You Need a Plan
Are you an attorney new to social media marketing or an old hand? If you’re smart, social media can be used to build friends for your law firm or practice, generate leads or to make actual sales. It’s up to you.
However, in order to make any of these marketing strategies work you need to have a plan. For the newbie attorney using social media to grow your business it can seem like a huge task. This newsletter is designed to unpack the mystery and take the fear out of developing and implementing your social media marketing plan and give you the best chance of success in whatever your strategy is. Whatever your social media skill level you need a plan. No adventure is complete without one.
The vast majority of law firms and attorneys have no social media marketing plan and hence fail when trying to use any social platform to market their business and services.
For the plan to be successful it must contain these four core elements.
1. What Channels?
The first part of a social media plan is to ask yourself, what media channel(s) do you plan to use. There are a wide range of social media platforms and there are constantly new platforms being released. You should not and could not be active on all of them. Choose which you plan to utilize with care so as to ensure that you are leveraging your time well and are giving yourself the best chance of reaching your clients or your efforts will be wasted. Look to see what platforms other lawyers are using as a starting point.
All social media channels are not created equal. Today we will look at two of the largest platforms where attorneys are already having great success marketing their services.
Facebook is the social media monster. It has over 1.8 billion users and comprises of the largest blend of demographics of any social platform. Be sure, whatever your legal offerings your clients and prospects are here. Facebook provides an incredible medium for your business to market to your prospective customers. Moreover, from an advertising perspective, it’s the easiest to manage and allows for the best possible audience identification and segmentation. This gives you pinpoint accuracy and allows you to go after specific niches and for the lowest possible spend. For example, if providing workers compensation legal services in Philadelphia one might target your ads to males & females 25-55 years of age, within a 30 miles radius of Philadelphia, Interests-Workplace wellness.
Another approach is to, do what Legal Optimized does and, match your Facebook ads to an audience who have already proven to meet our current clients/prospects attributes in one geography and to find similar people nationally. We in effect use our current clients/prospects as a seed audience. In this way people who click on our ads are sent to a specific landing page URL that has shown to appeal to similar audiences and is therefore primed for success. The ad is designed to resonate with the key driver on why they clicked on our Facebook ad in the first place.
If we sent them to our company webpage URL from our Facebook ad It would likely be that they would find the website’s information overwhelming and quickly click away. Instead, we specifically design webpage with a single value proposition based on the Facebook ad’s key pitch. This gives us the best chance to capture the prospect’s contact details and allow us to foster a relationship and ultimately turn them into a paying client.
Linkedin has around 400 million users, significantly less than Facebook but it provides an opportunity for the B2B marketer to find prospects and clients like no other platform available. Connecting with business professionals in any industry is easiest with LinkedIn as it allows you to target them by industry, job title, city, etc. As with all social media, LinkedIn prioritizes relationship building. However, this is more important criteria on Linkedin than on any other media.
One key to Linkedin is not to lead with a sales pitch. Start by building a connection. One of the best features for businesses are LinkedIn Groups. Businesses should establish Groups in your target niche or industry and invite others in your target market to join. LegalOptimized focuses on building new relationships with key prospects whose professional titles we’ve identified. For example, we’ll search “law firm managing partner” to find people who are the heads of their firms’ as a way to find our specific target audience members.
Advertising on Linkedin has all the segmenting options available in Facebook. However, it tends to be more expensive than Facebook in that conversions are lower (people clicking through from ads and becoming paying clients). Therefore, to advertise on this platform is generally more expensive than Facebook. Despite this, it is a must have for business lawyers looking for the B2B sale for the reasons outlined here.
2. How do you use each channel?
Another component to a successful social media plan is to establish your strategy for your channel. Once you have identified your channels it is important to develop what strategy you plan to use. Many businesses make the mistake of jumping into social media marketing without a strategy or plan.
At the very minimum your strategy should consist of “why are you on social media?” ie, what social media marketing success looks like for you. More fans, more prospects, more sales?. From here you should start putting together a plan in writing that you and your team, if you have a team, can rally around and refer to when you need it.Your social media plan should consist of mini-plans for each social media channel you expect to be active on. You’ll have a plan for your Twitter, Facebook and so forth.
If you’re just getting started, we suggest keeping your number of active social networking sites to two. For most law firms’, particularly small firms, trying to tackle more social media accounts often results in doing a poor job that ends up with little or no results.
3. When should you post?
Once you have established your strategic plan you next need to ask yourself when should you post to each platform. Sending out a single Tweet per day just isn’t going to cut it for your audience on Twitter. The Twitter medium is built for the short sugar rush type posts their feeds are designed for. Your audience on Facebook and Linkedin, by comparison, will not be as demanding. As few as three postings a week will suffice for either. Regardless of which platforms you choose you should develop a routine posting schedule for each to be consistent. That way you can gear up to make sure you will have the resources available to generate the content and you’ll prime your fans to be ready to read, like, share and re-post your material.
4. What type of content to post?
The Socratic adage is instructive here in that the value of a tool can be established by the work it performs. Remember social media’s audience, and by proxy, your fans are your fans because being so has value to them. In turn, whatever you post it must have a value to them. Sometimes that value may be small, sometimes large, but it must have value to them or they will not be your fans for long.
In general, successful posts have one or more of the following value attributes. They’re:
- Relevant to your audience
- Helpful
- Entertaining
The posts with the most shares are a good determinant as to value. Data shows that the most shared comprise of posts that contain:
- Strong emotional content
- Interactive content
- Infographics
- Images
- Lists (like this newsletter)
- “How to” content
- Newsworthy content
Naturally a post that contains a number of these is likely to be the most successful.
For instance, It may be newsworthy for a personal injury attorney to use a breaking news story on hospital admission numbers for motor vehicle accident victims as content to underpin the emotional rehabilitation story of one of his motor vehicle injury clients. The effectiveness of the post can be enhanced further, perhaps, by adding before and after images of his client and closing on a how to guide on filling a claim for motor vehicle accident victims.
Remember, if you are not using social media for conversions and you are not closing 4 out of 5 sales a week .
Contact me at 720-435-6400 to see how I can help