Marketing Ideas for Law Firms: 7 New Strategies for Social Media Marketing

You didn’t get into the legal industry to be a marketer.

You got into it to help people, to right wrongs, and to ensure your clients are represented through the complicated twists and turns of the legal system.

You didn’t get into it to write a Facebook post, test email subject lines, or optimize your website for conversions.

Nonetheless, this stuff is necessary. The old road — word-of-mouth, glad-handing on Main Street — doesn’t work anymore.

To increase awareness and land the best clients, you need to stand out from your competitors.

And digital marketing (through social media, lead generation, and email) is the best way to do it.

This article starts off a three-part series that gives you proven marketing ideas for your law firm.

In this series, we’ll cover strategies you can implement today to build awareness of your firm, drive visitors to your site, and increase your caseload and client base.

This piece will start it off, giving you ideas for marketing your law firm with social media.

We’ll cover:

• An introduction to social media marketing for law firms
• Creating social media posts around the holidays
• Creating a Facebook lookalike audience ad campaign
• Testing short video ads on Facebook
• Running a bumper-ad campaign on YouTube
• Creating a Facebook and Instagram video ad campaign
• Run a LinkedIn ad campaign

Marketing Ideas for Law Firms: Social Media

Imagine social media like a big room of people.

Every single client you’ve ever had is likely in that room, and every single client you ever will have is likely in there as well.

There are 3.499 billion active social media users, and about 65% of people in the US (221 million) are on Facebook.

Needless to say, it’s a big room.

So all you have to do is walk into that room and get their attention.

Here are a few top strategies to do just that.

#1. Create social media posts around the holidays that are relevant to your legal specialty.

It’s best practice to create social media posts that tie into what your target clients are already thinking about. And when the holidays come around, those holidays are what they’re thinking about.

Focus your social media posts on holidays and content that is relevant to your legal specialty.

For instance:

• If you’re in veteran’s disability or veteran’s law, post on Memorial Day, Veteran’s Day, the 4th of July, VE day, Armed Forces Day, PTSD Awareness Day (June 27th), 9/11, etc.
• If you’re in family or divorce law, post on Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, Grandparent’s Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, 4th of July, Valentine’s Day, etc.

Here’s an example from Sherrod & Bernard P.C. — a law firm in Georgia — sharing an inspirational quote on the Fourth of July:

This post garnered 419 Likes, 6 Comments, and 26 Shares — above and beyond the law firm’s average post engagement.

#2. Create a Facebook lookalike audience campaign that targets people similar to your clients.

A lookalike audience is a group of people similar to your existing clients that you can target with a Facebook ad campaign.

Here’s Facebook’s description:

“When you create a Lookalike Audience, you choose a source audience […] and we identify the common qualities of the people in it (ex: demographic information or interests). Then we find people who are similar to (or “look like”) them.”

Lookalike audiences are a powerful way to increase your firm’s brand awareness with people similar to your previous clients.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating a lookalike audience on Facebook:

#1. Create your ad campaign (the brand awareness objective is a good starting point for a lookalike audience campaign).

#2. Under “Create New Audience” select “Create New.” Then import a CSV list of your clients:

#3. Once you’ve uploaded your custom audience (your “source” audience), head back to the audience creation tab and select “Lookalike Audience.” Then choose the custom audience you just added, the country where you’d like to find a similar set of people, and the desired audience size:

#4. Click “Create Audience” and target it with your ad campaign!

Top tips for this marketing idea:

1. At the bottom of the image above, you’ll see “Select Audience Size.” This feature enables you to tell Facebook how specifically you want to match your custom audience list, with 1% being the closest match (but smallest audience size) and 10% being the largest (but less related), audience. Studies show that a smaller, more specific audience outperforms a larger one. AdEspresso, for instance, found that a 10% Lookalike Audience had a 70% higher cost-per-conversion than the 1% Lookalike Audience. So keep it tight.
2. You can also create a custom audience from the people who visit your website but leave without booking a consultation. To do this, add the Facebook conversion tracking pixel to your website and create a custom audience from the website traffic source.

#3. Test 6-, 15-, and 30-second video ads to see which performs best.

Video content outperforms all other types of social media content by 50-100%:

(Source)

So using video on social media is a no-brainer.

But not all video is created equal. If you upload your full-length brand video, you’ll get some engagement, but you could do better.

Here at Crisp, we tested 6-second, 15-second, and 30-second video on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram to see which format drove the highest engagement for law firms.

They ran the test for a law firm from Tampa Bay and saw some interesting results:

(Source)

The six-second video drove almost a quarter-million impressions (views) on YouTube as a bumper ad, and reached more than 75,000 people on Instagram.

The six-second video drove 363 clicks from Facebook for less than 75 cents each.

To learn more about the importance of optimizing video cuts for social media, check out Crisp Social Stack or connect with a video marketing expert for a one-on-one conversation.

#4. Create an educational video series on YouTube to increase brand awareness.

The legal process is a complicated one (there’s a reason the most recent pass-rate for the bar was only 31.4%).

So educating your prospective clients needs to be your first step towards getting them to choosing you as their attorney. They need to understand their case before they consider trying it with your firm.

And a video series on YouTube is a great way to do that.

Videos show your face and thereby remove the impersonal, corporate aspect of many law firms. Creating an educational video also puts you in the “giver” position — already delivering value before your clients have even met you.

Here’s an educational video example from Blachly, Tabor, Bozik & Hartman:

Top tip for this marketing idea:

Don’t just rest your iPhone against the bookcase in your office and start filming.

A poor-quality video will do more to damage your law firm’s reputation than no video at all. Instead, invest in a high-quality camera, sound equipment, lighting, background music, and filming B-roll.

To inquire about getting a professional team to manage video production on your behalf — speak with a legal marketing expert at Crisp today.

#5. Run a bumper-ad campaign on YouTube to increase awareness.

Bumper ads are six-second, unskippable video ads that appear before a video on YouTube.

They’re a fantastic way for your firm to increase awareness. This is because video, more than any other type of content, increases message recall (how much your prospective clients will remember your message).

To test the impact of bumper ads, we created a campaign that targeted attorneys.

Our six-second bumper ad got 32,472 impressions (views) and cost around $1.25 for every thousand views:

(Source)

Imagine paying just over a dollar for 1,000 people (people within your target market) to hear your voice and see your law firm’s name.

Top tip for this marketing idea: 

A high-impact way to use bumper ads is to create a retargeting campaign to increase brand recall on YouTube. Your ads will exclusively show to people who have visited your website but not booked a consultation.

If you’re ready to leverage video ad campaigns on YouTube to grow your firm, connect with a legal marketing expert from Crisp Video today.

#6. Create a Facebook and Instagram video ad campaign.

Facebook and Instagram are the one-two punch for increasing awareness. With a combined user base of 3.41 billion people, they’re the two largest social media platforms (not including YouTube), and setting up an ad campaign is quick and easy.

Here’s an example of the success you can find by using video ads on Facebook and Instagram:

The Berry Law Firm, a veteran’s disability benefits firm in Nebraska, used Facebook and Instagram ads to educate their prospective clients about their legal rights to disability benefits and how the firm could help them receive the dispensation they deserved.

With the help of the Crisp Video team, they created the following high-quality, emotionally powerful brand video and promoted it on social media:

The Results:

Within one week, Berry Law Firm’s Facebook and Instagram video ad had been viewed by 50,656 people, accumulated 37,000 Views, been shared 514 times, garnered 707 Likes, and had 32 Comments.

Since 2016, variations of that same video have reached 251,346 people, accumulated more than 1 million views, 3,000 Shares, 4,600 Likes, and 447 Comments.

(Source: Berry Law Firm)

#7. Run a LinkedIn ad campaign.

LinkedIn ads can be a powerful way to connect with prospective clients.

Linkedin’s users are, on average, older, wealthier, and better-educated than Facebook or Instagram users. As a result, it’s a great place to target qualified individuals.

LinkedIn Advertising Case Study:

LinkedIn has only recently added video ads to their advertising platform, but they’re already driving fantastic results.

We ran a LinkedIn ad campaign that targeted mobile users with ads in their LinkedIn newsfeed:

(Source)

Our target audience was 33-55-year-old men with the job title “attorney” or “lawyer,” a law degree, and a company size of between 1 and 50. This gave them an audience of 31,000 LinkedIn users.

Results:

The video ad drove 2,545 impressions for $509, with an average watch time of 32%, and remember, these were highly-targeted and qualified prospective clients.

Conclusion

These marketing strategies will help your law firm grow online. There’s no way around it.

They’ve worked for firms like yours in the past, and, so long as you implement them professionally, they will deliver results.

However, failing to do them well (for instance, taking an amateur’s approach to video) can actually be more damaging than doing nothing at all.

To learn how to effectively incorporate these social media strategies into your law firm’s marketing strategy, connect with a Crisp Legal Marketing Strategist for a one-on-one strategy session today.

And be sure to look out for the second and third part of our “Marketing Ideas” series, which will be focused on strategies to help your law firm generate leads and use email marketing more effectively.