How to Run a Successful LinkedIn Ad Campaign for Your Law Firm

As LinkedIn continues to rise in popularity, it’s pivotal to learn how to run a successful LinkedIn ad campaign for your law firm. LinkedIn’s membership and usage continues to grow and the platform is one that allows a high degree of targeting by industry and audience. According to these statistics from Hootsuite, two professionals join LinkedIn every second. Simply put, business gets done on LinkedIn and savvy marketers run campaigns on LinkedIn to grow awareness and generate new leads. Here’s a brief guide on what you need to know in order to run a successful LinkedIn ad campaign.

1. Learn your way around the self-service solutions LinkedIn offers

Take a few minutes to get familiar with how to set your own budget, choose clicks or impressions, and pause your ads at any time. Sign in to the Campaign Manager, which is where you’ll create and optimize your law firm’s ad campaigns.

2. Choose your law firm’s campaign objective

The first thing you’ll be prompted to do in the campaign manager is to choose an objective that best fits your goals. As you know, there are measures of success for each stage of a client’s journey. Consider branding, web leads, form completions, webinar sign ups, etc. Decide how you want your content to resonate with your target audience and what sort of action you want them to take, and then choose the corresponding objective: awareness, consideration, or conversions.

3. Define your target audience

Once you select your objective, you’ll be prompted to select your ideal audience. The LinkedIn tools show how each filtering option affects the size of the target audience. You can also choose the “Audience Expansion” option which will automatically include audiences similar to those you’ve selected. If you plan to run future campaigns against the same audience, save the audience for accessibility.

4. Choose your LinkedIn ad format

Now it’s time to get creative and decide on your imagery and copy. You’ll be able to choose from Sponsored Content, Sponsored InMail and Text Ads. We find that clients realize the most success from sponsored content. Sponsored Content is native advertising that appears directly in the LinkedIn feeds of professionals you want to reach. You can use imagery or rich media like video to stand out in the feed, and then easily test and optimize campaigns in real time.

In the consideration stage, you might promote a white paper and then view statistics on the downloads. For those in the decision stage, you might want to monitor newsletter sign ups. It’s best practice to create several versions of your ads so that you can see which messages resonate for better results. You can test different variations of copy, photos, images, or video and track results in real time in order to optimize towards the best performing message. According to LinkedIn, including an image with real people in your sponsored content post can increase your CTR by 160% (versus an image without people).

5. Set a campaign budget and schedule

Next, you’ll need to set a campaign budget and date range. At this point, you will enter your bid, daily budget, start date, end date, and total budget. Keep in mind you can pause a campaign at any time, no matter what you enter for an end date. Your bid options are cost per click (CPC); cost per impression (CPM); or automated bid. CPC is typically a better option for campaigns with a CTA – for example lead generation or registering for a webinar. A CPM model is best when brand awareness is the objective of your law firm’s ad campaign. We recommend starting out at the lowest recommended bid and increasing the bid amount in increments if you’re not getting enough traction with your campaign. This is a cost-effective approach to running ads on LinkedIn.

6. Track performance

Monitor your law firm’s LinkedIn ad campaign progress and draw insights using the campaign manager. The reporting function enables you to understand how your ads are doing and where you can optimize. Understand engagement metrics such as CTR, CPM, CPC, or CPA (cost per acquisition) in the default view or analyze progress using the performance chart. To access the performance chart, select the checkboxes for the campaigns to include and select a date range. 

To draw even more insights from your campaign performance, such as website visits and audience demographics, install the LinkedIn insights pixel on each of your website’s pages. Furthermore, you can install the LinkedIn conversion pixel to understand how your law firm’s ads led to valuable actions on your website.

Takeaway

With the right approach, LinkedIn advertising offers true business development opportunities for law firms. Custom targeting allows firms to connect with website visitors, key accounts, or mailing lists for hyper-targeted advertising that is more likely to generate new clients. With direct access to new business contacts, more and more firms are taking advantage of the network’s vast opportunities to attract and delight new clients and referral sources. As indicated in our 2019 Social Law Firm Index, 30% of Am Law firms are using LinkedIn ads as part of their overall marketing strategy.

If you need assistance with your social media strategy, contact us today. We have vast experience helping lawyers and law firms achieve success on social media.

Updated and republished from Oct 21, 2019