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Facebook Advertising for Law Firms: How to Develop Custom Audiences

by Kevin Vermeulen • March 30th, 2017 • Social Media | Blog

Facebook advertising for law firmsFacebook offers one of the most targeted advertising opportunities on the Internet. Users enter all kinds of information about themselves just because of the way Facebook works. This gives the social media giant the ability to pinpoint advertising to specific users like no other company can.

Among the many options Facebook offers for targeted advertising, the custom audience feature is one of the most precise. It lets you go beyond general groups and demographics to target your law firm’s advertising to specific, individual users.

The custom audience functions allow you to build an audience based on four different types of users:

  • A list of your law firm’s existing or past clients
  • People who have visited your law firm’s website
  • Users who have used a mobile app
  • Users who have interacted with your firm’s Facebook page

Advertising to these groups can be particularly powerful because you are reaching out to people that you have already worked with, or those who have shown an interest in  your firm. Any seasoned marketer will tell you that it is much easier to convert someone you are already familiar with.

Here are some tips for generating effective campaigns with one of Facebook’s most powerful advertising options.

Sort Your Lists Before You Start

Before you start setting up your advertising campaign, it’s important to break lists down into specific categories. For example, you probably don’t want to use the same advertisement for two groups such as past clients and people who’ve shown interest in your firm’s Facebook page.

To get the most out of your advertising budget, you should try to create individual lists that are as specific as possible and tailor your ads to those specific groups. You might have one list for email subscribers, another for past or current clients, and another for people who have visited your web page.

You might even want to go a step further and create separate lists for people who’ve visited specific pages on your site. For example, potential clients who’ve looked through personal services information and others who have looked through corporate services information won’t respond equally well to the same ad.

Strengthen Relationships

You can use these highly targeted ads to strengthen existing relationships and expand your law firm’s reach on Facebook. Following are two examples of how you can accomplish this.

You can ask email subscribers to join a Facebook group or subscribe to your Facebook page. Simply start out with a list of your email subscribers and create ads asking them to join a group that your Law Firm operates, or like and follow your Facebook page. This will strengthen your relationship with these leads, and, as a bonus, some of their friends will see that they’ve liked your page, which should bring you a few more new subscribers.

You can also target people who’ve visited your website, but didn’t subscribe to your email list or visit your Facebook page. You can bring some of them a step closer to signing up for your email list or liking your Facebook page with the proper ad copy. If you convince them to complete either of these steps you’ll create more opportunities to continue marketing to them.

Expand Your Law Firm’s Reach

Another option Facebook gives you with custom audiences is to create what they call a lookalike audience. This can expand your marketing reach significantly.

The basic idea is that Facebook will look at the people in your list(s) and find more users in their system that exhibit similar characteristics. You then have a new audience that your firm doesn’t have a relationship with, but this audience is much more specific than looking for different demographics on your own. Overall, you should see a much higher response rate than you would by setting all of the advertising options yourself.

As you can see, Facebook’s custom audience functions are very powerful. They can actually give you more precise targeting with less work. It’s an amazingly efficient system that can deliver great results.

If you’re creative with your ads and your lists are well organized, you should be able to achieve better results than you’d get on any other advertising platform.

Social Media for Law Firms

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