Next up in our series on the costs of marketing your legal business is social media and ads!
The hot topic everyone knows they need to do, but few do well!
Getting your social right from the content to the timing and the consistency is crucial to leveraging the biggest attention markets in the world. Because your social strategy will involve using your content from other sources like your blog most agencies like to package this up with their content creation options (like us).
So what is involved when thinking about your social media and ads?
Before we get into the details it is worth pointing out just how important ads are to your social media strategy. With the changes in the Facebook and Instagram algorithm it has become increasingly difficult to get any traction from purely organic results. That means, just posting stuff on your company page won’t do much. What will do a lot is a focused ads campaign that uses the content you make. We are at a point where you really do need to factor in ads if you are going to invest time in content, especially on FB and Instagram, it’s as simple as that.
DIY
Can you DIY it all? Absolutely, it just takes a huge amount of time to get right. So if you have the time and the expertise (or interest in learning) then you need to pull apart all of the steps above and work through them one by one. The key to doing it yourself is to be super organised and to do all your content in bulk. Like everything you need to be consistent with your posting and be operating to a key plan to get the traction you are after. There are a lot of great resources for managing your social posts that we can recommend like:
There is obviously a significant education element involved if you want to DIY and there are countless amazing resources to do this.
Check out the following from former BB team member and now brilliant DIY social media guru Steph Taylor:
Paid
For most business owners who are busy themselves the last thing they want to do (or should be doing) is all their own social and ads.
You are then ultimately going to have to pay for it, so what to expect from the key areas?
There is a big range primarily because there are varying degrees of quality and niche expertise that you can use (plus let’s be honest, some people charge a fortune!). Someone with subject matter expertise who is local is going to offer a very different level of service to someone who does things in a bulk way without the speciality. There are also huge difference in the quality of imagery and design.
The reality for most providers is that they will package up your options across most of these deliverables and offer blended rates that discount what they would charge individually. For instance most will package strategy, setup and ongoing content at a minimum for a monthly fee of anywhere from $1500-$5000 depending on the volume and quality of posts.
With Facebook and Instagram ads expect to pay at least $1000 to have FB ads set up, Ad templates created, Ad sets with targeting, setup of Pixel and everything else that goes into preparing an effective ad campaign.
For “search” advertising like google ads expect to pay at least $3000 to set-up your campaign and then an ongoing fee of $1500-$3000 a month for management plus ad spend. The set-up and management will include landing pages being made, all your google analytics and tracking set up, and strategy based on optimising your lead conversions.
Hot tip - What is your time worth? Doing all your own social including the content, design work and management takes a huge amount of work to get right. Have a think about the time vs cost investment and what return you are looking for on your investment when deciding on the smartest approach. If you get 1 lead a month which is a $10,000 file it obviously makes a lot of sense to invest properly. Look at what results you want, and reverse engineer a strategy to get them (which is the approach we take with our clients).
