The work of a personal injury lawyer is far from mundane. Each case presents its own unique set of challenges and can be rewarding in various ways. To the lawyer, a win is a victory, but to the successful plaintiff, a win is a step towards healing and the return to some semblance of normalcy.
Universal internet marketing goals are twofold: to instill a sense of awareness and confidence in your visitors and to cause them to answer any calls to action through engagement or eventual purchase. Emotional appeals are an effective and often underutilized tool for internet marketing strategy. Diction is an important ally for the creation and maintenance of an effective emotional marketing strategy – your word choice has the power to resonate with prospects and impact their actions.
When creating effective internet marketing – whether it’s your social media outreach, your contact management or your website text – it’s important to leave the lawyer mindset and approach the text as if you were a client or a prospective client. The conveyance of strength and support without sounding overly self-aggrandizing is a difficult line to walk, but an important distinction to make if you want to establish immediate trust in your prospects and allow them to feel comfortable and empowered when they make the decision to contact your firm.
Pretend for a moment that you’re not an attorney. Visit your own website – you’re a prospective plaintiff or concerned family member. As badly as you want to heal, you want more than that. You want revenge, but you’re not sure about that – revenge isn’t always an admirable desire.
Of course, few attorneys would ever be so crass as to call it revenge, but on some base level, your client understands that part of entering a legal proceeding is rooted in their innate instinct to fight back. As their attorney, you are, in some ways, their chosen champion. It’s easy to forget that when you’re slogging through mountains of paperwork, but it’s essential to convey a message of strength and protection at the outset.
The prospect’s first website visit is the most important one. It is at that time that the prospect is the most hesitant and potentially the most vulnerable. The employment of an emotional marketing strategy at any point will allow the client to feel supported without requiring any additional action on the part of the attorney or firm.
The home page must remain well organized, without excess visual clutter or loud videos that may distract from the initial impression. Your website visitors will want to be easily directed to the information they seek – but it’s imperative that your website text lead them to the information, rather than assuming that if they are willing to search, they’ll eventually find what they’re looking for.
Lay the path out for them by utilizing an easily navigable site structure. Offer a free consultation, if your firm offers one. The web chat function can be very helpful, if the staff assigned are knowledgeable and timely with their responses. It offers prospects a way to speak to your firm without having to take the potentially nerve wracking step of making that initial phone call.
An opening paragraph about your firm will be an important establishment of confidence, competence and expertise. This may be your only opportunity to speak to your client – if they don’t like what they see on the home page before they scroll, chances are likely that you’ll lose them. In that paragraph, or the initial appearance of “About Us” text on a clearly marked and easily accessible page, you should stress your commitment to the client, highlight your successes and express a level of inspiring confidence. It’s difficult, but when done properly, this effort will significantly increase your conversion rates and lead to a high level of sustainable client confidence.
The standard businesslike approach must also be palliated by a sense of emotional intelligence – whether it’s your first point of contact at the firm exuding nothing but fierce kindness or your social media pages highlighting a firm-wide volunteer weekend, people will respond to the content that resonates with them on an emotional level. Memory is tied to emotional responses, so creating and establishing firm awareness rests on your ability to create a positive or stirring emotional response.
Remember that every prospective client comes to your site or social media page with differing needs – it may be necessary to reiterate certain key emotional appeals in several ways in order to strike a chord with each visitor. It may seem like overkill, but the visitor will likely only retain the appeal that speaks to them directly and forget that you stressed your care for your clients or your success in trial several other ways.
An example of this would be stressing your commitment to the client: you may express your desire for justice in a way to appeal to those who are feeling wronged but also to those who may be seeking revenge; a sentence about dedication will appeal to prospects who value loyalty; high-lighting ways in which you go above and beyond the Call of Duty will seem admirable to those who have high regard for the dedicated.
You may also wish to highlight your attorneys by providing a bit of personal information about them, within reason. In addition to professional awards and additional certifications, the inclusion of community involvement can go a long way in establishing a relationship between attorney and client. Pictures and information about their education and accomplishments can be made more relatable by offering information about their hobbies. No extensive levels of pageantry are needed, but humanizing your attorneys will go a long way in establishing a relatable champion dynamic.
You want to create a sense of approachability, remembering that your client may not have worked with an attorney or the legal system before and may be wholly intimidated by the prospect of filing suit. By posting pictures of your firm dressed professionally and engaging in professional actions, you command the respect and admiration of your prospects. By allowing a bit of levity, you humanize yourself to the client – you’re not actually exposing anything too personal, but you’ve cultivated a small sense of camaraderie that will help instill confidence in your clients.
Social media provides an additional opportunity for increasing awareness of your firm and the injection of emotion into your marketing strategy. Social media is by nature less formal than traditional forms of marketing, and you can provide a broad array of content for followers that runs the gamut from serious to light-hearted. While social media content cultivation has become dreadfully difficult, a successful marketing strategy allows for a blend of firm-related press, firm-authored articles, human-interest postings, topical news, and other posts that display the firm’s personality. This blend establishes a rapport between the client or prospect and the firm itself, long before the client ever makes contact with the firm.
Injecting emotion into a marketing strategy can seem daunting and in truth is difficult to execute properly, but the emotional appeal is more likely to help convert prospects than a marketing strategy that relies too heavily on information and not enough on concern for the client. When weaving emotion into marketing efforts, concern yourself with the needs of the client. This awareness allows your content to remain authoritative and informative while simultaneously projecting a call to action that resonates with clients.
