As a senior partner in a boutique estate-planning law firm, I search for ways our 98-year-old firm can remain relevant and keep up with the times. New residents to Southwest Florida, where we’re located, don’t really care about our firm’s longstanding history of service. Like many, they ask their friends and neighbors whom to visit to update their estate plans. Others choose to go online to research law firms.
How does a firm become visible to those seeking counsel and stay top-of-mind to existing clients for referrals? Social media has become the go-to outlet to accomplish both. You may believe that your clients aren’t looking for an estate-planning firm when they’re “liking” their children and grandchildren’s Facebook posts, and you’d be right. Don’t discount, however, that your clients and prospects are on social media nearly every day, and with proper positioning, your firm can be seen as a leading go-to expert.
Let’s explore the process and foundational understandings to effectively implement social media strategies with a marketing agency. I’ll also share costly mistakes that we made along the way.
Use of Social Media
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2005, just 5% of American adults used at least one social media platform.1 By 2011 that share had risen to half of all Americans, and today, 72% of the public uses some type of social media daily.2
As more Americans have adopted social media, the social media user base has also grown more representative of the broader population. Young adults were the earliest adopters and continue to use these sites at high levels, but usage by older adults has increased in recent years.3 In 2021, the latest figures available, a full 81% of adults say they use social media at least occasionally, with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, in that order, leading the way for those aged 50 and older.4
Why Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing lets you reach prospective clients specifically through targeted demographic information you select. That way, you’re only spending marketing dollars to attract those individuals with whom you want to do business and are most likely to engage your services. You can also build lists of existing clients and target them with specific posts.
Using whatever content speaks to your client and prospects, social media automates advertising campaigns to put your message in front of your audience. It’s fully digital and cost-effective when compared to print advertising. Because it’s digital, it’s also easier to discover what content attracts your prospective clients and what doesn’t work, helping you focus your message.
What’s Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is when a business or entity uses online social platforms to connect with their audience to accomplish their goal. For readers of this magazine, that goal is to sell a service.
Technically speaking, most social media marketing uses a tracking code, referred to as a “pixel.” Your web editor can put this code on your website to track those who visit. The pixel will tell the social media platform which pages the individual visits, how long they stay on a page, how much scrolling they do and much more.
Social media marketing starts with strategy, using a variety of tactics. Be it text, photos, videos, podcasts or articles, social media marketing is typically content-driven, and that content must be addressed intentionally to the target audience.
Organic, Boosted or Paid
How you post your content is also relevant. If you post unpaid content on your social media accounts, this is organic content. You may post your weekly blog or relevant news articles. If you aren’t paying the social media platform to do anything, it’s organic posting. It’s difficult to build a large audience with organic posts, yet having an organic presence on social media is a key component to an effective social media marketing strategy. Most social media algorithms favor profiles that post high quality, relevant content over that which is overly promotional. Further, visitors to your page are more likely to engage with your firm if your content is fresh, relevant and up to date.
A step between free-to-post organic content and paid advertising exists on platforms like Facebook. You can do what’s referred to as “boosting your post.” Boosting a post starts with an organic post on your profile. From there, you boost your post by choosing your audience, the maximum budget and how long you want the boosted post to appear.
Paid advertisements, by contrast, allow you to choose different ad placements, set specific advertising objectives, exercise creative control over ad appearance and set up advanced targeting capabilities much more powerfully than what’s possible in a boosted post.
Boosted posts are a great place to start to increase post visibility and grow your audience, but paid advertising is far more advanced, requiring intentional thinking and planning.
Importance of Paid Consultants
Social media advertising is complicated, nuanced and can be extremely technical. Even if you become well versed in a social media advertising platform, it’s highly likely that the rules, capabilities and settings can quickly change. Facebook is particularly well known for its constant rule and algorithm updates, especially while facing Apple’s recent mobile privacy changes.5
Because the platforms are constantly changing, you must make sure that your social media professionals are true experts who stay up to date and consider their continuing education an important part of their model.
Costly Mistake
One issue to stay on top of is your ad spend. As an example, over the past 22 years, I’ve written an estate-planning column in a local weekly newspaper on Sanibel Island, home to several of our firm’s clients, and I believed that if I circulated that content through paid social media posts it would be a big hit. My print column has brought in millions of dollars of revenue over the years, so this seemed like a no-brainer!
A national publishing company, home to our regions’ dailies, suggested that we post articles on their newspapers’ websites. You’re probably familiar with how this works—in between a newspaper’s published articles would be ours, with the words “Paid Content” above them. It was explained to us that we would be charged for clicks (called “engagements”). After several weeks, the publishing company’s representatives excitedly summarized the results on their dashboard. We were getting a lot of engagements!
We weren’t so excited. As you’ll discover below, engagements aren’t what you may think they mean. Over a short period of time, we ran up a $40,000 bill, from which the only direct interaction with a potential client was a handwritten letter from an inmate at the Florida State Prison seeking counsel to claim an inheritance from his mother that his sister allegedly cheated him out of. We declined representation.
What this lesson demonstrates is that it’s best to use social media strategists who are independent of the media that you’re likely to use. In my opinion, the place to spend marketing dollars is with the agency of your choice placing your posts on the larger online presences such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube rather than in local media outlets, even if they’re run by national companies.
Lexicon
Every industry has its own set of terms unique to the field. Lexicons are direct expressions of a specific branch of knowledge. Social media is no different. Like with many professional or cultural lexicons, social media not only creates but also adapts existing language to express new meaning.6 With all this thrown at a layperson, it’s almost impossible to understand what the social media professionals are talking about.
Here are five common and critical social media terms:
Conversion. When a social media user or visitor to your website takes a specific, desired action. In our case, setting an appointment is often the desired conversion, but it’s not the only one. Other conversion examples include lead-generation actions like opting into a newsletter, registering for a webinar or downloading a white paper.
Engagement. Any form of interaction with your brand on social media. Likes, comments and shares are all forms of engagement.
Impressions. A metric that counts how many times an ad or promoted post is fetched from the server and displayed on a social network. It’s not a measure of how many individuals have seen the ad. For example, one social media user might have the same ad appear in their newsfeed multiple times over a certain period. Each of these instances is counted as one impression.
Link clicks. The number of clicks on links to select destinations or experiences, on or off Facebook-owned properties (for example, someone clicks on your ad to make an appointment and goes to your website).
Reach. Simply indicates that the content appeared in the user’s social feed at least once.
For more helpful social media terms, visit an online glossary my coaching company created.7
Platforms
YouTube is the most-visited social media platform.8 Owned by Google, this platform is often overlooked when conjuring to mind images of what social media is as it’s typically looked at as just a place for videos. However, videos are a powerful social tool and marketing tactic. Video blogs and influencers of all sorts take advantage of YouTube’s video sharing capabilities. With over 1 billion hours of videos watched on YouTube every day, most of us are familiar with their advertising platform through customer exposure. To add to its power, YouTube is the second most visited site globally after Google.9
While adults in the United States may use YouTube more than Facebook, the latter is by far the most used social media platform globally. Boasting over 2,740 million active users, Facebook was a unique and creative solution for college students when it debuted in 2004. Now it’s the most popular go-to place for sharing content with friends and family, keeping up to date with events going on around you and communicating online with a variety of people. With over 2.18 billion reported potential audience members, it’s no surprise that Facebook is essential for reaching your target client and putting them through the sales funnel process described below.10
Instagram is a photo and video sharing platform owned by Facebook. While popular among those aged 18-34, Instagram sees a decline in popularity among older users.11 With photo and video-based ads, copy in the captions may be overlooked in favor of the visual content typical of Instagram.
Twitter is a social networking platform that uses short posts to reach wide audiences. Individuals can post news, keep in touch with family and friends or follow celebrities, politicians, companies or users whose content they enjoy. With a global advertising audience of 353.1 million, Twitter has the smallest potential advertising audience of all these social networks.12
LinkedIn is a professional social networking site. It contrasts from the above-mentioned platforms in that it’s exclusively used for professional interactions, including job postings and applications, professional networking and more. Because LinkedIn is so niche, you should consider your target client before advertising on this platform.
Identifying Your Target Client
Before you begin organically posting or advertising on social media, you should identify your target client.
A well-defined client avatar is crucial. An avatar is a detailed representation of the characteristics of your A+ client.13 Only you’ll understand this, as most marketing experts aren’t experts in your field. They don’t know whom you serve and whom your ideal clients are. By having this clearly defined, you can help your professional consultants understand your target client and focus on them specifically. Consider questions like what keeps them up at night? What motivates them to schedule an appointment? What are the demographics of your favorite clients? Who are you a hero to?
Social media can use that information based on behaviors, interests and demographics to target your ads to those ideal clients.
You can then use the analytics from your first few campaigns to find out which messages speak to clients and what doesn’t work. You may find yourself changing images on the next round of ads, switching copy or modifying your call to action. Use whatever best informs the target client you identified.
Identifying the Goal
Most firms will have two goals. The first is to remain top-of-mind to your existing client base. When they see your posts in their social media feeds, they’ll be reminded of you and your excellent work and more likely to recommend you to their friends and colleagues. Further, you’ll be able to sell your existing client base related services such as advanced estate planning and administration services or cross-sell other services your firm provides.
With new prospects, the goal is to attract an audience of qualified prospects and then convert them into paying clients. Despite this goal, realize that it’s nearly impossible to immediately go from A to Z. You’re asking the prospect to leap from not knowing you to spending premium fees for premium services. This is a process that takes work on your part to gain their trust and confidence.
They must become aware of your firm as an authoritative source. I write about content below but know that providing quality educational material is paramount to the success of an estate-planning firm’s campaign. You place this content into a structure known as a “sales funnel.” If you don’t prefer the word “sales” for professional services, then think of it as a “commitment funnel.”
Funnels
You may be familiar with what a funnel is. It’s commonly defined as “the marketing term for the journey potential clients go through on the way to engagement.” Dan Sullivan, owner of The Strategic Coach, has perhaps one of the best definitions of sales: “Getting someone intellectually engaged in a future result that is good for them and guiding them to emotionally commit to take action to achieve that result.”14
There are several steps to a sales funnel, usually known as the top, middle and bottom, although these steps may vary depending on a firm’s engagement model:15
Top: Awareness. At the top of the sales funnel, you’re in the awareness stage. Prior to creating awareness, your potential audience may have never heard of your firm or be familiar with your services and reputation. Without awareness of who you are and what you do, the potential client has no interest in engaging with your social media posts.
This is where you’re building an audience. Perhaps you purchased a list of individuals who meet your ideal client profile and are creating what Facebook calls a “lookalike audience.”16 Maybe you’re building a new audience from scratch by posting your content. Either way, the top of funnel works with the advertisements and your client avatar to funnel down to those most likely to engage with your posts.
Middle: Interest and decision. Once a prospective client learns about you, they can now analyze how interested they are in the content available in your ads. At this point, maybe you’ve used what are called “micro-commitments” like downloading a white paper in exchange for an email address. At this stage, the prospective client is researching their options.
Now that they have this information, however, they can decide what to do with it. If your presence on social media and your website is robust and ready to tackle the prospect’s interest with enticing landing pages and calls to action, they may finally move into the last phase of the funnel.
Bottom: Action. If the prospective client reaches the bottom of your funnel, they passed through all your content and micro-commitments. They’re the primed prospective client. At this point, you want to call them to action. Maybe it’s time to set up that initial consultation or sell them an e-learning series on a topic of relevance. If for some reason a client reaches this stage and doesn’t bite, you can continue to send them interesting information in hopes that they become a paying client down the line.
Content
Having the content that will interest your target client is crucial. Your funnel must contain information that’s pertinent to the motivations bringing them into your conference room. While you can purchase content from various providers, I believe you shouldn’t spend the time or resources on social media marketing if that’s your plan. Instead, you must create content that’s unique to your target market, in your voice and written and performed by those individuals in your firm with whom your audience will interact.
When it comes to generating content, you may ask what kind works best. The answer is you’ll discover that by creating content. Just start doing it. You must figure out two things: what speaks to your client, and where should the content go in the funnel so that it’s most effective?
A concept called “circular viralocity” works well. This is when you create content but use it in multiple ways. As an example, I write an estate-planning column for the weekly print newspaper. We then post that content as a blog on our firm’s website. I record a podcast episode17 on the subject matter, which is then featured on a landing page.
Your content should be quick and digestible. You have a couple of seconds to gain your target’s attention. Don’t be afraid to reveal valuable lessons for fear that some will use it to create their own documents with an online preparatory service. Those individuals aren’t your target anyway. Do speak to the emotional and family issues in a layperson’s voice using words they understand. Stay away from citing statutes and court cases.
With the proper agency, you can test run content in various forms to determine what works with your target and what doesn’t.
Ad Control
The social media platforms can control which content sees the light of day. With Facebook, for example, some content may never make it past initial approval. Others, although approved, may never appear in front of a prospective client. Even though you’re paying for the posts, you don’t choose which ones will make it onto your audience’s feed. The platform does.
Many social platforms optimize for user experience and, therefore, want to create an aesthetically pleasing, relevant stream of content and information. This is all due to the social media algorithms that help determine what content should appear before users. User experience is the priority for most artificial intelligence (AI) when filtering through ads.
In our firm’s experience, Facebook has been difficult when using the word “tax” in any headline. They view tax content as political, which is then categorized and treated separately on that platform subject to different, harsher rules. If we use the name of a politician, such as a governor, senator, president or congressman, the same result occurs. Further, the use of the word “estate” causes the Facebook algorithms to consider the post having to do with real property as opposed to wills, trusts and probate, causing other issues.
This is where an experienced social media marketing firm is worth your resources.
Dashboard Analysis
Each marketing platform has its own analytics and control dashboard. While similar, there are nuances to each. Understanding social media lexicon will grant you understanding of the analytics dashboard as well. As legal, financial and tax professionals, you’re all fully capable of analyzing statistics and numbers to show the return on your investment. However, you may not understand the terminology used throughout.
There are also third-party programs that allow you to aggregate your social data and review and control those ads from a singular platform. Most of these unified dashboards are paid solutions.18
Mid-Course Adjustments
Mid-course adjustments can throw an entire campaign off course. Social media marketing is quite strict in its filtering process, as it uses AI to do so.
If you change the copy or an image while a campaign is running, you essentially must interrupt the campaign, shut it down to make your changes and restart. There’s no resuming as the specifications of your ad have changed. Social media platforms want to track exactly what you’re using in each ad, so changes are strongly discouraged.
It’s for this reason that a lot of social media marketing must be intentional and simultaneously diverse. You’ll want to ensure that your messaging is on point, sharp and clear, but you’ll also want to experiment with phrasing, images and the like. Most social media advertising platforms allow you to create campaigns with variants to further hone your message when the campaign ends and you wish to start a new one.
Budgeting
Budgeting for social media marketing brings up several questions:
- What are we budgeting for?
- How much is spent on the ad creation vs. the ad postings themselves?
- How much do we spend on each step of this process?
- Are we spending on conversion, views, or what exactly?
A good social media marketing expert will help guide you to the best strategies to fit your budgetary concerns, which is what my firm didn’t have when we had that experience with the newspapers. Your agency will discuss a number representing the cost to obtain a new client, which is the quotient of the ad spend divided by the number of clients obtained during a campaign. This number might be $50, or it might be $250.
When budgeting, don’t ignore ad spend, creation or list purchasing, but the most important spend will be on the experts who run your campaigns for you. If their monthly retainer fee includes the time spent on creating the posts, all the better.
Beyond that, a good agency will help you establish a budget based on your financial and time constraints. To determine that budget, you must go back to examine your goals. Are you looking to strictly build brand awareness? Do you want to fully convert a cold traffic lead into a paying client? The more you want to accomplish, the more you must spend on an aggressive strategy.
With that in mind, what you spend on is also dependent on the platform and bid strategy. A bid strategy is the method for how to bid on the space where your ad appears. You can bid spend on spending, goals or configure it manually. YouTube advertising is owned by Google, so it’s expensive. Facebook, in contrast, is considered more affordable. Be aware of what each platform considers in the cost of your advertisement before using that platform. How you set up your campaign goals will help determine whether you’re paying for clicks, impressions or engagements.
Virtual Red Tape
Social media platforms filter everything you post as an advertiser. Copy is scrutinized, images are analyzed for inappropriate content and calls to action must be precise. If a social media platform recognizes something in your post as violating its terms or falling into a special category, as mentioned above, trouble arises. An example of this occurred when Facebook addressed the increase in political and social issue-based ads and implemented a series of restrictions to ensure those posting on those topics were verified and disclaimed.19
Once again, AI determines if your ad makes it past the red tape. Appealing AI determinations to the social network can often require hours of manual interaction with that platform. The social media experts will help you determine what words, images and phrases to avoid, ensuring that your content can be published for advertising.
Ethical Considerations
You must adhere to bar advertising rules. Something as simple as a change of an image or change of color might require you to seek new approval for what’s essentially the same content.20 For those state bars that require payment to approve advertisements, this can become quite expensive.
I could write an entire article on online bar ethical considerations, which is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say it’s important to become familiar with your bar rules and make sure someone in your firm reviews the content that your agency creates. Don’t rely on your agency to comply with the applicable rules.
Financial services firms have their own compliance officers that they must contend with. That’s probably why you don’t find many social media advertisements from those professionals.
Some social media marketing platforms have their own ethical concerns, as evidenced above by Facebook and their stringency with political ads.
How Long for Results?
Social media results can take weeks to months. It’s a process that takes time. With my print articles for example, I’ve had new clients tell me that they’ve read my articles for a decade before making an appointment. I’ve often thought, “What took you so long?”
The good news is that social media marketing tends to have a shorter incubation period than a decade! Yet it does take a commitment to create and post content on a regular basis. Don’t try to choose multiple platforms. Stick with the one that you and your agency believe will work best for you.
A decade ago, your website was your calling card. Today it takes more than that, such as creating content that can be readily viewed by someone scrolling through their phone or when conducting a search about a topic important to them. If you’re consistent and disciplined with your approach, you’ll earn dividends on your commitment.
— The author would like to thank the contributions of Donald J. Wik, Jr., a marketing technologist in Fort Myers, Fla., in the preparation of this article.
Endnotes
1. “Social Media Fact Sheet,” Pew Research Center, www.pewresearch.org/topic/internet-technology/platforms-services/social-media/ (April 7, 2021).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. www.facebook.com/business/learn/ads-changes/guide.
6. www.languageservicesdirect.co.uk/social-media-changing-english-language/.
7. https://4freedompractice.com/social-media-lexicon/.
8. Supra note 1.
9. “Digital 2021: The Latest Insights into How People around the World Use The Internet, Social Media, Mobile Devices, and Ecommerce,” www.hootsuite.com/pages/digital-trends-2021.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Seehttps://4freedompractice.com/clientavatar.
15. https://keap.com/product/sales-funnel.
16. Facebook defines a “lookalike audience” as when it identifies the common qualities of the people in it (for example, demographic information or interests). Then, Facebook delivers your ad to an audience of individuals who are similar.
17. To learn more about creating podcasts, see Craig R. Hersch, “How to Create Your Own Podcast Series,” Trusts & Estates (July 2017).
18. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/social-media-dashboard-tools.
19. www.facebook.com/business/help/167836590566506?id=288762101909005.
20. See, e.g., Florida Bar Rule 4-7.19.