TV Advertising for Attorneys on Connected TV: A Sample Strategy
How do you run TV Advertising for your law firm? We recommend utilizing modern advertising technology that only shows your law firm’s television ad to relevant homes! How do you merge the emotional impact of video advertising with the data, targeting and tracking of digital advertising? Leveraging Connected TV/OTT is crucial to accomplishing your goals. If this format of advertising isn’t in your marketing plan, at this point in time it’s an opportunity cost.
Connected TV advertising gives law firms tight geographic control, ensuring proximity relevance. After all you don’t want to serve ads to individuals who fall outside your service or licensure area. But geo targeting for your firm is only a starting point – location alone doesn’t mean you should pay to advertise to someone. That’s where bringing on potent audience targeting comes in, serving only to relevant homes.
This example strategy is framed around a personal injury firm, but note that basically all law firm types can benefit. Example: Target the entire household for an individual who was recently searching “what to do after a car accident” (We literally power whole law firms with this targeting). And we’re NOT talking about search ads on Google/Bing. See info about Search Retargeting. Based on this search retargeting audience, the whole household can receive XYZ Law Firm’s ads on their TV devices while they’re watching Hulu or Streaming Fox Sports (or basically anything else).
This lets us place hyper-targeted TV ads for highly-relevant people. This isn’t “buying Hulu Ads” instead it’s placing an ad because a specific households meets a very goal-oriented targeting profile, and they happen to be watching Hulu, or Paramount+, or they’re streaming a live football game, etc.
We hope this law firm planning guide helps you identify how Connected TV or OTT can give your law firm the high-impact TV advertising it needs, while making full use of the available technology to have the best chance of success.
Defining Your Audience
Your target customer is not everyone. It’s most certainly not everyone within a target geography. It’s not even everyone who happens to be watching daytime television or a particular show. Even if your audience were “everyone” (it’s not) it’s extremely unlikely that you have budget to reach them all. We define key audiences in marketing to focus our messaging, appeal and impact to certain groups of people who are the most likely to connect with us. A good audience is comprised of:
- What defines your most frequent clients? What about your most valuable clients?
- What are makes you appeal to them, and how can your advertising directly appeal to this kind of client?
- How do you message to your client directly vs how do you message to the other members of their household? These other members of the household can become your advocates!
Dig deep when answering these questions. Your campaign is only as good as your data, and your targeting data could always be better! Is your digital advertising making use of custom targeting, or are you using generic pre-made targeting from ad platforms? How does your messaging directly align with your ad?
What might someone be searching for that would qualify them to receive your TV ads? What would other members of the household be searching? Based on what someone is searching for, would you change what your TV ad is showing or saying? (we can adapt your video ad based on why someone is receiving it!)
“What to do after a car accident?”
“Do I have a case for ____?”
“Find law firms near me.”
“Get legal help for ____”
Think of an audience this way: “Would my strategy work better if I spoke to this group of individuals differently from my other client types?” Example: a personal injury firm targets Car Accident vs Premises Liability ads based on how a household has recently searched for legal help around these terms. This is more on topic for the household, instead of generally advertising the same messaging to both audiences.
Some important context: an audience is anonymous. Our audiences can be very granular and are far more precise than most self-serve ad platforms will allow you to use. We won’t build audiences small enough that it reveals specific individuals or households. Some examples in this article are based on our data, which is used for targeting only on our platforms. Our targeting and audience data is not for sale, nor do our advertisers ever possess it. We have strict policies that must be adhered to for audience targeting, particularly around some sensitive data types. Ultimately the decision to approve or reject an advertiser’s audience request is ours.
An Audience Defines a Person or Household
Like geographic targeting defines where someone is, audience targeting defines who someone is. This can be defined based on an enormous range of targeting choices. Your choices can vary drastically based on your advertising platform. Common types of audience targeting data includes:
- Household composition (parents, children, elders, etc)
- Search history (what someone has recently been searching for. This is not search advertising, more accurately it’s search-after-the-fact targeting).
- Purchase behavior (major recent purchases, where they shop, frequent purchases from major retailers, things the household has researched purchasing)
- Recent behavior (things the household has researched, viewed online, recent places they’ve been, how they vote)
- Financials (income, number of income earners, credit card count/debt/behavior, home owner/renter status)
- And many, many other datapoints
We can track the demand we generate. The People who hit your site or search for you after seeing your ad on tV – We track it, custom built for you.
Not all ad platforms will have these features. Most ad platforms will hide the true targeting data in a black box and call it something like “in market for attorneys” or “interested in law” without telling you what actually constitutes that audience. It’s everything including other attorneys, law students, justice system employees, and even (a few) actually relevant potential clients. Audience data is not refreshed in real-time too, so an “interested in law” audience from some ad platforms may be a super-exclusive list of…. everyone.
That’s not a good audience.
Defining A Better Audience
How could we qualify a precise audience of people? Think of a Venn diagram for how your audience is constructed, or a set of OR/AND logical conditions:
Someone in the household recently searched for car accident (or related) terms.
AND ALSO: someone in the household has been searching for an attorney (or lawyer, law firms near me, other related terms, etc. )
This assembles an audiences of not only relevant individuals, but likely someone who is ready to make a decision soon! This is how we target display, but we can leverage this on TV targeting as well! Marvelous.
for illustrative purposes only
Leverage Our Best-In-Class Targeting Capabilities.
Your audience is unique. Your targeting strategy should be too.
Dynamic Audiences & Lookalike Modeling
Most ad platforms will have capabilities to analyze your website traffic and develop a targeting profile based on this. This is usually done by having a tracking code installed (we use this as well) that sees anonymous browsing behavior from your website visitors, as well as goals they complete on your website (like tap to call, generating a lead form, etc.). Based on this data, a dynamic model of who your typical website visitors are, and who among them are the most likely to complete website goals, an ongoing targeting audience can be generated. This is also referred to as a conversion lookalike model.
Some platforms do this well. Much of the targeting ability for dynamic audiences and lookalike modeling relies on two things:
- The quantity of visitors
- a larger sample size is better, always!
- The quality of the setup and tracking
- if you track goals on your website, the quality of data will be better
- it’s like telling the ad platform’s tracking code “all of my website traffic has some value, but everyone who submits a lead form is way more valuable, so find me more of those people.”
Defining Your Geography
Individuals who are most likely to be your potential clients, where do they live? You could define an entire state (or multiple) as your target geography, but that could leave you unfocused. What about just focusing on your main metro area? Perhaps, only locations near your office? Or even, only zones that you would be willing to drive to? You have that control.
Some of how you define a geography will be based on the platform you use. Many ad platforms are only capable of targeting a radius around your location, or might be as granular as zip codes targeting. This works well for some use cases, but sometimes you need more precision. We’ll show you both.
Low Precision Targeting
In this example we’re looking at San Diego with a 7-mile radius. This might be exactly what you’re looking for, or you may need even wider of a region.
But what if you need more precise control over where your TV ads serve? Perhaps you don’t want to serve ads to the top or east sides of the circle. With most ad platforms, you don’t have that power. And Traditional TV media? Forget about it, you’re buying the whole DMA.
7-mile radius around central/eastern San Diego. Low precision.
High Precision Custom Geofence / Polygonal Targeting
For more precise targeting needs, polygonal targeting is the route to go. This is frequently used to only target certain neighborhoods, city blocks, or just to strongly focus your messaging into a region with better value.
In this example, we only want to target the Mid-City area and some other nearby zones in central San Diego. Radius targeting has no chance of minimizing overlap with conditions like this! For advanced geographic targeting, use polygonal geofences.
Sidebar: we can leverage this data to target people who live in this area not just those who happen to be located there. That’s critical in tourist-heavy markets.
Prior circle still visible for context, but now our targeting area is the green custom region so we can prioritize only relevant areas. (Example for illustrative purposes only)
Additional Geofence Strategy Examples
Here’s some additional examples for how to leverage custom geofences / polygonal targeting. These are primarily used for:
- Targeting individuals who live in the geofence, but not those who are transient/traveling through.
- Targeting individuals who have recently been located in the geofence area.
- Targeting individuals who are currently physically located in the target geofence area in real-time (mostly OTT inventory)
- Many other targeting methods based on location, proximity and history. This can be neighborhoods, city blocks, large buildings, congressional district targeting, and basically anything else.
Example: Custom Political Geofence Targeting for people who live in Nevada’s 1st Congressional District (and not the millions of tourists in this area)
Example: Custom Geofence for people who live only in this section of Brooklyn, between specific streets as landmarks.
Example: Geofence targeting for residents near Chicago’s Lincoln Park Area, but prioritize anyone in the red radius.
Example: Custom Geofence Target for the Anaheim Convention Center for people who have been there recently.
We Can take care of all this for you. our strategies are custom, dedicated to making your CTV campaign a success.
Defining Your Messaging
Your geographic targeting is where your customers are. Your audience targeting is who they are. Your messaging – that’s the part of your advertising that your potential customers actually see. That’s your brief moment where you have their attention, so what will you say? What’s the compelling message? Why should they care?
As we mentioned, relevancy is extremely important. Your ad is interrupting their day, so use it well and respect the target audience’s time. We spent a lot of work above defining our geographic targeting and audience, so let’s not waste that work on low-effort messaging.
Again, take a step back and identify who the audience is, and why you should matter to them. You’re not selling legal services, you’re solving a problem. So, what is the problem you solves? How do you solve it better? How is that problem solved for different audiences? Speak to why someone is receiving your ad. We have the technology, use it to form a better connection with your viewers!
Don’t do this: “At XYZ Law Firm, we care about you. We handle car accidents, slip and fall, dog bites and more. Call us now.” This generalizes to the point of irrelevance and actually speaks to nobody. Listing your services misses the mark for all of them.
Instead, let’s do this:
- Someone in a household has expressed a need for a car accident attorney, and your marketing strategy serves an ad on connected TVs in their household:
- Your Targeted Video Ad: “After a car accident, you deserve more than a settlement — you deserve a team that understands your pain and will fight for the justice you deserve.”
- Someone in a household has searched online about available recourse after a slip and fall accident. Your experienced attorney marketing team built you a campaign that places this TV ad:
- Your Targeted Video Ad: “If you’ve been hurt in a slip and fall, let our experienced attorneys who truly understand your suffering help you stand up to those responsible.”
- Pair your TV Commercial with the actual reason someone is receiving it. Speak to your audience!
Testing Creative
We’ve discussed having video messaging that speaks to a particular audience, but how do you know that a given message is the best message to use for an audience? Testing!
Connected TV, as opposed to traditional television, gives excellent data about the engagement with and results from your video ads. This means that even with a single audience you can test two (or more) video messages and measure the results.
What Makes A Good Connected TV Video Ad?
CTV as a format should be treated a bit differently from In-Stream or other digital video formats. Here’s some general rules of thumb to follow:
- While timing is flexible, a :15 or :30 spot will allow you to place into more inventory
- Most CTV ads will play with audio on, so make full use of the audio experience
- Localization is extremely important! Make sure individuals who are receiving your ad understand the relevancy to you, not just their interest but the fact that you’re nearby!
On our CTV inventory, most people will view the whole ad. Make it worth their while.
Connected TV ads have additional specs & requirements that must be met in order to serve across our vast access to networks. Failing format requirements means we either must reject your ad, or it may not be eligible to play on Premium inventory like Hulu or others. See our specs & requirements documentation to ensure your video creative meets our expectations.
Bringing It All Together
The key elements when you create your successful Connected TV (CTV) strategy for your law firm require a focus on geographic, audience, and messaging alignment.
First, identify your target area: reach people who live or work in your target zone to ensure relevancy. Second, refine your audience based on specific customer profiles, so you can eliminate irrelevant viewers and tailor content for optimal engagement. Lastly, develop impactful messaging that encourages action, and emphasizes locality to inform your viewers that you’re nearby and here to help.
Geographic Targeting: Define the specific area around your firm that yields the most potential clients. Focus on neighborhoods where you have the greatest efficacy, as this increases the value to the firm itself Tailor your ads to reach only the most relevant geographic areas to avoid wasted impressions on people unlikely to be clients, or who may be outside of your representation.
Audience Selection: Identify the various types of customers who need your services and avoid advertising to irrelevant individuals, saving money. Leverage CTV’s audience selection tools to exclude irrelevant impressions and focus on those most likely to engage. By zeroing in on these sub-groups, you can further personalize your message, increasing its resonance with viewers who are most receptive.
Messaging: Develop concise, action-oriented messages that directly address the viewer and prompt them to take a specific action, such as “Call Us Right Now” or “Fill Out This Form, We’ll Call You In Minutes” Emphasize local aspects in the message, mentioning proximity or local service, or neighborhood names to help viewers immediately recognize that your firm is an available, local option. And always keep in mind, authenticity and trust matters more than a high-end polish.
Remember, relevancy is extremely important – so combine a target audience (who you’re reaching) with a message tailored for them (what you’re saying to them).