The True Story of Attorney Television Advertising on a Budget

Despite what you may have heard, TV advertising is accessible—even for lawyers operating on slim margins.

However, making your advertising dollars go further requires a smarter, more pinpointed media strategy. Since you can’t bully your way into the market by buying up copious ad spaces and airtime, your challenge as an attorney with a small budget is two-fold.

Mastering your message

Hone your brand message so it’s both concise and perfectly targeted for your audience, rather than repeating previously popular but now unfounded tactics of focusing on how superior your lawyers are, how many big cases and settlements your firm was won, and over-generalizing to the saturation point. This will make viewers tune out or turn you off altogether.

Take a deeper dive into understanding your real clientele and mutual pain points. What do prospective clients really care about in life—and in a lawyer? Are they really looking to make history as the biggest payout in the firm’s history, or are they more concerned with finding a lawyer who is going to listen, remain responsive, and make it easy to work with throughout the lifespan of a case? Surprise, it’s the latter.

Work on making your advertising message unique to your firm by defining your exclusive differentiators (what do you consistently do better!) and addressing your clients’ real-world needs. If that message is distinctly different from the competition (even larger firms with deeper pockets) and speaks directly to what your prospective clients might be feeling, grappling with and trying to understand when choosing an attorney, it will quickly take you out of the mediocre legal media milieu and set your firm apart.

Remixing your media buy

Small media budgets require creative, strategic-thinking media buyers who can survey the competition and get your message to the right people right when they’re tuned in to the TV. That might mean focusing on one demographic and one message, or buying a single station in your market and dominating those niche airwaves with a powerful message and local call to action.

Finding the media mix to maximize your limited attorney TV advertising budget will also require tying up lose ends after you get the message out to a targeted audience. Make sure your stations are tracking your exact spend with a post-buy media analysis—how many people you are reaching for what you are buying.

Likewise, what are you doing with TV leads that do come directly from your targeted advertising campaign? Work on buttoning up your firm’s intake process in a more accountable way. After all, even if you get one call, what’s measurable is what your firm made of the call. Did it convert to a case?

Attorney television advertising can be striped down to message and media mix. Take a direct and strategic approach to marketing your firm on TV, and you may find that your budget is can stretch in some surprisingly creative ways.

Find out what Network Affiliates can do for you. Give us a call, speak with an expert and get a FREE, confidential marketing evaluation 303-817-7313 .