Solo/Small Firm
How to Advertise on LinkedIn
Written by Stacey E. Burke
Linkedin is the most popular social media platform for law firms and individual lawyers. While its advertising capabilities are not as robust as Facebook’s, over the years more features have been added, including better tracking mechanisms and additional targeting parameters. In 2019, 30% of Am200 law firms utilized LinkedIn as part of their social media strategy. Once your law firm has created a page, shared content updates regularly, and is generally active on the social network, you should begin to advertise on LinkedIn. With LinkedIn ads, you can deliver messaging to a targeted audience beyond your attorneys’ current connections and/or your page’s followers. Below, find the steps your law firm should take to advertise on LinkedIn. As always, make sure to follow the Texas disciplinary rules regarding lawyer advertising and solicitation.
Create Campaign Manager Account
You need to have an individual profile on LinkedIn to advertise, and
that profile must be a designated admin for the law firm’s page. You
should then associate the law firm’s page with the newly created
LinkedIn Campaign Manager account to run all the campaign types
available. You also need to set up conversion tracking. Install the code
for the Insight Tag on your website to measure ad performance and learn
more about your audience.
Create a Campaign Group
Campaign groups organize the ad sets underneath them. You can choose to
leave the Default Campaign Group as is and just set up ads underneath
it, or you can set up campaign groups by practice focus or target
audience.
Create a Campaign
Define your campaign objective by choosing one of three
categories:
1. Awareness campaigns generate increased brand awareness.
2. Consideration campaigns seek to increase website visits, engagement, and video views. Engagement is the lowest-cost LinkedIn objective and is the one to select if you want to get more page followers as a byproduct of your advertising.
3. Conversion campaigns are for lead generation and website conversions—and if you are recruiting, they can also be used to acquire job applicants.
Targeting
On LinkedIn, more than 700 million professionals eagerly share lots of
information about themselves. Using this information, LinkedIn provides
preset targeted lists and lets users create their own audiences. The
professional social network now provides 26 audience templates from
which you can choose for your ad targeting, including “Members with a
Bachelor’s Degree” and
“Procurement Professionals” among others. In addition to predetermined
lists, you can choose from over 20 different audience attribute
categories to focus your targeting. Experts advise against combining two
types of targeting within the same campaign—instead, create two separate
campaigns and compare their performance.
Select Ad Type
The following formats are available, depending upon what kind of
content you are sharing:
-
Sponsored Content appears directly in the LinkedIn feed of those you want to reach. It functions as a paid promotion of your content. Posts from your law firm’s page or website will appear in the middle of a user’s newsfeed. These ads appear natively alongside content users see organically.
-
Message Ads let you reach prospects via LinkedIn Messaging. To encourage real-time engagement, messages can only be sent when recipients are active on LinkedIn. With Message Ads, marketers can display a targeted message with a single call-to-action button.
-
Dynamic Ads use LinkedIn Individual Profile information—such as user photo, company name, and job title—to personalize ads. These incredibly personalized ads change dynamically for each person you target.
-
Text Ads are simple but compelling and appear on the right side, top of the newsfeed, or below the “People You May Know” suggestions.
Determine Content
Once you establish the basic parameters for your ad, you’ll be prompted
to start building it and choose how LinkedIn will display and rotate
your ad variations. In short, you can either create new content inside
of the advertising platform or use existing content previously shared on
your page.
Set Budget and Schedule
LinkedIn allows advertisers to select automated bidding, which allows
the channel to determine what to spend based on your budget and
objectives. I tend to shy away from that and use one of the two bid
types in LinkedIn Advertising—cost per click, where you are charged each
time someone clicks on your content, and cost per impression, where you
are charged each time 1,000 users view your ads.
Measure and Optimize
LinkedIn Ads will take some time to produce results, but if the rest
of your marketing is humming along nicely, it can be a good way to
expand things and grow your business. Tracking and analyzing ad
performance can help you glean insights, optimize strategy, and ensure
you are allocating resources only to methods that are generating real
business results. If you aren’t regularly analyzing your ad performance,
you’ll miss out on opportunities to refine your strategy and get the
best results for your marketing
budget.TBJ
This article was originally published on the Stacey E. Burke blog and has been edited and reprinted with permission.
STACEY E.
BURKE has been a licensed Texas lawyer since 2001 and is the
owner of Stacey E. Burke, P.C., which crafts and implements custom
marketing strategies for lawyers around the country.
