Mass Tort Marketing: Best Practices for Attorneys
This is the third post of a three-article series related to working in the legal field of mass torts. In our first article, we addressed how to build a mass tort practice. In our second article, we addressed the pitfalls of working in mass torts. Be sure to check out all the articles for helpful guidance on mass torts, legal intake and marketing in this important field.
So, you’ve decided to start a mass torts practice. You’ve entered a valuable field that can help injured people hold negligent companies accountable. How do you market and grow your new practice?
Marketing a mass torts practice differs from marketing “standard” personal injury or class action practices. You need to approach your marketing with the specific needs of mass tort clients in mind. Here’s what you need to know about how to market a mass tort law firm, the ethics of mass tort marketing, and best practices for your mass tort strategy.
The Timing of Reaching Potential Tort Clients
One of the most important elements of reaching new clients is timing. Mass tort lawsuits take time. A mass tort lawsuit can take months or years to reach completion, so it’s vital to start marketing early so litigation with potential clients can begin timely. Furthermore, multiple law offices may be litigating mass torts for the same event. Once firms start educating potential leads about their eligibility for a mass tort, these people may start doing their own research to find the right attorney, so getting to potential clients early and receiving a signed retainer quickly is essential. Ideally, you want to be the first firm to market your services for a specific tort.
When you’re the first (or one of the first) attorneys educating clients about a mass tort or the first to appear in search engine results for a topic, leads are more likely to choose your firm simply because there aren’t as many competitors. If you back up your first-to-market advertising with a fast intake process, you’ll retain this advantage even after other firms start litigating the same tort.
The Ethics of Connecting with Mass Tort Clients
People with mass tort claims have already been harmed. You should take steps to ensure you don’t harm them further. That means that you need to take extra care.
The biggest ethical hurdle for mass tort firms may be the line between paying for leads and paying for referrals. Many law practices will pay for mass tort lead generation services that provide the contact information of potential clients. This is generally seen as ethical, because the attorney still needs to gain the client through normal means. Paying for non-attorney referrals of guaranteed clients is not ethical. Be sure to confirm your State Bar’s rules.
What Messages Work Best?
The biggest hurdle to bringing in new mass tort leads is that clients don’t realize they have a case. The average person isn’t watching legal news or paying attention to product recalls. They need to be informed about how their illness or injury ties back to a particular product or event. If you educate your audience about their potential claims through your marketing, you’ve already completed half the battle.
Simply letting people know about a mass tort opportunity isn’t enough, however. You should also show them how you can help them. With mass torts, there’s no upfront cost to the client. Many of those who qualify to file mass tort claims don’t have the means to hire an attorney. If you let them know that they’ll face no financial risk, they realize they have nothing to lose. That can be enough to convince many leads to contact your practice and begin their litigation journey.
Testimonials also provide a strong marketing message for mass torts. Some people feel like filing a mass tort is “too good to be true” because there’s no financial risk to them. Testimonials can help you build trust among your audience by reassuring them that your practice is genuine and you’re not taking advantage of them.
The Four Best Marketing Tactics for Mass Tort Practices
So, what strategies work best for marketing your mass tort practice? Remember, you want to put your ads in front of the broadest possible audience and encourage people to contact you before any other attorney. To accomplish this, consider these four marketing methods.
1. TV Commercials
One of the hallmarks of the mass tort strategy is the television ad. There’s a good reason these ads work so well: they reach a lot of people. You can quickly educate many people on the subject of a mass tort, giving them the chance to reach out to you for help.
Of course, modern TV ads aren’t as effective as they used to be. Just 52% of adults aged 30-49 and 31% of 18-29 regularly watch television. With many younger people ignoring television in favor of streaming services, your audience for television ads will skew older. Still, if your mass tort primarily affects older people, the television ad is a great way to reach them.
2. YouTube and Streaming Ads
Just because TV isn’t as popular as it once was doesn’t mean that video ads are dying, because you can neatly transition your TV ads onto streaming services. Like a TV ad, a streaming service ad can educate a wide variety of people in a short time. However, these streaming ads reach a generally younger audience. For any mass tort that heavily affects younger people, streaming is a natural choice for advertising.
You can also target people more precisely through streaming. For example, if you were litigating the RoundUp mass tort, you could place your ads with gardening podcasts.
3. PPC Ads
The advent of the Internet has made it much easier than ever to reach specific demographics. PPC (pay-per-click) ads let you get your message in front of people who are likely to care about it. You can use platforms like Google Ads to place your ads on relevant pages. You only pay for the ads that users engage with, which makes this one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing available.
4. SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of helping your website rank higher in search engine results pages. 75% of all Internet users don’t scroll past the first page of results. Furthermore, 96% of all people looking for legal advice and help will start their search online. That means that if you’re trying to connect with potential leads, getting your website at the top of the results is critical
Excellent methods of improving your SEO include:
- Making your website mobile-friendly
- Implementing content marketing through helpful blog articles and resources
- Prioritizing relevant long-tail keywords for the mass torts you’re litigating (“RoundUp poisoning help” instead of “lawyer” or “mass tort”)
Branding: Is It Important?
A common question attorneys new to marketing their mass tort practice ask is whether a brand matters. While many practices benefit from a legal brand (such as divorce attorneys or personal injury firms), mass tort practices do not.
Why? It all comes back to the educational nature of mass tort marketing. People rarely second-guess whether they need a divorce or car accident attorney, and they tend to choose the firm whose name they remember. However, with mass torts, people don’t understand the case. Your brand is less important than your ability to educate people about their ability to make a claim. People won’t think to reach out to even the best-branded firm if they don’t know they’re eligible.
Instead, focus on education. Teach people that they have a case, and they’ll come to you.
Location Marketing and Mass Torts
Many attorneys have begun focusing on local marketing both online and off. A local marketing strategy focuses on putting your messages in front of clients in your geographic area. For mass tort lawyers, this may or may not be effective.
On the one hand, mass tort clients may exist anywhere in the country. Limiting your marketing to local, traditional forms of advertising prevents you from reaching this wide range of clients. If you’re first to the table to market your services for a specific mass tort opportunity, local marketing is less of a priority.
On the other hand, local marketing becomes more critical once you’ve established your marketing campaigns and other firms target the same mass torts. Make it clear where your firm is located and use your location as an SEO keyword. Google and other search engines take a searcher’s location into account when ordering results. Someone searching for a mass tort attorney in Fort Wayne is likely to see pages from both nationwide and local firms at the top of their search. If your practice is smaller, local marketing can help you be seen among larger national practices.
Start Mass Tort Marketing Today
Mass tort law is a helpful, valuable field to enter if you can successfully market your practice. Far too many customers fail to realize that they could receive compensation for their injuries. When it comes to growing your mass tort practice, education is your edge. By focusing your marketing on educating and building trust, you can help these people take back control. Tapping into a portfolio of legal marketing services like those offered by MA can complement your approach on gaining new mass tort cases and clients.
If you want to learn more about mass torts, get more details by reading the other two articles in this series:
