Digital advertising or marketing has been on the rise within the past 20 years or so. It encompasses all forms of marketing that use a digital device or a medium, such as the internet, to leverage digital channels to connect with current and prospective consumers. It helps you reach a larger audience than you would with traditional methods such as print. It allows you to specifically target that audience based on their needs and the likelihood of buying your product. In addition, digital advertising is more cost-effective than traditional methods. It will enable you to measure your success daily and change directions when you see fit.
You might be asking yourself: how will digital advertising amplify my law office or law practice? Well, there are many benefits to utilizing digital marketing for any industry, especially the law industry for that matter. Here are some digital advertising tips for lawyers and background on digital advertising overall.
Advertising Trends and Insights
Consumers are exposed to over 5,000 ads per day, making it crucial to capture consumers’ attention. The key to advertising is ensuring that your content is displayed at the right place, at the right time, with the right message. There are many channels to choose from when defining the right place to advertise your content. Within the digital marketing world, you can select from reviews, blogs, photos and videos, websites, directory listings, Google My Business, SEO (search engine optimization), social media, and more.
The goal of finding the right time to display your content is to connect with customers along their buying journey to your brand in a memorable way. To start the process, you have to increase the awareness and interest in your brand by using different mediums to attract consumers’ attention. A great example of this is utilizing blog posts, infographics, or short videos. Blog posts increase organic traffic when paired with a strong SEO and keyword strategy. Infographics increase your chance of being found on social media because of their high volume of sharability, making your content more accessible to other followers. Short videos are also very sharable and can help your practice get noticed by new audiences on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok.
Track Your Progress, Ensure Results
Ensuring that your interest is measurable across all platforms will increase the success of your content over time. Interest is earned by showcasing your knowledge through research and establishing your credibility as a practice. This is done through social media, blogs, articles, and reviews. From there, customers should be able to make a decision and purchase your product or service.
The key to making sure that you are presenting the right message to the consumer is certain that your message aligns with the consumer’s needs. So first, ask yourself: who is the consumer? Why are they seeking legal counsel? What are they looking to get out of your business? Understanding their journey to your company and ensuring that you know the customer’s needs will help you better market to them across all digital platforms.
Digital Advertising Options and Platforms
What makes digital advertising more effective than traditional advertising? First off, digital advertising generates more leads than traditional advertising, which increases the number of people that contact your business instead of your competition. It also increases brand awareness and can target consumers more quickly and efficiently, all while being easily tracked and more adjustable than traditional advertising.
There are a variety of channels to consider when looking at digital advertising. Search advertising allows you to reach searchers on the Google and Microsoft search networks to increase your exposure. Around 95 percent of traffic goes to the first page, meaning that your reach skyrockets if you can get yourself at the top of the search results. Search advertising also allows you to target consumers only when looking for your products and services, narrowing down your exposure to those matters. This method is also a cost-effective way to reach your audience at the right time, making this form of advertising the number one option for the right place, time, and message theory.
Social Advertising vs. Display Advertising
Social advertising is another tool to consider under the umbrella of digital advertising. It allows you to reach specific audiences, utilize various ad formats, prioritize leads and sales and find new audiences. Mediums like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and Snapchat can help you reach your target audience and meet their needs through your content. Facebook ads are a great way to get your audience, as 80 percent of Americans use Facebook. It’s a great way to showcase your creativity; it has a wide variety of targeting options, and, on average, it costs less than other forms of pay-per-click ads. While search advertising is better for sales-based purposes, social advertising is best for brand awareness, audience building, and marketing your business.
Display advertising utilizes graphic design to catch the consumer’s eye and engage them visually. This form of advertising is excellent for brand awareness, targeting your audience by interest, or remarketing. Audience targeting uses geographical, behavioral, and other influences to target the customer towards a product or service. Display advertising has an extensive network that reaches 90 percent of North America’s online audience and has optimization technology, placing ads most effectively while being more cost-effective than traditional methods.
Strategies and Tips for Lawyers on Utilizing Digital Advertising
Small businesses, specifically smaller law firms and practices, can face numerous challenges when marketing themselves. 67 percent of small businesses have a limited marketing budget, and 34 percent don’t have the time or skill to learn digital marketing. Before you start to market your business, you should sit down and develop a game plan to execute these tools.
First, you have to set attainable and quantifiable goals. This will help outline your strategy and make your plan clearer. Specified purposes such as generating leads, driving offline and online sales, increasing awareness, and re-engaging your customers. The direction for your marketing plan will pave its way and allow you to transition into understanding your target audience better.
What To Do After Your Goals Are Set
Understanding your audience will take your plan a step further. Ask yourself questions about your ideal customer. How old are they? What level of income do they have? What is their highest level of education? Where do they live? What do they need outside of law practice? What interests them, and how can I use that to get their attention? Using tools like geographics, demographics, psychographics, and keywords can assist you in narrowing down your ideal customer and targeting them.
For effective messaging through ads and landing pages, ensure that your message is used towards the right person, at the right time, and the right place. This increases exposure and guarantees you won’t miss an opportunity to put your name out there.
Track Your ROI And Success Of Your Plan
Take time to understand how tracking and reporting work and leverage that for your business. Monitoring and reporting start on a micro or minor level and work their way up to the macro or higher level. We begin with engaging visitors through mediums like newsletter sign-ups and brochure downloads at the micro-level. This turns into leads using phone calls or forms submissions, generating qualified leads, and closing the deal.
Take advantage of insights by optimizing performance based on results and redirect your campaign from there. Notice that a specific ad or medium didn’t work like you thought it would? Change the direction of your marketing campaign better to fit the reaction and needs of the customer. Start with specific keywords, then look into the time, location, or type of device the consumer uses. From there, you can narrow it down and look at things such as the demographics, browser type, and language to zone in on your audience.
Lastly, expand your reach and channels to scale by exploring all of your advertisement options: social ads, display ads, search ads, and video ads. Each of these ads has its unique advantages and purposes. Focusing on specific ad types will help grow your company’s customer base and sales volume.
Surefire Local Helps Your Business Maximize Growth
Utilize these six tips to help further your exposure to potential clients and increase your ROI. At Surefire Local, we can help you do just that. Surefire Local provides the industry’s most complete marketing platform designed to help small and medium-sized businesses attract lifetime customers, grow revenue, and broaden their reach in their local markets. Through its flagship product, Surefire Local Marketing Platform™, locally-focused companies of all sizes can remove digital roadblocks hindering growth. Request a free demo to see how Surefire Local can help your business grow!