Is Paid Social Media Marketing Effective For Law Firms?

When done right, social media marketing for lawyers can be effective. However, if you’re not careful, paid social media marketing can suck money out of your pockets, offering little return on investment and taking up a lot of your time.

Free social media marketing – such as creating and managing a Facebook page – is a must for law firms and other businesses throughout the world. However, is paid social media marketing worth it for law firms? Or are you really just wasting your money?

Let’s have a look at some of the pros and cons:

Pros & Cons Of Paid Social Media Marketing

Pros:

Paid social media marketing for law firms has plenty of positive aspects. When done right, it can work. Some of the pros of using paid advertising on social media include:

• You will have the chance to reach huge numbers of people. A huge percentage of the world’s population is on social media.
• You can target your marketing by things like location and age, letting you choose quite a specific audience for your ads and promoted posts.
• Paid social media marketing can help you gain more page followers, increasing the effectiveness of the rest of your social media marketing efforts.

Cons:

However, there are also a lot of negative things associated with paid social media marketing. These can reduce the effectiveness of your ad campaigns and can lead to a lot of wasted money.

• It is very hard to target your ads towards people who actually need a lawyer, which can lead to very low ad conversion rates.
• Unless you’re getting at least a few leads per ad, you might also find that you’re spending more money on your campaigns than you’re getting in return.
• Social media marketing is hard. Unless you’re somehow able to create high quality ads that stand out from the rest, you will find that most people just ignore them. This can also lead to a lot of wasted money.

Paid Social Media Marketing Works – Sometimes

Determining when it is and isn’t worth paying for social media marketing is extremely difficult. Marketing streams like AdWords allow you to target your ads a lot more, but they are also many times more expensive – especially for law firms.

Personally, I would recommend focusing on SEO and organic social media marketing. Spend money on making sure that your website ranks highly in the search engine results pages, and the conversions will come.

However, if you’ve got a decent sized marketing budget, you could commit a little of it to paid social media marketing. Make sure that you employ an expert with a proven track record, and focus on building your page or profile following rather than getting conversions directly.

Good luck!