Facebook is a powerful lead generator for law firms thanks to its large user base and ad toolsets. These tools save you time and help you stand out from other lawyers.
But tools alone won’t help you gain clients. Marketing funnel fundamentals still apply to Facebook ads. Combining marketing knowledge with PPC tools helps create better campaigns.
We want to help you create ads people want to click on. We’ll break down Facebook’s ad tools and how to make your ads targeted and effective.
The Challenges of Marketing a Personal Injury Firm on Facebook
Marketing a personal injury firm on Facebook has several challenges. Understanding them increases your chances of making targeted, effective ads.
Your first challenge is standing out against businesses competing for the same clients. Your personal injury firm needs to have a standout feature or two that makes people choose you. These standout features could be timeliness, convenience, or creative ad copy.
Your second challenge is the cost of PPC. Facebook ads aren’t as expensive as other personal injury PPC options, but you still have to pay when someone clicks. Budgeting early will reduce the chances you waste your money on ads that don’t work. Understanding which ad types are best for your message will also reduce this risk.
Your third challenge is knowing which ads to use and how they differ from other tools. Starting with Facebook ads begins with understanding campaigns, ad sets, and ads.
Campaigns Vs. Ad Sets Vs. Ads
Creating effective ads is easier when you break them down into parts. Campaigns, ad sets, and ads are like a nesting dolls. A collection of related ads is an ad set. A campaign is comprised of a collection of ad sets.
Ads
An advertisement is your message to potential clients. This approach tells them who your firm is, what you offer, and how you make their lives easier.
Think of a Facebook ad like a single roadside billboard. This ad contains your pitch and the call to action for anyone passing by.
Ad Sets
An ad set is a series of multiple ads connected to each other. These ad groups share similar settings to save you time targeting your audience.
An ad set would be like a group of billboards containing similar designs and messages.
Campaigns
An ad campaign contains ad sets. Your campaign coordinates the overall goal your ads are trying to achieve.
Like a series of billboards, your Facebook campaigns contain all your ad sets. These ads could be videos, images, or even polls. As long as they’re all linked together under the same goal, they count as a campaign.
You’re ready to run ads once you understand these differences and maintain an active page.
Setting Up an Active and Actionable Facebook Page
Facebook ads paired with an active business page encourage leads to take action. When you maintain an active page, you create a seamless experience that builds trust.
Unlike the Facebook ads we’ll be exploring below, you don’t pay for a Facebook page. Your Facebook business page works alongside ads to increase your visibility in this channel. An active page with fresh and interesting posts helps maintain a lead’s attention. They may also decide to follow you in the long term.
An example of an actionable page is Fielding Law Group, a firm specializing in auto accidents. Their page is active with ongoing posts that aren’t more than a few months old. Each post is actionable and comes with prompts to contact them, share, or follow.
Finding Your Audience Types With Facebook’s Tools
Trying to appeal to everyone is the fastest path to obscurity. Finding high-quality leads is easier when you narrow down your target audience.
Your ad is more effective when it’s tailored to your ideal clients. Facebook ads provide tools for demographics, geographical locations, and behaviors. These audience targeting tools come in three categories to help your firm stand out.
Core Audience
Facebook lets you create a core audience based on metrics you set. These metrics include important demographic details such as:
- Location: this could be as broad as the entire country or as specific as a neighborhood
- Demographics: these details include age, gender, and education
- Interests: these interests could be hobbies like playing sports or traveling
- Behaviors: this last section focuses on buying patterns or preferred devices
Custom Audience
While the custom audience is similar to the core audience, there’s one key difference. Your custom audience has already interacted with you and given you useful information.
Facebook determines a custom audience by using the collective information of past clients. This information comes from customer lists or app data.
This feature is handy because you can use pre-existing information for future campaigns. You save time doing research and use data you already know works.
Lookalike Audience
The lookalike audience gets you new leads with less work. This tool seeks out audiences who have similar characteristics to your custom audience.
This feature also gathers information from past clients. You can adjust your lookalike audience to be more or less similar to your custom audience. This can look like changing the number of people you reach or tweaking their interests.
This is a great tool to use when you want to expand your services to more people. The lookalike audience ensures you’ll find new people who have a need for your firm.
Determining Your Budget
Since Facebook ads require bidding, you’ll have to determine a budget before starting. The average law firm spends at least $10,000 per month on marketing. Using a paid ad channel could cost you around $2,000 a month.
There are two main reasons to determine your budget early. Facebook ads change prices depending on how many people compete in the same auction. Setting a cap for your budget will narrow down what you can and can’t afford. For example, if you want to dedicate $10,000 to your advertising campaign, you’ll be set back if it costs $15,000 instead.
The second reason to determine your budget is to reduce your chances of wasting money. Since Facebook Ads are a form of PPC, you can lose money on irrelevant ads if you’re not careful.
Thankfully, Facebook makes it easy to adjust ads so you can keep costs in mind.
Bidding in the Facebook Ad Auction
Bidding in the Facebook auction is where you compete with other businesses for ad space. The best bids increase your chances of targeting the right leads at the right time.
Facebook determines ad performance using relevancy. Your relevance score runs from one (the lowest) and ten (the highest). They score you based on the positive or negative feedback of people clicking on your ads. The higher your positive feedback, the higher your score.
Not only will a relevant ad reach its intended audience, but Facebook will also charge you less for it. You’ll have a higher chance of winning bids against businesses with lower scores. If you want to figure out your ad relevance, use their Ad Relevance Diagnostics tool.
If you’ve never put out an ad before, you’ll be able to benefit from this feedback quickly. Just one advertisement will give you a starting point on where to go next in your campaign.
Businesses running Facebook Ads want to get the most leads for the least amount of money. Measuring how much of your money is paying off is done with the following metrics.
Cost-Per-Lead (CPL)
The cost-per-lead model tells you how much you spent to get a single lead. This metric helps you determine how much you’re spending so you can adjust your budget.
Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA)
While cost-per-lead tells you you’re on the right track, it’s not the full picture. Cost-per-acquisition determines how much it costs you to gain a paying client.
Choosing the Right Ad Types
Facebook ads come in several formats that all have their own strengths. Finding the best ad for your message will help your firm connect better with clients.
You can increase the chances of a lead clicking thanks to message placement. Facebook offers an automatic placement option to help you choose suitable ad formats.
There are several ad types for you to choose from.
Single Image Ads
These advertisements are simple and showcase just one image promoting your firm. These images come with text, a headline, and a CTA button.
Slideshow Ads
These ads take multiple single images and put them into a slideshow. Slideshows are useful if you need to give the viewer a little more information.
Video Ads
Video is rapidly climbing to the top of the advertising mountain. Facebook video ads use fifteen seconds or less to capture a lead’s attention.
These brief advertisements are great at capturing attention without being overwhelming.
Carousel Ads
Carousel ads hover between a single image and a video. This ad type will show ten images or short videos with individual links. The viewer has the ability to browse each image or brief video at their leisure.
A carousel ad for a car crash attorney, for example, could have eight images with eight links.
Lead Ads
These useful ads create a simple form for leads to fill out. They can submit their email and name for you to follow up with them later.
These ads are best for retargeting bottom of funnel leads. You can run these ads to people who have been to your website before but may not have submitted a contact form.
Polls and Instant Experience Ads
There are two other ad types that lawyers could run but may not net you the best results.
Instant experience ads are for mobile advertisements only. These ads become fullscreen after a potential client taps on them.
Poll ads allow advertisers to ask viewers to choose between two options. This drives up engagement on the ad and can help with retargeting.
These ad types work best for products and ecommerce sellers. That’s because these ads are highly visual showcases for goods. These may not be the best for lawyers providing services instead of products.
Matching Your Ads to Your Lead’s Funnel Placement
An effective ad is one that gets your target client to take a specific action. Working backward from your goal results in better ad campaigns. The best way to achieve this is by applying the PPC funnel.
The PPC funnel is similar to the marketing funnel. It charts the different stages of awareness potential clients may be in when they see your ad.
These funnel stages are:
- Unaware: the client doesn’t know they have a problem yet
- Problem Aware: they know they have a problem but don’t have a solution
- Solution Aware: the potential client has a few solutions in mind but hasn’t picked one yet
- Service Aware: they know they need a service but aren’t convinced
- Most Aware: these people are aware of many services but haven’t purchased yet
People at different stages need different types of ads. Matching ads to potential clients at different stages guide ads toward being relevant.
Due to competition from other law firms, your ads will benefit from a creative approach. You can choose to go out of the box or simply think about ways of giving your ads more flavor.
The basic components of an effective Facebook ad include copy and graphics.
Copy
The text of your ad needs to be actionable and to the point. Ad copy is where you tell the viewer how you’re going to solve their problems.
Advertisements paired with a call to action encourage the viewer to take action. Examples of calls to action are things like:
- Call us today for a consultation
- Learn more about getting compensation after a car accident
Ads are more effective at connecting with leads when you match your tone to their stage in the funnel.
Unaware or problem aware clients are not as emotionally invested yet. Lighter, educational tones tend to resonate better.
To contrast, solution aware and service aware people are in the evaluation stage. Also known as warm audiences, they are metaphorically warming up to your business. Showcasing the value of your service and how you can help them works well here.
Choosing the wrong tone makes your business seem pushy or insincere. For example, the legal field frequently uses boastful or self-absorbed tones in marketing. Your average client may be turned off by this approach. Using client-first copy instead can help you connect with them. For example, compare the following two phrases:
- “Were you in a car accident recently? You need my help.”
- “Were you in a car accident recently? Let us help you through this rough patch. Call us today for a consultation so you can get back on your feet.”
The first one puts you first and your client second. The second phrase puts your potential client first.
Graphics
Studies show that relevant information paired with images increases information retention by 65%. Your ads will benefit from a visual approach that showcases the personality of your firm.
Matching ads to your lead’s funnel placement improves your chances of gaining a quality lead. For example, an ad targeting a problem aware lead could educate them so they remember your firm later. One way you can do this is with an entertaining graphic on myths in the legal industry.
Another example of matching your ads is targeting a service aware lead. They’re still not ready to hire but are considering you as an option. One way you can connect with them is with an in-depth guide that analyzes their current problem.
Measuring Your Ads to Determine Effectiveness
Making effective Facebook ads that meet your goals is a learning process. You’ll learn which ads are better than others when you test them.
The A/B method is a reliable metric for testing ads. You use one version of an ad, then create a slightly different version to compare.
For example, a personal injury law firm for bicycle accidents creates an A/B test for its ad campaign. The ad has the same copy but different tones and images. The A advertisement uses an assertive tone to encourage the viewer to contact the firm. The ad uses a stock photo of a person with an injured leg and a broken bicycle.
The B advertisement uses a positive tone. This advertisement shows a video clip of someone checking their bicycle for damage. The call-to-action is also to contact the firm.
Both advertisements have the same goal in mind but different ways of achieving it. You then figure out which advertisement is faring better with the following metrics.
Impressions
Impressions measure the number of times a person sees your advertisement.
Facebook determines impressions by calculating the number of times an ad appears for the first time per session. A viewer that scrolls down and sees your ad will count as one impression. If they scroll back up, that still counts as one impression since they never left the page.
A high amount of impressions is a good start but doesn’t give you the full picture. This is where frequency and link clicks come in.
Frequency
Facebook helps you understand people’s behavior with their frequency feature. They calculate frequency by dividing the impressions by the number of unique visitors.
For example, let’s say your firm ran a personal injury ad video on Facebook. Your ad received five thousand impressions and five hundred unique visitors.
This equation would result in a frequency of ten. Facebook would consider this high frequency and a sign of a relevant ad.
Link Clicks
Link clicks tell you a lead was interested enough in your ad to give you the benefit of the doubt. This metric measures the number of clicks your ad received.
Facebook measures a link click on your ad’s text, media, or call-to-action button.
Conversion Rates
The final step in a client’s journey is deciding to work with your firm. You determine the conversion rate by the conversion number divided by the number of link clicks.
For example, five conversions from five hundred clicks mean a 0.01% conversion rate. Increasing conversion is a major challenge, but one you can tackle with a little help.
Facebook handles this for you with their Ads Manager feature.
Facebook Ads Can Be a Game Changer For Generating Leads
Now is a great time to experiment with Facebook ads so you can gain more quality leads. We’re ready to help you out.
Facebook Ads save you time by giving you useful metric tools and data analytics. You can quickly put together core audiences or use lookalike audiences to save time. Facebook bidding gives you the opportunity to have well-placed and well-timed advertisements. The more ads you run, the more you’ll learn what does and doesn’t work.
Facebook ads are more powerful when they're a part of a social media marketing campaign. Our experience will help you build creative ideas and connect with your audiences. Contact us today for a consultation so we can help you create effective Facebook ads.
