Demystifying Attorney Video Marketing for Law Firms

We know that video marketing for law firms is still at the early adoption phase…and every firm is different in how they are approaching video.

Some firms have adopted it.  Some firms are thinking about it.  While other firms are not there yet.

Which ever represents you, we’ve put together a scaled down version of the LMA webinar titled “Demystifying Video Marketing for Law Firms” just for YOU.  This webinar recap goes over some of the most important things that you should know about video marketing and its application to your firm

TRANSCRIPT and WEBINAR BELOW – DOWNLOAD THE SLIDE DECK BY CLICKING HERE (NO SIGN UP NEEDED)

This presentation is really a combination of the questions that legal marketers have about video production services company, attorney video marketing, video marketing for law firms, remote video recording and a couple of others that I’ve thrown into the mix that I’ve heard over the years. 

I’ve been in the legal marketing community for about six / seven years now, and I would say just within the last couple of years we have really started to work with law firms around integrating video. So we know that video marketing for law firms is still at the early adoption phase, and I hope that this presentation will be valuable to you to answer some of the questions that you have about video marketing for law firms.

So let’s get started.

Why Attorney Video Marketing for Law Firms?

Why video marketing for law firms?

We are all becoming a nation of watchers first over readers. Video is just easier to consume than reading, which is why it appeals to a lot of people. So at early stages of the sales process or the information gathering process, people are more likely to watch video. 

So attorney video marketing is just about appealing to people’s desire to watch video in the information gathering phase.  But when it comes to legal marketers, your products are people. And what better way to showcase your people than with video. And when you do that, not only does your partner’s expertise come in front of the camera, but their personality, who they are as people, just warms people up to them as they enter into or go through the buying cycle.

One thing that I love most about video is that it lasts for a long time

One thing that I love most about video is that it lasts for a long time. Although you’re going to be investing in video today, many videos will last three, four, five years.  Think about a practice area video or some thought leadership video content. Those are videos they’re going to last for a long time and will be used over and over again. 

We talk about other forms of content that you might be invested in, like webinars and podcasts. And I don’t really think it’s a matter of “do we do one or the other”….you should really be doing both because both webinars and podcasts and video fit into a different part of the buying cycle. 

People consume webinars when they want to drill down on lunchtime.  Then they’ll go about their day with a podcast when they’re commuting or in the car on weekends, they’ll consume that information. 

And video is very, very different. A couple of things that make video better at the top of the funnel is that attorney video marketing is more discoverable than webinars.  While this webinar that we’re doing today might be reposted and reshared. But if you find something in minute 25 of this webinar, you’re probably not going to share that with you colleague and say “Hey, go to minute 25”. 

But if we carved out that minute 25 into a 60-90 second video we can then use that as short form content that can now go into blog posts or email marketing initiatives or social media that is much more discoverable. So that’s a huge thing that webinars and podcasts don’t provide that video does.

In many cases, video can be multi-purposed across different channels of your digital footprint.  A video production services company can certainly guide you here.

Video Marketing Can Provide A Lot of Information in a Short Time

Now, one of the things that we hear a lot about video is that it’s very daunting because it’s living and breathing…it shows your partners who they are. They might not be great in front of the camera and as legal marketers, we don’t want to put our partners in a position where they don’t look their best, but we’re saying it really doesn’t matter if you’re partners or short, fat, skinny, they have a beard.

They’re old, they have glasses. It’s really their skill sets that they bring to the table. And this is one of the reasons why video marketing for law firms is so great because they are who they are in front of prospects and customers.

They used to go to trade shows and meetings, and they can showcase who they are in front of a camera with the help of a video production services company. That’s one of the things that a video production services company adds to the mix – they will help coach your partners to make sure they look and sound their best on camera. And it doesn’t matter what they look like. People are buying them more for their skill sets and what they know then than what they look like. 

So with the help of a video marketing agency, they can really help your partners come to life. 

5 Main Cost Factors To Business Video 

The second area that stops video marketing for law firms is the cost.  There are so many, many different ways to create a video marketing for law firms when you use a video marketing agency, but these are the five main factors that really determine how much you would want to invest. 

There’s some other smaller ones, but these are really the top high level five things that a video production services company, like ours, uses to determine how much an attorney video marketing project is going to cost. And just by example, here’s two different budgets.

The one on the left, you have 1 location. Whereas the one on the right, we have 3 locations. So forget about any other variable guess which one is going to cost more… the one with 3 locations. And as you go down, we still have cameras and equipment and staff and motion graphics. 

We still have the same things that we’re going to put into the video, but the levels of those are very different. And, and this is just an example. So you can have these check boxes all over the place. You can have 1 in location, but have a 4 in equipment and lights and a 1 in motion graphics, but these are the variables that will determine how much a video is going to cost.

So if you’re thinking about video, one suggestion would be to try to come up with a budget that is acceptable to you and your firm, and let that video production company know and challenge them to come up with the best value within the mix here for your budget.

Every law firm is going to have a different budget and is going to have different levels of quality that they deem that they want for their video…thus the mix is going to be different. 

How Often Should You be Doing Attorney Video Marketing

It really goes into the cadence that one firm has over the other. And if you’re just getting started with attorney video marketing, you’re probably going to do it on a smaller cadence than if you have been doing video and you see the power of it.  

But with any given budget level and sample those bars represent a single budget level, X dollars, whatever that is to you.

And what we’re showing in this graphic is how we can and carve up that particular budget based upon the production deliverables that we just spoke about a couple of slides earlier to give you a video within the same book.

So a high level production about your firm, your pro bono practices or a diversity and inclusion video, you will want to invest in that. Whereas FAQ videos, where it might be like thought leadership videos, they don’t necessarily have to be as produced as that firm overview.  Therefore with the same X amount of dollars, you can allocate those dollars differently and then get more videos out of that. 

So we hope that helps you understand how a budget can be allocated to get different types of videos, which goes into how many times you should be doing video per year.  

As we wrap up, remember this: YouTube ad targeting isn’t just a tool; it’s an opportunity to connect with your ideal customer in a world that’s overflowing with content. Use it wisely, use it creatively, and watch your business thrive. If you’re not sure how to get started and want to get expert help, contact us to request a free quote from us. 

Here are some of the use cases of video marketing for law firms.

• Thought Leadership                                                                                          ●Practice area overviews
• State of the firm                                                                                                   ●Internal communications
• Pro bono                                                                                                                   ●Crisis communications
• Bring industry report data to life with infographic videos         ●Bio videos
• Recruiting                                                                                                                ●Client Testimonials
• Events                                                                                                                        ●Big Pitches

Video is nothing but content, that’s it. So if you’re doing something on paper or in a blog, or you have a partner going to speak at a conference and they have a PowerPoint slide that is just content and video is just content. So how do you take those business objectives? And now video enables those business objectives.

If you go back to the budget conversation and the allocation of resources, all videos are not created equal.  The allocation of resources is very different, but at the end of the day, when you use a video marketing agency you will have a quality and professional and certainly your partners are.

Video First Marketing Strategy

So what do you do with video? When you have it?

We have something we call a Video 1st marketing strategy.  That basically starts with the video first and then derives all these ancillary pieces of content that marketers need in today’s world. So you can take that video and transcribe it, and you have a blog post, and you can put that video in an email alert, a client alert. You can put that video on an industry page or a bio page, use it as follow-up conversation pieces.

If you’re in the sales process and trying to get a new client, maybe you have a series of thought leadership videos on that specific practice area that you can send before or after a meeting. So once you have those videos, you really want to use it in many, many different areas over the next three, four or five years, all of the time.

And then there is YouTube… or not to YouTube.  Well, the answer is always YouTube.

Youtube is the number two search engine out there. People are on it all the time. But what YouTube is for you is a free hosting platform. The discoverability of video on YouTube will probably not be important to you as your type of business, but the fact that YouTube is optimized for any device out there that YouTube does all the work. YouTube is trusted. That’s what YouTube can be for you.

As you get more sophisticated with video, that’s when you can start looking for an online video platform, which is a software as a service tool that you can start to integrate onto your website into Salesforce, into Google analytics.  You’ll have to pay for that, but there’s no sense in doing that when you only have 5 videos.  Wait until you get to 50 or 60 or a hundred videos, and you get a little bit more sophisticated with video, and then you can start looking for ways to gain more analytics and traction into your CRM and other digital marketing metrics. But even so you always want to YouTube.

Do You Always Need a Video Production Services Company?

So this all being said, you’re like, Oh, this is great, Robert, but can we just do video ourselves? Do you need a video production company? Of course you can. You could do video. And in fact for our clients, we want them to do video themselves. So it’s about the cadence of video. And once you understand the process and how to shoot, you’ll get better at doing video.

So you have that mix of professional content at the right place at the right time and user generated, do it yourself, content at the right place at the right time. But it’s a matter of figuring out what goes, where. So we want people to do their own video.

Should We Script Our Attorney Video Marketing Content?

To script or not to script. That is the question. And our answer is never script. We don’t script this presentation today. I don’t know if you saw me flipping pages. I have an outline of bullet points. I’ve no idea what I want to say. If I needed to stick to a script, I would be fumbling all over the place. I’m not an actor. The thing is that your professionals know what they’re talking about. 

So we need to have in each video or each part of each video and outline a high level outline of what they want to say and get in a position to get them to be comfortable just being themselves in front of the camera.

That is one of the things that a professional video services company does add to the table. They’re used to working with people, making them comfortable, getting them to perform in front of the camera when you know, they might not, but over time for you marketers and working with a company like ours, you’ll be able to learn a lot of that and develop that balance between DIY and using an outsource company.

Making sure that they have the messaging down is really important. Two to three bullet points, do not script and get your partners in the mindset of talking to their clients. So I kind of like looking at the camera here on my camera.

I’m used to it, of course, but even for me, it was hard for me to do video at the very beginning, until I got into the mindset of this little dot right there, or the camera in front was just a client. And then the framing in and out, that just means that you want, when you shoot, you want a decent amount of framing on the sides. So if you need to, you can edit, punching in and outs, which most people will probably have just one camera.

Options for Attorney Video Marketing for Law Firms

Today there’s a couple options for your attorney video marketing. There is the DIY video, hiring a professional video production services company and also remote video recording.  Remote video recording is with software that the talent downloads on their devices.  It gives us some control over their phone from software when we log in on the web side and the partner logs in on the app. But more importantly, we’re coaching them. Even with remote video recording we are still directing them around the two or three key messages that the partner needs in order to perform.

So you have that crisp, clean, professional video content that hits your business objectives. And it’s really, really great. Some of the results that we have been getting with remote video recording recently are amazing. We shot from New York city to Paraguay, to Houston, to Dallas, Chicago, Maryland, and local here in New York city. And us as a video production services company are impressed with the quality that you can get out of it.

It does not take away the professional services that you get from shooting video.  With remote video recording you still go through the planning on the messaging and the pre-production process and we’re capturing the content in most cases up to 4k.

So they are really, good pieces of equipment and when the partner or subject logs in, because these are great for video testimonials as well, they download the app, they log in, they get a code. And this is an example of a manufacturing company we did in Seattle a couple of months ago. So that’s kind of what the screen looks like. And again, we’re on the, on the web-based side. So managing video video is different than images, copy web pages. And there’s a lot of management that goes in, and this is a flow that we use. So we would suggest that you use as well.

DIY Video or Professional Video Production Services Company?

If you’re doing your own video, it allows you, once you have the main folder, the main project, then you have all these sub files like raw files, assets, pre edits, previews finals, and marketing materials that go through the workflow of video that allows us to capture all the, the raw footage that we need, everything from the client, and then go through the editing phase and create the marketing materials that we need that it’s packaged really nicely.

So one of the things with video that if you’re going to get to that Jedi master phase is managing the workflow. We’ve done about 900 videos in the last 10 years. And we’ve worked with a lot of clients and, and we didn’t figure this out until like three or four years ago. It helped us a lot, the mixture of video of doing yourself versus a professional video services company. 

And every firm is going to be different, but some of the professional services that a company brings to the table is the process of directing, helping the partners and, and you to focus on your business goals. And of course, you know, the editing there. So, you know, video is much more than just the cameras and equipment that goes along with it. And you can see me there with the cameras and equipment coaching.

And then this is what we’re seeing here from a directorial standpoint, having people be natural in front of the camera, I’ve got a great team. We make it a fun atmosphere, and that really helps people to perform well. Getting started with your partners. We know that that’s one of the big challenges that people don’t want to be in front of the camera and a little daunting. 

We would suggest starting with some of those partners that “might be a little bit younger or might not care so much” and want to try something new. If you can find some of those people within your organization then build a use case. What we’ve seen is when that works, it will slowly morph into more people wanting to try video. And I think the COVID economy with everybody being on Zoom, has helped kind of break some barriers down to people being in front of the camera, which will only help everybody

We’ll see you in front of the camera.

As we wrap up, remember this: YouTube ad targeting isn’t just a tool; it’s an opportunity to connect with your ideal customer in a world that’s overflowing with content. Use it wisely, use it creatively, and watch your business thrive. If you’re not sure how to get started and want to get expert help, contact us to request a free quote from us.