The days when a law firm could survive on word of mouth are long gone.
Whether you’re a partner at a big city firm representing corporate clients or a one-woman show handling local family law, competition is fierce.
You need a way to stand out.
You need to show your prospective clients that you’re the answer to the challenges they’re facing.
Luckily, there’s a solution: video.
High-quality video is the best way for your law firm to differentiate itself in the modern digital world.
And this article will show you exactly how it works.
We’ll show you exactly how your law firm can use video to drive awareness and get more clients.
This resource will cover:
- Why Video?
- How to Use Video to Drive Awareness
- How to Use Video to Get Clients
Why Video?
There are more than 1,350,000 lawyers in the US. Competition is fierce, and your prospective clients have a hard time choosing who to trust.
So how do you do it? How do you stand out?
Let me guess — you talk about your years of experience, the care you have for your clients, or how dedicated you are to their case.
Unfortunately, you’re not the only law firm doing this, and it’s not cutting it anymore.
Video, however, changes the script.
Video introduces you to your prospective clients and serves to put a face to the name. It personalizes you by telling your story and why you practice.
And it works:
- Viewers remember 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in text.
- 72% of prospective clients would rather learn about a service by way of video than any other content type.
- 97% of marketers say video has helped users gain a better understanding of their products and services.
- Nearly 50% of internet users look for videos related to a product or service before visiting a store.
Here’s an example:
A legal brand video from Crisp shows what makes your firm stand out from the crowd, shares your story, gives all the reasons that make them unique. It also often features one or two client testimonials — allowing you to stand to the side and let your clients speak on your behalf (they’re far more unbiased than you are about how great your firm is).
Here’s an example, from the Law Offices of James J Sexton:
This video is front-and-center on the firm’s website because it’s the most compelling way to introduce themselves to prospective clients:
Top Tip:
Video production is as much about identifying and developing your law firm’s unique brand identity as it is about what’s on tape.
Invest in a video production team that focuses on developing a legal marketing strategy built around learning who you are. It will help to inform all your messaging going forward and allow you to see lasting benefits long after filming stops.
Using Video to Drive Awareness
When it comes to boosting brand awareness for your law firm, not all videos are created equal.
The video shown above would be your primary legal brand video. Its place is on your website, in blog posts, and on YouTube as long-form video content.
Its role is to give prospective clients the full picture: who you are, why you practice, and what differentiates you from your competitors.
And it will do that admirably.
It won’t, however, be as effective for driving brand awareness.
To do that, we need to access the largest collection of prospective clients the world has ever seen — social media platforms.
Facebook (2.41 billion monthly users), Instagram (1 billion+), and LinkedIn (675 million) are officially the biggest gathering places of your firm’s prospective clients ever.
The challenge, then, is engaging them. And video is the best way to do that.
To optimize your video for social media, we need to do three main things:
- We need to shorten that brand video down to a soundbite — a 6-, 15-, or 30-second clip that hooks your target clients, prompts a share with their network, and increases brand awareness and recall.
- We need to add subtitles, as 85% of videos watched on social media are watched without sound.
- We need to optimize your video for mobile, as more than 50% of videos watched on social media are watched on phones.
How to Use Video on Facebook and Instagram to Increase Awareness
Video ads outperform image ads by between 20 and 50% (depending on who you ask). If you’re looking to increase awareness of your firm and get more eyes on your message, it’s a no-brainer.
Social media video ads are the way to do it.
Here’s a step-by-step walkthrough to creating a video ad campaign on Facebook and Instagram.
Step 1: Choose the “brand awareness” objective.
Step 2: Use Facebook’s unparalleled targeting to ensure your ad shows exclusively to your target market. For a brand awareness campaign, you can go broader than a campaign designed to drive traffic.
Step 3: Focus on showing your ad in the Facebook and Instagram newsfeeds, video feeds, and in Instagram stories.
Step 4: Choose “Single Image or Video” under the Format selector, and upload your video.
Step 5: Make sure your video has a 1:1 aspect ratio. Square videos take up more than 75% more space in the News Feed and tend to outperform video shown in landscape.
Step 6: Write your copy and click “Confirm.”
Facebook and Instagram Advertising Top Tip:
Be sure you’ve added the Facebook conversion tracking pixel to your website before you launch your awareness campaign on Facebook and Instagram. Without it, you’ll have no guarantee that the money you’re spending is delivering any return.
If this is all a bit overwhelming, or you don’t have the time required to create and promote a high-quality law firm video, that’s understandable.
Professional legal video services, like Crisp, are dedicated to producing, optimizing, and driving awareness for law firms like yours. Connect with a Crisp legal video expert for a one-on-one conversation today to learn more.
How to Use Video in YouTube Bumper Ads
YouTube bumper ads are 6-second, unskippable videos that appear before another video on YouTube.
After reviewing 122 bumper ad campaigns, Google found that 70% of them drove a “significant lift” in brand awareness, with an average lift of 9%.
They’re perfect for increasing awareness of your law firm, as they use target CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) bidding. That means you pay each time your ad is shown 1,000 times, rather than when someone clicks on it.
Here’s how to set up a YouTube bumper ad campaign:
Step 1: Choose “Brand Awareness and Reach” from the new campaign goal selector in Google Ad Manager.
Step 2: Choose the “Video” campaign type and “Bumper” subtype.
Step 3: Set your budget, ignore “content exclusions,” and create your target audience.
Step 4: Ensure your 6-second video is uploaded to YouTube and drop in the URL.
Step 5: Hit “Continue” and you’re good to go!
YouTube Bumper Ad Top Tip:
Make sure you’ve set up conversion tracking for your website. Even if your YouTube bumper ad campaign isn’t focused on driving clicks to your website, you’ll still need conversion tracking to determine if an increase in awareness correlates to an increase in visitors down the line.
If filming and producing a great video, leveraging it into 6-second video clip, uploading it to YouTube, and tracking its success doesn’t sound like your idea of a relaxing afternoon, consider connecting with one of Crisp’s law firm marketing experts for a one-on-one conversation.
Bonus: Video in Social Media Ads — A Law Firm Experiment
To test the effect of a shortened video on ad performance for law firms, Crisp video ran an experiment.
We ran two campaigns for law firm clients over the course of one month.
- Both campaigns were run for personal injury firms, so ad targeting was narrowed down to match characteristics associated with each firms’ target personas.
- Every iteration of the ad kept the same messaging in order to exclude copy as a variable in the experiment.
- Each ad included contact information for the firm, including a website link and phone number.
Here were the results from a law firm in Tampa Bay, Florida:
The 6-second bumper ad on YouTube drove 247,659 impressions, and the 6-second Instagram video ad drove a 2% engagement rate (almost unheard of in social advertising).
Here were the results from a law firm in Lafayette, Louisiana:
The 30-second Instagram video ad reached more than 163,000 users, with a 4% engagement rate.
What is Crisp Social Stack?
Social Stack is a multi-channel awareness campaign that includes social cuts optimized for all the major social channels and managed paid ad campaigns on each.
While Social Stack can be customized based on your law firm’s budget and objectives, it generally includes:
- Six Online Commercials
- 6-, 15-, and 30-second videos in square and cinematic dimensions
- Full Scale Social Campaign
- Paid Advertising Campaigns across Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram
- Ongoing Optimization and Detailed Performance Reporting
- Constant ad optimization and performance reporting to ensure your campaign is set up for success
To learn more about Crisp Social Stack, check out the website, or connect with one of Crisp’s law firm video experts.
Using Video to Get Clients
Once you’ve gotten the attention of your prospective clients, you need to keep it.
Part of that is the primary legal brand video we showed in the first section, as it introduces you to your prospective clients, tells your story and why you practice, and connects them to your previous clients through their testimonials.
There’s no more powerful tool than a great brand video to convince people that you’re the right choice for their case.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other high-impact ways to use video.
This section will cover five more video use cases that help your firm get clients.
All of these videos can be sent to your prospective clients before or after a consultation, used as YouTube content to educate, or on your website as a differentiating tool far more powerful than any paragraph of text.
#1. Attorney Profile Videos
Once a prospective client becomes aware of your business, they may still be skeptical. Even though they’ve seen your face, they don’t yet know your team.
An attorney profile video serves to put faces to names for your prospective clients.
They’re particularly useful for large law firms with many attorneys — firms that might feel faceless to begin with.
Here’s an example of an attorney profile from the Nussbaum Law Group in New York:
Creating a strong series of attorney profile videos means when your prospective client comes into your office they already recognize (and feel comfortable) with the faces they see or the specific attorney they’ll work with.
#2. FAQ Videos
There’s a reason law school takes so long and the bar has a 31.4% pass rate: this stuff is complicated.
So, more often than not, you need to educate your prospective clients before they’ll come close to signing the dotted line.
And that’s where FAQ videos come in. They place your firm in the role as educator — already delivering value before any agreement with the client has been made.
It’s similar to the way many attorneys take cases on a contingency basis: you deliver value before getting paid.
Educational FAQ videos situate you as a provider of value with no money changing hands.
Here’s an example of a FAQ video from Sherrod & Bernard P.C.:
#3. Client Testimonial Videos
Client testimonials give your clients the opportunity to speak on your behalf.
When it comes down to it, you are not a particularly unbiased source of information when it comes to your law firm.
Your clients are. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do to get clients is to step to the side and let your work speak for itself.
Client testimonial videos feature more detail and more of the story than the brand video does. They feature your clients, the specifics of their case, and what their experience was working with your firm.
Here’s an example of a client testimonial video from Gartian Injury Law:
#4. Practice Area Videos
Practice area videos are a powerful way for larger firms to show the full extent of what they do, and how they serve an individual practice area.
Similar to the attorney profile videos, practice area videos work to introduce your firm to prospective clients on a personal level — showcasing the partners or attorneys in your firm who specialize, as well as the successes you’ve had in that specific area.
Here’s an example of a practice area video from Merlin Law Group:
#5. Specialty Videos
Is your firm involved in community development? Do you do charity work or a yearly fundraiser? Have you sponsored a youth baseball team or won an exciting, high-profile case?
Specialty videos are the “everything else” category for law firm marketing videos, but they’re no less impactful for it.
Specialty videos focus on those things your law firm does that no other firm does. They can address a local angle that your outsourced marketing team isn’t familiar with.
Here’s an example of a specialty video showcasing the community involvement from Laborde Earles Law Firm:
Conclusion
Now that you have a better understanding of the role video can play in growing your law firm, it’s time to get rolling.
- To increase awareness of your law firm, use a brand video alongside 6-, 15-, and 30-second cuts to create video ads on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube
- To turn that increased awareness into an increase in clients, send them your brand video alongside attorney profile, FAQ, client testimonial, practice area, and specialty videos to educate them about who you are, what you do, and why you do it.
Implementing these strategies well can be complicated and time-consuming, especially if you don’t have the experience or time to do it.
Luckily, you don’t have to.
To incorporate legal video into your marketing strategy, connect with a Crisp Legal Marketing Strategist for a one-on-one strategy session today.
