The Law Firm Guide to Creating a Winning Paid Social Campaign

What are the key steps to creating an epic, results-oriented paid advertising campaign on social media? Whether you want to improve your law firm’s brand awareness, generate webinar sign-ups or bring in new clients, social media is a great place to advertise.

Social ads can be hyper targeted, clients can interact with them, and you can easily adjust and adapt them based on data to make them more effective. Social networks will even reward you – with lower costs and higher reach – for getting people to engage with your ads. 

We’ve talked about the benefits of paid social media advertising for law firms, and we’ve covered the many ad formats available to use in paid social media. Now, it’s time to talk campaign strategy. Here’s a step-by-step approach to help law firm marketers plan, create, and execute a paid social media campaign like a pro.

4 Steps to Creating Winning Paid Social Campaigns for your Law Firm

Step 1: Define your campaign goals and strategy

Before you get started, it’s important to define your campaign goals, KPIs, target audience, plan and strategy. Defining goals (and objectives) gives you direction, purpose, and will help you narrow down the main themes your content will revolve around.

Getting to know your audience and understanding their pain points and what makes them tick is also an important part of your law firm’s paid social media campaign strategy. Information on your audience will also help dictate which social media channel you choose to run your ad campaigns on.

Here is a strategy checklist for you. You need answers to these questions before you dive into the tactical set up of your law firm’s paid social media advertising campaign.

• What is your campaign objective?
• Why does this matter? What’s your ultimate business goal?
• How will you measure success?
• What is your budget?
• Who is your target audience?
• How far down the funnel are they?
• What is your ideal audience to reach?
• Which platforms best reach your target audience?

Having a strategy in place helps ensure you don’t end up spending too much – thus decreasing the return on investment (ROI) of your ads – or spending too little – to the detriment of your campaign’s efficacy.

Step 2: Design your law firm’s social media ads

A great ad design stops people from scrolling past it, while bad ad design can easily be missed. Use your audience data, your brand’s style guide and social listening tools to inform your creative.

• Craft multiple versions of the same ad to avoid creative fatigue
  • Design 2-3 (or more) creative options for your ad visuals
  • Write multiple captions to go with each piece of creative (A/B testing). Try strategies like asking questions to help boost engagement.

• Utilize different types of ad formats to test (video, story ads, carousels, animated videos, etc.)
  • Check your creative is up to spec and renders properly across all ad formats

• Make sure your ad creative and copy are on-brand and compliment your law firm’s organic social media content
• Ask for feedback to select your best creative assets

Step 3: Build Ad Sets

Now you’re ready to start building target audiences and uploading creative assets onto your chosen social media platform(s).

• Create multiple audience segments for targeting (ie. prospecting, lookalike, retargeting, account-based marketing)

1. To build an audience of prospective clients, use the platforms native audience targeting options
2. To create lookalike audiences, utilize your law firm’s first party data
3. Create retargeting audiences from your site using tracking pixels
4. Use platform targeting parameters to suppress and exclude audiences you don’t want to reach
5. Utilize custom tracking links to collect data and measure success
6. Be granular, but not too narrow with targeting

• Upload your final creative assets to build multiple ads for A/B testing your social media ad campaign
• Install tracking links, such as conversion pixels and custom UTM codes to collect data and measure success.
• Bid strategically and use bid caps and set daily budgets to avoid high ad costs.

Step 4: Launch campaign

Just because your law firm’s paid social media campaigns may be underway or over doesn’t mean the work is done. Launch your campaign and regularly analyze the success of it as it progresses, and evaluate it closely once it’s over. Review goals and KPIs to measure success and gain valuable insight into what worked well and what didn’t.

You can also use tools such as Google Analytics and HubSpot Social Media Management to measure results across networks from a single dashboard. A social media report is a great way to track your results and present them to stakeholders.

Here are some things to keep in mind after launch:

• A/B test to learn what resonates with your audience
• Check-in and monitor progress frequently
• Run ads for 1-2 weeks before making changes

As your campaign progresses, pause any ads that aren’t working and have a low click-through-rate (CTR). Likewise, increase spending on ads that are performing well and be sure you take notes on what worked and didn’t.

Takeaway

The planning and execution of your law firm’s paid social media campaigns can be fairly involved. Follow these steps to get started on a paid social campaign and you will be running paid campaigns like a pro. Be sure to keep in mind the main objectives you chose and what you want to accomplish upon completion as you move through the steps.

Do you need help driving real business results through social media? Our social media offerings can be customized to your law firm’s needs and realities. In addition to social media management, we offer social media consulting and training for our clients. Contact us today for a free consultation.