With more than 500 million users, LinkedIn is one of the largest social media networks on the web. Whether you’re looking for new employees or trying to find new clients, your law firm should be utilizing this platform.
Like most other social networks, having an accurate company page and actively posting content is always important. However, there is another side of LinkedIn that law firms should not ignore: LinkedIn advertising.
In this article, we will highlight the basics of advertising on LinkedIn, when it makes sense for your law firm, and how it can be an effective tool to reach your potential clients.
Basics of LinkedIn advertising
Similar to other social media advertising platforms, LinkedIn advertising consists of campaigns, audiences, and ads. Within each of these components there are many factors to think about:
- Objective: What are your goals for this campaign?
- Audience: Who are you trying to reach?
- Message: What are you trying to communicate?
Campaign objectives
The first step to creating a campaign is deciding what objective or goal you wish to achieve. LinkedIn classifies these objectives in three categories: awareness, consideration, and conversions.
- Awareness is getting your brand and message in front of as many people as possible.
- Consideration is having your target users take some type of action. That could be clicking on an ad to get to your website, engaging with the ad by liking or commenting, or watching a video for a certain duration of time.
- Conversions is exactly what it sounds like—driving conversions on your website or entirely through LinkedIn. One of the objectives in the conversion category is lead generation, which provides a way to collect information from your target audience right on LinkedIn.
A nice benefit of these campaigns is that LinkedIn will auto-populate the form with details that the user has already provided, such as name, email, and company name.
Audience
One way LinkedIn advertising stands out when compared to other advertising platforms is with detailed and sophisticated audience targeting. In addition to basics like location, age, and gender, you can also use target things like specific job title and function, and even attributes of the company. This is where you can really start to benefit.
For example:
- You can target based on education both by level and field of study, and can even target the schools your target users went to. This might be useful if, say, you’re recruiting for a legal assistant or a new attorney and want to target graduates from law schools in your area.
- You can target based on job experience, including job function, seniority, title, skills, and years of experience.
- You can target based on interest and traits, which includes any LinkedIn groups users are members of. For example, when advertising for referrals, you could advertise to groups that pertain to other practice areas (e.g. family law professionals, franchise attorney, mediation & arbitration, etc.).
Another option that makes LinkedIn stand out is the ability to target the company that users work for. You can base this targeting on the company’s name, industry, size, growth rate over the last year, and category (which includes the list of Fortune 500 and LinkedIn-created Top Companies lists.
The third option within LinkedIn audience targeting is the ability to use your own data to target specific users. LinkedIn can upload a list of contacts and will match them up to users on LinkedIn. LinkedIn recommends uploading a list of at least 10,000 contacts, but the minimum requirement is 300.
These lists must include at least one of the following:
- First and last name
- Mobile device ID.
You can also include company, job title, and country to increase the likelihood of a match.
LinkedIn also allows lists of companies to be uploaded, too. These lists require at least one of the following:
- Company name
- Company website
- Company email domain
- LinkedIn page URL.
For the most accurate match, LinkedIn recommends that you include the LinkedIn page URL.
LinkedIn ad format
To pick the right LinkedIn ad format, you need to understand your audience, their LinkedIn browsing habits, and how they are most likely to engage with content. You also need to have a firm grasp of the message you are trying to get across to your target audience.
Video is becoming one of the more popular ad formats on LinkedIn. LinkedIn users spend three times longer on video content than static content, and video content gets 30% more comments than non-video content. Video is extremely useful for lawyers to share information on current topics and establish themselves as thought leaders. Video can also be a great opportunity to share client stories and testimonials to give your firm social proof and show how you can help targeted users who may be in similar situations.
Another popular ad format is LinkedIn Message Ads. Instead of serving ads in user feeds, these ads are curated into users’ LinkedIn inboxes. This format allows you to use more characters to share your story and value proposition, and can be a good choice for audiences more likely to engage with written content (such as business owners and other lawyers). Message ads can also be personalized to users by including personalized tokens of first name, last name, company name, or other information they provide in their LinkedIn profile.
Other ad formats that are placed right into user feeds are single image ads and carousel ads. These use static images to draw users’ attention as they scroll. You can get more creative with carousel ads by promoting different practice areas or sharing different values of your law firm.
What makes LinkedIn advertising different?
What makes LinkedIn advertising different than advertising on other social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, Snapchat, etc.?
LinkedIn as a professional social platform
First, it gives you the ability to advertise to hard-to-reach business professionals when they are in a business mindset. While other social networks are more geared toward personal use (like posting family pictures or killing time while watching a show), LinkedIn users are on the platform to hear about the latest business practices and network with like-minded professionals.
According to HubSpot, the best times to post on LinkedIn are between the hours of 8am to 2pm on Tuesday through Thursday. The worst time is on the weekend or outside of business hours. This shows that users are taking time during business hours to be on LinkedIn and are more likely to be in that business mindset.
Professional targeting
Second, LinkedIn’s professional targeting is unmatched by the other social advertising platforms. With the ability for both user-specific and company targeting, you can get very granular with who you want to share your message with.
Since LinkedIn is a business platform, you are also more likely to get accurate information like up-to-date job titles and job functions. Facebook has similar targeting with job titles and employer, but the accuracy is not the same as what you get on LinkedIn because there is no incentive for a user to add that information on Facebook.
Why choose LinkedIn advertising for your law firm?
Determining if your law firm can advertise effectively on LinkedIn is largely determined by your goals and the audience you are trying to reach.
For example, if you are a real estate lawyer looking to share thought leadership information with real estate agents and landlords in your area, LinkedIn makes sense. With professional targeting and the ability to share your message in different formats (video, short form copy, and message format), you can speak directly to your target audience with content that is tailored to their needs and business goals.
Another factor that will determine your effectiveness on LinkedIn is your budget. In general, you will pay more for ad clicks and impressions on LinkedIn than on other social platforms. At the same time, though, delivering your message to the right prospects can also generate better conversion rates. If your goal is simply to get your name in front of as many people as possible, then perhaps a different network might be a better choice. But if you want to reach business-minded professionals, LinkedIn could be the right fit for your advertising budget.
Are lawyer referrals a big source of clients for your law firm? According to a 2016 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report, over 93% of lawyers now use LinkedIn. Within LinkedIn advertising, you can narrow in on specific practicing lawyers based on their job function so you can reach exactly the people that are more likely to refer you clients.
Build effective, goal-focused LinkedIn campaigns for your law firm with LaFleur
At LaFleur, we can help you create effective LinkedIn campaigns for your law firm.
By getting to know your firm’s overall goals and target audience, we can create a LinkedIn campaign strategy that will showcase your brand, ad creative that will get your audience to stop scrolling, and copy that will effectively communicate your message.
Our marketing agency’s roster includes social strategists, designers, and copywriters with years of experience developing ad campaigns for legal audiences. We love working with passionate attorneys and law firms, and are ready to speak with you about your goals.
Please reach out today by calling (888) 222-1512 or completing this brief form. We’d love to learn more about your LinkedIn advertising goals and how we can make your vision a reality.
References
https://www.theb2bhouse.com/linkedin-video-ads/
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/best-time-post-on-linkedin
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_practice/publications/techreport/2016/social_media_blogging/
