If you’ve ever tried using display ads for your law firm with little to no success, or just found the strategy to be too expensive and time-consuming, then it may be time to change your advertising tactics. Despite what you might have heard, display ads for lawyers can be very successful—you just have to go after your ideal clients in a slightly different way from other firms.
At SMB Team, we’ve done a lot of testing and have discovered a Google display ad strategy for law firms that has proven to be one of the most targeted forms of online billboard advertising there is. It’s a strategy that has generated over 37 million impressions at a cost of just $0.27 per click.
If that sounds too good to be true, then just stop to consider that most lawyers aren’t using this strategy. They’re simply running display ads and hoping that a small percentage of their impressions will turn into leads. That might work for some firms with big budgets, but a highly targeted campaign will help you run an efficient advertising strategy that brings in new cases.
Want to beat out the competition with a superior display ad strategy? Here’s what you need to know to run a highly targeted campaign.
About Targeting for Display Ads—Identify Your Ideal Client
Our strategy for getting more impressions and clicks from display ads doesn’t really involve the ads themselves. While you should always ensure that your ads are as compelling as possible, the most important thing to focus on is targeting.
In theory, everyone who sees your ads is a potential lead for your law firm. After all, you never know who will need legal help, or when. However, you’re more likely to get leads and cases from people with specific interests or circumstances related to your firm.
Depending on your niche, your ideal client will vary, of course. If you’re a divorce lawyer, your ideal clients will be people who are unhappy in their relationships. For criminal lawyers, they will be people who have a history with law enforcement. Personal injury attorneys will want to advertise to people who have already been harmed through the negligence of others.
You already know a lot about your firm’s ideal client, and you can use that knowledge to create highly-targeted display ad campaigns. However, you have to get a little bit creative and clever to find out how your ideal client behaves online since they won’t always be consciously looking for legal representation.
The good news is that Google Ads features a number of different tools that you can use to segment and target your audiences. Explore and combine the following tools and segmentation criteria to test highly-targeted ads and find out what brings in the most business for your law firm.
Using Affinity Audiences
The first segmentation tool, Affinity Audiences, looks at the interests and habits of your ideal clients. Most lawyers don’t use Affinity Audiences for the simple reason that people usually seek out legal help for pain points, not for interests or habits. However, it is possible to use Affinity Audiences in display ads for lawyers by diving into your website data.
To use this tool in your strategy, you can go to your Google Analytics and see what the most common Affinity Audiences are for your website visitors. For instance, you might find Shoppers/Value Shoppers are your most frequent leads. From there, you can decide on which Audiences to target in your ad campaigns.
Make sure to target your ads based on how much time visitors spend on your site. Who is engaging with your site the most? How many pages did they look at? That’s all valuable information you can use in choosing your Affinity Audiences to target.
Targeting By Topic
When you target by topic, you’re using what you know about your clients’ pain points to bring in new leads. Depending on your niche, you might target ads based on topics like drunk driving laws, debt management, estate planning, immigration law, troubled relationships, etc. Think about the topics your ideal clients might be searching for and include them in your targeting criteria.
Demographic Segmentation
Even though you’re targeting based on very specific topics and audiences, it’s important to include demographic segmentation as well, particularly in very specialized niches. For example, if you are a divorce lawyer who works exclusively with men, you might specify gender and age in your segmentation. If you work in estate law with high-end clients, then you might segment by household income.
Search Term Remarketing
Because most people don’t think about hiring a lawyer until they’re facing some kind of problem in their life, search term remarketing can be very effective in creating a targeted campaign. To do this, you simply add keywords to your ad targeting that are related to your law firm’s practice area.
By adding these keywords, you can ensure that ads will display when people are viewing content related to those terms. Because Google’s ad network extends across thousands of websites, you can get your ads to show when they’re most likely to have an impact: when a potential client is actually researching the area of law you specialize in. By combining this with other targeting criteria, you can increase your ads’ effectiveness significantly.
Uniting Targeted Campaigns
Bringing together all of these different targeting factors when designing display ads for lawyers can make ads much more cost-effective, efficient, and powerful. Uniting different types of segmentation is the best way to ensure that you run a highly targeted campaign.
Knowing your audience and creating a campaign that is directly targeted at your ideal clients will lead to more clicks and more cases. You can even exclude people who won’t be a good fit using the tools above—they all have options for excluding users based on terms, interests, or searches.
Split Testing and Display Remarketing for Lawyers
Even though you’re going to be directing your ads at a very specific audience, it’s still important to have a large number of unique display ads within your campaign. This will allow you to do split tests and find out which ads are most effective, but it will also keep the ads fresh for the people who will be seeing them over and over.
When someone sees your ads 7-10 times, they start to tune it out. By having a number of different ads, you’ll have more opportunities to make an impression and get clicks.
Mastering Display Ads for Lawyers
Though the concepts of display ads and display remarketing for lawyers are simple, there’s a definite learning curve. If you want to get results quickly, SMB Team specializes in marketing for lawyers and has the experience to build targeted ad campaigns that produce results. For a free consultation, call us at (866) 747-1336 or visit our website.
