Unless you have been hiding in the wilderness, you will have already realised that video content is taking the marketing world by storm. YouTube is recognised as being the most popular website after Google, and this means that marketing yourself via videos can really make or break your business.

You might not necessarily put together the idea of video marketing with a law firm. However, I believe that you can’t make it work because you wouldn’t think these two things go together. Video marketing is a great way to ensure that your law firm is recognised. You just need to get it right.

To help you, I have created my back to basics guide for law firm video marketing—the 101 guide on what you need to do to get video content right.

Get yourself set up

The absolute first thing you need to do is make sure that your law firm has a YouTube channel. It is straightforward to do, and you only need to use your already set up Google account details to do this.

Once you have set up and logged in to YouTube, the next thing to do is create your channel. You want to try and do this with a “brand account”, as this will help to make it easier.

You need to popularise the brand channel with well-written about us information and header and profile images. Additionally, you also need to ensure that you have the links to your website and your social media profiles.

Research your competition

You don’t want to copy your competition, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t get some inspiration from them. They might be doing some things that you wouldn’t think to do and others that you would want to steer away from.

There are a few things that you can learn from your competition; these include:

• How they present themselves
• How do they get their brand voice across
• What their most popular videos have been
• Their average views
• How often do they post
• The quality of their videos
• What comments do they get
• The topics that they talk about

Once you know all of this information, the next step you can take is to make sure that you find ways to make yourself different.

Learn about your audience for your law firm

If you don’t tailor your videos to your target audience, you might find it hard to appeal to them. This means that it is worthwhile to learn who they are, what they watch, and of course, what they need.

Your social media accounts will probably point you in the right direction for this information, and then you can use this to create your YouTube videos. Once you have created your YouTube videos, you can check out how they are working for you and if they are being appropriately engaged.

Inspire yourself

As well as learning from your competitors, you can also learn more about YouTube videos by watching videos that you enjoy. These don’t necessarily need to relate to law; even unrelated channels can help you understand what YouTube videos should look like and how they can work.

Not only this, but you can also use these videos to learn about the video thumbnails that they use, how they link to other content and whether or not they use any pop-ups during their videos.

Upload

With YouTube, you can either publish your videos as soon as you create them or schedule them to be posted at another time. The good news is that various tools are designed to help you publish your videos at a time that works best for you.

When it comes to uploading, you want to be consistent with when and how often you post. You should aim to always dispatch at the same sort of time of the day as your audience will know when they will be getting your content.

It is essential to think about when the right time for you is to post, but also when is going to work best for your audience. After all, you want them to watch it.

Optimise content

You may think that you can only optimise written content, but this isn’t true, and you can optimise YouTube content too. You want to ensure that your videos get through the noise of the other videos out there. This means that you need to think about the keywords that you share in your title and description, but you also need to match these to the search history that your target audience may be searching for.

Another way to optimise content is to use timestamps to break up your video (mainly if you create a longer video that you think may need to be broken up)—also, write a detailed video description.

It is also worthwhile to consider what thumbnails you are using for your video, as this is the first thing your audience will see and could make or break whether or not they want to click through and watch your video.

Optimise your law firm channel too

I have already looked at how you can optimise your videos individually, but you also need to think about how your channel is optimised. You want to ensure that your profile image and the graphics you use on your channel reflect your brand; this will ensure that your YouTube channel fits in with the rest of your social media and online presence.

Other ways that you can try to optimise your overall channel are to:

• Group your videos into an organised playlist
• Create a trailer for your channel, which showcases what people should expect to see
• End your videos by asking people to subscribe, always with a clear CTA
• Include closed captioning where you can
• Try out YouTube Advertising

Once you have got to grips with the overall idea of having a YouTube channel, you can take this one step further and try out their advertising tools.

This is a paid advertising platform. However, it has proven to help with the success of channels. The majority of advertising opportunities will come in the form of videos. However, you can also try out banner ads to get the best chance of success.

When it comes to paid YouTube advertising, it is essential not to run before you can walk; it is always worthwhile to have at least five videos already posted on your channel, allowing your audience to have something to watch when directed to your channel.

See how it is going for your law firm

The last thing to do is to try and work out whether or not your YouTube efforts are working for you. There are reports and tracking metrics available on the platform that you can use to see more information about your viewers and what is appealing to them.

This will give you a much bigger picture of how well your YouTube videos are performing and mean that you can create similar videos in the future.

Video marketing for law firms may seem like a big jump, but I can promise you that it is worth trying out. It can help promote your law firm, but it also gives you a new avenue to share content and showcase yourself as an expert in the industry.  

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Need help?

If you would like help with your marketing then bringing on a marketing consultant with a fresh pair of eyes can make all the difference. I work with B2B businesses and professional service firms in London, Kent, UK and Europe as well as specialising as a Legal Marketing Consultant. Please get in touch or book a free 30-minute consultation.