You’ve probably worked out already that we think video presents many great ways for different businesses and industries to engage with customers. In this post we will focus on just a few tips that a legal practice might employ – And through in a bit of a freebie at the end 
1, Promote Your Authority
There are hundreds of resources online for finding answers to legal questions. Understanding whether these sources are reliable or not is another matter. Video presents an ideal channel for a lawyer to engage their audience with answers to questions whilst doing so in way that carries more authority than an anonymous Q&A site.
Step 1 – Scour forums or sites like Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn Answers or Quora to see what questions are being asked.
Step 2 – Film your lawyers answering 10 of these questions. (Malpractice concerns can easily be avoided whilst ensuring comprehensive answers are given.)
Step 3 (a) – Start adding these videos to your YouTube Channel. Link them together using annotations to ensure maximum engagement with your channel
or
Step 3 (b) – Create a video landing page on your own site. Use a player such as Wistia to upload your videos and optimize for SEO and rich snippets.
Over time you will build up a large bank of answers that will either drive engagement with a YouTube channel or generate traffic and enquiries through search engines.
2, Tent Pole Programming
Predicting when a client will need your services on a day to day basis is all but impossible BUT there are certain general dates that you can play to with your content output. For the same reasons scary movies get released just before a Halloween and the relationship experts turn up on chat shows just before Valentines Day, ‘Tent Pole’ programming can work for your legal practice.
The key here is to look for predictable diary events that you can leverage content creation against. (For example, the end of a financial year may create a surge of inbound calls from clients old and new. What are the chief concerns these people have?) Create a calendar of dates and events that you can play to and create videos in advance. Release just before these dates. Such content ensures that you are relevant just when your audience need you to be.
3, Meet your team
Legal firms are knowledge businesses. There is no product that can be shown off. Essentially lawyers are working with the same raw materials (i.e. the Law!) as every other business – so how can you differentiate your team?
Produce videos that showcase your team. Who are you? Put a face to a name. This will build confidence and engagement with your firm before a client even walks through the door.
Capture your team talking about the culture of your business. Explain how you help clients, your processes, your offices, your specialties. Allow clients to get to know your business. The mere fact that you are prepared to expose your team to the camera shows openness and builds confidence with your prospective clients.
4, Meet Your Clients
Even better than meeting the team is meeting some clients. What better way to find a trustworthy and competent legal firm than through recommendation?
Have you got three or four clients that will talk about the work you do? Make it fun for them – encourage them to participate. Promote their business too in exchange.
Nothing builds confidence more than a client that will stick his hand up and talk positively about your business.
5, Educate / Webinar
Run a live Q&A session online. Pick a topic such as tax and deliver a live webinar series featuring your lawyers and have an online community ask questions. Limit it to, say, 40 minutes and take pre-registrations.
Allow participants to ask questions via Twitter using a hashtag to gain extra exposure.
Once the webinar is complete take the recording and split it into several videos for each question.
Post these video clips to your YouTube channel or again to your own video landing page. After your webinar be sure to run an email campaign that includes links to your videos.
6, Add video to your Email
Start adding video to your email campaigns. It will not only increase your open rates dramatically but it will also increase the engagement with your services. Use a hosted video service such as Wistia so that you can track who is watching your videos and how they are engaging with them. Are they finding particular sections interesting? If so concentrate other videos on these areas.
If you have run a live event be sure to include video in your post-event mailout.
7, Feedback
Use video analytics to assess what to make. Are certain videos doing better than others. If so why? Is it a particularly difficult topic or one that is relevant at a particular time of year?
Take these trends and build on them. Can you expand on these topics?
Look at in-video metrics. Are certain parts of videos getting repeated? Again, Wistia in-video analytics is a great way to determine what people are watching. Can this a particular topic be broken off to a new piece of content?
8, Pay Per View – Guaranteed views for your videos
Perhaps one of the best ways to quickly and directly engage with prospective clients is using LinkedIn Video and Google Video Ads.
That is a whole new post but as a tester – Promote this article and receive a $100 LinkedIn Video Ad Coupon.
