Advertising on Facebook can be rocket fuel for growth. Whereas content marketing is effective for driving referrals and nurturing leads, Facebook ads will expand your network and reach. Although we will focus on Facebook ads in this post, it is important to recognize the distinction between them and Google ads. The latter is meant to capture the people actively seeking legal services (i.e., “best family law attorney in Boston”). Google ads appear at the top of the search results and typically have “sponsored” above them.
When done correctly, Facebook ads generate awareness about your firm and can capture people who need your services immediately.
Targeting the Right Audience
Precision targeting is one of the more elegant components of advertising on Facebook. There is an expansive array of targeting options that allow law firms to reach people based on demographics, interests, and behaviors. For instance, an estate planning attorney could coordinate their ads to appear in front of homeowners and high-net-worth individuals. Personal injury attorneys could target people who have shown interest in motorcycle insurance. To take it one step further, your firm can retarget warm leads. These people have visited your website or engaged with your previous ads (maybe they downloaded one of your resources).
There’s also geographic targeting. Imagine you create an organic (free) post on Instagram, and it immediately gets 100,000 likes. How many of these people are near your firm? This is one of several reasons why “likes” on Instagram don’t equate to revenue. With Facebook ads, firms can use zip code or radius targeting to reach specific people or create multiple campaigns for multiple locations.
How Much Should I Spend?
In terms of budget, building and executing a profitable Facebook ads campaign requires some degree of backward thinking. Start by looking at your past conversion rates. If you don’t have them, start. Your conversion rates tell you how many leads you get for every client you sign. For the sake of simplicity, let’s pretend that historically, your firm gets one client per ten leads.
The next step is to ask yourself how many clients you want to sign. Be realistic and reasonable. Your firm can’t grow beyond its capacity to serve clients and scale. Based on our previous numbers, you must generate at least fifty leads if you sign five clients a month. We track the cost per lead (CPL) for all our clients. If you’re spending $20 per lead, which is very reasonable, you’d need to spend $1000 a month.
Granted, that may sound like a lot to spend on Facebook ads, but based on the conversion rates we used, this firm can expect to sign five clients for every $1000 they spend on this strategy. Is that good? It depends on how much money, on average, you make per client. If you know that number, you will have a better expectation of the return on your investment.
Monitoring & Adjusting Your Ads
If you went through the numbers in the previous section and are excited to run Facebook ads, that’s great. However, these ads must be monitored and adjusted to get your ideal return. Some people at our agency have spent years studying ad strategy, particularly as they relate to Facebook and other social media platforms. That doesn’t mean they know with 100% certainty which ad will immediately produce the best results. To be fair, no one does. And I would be wary of anyone who claimed they did.
Only one group of people knows what works: the people looking at your ads. As I said, we have a high degree of confidence in what will work, but the smallest details can make a tremendous impact. Colors, shapes, and word choice have to be tested (among other things) before you can know what the most successful ad is. This requires running A/B tests, which are also commonly referred to as “split tests.” You run two versions of an ad, webpage, or email to see which performs better. You can test different creative strategies and copy variations. Your preference and style don’t matter as much as results do. These dictate how you refine and adjust your ad to improve its performance over time.
Grow Your Firm Through Paid Ads
Facebook ads can generate results, but you need a strategy backed by data, testing, and experience. Spotlight Marketing & Branding creates and optimizes paid ad campaigns that generate leads—and find people who need your services immediately. Let’s use a marketing strategy leveraging paid ads and content to grow your firm. Contact us today to get started.
Spotlight Branding
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