How Important Is Video Content for Your Law Firm?

October 2017

Companies in every industry are adopting video content as a part of their marketing strategies. It’s not difficult to understand why: according to Cisco, video content will account for roughly 80% of the world’s web traffic by 2019. That forecast, along with many similar predictions and statistics, has pushed some businesses to move further away from written content and toward video. Which video strategy is right for your law firm?

Related: Getting Your Law Firm to Rank High in Google

Let’s get the most important factor out of the way first: your law firm can benefit from video content. If 80% of the world’s internet traffic is soon going to be ruled by video, you don’t want your firm to be left in the dark ages of purely written content. Adding video content to your site can give you several advantages, including:

• SEO boosts: Google might not be able to crawl videos for keywords and keyword phrases the same way it can with content. Even so, Google considers video to be “high-quality content.” So long as you tag and title your video content using smart SEO principles, you should get a search ranking boost from it. ?
• Embedded content: Sharing your content on social media—or getting your followers to share it for you—is a big source of new traffic for law firms. But you are relying on prospective clients to click a link and visit your site, which not everyone (by a longshot) is willing to do. Video content can embed directly into Facebook or Twitter, and Facebook even auto-plays video. This kind of embedded content gives you a significant leg up when it comes to engaging people on social platforms. ?
• Added imagery: If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a thousand pictures. Video makes it easy for prospective clients to visualize concepts that you talk about in your content. If your lawyers are active participants in the content, it can also provide a sense of who they are and what they are like to work with. All these things can help establish your brand identity and improve the memorability of your content.

As you can see, video is an exciting frontier for law firms like yours to explore. Just don’t get carried away. While video content might be the future, it’s highly unlikely that written content is ever going to disappear. Blogs, case studies, articles, press releases: these things are still important in marketing because they are easy to scan and don’t require sound. As such, you should always balance your content marketing strategy between video content and written content.

The last question is how to maintain the right ratio. Tutorials and FAQs work well as video content, as do client testimonials and brand advertisements. You will likely want to maintain written versions of those pieces of content for people who want an easy way to scan or search content. Ultimately, your budget is the determining factor. To be engaging, a video must have a professional look, feel, and sound and have quick, snappy editing. Those things don’t come cheap, so you’ll need to pay close attention to your budget when deciding which types of video content (and how much content) to produce.