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Great overview of successful attorney videos by John McDougall of McDougall Interactive and Justin Parker and Jimmy Craig of MethodLoft in the podcast below.
https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/203761369
John McDougall: Hi. I’m John McDougall. I’m here today with Justin Parker and Jimmy Craig of MethodLoft. Today, we’re going to be speaking about three tips for better law firm videos. Welcome, Jimmy and Justin.
Justin Parker: Hi. Good to be here.
Jimmy Craig: Good to be here.
John: Why is video important for attorneys?
Justin: There are a few factors there. One of the most important is that an attorney is — you’re not only selling services but you’re selling yourself. A video is a great way to let your client know who you are, what’s your body language, how do you talk, is someone going to be comfortable working with you? It’s much more personal than just seeing a stock photo or a still photo of you on the website.
John: Yeah, and too much text, which certainly people read a lot online but video is a booming trend for sure.
Justin: For sure. For a lot of attorneys, you could have a video that doesn’t need to have a lot of views, but one sale from 75 views is really a big deal and can make the whole project worthwhile.
John: And you’ve seen that happen?
Justin: Absolutely, yes.
Jimmy: It’s obviously important for attorneys to be present online. So having video is just a, what we think is a critical piece of that, especially now since videos show up in organic Google search results. Also, YouTube is the second biggest search engine. It’s good to take advantage of that.
John: What is typically wrong with lawyer videos?
Jimmy: I’d say, something we always encourage lawyers to avoid is being too sales y. Video is a really good opportunity to be more personable. Basically, just share knowledge that you already have and don’t try to be aggressive, and not sales y and not stiff.
Again, anytime we shoot a video, we really encourage lawyers to not even use a script. We’ll basically have a loose outline, but we really want them to basically just be them.
John: Yeah, a lot of times, they’re really wondering, “Who’s going to write the script, and how long is the script?” It’s a lot more likely you’ll get a less stiff take if you don’t do that, right?
Justin: Absolutely. A lot of attorney videos, you’re just seeing, like Jimmy said, “Come to our law firm because we do this.” That’s all we’re getting from them, and it’s just blending in with everybody else who does that as opposed to, “I’m just here to share my knowledge with you.” That is just a much better sales pitch, I think.
John: Yeah, so starting with the right approach, a good inbound marketing type of approach. What are the three tips to improve law firm websites using video?
Justin: One tip is just to make sure your production quality is decent. It doesn’t have to be like Hollywood extravaganza, but you probably you don’t want to shoot your videos with the webcam in your laptop. Also, a lot of people underestimate audio quality. That’s a big thing that goes into the whole production process.
John: How do they miss out on that, just using the mic that’s in the camera or is there a way to get around that?
Justin: Yeah. Different microphones are obviously going to have better quality even if they are on the camera, but you could have a boom mic that you can place right next to the subject. That’s definitely going to increase the quality. Just put it up on a little tripod. It’s not really a big deal, not a big setup.
John: Do you often can go into a separate MP3 recorder or…
Justin: Yeah, absolutely. That’s our current process, but that isn’t the only process. Sometimes, you can feed directly into the camera. It just depends on the equipment.
John: But that means you’re going to have to sync it somehow, right?
Justin: Yeah, absolutely.
John: But you think that’s worth doing?
Justin: Yeah, for sure. Again, audio quality, almost more important than video quality. They’re right there.
John: Interesting. What else?
Jimmy: Another tip, I’d say, is to be mindful of the length of the content you’re releasing. Typically, when we do an overview video for an attorney, which is basically their commercial to the world, we stick around one to two minutes, typically. We don’t really want to go too long.
We found that a lot of attorneys want to say everything they’ve done, the history of their firm, and how much money they’ve won, and how long they’ve been in the business and stuff. It’s really just highlight points. Basically, you want to think of it as, this is your bullet list. Again, people online don’t really have the longest attention spans, so we try to keep things under two minutes.
Also, for FAQ videos, that’s another thing we do with a lot of attorneys, and we keep those, typically, I’d say, under a minute, probably around 40 to 45 seconds.
John: With the overview videos, I think some of those value proposition statements, a little bit of, “How long have you been in business?” and some of those stuff is OK but as long as they can do it quick.
Jimmy: Of course. The thing is, that stuff is definitely important. It’s just, sometimes, you can get that across, too, with even a text bulleted list during the video while the attorney is saying something else, maybe talking about a specific case or something like that. Basically, you want to pack a lot of information into a short thing. But you don’t need to go into detail, basically.
Justin: Again, it depends on what kind of video you’re doing. There’s overview videos, and then there’s FAQ videos. With your overview video, maybe that’s more of an overview of your firm. An FAQ video, it’s just, here is a specific question, here is a specific answer.
So as a law firm or an attorney, you have a lot knowledge you want to share, and just figuring out which pieces of that knowledge fit into what kind of video you’re doing.
John: With the FAQ videos, it’s important to pick keywords. So you’ve seen good results with that as well.
Justin: Definitely, another tip that we would definitely recommend is using keywords, and then adding them to YouTube, and then transcribe the text of what you’re talking about in your video, and you can put that text directly into your website for SEO purposes and also take that text and import it into YouTube as the Closed Caption text. Those are other ways to be searchable for sure.
John: Those are great tips. Again, this is John McDougall with McDougall Interactive Marketing, here today with Jimmy Craig and Justin Parker of MethodLoft. See you next time. Thanks, guys.
Justin: Thank you.
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