When you see your competitors and other law firms using paid social media ads online, you might feel pressured to start doing the same. But paid social media ads can be costly, and even when other law firms are using this marketing strategy successfully, you need some context before deciding if this is right for you. Here’s how you can decide whether paid social media ads make sense for your law firm.
Can Your Market Be Reached Via Paid Social Media Ads?
In order to run an effective social media ad campaign, your ads need to be targeted to your specific audience. Paid ads can get your brand in front of your target audience quickly when done properly. But the targeting available with certain ad strategies limits who will be successful. If you don’t have a market that can be reached via paid social media ads, your law firm is wasting its time and investment. Let’s look at some examples.
Let’s say you run a divorce law firm and are considering paid social media ads to gain exposure. The truth is you aren’t going to be able to target someone going through a divorce with a Facebook ad. That is not how social media algorithms work. You can make reasonable assumptions about what demographic traits a person considering divorce might have, but there’s no interest data on Facebook that can reasonably capture when someone is thinking about divorce.
But if you were running an estate planning practice and wanted to run paid social media ads, you’d have a better chance of seeing success. This is because you can target men or women of retirement age living in a specific geographic location who you know to be in line with your target audience.
Having a deep understanding of who your target audience is and how they are searching for information is going to be critical in helping you figure out whether paid social ads are a good choice for your law firm.
What Can Paid Social Media Ads Do for Your Law Firm?
Before you invest in paid social media ads, it’s important that you ask yourself what paid social ads can do for your law firm. From there, you need to determine if those features align with your law firm’s overall marketing strategy, particularly as it applies to social media marketing.
Paid social media ads can have enormous benefits. They can help your brand gain awareness, help your law firm build a strong audience of followers online, and drive leads to your profiles that introduce your law firm and how you’re going to serve their needs.
The problem is, these are all strategies you can find right at the top of the content marketing funnel. You’re casting the broadest net possible with ads at this part of the customer journey. Using social media ads in the hopes of booking paid consultations isn’t going to work when followers don’t know who your law firm is.
You can use social media to grow your following organically by posting thought-provoking, original, high-quality content that catches your audience’s attention. You should also be taking time to engage with your followers. Do giveaways, respond to comments and reviews, and continue posting regularly. Once your followers know who you are and what you can do for them, then start thinking about utilizing paid social media ads.
Budgeting for Paid Social Media Ads
Before you throw a good chunk of your marketing budget at paid social media ads, you need to consider what your budget is as a whole and where your marketing efforts are going to produce the greatest ROI.
If you have made the decision that paid social ads are right for your law firm, how many ads are you going to test in the early stages of your social media marketing campaign? It’s good practice to start out with a minimum of $5 per day to market to your target audience with paid social ads. Then, test your campaigns for a couple of weeks to determine where any necessary adjustments need to be made.
If you have decided that paid social ads aren’t a good fit for your law firm at this time, consider focusing your marketing effort on email marketing strategies, search engine optimization, and content marketing while your work to grow your law firm’s presence online.
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