Law Firms: Monitor Your Competitor Paid Efforts
It’s said that Henry Ford once asserted:
“A [person] who stops advertising to save money is like a [person] who stops a clock to save time.”
I’ve always loved that quote. After all, results from your paid efforts scale directly with your budget — meaning that if you slow or turn off the budget tap; you also slow or stop your results.
When considering paid efforts for your firm, wouldn’t it be nice to see what the competition is doing? Well, you can… All through publicly available data!
Specifically, we’ll be looking at what Bennett Jones , Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP , Borden Ladner Gervais LLP (BLG) , Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP , Dentons , Fasken , Goodmans LLP , Gowling WLG , McCarthy Tétrault , Miller Thomson LLP , Norton Rose Fulbright , Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP , Stikeman Elliott LLP and Torys LLP are doing across the following ad platforms:
All of the platforms allow you to search for ads by:?
All of the platforms search results include:?
BONUS — If, as a Canadian firm, you’re looking to activate some cross-border efforts in the EU, Facebook and LinkedIn adhere to the terms of the Digital Services Act (DSA) meaning that there is a wealth of competitor information available allowing you to get a sense of what’s working before you spend a dime, including:
LinkedIn:
Facebook:
*Note that reach is a more specific number than impressions as impressions may include multiple views of your ads by the same person.
Platforms
Let’s take a look at the platforms and see what kind of data they present while we also look at what the top firms are up to…
LinkedIn Ad Library
Google Ad Transparency Center
领英推荐
Facebook Ad Library (Meta)
Interestingly, Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP and Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP are the only firms that, according to these platforms, have had no paid efforts at all.
So, at this point, we're only looking at the platforms from a data/technical perspective. There’s a wealth of other (FAR more valuable) information that you can get from these libraries that can help in your decision making process for your next campaign.
Content
First and foremost, you can see what the other firms are advertising against. Very quickly and regardless of the platform, you’ll see that it’s all the same stuff, in this order: Thought Leadership, Events, Brand Efforts and Awards
Thought Leadership
I’m a huge fan of Thought Leadership as a marketing tool but… Unpopular opinion: There is nothing compelling to the audience to click on YOUR download when they see the same AI, M&A or “202X Legal Outlook” guide over and over, marketed the exact same way from every single firm. I get it. Everyone put a lot of work into those Thought Leadership pieces in order to have them see the light of day and you want to get eyes on it but every firm is producing the exact same content. That means that the differentiation is in HOW it’s marketed. Thought leadership is the top of the funnel. These days, people are not crossing a content or registration wall of any kind in order to read something from one firm that they can easily get from another firm without the hoops. How are you showing conversion at the bottom of the funnel through these pieces?
Don’t get me wrong, they are great traffic drivers for SEO. More website content = more better. But I would never have Thought Leadership be my top priority for paid efforts. Depending on budget, my preferred order would either have Brand (requires more $) or Events (if I had less $) at the number one spot and Thought Leadership coming in last (I'll talk about Award posts below).
Events
This is probably my favourite thing to back with some budget. This is a Lead Generation opportunity where, provided you have your internal dots connected properly, Marketing can directly attribute their efforts to billable hours. It was something that I did extensively at Fraser, Milner Casgrain and was able to show that the Marketing Department was a solid revenue generator that not only paid for itself but, more importantly, generated a measurable profit for the firm.
Brand Efforts
I love brand efforts but always firms have a very “meh” version of what a brand effort should look like — and they all look the same. More on that below, where I talk about creative.
Awards
My take is that advertising around awards, directories and league table results is a waste of time and money. This is the type of thing where an organic post by the firm is enough. Following that, each individual recipient of an award should be a) adding it to their LinkedIn profile under “awards and accolades” and b) posting about it to their timeline or sharing the firm's organic post to their timeline.
Creative
As a recovering designer and veteran of the ad world, I’ve always emphasized the importance of exceptional creative. Don’t go with the Buick… And let’s be honest, Cadillac isn’t really an upgrade from a Buick. I’m NOT talking Ferrari, McLaren or Koenigsegg (if you know, you know) but at least push for the Porsche; the BMW; the Mercedes. Data supports this.
Last year, LinkedIn partnered with Magna Media Trials to develop The B2B Renaissance – Drivers of B2B Ad Effectiveness available here: https://bit.ly/The-B2B-Renaissance. One of the key takeaways is that “Business Decision Makers are underwhelmed by the B2B ads they typically see.” and, surprise, surprise: strong B2B creative provides, among other things, a 40% lift in Purchase Consideration. Never mind the value of a repeating strong brand presence for your brand awareness and spontaneous favourability metrics — these are the metrics that further drive Purchase Consideration.
Closing Arguments
Explore the tools above. Search through the libraries and explore what all of the top firms across the globe are doing and you’ll quickly see that the legal industry sits in a stagnant marketing bubble trapped in a time-warp of days gone by. Law firm advertising around the world is homogeneous. It’s all… Exactly. The. Same. Ugh. No surprise here as it all stems from the same homogeneous branding, born from the same homogeneous mission statements — but that’s for another post which will inevitably end up being less of a post and more of a rant.
Want some help with this? Stop your firm’s hiring managers from always looking for “industry experience” for marketing roles. To me, industry experience is the exact same statement as “well, we’ve always done it that way”. Snore… The legal industry needs to get out of its own way. Firm’s talk about the strengths of diversity but fail to recognize that Marketing is one of the business units that thrives most when you fill it with people that offer diverse experience across multiple industries. In fact, taking some strategies that I used at BlackBerry and adjusting them for the legal world is what made my brand efforts at FMC exponentially more effective than all of the other Canadian firms, in a very short amount of time –?a claim that was verified by the Acritas Sharp Legal study.
So, is this all news to you or has your firm been using these platforms to monitor the competition? Is this something that you will insert into your paid efforts best Practices prior to spending budget and taking your ads to market?
Let me know in the comments!????
Founder & CEO of LuckyFish Media
1 个月Nice article. Alot to unpack here and some really good information. :) Thanks for sharing those links for Google and LinkedIn. I'm gonna dig more into this when I have time. Thanks for sharing
Fractional CMO
1 个月Ooh - looking forward to diving into this one. Nice share Bryan ??