You’ve finally decided you need video to market your law practice! You are a solo or are in a firm with 1-5 lawyers. You have convinced your partners that lawyers who do not use video will be left in the dust.
You’ve gotten the approval of your spouse and partners to jump feet-first into video. Excellent. There’s only one problem…
Where do you begin?
What equipment do you need?
What budget should you set for your video marketing efforts?
Where do you shoot your video?
What should you talk about?
How do you edit, optimize and upload and publish video online?
Is it really as simple as pressing the “Upload” button on YouTube?
How do you use social media to supplement the video?
These are just some of the questions you will have as you begin your journey to create great quality video to market yourself online.
Here’s a great way to understand video. There are five key components you need to understand:
- Planning
- Production
- Editing
- Publishing
- Complimenting & Supplementing
This article will help you understand what’s involved as you begin to create video on your own. Even if you are going to hire an experienced video marketing company to create video for you, this will help you learn what’s involved with the video marketing process.
There are two different sides to video marketing.
The first is the technical side which is all about equipment and how you use it seamlessly so there’s no technical distraction.
The second is the substantive side. How do you present your content in a compelling, interesting manner that gets a viewer interested in what you have to say and want more information?
If you cannot master both of those sides on your own, you are doing yourself, your family and your law firm a disservice. In that instance, you would be much better off hiring an experienced video company to do this for you.
WHAT TO TALK ABOUT
Let’s focus on the substantive content since this is where most attorneys fail to capture a viewer.
Keep in mind that the goal of creating video is to convert a viewer into a caller. The best way to do that is with education-based direct marketing messages.
What should you talk about?
The easiest thing to talk about are FAQ’s and answers. One topic per video. Do not include more than one topic and one answer per video. If you include multiple topics in your video, you will lose your viewer. Why?
Simple. Your viewer has a single legal problem. They want a solution to their problem. If you can give them an answer to their question, they will naturally want more information.
The next thing to keep in mind is that your viewer wants information about their legal problem. Tell a story about a case you have handled that’s similar to the question or legal issue facing your viewer. Actual names are not needed or necessary. Use the story model to illustrate what the legal problem was and what you did to help solve their problem.
Telling a story is one of the most compelling ways to transmit information. That’s how we have transmitted information from generation to generation. When you start to tell a story a viewer gets interested, as long as they realize this applies to them. This has nothing to do with why you’re the greatest lawyer or how long you’ve been in practice. Viewers don’t care about that…for the most part.
The reason why video marketing works so well is because it allows you to target your high value, high profit cases. Using video permits you to focus on the viewer who is actively searching for information about their problem.
Once you start to see who your ideal viewer is, you begin to recognize that you have much content to teach them using video. Remember, the content you provide is NOT content you want them to know. Instead, it’s content the viewer NEEDS to know. There is a huge difference.
Once you recognize that, you’ll be well on your way to creating great video content.
