Speaker 1: 0:06

How do I get started with video marketing? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101, I'm Toby Rosen. Unless you've been living under a rock for the last 15 plus years, I'm sure you're aware of the power of video marketing, because this isn't a new thing. Video marketing has been really popular, actually for close to a century in some ways, but we're just looking at things in a very, very different way now, and even within the last 5 to 10 years, the landscape for video has gone through an evolution that very few could have predicted, and we're not going to talk too much about all the specific platforms right now, but I will just drop in this cliche here for you. You have more options now than you have ever had to use video for marketing, and it is easier now than it ever was to create. So, no matter what platform you're going to be creating for YouTube or YouTube ads, or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or whatever it is, if you're listening to this podcast right now, I'm guessing you already have the technology that you need to create the video. The challenge may be creating video at the quality that you really want it to be at, but we'll come back to that Now. You've heard a million YouTubers tell you this a thousand times, but it really is true that all you need to create great video is just a smartphone. It would be ideal to have a little microphone and maybe a little light if you're shooting inside, but there are ways to get around all of that and that's how we come back to quality. One of the biggest fears I think lawyers have about getting started with video marketing is that they don't have the budget to do video at the quality that they really want, or they themselves they don't really want to participate, or they don't want to be on camera. And of course, there are workarounds for not want to participate or not wanting to be on camera. But my real advice for all of this is just get over yourself. It really doesn't matter how much you bill per hour or what celebrities your clients are. Even something like a selfie video is still a really good option for you. I can assure you that there's someone who makes 10 times more than you, or they're 10 times more important than you, and they're not thinking twice about making a quick selfie video for something that they're selling or marketing, and that's because they understand the value of their brand already. Just look at guys like Mark Cuban or Mark Zuckerberg or any of these CEOs who have that kind of personal public brand. They are building that brand and then they are leveraging it into business, and while they might think twice about what they're going to say and how they're going to do this marketing, you can bet that they are not thinking about twice about whether or not they're going to do the video.

Speaker 1: 2:46

Okay, so I got a little off track here, but let's come back to something that's a little more concrete. Like like I said in this little rant, the point here is that you can create video even with very little equipment. All you need is a selfie. So you might have to shift the style of the content that you're creating to fit what your budget will allow and to Sort of maximize the creative elements of your content. But that in itself is a huge discussion and we're not going to dive fully into that today. But what we are going to talk about is a couple of strategies that I really like for video marketing that you can get started with Really easily. They all have some kind of long-term value, and these strategies, I find, are just. They're a little bit middle of the road, but in a lot of ways. That's a good thing when we're getting started. It's it's easy to digest.

Speaker 1: 3:34

And first up on that list is educational content, which is broad, but you can do like quick selfie style videos for TikTok, just answering common questions, or you could do videos on a green screen or you could do them on a set where you read off of a teleprompter and Answer common questions, where you can do anything in between those two things. You could do it while you're running or while you're out hiking. Frankly, what's what's overwhelming about this type of content for a lot of firms is that you can do anything. There's so many options and there's no blueprint that works every single time. There are dozens of blueprints and some of them work, sometimes in some places, and it's kind of frustrating, but we're dealing with real people and there's just no formula for what people like every single time. Well, there sort of is, but I don't think I'm allowed to talk about it on the podcast or I have to to flag. This is explicit. But, that said, educational content itself does have a very, very high tendency to do well in the long run and for most firms we usually don't have to actually generate too much quote-unquote new content If you have a website that already has 50 or 100 pages on it, then you probably have enough content on there for maybe 15 or 20 videos already.

Speaker 1: 4:48

All you need to do is just go out and read some of the pages of your website and film those videos. Basically, if you pick a simple style for how you're gonna do things whether it's, you know, rewriting the content or just reading it literally to camera and then you can use editing apps on your phone or, more likely, you could delegate that to a younger member of your firm to do. The barrier here, you know, when you use all these pieces together, the barrier to doing great video content is it starts to fall down a little bit. But educational content isn't everything. People do look at it, they do engage with it and they will remember it. But it's not the only thing that we can do for video that has Flexibility in the, in the style that we're creating it. You might not expect it, but attorney profiles are actually something that I would suggest doing video for, or maybe at least a profile of your team as a you know, as a whole in video that can be posted somewhere on your website. You get the idea we're trying to create something here that is a little bit more Personable. It can be a little bit time-consuming and a little bit expensive to do this, depending on the size of your firm, especially if you're doing individual video profiles. But I think I might have a slightly better and, frankly, cheaper idea for you and this is a little bit edgier, I think in the legal space Maybe there's someone doing this I don't know that I've seen this specifically but I think for the right firm it could be a really interesting piece in your marketing puzzle.

Speaker 1: 6:13

So what if, instead of doing your attorney headshots and video profiles like the typical high school photo shoot thing that you do? And what if you did those as tiktoks? You don't have to post them on tiktoks, but what if you let every team member talk to camera for 30 seconds or a minute and, as part of that video, have them select their their favorite filter and then apply it, you know, with cat ears or with something funny on their face, and you don't have to forgo traditional headshots and you don't actually have to skip Traditional attorney profile videos. You could still do all of that, but what if you instead had a little bit more fun with it? Not only could you post these videos on your attorney's website bios, either in lieu of their headshots or just as a fun additional Personalization. But you could start slowly dripping out all of that content throughout all of your social profiles and start introducing your team and again giving your firm a little bit more personality.

Speaker 1: 7:12

Because the reality is that the biggest hurdle that you're going to have with video, after maybe being a bit camera shy and going through Creating the content and the first all of that stuff, the biggest hurdle is that you're gonna have to get this content in front of people, and People do like personality. They don't always want just straight, cold answers. They do like to see who we're talking about. Of course, if you've already built your audience and you're flush with leads, count yourself lucky. You have an easier time. You're gonna. It's gonna be much easier for you to get started with this.

Speaker 1: 7:45

You'll get some eyeballs right away, but for the vast majority of us, getting those eyeballs is pretty much the entire game here. So when it comes to pushing that content out, which is that last step once we've created personality, we've figured out our video content style, we've created our video, we figured out where we're gonna put it that last step is pushing out that content anywhere we can, and that's generally going to be our biggest hurdle. So we really have to look closely at how we're going to handle distribution, how we're gonna handle syndication of our content, and we have to look at a bunch of other factors that we're going to talk about In another episode. Because that's it for legal marketing 101. Check out rosanadvertisingcom for more. Thanks,