Social media might be construed as the plaything of swole bros and booty-happy influencers, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an incredibly powerful business development tool for legal and professional services firms. Far too many lawyers are none the wiser to the capabilities of platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn when it comes to business development. In this post, I’ll explore just four of many ways law firms can use technology to get really specific when it comes to their business development prospecting and targeting efforts.
A little known fact about Facebook’s advertising platform is that it empowers you to target people based on their job title and employer name.
So if I wanted to reach out to get in front of talent development folks at a law firm for example, I would target them as follows, specifically targeting them by age and location.
Typically, it takes between 28 to 62 touchpoints to make a sale. As such, we would be well served to use different platforms to automate those touchpoints, and stay in the mind of the prospective client.
One way to use Facebook to do that is by custom audience, email targeting. This essentially involves importing a prospect or past client list of emails into a custom audience in Facebook’s ad platform. If this email is the same as the one your prospect uses to access Facebook and its associated assets (i.e. Instagram), they will be served your ads.
Isn’t a pixel just the smallest element in a digital image? Yes, but it’s also a snippet of code you can put on a webpage to drop a cookie that will effectively track and ‘retarget’ webpage visitors with ads. This is why, when you visit a website advertising today’s most ergonomic mattress, said mattress starts following you across the internet.
Anybody who visits said webpage will see your ads across Facebook’s ad network.
Sales Navigator, LinkedIn’s flagship tool, is one of the most sophisticated B2B prospect targeting tools on the market. It leverages insights and demographic data from more than 660 million LinkedIn users to give you laser-sharp precision when it come to just who you’re reaching out to.
For example, you can filter people by variables such as, but not limited to:
It can also tell you who has changed jobs recently, who has appeared in the media recently, and how active someone is on LinkedIn.
For example, if I wanted to target chief technology officers (CTOs) from Australian mining companies, I could simply filter my search accordingly.
Well, I could either manually message an individual, or I could automate the process of reaching out and following up.
If I’m sending messages en masse to all of the search results, then I’d want to use a tool like LinkedHelper to do that (more on that here).
If I’d like to email these folks instead, I can use a plug-in such as LeadIQ or DuxSoup to scrape their professional email addresses, and reach out using a tool like Snov.io (more on that here).
You can deliver LinkedIn ads to your search results as well. It is worth noting that LinkedIn ads are much more expensive than Facebook Ads (typically $10 to $25 per click), based on the fact that B2B deals tend to be much greater. But if every 100 (say $2,500) clicks nets you a client worth $50,000, then it’s a unit economics no brainer.
So there you have it. Just four simple ways to target specific folks via Facebook ads, LinkedIn, and email.
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Steve Glaveski is the CEO and Co-Founder of Collective Campus which he established to help companies and their employees to create a more meaningful impact in the world in an age of rapid change and increasing uncertainty. Steve also founded Lemonade Stand - a children's entrepreneurship program, author of Wiley book, Employee to Entrepreneur: How to Earn Your Freedom and do Work That Matters, Harvard Business Review contributor, author of the Innovation Manager's Handbook vol 1 and 2, host of the Future Squared podcast, and keynote speaker. He previously founded HOTDESK, an office sharing platform and has worked for the likes of Westpac, Dun & Bradstreet, the Victorian Auditor General's Office, Ernst & Young, KPMG and Macquarie Bank. Follow him at @steveglaveski
