As LinkedIn con­tin­ues to rise in pop­u­lar­i­ty, it’s piv­otal to learn how to run a suc­cess­ful LinkedIn ad cam­paign for your law firm. LinkedIn’s mem­ber­ship and usage con­tin­ue to grow and the plat­form is one that allows a high degree of tar­get­ing by indus­try and audi­ence. Accord­ing to these sta­tis­tics from Hoot­suite, two pro­fes­sion­als join LinkedIn every sec­ond. Sim­ply put, a busi­ness gets done on LinkedIn and savvy mar­keters run cam­paigns on LinkedIn to grow aware­ness and gen­er­ate new leads. Here’s a brief guide on what you need to know in order to run a suc­cess­ful LinkedIn ad campaign.

1. Learn your way around the self-service solutions LinkedIn offers

Take a few min­utes to get famil­iar with how to set your own bud­get, choose clicks or impres­sions, and pause your ads at any time. Sign in to the Cam­paign Man­ag­er, which is where you’ll cre­ate and opti­mize your law firm’s ad cam­paigns.

2. Choose your law firm’s campaign objective

The first thing you’ll be prompt­ed to do in the cam­paign man­ag­er is to choose an objec­tive that best fits your goals. As you know, there are mea­sures of suc­cess for each stage of a client’s jour­ney. Con­sid­er brand­ing, web leads, form com­ple­tions, webi­nar sign-ups, etc. Decide how you want your con­tent to res­onate with your tar­get audi­ence and what sort of action you want them to take, and then choose the cor­re­spond­ing objec­tive: aware­ness, con­sid­er­a­tion, or conversions.

3. Define your target audience

Once you select your objec­tive, you’ll be prompt­ed to select your ide­al audi­ence. LinkedIn tools show how each fil­ter­ing option affects the size of the tar­get audi­ence. You can also choose the “Audi­ence Expan­sion” option which will auto­mat­i­cal­ly include audi­ences sim­i­lar to those you’ve select­ed. If you plan to run future cam­paigns against the same audi­ence, save the audi­ence for accessibility.

4. Choose your LinkedIn ad format

Now it’s time to get cre­ative and decide on your imagery and copy. You’ll be able to choose from Spon­sored Con­tent, Spon­sored InMail and Text Ads. We find that clients real­ize the most suc­cess from spon­sored con­tent. Spon­sored Con­tent is native adver­tis­ing that appears direct­ly in the LinkedIn feeds of pro­fes­sion­als you want to reach. You can use imagery or rich media like video to stand out in the feed, and then eas­i­ly test and opti­mize cam­paigns in real time.

In the con­sid­er­a­tion stage, you might pro­mote a white paper and then view sta­tis­tics on the down­loads. For those in the deci­sion stage, you might want to mon­i­tor newslet­ter sign-ups. It’s best prac­tice to cre­ate sev­er­al ver­sions of your ads so that you can see which mes­sages res­onate for bet­ter results. You can test dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions of copy, pho­tos, images, or video and track results in real time in order to opti­mize towards the best per­form­ing mes­sage. Accord­ing to LinkedIn, includ­ing an image with real peo­ple in your spon­sored con­tent post can increase your CTR by 160% (ver­sus an image with­out people).

Choose your LinkedIn ad format

5. Set a campaign budget and schedule

Next, you’ll need to set a cam­paign bud­get and date range. At this point, you will enter your bid, dai­ly bud­get, start date, end date, and total bud­get. Keep in mind you can pause a cam­paign at any time, no mat­ter what you enter for an end date. Your bid options are cost per click (CPC); cost per impres­sion (CPM); or auto­mat­ed bid. CPC is typ­i­cal­ly a bet­ter option for cam­paigns with a CTA – for exam­ple, lead gen­er­a­tion or reg­is­ter­ing for a webi­nar. A CPM mod­el is best when brand aware­ness is the objec­tive of your law firm’s ad cam­paign. We rec­om­mend start­ing out at the low­est rec­om­mend­ed bid and increas­ing the bid amount in incre­ments if you’re not get­ting enough trac­tion with your cam­paign. This is a cost-effec­tive approach to run­ning ads on LinkedIn.

6. Track performance

Mon­i­tor your law firm’s LinkedIn ad cam­paign progress and draw insights using the cam­paign man­ag­er. The report­ing func­tion enables you to under­stand how your ads are doing and where you can opti­mize. Under­stand engage­ment met­rics such as CTR, CPM, CPC, or CPA (cost per acqui­si­tion) in the default view or ana­lyze progress using the per­for­mance chart. To access the per­for­mance chart, select the check­box­es for the cam­paigns to include and select a date range. 

To draw even more insights from your cam­paign per­for­mance, such as web­site vis­its and audi­ence demo­graph­ics, install the LinkedIn insights pix­el on each of your website’s pages. Fur­ther­more, you can install the LinkedIn con­ver­sion pix­el to under­stand how your law firm’s ads led to valu­able actions on your web­site.

Takeaway

With the right approach, LinkedIn adver­tis­ing offers true busi­ness devel­op­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties for law firms. Cus­tom tar­get­ing allows firms to con­nect with web­site vis­i­tors, key accounts, or mail­ing lists for hyper-tar­get­ed adver­tis­ing that is more like­ly to gen­er­ate new clients. With direct access to new busi­ness con­tacts, more and more firms are tak­ing advan­tage of the network’s vast oppor­tu­ni­ties to attract and delight new clients and refer­ral sources. As indi­cat­ed in our 2019 Social Law Firm Index, 30% of Am Law firms are using LinkedIn ads as part of their over­all mar­ket­ing strategy.

SOURCE: Good2bSocial