Everything About Small Business Social Media Marketing

You may be surprised (or maybe not!) to learn that small firms are almost twice as likely to use social media for business marketing as large firms—70 percent to just 37 percent.  However, there's a big difference between just using small business social media marketing and using it effectively.  From outdated social media profiles to boring blog content, most lawyers are making big mistakes when they use social media for business marketing.  This guide will help you stop making those mistakes and start exciting your clients.

Why Smaller Can Be Better in Social Media

There are definitely advantages to being a large law firm when it comes to using social media for business marketing.  Almost 20 percent of large law firms now have a full-time social media specialist helping to design their campaigns.  But what if you don't have the money for a social media specialist?  How can you maximize your small business social media marketing without spending more than your firm can afford?

There are two things that make small business social media marketing substantially easier than marketing for a big firm.  The first is flexibility.  Using social media for business marketing is only effective when you are good at responding to comments and joining in on conversations.  Small firms can excel at this kind of responsiveness if even one or two attorneys are interested in contributing to your small business social media marketing presence.

The second big advantage your firm has when it comes to leveraging social media for business marketing is branding.  Small business social media marketing depends a great deal on your ability to successfully differentiate your business from competitors.  When you don't have a lot of red tape and bureaucracy, it can be easier to figure out what you stand for and what the brand personality of your business is.

Social Media For Business Marketing: Expanding What You Have

A lot of attorneys at small firms have already made small, tentative steps toward small business social media marketing.  Maybe you've got a Facebook profile, not just for yourself but for your law firm as well.  Maybe you occasionally update a blog.  Perhaps you casually surf websites like Reddit, Dig, or StumbleUpon.

When you start using social media for business marketing, start with what you know.  Every website is a bit different, and it can be hard to learn the etiquette for several sites at once.  In a small firm, you may be able to divvy up responsibilities for small business social media marketing: the attorney who already has a personal Twitter account can start tweeting for the firm, while an attorney who spends a lot of time surfing Reddit can start submitting blog posts to the site.

When you start by engaging with the social media communities you're already connected to, you already know the rules and—more than that—you can have fun with what you're doing.  It shows when you genuinely enjoying your conversations when you use social media for business marketing, and that kind of enthusiasm can translate directly into new leads and new clients.

Social Media For Business Marketing: Building a Reputation

In today's small business social media marketing world, it's not enough to just make a series of great entries on a blog or to get a few ratings on Yelp.  Getting ahead of your competition means building a reputation, and that takes two things: time and content.

Content is incredibly important, because even if you have a great deal of fantastic content, you need to keep it fresh and new.  On the internet, information seems to have a short shelf life, and waiting too long to post about the next new thing can mean that your posts go unread.  

Stay abreast of new developments in your field, and always look for new opportunities to develop your small business social media marketing content.  A client's question, a disagreement in a meeting about a legal issue, a judge's decision, a link you read elsewhere—all of these can be fertile grounds for creating engaging content for your blog or social media feeds.

Social Media For Business Marketing: Mistakes and Missteps

When attorneys start using small business social media marketing, they often make mistakes, big and small.  Sometimes, what starts as a small mistake—a faux pas in how you talked to a commenter, or a minor gaffe on your website—can seem to spiral out of control in the social media world.  When this happens (and odds are, someday it will), you need to know how to handle it.

Start by acknowledging your mistakes, which isn't always easy for attorneys.  Some companies have managed to turn social media nightmares into positive experiences by promptly apologizing in an authentic way.  View the mistake as a learning experience: if you can, ask for feedback that can help you to avoid similar mishaps in the future.

While a mistake can certainly be embarrassing, and can even feel like it's destroying your small business social media marketing, keep in mind the old saying: This, too, shall pass.  The same short internet shelf-life that makes it necessary to keep producing content will mean that soon, your gaffe will just be yesterday's news.

Social Media For Business Marketing: Staying Ahead of the Competition 

In the same way that you continue your legal education with seminars and online classes, you should give serious thought to getting formal training in small business social media marketing.  It's not a bad idea to make sure that everyone in your firm understands at least the basics of using social media for business marketing, just so that all staff members are on the same page.

You should also make sure that you're keeping informed about changes to the social media platforms that you're using, so that you don't get blindsided.  For instance, even small changes to the way profiles are displayed could have a significant impact on your LinkedIn advertising.  Avoiding technological surprises is key to making sure that your social media marketing strategies succeed.

Everything About PPC Management

So you've started using pay per click marketing for your law firm—but what now?  Do you want keywords that cost $50 or more, or to bid lower on keywords for just a few dollars?  PPC bid management software can cost hundreds of dollars, and PPC management services can cost thousands—are they worth it?  This guide will explore how you can best manage your pay per click advertising, with or without PPC management services.  You'll also learn about common PPC bid management mistakes to avoid when you begin working on your PPC management strategies.

PPC Bid Management Options

When you start learning about pay per click marketing, one of your first questions might be “how do I know what to bid?”  There are several different answers to this question, depending on your PPC management needs and your current pay per click advertising budget.  Usually, the search engines offering this type of advertising also offer PPC management services and options that can help you manage your bids.

While it's easy to use these services for your PPC bid management, you may know about your other options as well.  Some companies offer software that can help you make bids and learn more about PPC management in your pay per click campaigns.  Others offer full PPC management services that allow you to focus on your firm's business without thinking about your own pay per click advertising campaign.

When Should I Use Search Engine PPC Management Services?

If you're new to marketing with PPC, you may want to start doing PPC bid management with the tools offered by the search engines themselves.  These services have a few distinct advantages: they're easy to use, with effective tutorials that can help you learn how to do the basics of PPC management.  However, there's a reason that up to 70 percent of big businesses eventually hire specialized PPC management services to handle their pay per click campaigns: it's not easy to just use what you're given by search engines.

Keep in mind that any PPC bid management that you do with the services offered by Google or Yahoo will be run by them, and that they're more interested in their own profit than your law firm's.  When you use their tools, then, don't be surprised if the way they do PPC management seems hazy.  They simply don't make all the best analytical information available to consumers.

When Should I Use Third Party PPC Bid Management Software?

Once you've worked with PPC management tools from the search engines for a while, you may be ready to move on to tools that give you more control.  For this, you'll want to look for third party PPC management services software.  The quality of these tools can vary, and some can cost hundreds of dollars for a user license, so you'll want to make sure to look for online reviews of any software before you buy.

Of all of your PPC bid management options, using third party software can give you the most control over your bid strategies—if you know what you're doing.  Make sure that you understand the tools that you have, and consider sending an employee to a training that can help them get the most out of any PPC management tools that you've spent money on.  Remember that the tools you use are only as good as the people using them.  If you're not able to spend money on training someone to use PPC bid management software, you may want to hire PPC management services to handle your bids.

When Should I Use PPC Management Services?

Micromanaging pay per click bids isn't for everyone, and many law firms end up deciding that it would be better to leave PPC bid management in the hands of specialists.  There's nothing wrong with using one of these services for PPC management, but keep in mind that the cheapest service may not be the best.

PPC management services that keep your data may be cheaper in the short term, but make no mistake: when you lose data, you lose money and time. You may not think that your data means much, but think of PPC bid management as a series of experiments.  Some work, and some don't, and every time you find out one that works you'll save money and attract clients.  If your data doesn't belong to you and you switch PPC management services, you're back to square one: you won't know which of your PPC management strategies worked, and which were failures.  

The best companies that provide PPC bid management won't just make bids for you, they'll discuss your marketing strategies and help you build a website that converts clicks into clients.  This can be much more cost-effective than hiring bare bones PPC management services to handle your marketing on the web.

Common PPC Bid Management Mistakes

When you're new to PPC management, you can easily fall prey to common bidding mistakes.  One of the easiest traps to fall into is bidding too high.  Obviously you'll get more clicks when you bid high, but how many of those clicks become clients?  Experiment with bids that don't necessarily put you into the top position—you may find that you're getting just as many clients when you're spending a great deal less on your bids.

Law firms that are new to PPC management also tend to start by using keywords in their ad groups that are simply too general to get the kinds of clients they want.  Keywords that are too general hurt your PPC management in two different ways: they make conversion rates go down while causing your bid prices to go up.

It's also important not to keep changing your bids too often, too early.  While some PPC management strategies may require changing bids fairly frequently, smart PPC bid management relies on building historical data and using that data wisely.  Changing your bids too much when your campaign is new can result in bad data and bad PPC management.

Everything About PPC

In today's legal marketing world, the internet has begun to dominate the discussion, and pay per click is more popular than ever.  You may have heard that PPC pay per click advertising can raise your law firm's website traffic by as much as 66%, but have very little idea what else PPC can do for your firm.  This guide will help answer the most basic questions, from “what is PPC?” to “How do I manage my PPC bids?”  It doesn't have to be hard to set up a PPC pay per click campaign—you'll learn how to start from the basics here.

What is PPC?

Both new and old law firms need advertising that works on the web.  You have several options: you can manage keywords on your website or in blog entries, then use search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to get onto the first page of someone's web search.  However, this kind of search engine marketing requires a high level of skill with web writing to make sure that your content is relevant while keeping keyword density high enough to put your firm into the top few pages of results.

Instead of trying to get your website into the first few pages of results through a traditional search, you can instead use PPC pay per click marketing.  Even if you have little computer experience and are still asking “what is PPC?” you can still use Google AdWords or another PPC program to get your marketing campaign off the ground.  PPC pay per click advertising allows you to target your firm's advertising and only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

What is a PPC Keyword?

When you start to run a PPC pay per click advertising campaign, you'll need to think about what clients are typically looking for when they come to your website.  If your firm specializes in helping people to beat traffic tickets, for instance, your clients probably begin their web search by looking for keywords relating to traffic tickets.

When you advertise using PPC, you can decide which searches your PPC pay per click advertising is seen on.  You will choose the specific keywords that your firm will bid on.  If you're in the top several bidders for a keyword when someone searches for it, your website's ad will be seen by that person—meaning that your site is seen by the exact people you want to attract as clients.

What is PPC Going to Cost My Firm?

The cost of a PPC pay per click campaign depends largely on exactly what kinds of keywords you're bidding on and what your bid strategies are.  If you want to bid on very expensive keywords, like “mesothelioma,” the answer to “what is PPC going to cost” will be very steep indeed—often tens or even hundreds of dollars for a single click!  However, by narrowly tailoring your keywords, you can bring PPC costs down.

For example, you may want to include geographic terms in your searches.  You may also want to include very specific keywords that clients are likely to use, rather than using the kind of keywords that lawyers use.  Instead of using PPC pay per click keywords like “personal injury attorney,” consider terms like “rear end car accident lawyer.”  You can also choose some PPC keywords to exclude from searches—so if your firm doesn't handle a particular type of case, you can exclude clients searching for lawyers who can.

What is PPC Bid Management?

Because PPC pay per click advertising uses bidding, the cost you'll have to pay to get your advertisement displayed prominently will depend on what other firms have already bid.  While firms that are still trying to figure out “what is PPC?” may not be able to work out a great bid management strategy right away, as you continue to use pay per click services you'll learn how to maximize the profits from your bids.

For example, you may find that it might be much cheaper to appear early in search results with your PPC pay per click campaign when you're advertising at certain hours of the night.  If you still get the same conversion rates (the same percentage of people call your firm after clicking), you'll want to make sure your PPC bid isn't any higher than it needs to be.  You can use PPC pay per click bid management software to help you figure out what is PPC bid strategy that will work best for your law firm.

What is PPC Campaign Management?

“What is PPC?” is a more complex question than just what keywords to bid on.  If you're still not sure how to use PPC pay per click marketing, you may want to look into PPC campaign management.  Campaign management services can help you get beyond the initial difficulties of setting up your PPC campaign so you can move on to getting the clicks and conversions you're hoping for.

What is PPC Strategy?

Building a great strategy for your PPC pay per click ads requires knowing about your potential clients.  When your clients are looking for websites to answer their legal questions or find a lawyer, they want accurate information and contemporary web design that is aesthetically pleasing.  In order to have the best PPC results, you'll want to create strategic landing pages that contain the content your clients are searching for.

When you have done PPC pay per click advertising for some time, you can begin to look at changing and developing your strategy based on what works.  What is a PPC effective strategy can depend largely on the exact nature of your practice—you'll want to look at which pages are driving conversions and what those pages have in common.

What is PPC Going to Do for My Business?

Used effectively, PPC pay per click can help your business to grow—not just by getting eyes on your website, but by getting the right eyes.  When you use PPC, you're targeting only clients who specifically want exactly the kinds of services your firm is providing.  When you begin to develop your PPC pay per click strategy, you'll find that your conversion rates can steadily increase, making it cost less for each new client you're finding online.  While other forms of marketing require a great deal of computer knowledge, you can begin a campaign with pay per click advertising relatively quickly and easily.

Everything About PPC Campaigns

The internet has changed everything about finding a lawyer.  Today, 65 percent of potential legal clients look online for law firms before choosing which lawyer to call.  One of the fastest ways to get your website into the top pages of search results is to use PPC search engine advertising.  This kind of advertising is highly effective, and can increase the traffic to your website by 60 percent or more when you design your PPC campaign with your client in mind.

Starting Successful PPC Campaigns

One of the toughest things about designing a pay per click ad campaign is just knowing where to start.  You may have seen other law firms buy their way into sponsored web results, and wonder if there's a way to have your firm do the same thing.  PPC search engine advertising is available through most major search engines, and many of these search engines offer quick tutorials that can help you get PPC campaigns off the ground within days if you want to move fast.

While the speed of starting a pay per click campaign is one of the advantages of this form of advertising, it's important not to get too carried away.  Waiting to initiate your PPC campaigns until you are sure you know what you're doing can ensure that you get the maximum return on investment.  Before you start working with PPC search engine advertising, here are a few questions to consider:

• Do you know what your goals are for your advertising campaign?  Keep in mind that just generating more website traffic doesn't necessarily mean you'll get more clients—don't just have a goal like “we want to see a 50 percent increase in visitors to our website,” think about how many new clients you're hoping for.

• Are you familiar with the jargon and terminology of PPC campaigns?  You'll have a much easier time understanding best practices for PPC search engine advertising if you know enough of the vocabulary to do your research.

• Is your website attractive and well designed?  Even the best PPC campaigns won't work if your pay per click ads lead to a website with inaccurate information or broken links.  If your website is merely mediocre, up to 85% of clients will leave before they've even looked for 30 seconds—and they aren't likely to come back.

What to Do If Your PPC Campaigns Don't Work

Because PPC search engine advertising is still relatively new, it's easy for people designing new pay per click campaigns to run into some trouble when they first start designing their advertisements.  Here are a few common problems and how to fix them:

• If you're spending your PPC search engine advertising budget too quickly on too few clicks, you may want to focus your PPC campaigns on narrower, less prestigious keywords.  Hyperlocalization can help you to get the most out of each click made on your advertisements.

• If your ads aren't bringing in many clicks, the copy of your ads themselves may need fine-tuning.  Don't bother including a phone number in your PPC search engine advertising—save that for your landing page, where it isn't taking up such a high percentage of your space.

• If you're getting a lot of traffic with “broad match” keywords, consider adding negative keywords to your PPC campaigns.  For example, you may want to make sure that your PPC search engine advertising doesn't involve paying for clicks from people seeking free legal aid.

• If you have plenty of clicks but no one's calling, take a long, hard look at your website. PPC campaigns can fail even when ad copy is brilliant if a website is messy or just plain boring. The more you can differentiate yourself from the competition with your website, the more likely it is that your PPC search engine advertising will be successful.

You may want to consider hiring a service to help you with your PPC campaigns if you have corrected what you believe to be the problem, but haven't seen any results.  A well-organized pay per click campaign should have a significant impact not only on your website traffic, but on your number of clients.  If it's not, you may want professionals to evaluate your PPC search engine advertising and your website.  Professional help may save you money and time when trying to design a new campaign—think of these services as an investment, rather than a cost.

Third Party Software and PPC Search Engine Advertising

When you want to step up your analysis of data from PPC campaigns, you don't just want to rely on Google or Yahoo services for bidders.  There are dozens of third party tools that can help you improve any aspect of your PPC search engine advertising.

In order to understand how to get the most out of any third party software tool, you'll need to know how to use it.  Some tools for PPC campaigns include enough tutorials and documentation that you'll understand the basic features right away.  However, if you're a power user or you want to be one, it's critical to seek out training.  Training seminars and webinars can make it easier to use the more complicated features on your software so that your analysis of your PPC search engine advertising is more robust.

Alternatives to PPC Search Engine Advertising

While PPC campaigns can be a great way to get your website in the spotlight quickly, it's important not to let pay per click be your only marketing strategy.  A more complete internet advertising campaign will also include search engine optimization (SEO) strategies that can help place your website higher in organic (non-sponsored) search results.  

You may want to work on your PPC search engine advertising at first, when your internet marketing campaign is new, and then gradually increase the effort your firm puts into SEO.  Then, once your organic search results are high enough, at least for some terms, you can scale back your PPC campaigns on those terms and work on different sets of keywords or simply reduce your pay per click budget.

Everything About PPC Advertising

Starting your PPC campaign can seem like a giant headache: how do you make sure that your PPC advertising works and doesn't cost more than you can afford?  This guide will help you sort out the basics of PPC advertising, including common pitfalls for your law firm to avoid as well as strategies to maximize your conversions and clicks.  You'll also learn how the best PPC campaign strategies can depend largely on the size of your firm and the amount that you can budget for your pay per click ads.

PPC Campaign Management: Common Pitfalls

When you begin working with PPC advertising, it can be tempting to start with just one ad group leading to a single landing page on your website.  While this is certainly the easiest way to begin your PPC campaign, it also takes many of your options for PPC campaign management away.  Without running multiple campaigns, it's very difficult to see what's working well for your firm and what is failing.  While it's possible to run a successful PPC campaign without multiple ad groups, it's very difficult—and why would you want to miss out on valuable information?

You may also want to avoid having your bids managed by the same company that is profiting from those bids.  While bid management tools from Google and Yahoo can be easy to use, they also take away some of your control, and work mostly to maximize the profit to the search engine, not to your law firm.  You may want to look into obtaining third party software to make sure that your PPC campaign is working for you, not for Google.

One of the other big mistakes made by beginners to PPC advertising is spending too much on bids.  This usually happens for one of two reasons: either your PPC campaign is not focused enough on a niche target, or your PPC campaign management strategy has involved bidding too high for keywords.  Expensive “prestige keywords” can cost a great deal of money without offering great conversion rates.  If you always have the top bid for a particular keyword, you may be overpaying for your PPC advertising without seeing the results you were hoping for.

PPC Campaign Management: Landing Pages

One of the most important aspects of your PPC advertising involves where your potential clients go when they click on one of your advertisements.  Many firms that are new to running a PPC campaign make the mistake of having advertisements go to their law firm home page.  However, especially if your firm handles several different types of cases and is using multiple ad groups, you should consider making separate landing pages to get the best conversion rates.

PPC advertising that goes just to your home page requires clients to go through multiple clicks just to find what they're looking for.  By creating targeted landing pages, your PPC campaign ad goes right to the information your client wants.  Today's internet depends on instant gratification: if your clients can't get the information they want within that first click or two, your PPC advertising is likely to fail.

PPC Campaign Management: Learning From Your Campaign

Every PPC campaign that you run can give you valuable information about how to run future campaigns.  You may want to get some third party PPC advertising tools to help you learn how an individual PPC campaign went and what you might be able to do in order to maximize future returns.  You may want to examine which niches have been generating the most clients for your firm and either strengthen your advertising for those niches or use the same PPC advertising techniques for your other niches.

Especially when you're buying very targeted, lower cost keywords, you can afford to experiment.  Remember that trying something new with your niche marketing won't always work, but you should be careful not to give up too quickly.  Sometimes a new PPC campaign strategy will take time to work, and your PPC advertising may be more effective at a certain time of day or even a certain time of year.

PPC Campaign Management Strategies

When you begin to experiment with PPC advertising, you should think of it as science.  Much like with any type of science, having a clear hypothesis in mind before you begin experimenting can help you to get the best results.  Instead of just saying “I want to try a bunch of PPC campaign strategies and see which ads stick,” think about a question that you have about PPC campaign management.  Do you want to see if “exact match” gets better results for your ads than “close match”?  Do you want to see how much your click rate increases when your bids are toward the top?

No matter what your hypothesis is, it's also important to be honest when looking at the results of your PPC advertising strategies.  If one PPC campaign didn't work, or your hypothesis was incorrect, remember that this information isn't bad—it's great!  Knowing what doesn't work can be as important as knowing what works when you're working with PPC campaign management.

Complete PPC Campaign Management Services

If your firm has a large budget for PPC advertising, you may want to look into having your PPC campaign managed by a specialized marketing firm.  Make sure that if you are using the services of one of these firms, they allow you access to any data that is generated from your PPC advertising.  Without this data, you will have to start over from scratch if you need to hire a new company to handle your PPC campaign management.

A good marketing service will be able to show you how your campaign is working and what ad groups are most profitable for your law firm.  Even if you can't afford dedicated PPC campaign management services, you may still want to purchase PPC advertising software.  This can help you to analyze the results of a PPC campaign so that you can maximize profits on future campaigns, without the costs of hiring professionals to do the analysis for you.

The days of being limited to mobile text advertising with SMS are over.  Today’s statistics show that most users spend more time in apps than browsing or checking texts, and mobile advertising trends are showing a huge increase in the types of advertising currently being done.  From using mobile advertising networks to creating mobile video advertising, the new mobile world can seem a bit confusing if you’re not used to it.  Keep reading this guide, where we’ve identified the six biggest mobile advertising trends that your business needs to be aware of.

Mobile Advertising Trends to Watch #1: Mergers of Mobile Advertising Networks

The explosive growth of mobile text advertising and mobile video advertising has given rise to thousands of relatively small mobile advertising networks.  One of the mobile advertising trends you can expect in the next few years is that these companies will start to fuse together.

When mergers begin to pick up steam among these mobile advertising networks, you may have more choices for one stop solutions for mobile text advertising and mobile video advertising.  Because mergers can sometimes result in changes to user interfaces, you’ll want to keep on top of any merger or acquisition news that could affect your mobile advertisements.

Mobile Advertising Trends to Watch #2: Mobile Video Advertising

Mobile advertising networks weren’t able to fully take advantage of video ads when they first came out.  This wasn’t because mobile video advertising didn’t work well, but rather because the capabilities of wireless providers hadn’t yet caught up to mobile advertising trends.

With the proliferation of 3G and 4G networks across the United States, it has become more and more feasible to replace mobile text advertising with video.  Mobile video advertising has been shown to be significantly more effective than advertising with text and images alone.  These ads now represent one of the biggest mobile advertising trends.

To take advantage of the new mobile video advertising market, you can start by using similar videos to your traditional web ads.  Today’s mobile advertising networks may also let you make a video interactive, which can make its conversion rates even higher.

Mobile Advertising Trends to Watch #3: Location, Location, Location

As mobile text advertising and mobile video advertising have become more sophisticated, so, too, have the targeting systems from mobile advertising networks.  More than any other factor, mobile advertising networks have latched on to geolocation services as the next big mobile advertising trends.

Unlike a traditional laptop or desktop, mobile phones contain GPS technology that can pinpoint exactly where a potential client is at the time when they see your ad.  Mobile advertising networks can now target so accurately that it’s possible to make sure your mobile text advertising or mobile video advertising is seen exclusively by people within a few blocks of where you are sitting right now.

Mobile Advertising Trends to Watch #4: The End of the Desktop-Ported Mobile Site

If your firm started using mobile text advertising some time ago, you may have simply directed ad viewers to your normal website.  Mobile advertising trends show so much traffic being funneled through smartphones that you’d be foolish to continue directing potential clients to a website that isn’t optimized for mobile.

When you use mobile advertising networks, you should also make a mobile optimized website that still contains all the major information from your old website but in a shorter, easier to read format.  Then, you can direct all your current mobile text advertising and mobile video advertising to this version of your site instead of the old one.

Mobile Advertising Trends to Watch #5: Marketing With Apps

In summer 2010, mobile consumers spent an average of 43 minutes using apps and 64 minutes using the web every day.  By December 2011, consumers were spending more time on both activities, but apps had eclipsed browsing: people now spent 94 minutes on apps and 72 minutes browsing the web.

Consumers of mobile text advertising and mobile video advertising are now more likely to be looking at an app than at the web as a whole.  What does that mean for mobile advertising trends?  Well, for one thing, it means that your firm may want to consider focusing on mobile advertising networks that advertise in apps rather than on the web.  These mobile advertising networks are better situated for current trends than web-focused networks are.

It may also be time to consider supplementing your mobile text advertising and mobile video advertising with building your own apps.  Mobile advertising networks can help you develop your first app.  The interactivity of apps makes people substantially more likely to take further action (like calling your firm) than if you had used traditional mobile text advertising or mobile video advertising.

The kinds of apps you can build are limited only by your imagination.  You can make an app that is informative, entertaining, or both.  Like great mobile video advertising, a really amazing app also has the potential to go viral, spreading out on the internet even without direct marketing efforts.

Mobile Advertising Trends to Watch #6: Better Analytics

So far, it’s been much harder to track the results of mobile text advertising and mobile video advertising than other types of web ads.  Why?  It’s not because the analytics are actually more difficult, but rather because mobile advertising networks have been slow to build the same kinds of analytics tools that other web advertisers have developed.  Now that there’s big money in mobile advertisements, analytics companies have begun to see the potential in developing analytics software exclusively for the mobile market.

As mobile advertising continues to evolve, and especially as networks merge their information and tools, you’ll start to see better analytics leading to better lists of best practices. If you want to stay on top of your mobile ad campaigns, keeping an eye on analytics is crucial.  New analytics software may let you perform a number of geotargeted split tests, as well as figure out which landing pages help your conversion rate most.

In 2010, only 2 percent of companies were using mobile phone advertising to reach their customers.  Today, that number is growing rapidly, and a number of analysts believe that mobile advertisements will someday be a bigger market than traditional web advertising or even bigger than television ads.  This is a trend your law firm should stay up to date on if you want to keep pace with the rapid changes in legal marketing today.  Keep reading to learn the basics of mobile advertisements and why they look like the wave of the future for law firms.

The Meteoric Rise of Mobile Advertising

A few years ago, the only kind of mobile advertisements you were likely to see were text messages (also called SMS for short messaging service).  This type of mobile phone advertising was not particularly effective, but represented a big change toward targeted advertisements and market segmentation.

Today, phones have gone smart, and mobile advertisements have exploded onto the scene.  No longer just confined to the text message, today's mobile advertising looks sleeker and more integrated into mobile advertising systems. 

While the popularity of mobile phone advertising has increased worldwide, no country has seen it rise like the United States.  Recently, the U.S. eclipsed Japan for the number one ranking in mobile advertising spending.  Mobile phone advertisements are now a multi-billion dollar business, and the U.S. leads the way in innovation and growth.

Does Mobile Phone Advertising Really Work?

One of the few things that all the biggest marketers agree on is that mobile advertising is both incredibly effective and incredibly underutilized by most of the market.  People today spend hours on their smart phones, texting friends and browsing the mobile web.  When they see mobile advertisements, they're up to 13 times more likely to click these ads than to click a similar advertisement on a desktop site.

Now, don't get too excited: some of the clicks on mobile phone advertising are mistake clicks.   But even when you just take into account new business, mobile advertisements are substantially better at bringing a return on investment.  Mobile phone advertising is undeniably the wave of the future—smartphone use hours have been more than doubling for the last several years—and the smartest law firms will start running mobile advertisements as soon as possible.

How is Mobile Advertising Different?

If you've ever advertised on the web before, you know how frustrating it can be to narrow down the keywords you want to advertise on, or find the right demographics.  Trying to target your ads locally can be a huge hassle when you're using the web.

Mobile phone advertising changes all of that.  Instead of advertising to people who have listed a particular city on Facebook (which may or may not be where they're located now), mobile advertising has the capability to only target people who are actually nearby.  Do you want to limit your mobile advertisements to people within a mile of your office right now?  Now you can, and that kind of targeting means your ads are only being seen by the consumers most likely to actually need your services.

When consumers see mobile phone advertising, you've also got them in a place where it's easy to make a phone call.  Mobile advertising's fantastic rates of further action (like making phone calls to a law firm) are so high because smartphones make calling a number from a website so convenient.

Mobile Advertisements—The Do's and Don'ts

When you begin to work with mobile phone advertising for your law firm, you should know some basic principles to guide your mobile website and mobile advertising redesign:

Don't copy your existing website or advertising as your new mobile phone advertising, or try to duplicate the same experience as your website gives.
Do try to keep your brand image consistent and represent your firm personality in your mobile advertisements and traditional web advertising.
Don't be too wordy—studies show that you're better off using short sentences and paragraphs for mobile targeted sites and mobile advertisements.
Do give good information in as short a form as possible.
Don't run the same mobile advertisements for weeks in a row.  Ad fatigue is real, and your ads will lose effectiveness over time.
Do have many different versions of your ad copy and images available so that you can change them frequently.

The state of mobile advertising changes quickly, so perhaps another “do” should be added to the list: do keep up to date on trends.  Finding out what the next big thing in mobile advertising is before your competitor does can give your firm the edge it needs in today's competitive business world.

Types of Mobile Advertisements

Because today's smartphones offer a variety of ways to connect to other people, mobile advertisements have diversified into a huge number of forms.  The humble SMS mobile ad has given way to mobile phone advertising that interacts and targets automatically.

In-app banner ads and other display ads give your firm a good way to use images and text.  Because people today spend more time in apps than they do browsing the web on their smart phones, these ads are even more likely to generate results than ads that are dependent on search engine use.

A click to call ad can make a big difference in the number of clients your firm hears from due to your mobile phone advertising.  These ads will look like part of a person's organic search engine results.

Twitter and Facebook both have great potential for mobile advertising from law firms, but most firms haven't yet started using these mobile advertisements.  Because mobile phone advertising shows a great return on investment for Facebook and Twitter ad platforms, you should seriously consider adding these sites to your ad strategy if you do much B2C marketing.

Pandora and Groupon both give you the ability to choose hyper local targets.  Pandora also lets you have video advertising, which has been repeatedly proven to be more effective for lawyers than text alone.