As a Lawyer and business owner, there are a few things to consider before you choose Traditional Advertising, PPC Advertising, or a combo of both. Each type of advertising is more or less beneficial for your business based on niche, size, market, and budget. Also, beware if you are working with a full-service marketing agency. They will often push you to one type of advertising or another based on the commission that the salesperson gets. Direct mail, radio, and TV typically have higher commissions for the salesperson, but the least return for the business. Unfortunately, sometimes salespeople can be incentivized to sell one advertising type over a more productive type.
Push Advertising (Traditional) vs. PPC/Search Advertising:
Push Advertising is advertising that is simply put in front of a mass audience. There is relatively little ability to target a specific audience, even in 2018. When I think of “Push” advertising I normally think of billboards, radio, and TV as you’re limited in many aspects. With billboards you can choose which road you put your ad on. Most of the time you pay more for busier roads because businesses can get more “eyes” on their ad. Radio and TV are a bit better because you can choose to advertise on specific channels with certain listeners. Regardless, one common aspect with all of these “Push” methods is that they are shown to a mass audience that is largely uninterested in the ad they are seeing. With “Push” advertising it’s more of a spray and pray tactic in hopes that your ideal customer or client will see your ad at the moment that they need your service or product.
Pull Advertising is nearly the exact opposite of Push advertising, if done correctly. A great example of “Pull” advertising is Paid Search Advertising, commonly referred to as PPC. The main thing to understand about PPC advertising is that everyone who sees your ad wants to see your ad. I’ll say that again, Everyone who sees your ad wants to see your ad. The reason being is that if you filter your keywords correctly, you can focus your budget only to people who are searching Google & Bing for what your business provides. For example, if you are a lawyer you can show you ads only to people who are in need of certain types of cases. And on top of that, there are a ton of other targeting methods, and you only pay if targeted people click on your ad.
Targeting in Traditional Advertising: Radio, TV, Billboards/print
-Geographic location of Ad
-Publisher (magazine, newspaper, etc.)
-Channel/Station
-Time slot; TV & Radio
Targeting with PPC Advertising:
-Keywords
-Negative keywords
-Device
-Age
-Gender
-Income level
-Interests and behavior
-Time of Day (Hour)
-Day of Week
-Geographic: Country, State, City, DMA region, Zip, County, radius, congressional district, & neighborhood
How do you pay for Traditional advertising and PPC advertising?
-Traditional Advertising often requires you to pay up front ahead of time for an allotted time period or block.
-PPC advertising stands for Pay-Per-Click and you literally pay by the click. This allows you to turn on and turn off your ads whenever you want.
There’s a lot of differences between both types of advertising. Each type can accomplish goals, but it is good to be sure what is best for your business before spending thousands. Traditional advertising is best for branding and “higher-funnel” marketing tactics that reach large numbers of people in a general audience. Higher funnel tactics also tend to be more expensive, have higher commitments, and take longer to see results. With this in mind, I recommend PPC advertising to all small-medium sized businesses. When you know how much you are spending for each client it’s very easy to tell what is working and grow. On top of that, PPC advertising is wildly efficient. Small businesses can compete with, and overcome, larger brands by using a lead generation process driven by PPC advertising. Rather than try to “Push” your audience to do what you want, it’s always better to “Pull” them by placing your PPC ad in front of them only when they need and want you.
Learn more about our done-for-you Google Ads Management for Law Firms.
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