those your firm offers. Good content should answer the questions these people ask and give them the next steps to reach their goals. 

Your law firm can perform keyword research with multiple free (and paid) tools available: 

• SEMrush - Paid
• Ahrefs - Paid
• Google Search Console - Free
• Ubersuggest - Free
• Bing Webmaster Tools - Free
• Keyword Hero - Free

When doing keyword research, look at how many monthly searches a term gets (search volume), how hard it is to rank for those keywords (competitive density), and if your website is currently ranking for those terms.

Funnel stage

Similar to the marketing buyer’s journey, your content can address potential leads at different stages of commitment to your services. Today, many firms (and businesses in different industries) use content to convert prospects into paying customers, from awareness to consideration to decision.

Let’s explore what this looks like in your intake management. 

1. Awareness

At the top of the funnel are the content pages that convert readers to potential clients. These may include social media posts, optimized service pages, pay-per-click advertising, or marketing emails. The content at the awareness stage should help potential clients be aware of your firm and what you can do for them.

1. Consideration

At the center of the funnel is the consideration stage. When a potential client develops an interest in your firm, the content in this stage will pull them over the fence. At this stage, the firm can engage the person with educational resources, free consultation, or follow-up email campaigns.

1. Decision 

Finally, there is the bottom of the funnel stage, where your prospects commit to your services. This is a decision-making stage where the potential client decides to use your firm's services or seek more information. Helpful content for prospects in the decision stage could be testimonials, case studies, one-on-one conversations, and content that explains why you’re their best option. 

Putting it all together: Your editorial calendar 

Content creation is never a single event but an ongoing process. Content marketing continuously demands fresh content to keep potential clients and search engines visiting your blogs or tweets. 

To do this, create a content calendar for every stage of the funnel, factoring in all personas targeted by the firm. Here’s an example of your content marketing calendar: 

Above are just a few topic ideas to educate your personas and find people that may be a good fit for your services. 

With a content marketing strategy in place, it becomes easier to keep track of the content you’ve created and keep tabs on which niches or categories need a change in strategy.

Pro tip: To brainstorm topics, consider questions and topics you’ve answered from current clients, prospects, and social media users. 

1. Write, publish and optimize your content

Creating digital marketing content is only one part of the equation. Once you’ve done the planning and writing, the next step is publishing and promoting your content to drive the results you established in step #2. 

Luckily, you can use one of the many content management systems (CMS) that provide detailed insights into how you can optimize your content for the intended audience. Your website hosting platform might already include this, or you can turn to third-party apps like Salesforce’s marketing cloud. 

Monitoring the impact of your firm’s content

Your content marketing campaign may start small, but it should grow gradually and evolve with time. 

With the right reporting and measurement tools, like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and CASEpeer, you can understand your lead sources and volume, then evaluate the impact of your content regarding the strategy used. 

Other than lead sources and closed-won clients, you can also look at important metrics like: 

• Search engine ranking positions (SERP): where is this ranking on Google, Bing, and other search engines? Page 1 (positions 1-10) are ideal, so monitor progress in Google Search Console and understand how your content is performing. 
• Click-through-rate (or conversion rate): how many page visitors are taking your desired action? Aim for a CTR around 2.5% to 5%.  
• Time on page and bounce rate. This can indicate if your audience finds your content valuable or if they jump immediately after opening your tabs. The longer your prospects spend on your page, the more valuable it is.  
• Total page views. This shows you what content is performing well and what’s not. Then, you can direct your future strategy to high-impact content. 
• Organic traffic. This tells you how many people find your content organically (through third-party search engines) and directly indicates how well your content aligns with your searcher intent. 

Over time, your firm may try different content strategies to find one that best works for each target demographic. Understand how your unique expertise as a personal injury lawyer in your geography can help answer questions and guide your readers towards what they need. 

Remember that good content is fresh and valuable. Don’t just copy and paste what’s already out there, but don’t overthink things easier -- any content is better than no content, and you can learn as you go! 

Kick start your personal injury firm’s marketing engine

While we can only give you general pointers to help you market your personal injury law firm, most hard work depends on execution. The legal market is very competitive, and getting your practice to outperform your competition takes a blend of practice management strategies. 

To learn more about marketing for your personal injury law firm, check out these resources: 

• 4 Ways to Use Email Marketing for Personal Injury Firms
• How to Calculate the ROI of Your Law Firm's Marketing Campaigns
• How Attorneys Can Use Twitter to Market Their Law Firm

About CASEpeer

CASEpeer is the leading cloud-based case management solution built for personal injury attorneys and their firms. With a turnkey solution tailored for the unique needs of personal injury law and backed by industry-leading support, your firm can onboard and hit the ground running that day. 

Gain visibility across your entire firm’s operations, from case management and calendaring to employee performance, pipelines, and profitability. Built around the feedback of successful plaintiffs’ law firms nationwide, CASEpeer provides everything your personal injury firm needs to succeed.