There are several sectors who spend a lot of budget on marketing and advertising in local markets. These include auto dealerships, retail stores and restaurants, and banks and credit unions. Law firms and attorneys are no exception. It is critical for personal injury lawyers to be top-of-mind because consideration and choice of a personal injury lawyer are event-driven.
When I get injured, who do I contact? Personal injury lawyers want to be at the top of this list and this is why lots of advertising dollars go into television, radio, and digital advertisements.
However, personal injury lawyers often struggle to understand their true brand identity, perception, reason(s) consumers would or would not choose their firm, and many other unanswered questions. Advertising dollars are designed to create action and calls. The cost per lead/case is a common metric analyzed among personal injury lawyers.
But so much goes into why or why a consumer would not contact a firm. A personal injury lawyer market survey will answer all of those questions for you. The personal injury lawyer market survey collects feedback from consumers in your relevant market area or DMA. The geography can be defined as small as a ZIP Code to as large as a state, depending on your target market.
Here are a few of the high-level benefits of a market survey:
- Understand top-of-mind brand awareness vs. competitors
- Understand total awareness vs. competitors
- Understand positive or negative brand perception vs. competitors
- Understand word associations and phrases for your brand (expensive, inexperienced, smart, etc.)
- Understand how your brand’s word associations compare to key competitors
- Understand source(s) of awareness for your firm (TV, radio, digital, billboard, etc.) to guide budgeting
- Gather head-to-head scores on competitors (who is less expensive, more experienced, etc.?)
- Factor(s) in choice when choosing a personal injury law firm (use these messages in your campaigns)
- Behavior around searching for a choice (branded or unbranded search, restructure your PPC)
- Demographic splits (income, age, gender, type of profession, etc.)
What is the step-by-step process for a personal injury lawyer market survey project?
In this post, we will outline the steps taken to complete a market survey project for a personal injury attorney or law firm. This outlines steps A through Z if you are considering a market survey project to better understand your brand, your market, and the ROI of your marketing and advertising efforts.
When I get injured, who do I contact? A personal injury lawyer market survey will put your legal organization on the top of that search query. Here's how!
Step 1: Seek a Proposal
In order to complete a market survey, you will need to use a third-party market research company. It is essential to string your brand from the survey as the sponsor. If you personally reach out to the general public using your branded survey, you will not be able to truly measure awareness correctly and you will get biased and unreliable responses.
Using an expert in this space is essential. Reach out to a personal injury market survey firm and let them know when you would like to conduct the survey. They will respond quickly with a few additional follow-up questions and even schedule a quick call with you to discuss your unique needs.
Step 2: Choose a Personal Injury Market Research Firm for the Kickoff
Once you have collected proposal(s), make your choice. Choose a market research company who can customize the survey to your needs (not a cookie-cutter replica of another firm’s study), is personable and easy to work with, and one who is responsive and interested in your project.
Choose an approach that best fits your needs and budget. How many responses do they recommend? How do they recommend breaking down responses by each market? Do they give you options for reporting (topline vs. in-depth report)? Consider all of these before making a decision.
Once chosen, the kickoff meeting should take 30 to 60 minutes. In this meeting scheduled by the market research firm, they will review your core objectives and needs. They will recommend which questions to ask but also listen to your unique needs. A workplan will be developed to highlight key dates and tasks.
Step 3: Survey Design
This is the most critical step of a market survey project. This will be driven by all of the discussions which have already taken place during the proposal build-out and kickoff.
We find the sweet spot for survey length is about 15 to 25 questions (or 3 to 5 minutes). Believe it or not, this is a lot of questions and a lot to cover in a survey. This length strikes the perfect balance of respondent engagement with addressing client objectives.
The survey draft will be sent to your attorney firm for comments and edits. This may only take 1 or 2 drafts, while sometimes it can take 3 or 4 drafts to finalize. The market research company should make sure you are 100% happy with the questions before programming.
Email is one of, if not the most common communication channels for sending surveys. Drive Research finds these tips to be most beneficial in collecting more quality survey responses.
Step 4: Fieldwork
The market survey will be conducted online using an advanced survey platform. Feedback from consumers will be collected via email databases and through paid social media advertisements.
These paid social media advertisements are shown specifically to consumers who fit your target profile in your markets. They are shown a link to the survey and are offered an opportunity to win a gift card raffle.
The number of required responses varies by market. We recommend a minimum of 100 responses overall. If you can acquire 100 responses or more for each market this is recommended because it allows you to slice and dice the data by market and demographics.
Overall, we recommend obtaining 400 responses. If your market is large enough, 1,000 responses are considered to be the ultimate goal. This is driven by the days of political polling benchmarks. This is all highly dependent on budget. More responses translate to more cost.
Step 5: Analysis and Reporting
The final step is to run quality checks on all of the data prior to analysis. Your personal injury market survey company will offer several options here:
(1) A top line report with tabulations and frequencies for each question broken down by age, market, income, etc.
(2) A full report which includes an executive summary of themes answering your objectives through narrative, recommendations, an infographic, consumer persona, and the appendix of question-by-question breakdowns.
The full report is often recommended because it will add perspective and help you digest the key findings. Rather than you and your team trying to understand the findings and key takeaways, let the personal injury law firm market research company do this for you. They can add context and thoughts from other personal injury projects.
Contact Our Personal Injury Lawyer Survey Company
Drive Research is a market research company located in Syracuse, NY. We work with clients across the country to assess brand equity and collect feedback from consumers in all 50 states. Questions about our process or how we can help? Contact us.
Interested in learning more about our market research services? Reach out through any of the four ways below.
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Email us at [email protected]
Call us at 888-725-DATA
Text us at 315-303-2040