Best way to market attorney services?

[Veridian]

I am thinking online advertising; I'm not really interested in billboards or commercials at the moment and no one seems to look at phone books anymore lol...I'm hoping to find something that is somewhat affordable for a personal injury law firm. Suggestions?? Thanks!

[Jake]

Internet advertising does provide individualized ad targeting not available in mass media, you in particularly need well targeted ad placement in competitive bid environments like the quite effective Google self serve Adwords system, ridiculous bidding by doctors and lawyers for high paying hot keywords like mesothelioma have driven click costs to over $50, while a click on a low profit keyword search like Mittens might cost $0.35, this inflated pricing unique to your profession might make Adwords not cost effective, non the less there are fist time user vouchers for $50-$100 in circulation that might make an experiment worthwhile. Google search ads give the best conversion, but in your case using their ad network of publisher sites might be more cost effective, you can select specific sites or individual pages where you want your text or banner image ad to appear, this could be for example next to a legal advice article. There are many other 'ad networks' that place ads on a number of participating sites, you may not be able to select the specific sites in some cases, generally you will get geo targeting whereby you can only have ads shown to people within a certain radius of your location, this is vitally important when using a media that covers the globe.
Facebook paid ads are another possibility, you have very good demographic targeting information allowing for tailored ads. In addition to age, gender, marriage status, you can target some expressed 'interests' and can target employees of larger companies. There are also first to vouchers available, you will find web site hosts often including these as bonuses.
To get your feet wet for as little as $10 a month you can place a banner ad on a web site of your choice on te banner broker site BuySellAds.com, often one has to test different traffic sources to find those that convert to sales, generally the web site page that an ad sends people is an integral part of the sales process, Google actually assigns a quality score ad-landing page combinations, a page that delivers what the ad promises, at least as far as expanding on the original message provides a better user experience and earns lower click costs. You could just have a free page with pre-sell and contact info that the ad sends people, I believe Google allows phone numbers in their pay per click ads so now and than you get a prospect without paying, but having a landing page is standard procedure.

There are services that provide leads, one common form worth learning about is CPA (Cost Per Action) promotions in which you only pay when a prospect takes a particular action, as simple as filling in a Zip code or as complex as filling in a multi page loan application. Multiple CPA marketers produce their own ads, etc to drive people to the offer. This is often geared for large scale promotions, some 98% of the literature online will be aimed at the marketers and not the product sellers, it's a bit hard to find info for your side of it you would probably directly contact the various CPA Network sites.