A 5-Step Law Firm Video Marketing Guide

Online video has become one of the most important marketing channels for a business. As a result, major social channels like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube have all taken giant steps to make videos easier to upload, watch, and share with others. 

Below, we lay out the five main phases of video marketing for lawyers—from brainstorming a concept, to producing the video, to measuring your success. We also provide some actionable tips and the most important factors to consider during each phase for good measure.

Why attorney video marketing is worth the investment

Put simply: people love videos. They are more engaging than articles, and more expressive than photos or infographics. Of all the forms of web-based content, video is growing the fastest and being consumed the most.

So, it shouldn’t come as a major surprise that legal professionals are increasingly embracing law firm video marketing. In fact, the 2022 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report found that 31% of respondents indicated that their firms produced videos to help market their practice (up from 26% in 2019).

Specifically, lawyers are using video to:

• Convey complex legal concepts
• Engage with prospective clients
• Show clients that they’re knowledgeable and trustworthy 

Understanding Your Audience

As we discussed in our article about building a law firm brand, it’s crucial to have a solid understanding of your target audience in order to properly market your services to them.

That’s especially true when it comes to video marketing for lawyers.

Before you even start to think about creating a video to market your law firm, you need to thoroughly understand what types of people are most likely to become your clients. Spend some time thinking about questions, such as:

• Where do they live? 
• How old are they? 
• What is their job? 
• How much income do they earn? 
• What religious/cultural values do they have?

After reflecting on these, you can come up with a profile for your prototypical client. This will allow you to develop a message and video concept that will appeal to them. 

One of the most important aspects of video marketing for lawyers is to provide helpful information to your audience. Along with giving potential clients the answers they need, search engines like Google typically rank useful content that’s written specifically for users higher through its algorithm—helping your firm get noticed. 

The takeaway: Having a message that resonates with your viewers is the most important aspect of effective video marketing, so don’t overlook this first step in law firm video marketing.

Writing a Script

Once you know who your audience is, the next step in law firm video marketing is to come up with a concept and craft a script. This is where a bit of creativity comes into play.

Will your video be funny? Serious? Informative? Educational? The answer probably depends on the type of law you practice, but mostly it depends on your intended audience.

Here are some examples to consider when designing your concept:

• If your firm works with small business owners: you should probably come across as professional and informative, but not overly serious. You want your clients to be long term and have a high lifetime value, so you need to show them you’ll be easy to work with and explain why you would be a valuable asset to their business.
• If your firm does criminal defense: you might have more success using a funny approach like this. You can reach a large number of potential clients very quickly when your video goes viral. Plus, it makes your firm stand out in people’s minds. Not every viewer will need a criminal defense lawyer at the time they see the video, but you will be top of mind if they do need a lawyer in the future.
• If you do plaintiff’s law: you may try using a somewhat serious and tenacious tone in your message. Prove to clients that you will fight hard to protect their rights when they have been wronged. Just make sure not to seem overly intimidating.

Once you determine the concept for your video—i.e. what your message will be and how you want it to come across to your audience—you will start actually writing out a script. This process can be the most challenging part. Plan to go through several revisions and get input from others along the way.

It’s important to focus on being concise while still delivering an enticing message that will resonate with viewers. Strive to keep your video relatively short, between 2-5 minutes. Anything longer than that is far less likely to be watched in its entirety, so you’ll just be wasting your time and money producing it.

Above all, keep in mind these two things when creating your video script:

1. What is your audience looking for when they watch your video?

The audience doesn’t really care about your personal background, where you went to law school, or why you wanted to become an attorney.

Rather, they are most likely looking for information to help them understand their legal situation. So, show them what it’s like to go through the legal situation they are facing, and why you are the right person to help them.

2. What goal are you seeking to accomplish from creating a video in the first place?

Your single most important goal from law firm video marketing is to generate new business. If your video gets a million views, but none of those viewers pick up the phone to call your office, that’s not a successful campaign with a positive ROI.

That’s why you need to give the client a reason to call you or visit your website when they watch the video, and provide a direct call to action at the end of the video encouraging them to get in touch.

Producing the Video

With your script written, you are well on the way toward having your first law firm marketing video.

This brings us to the next step in your law firm video marketing quest: record and produce the video.

If you’re not an expert cameraperson and/or video editor, you may want to hire outside help. But if you’re on a tight budget, modern smartphone cameras and webcams are high quality and they can be sufficient to get the job done. For example, this attorney has over 4,000 YouTube subscribers and she just shoots her videos on a laptop webcam.

Quality is certainly important. But a potential client is going to be less concerned with the production quality than they are the message in the video, and whether they believe you can help them. So don’t shy away from video marketing solely based on budget or quality concerns—it can be a highly effective marketing method, even when done on a budget.

Things to Consider when Producing Law Firm Marketing Videos:

• Camera: Smartphone cameras will suffice if you don’t have a higher resolution one. If you’re doing an interview-style video, you can even use your computer webcam. Just make sure to use a tripod or otherwise stabilize the camera while shooting. Nothing makes a video look low quality more than a shaky camera.
• Lighting: Proper lighting is extremely important. Again, you don’t necessarily need high-end equipment, but make sure the room where you are shooting is well lit and isn’t backlit so that the subjects in the video appear dark.
• Sound: Clear sound without any background noise is another important consideration. You can purchase a microphone for pretty cheap on Amazon. At the very least, make sure the shooting location is quiet, and speak loudly and clearly.
• Editing: Editing is pretty much a necessity. You are unlikely to shoot an entire video perfectly on one, long take. Film each segment several times, and cut the clips up to shorten the video and use only the best clips. Many computers come standard with basic video editing tools. Your smartphone app store will also have a multitude of apps to download for basic video editing needs.

Distributing your Law Firm Video

With your video finally produced, it’s now time to get it out on the internet for people to watch it. 

The reason video content is so big on the internet in the first place is for the very reason that it’s incredibly easy to publish videos and distribute them to anyone around the world, for free.

Videos lend themselves very well to sharing and they have a natural tendency to create conversations online. This makes distribution of videos one of the more effective law firm content marketing strategies out there.

Here are the most important ways and places to share your video online:

YouTube

The first and most obvious place to share your video is YouTube, which is one of the most highly trafficked websites in the world and the second-largest search engine behind only Google. In fact, YouTube has some 2.5 billion users worldwide.

Clearly, YouTube is a no-brainer, but don’t plan to stop there.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok

All other major social media channels are making much more of an effort to incorporate video content due to its incredible popularity. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok are also important outlets for connecting with your clients and potential clients. So you should be sure to share your law firm marketing video across all of these social media channels regularly as well.

For more tips on social media for law firms, be sure to check out our resources in our digital marketing hub.

Your Website

Aside from social media, you should also find other places to distribute your video. Your website is the next most obvious place. Not surprisingly, of the 31% of firms who create videos to market their firm, 68% house the video on their firm’s website.

Depending on the purpose of the video, you might want to put it directly on your home page, since videos have been shown to significantly increase conversions when they’re prominent on the front page of a website. Clio’s law firm website builder makes adding multimedia – like video – to a website easy. Videos are good for your search engine ranking, too.

Email Marketing

If you use email marketing, sending out your video in your newsletter or to your email list would be an excellent idea as well.

People may not be very likely to read an entire email or click links to read the articles you send them. But video tends to be a bit more intriguing and has higher engagement rates. Combining video marketing with your law firm email marketing strategy can be an excellent approach to try.

Measuring Your Results

Finally, you’ll want to have some way of determining the success of your law firm video marketing strategy, and that means measuring and analyzing the results.

The number of views is certainly a good metric to keep your eye on—if no one is viewing the video, it’s either not interesting to people, not useful for them, or you haven’t done a very good job of distributing it. You might need to revisit steps one and two above to come up with a new audience and/or concept.

However, views alone aren’t all that important if your primary goal is to attract new clients. The following factors also matter: 

• How many leads the video generates
• How well those leads convert into paying clients
• How valuable those clients end up being for your law firm

We have spent considerable time covering the measurement and analysis of metrics like your customer acquisition cost and ROI in previous posts, so we won’t cover them in detail here.

But mainly, you should plan to implement a lead tracking system, or CRM, to capture data about where your leads come from. This will make the process of calculating your conversion rate and ROI that much easier. Clio’s Legal CRM helps you visualize all this in one place.

The final word on video marketing for lawyers

As with any other form of marketing, don’t expect the results to happen overnight, and don’t give up if you aren’t seeing results early on.

Effective marketing is a learning process that requires a fair amount of trial and error. But with the right strategy going in, you’ll be sure to maximize your odds of succeeding at video marketing for lawyers the first time around.