By Jason Marsh
As the digital media environment has matured over the past two decades, traditional forms of advertising like TV, print and radio have given way to many online options. More than ever, small and local businesses, like law firms, have a variety of powerful and cost-effective digital advertising options at their disposal.
Law firms can now run campaigns that are more targeted, measurable and scalable than ever before.
With the right strategy and clearly defined objectives, Facebook can be a great advertising channel within a firm’s overall digital marketing mix. Use it to build awareness, cement consumer preference and generate new clients.
Not to be confused with organic posts, Facebook advertising involves targeting a specific audience, crafting a message and paying to reach that audience to generate the desired outcome — new clients.
Step 1: Define Campaign Objectives
The first step in developing any successful advertising campaign is to clearly and narrowly define your objective. What, specifically, do you want to accomplish with this campaign? While it’s OK to have multiple objectives, usually you want to create separate campaigns aligned with each objective. Broadly speaking, advertising campaign objectives typically fall into two categories: branding and direct response.
Branding Campaigns
The goal of a branding campaign is to increase recognition and positive sentiment about your firm. When someone in your geographical area or industry needs a lawyer or a firm that does what you do, you want to be the firm 1) they think of first; 2) perceive the be the best; and 3) ultimately hire. In other words, be THE lawyer, not just ANOTHER lawyer.
Direct Response Campaigns
The goal of a direct response campaign is to generate a specific response to your ad. Typically the goal is to use a strong call to action that generates inquiries from new prospects interested in the legal services you provide. For example, “call for a free consultation” or “download our free legal handbook.”
Step 2: Target Your Audience
Once you’ve clearly articulated your objective, it is time to target and build your audience. Targeting your campaign ads to the right people is critical to your success (after all, even the best ad shown to the wrong person has virtually no chance to succeed). Fortunately, Facebook has powerful audience targeting capabilities to help you get your ad in front of the right people.
Depending on your objective there are different audience targeting techniques to consider. These include geographic, demographic, interest and behavioral targeting. There’s also remarketing, engagement and “Lookalike” targeting.
Remarketing
While each targeting strategy could be its own chapter in a book, “remarketing” (also known as retargeting) is an important topic worth discussing. Remarketing enables you to target people that have previously visited your website (or a specific page on your website) with ads on Facebook. This is extremely useful because people that have already visited your website theoretically have an interest in the services you provide. This targeting strategy can be particularly useful in augmenting other website traffic — generating activities like a paid search or SEO campaign. In Facebook, this is known as “building a Custom Audience using Website Traffic.” This function can be enabled by installing a “Facebook Pixel” on your website. For building an audience, this can be a great (and safe) place to start.
With all of the targeting options that exist, you will want to test different targeting strategies and configurations to see what works best for you.
Step 3: Create Your Ads
The next step is creating your ads. This requires thought and creativity based on your campaign’s objective. If your goal is to build your firm’s awareness, you may choose to showcase your firm’s expertise, promote content on your website or share some great client testimonials. If your goal is to generate conversions (new prospect leads, email sign-ups, lead magnet downloads), then your ad will center on a specific offer and call to action. That could be something like “call for a free consultation” or “download our free handbook.” Remember, lead generation can be challenging because your ad, message and specific offer must be so compelling that the user feels inclined to act in that moment.
Step 4: Define The Post-Click Experience
As you create your ad, you will also want to consider the user’s “post-click experience.” In other words, what happens when someone clicks your ad? Where will that click take them … to a dedicated campaign landing page, a specific piece of content on your website or a form to enter their email? The post-click experience should be aligned with and pay off on the expectations created by the ad. Consider using Facebook Lead Ads, which allow you to keep the post-click experience, including messaging and a contact form, entirely within Facebook.
Step 5: Measure Campaign Performance
The beauty of a Facebook campaign, like most digital campaigns, is that they produce a great deal of data that allow you to measure the success of the campaign. Based on whatever objectives you have defined for your campaigns (more traffic, new leads, email subscribers, etc.) you can develop a clear picture of what is working and what isn’t so you can ensure you are getting a meaningful return on your marketing investment.
Step 6: Scale for Success
Last, you can scale your Facebook campaign. Once you’ve identified an audience and set of ads generating a successful response, you can expand your campaign model to reach a larger audience using one of Facebook’s most powerful audience targeting techniques called a Lookalike Audience. Because initial custom audiences can sometimes be limited in size, this feature enables you to expand your campaign to reach an entirely new audience that “looks like” (and hopefully behaves like) one of your existing audiences.
Conclusion
While the world of Facebook Advertising can seem daunting at first, this six-step process should give you a good start. Building a successful online marketing campaign takes time and, likely, trial and error — but don’t get discouraged.
Jason Marsh is founder and owner of MARSH8.