Diversifying marketing budgets across platforms is good. Just like investing, you shouldn’t stick all of your money into one “basket.” You should have one marketing goal for marketing a personal injury law firm across multiple platforms.
What does this mean?
Let’s take a real world example of doing it the wrong way.
Joe Starter, PI Attorney starts a social media campaign for your personal injury law firm. What’s the goal? More clients, of course. So he hires a social media expert. This social media expert has helped some big names get more business. Names like McDonald’s, Toys R’ Us and Kmart are part of his social media expert list. Joe learned the hard way that hiring the college student with 30,000 followers on Twitter is not a good idea so he spent some serious money on a social media expert.
Joe then decides to do a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign. What’s the goal? More car accident cases! Joe wants some serious accident cases with big insurance policies behind it. Joe will take rear end cases with some soft tissue damage, too. So Joe decides to have his assistant manage the PPC campaign. He can select keywords like “Personal Injury Attorney” and “Car Accident Attorney.”
Joe then decides to do an search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. He hires an SEO company. Once again, Joe has been burned in the past. Joe vets an accomplished SEO company that is local, so he can walk into their office if there’s not results. Joe dumps a ton of money into being #1 on Google for “Personal Injury Attorney” in his medium sized town – and he gets there.
He receives a few phone calls and a case or two, so Joe decides to start a new website. He finds a couple of amazing attorney websites from law firms that are rocking it in his area. He hires a local web designer and they build him a beautiful site. It looks great on mobile.
Joe gets a couple more clients. That’s great, right?
But Joe is hurting his business in a major way. What were his goals? Never did he mention type or size of client, except in a fleeting thought during his PPC campaign.
How would Joe know if someone saw all of his campaigns? He wouldn’t! Joe is losing out by not using repetition in his marketing campaign. He has no pointed message. His marketing budget is spread too thin. While he might be getting a couple of clients now, competition will increase. Joe could reinvest that money the same way and completely lose out.
What does Joe have in common with personal injury law firms throughout the United States? He has no set goals; he’s just slapping money on marketing.
Focused Goals Allow For Repetition of Message
What does repetition have to do with it? Seeing the same message over and over again makes prospective clients much more comfortable. Seeing a precisely pointed message increases conversion rate.
Let’s look at it from a different standpoint. If you were facing surgery on your foot, you would be more likely to hire a surgeon that keeps speaking about the specific type of surgery you need. It comforts you because he is speaking about your specific type of surgery. That does not mean that this guy is not good at other types of foot surgery. In fact, he might discuss other types of foot surgery elsewhere, but you ignored that because it was not relevant.
“If you are going to take Vienna, take Vienna.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
What does Joe Starter have in common with Napoleon? It’s not that he is the most hated man of his time. Joe is greedy. He is battling on too many fronts with the goal of world domination. Joe wants it all right now and can end up getting nothing.
Don’t battle on too many fronts with your marketing. Decide to focus in one area. You can list as many as you want on your site, but focusing on one practice area will help you find your ideal clients. Like I told you before, personal injury attorneys without ideal clients are seriously wasting marketing dollars!
Set common goals across your marketing teams. If you are going to “Take Major Car Accidents,” take major car accidents in your area.
If you have a larger marketing budget, spread it across campaigns – NOT platforms. Instead of saying, “I’ll spend $5000 per month on PPC and $3000 on SEO,” focus on campaigns (“car accident attorney”) first and then platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc).