..plus, the marriage between prospecting and retargeting
A key component of successful Facebook targeting for lawyers is defining a target demographic. The targeting capabilities of Facebook allow you to create audiences with a high degree of granularity. As a result, your campaigns will operate with much greater efficiency when you’re focused on reaching the audience that matches your target demographic. This will equate to a much greater probability of marketing success.
As a general rule, potential clients or customers need to see an ad multiple times before they will convert. Effective digital marketing is a balancing act between adding new potential clients (prospecting) with serving ads to people who have already engaged with your Facebook ads or other content (retargeting). Facebook allows you to constantly refresh your audiences for both prospecting and retargeting.
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The Basics of Facebook Targeting for Lawyers
With over 1 billion daily active users, Facebook is a valuable digital marketing platform. The social media platform allows you to create audiences based on location, demographics, and interests. The targeting capabilities of Facebook include:
- Location-Based Targeting: Target an audience by country, state/region, counties, DMA (designated market area), city, postal code, or specific address radius. This can also be set to users tracked by GPS to a location (geotargeting).
- Demographics-Based Targeting: The basic demographic filters include age, gender, and language. Detailed demographic filters include education, life events, work, parental status, and others.
- Interest-Based Targeting: Facebook allows you to target directly to people interested in a subject related to your product or service, based on Facebook users’ likes and interests, apps they use, pages they’ve liked, and more.
- Placement Targeting: When you create ads, you can choose where you show your ads or let Facebook determine where they’re likely to perform best. Do you want to show your ads on a Facebook feed? Would a Facebook or Instagram story bring better results?
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Facebook Custom Audiences
A Facebook custom audience is comprised of people who may have already interacted with your firm or business. You can create an audience of your website or landing page visitors with information Facebook receives from a Facebook Pixel that you add to your site. You can also create a custom audience by uploading a CRM database (Name, Email) of your best clients. Additionally, you can create custom audiences based on people who have engaged with your Facebook page, or opened or completed a form or engaged with your Facebook ads.
Facebook targeting for lawyers can be expanded beyond the basics. You can also create lookalike audiences based on the custom audiences you have created. When you provide Facebook with explicit data points, Facebook works to find connections with behaviors. With this information, the platform’s algorithm can come up with thousands, if not millions, of data points that will help you find lookalike audiences likely to convert. Essentially, Facebook is connecting the dots between your target audience to find highly qualified users to extend your audience.
Prospecting and Retargeting, Key to Digital Marketing
Successful digital marketing requires continuously balancing between prospecting or finding new audiences and retargeting or remarketing to audiences who have already interacted with your content. Prospecting is always working to drive new people into your funnel, but retargeting is where most conversion happens.
Facebook’s prospecting and retargeting approaches are based on the audiences you select. This helps you bring in prospects, as well as continuously serving relevant ads for retargeting. You can target these audiences to capture the interest of prospects and then, deliver them relevant ads and content along the way to move them closer to conversion through retargeting.
The Bottom Line on Facebook Targeting for Lawyers
Facebook is a valuable tool for digital marketing. The platform allows you to create granularly targeted audiences and to continuously update audiences to drive efficiency and scale in your marketing program. At CAMG, we leverage data from thousands of TV campaigns and additional proprietary data to drive efficiency and scale in digital campaigns.
About the author
Steve is a leader in the legal advertising and marketing arena, applying response-driven marketing and cutting-edge technology to the legal advertising space. He is a frequent speaker nationwide at industry conferences and events, as well as a frequent contributor to numerous legal industry publications.
Steve’s aim is to apply the best marketing practices that lead to the highest level of success for clients and with a transparent, ethical approach. He has made CAMG’s proprietary data available to the legal industry with the Legal Marketing Index® (LMI®) and reference guides. The LMI® includes detailed in-depth demographic information, spend data, heat maps, and additional up-to-date information for mass tort and single event practice areas.
Steve is a frequent contributor to PILMMA’s blog about law firm marketing.
