Traditional marketing strategies can provide a number of benefits to many businesses. Law firms have commonly used advertisements on buses, bus stops, and benches as a way to generate more visibility for their practices.
But do these methods still work?
Bus and bench ads may position your brand in front of a larger audience, but there are other factors to consider if you want to see a return on your marketing investment.
The following will help you understand the limitations of these marketing methods along with effective ways that you can be capturing the attention of your target audience.
Ads Are Everywhere and Often Ignored
The right marketing strategies can provide significant results for your practice. But many law firms overlook fundamental principles that can help them achieve better results from their campaigns.
Greater visibility doesn’t always translate into more revenue for your practice. Advertisements are everywhere these days, and the public has become good at tuning out a majority of the ads they see.
Bus and bench ads may be so common that they simply blend in with everything else around them. This leads to poor and costly marketing results.
If traditional advertisements aren’t generating new clients for your practice, you may want to consider more current marketing strategies that help law firm compete in the marketplace.
Bus and bench advertisements can fail to create the relationships that convert prospects into paying clients.
Many of these ads focus on what the services are, but they don’t address the “why” or “how”. Why should your audience choose your legal services over your competitors? How can they achieve the benefits that your services offer?
Advertisements need compelling messages that resonate with your ideal clients. This demonstrates an understanding of their needs and positions you as the obvious choice for them.
Advertisements Must be Optimized for Mobile
Smartphones, tablets, and other devices create new opportunities for brands to reach their target markets.
Most bus and banner ads provide a phone number or website URL. But today’s audiences rarely call a business after seeing an advertisement. Instead, they go online to learn more.
A website URL can make this process easier, but many advertisements drive audiences to business home pages rather than a dedicated landing page with content that’s directly linked to the advertisement.
When users land on your homepage, they have to make sense of your site’s content and navigation to figure where they can go to get the information they need. This creates friction, increase bounce rates, and hurt your bottom line.
Understanding how to use ads in ways that accommodate mobile users is essential to getting the most out of your advertising.
Create a Consistent Brand Experience
Advertisements must create a consistent brand experience. Bus and bench ads often lead users to websites that don’t connect the ad’s message to the content a user sees.
Also, design elements may be inconsistent from one channel to another. This creates a disconnect that can cause users to question your credibility.
Omnichannel marketing and other strategies emphasize the importance of creating a consistent experience across all of your marketing messages.
Your brand’s voice and message must be consistent in order to achieve maximum results from your marketing campaigns.
Law firms still use bus and bench ads to market their services. But are these methods still effective? How can they be improved to become part of a much larger marketing strategy?
Let us know if bus and bench ads have (or haven’t) worked for your law firm in the comments below.
We can help you identify the factors that can improve their performance and provide alternative strategies that give you a greater return on your marketing investment.
