What is My Secret Weapon for Online Advertising?

What's my secret weapon for targeting ads? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101, I'm Toby Rosen. We've been using Google and Facebook ads for years and you know that I'm definitely a fan of these platforms, but what I haven't told you is that I have a secret weapon for targeting legal clients, even if they're not searching for my firms. Now, I've definitely left some hints here and there about what this is, and I think I've even mentioned some of the platforms that helped me do this targeting, but today we're going to talk about why it's so challenging to build campaigns that actually reach a highly targeted audience and how you can stand out amongst the crowd in what can feel like a battle in and of itself. Running ads on Google and Facebook works there's no doubt about that, but it's just not as simple as slapping together a few campaigns, checking in some targeting options and a credit card number, and then you'll be scrambling to cover the phones. We do hit gold every now and then, but most of the time, successful campaigns are the result of long term and consistent rules based optimization. Unfortunately, that's not really sexy. It's kind of the marketing equivalent of the Warren Buffett style of investing. People aren't going to fall in love with that as much as they are, say, nfts or Bitcoin. We all want something that has a few more bells and whistles that can actually work. Now I've just drawn a comparison between PPC advertising and an industry that has gone through an extinction level event in the last year, and while there are plenty more comparisons that we can draw here, online advertising is definitely a lot more stable, even with the collapse of a major advertising firm in the last. Okay, we're just going to move on here. But yeah, if you do a little research, if you're planning to pony up a prepayment to an advertising network, just make sure you do a little research. I suggest paying networks in smaller chunks these days.

Back on track, let's come back to this assumption that our clients are out there, that they are interested, but they maybe aren't performing the same kind of search behaviors that they used to be. Basically, let's just say that in this example, it's much harder to find good clients from Google ads in your particular area than it once was. Maybe there are fewer clients or maybe the ads got more expensive. Either one of these or many other things can happen, and this may not be the first time that it has happened to you, or it may be the second or the third time, or it could be, you know, it may have never happened to you, but you just want to look for another option that's outside of the bigger players of Google and Facebook. And after all, while Google and Facebook and all their associated companies, they do dominate a huge swath of the internet's traffic, they're not everything, and that's where my secret weapon comes.

In Third-party ad platforms, they range in size and shape and price and niche, but these are basically all specialized versions of what you're getting from Google ads or from Facebook ads. At their core, google and Facebook and almost every other advertising platform are simply running what's called an advertising exchange. Publishers or people who create websites or content sell space in their publications and advertisers can buy that space. But instead of face-to-face transactions or doing deals over email, this all happens automatically, powered by complex software that instantly matches buyers and sellers and the user who will see the ad and performs an auction on all of that within a fraction of a second. Every time you search on Google, that entire process happens multiple times for every paid ad you see on the screen. And while Google and Facebook and Amazon definitely do have the most and best technology when it comes to this type of marketplace for advertising, they're not the only ones who do a good job Third-party ad platforms like Outbrain and Tobula and Adroll that also run inventory from Google and Facebook. In a lot of ways, they actually outshine what the giants of tech are doing. With less oversight and less red tape, these companies are offering solutions that could take months or years for the big companies to roll out, and we've seen this story play out over and over with different types of targeting. Today, we see dozens of options for targeting users, but geofencing and remarketing and affinity audiences these are all things that have a history in startups, just like these ad networks we can access right now, and right now these networks offer targeting options that Google and Facebook just aren't willing to offer. From using third-party data sources built into OutBrain or multi-platform retargeting with AdRoll, we get options that build that quote-unquote how are they doing that element? Into our marketing? And it takes things to a whole new level. With laser-like precision, we can access demographic information, behaviors, interests, and in some platforms, we can even look at specific legal needs that potential clients could have. Not only does this allow us to reach these people more effectively, but it opens up a smorgasbord of options for the creative we can push, giving us even more depth and personalization for our campaigns.

I've been rewatching the made-off documentary on Netflix. So let's look at this type of targeting for a criminal defense attorney, perhaps one that's looking to defend persons charged with white-collar crimes, maybe financial crimes specifically. I don't know why I'm saying that, and you're just going to have to suspend reality a little bit here, because I realize that most of these kind of criminal attorneys generally aren't doing that much online advertising unless they're, I guess, really really big, but even then it's not a lot of advertising. So we're going to suspend reality. But with that in mind, how would we target these potential clients who have been charged with white-collar crimes? It's probably unlikely that they're spending a lot of time googling for attorneys or for solutions to the problems that are really the meat of their situation. I mean, maybe they are, but honestly, that would be kind of stupid to leave a trail like that. So let's just assume that they're not searching, or at least they're using a more private search engine like DuckDuckGo. Duckduckgo and some other private search engines and email providers do have some advertising options that are either usually contextual, which is a really strong strategy for targeting that we're going to get into in a minute, or it's an entirely search, keyword-based strategy, like in the case of DuckDuckGo. This does work and it's a great strategy, but it's for a future episode.

So back to our white-collar financial criminal. They're not leaving a trace by searching, they're not messaging or emailing or tweeting about things. They're doing everything right and they're keeping mum. So we're not going to get any of the typical signals we get from a user, and we're going to have to do a little bit of guessing to get around our elbow to our thumb. I like to work from the top of the funnel down, so, if we're practicing federally, we're going to want to pick out all the hotspots for financial professionals around the country and target those areas first. This is probably New York, new Jersey, connecticut, greater Chicago, some areas of South Florida, silicon Valley I'm just bit-lawing. We'll start with targeting these areas, though, because that's where it's likely that our potential client is either located or is visiting often, and then we're going to look into demographics. Now, the things you'll typically think of, like age and gender and devices, aren't going to apply so much here. Gender and maybe devices might, but I haven't done any research about what gender is committing the most financial crimes, so let's just say those are all ones to skip.

For what we're talking about here, those aforementioned types are more basic I suppose Now without brain. Specifically, though, we have two major categories of targeting to choose from Beyond, using our own data and demographics, and those two categories or types of targeting are interest-based targeting or contextual targeting, and each network may have slightly different names for this or different options depending on what data they're tapped into, but this is what we're talking about with these two. For interest-based targeting, we're talking about either using a platform's first-party data or the third-party data that they purchase to target users based on the profile of a user in that data. I realize that's a little convoluted, so let me try and simplify it as well as I can. Every advertising network uses tracking pixels to track a bunch of different things, including conversions on the websites of their advertisers, but they also track things on the websites of their publishers. Remember who the publishers are from before right. With all of this data, they can build a picture of what a user is interested in, and then they can include them in a group or an audience that we can select and then show ads to. Essentially, it's the same thing as what Google and Facebook do with a lot of their display advertising, and it's why Google and Facebook are so good at this. They have a ton of data on their users, but with privacy regulations and people getting more serious about their own personal data privacy, it hasn't quite hit lawyers just yet, but the online advertising industry as a whole is taking a bit of a hit when it comes to this type of targeting. People just don't want these profiles being built on them, and they're even taking action to make sure that these profiles don't get built.

Remember duck-duck-go? And that's where contextual advertising and contextual targeting, among other forms of targeting like remarketing, comes into play. For us, instead of looking at what a user has been looking at in the past and trying to hypothesize what they're going to want next, we're looking at the context of where our ad will be placed instead of information about the user. You can liken it a bit more to traditional forms of advertising like radio or television, but with many, many more times precision in terms of our placement, and this is where our demographics actually do become important. But we also have incredibly granular control over who is seeing our ads within a particular context, so it's not as much of a worry.

But this is the secret weapon Looking outside of the mainstream, beyond Google and Facebook and TikTok, and accessing the massive networks of publishers that exist to provide us options for contextual, programmatic and algorithmic targeting, options for buying, selling and creating success with our campaigns. And now that you have that weapon, how are you going to use it? We're going to dive deeper on these platforms and all the confusing terms I just dropped on you very soon, so stay tuned. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out rosanadvertisingcom for more. Thanks, I'm going to watch Jamming on Before you Again.