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Legal IT

Introduction to Advertising on LinkedIn

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This article will provide you with a first introduction to paid advertising on LinkedIn. If you are not familiar with it, advertising on LinkedIn can be at first confusing. The purpose of this article is to provide you with some necessary background on how LinkedIn advertisements work, and what types of advertisements you can use. The first three articles listed in the sources below provide a more in-depth introduction.

Now, why would you, as a lawyer, want to advertise on LinkedIn? LinkedIn is a social media platform that is used by professionals, so it is an ideal way to reach businesses you want to offer your services to. LinkedIn allows you to target very specific groups of individuals. You could, e.g., do a campaign for business owners of small or medium sized businesses in your neighbourhood that specialize in certain products or services. Or you could target the heads of legal departments in bigger companies. LinkedIn also is a good place to advertise job offers. If you are looking for new clients, you can use the funnel approach and create specific ads for specific segments of your target audience based on where in the funnel they are. (More on that later). You can also do something like an email campaign by sending message ads, etc. Add to that, that LinkedIn provides you with the necessary metrics to see how your ads are performing. Given all of the above, it should not come as a surprise that LinkedIn is the preferred social media platform for lawyers to advertise on.

So, how do you get started? Before you can begin to advertise on LinkedIn, there are two prerequisites. First, you must have a company page for your law firm. You cannot advertise on LinkedIn if you only have a personal profile. You need a company page. Secondly, once you have a company page, you need to create at least one account in the Campaign Manager for your law firm. The campaign manager is where you organize your advertisement campaigns. It lets you define your objectives and goals and select your target audiences for each campaign. It lets you set a budget, choose from different types of ads, and set a timeline for your ads. The platform also includes several features designed to help you meet your advertising goals. It is also good to know that you can create more than one account in the campaign manager for your law firm.

Once you have your Campaign Manager account set up, you can start your ad campaign. Typically, this involves seven steps:

  1. Choosing your objective
  2. Defining your target audience
  3. Choosing an ad format
  4. Setting your budget and schedule
  5. Starting to build your ad
  6. If applicable, providing payment information
  7. Measuring and optimizing your campaign

Let us have a closer look at these seven steps.

Step 1: choose your objective. What is your ad for? Is it a job listing? Do you want to attract new clients, or do you want to find people to attend a webinar or seminar you are organizing? LinkedIn uses a funnel approach that is common in digital marketing that involves three stages: awareness, consideration, and conversion. To raise awareness, you typically want views, or impressions as LinkedIn calls them. For consideration and conversion, you typically want people to respond to a call to action, which is measured in clicks. To convince them to respond to your call to action, you may want them to view a video first, etc. The goal you choose will largely determine the rest of your campaign.

Step 2: define your target audience. Selecting the criteria to determine who should see your ad is the same across all objectives and ads that you choose. You have more than 20 different criteria that you can combine, which allows you to be very specific in who you target. These criteria include profession / job title, company size, company name, interests, skills (including languages), seniority, etc. Reaching the correct target audience is one of the most fundamental pillars of success for an ad campaign. In the sources, listed below, you will find an article to assist you in the process of targeting the audience that is right for your campaign.

Step 3: choose an ad format. LinkedIn uses different types and formats of ads that you can choose from. You can use Sponsored Content, Message Ads, Dynamic Ads, Text Ads, or a mix of all four. Sponsored Content appears directly in the LinkedIn feed of people you want to reach. They come in three formats: single image ads, video ads and carousel ads. As the name suggests, message ads send messages directly to LinkedIn Messaging. Dynamic ads are individualized ads that use data that are available in your target audience’s profile. They are available in three formats: follower ads, spotlight ads, and job ads. Text Ads are simple but compelling pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) ads (see below, in step 4).

All in all, this means that at present, LinkedIn offers the following ad formats:

Step 4: set your budget and schedule. You determine the amount of money you want to spend. The cost of the campaign consists of three possible options:

  • Cost per Impression (CPM) refers to the cost of advertising where you pay for each time an ad is displayed. These ads are typically used to raise awareness.
  • Cost per Click (CPC) is where you pay for each time a person responds to a Call-To-Action by clicking on a link. These ads are typically used in lead generation or event registration.
  • Cost per Send (CPS) is used when you do a campaign with message ads, where you pay for each message that is sent. You only pay for messages that are successfully delivered.

Along with your budget, you can also determine the schedule of the ads. Keep in mind that setting your budget and schedule is an interactive process, called bidding, where LinkedIn will, e.g., offer a bundle of ads in a schedule at a certain price, and you can then modify that offer to better suit your needs.

Step 5: start building your ad. LinkedIn provides you with some tools to build your ads. For some ad formats, previews are available. For message ads, it is possible to send yourself a test message. Typically, though, you will want to build your ad outside of LinkedIn first, with professional tools.

Step 6: if applicable, provide payment information. If you are organizing a seminar, webinar or other paying event, you will have to provide payment modalities and information.

Step 7: measure and optimize your campaign. The Campaign Manager offers you a dashboard where you can follow-up on each one of your campaigns. You can review performance metrics, access charts and demographics, etc. It is possible to export these data as a CSV report.

With this information, running an ad campaign on LinkedIn should be less overwhelming.

 

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Legal IT

An Introduction to LinkedIn for Lawyers

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In previous articles, we mentioned how social media have become an essential part of online marketing strategies. A report, published in January 2019 by the Attorney at Work website, reveals that in 2018, 85 percent of responding lawyers use social media as part of their marketing strategy. More than two-thirds, 71 percent, of lawyers say social media contributed to bringing in new clients.

Generally speaking, LinkedIn is the network of choice for lawyers, with 77 percent saying it is their favoured marketing platform. This has to be nuanced, in that larger law firms whose clients mainly consist of companies tend to focus more on LinkedIn, while lawyers who deal with individual clients tend to slightly favour Facebook. In this article, we will give you a first introduction to LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a professional social network, which is mainly used for professional networking. It is a business and employment-oriented service that operates via websites and mobile apps. It was founded on 28 December 2002, and launched on 5 May 2003. Since December 2016 it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. As of October 2018, LinkedIn had 590 million registered members in 200 countries, of which more than 250 million are active. Signing up to LinkedIn is free, but some premium features are only available with a subscription one has to be pay for.

The main reason people use LinkedIn is to help grow their business or career. It is a tool for networking (which includes a system of introductions), for recruitment (where people can list their skills and experience), for marketing (e.g. to display endorsements and recommendations), advertising, and for research. It also is a publishing platform, and it offers discussion forums, called groups. These can be important to lawyers, as LinkedIn promotes certain authors as influencers (or thought leaders).

LinkedIn offers a package that includes:

  • Profiles
  • Networking Tools / Connections
  • Company Pages
  • Groups
  • Messaging
  • Notifications
  • As well as some other services, some of which can be useful for lawyers.

Let’s go over these in some more detail, knowing that we can only scratch the surface, and that each of them could easily warrant one or more articles by themselves.

Profiles: when one signs up to LinkedIn, the first thing to do is to create your profile. This is a profile for you as an individual. Think of it as a standardized bio or résumé. In it, you can give a summary of who you are, and provide more information about your background: your education, experience, skills, endorsements, accomplishments and interests. For each of these categories of information, LinkedIn offers a separate section in your profile. You can also make posts from your profile, and publish articles. Your profile contains an activity section that lists those. If you want to start a blog on LinkedIn, you can do so from your profile. Profile sections can be added in more than one language.

Networking Tools / Connections: LinkedIn not only allows members to create profiles but also connections to each other in an online social network. These connections may represent real-world professional relationships, but don’t necessarily do so. Members can invite anyone (whether an existing member or not) to become a connection. Members can also ask other members to introduce them to their connections. When looking for someone on LinkedIn, it will show you how many connections you may have in common, and if there are none, how many degrees you are separated from them.

LinkedIn also offers Company Pages, where you can provide information about your law firm. Here the rule is that each company only has one main page, for which a custom URL can be created. It consists of several sections, and each section can be entered in more than one language. Linked to the company pages are showcase pages. If your law firm, e.g., has offices in several locations, each one could get its own showcase page. Showcase pages can also be dedicated to services or products you offer. For showcase pages, too, it is possible to have them in more than one language.

Company pages can post updates, but can’t publish articles. It is therefore not possible to set up a company blog on LinkedIn. It is possible for individuals (profiles) to publish articles, and to provide links to those articles as company updates. Also good to know is that company pages can be linked to a LinkedIn Group.

Groups in essence are discussion forums. Anybody can create a group, and invite people to become members. These groups can either be public (anybody can join) or private (upon invitation or approval). As mentioned above, companies can create a group that will be linked to their company page. Often, these are used, e.g., by the customer care and / or the support department. Interesting for lawyers is that groups can be dedicated to specific topics, and that there are plenty of groups that deal with legal matters (as well as legal technology). Taking part in discussions in such groups can help build your online reputation.

Like other social media, LinkedIn also offers messaging and notification services. For lawyers, LinkedIn also is an important advertising platform (cf. the statistics quoted in the introduction to this article).

Apart from the services mentioned above, LinkedIn also offers a series of other services. These focus on learning and on insights; they allow you to post job offers, etc. In this context (of recruitment) it is worth mentioning a new service that at present is only available in the US and within specific service categories, and is called ProFinder. “LinkedIn ProFinder is LinkedIn’s professional services marketplace that helps you find the best freelance or independent professionals in your area.” It already does include certain legal services, and is expected to include more services, and to become available internationally.

Also worth mentioning is Slideshare. It is a hosting service for professional content including presentations, infographics, documents, and videos. Users can upload files privately or publicly in PowerPoint, Word, PDF, or OpenDocument format. Content can then be viewed on the site itself, on hand held devices or embedded on other sites.

 

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