One of the biggest challenges of digital marketing for lawyers is getting in front of the right leads at the right time. After all, it’s a waste of time and money to show advertisements to people who are never going to become clients!
With traditional pay-per-click ads, it’s hard to do the kind of targeted advertising that gets real results. Using geofencing for lawyers, however, you can precisely target your local area and maximize your advertising budget by only showing your ads to people who are the most likely to become clients.
Location Matters in Law Firm Marketing
Statistics show that the average client for a law firm will travel no more than 16 minutes to meet with a lawyer. That’s a pretty small geographic area for bringing in new clients!
Location matters for lawyers. Depending on your niche, certain businesses and locations will naturally have a higher percentage of potential clients. For instance, if you’re a personal injury attorney, then medical clinics, hospitals, chiropractors, and physical therapy offices will be most likely to yield qualified leads. For defense attorneys, prisons, jails, and juvenile detention facilities should be the target locations.
At this point, most people use their phones on a near-constant basis. They use location data for GPS, for finding restaurants and gas stations near their location, and for updating their social media accounts with real-time information. This constant location-tracking has allowed geofencing to become reality, creating more targeted ad campaigns for local businesses that bring in new clients for pennies on the dollar when compared to other advertising tactics.
Geofencing allows you to bring your marketing campaigns directly to the most relevant locations for your law firm. If you know exactly where your ideal clients spend their time, then this strategy can represent a huge opportunity to bring in new business.
Geofencing: Using Location Data for Highly Targeted Campaigns
Geofencing is a method of advertising that uses location data to display ads when a person brings their device within a certain geographic area or location. Essentially, you can put a virtual “fence” around specific buildings, neighborhoods, or other locations in your area to trigger highly targeted ads that are likely to be relevant to the needs of those mobile users.
Once the geofence has been triggered, the device will start to display your ads on thousands of different websites that the user may visit, using a display ad network. Instead of predicting who will become a lead through keywords, your firm can go straight to places your prospective clients are likely to be and trigger highly-targeted ad campaigns.
If you’re a personal injury attorney, then showing ads for your firm at medical facilities is more likely to bring in qualified leads who need help with their cases as soon as possible. A firm specializing in estate law, on the other hand, might want to target entire high-income neighborhoods to find clients who are thinking about setting up their will and estate. Defense attorneys can find clients by placing a geofencing “net” around correctional facilities and courthouses. Geofencing allows you to have a virtual presence in all the locations where your potential clients are likely to spend time.
Once a device enters the specified area, the user will get targeted ads for 30 days. That’s enough time for them to consider what you’re offering and decide whether or not to contact you.
Excluding Devices From Geofencing Ads
Obviously, not everyone who enters a target location is an ideal client. People who work at jails, courthouses, and hospitals are very unlikely to need your services and will cost you money through display ads. Fortunately, there’s a way to exclude the devices of people who spend a lot of time at your target location but aren’t good leads.
Through “door count sessions,” geofencing campaigns can detect people who visit the site multiple times a day or week on a consistent basis and exclude them from ad targeting. That way, only people who are likely to be good leads will see your ads.
Ad Clicks – What Happens Next?
When a person clicks or taps on your ad, they’re brought to a landing page or a specific page on your site. This is where (ideally) clicks turn into leads. Not everyone will become a lead, of course, but you can still learn something from the people who don’t convert and you may even be able to convert them later.
To give yourself more opportunities to retarget people who click on your ad but don’t ultimately buy, you should place a Facebook pixel and a google pixel your landing page. These are codes that will place and trigger cookies so you can continue to advertise to potential clients who took the time to visit your landing page.
Once the pixels are in place, you can show a series of Facebook or Google ads to people who ultimately didn’t become leads. This allows you more opportunities to give them valuable information and to convert them into clients.
Even better, you can create a “lookalike audience” by using a pixel to capture information from everyone who clicked on your original display ad and was then retargeted for Facebook ads. Facebook will use this information to find users who exhibit similar behavior for ad targeting. Using this process, you can get even more leads and make your geofencing strategy and ad content better over time by learning about your potential clients’ online behavior.
Geofencing for Lawyers—Powerful for Attracting Local Clients
Since most lawyers operate within a very small geographic area, geofencing is often an ideal advertising strategy for small to medium-sized firms. Focusing your marketing dollars to get in front of the people who are most likely to become clients will help your firm save time and money.
At SMB Team, we’re experts in helping law firms capture new leads and grow their revenue with advertising and content marketing strategies. If you’d like to learn more about how geofencing can work for your firm, we’d be happy to help you get started. Contact our office online or call (866) 747-1336 to get a free consultation!
