[Laura Toledo, Communications and Marketing Manager at Nilan Johnson Lewis, offers a perspective on running advertising campaigns on social platforms. The first in a series of posts in support of her upcoming LMA Tech West panel, LinkedIn & Facebook Ad Campaigns: Awareness & Sales in the New Age, taking place on October 22 in San Francisco.]

Does it makes sense for your firm to run ads on social platforms? Short answer:

Yes!

The one thing to understand about social advertising is that it’s most akin to traditional advertising, not a social-media or content-marketing strategy. You’re writing pithy headlines to grab the reader’s attention so they click on the ad, which may or may not be actual content; it could be a whitepaper, downloadable checklist, etc. (In other words, what you would write on your firm’s LinkedIn page is not the type of headline you’d write for a sponsored ad. More on that in my next posts and during our panel in October, at the LMA Tech West conference in San Francisco.)

Here’s what you should be asking yourself about social ads:

• Does my firm spend money on traditional advertising?
• Does my firm have at least one social media account?

If you answered yes to one or both of these questions, you should start sponsoring ads on social media platforms. There are so many great reasons why, but it might be easiest to use a hypothetical.

So, here’s the scenario: An attorney from your labor & employment practice wants to promote her tip-pooling practice (Minnesota has weird tip-pooling statutes).

Based on my theory that social advertising is most like traditional advertising, here’s that scenario in two contexts:

1. Traditional Advertising

Your firm spends $5K for a quarter-page ad in a local magazine, plus $3K for ad design. This $8K gets you in front of local business people—let’s say a circulation of 5K people—but other than the estimated unique month views and word-of-mouth, you have no other indication of how successful that advertisement is.

2. Digital (Social) Advertising

I can spend under $300 on a week-long campaign, using my skills to craft headlines and Canva to create compelling images (and yes, both are plural because I can send out multiple ads to a single audience). For our audience, we can target decision-makers running Minneapolis restaurants—which, if you’re running a tip-pooling campaign, is your Holy Grail of audiences.

After the campaign, I can not only give my attorney statistics on the number of impressions (users who scrolled past the ad) and clicks, but I can also generate a list of companies who either scrolled past the ad and/or clicked on the ad.

For a bonus: link to a JD Supra article and generate a list of user names from their database.

So, spend $8K plus resource time for maybe some word-of-mouth feedback

or:

Spend $300 to target specific, relevant audiences and get actionable data for me (e.g., how to improve upon the campaign) and my attorneys (potential company and individual names)?

Kind of a no-brainer!

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Join me and my co-presenter, Jaime Lira, Director of Marketing at Cohen & Malad, in San Francisco, October 22, for our panel, LinkedIn & Facebook Ad Campaigns: Awareness & Sales in the New Age, when we will discuss all aspects of running social ad campaigns for plaintive and defense firms, including content best practices. See you there!