Everything About Facebook Mobile Advertising
Whether your law firm is large or small, you need to get on the Facebook mobile advertising bandwagon as soon as you can. Data gathered by Facebook and its partners now shows that Facebook mobile ads are 13 times more likely to generate clicks than the same ads presented to desktop users. That's a staggering number, and it's not the only surprise. Keep reading to find out how Facebook mobile advertising is changing the way law firms think about their advertising solutions.
The Future of Computing is Here: Mobile Device Popularity
As of 2012, about 20 percent of computing is being done not on desktop or laptop PCs, but on mobile devices like iPhones, iPads, and Android smartphones. Just one fifth of total computing may not sound like much to your business yet, until you understand that mobile traffic has actually been doubling for the last three years.
With trends like that, you can't afford to ignore Facebook mobile advertising. In just a few years, mobile traffic is expected to actually be more common than traffic from traditional personal computers. Learning to use Facebook mobile advertising now, while mobile is still in its explosive growth phase, will help you get an edge against competitors who are still stuck with traditional advertising choices.
Problems With Regular Facebook Ads
It's no big secret that some companies have been dissatisfied with the quality of results that they've seen from traditional Facebook advertising. General Motors made huge headlines after withdrawing their Facebook paid advertising after seeing very little change to their bottom line as a result.
Traditional Facebook ads (as opposed to Facebook mobile advertising) are sometimes difficult even to see in the normal course of reading a Facebook feed. Most people's eyes are drawn straight down through the list of their friends' life events and status updates. Sidebar advertising, because it hides far away from the main path a visitor's eyes are focused on, simply doesn't get the attention that stories in the feed do.
What's more, non mobile Facebook advertising also tends to look very spammy. If you've ever seen a “get rich quick” Facebook ad, or one for weight loss products, you'll know what those spam ads look like. Law firms are often reluctant—and rightly so—to put their professional advertisements in a space that could make potential clients think that they're just spammers.
The Solution: Facebook Mobile Advertising
On a mobile device, there's not a whole lot of room for sidebars and other, extraneous advertisements. That's why Facebook mobile advertising includes advertisements as part of the actual news feed, in the form of sponsored stories. This kind of advertising is a significant improvement over traditional Facebook ads for a number of reasons.
First of all, when a sponsored story appears in someone's mobile Facebook app, they don't have to change where they're looking just to spot your Facebook mobile advertising. Instead, your story looks largely the same as the organic results of their friend news feed.
Because people are using touch screens to flick and scroll their Facebook news feed, it puts clicking on your ad literally at their fingertips. What's more, once they click on one of your ads, they're already at a phone and can make a call just by tapping your phone number on the landing page where your ad directs. That's what makes Facebook mobile advertising so great for lawyers—your clients can go from seeing an ad to being on the phone with you within seconds.
Does Facebook Mobile Advertising Really Work?
So far, all evidence has shown that mobile ads on Facebook are actually much more effective than their traditional advertising counterparts. Click through rates (CTRs) are more than ten times higher when using Facebook mobile advertising than when advertising with traditional pay per click sidebar ads appearing in people's browsers.
What's more, the effectiveness of this type of advertising doesn't seem to be slowing down. With thousands more people using the mobile web every day, Facebook mobile advertising is here to stay, and its effectiveness couldn't be better when compared to the other advertising tools at your firm's disposal.
Maximizing Your Return on Investment With Facebook Mobile Advertising
If you plan to use mobile ads, you need to do it right. A poorly thought out Facebook mobile advertising campaign won't give you the results you want and may lose money for your law firm instead of expanding your reach and fan base.
The biggest thing that you need to change when adjusting to mobile advertising is the structure of your landing pages. The same landing page that generated tons of conversions when you were running it in people's Facebook sidebars may no longer give you the same rates when you use it for Facebook mobile advertising. Why? Because people using their mobile devices have different needs.
Scrolling and clicking using mobile devices can be irritating, so you should try to make your landing pages an exercise in being minimalist yet informative. Facebook mobile advertising is most effective when it directs people to a landing page that is specifically designed to look great on smartphones and doesn't have a “wall of text” facing new visitors.
Tracking Your Facebook Mobile Advertising Results
If you're not sure whether mobile ads will work to generate business for your firm, there's one way to find out: testing, testing, and more testing! Create a number of split tests so that you can monitor whether your Facebook mobile advertising is performing and if its performance is comparing favorably to your existing pay per click sidebar ads.
Remember that you won't be able to replace all of your existing web advertising with mobile ads in the foreseeable future. Even in a few years, not everyone will be using the internet on mobile devices. Facebook mobile advertising is a great way to boost your pay per click advertising return on investment, but it won't work for all law firms and you should never rely on it as your sole form of direct advertising.
