In last week’s blog post, we wrote about the importance of having a detailed marketing calendar for 2023. Now that you know your plans for the coming year, it’s time to ensure that you keep everyone else in your firm in the loop as well.
Each and every department in a personal injury firm contributes to the firm’s overall success and efficiency. While some of these departments are required to communicate with one another often and in-detail, other groups can start to feel like a bit of an island at the firm. The intake department and the marketing department are two pieces of your firm’s puzzle that are susceptible to feeling isolated and out-of-sync with the rest of the firm. Intake specialists often work different hours and might be unable to join firm events or lunches when the phones need to be manned. Additionally, many intake specialists are now remote, adding another degree of separation between the specialists and everyone else at the firm. Marketing, while involved in day-to-day events and goings on at the firm, can feel distant from the firm due to the fact that they are not involved in the calls or cases that are coming in. Interestingly enough, ensuring that the intake department and the marketing department communicate with one another is one of the best things that you can do to ensure that your marketing efforts are paying off.
Keeping Intake Informed
Intake specialists are your personal injury firm’s front line; they are the first people to interact with everyone and anyone that reaches out to your firm. More than anyone, they have a deep understanding of what types of people are calling in, what they are saying about your advertisements, how callers find the firm, and the quality of the cases that they are receiving each day. Thus, it is critical for them to know what is going on with the firm’s marketing so that they can better understand the calls that they are receiving. Whenever you put new creative on the air, send it to the intake department for them to view so that they can know exactly what a caller is talking about when they mention seeing a commercial that they found particularly compelling.
Give the intake department a heads up when you are running a new community campaign, starting to advertise for motorcycle cases, or making any other shift to your marketing efforts. This insight will better enable them to prepare themselves for the types of calls they might be getting and will give them an opportunity to ask any questions that they might have about handling certain types of calls or the criteria for accepting certain case types. If you start advertising for a specific case type, such as nursing home cases or slip-and-fall cases, and an intake specialist has not taken those types of calls before, receiving an influx of them could throw them off their game.
Furthermore, keep your intake department informed of big wins at your firm or great things that your firm is doing in the community. This will give them some great assurance pieces to discuss with callers, and will make their sales kit even stronger.
Intake Is the Marketing Department’s Best Resource
No one at your firm knows more about the number and quality of leads you are receiving more than the intake department does. As I mentioned earlier, they are the front line. Throughout their days, they are constantly gathering invaluable information from callers about why they chose to call your firm.
When making marketing decisions, the best planning tool is the empirical data of how many calls you are getting from certain sources and the quality of those calls. As a marketing director, it’s just as important for you to have source information about the calls that your firm rejected as it is to have source information about the calls that your firm accepted. Go through and see what information you are currently receiving from intake reports and note what pieces are missing. Work with your intake department to ensure that you have an idea of the number of leads coming from each and every marketing source as well as the quality of those leads. From there, you can start to make informed decisions about changes to your marketing plan.
Moving Forward
Syncing up the intake department and the marketing department might seem cumbersome at first, but it is certainly worth the effort. Both departments possess unique and extremely valuable information that the other can benefit from. The more you know, the better your firm will run. If you would like advice on how to better get your intake and marketing departments in sync, please reach out to askus@cjadvertising.com.
