If you’ve made the decision to produce a legal video for your law firm, congratulations – you’ve made the right choice. Video has been shown time and time again to drive massive results to online marketing campaigns, is a proven strategy to enhance your brand, and can establish a direct connection with potential clients. Here are a few of the more surprising statistics about video:
- Adding video to emails can boost click-through rates by 200-300%
- 90% of users say videos are helpful in the decision-making process
- Videos can boost landing page conversions by 80%
- A third of all the time people spend online is dedicated to watching videos
Videos have become a dominating force in online activity, and companies are responding by making their content more visual and interactive. HighQ predicted that 2017 will be the year of video marketing, and there’s a reason for that.
However, getting your legal video produced is only half the battle. To achieve dramatic results, you have to distribute it to the right channels. Your video won’t boost revenue or bring in clients if no one sees it, so you have to ensure that you’re taking advantage of the many ways you can use your video if you want to see the most success. This includes distributing your video through both traditional and nontraditional channels, promoting it on all social media, and ensuring you’re incorporating the best practices of video marketing.
We’ve created a list of 10 ways to leverage legal videography to grow your law firm below, so you can keep track of which channels you should use to distribute your video to bring in clients, increase revenue, and drive results.
#1: Upload your video to Facebook natively
Video content shared on social networks generates 1200% more shares than text or images combined, and videos on Facebook receive a total 8 billion views per day. While it may seem obvious to share your video to Facebook, there is an important distinction between sharing a Youtube link on your firm’s Facebook page versus uploading it natively.
Videos that are uploaded natively to Facebook achieve 10x higher reach than shared links, and Facebook’s algorithm rewards native videos because they’re trying to carve out their own space in the video industry.
Another important benefit of native uploads? Native Facebook videos will autoplay, so potential clients don’t even have to click “play” to watch your video – it will play automatically as they scroll past it.
Facebook videos are proven to have more social engagement than their counterparts on Youtube, and the massive amount of data Facebook has on its 1.2 billion users allows you to develop targeted advertising campaigns towards your ideal client persona.
This means that you can guarantee your video will show up in front of people who have visited your website, opened your emails, or engaged with past social media posts – thereby increasing your chance that they’ll come back as a client!
After uploading, pin the post to the top of your company page so it’s the first thing people see when they navigate to the firm’s profile. Ensure that you’ve included accurate captions for people who may be either watching the video without sound or have hearing difficulties.
#2: Upload your video to YouTube
Just because Facebook won’t autoplay YouTube videos doesn’t mean you should shirk the opportunities present in YouTube video marketing. YouTube has more than a billion active users and is considered the world’s second largest search engine, and video consumption makes up ⅓ of all online activity. To make the most out of YouTube, though, it requires more than just uploading a video to your channel.
Videos are a fantastic tool to boost your firm’s SEO and generate more traffic to your website, especially through backlinks. The basic rule of thumb for YouTube is to never upload a video without creating tags, titles, and descriptions. This allows your video to be found in search results and will generate more traffic than if you had created a title without any additional information.
While a single video can direct an influx of traffic to your website, consistent content is the best way to generate proven SEO results and increase success. It’s recommended to post a video every other week (or twice a month) with content that’s directly related to the search terms your client is looking for. This can be completed through SEO and keyword research, and over time your video campaign will drive more traffic and higher conversion rates to your site.
The best way to monitor a YouTube campaign once it’s been initiated is to analyze and optimize your search traffic results on YouTube. Initial keyword research is a fundamental step in your video campaign, but it’s just as important to monitor your search traffic after your campaign launches to see which videos are showing up in searches. This will allow you to decide which videos are most and least successful, and could potentially lead to a pivot in your video marketing strategy.
Ultimately, YouTube is the place to go for video content. But, if you don’t optimize your YouTube videos to show up in searches, you’re missing out on huge amounts of traffic and potential conversions. It’s imperative that you follow the best practices we’ve outlined if you want to see real traction in your online campaign.
#3: Embed your video on your website
The homepage of your website will deliver the first impression of your firm to potential clients. Embedding your video on your website allows your visitors insight into your firm and immediately establishes an emotional connection that text alone can’t provide – in fact, the human brain processes video content 60,000 times faster than text, which means the amount of information we can consume in a two minute video vastly overpowers the information we could absorb from the standard “About Us” section on a website.
Video can serve as a powerful differentiator in the decision-making process. If a potential client is trying to find an attorney to represent them, they’ll more than likely visit multiple websites before making a decision. To put this in perspective, the average person will visit 38 different websites when booking and planning a vacation, a relatively low-stakes decision.
When deciding on legal representation, a decision with much higher stakes, chances are they’ll visit even more websites when making a decision on which person is going to represent them in a fight for their legal rights. Here are a few attorney video marketing campaigns produced by Crisp: McCready Law, Law Office of Tammy M. Holcomb, Atlanta Personal Injury Law.
If someone is visiting upwards of 40 websites trying to decide on an attorney, is your website going to make the cut? You have to make sure that you put something unforgettable in front of them, and that’s where legal video comes in.
When embedding your video on the website, embed it above the fold, meaning the video is visible without having to scroll down on the website. This not only increases the chances of your video being seen but is also proven to boost SEO rankings, as Google rewards websites with enticing visual/video content. Your law firm video marketing campaign will complement your domain’s SEO.
Moreover, be sure to include a schema markup on your legal video, which is a simple piece of code that allows search engines to gather data on the video. It sounds complicated, but it simply allows search engines such as Google to access basic information on the video – as Google’s algorithm won’t be able to index the visual content, you’re providing detailed information on your video for them within the schema markup.
#4: Use your video as your Facebook page header
Facebook recently rolled out an exciting new feature that allows users to upload videos as their Facebook header (the banner displayed behind the profile photo). Known as a video cover, this feature will silently autoplay as soon as someone hits your Facebook page. While there are a few restrictions on this feature, it’s a great option for a lawyer looking to improve the aesthetic of their company page and potentially increase engagement with your social media.
Uploading a video cover is a quick and easy process, but may require some edits to your video. Here are the requirements for uploading a video over to a Facebook page:
- The video must be between 20 and 90 seconds long
- The video resolution must be 1080p
- The video must maintain a resolution of 820 x 462 pixels to achieve the right aspect ratio – without this, part of your video will be cropped out
Because the video limits are only 20-90 seconds, it’s recommended to put together a shorter cut of a full-length video so that your audience will see the most important aspects of your video rather than just half of one video. We would recommend creating either a 30-45 second cut of your firm’s brand video or something creative that highlights your team and office.
This will serve as an exciting and unique introduction to your firm as soon as someone lands on your company Facebook page, thereby increasing the odds that they’ll convert into a client on your website. To complement this feature, make sure your staff is active on Facebook messenger so you’re able to quickly answer any inquiries and avoid losing out on a potential client.
#5: Showcase the video in your office
Waiting for appointment times is a common, and often unpleasant, experience for most of us. To compensate for this, give your clients something interesting to watch while they’re waiting for their appointment. Just as a video on your website offers the first impression of your firm, a video playing in your office as clients come in is an engaging way to solidify the image of your firm in their mind.
What would clients think if they saw a video like this playing in your office?
If your firm’s office has a reception area or lobby, having video content running on a TV in that area will provide clients with information about your firm, practice area, lawyer videos, client testimonials, and more. Simply looping a brand video over and over will get old quickly, so if you choose to go this route, you need to be including fresh video content on a regular basis. This could include a compilation of FAQ videos, testimonials, and specific case studies that exemplify your expertise in your market and reinforce past clients’ positive experiences in the eyes of potential new clients.
These videos will more than likely be playing without audio, so make sure that your video content has accurate subtitles so your clients don’t miss out on valuable information!
#6: Include your video in your staff’s email signatures
Although email platforms do not currently have the capability to directly embed videos, you can take advantage of this underused strategy by embedding a link to your video under every staff member’s email signature with a clear Call-to-Action, such as, “Check out our latest video to learn more about our firm!”.
When they click the link, they’ll be redirected to a specific landing page you’ve established – whether it’s a video portfolio or specific page with your video – in which you should include additional CTAs. This allows curious browsers the chance to learn more information from your latest video following an email conversation, and also provides them the opportunity to book a consultation if they haven’t already.
You could include the video as a link within the email signature, or as a video thumbnail that links to the video – images are more engaging, but if your staff signatures include their headshots already, it may cause for clutter in email dialogue. Video can increase email click-through by almost 300%, so this is yet another tactic to increase the amount of traffic coming to your site and ensuring everyone you interact with is exposed to your firm’s freshest content!
#7: Use your video in your hiring process
Interested in hiring top-notch candidates with a genuine desire to work for your firm? Show them your video. Your video communicates your brand, your values, and humanizes your firm in a way that most job descriptions can’t. Embed a brand video or a “Meet the Team” video on your Careers page, link to your videos on all of your hiring posts, and include a video signature on all interactions with potential candidates.
Communicating your unique value proposition to potential hires will create an influx of candidates with a true desire to work for you because your video has established an emotional connection with them. Don’t just tell them what your firm does, show them why you do it and how they can be a part of those efforts. Employees want to know that their work has value, and this is easier to accomplish when you clearly communicate what value you strive to offer within your firm.
We’ve had clients who have received emails from highly qualified attorneys looking to join their practice after viewing their video without even listing an open position. Expanding a team allows you to grow your business quickly and efficiently, so you can worry about the important things: your clients and their cases. To truly have a successful team, though, you need the right team members, and video content can help attract that talent.
#8: Add your video to your Avvo profile
Want a winning Avvo attorney page? Add your video to your profile. Maximize your Avvo rating and exposure by linking your YouTube videos to your Avvo site. When potential clients navigate to your Avvo profile, they’ll find a portfolio of video content directly under your headshot, right above the message link!
Just think- if a client sees a high-quality, engaging legal video on your Avvo site, wouldn’t they be more compelled to message your firm right after watching it?
Your Avvo rating increases based on their unique algorithm, which takes into account factors like content publication. Adding videos, articles, and blogs to your Avvo site will boost your rating on an ongoing basis. The higher your score, the more likely it is that you’ll show up first (or close to it) in search queries completed through Avvo. Publishing the video (or multiple videos) to your page is a great way to improve your profile and boost your score.
#9: Run a Paid Facebook Campaign with Your Video
The best way to generate real results from a Facebook video is to create a targeted campaign around it. While uploading it natively to your company page will drive traffic, it won’t guarantee that it’s getting in front of the right people (by that, we mean people who are more likely to become clients).
96% of social media marketers consider Facebook to be the best advertising platform, with good reason – with 1.2 billion users, Facebook has a massive audience, with plenty of options for you to narrow down your targeting to only include your ideal client persona.
The average person spends 20-50 minutes a day browsing through the uber-popular social network, but without a paid ad campaign, there’s no way to know that they’ll end up on your company page.
Facebook campaigns are highly customizable; you can create an audience based on age, gender, location, ethnicity, what kind of car they drive, what phone network they use, and even the likelihood that they’ve searched for legal help in the last 12 months. That is a huge asset sitting right at your fingertips.
You could do one of two things: you could boost your original video, which simply places the post higher on your audience’s news feeds and increases engagement, or you can create an ad campaign throughFacebook or an affiliate service that will allow you to create direct, targeted campaigns to a specific audience. Each has their virtues, and your decision may depend on your level of comfort with social media advertising, but if you want real results (leads and conversions) we would recommend running an ad campaign.
Ad campaigns allow you to monitor and optimize ads to ensure you are generating conversions from qualified leads. You can experiment pairing your video with different captions, CTAs, and landing pages. If you have more than one video, you can run multiple campaigns at the same time to different audiences.
The Facebook audience network is a seemingly endless well of potential client revenue, you just have to figure out where to start drilling. Our recommendation? Build a lookalike audience by uploading a list of your current clients to your business account – Facebook will handle the rest by building a list of users who share similar characteristics. By targeting lookalike audiences, you’re putting your ads in front of people who are similar to the people who have already become your clients.
More than 5 million businesses run ads on Facebook every month. Will you be next?
#10: Include it on your LinkedIn Company and Personal Profiles
While LinkedIn falls behind Facebook and YouTube on traffic and audience size, it’s still a relevant social platform to advertise and promote content on. Remember that tidbit on visiting 38 websites before making a decision? Well, your LinkedIn company or personal profile may be one of those sites – so it has to have the right content on it.
Just like Facebook, LinkedIn has begun promoting video content within their news feeds in an effort to make it more like a social network. While advertising content on LinkedIn pales in comparison to Facebook, it still has a diverse array of targeting options including profession, gender, age, location, and more. You can include keywords in your captions and video that are optimized for search, and boost overall engagement with your company page.
A quick way to add video to your LinkedIn: add the YouTube link to the “Add Media” section of your personal and company profile.
You can also include the video linked within a status update and include a relevant or compelling quote from the video to increase engagement. LinkedIn is rated as the most trustworthy social network, which means you can include testimonials and other content that will carry more weight than they may on Facebook.
While LinkedIn does not currently support video ads, you are encouraged to post video status updates. This will allow you to distribute content to LinkedIn’s 500 million professional users and engage a more discerning audience.
Each of these strategies, when completed in tandem, will create an impactful, widespread legal video marketing campaign that is sure to drive results, increase revenue, and influence your average case value.
The most important factor in every one of these steps, though, is the video – if it isn’t done well, these strategies will not have as much of an impact. In fact, it could potentially damage your SEO rankings. More than anything, the most important aspect of a legal video marketing campaign is the partner you choose to produce your video. We hope you’re able to take advantage of these strategies to make the most impact with your legal video.
