Digital Advertising for Law Firms and the Third Party Cookie Crumble

For the past 25 years, one of the big promises of digital advertising for law firms, was the tracking cookie, the ability to follow potential clients and leads across the web, from social to apps to everything in between.

Well, due to consumer pressure from the marketplace, privacy concerns, and anti-trust legislation, third-party tracking tech and it’s “cookies” are going the way of the Dodo, but that data, and the ability to gather and create solid legal marketing campaigns with it, is never going extinct!

You get the idea…

As leads fracture to platform specific, walled-in gardens, going forward, successful legal marketers will sharpen the skills of traditional advertising, while meeting the demands of measuring and converting on the platforms that drive the most cases and leads.

Let’s discuss some of the new changes to digital advertising, how law firm marketers are adjusting, and how to get the most out of online campaigns in a cookie-less world.

The Third-Party Tracking Cookie Party is Canceled

Digital marketers have long relied on third-party tracking cookies to follow consumers online. Almost every ad tech and martech platform uses cookies for display advertising, targeting, retargeting; and now, that’s all changing.

From the GDPR, to the California Consumer Privacy Act, to smart cookie-blocking technology that comes standard with Firefox and Apple products, the third party tracking cookie party is being cancelled on many fronts.

In some ways, this is a good thing for performance-minded marketers, forcing innovation and exploring new technologies to develop a law firm’s book of business online, while balancing profit and privacy.

But guess what?

The digital advertising campaigns available to law firms on Google Ads, including new additions to the ecosystem like Local Services Ads, continue to drive business.

And so, while there are alternatives to digital advertising on Google, through PPC or SEM, it’s hard to miss their share of market, so it makes sense to dive into the cookie crumbs hitting Google Ads first.

How Google Ads Is Changing for Law Firm Marketers

Google Ads is limiting/halting access to information such as search term reports. Whether it’s by design to push users into automating more portions of their campaigns (and thereby relying on Google’s tools and algorithms to manage ads), or in response to privacy concerns, the days of robust datasets and user tracking are coming to an end.

• – Note for clarification, according to Google ,”A search term is the exact word or set of words a customer enters when searching on Google.com or one of our Search Network sites. A keyword is the word or set of words that Google advertisers create for a given ad group to target your ads to customers.”

Third party cookies will begin to get phased out, and user data will continue the trend of being restricted/removed.

Google is already working to block 3rd party trackers in Chrome and is touting “more transparency and control” in this blog post by VP of Ads Privacy and Safety.

Also from Google’s own playbook:

“This forward thinking group of marketers has:

• Redefined what it means to have strong, direct relationships with their users. They recognize the growing importance of first-party data, making sure they have solutions in place to collect it responsibly from customers, as well as clear privacy policies that offer people transparency and control.
• Found ways to reach their audiences and measure results when signals are limited.”

The writing on the wall could be any clearer; digital marketers will not be able to track and segment advertising the way they can now. But the necessity of Analytics and utilizing a law firm’s owned data, and strategizing “best-in-class” search engine marketing campaigns on Google that deliver clicks, plus clients, will be of evergreen importance.

How Digital Advertising for Law Firms Can Work Without Cookies

There isn’t an expected decline in advertising dollars with the tracking cookie industry crumbling, but rather a reallocation and shifting of budgets.

• Paid ads will continue on platforms like Facebook and Google, along with the targeting options digital marketers have gotten used to.Digital advertising strategies are going to have to rely on more site-specific specialists, or a strong advertising agency that works with law firms specifically, to ensure campaigns are performing properly.
• Contextual targeting will become more common, which is placing ads on content-specific sites and articles, rather than tracking user behavior all over the internet.The good news is that conversion rates tend to favor contextual targeting over hyper-targeted ad placements.
• Content marketing, and other opportunities to gather first party data will also become increasing relevant tactics law firms will use in a cookie-less world. Newsletters, video series, and other audience generating content, are good places to start.

And yet, with all the changes to the digital marketplace, traditional advertising principles and skills will prove more cost effective and conversion focused in a cookie-less world.

Solid copy writing and conversion optimization techniques work alongside the targeting available, which is key to designing successful legal SEM campaigns, and strategies, for law firms.

Set benchmarks and run A/B tests to continually discover and refine what works best.

Reviewing patterns of search behavior, rather than individual search terms – may have to split into bigger buckets such as branded vs non-branded.

Gathering First Party Marketing Data in Your Law Firm

A key ingredient to successful digital advertising for law firms without third party tracking data, is a deep understanding of your own law firm’s client base, and a keen awareness on the desired category audience you’d like to expand into.

Via client surveys and other intelligence gathering avenues, fill client personas out as best you can, and not just the typical demographics things like age, gender, income, but social media sites they prefer and platforms the interact with most, because the big guys (Google) aren’t going to make it easy for you anymore.

As third-party data disappears, first-party data on your clients will become even more important to capture.

Call Tracking, CRM, and Data-Driven Legal Marketing

Call Tracking & lead review allow you to score calls and get granular with your lead-tracking.

With tools like CallRail, Call Tracking Metrics, and a case management system, like Needles, or Casepeer, or Clio, you can generate better performing, first-party data driven marketing campaigns.

With a strong connection to the firm’s pipeline, using a reliable dashboard here can generate reports that track both sales and marketing.

Start doing your own research and compiling your own data from your CRM. Use the information you collect to create compelling ads that speak to your audience using the language and affinities that they share, and put them in places where your potential clients will be. Set benchmarks, A/B test to determine effectiveness.

In Conclusion

Digital advertising will always remain a critical brand-building tool, especially for service industries like law firms. Third party data has been an interesting experiment, and really no more divergent than traditional advertising audience analysis methods.

But the marketplace and legal community have spoken out, and thankfully, being on the right side of this means a better yield for advertising budgets in contextual targeting, a higher demand for first party data and the content that goes along with driving awareness, and a digital marketing strategy

Have questions or are interested in improving your law firm’s social media marketing, Get In Touch,  Subscribe to our Newsletter, and catch up with the LAWsome podcast!

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Social Media for Law Firms: The Basics

Choosing to develop your law firm’s book of business through social media marketing can be a decision, fraught with variables.

Do you bandwagon on the latest platform? How does organic traffic, differ from paid?

Is it possible to track social media ROI?

Should you keep paying your partner’s kid to do, whatever it is they do on the law firm’s Twitter account….

Recognizing that effective legal marketing strategy achieves both short term and long term business objectives, your law firm’s social media must be focused on essentially two things; growing awareness of your brand, and generating leads/clients.

Let’s cover the basics of social media marketing for law firms, learn why you should partake, how you can grow your total addressable audience, and how you can track all this back to actual revenue.

Why should your law firm be on social media?

Marketing your law firm via social media is not a new idea, and it remains one of the easiest ways to establish an online presence.

According to the American Bar Association 2020 Websites and Marketing Survey, lawyers are overwhelmingly on social media, but see varying results of success in regards to generating business.

In our own research and interviews with lawyers that use social media marketing to great effect, we’ve discovered a theme of pairing content with a way to track and measure effectiveness across a campaign, while appreciating the nuances of social media as a community building platform.

So the question becomes, how to grow your law firm’s online audience through social media, and where?

Best social media platforms for lawyers

You’d like to know exactly which social media platforms and advertising ecosystems your law firm needs to be on, right?

You’re nervous you have to start lip-syncing and dancing and we totally get it; we won’t desert you.

The truth to an effective law firm social media strategy, isn’t to go “where the eyeballs are,” but rather research your own client database, their demographics and media preferences, to discover where you’re most likely to generate client relationships that mirror the one’s you’ve already initiated.

Download this FREE Client Experience Survey

After a simple but comprehensive client experience survey, like above, you may discover your most valuable clientele prefer Instagram to Facebook, that you don’t have to TikTok but SnapChat, or that clients prefer email marketing and listen to the radio.

You’ll never know the best place to look for new clients, unless you know where your current ones came from.

How can I grow awareness for my law firm on social media?

Extracting value and ROI from social media has eluded most law firms, not because of lack of content marketing, but of lack of marketing strategy.

Referring again to that 2020 ABA Marketing Survey, out of a possible 5, lawyers marked their ability to measure marketing effectiveness, at a 2.9.

We can also refer to our own empirical (Twitter poll) data to show another side of the argument….

Again, the ABA Survey shows lawyers are struggling to measure marketing. Well, maybe that’s because they aren’t really measuring it?

Law firms produce immeasurable amounts of organic posts, with no promotional budgets or straight selling ads to be seen, and wonder why they never see results on social media.

Legal marketers have to appreciate the difference between brand building vs sales activation, when it comes to social media marketing.

If you need sales on Monday, no amount of organic content on social media is going to get you there. However, without a long term plan to build an audience, particularly through content marketing, short term sales alone won’t be enough to grow your business.

As discussed in our Legal Marketing Nutrition Guide, most legal marketing budgets are solely focused on, and measured by, short-term sales uplifts.

While smaller advertising campaigns create spikes in revenue (indeed they appear successful at the moment), brand-building marketing activities, which can ensure the long-term sales growth of the law firm, are typically ignored.

Prioritize ad budgets to produce great content that’s focused, not only on lead generation, but also aligned with a consistent brand strategy aimed to win online market share.

There is a compelling argument in favor of content marketing which the 2020 ABA Law Firm Marketing Survey unearthed, in this case for video and blogging in particular.

Only 5% of respondents maintained a legal topic blog, and just 3% of respondents produced their own videos for marketing purposes.

So there is a huge market opportunity for lawyers to make good content, both written and visual; so what kind of content do you make?

Ed Herman of the law firm of Brown and Crouppen, has worked with a production studio for the past few years to create the hilarious, and Emmy Award winning, “Ed Versus” video series.

The ability to leverage such entertaining content into an addressable audience through social media for a lawyer, is nothing short of marketing majesty, but the truth is, he had help building this empire, and if you’re looking for award-winning results, you’ll need help too.

One of the most important aspects to having a solid marketing partnership woth a social media vendor you can trust, is creating campaigns that are attached to measurable goals and metrics you can understand.

How can I measure ROI for my law firm’s social media?

Although it’s easier to just determine whether your firm is turning a profit, it is important to put the work into figuring out which marketing dollars are contributing to that profit (and if money is being wasted on certain campaigns).

Start by separating your marketing campaigns by medium: television, online, social media, etc. And track results from your various online marketing e’fforts, using something like this ROI Calculator.

For example, you may be allocating a certain portion of your budget to offline efforts, or pay-per-click or specific social media campaigns. When you can manage and analyze these individual campaigns to determine whether they are producing quality leads, then you can adjust investments and better allocate spend.

Some of the tools we use to track leads include:

• Call-tracking software that ties unique phone numbers to specific marketing campaigns
• Google Analytics UTM parameters in URLs that identify which campaigns are driving tra‹ffic
• Live chat services in which leads can be tied back to individual online campaigns
• Specially designed and marketed webpages with unique contact forms for tracking submissions
• Special content that requires a prospective client’s contact information in order to download (think ebooks, calculators, etc.)
• Audience behavior analysis software (helps reach potential clients)

In Conclusion

Regardless of firm size or budget, the basics for an effective social media strategy for your law firm must include great content, long and short term marketing goals you can measure, and a plan to cultivate relationships with audiences on platforms that are more likely to turn connections into cases.

Have questions or are interested in improving your law firm’s social media marketing, Get In Touch, Subscribe to our Newsletter, and catch the latest episode of the LAWsome podcast!

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