Facebook Advertising for Personal Injury Lawyers: 2024 Guide

Personal injury is arguably the most expensive subcategory in the legal industry for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. This is one of the many roadblocks you must overcome when promoting your law firm on Facebook ads. Thankfully, I’ll break down the steps for launching a Facebook ad campaign that drives engagement without going beyond your allotted budget.

Why Use Facebook Advertising for Your Injury Law Firm

Personal injury lawyers like yourself can benefit greatly from using Facebook advertising as part of their law firm marketing strategy. Despite having over 2 billion users, you can show your ads to users using targeting options like geographical locations, interests, and demographics. The more targeted your audience is, the more affordable the ad cost becomes.

Unlike Google Ads, Facebook advertising has lower cost-per-click rates, making it even more cost-effective. However, this doesn’t mean you should abandon your Google Ads campaign, as you can use both to power your lead generation initiatives.

Challenges of Facebook Ads For Injury Lawyers

As beneficial as Facebook ads are for your law firm, they have two drawbacks. First, prospects aren’t in the mindset of shopping for lawyers on social media. Just because they see your ad on their feeds doesn’t mean they’ll immediately ask for help for their case.

You want to align your ad goals based on which stage in your marketing funnel your audience is. For people who don’t know your law firm exists, promote your how-to guides and informational content to increase brand awareness. To improve client acquisition, target people who showed interest in your law firm before and reconnect with them.

The second is the competition with lifestyle brands with larger advertising budgets and stronger online presence. You must increase ad costs to offset these advantages they have and compete with them. Even then, there’s no guarantee your target audience will choose you over these established brands.

Nonetheless, you can overcome both challenges by following the steps below to develop and execute a Facebook ad campaign correctly.

How to Launch a Facebook Ad Campaign for Your Personal Injury Law Firm

Before executing a Facebook advertising campaign, you must know how it differs from ads and ad sets. An ad tells your target audience what your firm is and how you can help them. An ad set is a collection of ads that share the same message and settings. Finally, an ad campaign contains all your ad sets in video, image, or poll format with the same goal for your law firm.

So, to get the most out of your legal marketing efforts, you must develop and launch an ad campaign. Here’s how you can do one of Facebook:

Set Up Your Personal Injury Lawyer Facebook Page

You need a Facebook Business page as a personal injury lawyer or for your law firm to get started. Log in to your Facebook profile and click on Pages on the left sidebar.

Then, click on the “Create a New Page” button.

Enter your page name and category. 

You also must input your bio as a personal injury attorney or of your law firm, but you can accomplish this later. It should describe what you do and how you can help them within 255 characters. How you describe yourself here can influence people who visit your page in hiring you.

Uploading your profile and cover photos is next. For optimal viewing, the profile picture must have 128×128 dimensions on mobile devices (170×170 on desktop), while the cover photo should have 640×360 dimensions on mobile (820×312 on desktop). Incorporate your logo and branding on both photos for brand consistency.

You’ll need to include your law firm’s email address, phone number, physical address, and a link to your personal injury firm’s website for your contact information. Showing all these on your Facebook page makes reaching out to your law firm much easier. Include your business hours as well to encourage walk-ins.

After completing your Facebook page, publish it for all to see and jumpstart your ad campaign. Even if published, you can still make changes on the page to correct mistakes and update old information.

Identify the Objective of Your Ads

Identify what you want your ads to achieve for your law firm. To help you decide your campaign objective, you must know the different stages of a sales funnel and which stage your campaign falls under. There are three you should consider:

• Awareness – Located at the top of the funnel, the campaign in this stage must grab the attention of people who match your demographics but don’t know your business exists. Your ads should focus on promoting your expertise in your practice area. You can do this by covering trending topics, like an unfortunate car accident injury case in the news, and how you plan on handling the proceedings in a short video. 
• Consideration – People in this funnel stage need a personal injury lawyer, and your campaign here should give them a reason to put you on their shortlist. Create ad sets promoting your latest free whitepaper about people’s rights after a personal injury. After clicking on your ads, Facebook users should be redirected to a landing page with a lead capture form as its call to action (CTA) so they can download a copy of the whitepaper.
• Conversion – The campaign in this stage should turn people into new clients of your law firm. Its goal is to get users to contact you for a free consultation or hire you as a lawyer for their case. To increase your conversions, make a compelling case for your services through the ads’ visuals and copy.

Determine Your Target Audience

Facebook allows you to be more granular with your ad campaigns, thanks to its custom audience targeting tools like Audience controls and Advantage+ audience. Here are the different options to filter your ads:

• Location – Ensure that you show your ad set to people at locations where your law firm operates. 
• Sex – While you want to attract people of all genders and associations with your ads, you may discover that certain genders convert more than others. Use this information to make your campaign appear only to specific genders to maximize ad performance. You can also create a separate ad catering to another gender and see if it performs better.
• Age – Most law firms entertain potential clients of varying ages, but some may specialize in personal injuries incurred by the elderly or children. If you have the same specialties as the ones mentioned, enter the age of the people you want to see your ads.
• Job title – Constructors, steel workers, loggers, and other physically demanding jobs have the highest risk of injuries and worker’s compensation cases. If applicable, customize the campaign to show your ads to these people and greatly increase your conversions.
• Interest – Identify the interests of Facebook users that align with your business. If you specialize in car accident cases, show your ads to people with cars and vehicles as their interests in the platform. Or if your law firm works cases for product liabilities, feature the campaigns to users who follow defective products or those that endangered people’s lives in the past.
• Behavior – Optimize your ad campaigns to anticipate user behavior. Determine your competitors and set your campaign to display your ads to users who recently visited them. You can also create desktop and mobile versions of your ads so Facebook shows the appropriate version to users based on their device.
• Lookalike Audiences – Let Facebook push your ads to people who share your client’s demographics, interests, and behaviors. Another audience type, custom audiences, requires using Facebook pixel to retarget users who previously engaged with your brand on the platform. The ads you create for this group should familiarize them with your law firm and build relationships with them.

Set Aside Your Budget Early

The steps above help determine how much you should spend on your ad campaign. The campaign budget differs if you want people to see your ad (scrolling past it counts as seeing it) or getting them to click on it. Also, the broader the audience who will view and engage with your campaign, the higher the cost is. 

The next thing to decide on for your Facebook ads is assigning a lifetime budget or passing on a daily budget. You can shift how you pay for the campaign anytime if there are changes to your original plan. For example, your ads with a daily budget perform beyond expectations. So, to help you save on costs, pay for a lifetime budget instead.

There’s also a budget scheduling feature to help you plan how much you should spend in advance for certain times and dates to maximize your budget.

Consider these factors to develop an ad campaign that makes the most of your budget.

Choose the Right Ad Types and Formats

Facebook lets you choose from different ad formats, each with strengths and weaknesses. They require you to design an image with 600 x 600 pixels max and a minimum resolution of 1080 x 1080.

As for the copy, Facebook allows different character limits for each ad. Most have a 40 and 125-character limit for the headline and primary text, respectively. The description text for all ads varies between 20 and 30 characters. Also, Facebook features ads in different positions on its site. Keep these in mind when choosing which ads to use for your campaign.

All ads come with a CTA button that links to your landing page, books a consultation with you, or calls your customer support. The button appears below the ad photo.

Below are the types of ads to choose from and a short description of each.

• Photo Ads – Also known as feed ads or image ads, they show a single image promoting your law firm. 
• Carousel Ads – You can display multiple ad images and videos one at a time. Each ad unit has its own link and a unique primary text and description, making this ad type ideal if you want to provide users with more information about your law firm. You can also use this ad type to tell a sequential story to attract more attention from users.
• Video Ads – They usually run up to 15 seconds or longer to grab your audience’s attention. The key to higher engagement with this ad type is to create high-quality and professionally-made videos with a strong offer. You can also enable the 360-degree option to make your videos even more compelling.
• Slideshow Ads – These ads use motion to display images and text compellingly. Slideshows perform much better than videos because they load much quicker and play smoother. They are also ideal if your target location for your ads suffers from slow internet connection.
• Instant Experience Ads – Previously known as Canvas Ads, this ad type works best if most of your audience uses mobile devices. They load faster than other ads and open to full-screen view when tapping them. Setting up an ad for this type is easy, as there are pre-made templates to choose from to jumpstart your campaign.
• Boost a post – If a post on your Facebook page gains traction from people, you can run an ad to boost its visibility even more. This is a great way to promote your latest blog topic ideas, showcase expertise in your practice area, and get your target audience to learn more about your law firm. 
• Retargeting Options – Retargeting ads reach out to people who visited your website from a prior PPC search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. Their previous engagement with your brand means they’re interested in your legal services, increasing their likelihood of becoming leads or clients. When done correctly, the ad type helps reduce ad costs and get more from your Facebook marketing campaign.

Craft Ad Copy

How you write your ad copy determines whether or not you can meet your ad campaign’s goal. The character limits for the ad’s headline, description, and primary text force you to be concise while saying as much as possible.

To overcome these limitations, you must use easy-to-understand language in your copy. Get straight to the point so your audience immediately knows what your ad is about. Also, use action-oriented language to make your ad copy more compact. Ensure your copy aligns with what people see in your image or video as well. 

Your tone’s copy is another factor you must consider when writing your copy. Instead of saying, “You need my services” in your copy, “Navigate through the personal injury case with our help by calling us so you can get your life back.” Telling them why they must contact you mobilizes them to action, resulting in more potential clients.

Finally, choose the correct CTA for each ad you’ll launch in line with your marketing funnel. Ads in the awareness stage should encourage users to read your content, watch your video, or download your guide. Those in the conversion stage must get people to call about your services and how you can help them.

The level of cohesion the elements in your ads have can dictate whether they will meet their goals. However, you can always change them if the ad doesn’t perform as expected. You can change the CTA if the initial one isn’t getting enough clicks or conversions.

Start Bidding

The Facebook Ad Auction helps show your ads to your determined specific audiences over your competitors’ ads. Facebook usually prioritizes ad quality over the highest bidder, so optimize your ads before you join the auction. 

Your ad campaign automatically undergoes the auction, although you don’t have to be present when the auction takes place. However, you can make bids in real-time to improve the chances of your ads appearing before competing law firms on the platform.

The platform computes the latter based on the ads’ estimated action rates, which describe the likelihood of ads engaging with their target audience. On the other hand, Facebook determines the ad quality according to user feedback and variables that could make it low-quality, like overpromising and underdelivering on offers, providing incomplete information, and more.

Track and Monitor Ad Campaign Results

Upon launching your campaign, you must check how it performs over time using the Facebook Ads Manager. Use metrics like impressions, frequency, link clicks, and conversion rates to determine its success. Determine which ads or ad sets performed the best and least and make the necessary changes to double-down on successful ads and rework poor-performing ones.

Want to Get PPC Help From Us?

If launching Facebook ads for your law firm following the steps above may be too much for you, hire On The Map Marketing. Our digital marketing agency ensures you meet your ad campaign goals on Facebook and even Google while maximizing your ad spend. Contact us now for a free consultation from an ads specialist on our team.