Have you ever wondered what happens to people who visited your site but never reached out?
Well, some might have just been browsing, without any intention to hire a law firm, of course. Their lack of engagement comes as no surprise, then.
But I think it’s safe to assume that the majority of your website visitors at least consider getting some legal assistance. And that might also suggest that if they haven’t inquired with you, they, most likely, ended up going somewhere else.
Not a nice prospect, right?
But what if I told you that there is a way to bring those prospective clients back to the site, remind them about your firm, and stay on top of their minds to convert them into leads?
I’m sure you’d be quite stoked.
Well, that’s exactly what retargeting does. This incredible marketing strategy can help you reconnect with people who have visited your website but haven’t become leads, bring them back, and perhaps, get them to inquire about your services.
In this guide, I’ll show you everything there is to know about using retargeting for lawyers. We’ll cover what retargeting is, and why you absolutely must invest in retargeting campaigns. We’ll even discuss some ethical considerations when it comes to running retargeting ads for law firms.
So, let’s not waste any more time.
What is Retargeting?
Retargeting (note, some marketers also refer to this strategy as remarketing) is a simple online advertising strategy that allows you to advertise to people who have visited your site already.
Here’s how it works.
When a person visits your site but does not convert, a small snippet of code adds that person to your retargeting list.
As they move across the Internet and visit other sites that display advertisements, they will be served your ad.
Now, your ad can be anything, of course. But the power of retargeting lies in determining and targeting specific website visitor behavior with relevant ads. For example:
- You can retarget people who have visited your contact page with an ad reminding them about you, your expertise and enticing them to reach out.
- Visitors who reviewed pages relating to a specific area of practice can see display ads focusing on said area and so on.
In short, retargeting allows you to advertise to people who already have some relationships with your firm. What’s more, your ads can focus on a specific outcome, determined by the person’s behavior on the site.
And those two things alone deliver incredible results for any company:
- Retargeting ads can keep your visitors engaged, even though they’re no longer on your site.
- They can convince more people to return to your site and convert them into leads.
- Such a laser focus on the right audience means a much better spend of your advertising budget.
- Retargeting can also deliver incredible data that you can use to fuel other digital marketing initiatives. For example, retargeting data can help you create lookalike audiences on Facebook and use them to run more relevant campaigns.
Where to Run Retargeting Ads?
Originally, retargeting was an advertising strategy on Google’s display network. Today, however, you can place retargeting ads on many other platforms:
- Facebook,
- Instagram,
- YouTube, and
- Third-party websites using Google Ads Display Network
Why Should Law Firms Be Investing in Retargeting?
Retargeting offers incredible opportunities to businesses of all kinds.
But it holds a special significance for lawyers.
To explain it, I must first give you the full context regarding lead generation strategies for lawyers.
First of all, getting visitors to your site is expensive. The cost of advertising in the legal space is high. Law and attorney-related phrases place 4th on the list of the most expensive keywords in Google Ads. The average cost per click for those terms is $47 (however, many specific keywords cost many times more than that per click!)
(Even if you convert this traffic at above the average conversion rates, you still spend a lot of money with zero return.
There is a reason for that too, and it relates to a typical buying behavior when looking for a law firm.
Most customers conduct thorough research before settling on a particular law firm. They scout Google for recommendations, visit law firm websites, read reviews, and spend considerable time pondering the decision. And only then, when they’ve satisfied all sources, they inquire with a company.
This means that they can be visiting your competitors’ websites alongside yours.
Retargeting allows you to stay on top of their mind and remind them about your firm as they go through the research process.
Your ads keep the brand in front of your potential clients and entice them to come back and research you more.
And that, of course, could lead to them inquiring about your services.
Should All Lawyers Run Retargeting Ads, Though?
Retargeting ads are amazing. It’s a fact. However, there are some ethical considerations for using remarketing, particularly if you advertise a law practice, and we should discuss them as well.
You see, because retargeting aims to remind a person about visiting your site, your ads will, most likely, focus on whatever information the person has viewed.
If they viewed your pages relating to criminal law, you might retarget them with relevant ads. The same goes for divorce and other areas.
Unfortunately, that could lead to some problems.
Take a divorce attorney, for example. The firm’s ads will, naturally, focus on getting help with a divorce. But, both parents and their children could be using the same computer. As a result, divorce-related ads might not only alert the other partner about their spouse’s intentions. They might reveal the situation to the child before their parents would get a chance to explain the situation to them.
The situation might be similar when it comes to ads relating to criminal law or DUI.
For such reasons, Google, for example, will not allow anyone to show retargeting ads that include or focus on:
- Financial information
- An allegation of a crime
- Any information on marital status or divorce.
Wondering whether retargeting would work for your area of practice? Talk to us, and we’ll be delighted to advise you on the best options for your law firm.
How to Launch a Retargeting Campaign for a Law Firm
Setting up and managing retargeting isn’t overly complicated. True, like any marketing channel – SEO, Google Ads, and others – some intricacies and strategies help maximize the campaign’s performance.
On the whole, however, to run retargeting ads successfully, you need to focus on:
Step 1. Collecting remarketing data through the retargeting pixel
The first thing to do is set up a website to start building retargeting lists.
The process involves adding what’s known as the retargeting pixel to every page on the site. This includes Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics tag and retargeting pixel, and pixels from any other platforms that you’d want to use.
These snippets of code will allow you to track your audience data and build retargeting lists to display your ads.
A quick note – Retargeting displays ads to people who left your site. This means that you must give it some time to collect relevant audience data before you launch your remarketing ads.
Launch ads relevant to the customer buckets that you want to target
One of the most successful retargeting strategies is to identify and target specific buyer behavior on the site. What I mean by this is that you shouldn’t display the same ad to every visitor you want to retarget. Instead, you should identify pages or actions on the site that suggest a person might become a lead and use those to create customer buckets to target.
Your buckets could include:
- First-time visitors,
- People who leave the site from a page related to a specific area of practice,
- Visitors who viewed your contact page,
- Visitors who spend considerable time on the site, and so on.
Those people will, most likely, have different needs and different expectations. So the best way to engage them further is to show them messages relating to those needs.
Cap the frequency
This is an incredibly important thing to do. You see, without frequency capping, your ads will display to the person over and over again. But that might, and, most likely, will be too much. They might tune out to your message or get irritated by the number of times they see it.
In short, the high frequency will have the opposite effect, deterring them from contacting you.
Frequency capping allows you to specify how many times people on your retargeting list will see your ads.
TIP: You can create different ads and cap their frequency to no more than 3-4 times. Then, once you’ve exhausted the frequency, your remarketing platform will swap those for other visuals, keeping your brand fresh for the person.
Convert retargeting lists into lookalike audiences to further expand your advertising campaign
Finally, you can use retargeting lists to boost your ordinary advertising campaigns’ performance too.
The simplest (and most effective) way to do it is to use retargeting lists as the basis for creating lookalike audiences on Facebook. By using retargeting list, you allow Facebook to find people similar to anyone you are remarketing to currently. That means that you can build custom audiences that share the same characteristics as your best leads.
Incredible, right?