What Every Lawyer Should Know About Advertising On Facebook

I spend a great deal of time getting my clients to the highest organic positions possible on search engines due to the fact that paid advertising (or PPC) has a much lower ROI and typically only receives around 20-25% of the user clicks.

By the recent explosion in social media has provided a new and much more dynamic way in which to advertise your services online that never existed on the search engines.

Traditional Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising allows the customer to choose a geography for their search and then requires that keyword selection be used to match the desired search engine traffic. Since nearly 50-70% of all attorney search engine searches are non-repeatable (i.e. long-tail), there is simply no way to accurate capture the majority of these searches.

But Facebook has thrown a whole new wrinkle into the equation. Facebook is the fastest growing social media tool with an active user base of over 500 million people and growing. To put this into perspective, if Facebook were its own country, it would be the third most populated country in the world! Moreover, Facebook is the second most visited site online next to Google and over half of all internet users are now projected to visit Facebook at least once a month.

So why is all this important to an attorney? Because the most important aspect of marketing is to match the way you market your services to the ways in which your customers will best see them. The bottom line is that your prospective clients are now on Facebook.

What Makes Facebook Advertising So Unique

Traditional Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is based largely on keyword selection and geography and your ad is then displayed in a very small section with very limited text. Facebook ads also display on the user’s page but allow you to add an image to your advertisement and best of all, your user targeting demographics are much more dynamic.

When users create a Facebook account, they will provide information about themselves including their: location, age, sex, relationship status, likes and interests, education, and connections to other facebook people, groups and pages. As a result, Facebook allows you to advertise to people based on their user demographics. In short, if you have a target profile for your prospective clients, Facebook will now allow you to advertise directly to them through their website.

For example, say you are an estate planning attorney in NYC and determine that your targeted user profile is highly educated men in Manhattan within a certain age group and profession. You can now, based on what these people tell Facebook about themselves, advertise directly to these people in a way that traditional search engine advertising never allowed.

Another example might be a divorce & mediation attorney in NYC who knows that married police officers tend to have higher incidents of marital problems and therefore decides to target people of a certain age who have law enforcement as an interest as well as those people who are part of NYC police groups and pages on Facebook.

Recent Pew Research also suggests that the highest level of divorces tend to fall in the 25-31 year old age groups. PPC doesn’t allow you to target users by age but Facebook now does…a definite advantage.

As you can see by these examples, the best way to target your ideal customers is to first know their target profiles and then enter these criteria into Facebook to see how many people meet this advertising market size. If it then makes sense to run ads for these people, you can choose to pay based on the number of impressions (views) or clicks you receive from the ad.

How To Get Started With Facebook Advertising

1.) Create a new facebook account by going to: http://www.facebook.com/

2.) Go to http://www.facebook.com/advertising/ to setup your new advertising account and select your criteria.

3.) Once you start selecting your user criteria, you will notice an “estimated search” number to the right of the screen indicating how many people fit these criteria. You will also notice at the bottom of the screen the estimated number of clicks or impressions you should expect to receive on a daily basis.

4.) Make sure to spend a good deal of time in crafting both the content for your ad as well as the image you will use within it. If you need ideas, visit the ads on the right of your own Facebook screen to see how other people are advertising to you.

5.) Set a reasonable budget and run your ad for a 2-4 week period of time and then gauge your response rates and potential new clients you receive. Make sure to ask each new client you receive from the web where exactly they found you from so you know if your Facebook ads are effective from both the qualitative and quantitative perspectives. Your website analytics will also help by proving a “source” indicating the number of click you received from Facebook.com.

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