How To Use Legal FAQ Videos to Reach New Clients
In this Webinar, hosted by Tanner Jones of Consultwebs, Michael Mogill, President of Crisp Video Group, will talk about how attorneys can take their business growth to the next level with legal video marketing.
Transcription:
Tanner: Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s Consultwebs webinar. It’s entitled “How to Use Legal FAQ Videos to Reach New Clients.” And we are so excited to be able to share several great tips and techniques being used today to attract new clients online. And that’s through the use of engaging video content. My name’s Tanner Jones, I’m the vice president of business development here at Consultwebs. Consultwebs is the leading provider of web marketing services for law firms. I’m very excited to be able to announce today’s guest, Michael Mogill. Michael is the president and CEO of Crisp Video Group, a national legal video marketing company producing high-quality and engaging legal videos for attorneys all across the country as well as internationally. Crisp Video helps attorneys get noticed, build their brands and attract high-value cases, which hopefully is why the vast majority of the attendees are here today, to learn to be able to drive more clients through the internet. Now Crisp and Michael have been featured in Forbes, Avvo, the ABA, Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and many, many other high-quality publications. So, Michael, we’re very, very excited to be able to hear what you’ve got to say today.
Data-Driven Legal FAQ Videos to Educate Prospective Clients and Establish Trust
Michael: Excellent, thank you for having me. So today guys, we’re going to talk about, just as Tanner mentioned, we’re going to talk about ways to attract new clients with legal videos, particularly legal FAQ videos, the educational type of videos. So just some information about our company. As Tanner just mentioned, we’re a national, and I guess now an international, legal video marketing company. We do everything from the production and the strategy of the video content, the planning, the filming, the editing, everything comprehensive from start to finish. And our goal is to help attorneys not only enhance their brand but help them attract more cases, particularly higher value cases through the use of video.
So we’ll breeze through these next ones pretty quickly because I know Tanner’s already mentioned them. But we’ve been featured in a number of publications speaking about legal video marketing and as far some of our clients, we work with a number of legal organizations and law firms, solo small firms, medium size firms, just all over the country. So in terms of video, there’s really when you get right down to it, two types of goals for legal video. In fact, most of the content you produce, 95% of it I’d say will probably fall into one of these 2. There’s videos that are focused around building authority, so driving more traffic and leads to your website. Those are the educational FAQ videos that we’ll talk about. It’s a great way to set up your firm as a knowledgeable and trustworthy resource, it’s great for credibility and thought leadership.
And then the other type of goal can be actually conversion-focused. And so let’s say once somebody does sign you online on your website, converting those visitors into consultations and contact form submissions and so on, and that’s what the brand videos are for, and that’s how those can be very successful. This webinar will focus particularly on the personal, but we may touch a little bit on the brand videos as well.
So what are FAQ videos? Because it’s interesting and we’ll kind of delve into this because a lot of what we’ve seen online and what many law firms are doing, what they believe FAQ and educational videos be and how to use them is a little bit different from the goal that we’re talking about. So FAQ videos are short, so they’re typically about 60 to 90 seconds in length. They’re educational, so they’re very much value-driven, they’re not a sales pitch. Essentially you’re answering a question that someone may have relating to your practice area that they’re searching. Many times they may not even be searching for the name of your firm, they may just be searching for an answer to a problem or question that they may have. Of course, they’re targeted, and we’ll talk about the long tail keywords and how to do that keyword research. And then digestible. So it’s a short educational video, it’s not intended to provide a comprehensive answer, essentially it provides a short, directed answer.
So when we talk about these being very data-driven, one of the things that we’ve seen with many educational and FAQ videos that are produce is that typically they are based around the questions that an office frequently is asked. People call in, they ask questions or an office manager will say, “Well, these are the things that we hear all the time.” It’s not to say that those videos don’t have their merits, they certainly do. If you’re getting certain types of questions in terms of what is your payment policy, or how [inaudible 00:04:39] or anything along those lines, having video content can be very helpful and that you can send the link to that video, or that video can be on your website and it can be a great resource for someone. But when we’re talking about being found organically through Google search, in order to really achieve that result, the videos have to be based around keyword research, particularly long tail keyword research so that the content that you’re producing is in line with the search volumes in your market for specific long tail keyword questions.
So these are just some examples here where it says, “Is a DUI a felony?” And that one’s getting an average of 260 monthly searches for that exact long tail question. I believe that is in Marietta, Georgia. But you can produce a similar list for your firm and in your market and we’ll talk about how to do that a little bit later in the webinar.
So, why FAQ videos? If driving traffic to your website is not enough, there’s a few other benefits in terms of search ranking. About 70% of page visits are the direct results of long tail search terms and we’ll actually talk about that in detail as to what is a long tail search term. And then engagement. So people are much more apt nowadays and I’m sure everybody knows, with attention spans being so short, to watch a video as opposed to read text. It helps establish trust and credibility because it is a video that ultimately humanizes a firm and can set yourself up as an expert in your field. So when you’ve got great video content, and great video quality, you’re going to see better results in terms of conversions in the way of consultations and contact form submissions and then, of course, a return on investment on that.
Tanner: I’d like to just make a quick point on that because you’re exactly right. We found from our clients when they have engaging video content on their homepage in particular, but also their bio pages, typically the bounce rate is significantly lower because visitors are staying on the page longer to watch and consume the video. And usually, your conversion rate is going to be significantly higher because of that. So just based on the data that’s been proven across our client sites. And I also want to make the quick point to the attendees that if you have any questions that pop up, Michael you have a ton of great information you’re sharing, if we miss anything and do not address any particular questions you have, I encourage you to submit that through GoToWebinar and we’ll be able to address those at the end. Thanks, Michael.
Michael: Absolutely. And since you touched on bounce rate, some of the indicators that we look for in terms of video impacting when it comes to Google Analytics, is, of course, bounce rate, the number of pages per session and even time on site. That’s a huge one. Because you have video on your pages people are staying on the pages longer, that really helps with organic rankings, and you can really test the impact. Because one of the things I think a lot of people wonder at times is how do I really track the improvement or the impact that video is making? And you can evaluate that by setting a baseline and seeing where are your Google Analytics and metrics before you’ve implemented videos, and then tracking it month to month afterwards and seeing how that changes in terms of referral traffic, organic site visits and so on. So there’s excellent ways to see if the videos are making an impact.
Answering Questions to Drive Traffic to Your Law Firm’s Website
So in terms of the differences between brand videos and FAQ videos, we get asked this a lot, so brand videos are typically introductory videos or videos that tell the story of your firm and introduce you. But the FAQ videos which is what we’ll be talking about here are really short videos. These videos are focusing on driving traffic to your website. Because many times, a visitor isn’t searching for the name of your firm, they may not even know the name of your firm or that it even exists. They may just be searching for, well, what do I do if I’ve been pulled over, or let’s say something relating to a DUI or a truck accident or a brain injury or a spinal cord injury or whatever it may be, that may be their question and when they pull up your video, that can also help drive them to your site.
So many times it’s not just the video that will come up in terms of the YouTube video, it’ll actually be the video on your website. So we’ll talk about that in just a moment. So like I said, the FAQ videos, these are short, these are focusing on typically providing valuable information, not a sales pitch. Of course, you will want to have a call to action at the end of any video you produce. So in terms of your website, a phone number, whatever that next step for someone may be, it could be downloading an e-book, it could be a whitepaper. You could have that at the end, but FAQ videos really aren’t the place to make a sales pitch for someone. You’re providing valuable content and the aim there is just to have the element of reciprocity.
So in terms of brand videos, these videos are a little bit longer, so typically it can be anywhere from one to three minutes, I’d say usually around two or so. These are very conversion-focused. And when we say conversion, for example, let’s say you have 100 visitors coming to your page and out of that 100, 5 for example, are requesting a consultation, or filling out a form, with a high-quality brand video you can oftentimes see, like in some of the metrics that we’ve seen with our clients have been a three times increase in conversion. So out of the same 100, now 15 are submitting contact forms or booking consultations. So it can really help convert those visitors into consultations.
So before we get into the ways in which we use FAQ videos, I like to show an example of an FAQ video so you guys have a reference of what these look like and how they’re produced. And this is a video that we produced for Holliday Karatinos in Tampa, Florida. And I’ll go ahead and launch this now, and because this is Go2Webinar it may not play perfectly but we’ll give it a shot.
Jim: So there are all types of different injuries that can be suffered or sustained in a car accident. A lot of what we’ve seen are spine injuries. There are all types of different injuries that can occur in the spine. We also have, just like any other part of the body, we have joints in our neck and back. We also have ligaments, tendons that can be stretched or torn. One of the most common defenses that we hear from defense lawyers is that the spinal injury of that client had to be a pre-existing condition. The law basically says that if someone has this pre-existing condition, they’re [inaudible 00:11:13]. Just because you have a prior condition doesn’t mean you have a bubble around you that protects you. If anything, it makes you more likely to be hurt. And we can prove through science and through medical testimony that if you have a pre-existing condition like degenerative disease [SP], all that really means is that you’re someone vulnerable, that can be even worse, you’re still allowed to drive on the road. If someone hits you and they make your condition worse, they’re responsible for it.
Michael: All right, so that’s a good example there of a typical FAQ video. Of course, that video is based on long tail keyword research. And to get back to the slide, some meaning that that video, and the topic was chosen for that video based on the long tail search data in Jim’s market in Tampa, Florida. So the other thing to consider, and this goes for any video content that you produce, is really the buyer’s journey. Kind of like the weed and nurturing funnel in terms of how people make decisions and where you want to have content. So there’s really three stages in terms of awareness where people may not know the name of your firm and are simply searching for a question based on a problem that they may have. This is where the FAQ videos and the educational videos really have the most value, driving people to your website and your online property.
When they make it to your website, that’s where a brand video is very helpful from a conversion standpoint, in terms of converting that visitor or that viewer into a consultation. And then, of course, people also base their decisions based on testimonials and reviews, and having those on your website and having them online is extremely important. When it comes to video, we tend to include client testimonials within in the brand videos. So that’s a great, comprehensive way to consider any kind of nurturing funnel that you may have. It doesn’t mean that someone may come in at the awareness stage every time, sometimes they will land on your website and you’ll have the brand video there, the important thing to remember is just to have content at each stage of your funnel.
Four Steps that Law Firms Can Use to Drive Traffic & New Clients
So let’s talk about these steps. We’ll really touch on four main ones, in terms of using FAQ videos to drive traffic to your website, and drive new clients and cases, these are the four main ones we’ll talk about. One is content calendar in terms of how you’re going to schedule your content and determine the appropriate amount of content based on your goals. Your keyword research, that’s how you determine what videos you’ll actually be producing, the questions you’ll be answering, the topics. And of course, you do have to produce the videos. You either do that on your own or you hire a professional video crew. And then releasing and implementing and publishing those videos.
Creating a Content Calendar for your Law Firm’s Video Content
So the first one is creating a content calendar. Now this is where we’ll talk about as far as scheduling your video content, you want to have consistent content. So just as you would have a blog that you update consistently, you will want to release consistent video content. It sends very positive signals to both YouTube and Google. The two in line I would say, hand in hand. And your audience really wants to see you as a reliable source of new and frequent information. It’s a great way to build thought leadership. But scheduling things this way really allows you to have a plan. So if you have a marketing team or if you’re doing this on your own, there’s great ways to automate the scheduling. But you’re not just scheduling the release of the video, oftentimes it’s very helpful to coordinate releasing a video along with a blog post on that same topic, like a video blog so that you’re able to draw traffic, not just the video itself but to a blog post on your website as well.
Now here’s a thing you do want to watch out for. Just as you wouldn’t release 20 blog posts all together at once, you more than likely do not want to release all of your videos together at once. This can lead to something called subscriber burn. Meaning that too many uploads can actually stunt your growth. It can result in people missing videos, being annoyed. You wouldn’t send somebody 20 emails if you had 20 ebooks. So you do want to space these things out. And this makes sense because you can actually focus on you’re releasing each piece of content, a strategy around that. So whether it’s going out with a blog post, it’s going out in an email, it’s going up through a page marketing campaign, it’s better to space them out and focus on releasing a new video at least once every other week. That’s the typical recommendation. We say start with twice a month, that’s the recommendation from Google and YouTube in terms of really seeing kind of that perfect balance of sending positive signals to the search engines while at the same time being a source of consistency.
What you can do is, we find oftentimes depending on the number of topics that you may have, let’s say you focus on several practice areas, you may have more videos. Our recommendation is to scale slowly. Twice a month is a good measure, but if you’re finding that you’re seeing very steady growth and there’s increase, then you can try to add another video to your monthly release schedule so you can go up to three a month, and potentially four a month. The best thing to do is truthfully to check the analytics and check the results and if you find that adding an additional video beyond two makes an improvement, absolutely do it. If you see a decline, then perhaps cut it back. So that’s really the best strategy. It really depends on your market, your practice area, and the types of result that you’re seeing.
Keyword Research for Law Firm FAQ Videos
So I know we talked about long tail keywords, so what are these things? Because I know this one is…we’re going to talk about this and mention this a lot during the webinar. So long tail keywords. They’re different from your typical keywords. These are search terms that are they’re longer, a little bit more specific that visitors are more likely to use when they’re searching for problems. So in this example up here, and we’ll do legal examples instead of these, but let’s say you are personal injury. If your keyword is strictly personal injury, you’ve got to compete against every personal injury lawyer in your market and sometimes even outside of your market, even nationally. So that’s very, very competitive and the likelihood of ranking organically for that is going to be lower, unless you’re already doing comprehensive SEO. So if you add a phrase to that, so let’s say “personal injury trucking,” now that will further narrow it down so it will be more specific but it’s still very competitive.
And then finally, and this is why we say with the long tail keyword questions and topics, if for example, you find that “what should I do in a trucking accident” is resulting in a search volume every month in your market, then it’s so specific that the likelihood of ranking for that is extremely high. And what we have found is when you’re doing keyword research right, the chances of first page rankings are extremely high. In fact, we’ve seen it for over, I’d say 75% to 80% of the video topics that we release for attorneys end up ranking in the top 10. So again, if your targeting is correct. So essentially the less specific it is, the higher the competition, the higher the cost. And of course we’re talking about organic search here, so cost would probably apply to Google AdWords when wanting to rank for that term. But when it comes to organic it’s very high competition, so extremely unlikely. The more specific and more descriptive the phrase is, you’re going to see a higher probability of conversion and lower cost.
So the interesting thing about this is that long tail SEO actually accounts for 70% of all searches. And the more specific you can be, the higher your conversion rate will be. So with your market, you can be much more targeted. In this example we talk about instead of saying :Seattle personal injury lawyer” in your video, you could have a term, and again based on data, “how much is a motorcycle accident case worth in Seattle.” So we’ll have less searches, it’ll be easier to rant for and will provide you with much more targeted leads. So you also have to consider who would be searching for you and what types of cases are you trying to attract.
Now how do you do this keyword research? How do you figure out what video topic to produce content on? There’s a couple of ways to approach this. I’m sure as many of you know, when you go to type in certain terms into a Google search box, you’ll find that different topics and different phrases pop up. These are Google’s suggestions based on the top searches, and there’s software out there that can actually scrape these suggestions. Keyword Researcher is one of them, there’s several others that will essentially take all these down for you. Then what you can do is you can take that list, import it into Google Keyword Planner and you can target based on your market. And what that’ll tell you is ultimately how many searches that topic or that question gets every single month, how much competition it has, and the other people are trying to rank for it. And it will help you prioritize the videos that you produce based on real data.
So you may find that if you have something that’s very, very specific, let’s say “brain injury in Dallas,” and the question going with “brain injury” may not yield as many searches as you’d like, you may find that 25 or 50 a month in your market. But remember, because this is much more targeted, then you are much more likely to rank for it. The person who is searching for that is much more likely to be a prospective client. So even if you get 1 out of 25 who will then visit your website, as a result, it’s still a very, very good ROI. So ultimately base it on how specific it is and not always on how many searches it is because not everything may get 1,000 searches or 500 searches depending on your market. But at least this way you’re approaching it with data in mind.
And then the last thing I’ll mention on this one is when you’re doing this keyword research, you really do want to leave it to someone who can do this professionally. The last thing you would want would be to go about this and do the keyword research incorrectly, produce a ton of video content that is not targeted around the correct keywords, only to find out that when you do release them, that they aren’t ranking properly. So definitely if you have an SEO company, that you’re working and consult with, defer to them to handle this for you to make sure you’re working with an expert who understands keyword research.
Video Production – On Your Own or With a Team
All right. The next one here, let’s talk about the video guidelines when you’re producing these educational videos. So when you’re producing this content, a couple of things to keep in mind. You’ll want to keep the videos short, so it’s something that needs to be digestible. Especially if you’re including these on different pages on your website, if they’re showing up as YouTube videos, or even if you’re running a paid marketing campaign, shorter is better when it comes to educational and FAQ videos. Also, make sure that they’re direct. Answer the question right away. Because with any video you’re going to see drop off, and if you’re not answering that question right away, if you’re doing a very long introduction, a viewer may just click away and they’ll click to another video.
You do want to make sure that they’re informative. I wouldn’t worry too much about providing legal advice and that deterring someone from being a prospective client. More often than not, what we find is that providing this educational information, you’ll find that your viewers realize that they do in fact need an attorney and they do need an expert because now they’re more educated on aspects of whatever their problem or case may be. And then, of course, a call to action. Something that either directs people to the firm at the end or whatever the next step, whether it’s to call into your office, whatever action you would like for someone to take.
Tanner: And then Michael, from your experience, if you go back to that slide, what is the most common mistake that you see law firms making when they’re doing these FAQ style videos?
Michael: I would say the most common mistake is producing video content on an incorrect topic. But outside of that, I would say that the videos tend to be a bit longer. So they’re not short. You really do want to keep these to 60 to 90 seconds, and we’ve seen 4 to 5 minute FAQ videos that start to verge on actual conference sessions and webinar content when it really needs to be very short.
Tanner: Yeah, and the point you made about delivering the answer immediately upon the start of the video is applicable to so many other aspects outside of legal. As we’re all doing our own searches and watching videos for certain tutorials or seeing how something works, we’re looking for the answer right away. And people’s attention spans are very, very short on the web. So it’s a very, very good suggestion and hopefully, everyone took that away.
Michael: Absolutely. Because you’re really thinking about, when you’re producing video content, it’s providing value. You’re really trying to build trust and good faith with people who are viewing the content. And for example, let’s say that the content you’re presenting may not be applicable to them at the time that they’re searching for it and they refer it to a friend, for example. So as long as you’re providing valuable content, people will look to you as a thought leader for your practice area. That’s really the most important thing. This is one of those things where you’re giving value and not so much asking for it. The hope here is that you’re driving people to your website as a result of them watching these videos and viewing this content, and as a result of that, because you’ve built trust amongst them, now they’re more apt to contact you and reach out to you as opposed to an attorney or law firm that may not have content like this.
So I know I mentioned the one time in the life that’s the perfect segue into this. So audience retention. Now this is one of the most important factors when it comes to ranking video content. So YouTube’s not able to watch every single one of the hundreds of millions of videos that are uploaded every single day and week and month. So how are they to rank that content? How do they know what is quality content and what should rank above other content? It used to be likes and the number of subscribers and things like that. The number one thing now is based on retention and percentage of watch time. So watch time’s the biggest factor.
So the assumption, and this does make sense, is that the longer that somebody’s watching a video the more valuable that content may be. So theoretically you could have two law firms in the same market produce a video on the exact same topic, and the video that’s more engaging and provides better information will have higher retention and will outrank the other firm. So you’re going to have drop off, as with the graph here shows, you’re going to have drop off, but the shorter the video is, particularly when it comes to FAQ videos, the longer and better retention you’re going to have. If somebody starts looking at a topic and they see the video’s 20 minutes long, they’re going to drop off because they don’t want to wait that long to get an answer to a question. But if they see it’s 60 seconds long, then absolutely I think everybody has 60 seconds.
Now the next thing here in terms of planning your video, this is probably a bit more content than we’ll delve into in this specific webinar, but the biggest thing to consider here is really setting a goal before you even get started. What do you hope to achieve when you’re producing your videos in terms of your video campaign. If you don’t have a goal in mind, you definitely want to make sure that you do set one and do think about the result you’d like to achieve, whether it’s attracting specific types of cases, whether attracting high-value cases, or whether it’s attracting more cases, whatever that might be, just so you have a way to measure it as well. And that can factor in developing the concept of your video. So let’s say your goals are based around, and this is, for example, let’s say family law and you’re doing divorce, but your firm primarily works with men or with women, for example. When you’re developing your concept you’ll want to keep your audience in mind, who the viewers will be, to ensure that your messaging is in line with your viewer. So you don’t want to alienate your audience.
We see this all the time, for example, if you were a pediatric dentist and you had a video produced for a dental office, many times people think that those videos should be produced for children, as a pediatric dental office. But children aren’t the ones watching the video and selecting the dental office, it is the parents. So definitely consider your audience when you’re producing video content. And all of that goes into pre-production which is really the planning, the logistics of your video shoot, who you’re going to be interviewing, the content that you’re going to be filming. Equipment, it’s an important consideration, the quality of your video is going to directly reflect the conversion that you’ll see. Scheduling is important especially if you aim to accomplish multiple interviews and testimonials and things like that on a single day. And then common mistakes to avoid, I’m sure we’ll do another webinar on this one, but there’s quite a few to consider. And like I said, when you are planning a legal video, just realize that there’s several steps involved in this. And if you do want to achieve great results, you do want to approach it the right way.
So when we talk about creating your videos, here’s what we mean when we talk about some of the equipment. The camera, you’ll want to use an HD camera. I don’t know that it’s even possible now to find a camera that’s not HD. Technically even an iPhone would be HD. But you’ll want to record at a high resolution, and soon 4K, l think, is kind of the move in that direction. For a microphone, you don’t want to use the in-camera microphone, whether it’s on a camera or on a phone or whatever that might be, that’ll cause a lot of noise, particularly if you’re filming outside, and it can cause a lot of distortion. So a boom, a lapel mic tends to work the best. And then lighting, extremely important, regardless of how your lighting may be, whether it’s in your office or filming outside or in different areas such as a courthouse, you’ll want to make sure that the video is well-lit. And then as we always say, you can have all the best pots and pans but it does not make you a great chef. So knowing how to bring all these items together and how to bring all this equipment to produce great video content is really the most important and valuable aspect of this.
Now here’s an important item, we get asked this all the time, does video quality matter. Is what you film on an iPhone make a difference versus what you film when you’re working with a professional video production crew. And objectively, there’s a study by Aberdeen, they’re an independent consulting firm, they were actually comparing these exact metrics, seeing amateur low-quality video versus professional video, and they found that not only does it not improve conversions, the low-quality stuff, iPhone and candid stuff, not only does it not improve conversion but in extreme cases it can actually hurt conversion. And I’ll give you an example of this.
So we worked with a client about a year ago. She had reached out to us, it was a family law firm specializing in divorce. They had their videos produced by another company. And as soon as they released their videos, she found that their conversion rate dropped significantly. Phone calls dropped significantly, it was terrible. And she called us asking, “What is going on, can you guys help me fix this and figure out why this has caused this?” And we went in, we actually watched all the videos and what we found was that her firm, primarily female, their clients were about 99% male, but the videos were very female-focused. So it’s very important when we talk about quality, that we talk about not just the actual production quality because that’s very important, but also the proper messaging. So you want to appeal to the right audience and ensure that if it’s something that’s applicable to them, they can relate to the clients in the testimonials in your video and they can relate to the people in your video and the content in your video, you’re going to see much better results.
So high-quality videos, they’ve been shown to improve conversion rates by 300%, some even higher. We’ve gotten attorneys that are seeing 833% improvement in conversion. He’s absolutely crushing it in his market. But as a baseline, I don’t know that we’ve ever had one that’s been below 300%. So it definitely makes an impact. So what do we mean by low-quality videos? I think it’s an interesting comparison here. The low-quality videos, and sometimes these can be produced by a professional production company, so I don’t always mean iPhone. We have seen everything. These are videos that are not very engaging, it could be a dull background, low-resolution, no music, there’s really no value in the video. It really is just someone talking and sometimes even the content that they’re speaking about isn’t something that’s applicable to some to someone who may be viewing.
And what you can see here in the YouTube analytics is that the view duration tends to much shorter and there tends to be much higher drop off in a video like this. As opposed to a higher quality, more engaging video, these are videos that are high resolution, they tell a story, they’re engaging and in the case of FAQ videos, they’re very informative, the viewership is much more consistent. So as we mentioned when it comes to Google rankings, Google search rankings, these videos outperform the lower engaged videos because the watch time is much higher. So people are watching it in greater percentage of these types of videos.
Releasing Your Law Firm’s FAQ Videos – How, When, Where and Why
Now let’s talk about releasing your video content. At this point, you’ve put together your content calendar, you’ve figured out and done keyword research to figure out what types of video topics to produce content for, and then you went the distance and actually produced all these videos. And now, what do you do with them? So there’s a few areas where you’ll want to release your videos, one of them being YouTube. YouTube happens to be owned by Google, the number one search engine, so that makes YouTube number two. So you’ll absolutely want to upload your video to YouTube. And we’ll talk about some ways in which you can tag, title and optimize that. But let’s talk about, for a moment, the difference between some of the platforms that you can use. So we absolutely recommend YouTube. You should do it, it’s free. Facebook as well, though. So there’s an interesting study that came out from Ogilvy comparing Facebook video to YouTube video.
And what they found was that Facebook owns the day one traffic, YouTube owns the long tail. So what does that mean? Essentially what it means is that videos are more likely to go viral on Facebook and that’s because of the way that Facebook works and the way that the newsfeed works. Videos on Facebook autoplay, people share content, I’m sure that anytime there’s a current event or a story in the media you find out about it through Facebook. And Facebooks’ great at that. YouTube, conversely, is very good for search. So the long tail questions we’re talking about, the FAQ videos, Facebook doesn’t have a very good way to search for video content, so if somebody is searching for a long tail question, they’re more likely to find it on YouTube, particularly in Google search.
So what’s the strategy here, what do you want to do? We recommend uploading to both and when you’re uploading to Facebook, upload directly to Facebook, upload natively to Facebook. Don’t post a YouTube link on Facebook when you’re making a post. The reason for that is Facebook prefers to keep people on their site, and they’ve also migrated analytics, it’ll result in your videos auto-playing when people see them in the newsfeed. And if you want to take things up a notch, you can also upload some subtitles so that people can see them, and they and they don’t necessarily have to click on your video to start actually viewing the content and understanding what’s going on.
All right, so coming back to YouTube, I know we talked about uploading the videos there, how do you want to title, tag, and include descriptions for your videos? You definitely want to be considerate of those. What we often have seen that it’s the name of the firm, and sometimes let’s say two or three firm partners, because that is so long you don’t actually see…the viewer who’s searching, they may not actually see the title and the topic of the video. Instead, we recommend to optimize the title based on what people may be searching for. So while they may not know the name of your firm, they may know that you’re a, let’s say for example, Miami personal injury. So that’s going to be excellent to include. You can include your firm name and a phone number.
And if we’re talking about FAQ videos you’ll want to include your topic in the title. So typically it works best to have the city that you’re in and the practice area and then the topic of the video. And then of course, in the description you’ll want to include your website. If they’re finding your video on YouTube, you’ll, of course, want to take them off YouTube, to your site. And then the tags should be applicable. You don’t need to, just as you wouldn’t for your website, you don’t want the keyword stuff, just think about the tags that are applicable to the content of your video and your market.
The next item here is uploading a custom thumbnail. Now we used to not be able to do this. Previously there used to be a limitation so when you upload a video, YouTube would preselect maybe three options for you and you’d pray that one of the three would be acceptable. Now you can actually choose a custom thumbnail, meaning you could upload a screenshot that you choose, or if you have a title or a template flag that you’d like to include, this can be very helpful.
I’ll show you guys an example of what this looks like. Here’s kind of the before and after, the Cagle Law Firm. On their website, they had a videos page with 20 videos and each of the 20 videos looked like the thumbnail on the left. Now not only is it not the most flattering thumbnail, but it’s also very non-descriptive. And if you’ve got videos based on different topics, when you embed the video, what people will see is the thumbnail. So it doesn’t provide them with much information about the content they’ll be seeing. And then of course for branding reasons, you can make your video content embeds look much more professional when you actually upload your own custom thumbnail.
So once you get the videos up on YouTube, the next thing you’ll want to do is also get the videos up on your website. And a great place to include them is your blog. So we actually recommend for every video that you produce, you have a blog post for that video. And an easy way to approach this is you can actually transcribe your videos and the transcriptions can become your blog posts. And of course, you can update that with some supporting information, supporting content. And there’s some great services online they can do the transcription for you. Verbal Ink is one, and this one’s $1.50 a minute. So when we’re talking about FAQ videos that are about 60 to 90 seconds, it’s relatively inexpensive to get the transcriptions. So the strategy that you’d apply here would be to create the blog post, same title as your video, embed your video at the top of the blog post, and then beneath that video paste your transcription. So you’ll have the content for that blog post.
And then use schema markup. Schema markup is a way to…it essentially provides Google with more details about your video content. It really can help your videos rank higher in the search results. So it’s similar to a YouTube embed but it provides a little bit more detail. I’ll show you guys an example of what this looks like. Nothing too tricky. Essentially it’s very similar to YouTube embed but you’re adding the thumbnail URL, the duration. There’s some great resources online that will if you just search for “schema markup,” that you can just paste your YouTube link into and it will generate the schema markup for you. And then you just replace your YouTube embed code with this code, and you don’t have to figure out all this code on your own. But definitely do it. And I’ll show you what kind of impact it can make a little bit later in the webinar, but it does help with your Google ranking and it helps with the indexing.
Now I know we talked about releasing videos over time when were talking about some of the subscriber burn a little bit earlier. There’s great ways where you can schedule YouTube videos to be released on certain days and then certain content management platforms you can schedule content to be released as well. So if you do have a tremendous amount of content you can schedule it. I’ll be honest, though, while this would be an ideal, typically you do want to keep an eye on your content and with a content calendar, you can have drafts of all this content created and publish it yourself. We’ve found that the scheduling can be sometimes a little bit inconsistent so we do approach these things manually and do we do ’em on our end, but you can certainly give ’em a shot. And especially if you’re coordinating other content being released around this time, it may be best to create drafts of all your content and then release them on a preset date.
All right, so let’s get to the fun stuff here. And this is promoting your videos and driving views. Now, everything that we’ve talked about to this point has been focusing around organic traffic. So people typing things into Google search, not any type of paid marketing. And if you’re using those long tail questions and you’re doing the long tail keyword research correctly, your videos will rank. And like I said, what we’ve found is 75% to 80% of these things are ranking on the first page, in the top 10, in every single market we’ve done them. But that’s not enough for some attorneys. Some attorneys like to be as aggressive as possible. So how do you give your videos a little bit of a push to really blast them out and make sure every person who could be a prospective client is seeing your content? Now there’s a couple of ways to do this. The first one we’ll talk about here is going to be YouTube.
YouTube Video Ads and Ad Placements for Law Firms
So what you can do is actually create ads on YouTube. Now I’m sure you’ve seen these when you play a YouTube video. The video has a little ad that pops up, a video ad, that you have the option to skip after five seconds. I think we all pretty much hit skip almost every time. But the good news is, if you’re running these YouTube ads and they’re called TrueView, you’re not actually paying for that ad unless somebody has watched a required amount of time, so let’s say 15 seconds. So if they skip after five seconds, you’re not paying for that view. And the good thing is your ads can link to your website or any landing page that you choose. So this can be tremendously valuable and the cost is extremely low because there’s not a lot of competition for this right now.
Now one thing that you can do, and this can be pretty powerful, is you can actually run your videos, your FAQs or your brand videos as ads and have your videos play before your competitors’ videos play. And I don’t just mean on YouTube, I mean on their website as well if they’re using a YouTube embed. I know this sounds crazy but here is kind of a pro tip that you can use, and if you come away with one thing from this webinar, maybe this’ll be it. I’m sure everyone will remember it. But what you can do is actually with the YouTube app platform, you can target specific keywords, placements, and even channels.
So let’s say you know about all the law firms in your market and all the competing firms, and you know about their YouTube channel, you can have your videos run an ad before theirs. And again, this is one of those things which is not being done by many firms and it can be very powerful. And the thing that’s most powerful about it is it doesn’t run the ads just on YouTube. It can run them on their website too. Amazing. And we actually will talk about this at the end of the webinar, but we’ve got a how-to, step-by-step guide for how you can set this up. The thing you’ll find is actually the cost per view is so low, in this example, it’s about 8 cents per view. So you can be running these types of campaigns sometimes for $10 or $20 a week, it is absolutely amazing.
Now I’m sure you’re all asking and I can’t hear it because of the webinar, but for those of you losing your mind and wondering how do you prevent this from happening to your firm, how do you prevent somebody else from doing this to you, here’s how you do it. So by default, YouTube allows for monetization of all videos. When you upload a video to YouTube, you’ll allow ads to run on it. What you can actually do is disable that, however. So if you go into your creator studio, that’s kind of like your YouTube settings for your YouTube channel, and you click on channel settings, click on advanced, and you’ll see a checkbox that says allow advertisements to be displayed alongside my videos, and you can uncheck that. So if you uncheck that, you will protect yourself from this happening to you. So, anybody who didn’t attend the webinar, I’m sure they’re fair game. But everyone who’s here I’m hoping will take advantage of this strategy. And we actually include this in the how-to, step-by-step guide that I’ll give you guys a link to at the end of the webinar. So very powerful strategy, absolutely take advantage of it if you’re producing video content.
All right, so the next one. And I absolutely love this one. I have been such a proponent of this because I see this now as the gold rush. This is what Google Ads were 10, 15 years ago when you could get a keyword for, that was an actual keyword for a dollar, two dollars and get it every time, now the costs have quickly gone up significantly. But this is what Facebook is right now. A year from now, I think this will be different, I think all the law firms will flock to it and it will be much more competitive and saturated as these things go. But I certainly recommend promoting your videos and running Facebook ads. Through Facebook, you can get so targeted and so specific, it’s absolutely scary. You can target not just based on a zip code, and age range, and gender, but also things like household income, and the associations that someone’s a part of.
For example, let’s say you do probate, you can target people or even, let’s say, you’re focusing on asset protection or asset management. You can target based on life events, where recently engaged, or recently married. Let’s say you’re a family law attorney, target by recently divorced. It’s absolutely incredible how targeted you can be, you can target based on industry and so on. And once you kind of dig into the Facebook Ads platform, you’ll really feel like there’s been an invasion of your privacy. But the good news is, you can take this resource and apply it for good in terms of driving business to your firm and targeting it very specifically.
Examples of Law Firm Videos Getting Results
Now, what does this look like? Here’s an example. This is Calvin Lee in Gallup, New Mexico. Just to tell you how absolutely ridiculous this is right now in terms of a paid marketing platform. We produced the brand video for Calvin, and essentially on a $240 ad spend, Calvin in under 30 days received 23,000 views, over 600 likes and over 200 shares. That is absolutely incredible when you consider that dollar for dollar. Now you can think, okay, the views are nice, the likes are nice and the shares are cute. But how does that actually impact the number of clients and cases? Well, let’s take a look at that.
So if you go and look at this post, and it’s still up on his Facebook page, so you can actually see the results and they’re much higher now than the time of the screenshot. But you’ll see that there’s a lot of clients that are commenting on it. They’re saying, thank you, Calvin, that they appreciate him, how great of an attorney he is, this is great for social proof. This is great for client testimonials and so on. And if someone is viewing this and they see this, this can help drive them to reach out to Calvin. But if you scroll down a little bit further, you then see people asking questions. Do you take cases for family law? Yes, I do. So it can really help drive business to your firm and all that on a $240 ad spend. Absolutely incredible.
Let’s talk about one more. Let’s talk about some real world results. Let’s say there’s a scenario. This personal injury firm has been looking to grow their online or web presence, improve their search rankings and ultimately attract more new cases consistently in their market. I don’t know if this sounds familiar to anyone, or if anyone has similar challenges, I believe this is a challenge that every single law firm in the United States has, at least a goal that they have. So let’s talk about how we addressed it. For this attorney, we produced a high-quality brand video for their homepage. A series of high-quality FAQ videos just like the ones we discussed, same strategy that we discussed. We released them on a regular schedule. All the FAQ videos were based on keyword search data, so they were long tail keyword research data, and we released them on both their YouTube channel, their blog and also their website.
So let’s look at some of the results and we’ll talk about 30-day results. So before the campaign and then 30 days in. So we’re not even talking six months or a year, we’ll just say 30 days. All right, so first off, let’s take a look at the organic Google search strategy. Now from before the campaign started to about 1 month in, 96% increase in the website’s monthly organic traffic. No other changes, it’s just the video. All right? Let’s take that step further, because Tanner was mentioning earlier, we were talking about bounce rate, we were talking about page per session and average session duration, well here’s how the videos impacted those metrics. Bounce rate decreased 65% to 43%, the number of pages per session when up from 1.87 to 3.20. And then the average session duration, the average time on site went from one minute to three and a half minutes, a 350% increase. Now those numbers are nice, but I know we all care about where do rankings on Google search. All right, let’s take a look at that.
So one month in, organically, and what we’ve found and the video is, “What Should I Do After an Accident If I’m Not At Fault?” This is in the Miami market. We see that the YouTube video’s ranked number one, the website’s ranked number two, and the blog post is ranked number three, organically. And then number four, our friends at Avvo, so if you think that you cannot compete with the directories when it comes to organic search, this is a testament that you absolutely can. So those are some real metrics with some real data, and you can see that if you apply these video marketing strategies properly, you can really see some strong return on video. So tying this all together, when we talk about the inbound methodology, you’ve got educational videos that are focusing around generating traffic, driving people to your website. And then your brand video is the content that focuses more on conversion. And this all ties back directly to the buyers’ journey. So having content at every stage of the decision-making process.
So awareness, where they may not know the name of your firm, they may just be searching for a solution to a problem or a question that they have, that’s where the FAQ videos add value. Then that would drive them to your website, where you can have a brand video that provides a conversion for them as far as just viewing the video content and actually reaching out to your firm. And with the video content you can, of course, include testimonials and reviews. And you guys should have those things on your website anyway. So the three Cs, when we kind of break it down, it’s pretty easy to remember. That’s why we did three Cs. You want, in any video campaign, you want to have high-quality content, consistency releasing new content, new information so that you can be shown as a reliable, consistent source. And then community. So getting involved with your subscribers, getting involved with people who make comments.
Like the example that we just showed for Calvin Lee, on Facebook. When people were commenting and asking questions, Calvin was answering. And if you don’t have the time to do this, have somebody in your office who manages the page. This is the same thing goes for YouTube videos or even on your blog. If you allow comments, when people ask questions, engage with them. And sometimes, some of the most powerful ways to approach it, you know, it’s the internet. On Facebook, it can’t be so anonymous but other places online it can be. People can write some crazy things. I’ll give you an example. We run Facebook ads, we actually run some of our metrics and the success stories of those Facebook ads, and we always have the sour attorneys, it happens every week that they say “I don’t believe it, BS, that didn’t happen.” And we always leave those comments up. In fact, we actually replied to that comment with a link to that attorney’s law firm so they could absolutely reach out to that guy and ask them themselves. So that can be very powerful. So you don’t always need to leave any kind of negative feedback, it can actually work in your favor at times.
Summary
Let’s bring it all together in summary. You’re using these short, educational videos that drive traffic, you’ll want to create a content calendar before you get started so you’ve got a plan for releasing your videos. Use real data to plan your video topics, to choose the topics that you’re going to do. Create high-quality videos, those are going to outrank the lower quality videos, and of course also help you with ranking in general because those will have a higher watch time. Optimize your videos, use the right tags and titles so that you’re targeting properly. Upload and optimize your video for YouTube, embed your video on your blog. When you’re embedding use schema markup. And then you can promote your videos. One of the ways we mentioned is others as well, but if you have to pick two to start with, YouTube and Facebook are a really great way to do it. So I want to thank you guys. I know that How to Run Ads on your Competitors’ Channels, I’m sure that’s popular. If you guys would like it, just visit our site, crispvideo.com/vipguide, and we’ll send that to you as a PDF. And I’m happy to answer any questions that you guys have.
Tanner: Great stuff, Michael. Thank you so much. Lots and lots of good, good tips there. There are a few things that stood out to me. We do have some questions that we’ll address here, but there are a few points that really rang true to my mind. Several of the attendees may be very aware of Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and that he had in his second habit that he mentioned was begin with the end in mind. And a lot of things that you mentioned, Michael, was basically think through this before you start on a video strategy. Everything from the keyword research, to the intent, to the messaging, to ensuring that you’re addressing the answer first, call to action later, the demographic, everything you were saying really goes back to start with the end in mind. And don’t just jump into this and assume that it’s going to work for you because it’s not, unless you have a plan that you’ve laid out. And obviously you’ve been doing this for a long, long time and helped a lot of law firms generate cases from it. So that’s one thing that really stood out to me and just seemed to echo time and time again throughout this webinar.
Another point you made, Michael, was the fact of recycling the content. Now you alluded to this in the beginning, but I think there are several other things that I want to stress here is that if you do an FAQ video or you do a brand video, there are several places that you can push that out throughout the web and leverage it to the fullest degree. But you can also use it to promote to your existing client base, or when you have prospective clients that call in the office, whether it’s from the video or from search marketing efforts or paid advertising or any other traditional advertising, utilizing that video to get in front of those prospective clients, maybe when they’re on the fence of considering your firm, it can be another great way to leverage that video content and really help to establish a strong brand. There’s also the fact of marketing automation, whether you’re using Captura which is a really great software system to implement marketing automation and stay in front of leads or any other system like that, you can pull in your video content into that and drip that out to prospective clients and existing clients. So you can get a lot of leverage from a single video.
Q&A
But with that being said, let’s jump in to a few of these questions. One question, just to quickly address, “Can we get copies of these slides?” And the answer is absolutely. We will be sending those out. We’ll send the webinar out, a recording of it, and we can also include the slide share in the email as well. Lots of good comments and feedback. Michael, one question in particular was when you showed the video example earlier, there was background music playing. And they’re asking basically is that something that’s required? Is it necessary? It seems like it can be annoying to some people.
Michael: Yeah, that’s a great question. So with the background music, what that helps is determine the video itself. When we’ve actually measured this, and it’s interesting because this past week we were at a legal conference where I was showing the difference between background music where there’s no music and then you add music, and it’s pretty striking. Objectively the data shows that the videos are much more engaging, you see a much higher watch time when you do have music, it’ll also be very professional. You always have to remember that many times who is your viewer and who are you marketing towards. In some cases it’s prospective with clients. So you have to think about what would appeal to them and what would engage them versus yourself. And then at times, let’s say most of your business comes through referral from other attorneys. And then in that case you’re producing video content for other lawyers. So always consider the audience, but I would say that almost 100% of the time, the videos with music outperformed the ones without music.
Tanner: Great. Another one, you gave a lot of information that’s basically do-it-yourself. And so the question is, is it more cost-effective to buy your own equipment, set up your own video studio in your own firm? Or is it more cost effective to outsource it?
Michael: Great question. For that one, I would say is it more cost-effective for you to practice law, or is it more cost-effective for you to create websites and produce your own videos? And I would say almost every single time because we have seen this for years, before the attorneys, they’re considering the cost and it’s the biggest factor, they go and try to do it themselves. They’ll produce the videos, they’ll spend a tremendous amount of time, and energy, and resources producing that content. They’ll release the video content, and then they’ll find that the videos really are either not seeing any response whatsoever, or sometimes they’ll hurt their rankings. And when you really consider all that time and the equipment that you have to buy, the planning that you have to do, the keyword research that you’re doing, filming and editing the content, releasing it, and think about how you could’ve spent that time growing your law firm and focusing on working with clients and cases. It’s just one of those things where it’s probably not the best option.
Now you can produce your own content. Let’s say something pops up in the news and you want to address it quickly, it’s relevant to your practice area, you can record a quick video. It could be on a webcam, and people can be a little bit more tolerant, we find, when something is timed around a current event. So we find that that ends up being a little bit more tolerable, and you can actually see great results from it. So you can do Facebook Live, or you can just record a YouTube video and send it out. But that’s really the only time where we’ve seen candid video content be effective in terms of driving traffic or driving conversion. So in terms of buying all the content and doing it yourself, I have yet to see a case where this works out and ends up driving results, but more importantly as a business owner myself, there’s certainly things that I don’t delve into so I can focus on the areas where I’m the strongest and I have the most value. And for all other aspects, we hire outside competent vendors that we trust, and they execute, and that has allowed us to scale tremendously.
Tanner: Very good. I agree with that, Michael. Well said, and very well delivered. Like I said, tons of great information provided here. Thank you so much. For the attendees, I did drop in a link to your free giveaway here, “How To Run Ads on Your Competitors’ YouTube Channels.” So there’s a link there in the comments field. You can grab your copy today. I certainly encourage that. Michael, thanks so much. We most certainly appreciate you sharing this great information.
Michael: Excellent. Thank you for having me.
