Facebook Marketing For Law Firms

You should, after reading, take the following concepts away from this chapter.

• Your law firm’s Facebook page can attract clients and build your brand.
• Creating a Facebook landing page for your business is free.
• Discover how to create an ad campaign that will build brand awareness and which ad type is best for your law firm.
• Learn how to create a marketing strategy that includes campaign objectives, lead generation, and high conversion rates.

The first thing to understand is that creating a business page for your law firm is completely free. Having a business landing page on Facebook, when you manage it properly, can help you reach a broader target audience and identify potential clients. It also allows you a new communications channel for established and new clients through Facebook Messenger. The first step, however, is to establish your business page and learn how to structure and manage it.

What to include on a business page

The first and most important aspects of your business page include your contact information. Add your address, phone number, updated business hours, and any holidays your attorneys may be off work. A link to your law firm website is also important to allow potential clients to learn more about you, your practice areas, referrals, legal services, fees, and the like. Criminal defense attorneys are quite different than personal injury lawyers, for example, and attract a different demographic.  

Type of content you should create

Running a business page on Facebook is free, but it starts out empty. You need to fill it with content, which should be both useful and interesting to potential clients. Some good ways to start are to take polls, create events for people to attend, and share educational information. In fact, sharing information can establish you as an authority in your field and can help to build a culture of trust with your clients.

Educational information can take many forms. It can:

• Involve sharing your insights on a new law.
• Be a legal brief benefitting clients.
• Link to interesting articles about current legal issues.
• Be short promotional videos of one of your attorneys explaining the answer to an evergreen question.
• Be live streaming sessions where you or one of your attorneys conduct real-time Q&A sessions with clients and potential clients.

Regardless of the form or forms it takes, educational information on your Facebook page should link back to your website in some way, preferably to something like a search engine optimized (SEO) blog to create a content marketing web across your online platforms. Above all, include a call-to-action (CTA) that encourages potential clients to contact you.

Your business page is just the first step in Facebook advertising for your law firm. Facebook ads are a practical tool on the social media platform that allow you to directly reach potential clients and target your specific demographic. They allow you to push your content out to both targeted and new audiences.

Types of Facebook Ads

Creating ads begins with knowing what kind of ad you need. There are several types and formats of Facebook ads available for a law firm, and each is best for different aspects. Video ads, for example, might be there to demonstrate knowledge or entice users to engage more directly with the source. Each has its own targeting options, and you will need to decide which is best for your needs. Beyond video ads, other types of ads on Facebook include:

• Carousel ads: These allow you to use anywhere up to ten photos or videos which you can rotate to showcase your law firm’s services. They may be best for law firms with various practice areas where you want to showcase those you are most focused on providing.
• Collection ads: Collection ads only work on mobile devices, but they can still be an important part of your Facebook advertising and marketing campaign. After all, 1.5 billion people still access Facebook via mobile devices alone. They are often used for product sales, but they can allow you to showcase the various services you provide, possibly letting people click through to the proper page on your website.
• Photo ads: Photo ads are the most basic type of Facebook ads. Through the use of a photo you can showcase individual attorneys in your practice, show something related to your practice areas, or boost an existing post you have on your business page.
• Slideshow ads: Slideshow ads are somewhere between a video and photo ad. These allow you to take a collection of photos or video clips and combine them to create a short video. They load faster than a standard video because they use lower bandwidth, and they have interactive features that encourage users to engage and click while watching.

The types of ads you create encompass many factors, including your campaign objectives, daily budget (pricing for ads is on a cost-per-click basis), and many other metrics.

The Facebook newsfeed is what pushes content to viewers and is, in many ways, the core of your Facebook advertising. Still, you are not guaranteed to have your posts seen unless you take the right steps. Facebook uses complicated algorithms to determine who sees which posts from those people and pages that they follow.

The idea is to allow the user to see the stories that are most meaningful and informative to them. The algorithms, Facebook says, can be shaped by users, but in the end, it is the platform that evaluates posts and passes them to users based on what its algorithm says is relevant. It uses three main factors to estimate this relevance. These three factors include interaction, content type, and the originating post itself.

Interaction

Posts that get a lot of reactions, comments, click-throughs, interactions, and shares are more likely to be seen across the platform. This means that the more effective your posts are in encouraging people to interact with your posts, the more people that comment, the more that like your posts, and most of all, the more who click links, the more likely it is that Facebook will show your posts to other people.

Content type

Facebook also looks at the type of content that people interact with the most frequently in determining what to show them. If people tend to click “like” on photos very often, Facebook shows them more photos. If they play videos more often, Facebook shows them more videos. Because of this, it’s a good idea for content providers to mix up the type of content offered for the sake of targeting and retargeting a broad audience.

Originating post

The source of the original post is also a major signal that Facebook uses. Those people a Facebook user interacts with the most are seen most often in their feed. Thus, the Facebook users that interact with you the most often are most likely to see the posts you make. As you can see, content is king when it comes to your digital marketing campaign. The more effective your posts are, the more people will see them.

Facebook allows you to target audiences similar to those you want right out of the gate, and then as you gain experience, use a Facebook pixel for retargeting your website. Beyond that, Facebook advertising relies on your relationships with people, which is precisely on which your law firm depends. Streaming services have usurped television, which means people skip over commercials. As such, Facebook ads give you a greater ROI than a TV ad. Facebook Ads Manager also gives you a wealth of data right at your fingertips to determine which ads are the most effective and allow you to tweak and manage your lifetime budget effectively.

An effective ad campaign lets you target “lookalike audiences,” those audiences other firms and competitors use that look a lot like yours, to expand your own reach. It lets you leverage current events, create lead generation forms, and finally, it builds social proof that you effectively engage with people.  

Having an audience you want to target will be vital to your Facebook content marketing strategy. Your ROI goals, as well, will be essential. You will need to set up a daily budget and lifetime budget and do some research to ensure that your Facebook advertising is as effective as possible.

Set up your Facebook business page

If you have not already done so, create your law firm’s Facebook business page using the advice presented earlier in this chapter. When you create content, check in every so often to review Facebook’s own “Best Practices for Page Posts on Facebook.” This is an invaluable guide straight from the source at how to best use the platform’s algorithms to your benefit.

Set your Facebook ad campaign goals

Next, determine in concrete terms what you want to gain from your Facebook ad campaign. Are you looking to gain more clients? Build brand awareness? Increase visits to your website? Or are you looking to use a social media platform as a hub for cross-linking to your other online spaces?

Your specific needs for your ad campaign will determine the type of ads you create and how you use them. Keep it realistic, both in terms of short-term goals and long-term goals, and be sure your goals are attainable.

Make your budget

Again, Facebook ads are usually priced on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis. Your daily and lifetime budget will come into play. Essentially, the more interactions you get, the more the ad will cost you. You can set your daily budget to stop showing the ad after you reach a certain threshold. You will likely need to monitor and readjust your budget, removing ads that are not performing well, and adjusting the budget for those that are.

Keep in mind that ads which get negative interactions can still cost you, so look at ads that are high performing but have a high level of negative comments or reactions. Consider removing these ads while increasing the budget to those with a lot of positive reactions.

Choose your target audience

As a law firm, you should already know your target audience, so this part should be simple. Facebook allows you to choose an audience from within their Ad Manager and will alert you if your choice is too specific or too broad.

Still, do your homework. Check out your competitors’ pages and see how they are using the platform. You can grab their lookalike audiences to add to your own. Check out anything they are doing that seems to be turning off clients and avoid doing that yourself. Follow legal influencers online, share their content, and get involved in online communities they host.

Focus heavily on engaging with current and potential clients. If people comment on your ads, respond, but keep it friendly and neutral. Getting angry or confrontational is never a good strategy on social media. Always take care to moderate how you present yourself.

Avoid hot-button topics like politics and religion (unless, of course, these are the major thrust of your law firm). Remember that whatever your proclivities might be, those on the other side are still potential clients. As a business (and often, as an attorney), it is in your best interests to remain neutral.

Create your ads

Now it’s time to create your ads. Mix up your content types as discussed earlier and make use of Facebook’s tools, which make the process straightforward and fairly intuitive. You can choose and set specific goals right within the platform. This will enable you to measure your success moving forward.

Pick your images or videos, create a headline and body text, and determine where you want the ad displayed on Facebook. You can use an existing post on your page, or you can create something from scratch. Focus on visuals but remember, the words count, too.

You can convert content into videos. Experiment with new options, beginning with a narrow audience and expanding as you go. Never assume an ad will or will not work. A/B testing (alpha/beta) is essential. Test everything you do before diving in all the way.

Monitor your performance

Facebook Ads Manager offers extensive data analysis tools for you to monitor how well your ads are performing. Turn Facebook’s algorithms to your advantage. Watch out for ads that are hitting you with a higher cost-per-click than you thought they would. For these ads, broaden your audience and let the algorithm handle the rest.

If you are still unsure of your strategy, Array Digital can help. Our social media experts can help you to develop a winning strategy and can potentially help you fix your current approach or even create a brand new one. Array Digital has decades of experience handling social media marketing, and we offer proven, winning strategies. We are social media experts, so you don’t have to be.

Tired of not being seen?

If you are not sure how to get started, or you are not having the success you think you should with your social media strategy, contact Array Digital for help. Reach out to us at 757-333-3021 or use our online contact form to speak with one of our social media marketers today.