How to Put a Small Budget to Work With Digital Advertising
The cliché about spending money to make money rings true in legal marketing, where digital outreach plays a crucial role in acquiring and converting leads. Paid digital advertising benefits law firms of all shapes and sizes, but it’s particularly helpful for solo or small boutique firms with limited budgets. Smaller firms lack the resources to fund traditional advertising tactics and should rely on more affordable internet-based alternatives.
Digital marketing is a viable but criminally underused marketing tactic, evidenced by a 2019 survey from the American Bar Association. According to the study, only 47 percent of firms have an overall marketing budget. This absence is particularly prevalent among smaller practitioners, with 31 percent of firms with 2-9 lawyers having a marketing budget.
Without a well-rounded digital marketing campaign, your law firm misses out on qualified leads that could become top clients. However, if you’re like many attorneys, you don’t have the time or budget necessary to commit to resource-intensive organic marketing efforts. Luckily, paid digital marketing can help you generate a quick and reliable influx of qualified leads.
Simple paid marketing strategies can help you achieve impressive results on modest budgets. Here, we’ll cover a few effective paid marketing options to improve your conversion rates.
Use Targeted Keywords For PPC Campaigns
Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns can provide a significant boost to sustain your marketing efforts until you begin to see increases in organic traffic. This can be a great short-term option for building an audience on a limited budget, unless your search engine optimization (SEO) approach involves competing for high-volume keywords.
Carefully targeted search terms make all the difference. For example, you’re unlikely to gain traction with broad keywords such as “criminal lawyer.” However, more specific phrases such as “Miami DUI lawyer” will produce more reliable leads and higher conversion rates.
Optimize Pay-Per-Click With Strong Landing Pages and Intake
Beyond strategic keyword selection, your firm will gain maximum value from your PPC budget by taking advantage of several effective strategies:
Cultivate PPC Campaigns
Focus on getting leads on the phone. Google’s call-only option encourages leads to get in touch by tapping on your ad. This removes the need for a landing page—a top source of lost leads for many law firms.
Level up Your Legal Intake
Call-based PPC efforts will produce limited results if prospective clients are forced to deal with voicemail. Conversion rates drop dramatically with every extra minute added between initial contact and follow-up. Effective intake solutions will reduce losses by ensuring that your firm picks up on the first ring.
Harness the Power of Video Marketing
Not all leads immediately follow up with calls. Folks who visit your website expect an engaging landing page that conveys your brand’s core message. A quality video will help build the foundation for a trusting attorney-client relationship—and it need not be expensive to produce.
Videos also help boost traffic to social media pages. Facebook, for example, offers paid advertising options within video streams, news feeds, and even stories. Similar options such as YouTube display ads can also help produce high lead engagement.
Try Remarketing
Remarketing involves focusing on previous leads to make your PPC efforts more cost-effective. Using this approach, your paid ads appear as users browse the web to remind prospective clients of your service as they research their options. An effective remarketing campaign can return seemingly lost leads to your sales funnel.
Choose the Right Platform For Paid Social Media Ads
Social media is useful for building strong relationships with prospects. As with organic marketing strategies, however, social network followings take time to develop. Be strategic and choose top sites to score quick boosts in website traffic.
As you court new followers, make the most of paid options such as Facebook for Business. Targeted to specific users based on demographics, ads produced through social media channels let you customize your digital marketing campaign based on your budget and preferred bid per click.
Although social media campaigns are relatively easy to set up and manage, don’t spread yourself thin and produce ads for several different sites all at once. One or two paid marketing campaigns on the proper social media channels will yield far better results than haphazard campaigns on every possible platform you can think of. When in doubt, use metrics to track the performance of your paid social media campaigns and determine which platform delivers the best leads.
Choosing from today’s vast range of digital marketing solutions can feel nerve-wracking—especially when your law firm has limited resources. If your firm focuses on a few targeted strategies, you can score exceptional leads without running over your budget.
