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Creating a Paid Social Ad Campaign

3 mins

With a reported 93% of internet users having at least one social media account, it’s almost impossible for legal marketers to ignore the opportunity of executing powerful paid social campaigns. There is an abundance of law firms with similar practice areas, thus lawyers can use paid social ad campaigns to help build brand awareness with potential clients. Advertising on social media is not a new tactic for marketers. That means that in order to execute a meaningful campaign, you have to make your campaign stick out. Here’s how.

First and foremost, it is essential to define a specific target audience from the beginning of your campaign to ensure the right people are viewing properly targeted content. Capturing the right audience enables you to have a higher chance of invoking the desired reaction with potential clients. Say you want someone looking for an IP lawyer to be presented ads for firms specializing in these areas. How do you do this? From the onset of your campaign, ask yourself:

1)    What platforms would these consumers be using?

2)    Where are they likely to be when searching for these services?

3)    What type of media do they consume regularly?

Acquiring answers to these questions provides you with creative insight along with technical information about your target audience. Knowing the major social platforms where your audience lives help target your campaign. For example, the type of clients that you will find on LinkedIn or other professional networks are:

- Executives
- Clients seeking corporate litigation
- Security law

Don’t rule out the possibility of using multiple platforms to help better target your goal, but if you decide to use multiple platforms, you still want to dedicate one platform for the majority of your attention.

Now that you know where to target your audience, you need to better understand the purpose of your campaign. What exactly are you trying to achieve through your campaign? Some firms will be simply trying to garner brand awareness--informing viewers of the firm’s practice areas--while others may be trying to drive a specific and direct response—like requesting a consultation. Your campaign’s purpose impacts its structure and its creative look. To have a successful campaign, it's essential to ensure your ads stand out with a clearly defined message pointing to the right objectives.

From here you want to define your budget. This is often one of the biggest hurdles with these paid social campaigns. Let’s say the lifetime value of a client is $10,000. From here you want to find out how many marketing leads you would need to get a new client. To do that, you work backward and see that it takes 3 opportunities for one of them to become a client (3 visits to create 1 client). It takes four people calling your firm for one of them to come in for a consultation (4 calls x 3 consultations = 12 calls for 1 client). Therefore you need at least 12 leads to garner 1 client. Each of those leads has a value of around $833, so you should be looking to spend at least that amount in order to ensure you are bringing the appropriate amount of clients that will produce a closed deal.

Once you have your target audience, budget, timeline, goals, and advertisements in place, you need to upload it to your social media network and let the network show your ads to your future clients. This process takes time and a great deal of understanding of the nuances of this kind of advertising, but the results can be very rewarding. Once uploaded, monitor the metrics of your add and check in on performance.

If you want to continue to learn how to evaluate your digital marketing presence, check out this blog here.

Raj Jha