Why Your Content Is Turning Off Potential Clients
At Lawfty Law, we constantly strive to understand our audiences better. Every time we draft and publish a piece of content, we first ask ourselves for whom it’s intended: tech investors, potential clients (whether personal injury or mass tort victims), or partner firms. We then imagine what that audience’s concerns are. What information do they value? How can we draw them into the story we’re trying to tell? What do they really want and need?
Sadly, we don’t see many law firms doing the same thing when blogging, writing, or recording video for potential clients. In fact, there’s a huge disconnect between what goes through a potential client’s mind when they’re searching for a personal injury attorney and how lawyers describe their services. While it’s unfortunate, it’s also completely natural that this happens. The law is an intense and all-consuming profession. Lawyers are so deeply immersed in the law, their cases, writing and drafting motions, and spending so much time with other lawyers, that we don’t realize we actually have a solipsistic and law-centric way of talking. In laypersons’ terms, we’re super awkward.
When someone is in trouble and desperate for help, they don’t want super awkward. They want relatable.
In this article we’re going to explore some of the most egregious examples of personal injury lawyer content marketing that fail to connect with potential clients’ wants and needs, and explore why it’s absolutely necessary to partner with someone who has enough emotional intelligence to bridge the gap between legalese and the layperson.
Your Qualifications Are Tangential
So many personal injury attorney websites begin with a focus on the attorneys’ qualifications that you’d think the profession was bursting at the seams with experts who have won multi-million dollar cases. Personal injury attorneys talk about their trial certifications, their settlement amounts, where they went to law school and the states in which they’re admitted to practice law as if they were talking to a colleague — without asking themselves if potential clients understand or care.
Lawfty has reviewed thousands of calls to our dedicated intake staff and paralegals, and one question we’re never asked is, “What are the qualifications of the attorney who will take my case?”
Imagine yourself in the place of someone who’s contemplating hiring an attorney on a contingency fee basis. This option is attractive for people who have been living paycheck to paycheck — they have hardly enough savings to weather the crisis they’re facing. They probably don’t know many attorneys personally and can’t afford to hire an attorney hourly or on a retainer fee basis. What difference does your year of graduation from law school make to someone who’s losing income because they can’t work, struggling with constant pain, and trying to put food on the table?
It’s vital to know what a potential client actually does worry about when they’ve been injured — and why your blog articles, on page content, and pay-per-click ad text all have to speak to those concerns instead of bragging about where you went to school, how many millions of dollars you recovered, or whatever certifications your firm may have.
Your Legalese is Boring
If an attorney realizes that bragging about their qualifications isn’t the way to win new clients, they often try to explain complex legal issues to potential clients as a way of indirectly proving their expertise and putting the potential client at ease. The problem with this approach is that after years of learning the law and practicing as an attorney, many lawyers forget that laypeople have absolutely no clue what they’re talking about.
I sat in once on a webinar related to a mass torts case. I was curious to see how a law firm was leveraging live video education to attract more clients, and I thought maybe they had caught onto something Lawfty Law had missed. The attorneys leading the webinar spent the first thirty minutes reviewing judicial standing for plaintiffs to proceed with their cases in federal district court…
And I was utterly bored out of my mind. I’m a graduate of the Yale Law school and someone who passed the California State Bar Exam, and the only reason I was sitting in was to see if law firms can effectively leverage live media. I wanted to leave that stunningly dry, legalese-infected webinar as soon as possible. Imagine what an average person with no legal knowledge would have done.
Again, it’s absolutely important to consider what prospective clients really care about. If your firm operates on a contingency fee basis, consider the type of person to whom that arrangement makes the most economic sense. Would someone in pain, or in a desperate situation, really understand or care about legal issues? Before they’ve entered into an attorney-client relationship with you, will they even have the patience to understand what you’re talking about?
Emotional Intelligence: What Potential Clients Really Want
What potential clients really want are answers to their most urgent questions in a way that speaks to them naturally and authentically. Based on thousands of calls we’ve received over the years, the most common questions we get from the inquiries that actually turn into signed cases are:
- How do I cover my expenses? How am I going to pay my bills?
- Am I a bad person for suing?
- Will my insurance view this as a bad mark against me?
- Will I actually get to speak with an attorney?
At the core of each of these questions, the following fears and concerns are the biggest: economic pressures, guilt over suing, and whether one’s own attorney actually cares or is simply treating the case as a cash cow. What Lawfty and Lawfty Law do with these questions is easy — we adapt them to each of our practice areas in a way that speaks to the potential client’s actual concern. We do this across all levels of our practice: in PPC ad text, in blog posts, and on our law firm landing page.
Why You Can’t Be An Effective Lawyer and Marketer At the Same Time
The reason why so few personal injury firms get content right is simple: being an effective advocate for your clients requires a laser-like focus on their cases. Investing time and energy into content marketing requires interviewing hundreds of potential clients to understand their motivations, then fleshing out a content calendar, and drafting that content in a completely different voice than if you were writing a brief or filing a motion. It’s a change in mindset and style that’s close to impossible to make for anyone who’s simultaneously immersed in their legal practice.
That’s why it’s important to partner with the right specialists in legal marketing and case generation technology. If your law firm’s branding is turning off potential clients, your firm may be losing thousands of dollars in misguided ad spend and lost opportunities to sign cases. Lawfty and Lawfty Law offer partnerships with a select group of partner firms, signed to geographic exclusivity, from around the nation. If you’re interested in working with us, reach out now.
