The injury lawyer marketing space is wide open right now. Fortunes are being won and lost every month. I know firms that are broke, I know firms that are going broke but don’t know it yet, and alternatively I know firms that are getting filthy rich.
Maybe no industry relied on the phone book like the injury law industry, and lawyers in general. When people in the 80s, 90s, and the early 2000s needed a lawyer, they popped open the phone book and ring ring off they went. But when the internet and Google took off in the 2000s, the game changed.
The phone book died. And Google grew up into a giant. Google is the new phone book. Google is the place people go when they need a lawyer now, and if you’re an injury lawyer that is serious about making money and generating leads, then you need to get serious about Google.
Google AdWords is the best way to generate injury leads. And beyond just overall injury leads, you can also niche down inside of AdWords and focus on some of the most valuable injury leads, which are the car accident leads.
Injury lawyers love car accident leads. And running a Google AdWords campaign is the best way to generate car accident leads. If you have a highly skilled AdWords expert like myself running your campaigns, then you quickly find yourself in the envious position of drowning in car accident leads. All day long the phone will ring with people who have been injured in a car accident who need legal help. Here are six tips on how to make the most of these car accident leads.
Answer The Phone
Believe it or not, an alarmingly large amount of law firms are rather laissez-faire about answering every single call they get from their lead generation campaigns. This is self-sabotage at its ugliest.
Lead generation activity, like running a Google AdWords campaign, when run successfully, leads to a lot of, well, leads. And those leads come in the form of contact form completions and also phone calls. And of course getting someone to call your law firm and getting on the phone with them instantly is more valuable than getting contact form completions. But the key thing about getting these incredibly valuable phone calls is that you actually have to answer the phone!
I’ve seen law firms with missed call rates during business hours of 10%, 25%, and even 30%. Missing this many phone calls is the equivalent of taking money out of your wallet and lighting it on fire.
Ideally a missed call rate of 0% is what you should be achieving. Anything above missing one or two calls per one hundred is a serious problem. And when you do happen to miss a call for whatever reason, you need to call that person back right away.
Getting car accident leads from Google AdWords works. But in order for it to work as well as it can, you need to answer all your calls and strive for a 0% missed call rate. People searching for a car accident lawyer are not usually brand or firm driven. They are often scared, confused, in a rush, and just looking for help. As soon as you miss their call, they’re going right back to Google and trying the next guy. Take your phone calls seriously. Always answer the phone.
Have A Good Intake System
When you do answer the car accident calls that your lead generation campaign brings in, you need to have a good intake system in place. You need to have a great phone system, clear lines, and a highly trained intake staff.
I’ve seen small-time lawyers run campaigns routing calls to their personal cell phones and that kind of behavior just doesn’t cut it. No one wants to listen to you navigate traffic with bad reception while they’re trying to find someone to help them with their injuries, medical bills, and dealings with the insurance company.
If you’re running a lead generation campaign you need to have a clear phone line, dedicated intake staff to handle those calls, and the intake staff needs to be highly and effectively trained at handling car accident phone calls.
Show Empathy
Speaking of your intake staff’s training, one thing they need to do with the accident lead phone calls they get is to be empathic. Lawyers and intake staff at injury law firms can quickly become numb to the day to day realities of car accidents. The lawyers and staff at injury law firms have seen it all and they’ve seen it all thousands of times. Nothing shocks or surprises them anymore. When they deal with car accident cases, from the benign to the horrific, on a daily basis for years, no one car accident story means that much anymore to them. And that’s natural and that makes sense.
However, for the caller on the other end of the phone looking for a lawyer to help them with their car accident case, their car accident is a hugely big deal. Car accidents don’t happen often in people’s lives, and getting hurt or seeing a loved one hurt in a car accident is a traumatic experience. Not to mention the trauma inducing hassle of all the stuff that comes along with a car accident, like dealing with the other driver, dealing with insurance companies, losing a vehicle, medical bills, missing work, and on and on and on. Car accidents suck, and getting in one can be a traumatic experience.
Because car accidents are traumatic, your intake staff needs to show empathy to the leads you bring in. People looking for a car accident need help, and they need help now. People want to be listened to, they want to be taken seriously, and they want to be helped. Your intake staff listening to people, taking their concerns seriously, and being empathic will go a long way towards your firm making the most of the car accident leads you bring in.
Have A Sense of Urgency
Being empathic does not mean that your intake staff needs to be dumb. Let’s not forget, we’re not running a free advice line here. This is about signing up quality cases and making money.
When you successfully run a lead generation campaign, you will get tons of car accident calls every day. And since you’ll be getting so many calls, your intake staff will get stretched thin.
In order to deal with the call volume, your intake staff needs to act with a sense of urgency on two fronts. First, they need to sniff out if the caller has a good case, and then secondly, they need to sign the case. As Alec Baldwin said, coffee’s for closers, and your intake staff better like drinking coffee.
Your intake staff, while still being emphatic, needs to sniff out whether the caller has a good case that your firm wants to take. They need to quickly determine things like which party was at fault, did the caller sustain any injuries, does the other driver have insurance, etc. The intake staff needs to quickly find out whether the caller has a case you want.
If the caller doesn’t have a good case, the intake staff should quickly get off the phone and free up themself and the line, but if the caller does have a good case, then the intake staff should quickly sign up the case. This point is crucial. People searching Google for a car accident lawyer are looking to get help and get help fast. They want to become your client. They don’t want to be told you’ll consider their case and get back to them. As soon as your intake staff says “thanks, we’ll get back to you soon” the lead is going to go back to Google and start calling other firms. Act with a sense of urgency and sign up your quality leads as fast as possible. And the same thing goes with people who fill out contact forms on your website. Call them immediately, find out if they have a good case, and then sign them up.
Target The Right Keywords
Getting quality leads that have good cases is all about targeting the right keywords. The beautiful thing about Google is that people tell you what they need. And all you have to do is target the right search terms and get in front of the right people.
Don’t target general keywords like lawyers, law firms near me, or work injury attorneys. Instead, you need to niche down to the exact searches you need to be found on like car accident lawyers, auto accident attorneys, car wreck lawyers, and accident attorneys. These car accident and accident heavy searches are going to be the searches that bring in the quality car accident leads.
Use Negative Keywords
Alternatively, you need to know what search terms to block your ads from showing on by using negative keywords. You need to block your ads from showing on the basic negative keywords a car accident lawyer campaign should have like divorce, real estate, law school, etc.
But you should also go a step further and block out the accident-related searches that you could show up on but that won’t bring in good cases, like non injury, at fault, property damage, no insurance, etc. Using these negative keywords can block searches you don’t want to get calls from because the search user will mostly likely have a bad case, like car accident lawyer I was at fault, accident attorney for property damage, or other driver doesn’t have insurance I need a lawyer. Those kinds of searches will bring in low quality calls and you want to block your ads from showing up on those related but not relevant searches.
Google is the new phone book. And injury law firms that can successfully run Google AdWords campaigns can drown in accident leads like the old phone book advertisers used to. When run effectively, there is no competition for AdWords as a lead generation source for car accident leads. You can’t beat getting in front of people looking for a car accident lawyer at the exact time they’re looking. Running a Google AdWords campaign will get you leads. I hope this article helps you make the most out of those leads.
