How Law Firms Can Use LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads

LinkedIn is an important platform for creating thought leadership and sharing expertise. Those in the legal field find it especially helpful for building credibility and demonstrating the knowledge that sets them apart. Now you can take that effort even further with thought leader ads. In this post, we’re covering what LinkedIn thought leader ads are and how to get started using them. 

What are Thought Leader Ads?

Thought leader ads can be used to promote content from people in your firm (or yourself) which can significantly increase your reach and help you to reach more of your brand awareness goals. Using thought leader ads can help your content to stay relevant and increase engagement. There are a few things to note, though: 

• Only posts from verified members can be promoted. 
• To promote an employee’s content, they must have a public profile and their employer should match the company page associated with the ad account. 
• The person setting up the campaign must have Direct Sponsored Content (DSC) poster permission approved for the company page of the post that they’re promoting.

Users can leverage thought leader ads to: 

• Enhance credibility by communicating using a trusted voice
• Promote authentic content from real legal experts
• Highlight your staff as an industry expert and legal authority
• Share unique perspectives that help you stand out from competitors
• Grow a community around your specific experts and practice areas
• Generate a bigger following and increase engagement

How Should Law Firms Use Thought Leader Ads?

Thought leader ads are available with LinkedIn’s “brand awareness” or “engagement” objectives. Navigate to the Campaign Manager and follow these steps. 

1. Pick your campaign objective. Once you’ve decided which objective and audience is best for your campaign, go to “single image ad” as the content type. You can also choose “video ad” if the content is video-based. You can also add accounts to a LinkedIn page or Showcase page to create a thought leader ad. 
2. Choose your thought leaders and content. You can start by requesting permission to promote your thought leader’s post. Perform a search for an employee at your firm, pick a post to promote, and request the poster’s permission. You can do all of this within the Campaign Manager. The author of the post will get a notification that you want to promote their content and once they’ve approved it, you can use the post as your ad creative. 
3. Analyze the ROI. It’s important to measure the impact of your campaigns, including thought leader ones. Within the Campaign Manager, evaluate the performance of your ads by reviewing the metrics that align with your campaign and objectives. Additionally, your thought leader can view the aggregated paid and organic metrics on their performance. Tip: It’s a good idea to have the thought leader save metrics about their organic performance before engaging in promotion, then you can see the real impact of the advertising campaign. 

Thought Leader Ad Best Practices

According to LinkedIn, Thought Leader Ads have a 1.7x higher click-through rate and 1.6x higher engagement rate compared to other single-image ad campaigns. There are some things you can do to improve performance and ensure success from thought leader ads. 

• Ask thought leaders in your firm to post content in creator mode to grow their reach. 
• If thought leaders want to limit their connection requests, they can change their profile CTA from “connect” to “follow”. 
• Keep things fresh by sponsoring content that is less than 30 days old. Revisit performance quarterly to align with your content strategy. 
• Use your page’s “My Company” tab to find trending employee content and source your next post for advertising. 
• Ask thought leaders to save reports on their organic performance so that you can properly measure the impact afterward. 

Takeaway: 

When it comes to the legal industry, your expertise is what you need to sell. One of the best ways to do that is through thought leadership on various platforms. LinkedIn has a new advertising feature that allows you to amplify the thought leadership that comes from experts in your firm. Consider creating campaigns around the informational posts that you or your staff publish on LinkedIn, and watch your reach grow significantly. Need more tips on advertising on social? Reach out to our social media advertising experts. We can help you with anything from audience segmentation to robust campaigns that attract your audience.