The One Change That Doubled Our Clients from Social Media

Social media has transformed from mere communication platforms into powerful business tools. One of the most impactful strategies within the legal marketing landscape has become social media advertising. With billions of active users, social media provides an unparalleled reach for many businesses and can lead to revenue generation when done right. We are always staying up to date with the latest trends across all digital platforms, testing different types of ads, and sharing our findings. In half the time we’ve generated more clients from social media than we had in all of 2022 for Colorado Legal Group and we only made one simple change.

Social Media Platforms Law Firms Should Be Advertising On

Almost every business is advertising on Facebook and Instagram (Meta), and law firms should be doing the same. Meta has over 3.7 billion active users worldwide. Your target audience is out there, you just have to know how to accurately target them. Clients from social media typically have a longer sales cycle, but this doesn’t mean that social media advertising isn’t lucrative. Meta offers law firms the availability to pinpoint their ideal clientshrough audience targeting and the ability to target by lists. Additionally, social media advertising can be quite cost-effective compared to other digital advertising platforms. By crafting tailored campaigns that resonate with these audiences, law firms can establish a meaningful connection that transcends the traditional boundaries of legal services.

Setting Up Your Social Media Ads

Before you begin advertising on social media there are two things you need to know, 1. your audience, 2. your advertising goal. Once you know these two things you can determine which ad type makes sense. For Colorado Legal Group as well as our other law firms, our audience consists of individuals facing a divorce or family law case that can afford our services and our goal is to gain higher-quality leads that will convert into paying clients. Originally we had all of our ads on Meta setup as traffic ads, because they tend to have a higher amount of impressions and a farther reach. From there the social user would be directed to a dedicated landing page where they had to submit their information in order to be able to access our eBook advertised in our social ad. After submitting their information the user had the ability to submit a case evaluation. Over time, opt-ins and case evaluation submissions had begun to slow down and I knew a change was needed.

The One Change That Took Our Social Ads to the Next Level

Realizing a change was necessary to improve the performance of our social campaigns I took a step back and first evaluated the user journey. How could I make it easier for social users to get their eBook? I noticed that in order for the user to get to the first landing page where they would submit their information, a pop-up occurs, asking the user if they’d like to leave Facebook to enter a third-party site. I knew this was the part I needed to eliminate. I eliminated this step by changing the ad type from traffic to lead generation, even though multiple Facebook Marketing Pros advised me not to. I’m not going to lie, our reach and impressions did drop, but our case evaluation submissions, consults, and clients from social all went up. In fact, in the first six months of 2023, we acquired more clients from our social campaigns than we did in all of 2022.

Takeaways

This one small change of updating the ad type from traffic to lead generation brought some valuable insights. First and foremost, you can’t always trust Facebook. It was strongly recommended that I shouldn’t make this change or else our social reach and engagement would drop. While our reach dropped, our engagement didn’t, and most importantly we acquired almost double the amount of clients in half the amount of time. Another key point I want to make here is don’t be afraid to test new ad types and creatives on Facebook, one test could lead to a dramatic change for the better. The last takeaway I want to share and arguably the most important is to consider the user journey. Imagine you’re the client. What would lead you to, in this case, submit a case evaluation and what would steer you away? At Cardinal Concepts we’re constantly working in Facebook Ads and developing and testing new strategies for optimized campaign performance. If you’re looking to advertise your own law firm on Facebook or try some different social strategies, contact us today to see how we can help.