What Used to Work
Lawyer advertising trends shifted away from billboards, print, radio, and television ads a very long time ago. Although law firms continue to include these mediums in their marketing strategies, it should be clear that nowadays marketing budgets are increasingly invested in digital advertising more than older, traditional methods.
In fact, 2019 is on track to be the first year where digital ads will reign as king over offline ads. But this isn’t news. Online ad spend has been increasing for years now and law firm marketing has already adapted to advertising on the internet. Banner ads, Google ads and Facebook ads probably make up a large portion of your marketing spend right now; but have you taken a moment to wonder if you’re really getting the most out of your ad dollars?
What You Want
To create the full social media video suite, you want a total of 6 videos:
- 30-second wide
- 30-second square/vertical
- 15-second wide
- 15-second square/vertical
- 6-second wide
- 6-second square/vertical
The square video format (1:1) is fully optimized for social websites including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Take your ads to the next level with a vertical ad format. Vertical formats (4:5) are displayed on mobile devices in a larger size, giving your video ad greater mobile-screen real estate.
Wide video formats (16:9) will also work on the same social media platforms, but with a smaller display size on the user’s screen. Wide formats are most optimized for video streaming platforms including YouTube and Hulu. These platforms prioritize wide formats as they fit better on computer (desktop & laptop) and television screens.
What You Have
If your law firm has already invested in filming videos, they are likely made specifically for a wide format display in either 4K, 1080p, or 720p resolutions. If we force the wide format into a square or vertical format 1 of 2 things can happen.
First, is the wide format video will scale vertically to fill the height requirement of the square format. Here are some screenshots showing the wide video being cropped and stretched to fill the vertical height. You can see a lot of the information is cut out (in red).
Secondly, the wide video will follow the square format’s width dimension, but not the height. We can fit the wide video to follow the square format’s width dimension, but not the height with a few options:
- Option 1: no frame, just black
- Option 2: blurred frame
- Option 3: custom frame
What We Need
To recreate these videos in square format, we need the following:
- Unedited video files (no text, no music, no voiceover) (the video can include visual editing like color balance, white balance, saturation, etc. – but nothing besides the original video)
- Music files (to be retimed)
- Voiceover files (to be retimed)
- Logo, text, subtitles (optional)
*It’s important that we receive the music and voiceover files to create a 6 second version to avoid disrupting the flow of the video’s narration and music.
If your law firm wants a video for a 30 second spot, we may need additional footage. Although, most platforms will allow the same 15s video to loop once to fill a 30s spot – if no additional footage is available.
Leveraging The Multi-Platform Approach
Your current marketing budget is probably already invested into some of these social ad platforms. So how do you know whether you’re doing it in the most efficient manner? The answer is data.
One thing The Search Engine Guys has claimed since the start is that we are a data-driven firm. The way we approach social media ads and manage campaigns that produce results is by running ads on as many platforms as we can within our client’s budget. Casting a wide digital net to start off a major campaign gives you the opportunity to collect data on the ads we run. Running split tests with different creatives, ad copy, and media types returns information about the audience that the ad was served to that can help refine the ad’s set up and consequently its future performance.
A small budget on various social ad platforms may not generate leads immediately, but the data that comes back is valuable nonetheless. Week after week, we monitor an ad’s performance and make any necessary adjustments to better serve the ad to an audience that is more likely to engage and ultimately convert into a case for your law firm. Take a look at some more data about today’s social media giants from online measurement company, SimilarWeb, below.
Going after mass tort cases has never been easier. Running a multi-platform campaign on social media ad networks can increase your case volume with the smallest cost-per-acquisition numbers you can achieve online.
Whether you’re trying to maximize your cases with a definitive budget, or if you’re pursuing a mass tort with massive return and a limitless budget: multiplatform is the way to go. Some example numbers are below. We invite you to contact TSEG today to talk about your law firm’s objectives and how to best leverage social media advertising.
The Theory of Attention Economics
Though online ads are the way to go; advertising on the internet isn’t enough. The internet is a huge space, with seemingly infinite content. You have to know where your potential clients are spending their time to break through to them. “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.” This theory by social scientist, Herbert A. Simon, perfectly captures the problem that marketing in the legal industry is facing.
Are you capturing the right attention? And are you capturing enough of it? These questions should be driving the development of your social media marketing strategy. If this is the first time you’ve asked yourself these questions – allow us to shed some light on your next campaign.
The above graphic is a great representation of how people spend their time online. The trend is that social media is consuming more and more attention. Apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn are among the biggest platforms where people spend close to two hours a day, on average, browsing content. Perhaps more importantly, users tend to share content with their friends and followers which can cause certain images or videos to go viral. This is the modern iteration of word-of-mouth marketing, and the thrill of discovering viral content continues to bring users back to these social platforms in search for more. Spending time on social media therefore extends past the core function of socializing online with friends and family to a broader avenue for entertainment where brands, and law firms, can capitalize by advertising their message to thousands or even millions of people.