Is Facebook advertising right for your law firm?
If you’ve considered Facebook advertising for your law firm and, you’re still only thinking about it, now’s the time to take that step. There are 2.27 billion users on Facebook worldwide and 15,000,000 monthly active users in Australia alone. It’s one of the best and cheapest paid ways to build your brand’s awareness online.
We’re often asked, “do Facebook ads for law firms deliver value for money?” We believe the answer is a resounding yes. Facebook combines both your organic brand building options and paid advertising (paid digital search) and the paid option allows you to target specific demographics depending on the services you’re selling.
Let’s take a quick look at the various components of Facebook advertising.
The campaign
The campaign is the starting point for your advertising. At this point, you'll choose your advertising objective. For example, do you want the most number of people to see your ad or do you want people to click on a link in your ad or do you want people to fill out a form or attend an event.
Campaigns are grouped into awareness, consideration, and conversion all of which play a specific role.
Facebook Awareness Campaign
As the name suggests, this creates more visibility for your law firm by advertising your business to a specific target that may require your services. Awareness campaigns are a great way to get recognised by potentially new clients and reach out to a target audience that may want a lawyer right now or at some time in the future.
It’s not necessarily designed to get instant results but more as a branding exercise. It’s designed to get your ad in front of as many people as possible for the amount of budget you apply.
People will see your ad and your firm name, over and over (assuming you run regular campaigns) and when the time comes that they need a lawyer, your name has resonance. For example, they may search for a lawyer on Google, and assuming your website SEO maintenance has been ongoing and is in order, if you come up in the search results, your firm name will be familiar and thus have more trust (even if only perceived).
Likewise, they may see your ad on Facebook time and again and either like your page or search for you on the platform.
So if you want to advertise your law firm generally, or generate leads for your firm page and/or increase your follower base, you could start with a Facebook awareness campaign. You can start today with as little as $20.00.
Facebook Consideration Campaign
This campaign is more so designed for the potential client who may require a lawyer or perhaps is at a point where they want to know more about a particular topic. It is designed to provide a number of different options including:
- Sending more traffic to your website by clicking on your ad
- Getting more engagement (likes, comments, shares etc) on your ad
- Driving video views
- Performing lead generation
Consideration campaigns also expose your brand by making your law firm visible to more people when other Facebook users click or comments on ad. It automatically translates into all their friends also seeing your law firm.
Consideration campaigns are also very cost effective (compared to Google) when you want people to click through to your website. There is however, a number of factors to consider when choosing a consideration campaign:
- Is the page you might use to send traffic to, offering something valuable?
- If selecting lead generation, will viewers who provide you with contact details, perceive value in that?
- If selecting video views, is your video something informative, educational and/or entertaining?
So if you want to drive traffic to your website, make clients see a video about your law firm or your services, increase the addresses of your email list and get a response to a particular event, then a consideration campaign could be good for you.
Facebook Conversion Campaign
We think conversion campaigns are better suited to consumer goods. As the name suggests, it converts the ad viewer into a purchaser or a potential purchaser. Given legal services are a rare (and expensive) purchase for individuals, it’s not commonly likely that they would see a law firm ad on Facebook and immediately contact that firm for services.
That said, there could be occasion to use this campaign. For example, let’s say there’s a class action involving potentially tens of thousands of members. You could create a conversion campaign to the target audience getting them to enter their details to a database for you to contact them. This could be a perfect scenario for a Facebook conversion campaign.
The Advertisement
Once you’ve selected the type of campaign you will run, you can then create your specific advertisements. Find out more about creating Facebook ads on our recent post “What’s the difference between Facebook Boosted posts and Facebook ads?”.
Why should your law firm consider Facebook advertising?
You are able to target an audience. If you’re used to Facebook, you would know that it gathers significant information about its users. You can leverage this by precision targeting of your ads to capture the right people for your practice areas.
A cost effective platform to provide valuable content to potential clients
With Facebook ads, you are able to provide valuable content to potential clients with blogs, events and video. It’s an extremely cost effective advertising platform to build your firm’s brand and reputation.
So with all this in mind, should your law firm consider Facebook Ads? We think that’s a resounding “yes”. Using Facebook ads in a planned and consistent way, can take your law firm to the next level. We recommend it to all law firms providing B2C services.
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