In 2020, the equivalent of 2.1% of the United States’ gross domestic product amounted to the settlements awarded in the mass tort legal industry. With the mass torts’ market size estimated to aggregate $443 billion, and the average mass tort settlement clocking multiple six-figure payouts per plaintiff, it’s no wonder why this industry is so competitive for personal injury law firms marketing themselves to potential clients.
Mass tort marketing presents challenges on two fronts: high cost and low reach. In this marketing guide, we’ll explore solutions to the large investment needed for mass tort marketing which may solve the other issue – raising awareness to reach all potential claimants.
Mass Tort Marketing vs Personal Injury Marketing
Mass tort marketing is applying advanced marketing techniques to gain leads and clients for a specific mass tort.
Unlike with personal injury law, in mass tort, your firm will address health issues with dozens – potentially hundreds or more – plaintiffs typically related to dangerous drugs and medical products.
Mass torts are also scalable. To grow the file, add more plaintiffs who were similarly injured. In traditional personal injury, cases are represented by injury lawyers on an individual basis.
From a marketing standpoint, mass tort marketing is far more granular than personal injury marketing. With mass torts, your firm will be speaking to an audience suffering from a specific malady (or group of injuries) caused by one dangerous product or event.
As an SEO example of mass tort marketing, one quick campaign we ran for Louthian Law Firm was for the popular hair straightener mass tort. In 3 weeks, we took their new landing page for high volume, high competition keyword [hair relaxer lawsuit] to page one of Google.
Personal injury marketing, however, is more broad. The content distribution covers an assortment of injuries under the same umbrella. For instance, an injury lawyer may promote their car accident landing page to get organic search (SEO) leads for victims searching for “car accident lawyer,” but will not distinguish whether or not they are t-bone, rear-ended, or DWI victim accidents. Instead, they’ll all fall under the broad umbrella of “car accident lawyers,” and that works for their practice.
Mass Tort Marketing Key Performance Indicators
To solve the problem of the large investment required to win in mass tort marketing as well as address reaching more potential claimants, you need to know your numbers and your market. You’ll be investing serious cash here, so knowing your KPIs is crucial for optimizing your marketing spend.
Know Your Marketing Numbers
Digital marketing has its own terminology and often confusing acronyms used to measure results, also known as key performance indicators. Know them well so you can speak well with your digital marketing specialist.
Cost per acquisition (CPA)
Cost per acquisition measures the average investment you need to acquire one lead. This is a very important metric because it shows the rate you’re getting people into your sales funnel. An acquired lead is just a step away from becoming a case, so monitor this number and compare it to your cost per case to measure how effective your marketing campaigns are. The closer your CPA is to your cost per case, the more effective your lead conversion.
Cost per click (CPC)
Cost per click (CPC) is a marketing metric that represents the price an advertiser pays every time someone clicks on their ad. Some websites, search engines, and other platforms like Google AdSense have a bidding system for setting CPC rates, where an advertiser is asked to pick the maximum amount they’re willing to pay per click.
CPC can be influenced by:
- Your bid
- Ad quality and relevance
- Search topics
- Related auctions
CPC shows you immediately how much you’re paying for advertising and how effective your ad is. It’s a high-value marketing tactic that can drive more traffic to your website, but prices vary wildly because of the bidding system.
Cost per case
“Cost per case” is simply the measurement of how much you spend to acquire a new client. This is calculated by dividing your total expenses for marketing and sales by the number of new clients you acquired within a set period (e.g. monthly, quarterly).
For example, personal injury lawyers calculate their cost per case by tallying up all the money they spent in marketing to acquire a new personal injury case. These costs include:
- Search engine optimization
- Legal directory listings
- Website development and maintenance
- Social media marketing
In a nutshell: anything you spent to reach and eventually get a new client within a month, add it up. Then divide that total by the number of cases you acquired in a month. That’s your monthly cost per case.
So if you spent $10,000 this month on marketing and advertising, and then acquired 20 new clients this month, your cost per case this month is $500.
Lifetime value of a customer (LTV)
Also known as customer lifetime value (CLV), LTV is the total revenue generated from a client over the entire duration of their relationship with your law firm. Understanding this metric helps you prioritize and retain high-quality clients.
Click-through rate (CTR)
CTR measures how many people click on your ad or link compared to the number of impressions it gets, a.k.a. The times your ad or link was seen. A high CTR indicates that your audience finds your ad convincing and effective.
Knowing Your Target Market
If your market has a cluster of infections and victims are concentrated in that area, target your digital marketing efforts there first. In the coming sections, we’ll discuss various marketing channels and strategies to get your firm’s cost per acquisition down.
Types of Mass Tort Marketing To Get Leads
Now that we’ve taken a good, hard look at the numbers and what KPIs to monitor, let’s take a deep dive into the types of mass tort marketing you can get to actually acquire leads.
Lawyer Marketing
Lawyer marketing is the set of strategies that you use to promote you and your firm’s services, attract new clients, and grow your practice. These focus on building awareness about your firm, establishing your firm’s reputation, and differentiating it from your competitors. I break down the most common lawyer marketing methods below.
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your firm’s online presence to improve its ranking and visibility on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). The better your SEO, the higher your ranking – which means you’re the first firm potential leads see when they look for useful, high-value keywords like “mass torts Florida”.
SEO is a multi-layer strategy with key components like:
- Local SEO: This optimizes your firm’s page for local searches, which is key to capturing leads within a specific area. Local SEO works on fixing up your directory listings, optimizing your Google My Business listing, and providing consistent information about your firm across all platforms.
- Keyword research: This involves identifying relevant keywords and phrases that your target audience is entering into search engines. Keyword research needs deep knowledge of legal topics, concerns, and questions that are most important to your potential leads.
- Link building: This is about getting high-quality websites (like legal directories or journals) to link to your website. The more sites that link back to your website, the more trustworthy and useful it is to search engines so your ranking on pages is boosted.
Not only does SEO have a lower cost per case than other forms of marketing, but its lead quality is typically higher than other forms too. Because your audience is directed to your firm’s page through their own searches, there’s already a funneling-off of lower-quality leads.
Whoever is looking up your firm or the types of services it offers in their area is signalling a strong intent to get legal help. Combine this with making sure every call or message, and you’ll drive up your client acquisition.
Leads are generated organically instead of being paid ads, which makes your law firm more likely to be trusted and hired. But note that SEO can take time to build and ramp up unless you already have a stellar website – patience is key to getting the best results.
Meta Ads
Meta ads insert your law firm’s ads into Facebook and Instagram user feeds. Basically, every time they scroll through these platforms, your ad shows up. A Meta Ads campaign is pretty cheap and generates lots of leads, with a low cost per case – but it also generates lower-quality leads.
To ramp up Meta Ads conversion to cases, you need to really nurture leads. Your law firm’s intake process needs to be flawless, with every call, email, and message answered and follow-ups made regularly. If needed, you may have to consider double-tapping (calling a lead twice) instead of just attempting contact once.
It’s a lot of constant monitoring. True, leads are cheaper, but without a solid intake process, you may just be throwing money into a hole.
Google Ads
Google Ads is the online advertising platform developed by Google, allowing businesses to display their ads on its SERPs and its advertising network which includes websites and mobile apps. They can be different types like text ads, video ads, and app promotion ads. I’ll focus on three of the biggest and most relevant types to legal marketing:
- Content Display Network: This is Google’s network of websites, apps, and video platforms where you can display your ads. It’s one of the world’s largest online advertising networks. Using this, your ads can appear on websites that are relevant to your target audience or based on unique criteria. This is highly effective for targeting potential leads based on keywords, demographics, interests, and topics.
- Google Search Ads: These text-based ads appear on search engine pages after you perform a search on Google. A search ad consists of a headline, a description, and a display URL. While they’re displayed along organic results, they’re marked with an “Ad” label to distinguish them. They’re very useful because they let you reach leads at the very moment they’re searching for words or phrases related to your law firm and its services.
- YouTube Video Ads: Exactly what it says on the label, this is when you run video ads on YouTube, Google’s video platform. With over 2.7 billion active users, running video ads on YouTube creates awareness of your company for a massive audience.
Fair warning: while Google Ads are highly effective and scalable to your campaign specs and budget, they’re pretty expensive. This option is reserved for heavy hitters who want to swing for the fences and crush their competition – a low budget won’t cut it.
Case Acquired Deals
With case acquired deals, your law firm works with digital marketing specialists to attract and convert leads. The specialists handle finding the leads and bringing them to your firm, then your firm takes care of closing the lead and converting them into a client.
Note that in this type of arrangement, the market doesn’t get splitting fees. They only get a flat fee – not a portion of what you earn from each acquired case.
Lead Generation Packages
You may consider buying lead generation services from agencies to find potential clients most interested in your services. Agencies like Walker Advertising and 4 Legal Leads offer customizable targeting through campaigns using TV, radio, live events, and other strategies.
While it can be good in a pinch when you need to find high-quality leads ASAP, it’s too expensive to be practical, especially in the long run as it can cost up to thousands per lead.
Media Buying
Media buying is when you directly buy ads on popular websites. Instead of buying ad space on search engines like Google, you buy ads from the site owners by setting how many times your ad will be displayed on their site or how long it’ll be displayed.
Because you’re cutting out the middle man, it’s a much more affordable way to reach people who may be interested in your law firm. Just make sure you know which sites you should be advertising on and find good placements to maximize your spend here.
For example, let’s say you’re planning mass tort marketing for Camp Lejeune mass tort cases. Because the target audience is plaintiffs who lived at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune between 1953 and 1987 and experienced health issues, your target sites for media buying should be North Carolina-based sites. Likewise, mass tort marketing for
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a long-term strategy that involves creating and sharing valuable content to attract your target audience. The primary goal of content marketing is to increase brand awareness and acquire more clients. Examples of content marketing are:
- Press releases
- Blogging
- Organic video content
- Organic social media
- Email distribution
- SMS
- Webinars
Sharing useful, entertaining content may sound like a surefire way to get clients, but in reality, you’re pouring your efforts into an area where you’re going to get beaten by more highly funded, aggressive marketing.
Avoid spending on fluff and focus only on creating bottom-of-funnel, transactional content that converts leads to paying customers. Anything less than that is a waste of time and resources.
Traditional Mass Tort Marketing
Traditional mass tort marketing includes these old-school strategies, many of which are not digital and have been used to generate leads for decades.
Over The Top (OTT)
Over-the-top (OTT) ads are ads on streaming platforms and services accessed by devices connected to the Internet, like mobile phones, laptops, and smart TVs. Some OTT ads are in-video, playing before, during, or after you’ve watched content. Others are pop-ups or banners displayed on-screen while you’re watching.
Running OTT ads on popular streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime can give your law firm a serious edge. We spend an average of three hours and nine minutes a day streaming digital media, and Americans pay for roughly 2.9 streaming subscriptions every month. With all those eyeballs regularly watching content, running ads on these platforms will improve your firm’s discoverability and audience awareness.
Network TV Advertising
An old-school way to advertise, network TV ads build a deeper connection of trust with your audience. With the sheer number of online ads, some may find it a relief to be able to put a face to the law firm name they see for a change.
While it gives your firm a lot more trust, I wouldn’t recommend network TV advertising. 52% of consumers tune out TV ads – and this number is rising. More people are streaming too, with 99% of U.S. households subscribed to a streaming service while U.S. cable TV viewers declined from 76% in 2015 to 56% in 2021. If you want to establish trust and improve your reach in a similar way but with better results, consider OTT ads instead.
Radio Ads
Radio ads reach a station’s audience by playing audio advertisements during its timeslots. This connects your law firm to a specific station and helps you reach a large local audience of loyal listeners.
Radio ads may boost awareness about your firm, but they lack targeting and detailed data to measure their effectiveness. If you want the benefits of radio ads but with better cost-efficiency and more features, consider digital audio advertising through AudioGo.
73% of people consumed digital audio in 2022, compared to a mere 38% who consumed radio. Apart from reaching a wider audience, AudioGo helps you reach your targets by location (state, DMA, city, county, zip code), age, gender, device, music/radio genres, and other interests. Because of digital audio’s wide range of content, real-time reporting, and precise targeting, AudioGo will give you more bang for your buck than radio ads.
Billboards
Billboards reach a large number of drivers and pedestrians every day, especially when placed along busy highways, streets, or other high-traffic areas. Because they’re visible 24/7, they continuously advertise to your target audience.
Static billboards made of printed vinyl have a fixed image or message set on them, while digital billboards use LED or other display technology to show content that can be changed remotely and quickly.
Unlike static billboards, digital billboards can display videos or animation. You can also show multiple ads on a digital billboard. If you’re considering billboard advertising, Lamar Advertising is a trusted nationwide provider you can contact for your campaign.
Trust An Expert To Jumpstart Your Mass Tort Marketing – Let’s Talk
With mass tort cases, you need to grab every single lead you can get – but it can be tough to convince people to join a case where the burden of proof is on them. Every year, there are 39.5 million personal injury cases that require medical treatment in the U.S., but very few file a claim, with just 3 to 4% of personal injury cases even making it to trial.
What you need is an experienced mass tort marketing specialist to turn those “nos” and “maybes” into acquired cases. Hire me to crush the competition on the search ranking pages and get as many mass tort leads as possible.
You’ve seen what I can do to take just one of my many satisfied clients to the top of a Google page. Contact me and let’s kickstart a plan to convert mass tort leads for your firm.