LinkedIn Ads for Law Firms: The New Conversation Ads

In these unpredictable times, it’s become more important to be thoughtful about your law firm’s messaging and advertising tactics on LinkedIn. It’s also crucial to consider how communication preferences are shifting towards being more interactive and conversational. 

In response to a shift in preferences, LinkedIn has introduced Conversation Ads, a new ad type that can be used to deliver individualized messages and offerings to your law firm’s target audiences. In this blog post, we dive into what Conversation Ads are and how they can be used to help you interact with your law firm’s prospects in a more personal and engaging manner.

What are Conversation Ads? 

The Conversation Ad is LinkedIn’s latest one-to-one message-based ad format. With Conversation Ads, you can add direct action CTA buttons into your Sponsored InMails – or ‘Message Ads’ as LinkedIn now calls them. According to LinkedIn’s own statistics, messages on the platform have quadrupled in the last 5 years and the messaging reply rate has grown by 30%. That means it’s a successful channel for reaching clients and prospects. 

In order to encourage real-time engagement, messages can only be sent when the prospect is active on LinkedIn and in the right mindset. Someone is “active” on LinkedIn when they have a green dot next to their profile photo. That means they are currently logged into the platform. (A green dot with a white circle in the middle means the connection is available on mobile.) 

LinkedIn Conversation Ads include options to help you distribute content based on where your prospect is in their journey with your firm. For people at the earlier stage of research, you should choose to message them with content such as a blog post. As their interest grows, send more detailed lead magnets like a white paper to download. 

A 5 point plan for making the most of LinkedIn’s New Conversation Ads

1. Share content based on the client journey.

Before you begin any digital marketing campaign, you should build out the right personas and a client journey with various stages of familiarity with your firm. Include the various stages of audience activity and what the call to action is for each. It’s a good practice to ask questions in your messaging – this encourages a two-way conversation. We suggest using a question/solution/CTA format, where you begin with an initial question, propose a solution (like reading your latest ebook), and including a CTA.

What’s so neat about Conversation Ads is that you can add several CTA buttons to each of your messages, giving your recipients more ways to respond.

2. Create your LinkedIn campaigns.

Your first step is to open the LinkedIn Campaign Manager and begin a New Campaign. From there, you can follow the “choose your own path” experience to create funnel campaigns with different CTAs like visit a website, sign up for a webinar, etc. From there, choose either Website Leads or Lead Generation Objective, select a location, and build your audience, and finish by selecting “Conversation Ad” as the format. 

3. Add conversion tracking.

You will find conversion tracking as an option in the last section of the campaign setup process. You’ll have a better understanding of your law firm’s Conversation Ad performance if you are set up to properly track results like the number of downloads of your eBook or checklist.

4. Create your LinkedIn Conversation Ad.

Here is where you create a new ad and enter the general information for your campaign such as sender details, a banner image, and custom footer. Begin by naming your ad and choosing the sender (if it’s not you, you first need to get approval from a first-degree connection). The sender is very important when it comes to this type of advertising. Choose the person who best represents your firm, and ensure their profile is complete and optimized. For a step-by-step guide on how to create the ads, use LinkedIn’s guide here.

LinkedIn has also published a collection of message templates to help formulate more effective campaigns, if you need.

5. Analyze campaign performance over time.

Use LinkedIn’s campaign manager to monitor how your law firm’s campaigns are doing. You can even download the results into a CSV file for an easier way to review insights. Make sure to note how many people click on each content or offer, and how engaged they are in the conversations. From there, you can choose which ad elements to test and make adjustments.

Takeaway

Today’s law firm marketing efforts should focus more on encouraging interaction and building trust. If you’re struggling to increase engagement, consider testing LinkedIn’s new Conversation Ads for your law firm’s next campaign. Remember, it’s important that your ads offer content (such as a downloadable checklist) rather than just salesy or promotional information.

We know that running advertising on LinkedIn presents some unique challenges – we’re in the platform day in and day out running campaigns for our clients! That being said, contact us today if you need assistance making the most out of your LinkedIn advertising campaigns. We have vast experience helping lawyers and law firms achieve success on the platform.