As the dynamics change, so do the skills and attributes required to be successful in marketing activities. GrowthPlay‘s Alycia Sutor‘s insightful statement, “The skills that got us to where we are, won’t be the skills that get us to where we need to be,” resonates deeply with us and inspired us to apply this thought to marketing efforts – because great leaders and team members that law firms seek out and rely upon to build a law firm’s brand and execute marketing strategies aren’t born. They’re developed.

So let’s delve into the qualities that define a great legal marketer in 2024, with a focus on resourcefulness, claiming professional space, curiosity, project management, and embracing failure as a part of growth that culminates and allows professionals to become their law firm’s most powerful marketing tool.

Uncovering the Missing Pieces in Your Law Firm Marketing Plan: Resourcefulness

In the legal marketing realm, resourcefulness has become a cornerstone attribute. Legal marketers often find themselves navigating through the complexities of law firms, extracting valuable information from time-strapped lawyers, legal assistants, and practice group leaders. Being willing to go the extra mile, from reading legal literature crucial to understanding terminology, and having the humility to seek expert guidance when needed, defines a great legal marketer.

5 Actionable Steps to Be More Resourceful in Legal Marketing

In the pursuit of professional growth and development (and most everything, if we’re being honest) taking actionable steps is the only way to progress, especially when it comes to goals that may not feel measurable, such as being more resourceful.

We’v explained why resourcefulness should be part of your law firm’s marketing strategy before, and now we’re sharing 5 actionable steps to improve your law firm’s marketing efforts with increased resourcefulness:

1. Forge Strong Relationships: Cultivate connections with lawyers, legal assistants, and practice group leaders to facilitate open communication and collaboration. Establishing rapport makes it easier to extract valuable insights and information.
   
   Your relationships with these professionals is a living thing, not a box you check. It takes continuous effort.
   
2. Embrace Continuous Learning: Stay updated on legal literature and terminology to enhance your understanding of the industry. Invest time in self-education to broaden your knowledge base and better navigate the intricacies of law firm marketing. This is a great step to combine with forging strong relationships with the attorneys in your law firm. Showing interest in understanding their niche practices or client alerts allows you to learn and strengthen those bonds.
   
3. Leverage Technology: Digital marketing is no longer an option, but an imperative. Utilize digital tools and resources to streamline information-gathering processes. From online research databases to communication platforms, technology can expedite data collection and facilitate collaboration.
   
4. Seek Mentorship and Guidance: Don’t hesitate to seek guidance from subject matter experts or experienced professionals within and outside your organization. Embrace humility and recognize when expert advice can enhance your marketing strategies.
   
   Some of our most impactful professional bonds, opportunities, and clients have come from our involvement in the Legal Marketing Association. Get out there and connect with your community – you’ll be amazed but what can come of it, both professionally and personally.
   
5. Think Outside the Box: Be creative and innovative in your approach to problem-solving in your marketing strategies. Explore unconventional avenues for obtaining information and insights, such as attending legal seminars, networking events, or engaging in industry forums. Embracing a proactive and resourceful mindset will set you apart as a standout legal marketer.

Claiming Professional Space: Marketers as Business Professionals

The legal marketers of tomorrow must be unyielding in claiming their space as business professionals within the legal industry. In a field where lawyers may appear intimidating, the shift from being a task taker to a strategic business advisor becomes paramount if you want to successfully implement and execute law firm marketing strategies that reach prospective clients. Marketers need to be comfortable pushing back and asserting their value, ultimately influencing business strategy discussions and securing a seat at the table.

5 Actionable Steps to Claim Your Professional Space in Legal Marketing

Not sure how to stake your claim within your firm or department? We’re back in action with more steps that make a difference:

1. Position Yourself as a Strategic Partner: Actively position yourself as a strategic partner within your firm by demonstrating a deep understanding of both legal and business aspects. Engage in conversations about business strategy, showcasing how your marketing expertise can contribute to achieving firm objectives.
2. Build Credibility through Expertise: Continuously invest in expanding your knowledge and expertise in legal marketing and broader business concepts. By becoming a subject matter expert, you enhance your credibility and confidence when engaging with lawyers and firm leadership.
3. Initiate Collaboration: Proactively seek opportunities to collaborate with lawyers and other key leaders on marketing initiatives. Offer insights, propose innovative ideas, and actively contribute to discussions, demonstrating your value as a collaborative partner rather than just a service provider.
4. Advocate for Your Ideas: Don’t hesitate to advocate for your ideas and strategies, even in the face of resistance or skepticism. Articulate the rationale behind your proposals, backed by data and industry insights, to showcase the validity and potential impact of your contributions.
5. Establish Boundaries and Assert Professional Boundaries: Establish clear boundaries regarding your role and responsibilities as a legal marketer, and assert these boundaries confidently. Communicate your expertise and value proposition effectively, ensuring that your contributions are recognized and respected within the firm hierarchy.

Curiosity: The Power of Asking “Why”

Curiosity is the driving force behind a great legal marketer. The ability to consistently ask “why” helps uncover the underlying motivations and assumptions within a law firm marketing strategy. By questioning decisions, lawyers, and clients, marketers gain a clearer understanding of the firm’s dynamics and goals. Embracing the power of “why” positions marketers as invaluable contributors to strategic decision-making.

5 Actionable Steps to Increase Curiosity that Strengthens Your Law Firm Marketing Strategies

Speaking up and questioning the status quo might go against everything you’ve been taught, but it’s how we achieve progress, streamline inefficiencies, and build stronger professional relationships. Here are 5 ways to professionally implement the “but y tho” mentality for your benefit.

1. Challenge Assumptions: Actively challenge assumptions and preconceived notions by asking probing questions during meetings, brainstorming sessions, or strategy discussions. An excited attitude helps turn your questions from Debbie Downer to Strategic Sally. Encourage colleagues to rethink their perspectives and consider alternative viewpoints, fostering a culture of critical thinking and exploration.
2. Seek Deeper Understanding: Prioritize seeking a deeper understanding of the motivations and intentions behind decisions made within the firm. Engage in conversations with lawyers, clients, and other leaders to uncover underlying drivers and objectives, allowing for more informed and strategic marketing tactics.
3. Facilitate Open Dialogue: Create opportunities for open dialogue and discussion by organizing forums, workshops, or informal gatherings focused on exploring the “why” behind various decisions and strategies. Encourage participation from diverse perspectives to stimulate innovative thinking and collaborative problem-solving. Think tanks don’t have to be grand or formal. Thought leadership can happen in small spaces, and even over Zoom!
4. Utilize Data and Insights: Harness data and insights to support your curiosity-driven inquiries and validate hypotheses. Analyze market trends, client feedback, and performance metrics to identify patterns, correlations, and opportunities for improvement, guiding informed decision-making processes in your firm’s marketing strategies.
5. Continuous Learning and Development: Cultivate a mindset of continuous learning and development by actively seeking out new knowledge and expanding your skill set. Stay informed about emerging trends, industry best practices, and cutting-edge technologies relevant to your marketing campaigns, empowering you to ask more insightful and impactful questions. Being known as a curious and lifelong learner will not only boost your understanding but also your professional standing amongst attorneys.

Project Management Excellence: Meeting Lawyer Expectations

Managing the expectations of lawyers, notorious for being tough to please, requires strong project management and execution skills. The best legal marketers excel in organizing, prioritizing, and executing flawlessly. Beyond individual tasks, they communicate effectively with leaders, ensuring a seamless flow of information while meeting deadlines in a dynamic legal environment.

We always say legal marketers wear many hats, and project manager is one of them. But what if that’s not your strong suit? We’ve got you covered.

5 Actionable Steps to Strengthen Project Management Skills in Your Marketing Methods

1. Implement Clear Project Planning: Time is everything in industries that bill hourly, and there is NO time to waste if you want buy-in from attorneys on your law firm marketing plan. Begin by thoroughly outlining project objectives, timelines, and deliverables in collaboration with lawyers and other leaders. Establishing clear expectations from the outset sets the stage for successful project management and helps align all parties involved.
2. Utilize Project Management Tools: We love a few tech tools… or more than a few, actually. They are game-changers. Leverage project management tools and software to streamline workflows, track progress, and allocate resources efficiently. Platforms such as Asana, Trello, or Microsoft Project offer features for organizing tasks, setting deadlines, and facilitating communication among team members. We have a few friends over at Society 54, and they have a business development and marketing goals project management system created exclusively for legal services, and it’s incredible.
3. Effective Communication Strategies: Develop and maintain open lines of communication with lawyers and your colleagues throughout the project lifecycle. Regularly update them on progress, address any concerns or challenges promptly, and solicit feedback to ensure alignment with expectations and priorities.
4. Prioritize Tasks and Manage Resources: Prioritize tasks based on urgency, importance, and impact on project outcomes. Allocate resources effectively, considering factors such as skillsets, availability, and workload, to optimize productivity and minimize bottlenecks.
5. Adaptability and Flexibility: Remain adaptable and flexible in response to changing priorities, deadlines, or unforeseen challenges that may arise during project execution. Anticipate potential risks and develop contingency plans to mitigate disruptions while maintaining a focus on meeting lawyer expectations and delivering high-quality results.

Embracing Failure: Part of the Growth Journey

Listen, nobody is harder on themselves than legal marketers. BUT… what if, instead of spiraling from a perceived failure or setback, we… actually learned from it!?

Great legal marketers comprehend that failure is an inherent part of growth in the dynamic field of marketing. Recognizing that strategies that succeed in one setting might not apply universally, they are willing to challenge the status quo and experiment with new approaches. Understanding that failure is not the end but a stepping stone to improvement, they navigate the fine line between risk-taking and consistently delivering positive results.

5 Actionable Steps to Embrace Failure from Your Law Firm Marketing Strategy

Here are some actionable ways to stop the spiral and embrace the silver linings and growth opportunities that come from embracing failure.

1. Shift Mindset Toward Learning: Reframe failure as a learning opportunity rather than a setback. Encourage team members (and yourself) to view failures as valuable experiences that contribute to personal and professional growth, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and resilience. When you start practicing this with others, it becomes much easier to do for yourself. Extending grace is a gift that pays back tenfold.
2. Promote Experimentation and Innovation: Create a supportive environment that encourages experimentation and innovation in marketing strategies. Empower team members to test new ideas, approaches, and techniques, even if they carry a risk of failure, recognizing that innovation often arises from trial and error. We’re all floating on this giant rock that’s traveling through space. Why do we mention that? To remind you and ourselves that everything we do is a test to be better and that rules, processes, and operations improve by constantly testing the waters.
3. Conduct Post-Failure Analyses: Following unsuccessful marketing initiatives, conduct thorough analyses to identify root causes, lessons learned, and areas for improvement. Encourage open and honest dialogue among team members to extract valuable insights and apply them to future endeavors. This isn’t the blame game but a collaborative way to improve.
4. Encourage Risk-Taking with Calculated Measures: Encourage calculated risk-taking by establishing clear parameters and guidelines for experimentation. Encourage team members to assess potential risks and rewards, weigh alternatives, and make informed decisions based on data and insights to minimize adverse impacts. Our best and brightest ideas come from thinking outside of the box.
5. Celebrate Progress and Effort: Celebrate progress and effort, regardless of the outcome, to foster a positive and supportive work culture. Acknowledge and reward team members for their initiative, creativity, and willingness to take risks, reinforcing the importance of embracing failure as a natural part of the growth journey in legal marketing. Don’t just stand there, pop some bottles!

In conclusion, thriving at a law firm marketing agency, or global provider of legal services in 2024 requires a unique set of skills and attributes. By embodying resourcefulness, claiming professional space, fostering curiosity, excelling in project management, and embracing failure, legal marketers can navigate the evolving landscape and contribute significantly to the success of their law firms or agencies.

The post Thriving in Law Firm Marketing: Skills and Attributes of a Great Legal Marketer in 2024 appeared first on By Aries.

That’s what is so great about the Legal Marketing Association and the collective community of passionate and brilliant legal marketers – the benefits and support never stop!

If you weren’t able to make it to LMA’s 2023 Annual Conference or missed our recap of the LMA ’23 session By Aries Founder, Jessica Aries, and Executive Producer and Founder of Kates Media, Rob Kates, presented, you can find it all here:

How Law Firms Can Use Video Marketing Effectively & Strategically | 2023 LMA Annual Conference Recap

We know session recaps and resource downloads often miss one of the most beneficial components of an in-person session at a professional development conference – the Q&A portion. Those provide feedback from the audience and clarification from the presenters, and we think you deserve that, too!

That’s why the By Aries team has taken an even deeper dive into their LMA ’23 presentation and pulled out the common questions we were asked after the session, which happen to be questions we regularly receive from clients and prospects regarding successful video marketing strategy.

Go All In on Video Content

Whether you made it to LMA ’23 or not, you’re likely already sold on the power of video marketing. In today’s digital age, you understand that video content has become an essential tool for marketers and really isn’t an option any longer if your firm is seeking engagement and building trust with their target audience.

With its ability to convey stories, emotions, and information in a dynamic and engaging format, video marketing has emerged as a dominant force in the realm of digital marketing. Despite video consumption continuing to rise, many questions often surround the practice when it comes to implementing video marketing strategies effectively.

So let’s get to the most commonly asked questions about video marketing we heard at LMA ’23, as well as what we routinely hear from clients and prospects when it comes to best practices, tips, and misconceptions.

Common Questions About Video Marketing Strategy Asked and Answered

1. When working with a client, does By Aries usually use paid services when developing strategies around “search” or knowing what people are searching for? What about paid video ads?
2. If a firm feels they are too conservative to use a YouTube channel, what other social media platforms does By Aries recommend for leveraging marketing videos?
3. Some clients are fearful of their online videos being manipulated or misused. What’s By Aries take on that concern?
4. How do you get buy-in on video marketing from firm leadership and attorneys?
5. How do you handle putting out a disclaimer on your video content?
6. What does By Aries recommend for video captioning?
7. Boutique and smaller firms are using short-form video marketing, but what about the big firms?

When working with a client, does By Aries usually use paid services when developing strategies around “search” or knowing what people are searching for? What about paid video ads?

The short and straight answer about paid search tools and search strategy is a hard YES!

We are an agency that creates a lot of video for our clients’ digital marketing strategies, and we absolutely take advantage of paid tools to make the most impactful strategies. Whether it’s free or paid, you should ALWAYS start with search when developing your campaigns – key video marketing statistics are crucial to strong strategies.

Great video engagement for law firms is impossible to achieve without a thorough keywords research. We provides details about free and paid search tools in one of our recent blogs:

Law Firm Video: How to Build the Best Youtube Channel

Take a minute to review ways to optimize your videos with search, and check out one of our favorite search strategy tools, TubeBuddy to optimize your YouTube videos.

If a firm feels they are too conservative to use a YouTube channel, what other social media platforms does By Aries recommend for leveraging marketing videos?

The honest answer here is that nothing else has that search engine optimization powers that YouTube has, and you’re missing out on a ton of value and ranking power if you skip on YouTube. YouTube should be your foundation and home for marketing video content, and other social media platforms should be used as a supplement – not to mention the analytics and insight YouTube provides! It’s truly a powerhouse, and the world’s second-largest search engine. It’s a must, in our humble opinion.

If you’re not quite ready to share videos with the world but are still building a collection or wanting to create videos to use internally or embed, we recommend using Vimeo or Muse.ai, which is terrific for embedding and editing.

Some clients are fearful of their online video content being manipulated or misused. What’s By Aries take on that concern?

Is the infiltration of Sony’s internal network, hactivist groups like Anonymous, and the never-ending news cycles about data breach have taught us anything, it’s that nothing is this digital world is ever 100% safe.

At the end of the day, you have no control over external forces taking any of your content, video or not. We’re in a digital world in which safety is an illusion. You can put your video in the most secure place and somebody can still access is, edit it, and make it something completely different from what you’ve intended – and that’s the same with any sound bite, white paper taken out of context, or even the glossy legal photos and ads printed in annual law firm rankings.

Ultimately, you’ve got to look at the balance of what you’re losing versus what you’re gaining. If your strategies run on fear and play the safest card, you’re already playing a losing game. We’ve always found the risk to be well worth the reward (and ROI).

How do you get buy-in on video marketing from firm leadership and attorneys?

When it comes to showing value and obtaining buy-in from leadership (and even the most video-resistant partners), analytics are your very best friend!

Test the waters of video, and show them what you find! Pulling in actual data and being able to show leadership the viewership, the comments, the questions that come in directly from your video views will do the talking for you.

One of the biggest struggles we face as marketers, especially video marketers, is being able to attach the customer journey or the client journey to the work we do. laying the groundwork and pulling the reviewing the metrics are worth the effort every single time, despite how time-consuming it feels on the front-end.

They can buck trends all they want, but they can’t deny data!

How do you handle putting out a disclaimer on your video content?

We include a small written blurb in the caption of video posts, especially on TikTok when it comes to “legal advice” that isn’t technically legal advice.

By Aries has many attorney clients who proudly show up on camera and make it clear they are sharing their perspectives and unique experiences, and are sure to mention that everyone’s legal needs require personal attention and assessment from their own attorney. This is a more casual and conversational way of addressing that issue, but we also know attorneys are sticklers on putting disclaimers in writing.

By Aries will put disclaimers in the video caption on Tiktok or Instagram where it’s all about quick hit/watch time, and we use the actual content section where you can share your social blurb or takeaway to provide coverage and reduce risk. We also will put it on the actual channel page, Tiktok homepage, LinkedIn bio that these videos are for entertainment, etc

What does By Aries recommend for video captioning?

By Aries will always recommend optimizing video with captioning, not just for the hearing impaired but for ease of use digital video viewers. Video captioning boost views, as many people are scrolling through short-form videos in quiet or public spaces – providing your audience with the option to read what you’re saying keeps them from swiping next if they’re volume is low or turned off.

We like to use varied video format with two versions of videos so we can upload a non-captioned version to platforms like LinkedIn that auto-generate the captions to avoid duplicative and overlapping captions. Different digital and social channels have different requirements and practices. Take time to research the online platforms you want to use for short-form video to know if you should upload a captioned on non-captioned version.

Boutique and smaller firms are using short-form video marketing, but what about the big firms?

The common gauge most law firms use to decide if they’ll agree to a marketing strategy is whether or not other law firms, Big Law, are doing it. They err on the side of caution and rarely want to step outside the box and try something new or different for the first time.

Spoiler alert: Big Law knows the benefits of video marketing and is taking full advantage. We researched and analyzed video footage for over a year to create the Law Firm YouTube Index 2022, which delves into the video practices of the AmLaw 200 firms – check it out for yourself! Again, the data doesn’t lie. Video is IN for the biggest names in legal.

Still getting pushback from firm leadership on launching an effective video marketing strategy? We get it. Lawyers are inherently cautious.

Instead of announcing to firm partners that you’re creating an enormous video marketing campaign, you should organically include digital and video marketing efforts within their regular social media marketing campaigns. What do we mean?

Turn the graphic for what you’d include on your firm’s social media posts into animated videos by adding moving elements or making the graphic a loop with sound – it still looks like a safe and approved graphic but will draw more views and engagement simply because it is video.

Instead of using a still image from your firm’s client event or attorney presentation, use event videos and add your firm’s standard branding to it for use in a blog post or email campaign. You’ll be amazed by the boost in engagement with actual video, and you’ll get the numbers you need to sell firm leadership on the unlimited powers of video marketing and have leadership lining up to get started with video marketing!

Pretty sneaky, sis!

Video marketing is a powerful tool that can significantly enhance your firm’s reach, engagement, and conversion rates. By understanding its importance, utilizing various video formats, and having the answers to the most common questions surrounding video creation process and the practice of an effective video marketing strategy, you can boost engagement, build authority and trust, and expand your firm’s reach.

Still unsure about our most favorite pillar of digital marketing or need strategy and video editing support to get your campaign off the ground? Schedule a call with us to discuss how we can help you perfect your firm’s digital presence and outperform all of your marketing goals with our video planning, creation, and support from By Aries!

The post Unlocking the Power of Video Marketing: Common Questions Asked and Answered appeared first on By Aries.

By Aries Founder and Digital Marketing Strategist, Jessica Aries, and Executive Producer and Founder of Kates Media, Rob Kates, were asked to build and present a session on the ways law firms can effectively and strategically use video marketing in 2023 and beyond, and we’re giving you all those details.

Let’s get to it!

Law Firm Video Marketing Objectives Covered Here

1. How to build a video marketing strategy that sets your firm apart and generates visibility for your law firm’s services.
2. Insight into what prospective clients care about and how to better build video content that gets the attention of your target audience.
3. How to generate buy-in with your law firm leadership to launch your first video campaign.

Marketing Strategy for Engaging Law Firm Videos

Take Advantage of the World’s Second-Largest Search Engine

If we had a dollar for every time a law firm Partner told us they wanted to rank on Google…

If you’ve been a part of a legal marketing team for any amount of time, we’d bet you’ve heard this request too, and you might even have allocated a big chunk of your marketing budget for Google Ads. While that’s perfectly ok, we want to let you know that you might not get the highest ROI on those paid ads if you’re not posting video content strategically on a certain platform.

Guess what platform is the second most utilized search engine (behind Google), is owned by Google, and whose algorithms work to boost ranking on Google. It’s a platform used by 80% of the Am Law 200 firms…

YouTube Videos!

YouTube helps your video marketing strategy and makes it possible to:

• Find out what your target audience is searching
• Build chapters into your video content
• Publicize your efforts with links and icons
• Create videos of various lengths
• Repurpose valuable existing law firm content such as webinars and white papers
• Get insight on performance metrics

There are a number of best practices and ways to optimize your law firm channel on YouTube, and we’ve broken them down for you here: Law Firm Video: How to Build the Best YouTube Channel.

Cross-Post on Other Social Media Platforms

When it comes to boosting your brand, you know that consistency is key! If you’re taking the time to develop legal marketing videos on one platform, you will only hit your maximum ROI if you post across other social media channels regularly.

While it might be a controversial topic with the talking heads on the news, short-form video platforms like TikTok are here to stay and are a crucial part of a law firm’s video marketing strategy.

This isn’t just a passing phase or a strategy we found via crystal ball. We’ve had a massive influx of law firms approach us over the past year to help them create targeted TikToks, Instagram Reels, and Facebook videos. And guess what… those law firms are, in fact, routinely booking prospect calls and engaging with new clients who found them on those platforms.

We could go on endlessly about the powers of short-form video adapted for various platforms and cross-posted to boost visibility, encourage engagement, and build credibility, but this is a quick recap. Plus, we’ve already broken down all the details for you on the best practices and strategies of short-form video marketing for lawyers:

• TikTok for Lawyers | Six Tips for Getting Started with Short-Form Video for Lawyers
• TikTok for Lawyers: The Ultimate Guide to Marketing with TikTok for Law Firms
• 10 Lawyers on TikTok to Follow
• TikTok for Business? 4 Reasons Professionals Need Video

We highly recommend taking a deep dive into these resources, as well as our entire Video Marketing Hub for Lawyers. Fair warning, though: once you realize how powerful these platforms and your attorney’s video marketing efforts are, you’ll be inclined to talk endlessly about making video content a pillar of your law firm marketing plan.

What Existing Clients, New Clients, and Prospective Clients Care About

Many firms mistakenly jump into video marketing with glossy tours of their new offices, overworked and out-of-touch virtual holiday cards, or a lengthy reel of rankings and awards that most potential clients know (or care) little about.

So what do potential clients care about? Authenticity.

Your audience wants an authentic version of your law firm and attorneys. And at their core, they want what your clients want: help. Paying clients seek legal services because they’re not equipped to understand or apply the law. Show them that you are!

Great ways to promote your expertise, build rapport, and genuinely connect with your audience with lawyer video marketing are:

• Video testimonials from actual clients you’ve helped with a particular legal matter
• Professional videos of your attorneys describing their practice areas and their experience
• Explainer videos that break down a complex service your legal practice provides into digestible bites
• How to videos on legal processes
• Personal background of your attorneys, why they decided to practice law
• And even video advertising that highlights your firm’s differentiators and willingness to serve
• Educational content you’ve presented at conferences
• Video of client alerts and news feeds that already live on your law firm’s website
• Practice area overviews from a law firm website in video format

Inform Your Strategy

In addition to ensuring your legal videos are valuable and authentic to your audience, to enhance your legal video strategy, review viewer data such as location, age range, and traffic source to optimize content for your audience.

Metrics and data should be your guides for creating effective law firm videos. If you’re taking the time and spending resources to incorporate video into your marketing strategy and produce high-quality branded videos, you should use the traffic data to inform your legal marketing strategies. This should be done for video and across all aspects of your marketing efforts.

Need a little help with which metrics to measure? We’ve got you covered. Check out this breakdown of 4 digital marketing metrics that help you get a better understanding of what your audience cares about:

4 Digital Marketing Metrics to Measure | Your Scorecard for Success

Whatever your clients’ unique needs may be and whatever the topic is that drives them to seek out and engage with your content, the bottom line is:

• The future of all content marketing is video-first.
• Everyone has their own brand and will need to utilize videos to promote it.
• Authenticity will become the new currency with online video.

Get Law Firm Leadership On Board with Video Marketing for Lawyers

Legal marketing departments are usually ahead of the trends and have been pushing their firms to incorporate video into their outreach strategies for a while. It’s leadership that is often the push-back on the issue of creating marketing videos as a strategy.

We get it. Regardless of firm size, most of the legal industry tends to toe the line, and stick to what they’ve always done. They only break from their standard marketing practices if and when the big firms do it. So, what are other law firms doing? Which of the big law firms are using video, and in what ways are they optimizing their reach?

Over 80% of Am Law 200 firms recognize the importance of having a branded YouTube channel and promoting their firm via online video. Yeah, the big names in the business are doing it because it’s effective, and we have the stats to back it up.

Kates Media and By Aries spent over a year collecting details, data, and gleaning insight on how Big Law is using video marketing for lawyers, and we’ve wrapped it all up into a nice package for you.

Gain access to the statistics you need to show the value of video to your firm.

Download our Slide Deck for Making the Case for YouTube Videos.

It has all the data and details that matter most to law firm leadership. It clearly demonstrates that the future of content marketing for lawyers is video marketing for lawyers. It’s time to jump aboard the video concept train before it leaves you in the dust!

Whew! We hope this “short recap” of our effective video marketing for lawyers session at the 2023 LMA Annual Conference was helpful. We know it can be overwhelming to dive headlong into a new marketing strategy like law firm video marketing, but remember these points when making your case for video content in an effective marketing strategy:

• Master how to build video marketing strategies that set your firm apart and generate visibility for your firm’s services.
• Gain insight into what clients care about and how to build better video content that gets their attention.
• Learn how to generate buy-in with your law firm leadership to launch your first video campaign.

It’s also important to recognize when you need to engage with outside support to supplement your in-house marketing team with high-quality video that reaches your audience and serves a purpose. The By Aries team is always here to perfect your digital presence, including video marketing.

From digital audits to campaign strategy, creating video scripts, and a professional video editor, we are your go-to video marketers! We’re equipped and excited to partner with professional service providers like legal professionals to help them reach their clients and grow their law practice with effective marketing videos that make an impact.

Learn more about the support By Aries can provide, and schedule a call to discuss your goals with online marketing.

The post How Law Firms Can Use Video Marketing Effectively & Strategically | 2023 LMA Annual Conference Recap appeared first on By Aries.

Set Up a YouTube Account for Your Law Firm

Youtube is  the most popular site for promoting law firm video, and it’s free to set up a professional-looking and branded channel. With YouTube being a subsidiary of Google, content you add to your channel becomes more visible and helps your law firm rank higher on Google searches.

Speaking of ranking…

What Factors Does YouTube Consider When Ranking Videos?

You consider open rates in email marketing and best time of day to post on social media for increased engagement, and you should absolutely be strategic with your law firm video marketing strategy when it comes to your YouTube channel.

What does Google/YouTube consider when evaluating content to promote? Key factors in video titles, tag descriptions, and keywords are important. You know how important keyword research is in your other forms of digital marketing. It’s no different here!

Conduct Keyword Research

Strong video for law firms is impossible to achieve without a thorough keywords research. Optimize your videos descriptions with in-demand search terms to increase views. The autocomplete feature of YouTube’s search bar is a great place to start and automatically provides queries according to popular search results.

Make sure you’re searching a bit yourself or using keyword research tools to find out what your client base searches to determine keywords which are the most relevant in your practice area. We recommend using TubeBuddy to optimize your YouTube videos. Of course, comments, responses, and views are important components for visibility within YouTube, but that’ll come naturally to your firm if you implement these best practices.

Beyond the titles, tags, and keywords you use when you create content for YouTube, the actual videos themselves are a pretty important factor in visibility and growth.

Video Content for Law Firms: Create YouTube Videos Your Audience Wants to See

Videos market your practice and can be used in conjunction with other marketing initiatives to reach clients and prospective clients. In fact, we bet you already have a backlog of webinars, trainings, and explainer videos that you should include on your YouTube channel.

We will NEVER stop preaching the powers of repurposed content, especially when its content that has already performed well on other social media platforms. If you don’t have a treasure trove of video already to use and need help getting started, we have you covered on tips to get started with law firm video and some intel for improving your video marketing efforts across the board!

You can find a wide array of useful and relevant info on Youtube for just about anything you could ever want to know. We find the most successful firms create videos that are cohesive and consistent in their branding and offer users informative videos that help explain complex legal issues or explain how their specific service and experience served their clients well.

Whatever video idea you use, just be sure the information you include is valuable, worth your client or prospective client’s time, and positions your firm and attorneys as leaders in the industry.

How to Get More Views and Subscribers on YouTube

Now that you have a channel and know what kind of video content to include, let’s get down to a number. Specifically, we’re talking about the number of videos on your channel.

Have a High Number of Videos Posted

Posting videos regularly and providing plenty of content is one of the most important things to make a YouTube channel stand out and rank in YouTube’s algorithm. Uploading videos to YouTube establishes your authority in your field, improves your reach, and can eventually lead to a bigger book of business. Getting started from zero is not a simple task, and nobody wants to take the time to view a firm’s channel with a handful of videos that don’t add value.

Increased Views Unlock Optimized Features

Having regular viewers and people engaged with your channel is another important metric.  YouTube will not let you add advanced features, like a custom URL, without at least 100 subscribers. You have to start somewhere, and that backlog of well-performing videos we mentioned is an excellent place to start.

Once you have some views under your belt, you can utilize more features from YouTube to increase visibility and drive more traffic to your website and other social platforms. In a nutshell, here are the best practices for a high-performing, optimized channel.

Optimize Your YouTube Channel

Optimizing a YouTube channel is important for increasing the visibility and engagement of your content. Here are some steps you can take to optimize your channel:

Create a Strong Brand Identity

Your channel should have a clear and consistent brand identity, including a recognizable profile picture, banner image, and channel art that reflects your brand.

Optimize your Channel Description

Your channel description should be clear and concise, and include keywords relevant to your niche. It’s also important to include links to your website and social media profiles.

Create a Compelling Trailer

A channel trailer is a short video that introduces new viewers to your channel. It should be engaging, visually appealing, and highlight your best content.

Organize Your Content with Playlists

Playlists make it easy for viewers to find specific types of content on your channel. Organize your videos into playlists based on topic, format, or series.

Use Keywords in your Video Titles and Descriptions

Including relevant keywords in your video title and description can help your content rank higher in search results.

Engage with Your Target Audience

Respond to comments and create a community around your channel. Encourage viewers to like, share, and subscribe to your content.

Analyze Your Metrics

Use YouTube Analytics to track your channel’s performance and adjust your strategy accordingly. Pay attention to metrics like watch time, engagement, and traffic sources.

By following these steps, you can optimize your YouTube channel to increase visibility, engagement, and ultimately grow your audience.

See How AmLaw 200 Firms Do YouTube

We think informative and helpful videos stand the test of time to build business and that most firms will eventually have their own YouTube channel. If you’re wondering how Big Law does YouTube and how you can do it better, we did a year’s worth of research and analyzing to deliver the stats on who is doing it well and how your firm can do it better. Check out our Law Firm YouTube Index 2022.

The post Law Firm Video: How to Build the Best Youtube Channel appeared first on By Aries.

Tip #1: Don’t Copy Other Law Firms; They Are Doing Video Marketing for Lawyers and Firms Wrong or Poorly

A lot of attorneys and firms come to us because they see their competitors create videos, and they want to do it too. The problem lies in the fact that most law firms are doing video online the wrong way.

How do we know this, you ask? By Aries just spent the last year in tandem with professional video editor and producer, Kates Media, reviewing the Am Law 200’s YouTube video content. After careful analysis, it’s become clear that many firms are doing firm and attorney video marketing very poorly, and sometimes entirely wrong.

Want to understand what we mean? You can download a copy of the report and review it for yourself.

If you think your clients want videos that talk about your law firm’s prestige or history, you’re wrong. Clients and potential clients want informative content that’s answering their questions. This is the foundation for one of our most successful campaigns, FAQ Fridays, which allows us to answer common questions we field from clients and prospects.

FAQ videos perform phenomenally and lay the groundwork for your target audience to seek your expertise on their most pressing issues. What is it that your prospective clients want to know? That leads us to our next tip.

Tip #2: Your Law Firm Video Marketing Strategy Should Start with Search

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. And TikTok, the one website that has overtaken the king of all search engines, Google, as the most trafficked website in the world, is prioritizing search results. What’s the significance and how does it pertain to you?

So, if you want your law firm video to work – you need it to be seen. The only way your firm and lawyer video will be visible and gain traction on social media platforms is if you create videos that your prospects and clients actually want to watch.

The way to make videos easier for the algorithms to promote to your clients is to grasp for what your clients and prospects are searching. Get inside the minds of your clients and prospects, and do some searching online to see what results and terms are most used.

Answer their questions with an engaging video that includes a call to action and points to specific web pages on your firm website or requests online engagement from your audience. This is the right strategy to boost visibility to your prospects, who might not even realize yet that they need a lawyer.

Our next tip is to…

Tip #3: Your Videos Should Directly Reflect Your Clients’ Needs

We see a lot of law firms and lawyers invest heavily in video only to make video marketing content that feels like corporate fluff. Your legal practice focuses on real issues, and so should the video on all of your social media accounts.

Although the “corporate fluff” video content is beautiful, it has the opposite effect of what you’re hoping to do with your video marketing and is just background noise that interferes with that your audience wants to hear.

We’ve been on many panels with in-house counsels and heard their biggest concerns. They need law firms that understand their businesses and operate less like cost centers and more like value centers. So, when your firm produces a video that showcases its beautifully designed New York office in the most expensive part of Manhattan, what message are you really sending?

Your video is not sending the message that you’re chic and cutting edge, you’re sending the message you’re expensive. As clients across the country are operating on leaner spend in preparation for a potential recession, they aren’t thinking about which law firm has the prettiest office, they are thinking about which law firm understands their business and needs.

In lieu of flashy legal marketing that highlights your swanky digs, create video that addresses a particular legal matter your prospects would find informative, create explainer videos on a legal process your audience wants to understand. This type of video makes your firm an approachable authority that sees and understands its clients’ needs.

You may already have created a backlog of blogs which answer burning questions. Convert your target audience on Facebook and the likes into website visitors by sharing videos that give a quick overview of a blog post or attorney article on your website. This is a great opportunity for legal firms to increase the value on valuable content they already have.

Speaking of clients… use their satisfaction to your benefit by creating video testimonials. Many clients are happy to allow you to share their success with your firm via video. Quote your clients and have an attorney explain exactly how well you alleviated your clients’ concerns. This brings us to our next tip…

Tip #4: Effective Video Marketing for a Law Practice Should Focus on Human-to-Human Relationships

Video marketing is one of the fastest and most effective ways to instill a personal touch and help acquaint your prospects and clients with you. Yet, a lot of the video content that firms produce is repurposed webinars, fluff pieces showcasing their offices and locations around the world, or text graphics on branded backgrounds that feel inauthentically cold.

Remember how we mentioned that clients want to work with lawyers they know, like, and trust? Successful video marketing should focus on bringing forward the lawyers who do the work via rich storytelling that’s engaging with the audience and utilizes video marketing platforms, like YouTube and LinkedIn, to build relationships and deepen connections. Even Facebook and Instagram are prioritizing short-form video. Every platform is just as hungry for a strong story as are your clients and prospects, so don’t only think of this as creating YouTube videos.

So how can you illustrate your firm’s values and commitment to providing excellent service in a strong story? Market your firm with a focus on lawyer video marketing. One way to do this is with “day-in-the-life” video content. Humanize the legal industry. Show new clients and prospects your approachable and committed associates and partners, and allow them to provide personal background and connect with your audience on social media channels and your law firm website with candid interviews.

Don’t forget to focus on the content your clients crave to guide your interview questions. Set your attorneys up to offer advice and engagement on specific issues your potential clients face.

This type of footage coincidentally also performs really well when it comes time to recruit new laterals and associates too. Remember, a law firm is only as good as its lawyers, so invest in video production that will showcase their humanity and optimize client connection.

While lighting, sound, and all the technical elements of video production are important, video marketers will tell you authenticity will be the marketing tool that bridges the gap to your business development and marketing goals with videos.

If you want to build rapport with your prospects and clients and stack your deck with very effective recruiting tools, it’s better to grasp the skills necessary to create effective video content now rather than later when it’s too late. 

It’s clear that video marketing won’t just be a luxury that some lawyers use to develop business. It is quickly becoming an everyday part of marketing that clients expect to see.

Continue to check back in with us for more coverage on videos and other effective tactics to include in your ongoing strategy for success!

The post Video Marketing for Lawyers | Tips for Improving Law Firm Video Marketing appeared first on By Aries.

And it’s a message every change-averse law firm needs to accept and incorporate into the ways they message and reach their clients and target audience.

Video has become an essential advertising platform for businesses of all kinds, and we’re not just talking about businesses with tangible goods to feature in sales ads. We’re talking white-collar, niche service providers. The more highly technical your service, the better suited for video messaging your communications are – looking at you, law firms!

Many professional service firms are now releasing communications to clients, including in-depth client alerts, in the easiest and most digestible format possible: short-form video. Don’t believe us? Seriously, there are some legal pros dropping truths and raking up followers – take a look at 10 attorneys who have taken full advantage of the reach and power within law firm video content.

Why Are Attorneys and Professional Service Firms Turning to Video Marketing?

The bottom line is the data for us (data is our favorite), and video advertising is powerful. Consider that this year alone, Americans spent 23 hours a month on YouTube, and that’s just on their phones. In addition, a desktop or laptop computer user can almost double that amount of time spent poring over YouTube video content.

If you’ve spent ANY time on other social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram, you know firsthand that the 23 hours of screen time a month on YouTube is additive to the amount of time social media users are spending consuming video content.

No matter the platform, you can’t escape the prioritization of video.

Video has proven to be a powerful brand-building tool, ensuring that firms can establish trust and build credibility with established and potential clients through its use. If you are speaking to your target audience in any way, that messaging can be more optimized and promote your firm’s brand better when video content is your medium.

One of the biggest reasons that video is so successful at boosting your ROI and converting prospects is its vast reach and place on every single platform, and half of online users say that video is the most engaging form of outreach (and that number is growing).

We’ll dive deeper into the various video platforms and formats for best practices, but rest assured that this is not a fleeting trend. Video is here to stay, and you’ll likely be seeing much more of it as the platforms continue to prioritize video, pushing your target audience back to your website and ultimately to you for service needs. It’s a no-brainer.

Truthfully, we believe more law firms will look back on video like they look back on the old days of SEO and wish they had started sooner.

Do We Need to Hire Someone for Law Firm Video Marketing?

Most savvy legal marketers have been urging their practice groups and C-suites to think outside of the box and make use of law firm video for a while. While we have seen an increase in the use of video marketing to create law firm videos, we can’t help feeling that there’s a huge opportunity to shift how law firms approach video marketing.

In our analysis of the Am Law 200 firms with YouTube Channels as part of the Law Firm YouTube Index 2022, we found that many firms are making video marketing content to help elevate their brand visibility and engage with clients and prospects. However, the way law firms use and develop video content as a part of their digital marketing efforts feels like an afterthought driven by what’s currently available in a firm’s repository of video content (which is typically webinars).

Over 80% of the Am Law 200 law firms have a publicly accessible YouTube channel. Yet, only a few of them are using a strategic approach to their video marketing content. It’s clear that many firms approach YouTube as a video repository instead of a strategic visibility platform and the second most popular search engine in the world.

So many firms invest heavily in producing video content only to have it never be seen or viewed. Thus, hiring a video marketer to help firms understand the value of utilizing YouTube and other video platforms more strategically is a clear choice.

Furthermore, when it comes to production, we highly recommend law firms invest in the tools and resources to either produce high-quality videos or hire a qualified outside executive producer like our friends at Kates Media.

Law firms are seeing the writing on the wall regarding video marketing. A few weeks ago, Ackerman’s Chief Marketing and Client Development Officer Iris Jones revealed at the Legal Marketing Association Southwest Regional Conference that her firm is investing heavily in video marketing and production – equipping many of their offices with on-site video studios. 

For those looking to outfit their own video production studios or learn more about the equipment we use to film our short-form videos and YouTube videos, we recommend checking out our Video Marketing for Lawyers Hub, which provides a full equipment list.

This is the future of big law firm video marketing, which we predict will only become more prevalent with time.

Video Marketing for Lawyers By Lawyers

The Face of Your Law Firm – Who Should Be on a Law Firm Video?

Clients and prospective clients may be faced with difficult choices when choosing their trusted legal advisors, so why not make it easier for them and show them who you are and why you’re the expert. You can create compelling content on various platforms that differentiate you from the competition. Easily and affordably.

Give your potential clients a solid understanding of your firm with an overview of each practice area, the key benefits of engaging your firm for legal services, and to establish the ever-important emotional connection through authentic storytelling. You’d be shocked by how engaged users even become for the simplest how to videos and FAQ videos on what are standard and widely-known processes and practices in legal.

But where are you creating content to go? Why not to the world’s second-largest search engine? Pro-tip: you can repurpose any and all of your YouTube videos to use across platforms – boosting that ROI one upload at a time.

Types of Video Marketing for Law Firms

YouTube Video Marketing

What YouTube is

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and a database of user-uploaded video content, and best yet… it’s a free platform, YouTube was bought by Google so it’s no wonder that Google prioritizes video in its search engine.

How YouTube is Used

YouTube is a creator’s platform. Individuals and corporations upload millions of videos every year to YouTube’s native platform in the form of entertainment, educational videos, movie trailers, music videos, video and TV show clips, shorts, and documentary films.

Many businesses and professionals use YouTube as a content marketing platform. Since YouTube has such a robust search functionality, it is a vital discovery tool for many professionals, allowing them to reach new audiences and potential clients.

How to Do YouTube Video Correctly

Many professionals mistakenly believe that uploading video content alone will help them build an audience. But using YouTube correctly to market your content requires planning and a strategy.

The most important part of your YouTube strategy is ensuring your content is searchable on YouTube. This is where Google’s “People also search” functionality and paid tools like Answer the Public, Aherfs, and Ubersuggest can be helpful. Some of the most informative and value-packed videos a law firm or lawyer can make are FAQ videos optimized for search.

Once you have a searchable phrase, you’ll want to see how hard it will be to rank for those keywords using a tool like Tube Buddy. Tube Buddy can be a great tool for understanding the competitiveness of your law firm video content and ensuring you have an optimized description and chapters.

In addition, a tool like Tube Buddy can help your firm identify your thumbnails’ effectiveness, track competitors, and help you identify what type of content to develop for your audience. Remember, video marketing aims to develop business and generate awareness for your firm, so catering to what your key prospects and clients want to see is key. Tools like Tube Buddy helps make this easy for marketers.

How to Build an Audience on YouTube

Building an audience on any social platform requires consistency. We’ve found that consistency on YouTube is best achieved by batching content development. We recommend batching every phase of YouTube content development to ensure success. Maintaining a regular filming schedule can help ensure you stay on track of your filming goals and produce sufficient content to keep your YouTube channel thriving.

The first thing you should know when you start building a brand is how to market the services you offer effectively. The same holds true for the video marketing industry. You must know who will become the most likely clients before creating a law firm video. We’ve covered client personas before, if you need a refresher.

At the end of the day, the key advantages of a YouTube channel are that if you play to the YouTube algorithm, you will grow your audience and niche and therefore your client base quickly.

Lawyers on YouTube

Not to harp on it too much, but we really do understand how reluctant firm leadership can be to try something as what they see as new. Thought leadership and ground-breaking is usually reserved for the courts and filings, but there are plenty of lawyers blazing the trails on video marketing, and here are a few of our faves to spark your creativity and give you the “OK” to think outside of the marketing box… even if your biggest competitors haven’t YET done so.

For examples of Big Law firms doing video marketing well, we highly recommend downloading our Law Firm YouTube Index 2022 where we showcase the top 25 firms using law firm video most effectively as a part of their digital marketing strategy.

For a few firms outside the Am Law 200, we recommend checking out the following channels:

• McBean Immigration
• Jillene Doolkadir
• Erika Kullberg

These are just a handful of some effective law firms and attorneys creating professional videos with impact, but YouTube is just one piece of the video marketing pie.

LinkedIn Video Marketing

What Is It

You know LinkedIn. In fact, you’re probably most comfortable on that platform, and it’s an incredible space to include video online.

LinkedIn is a B2B professional networking site that’s recently shifted its focus to video allowing the cross-posting of video content from various platforms and even introducing micro-video introductions via its LinkedIn profile.

Everything Lawyers Need to Know About LinkedIn

We could give an entire seminar on the powers of LinkedIn – no really, we mean it. We actually offer LinkedIn training for professionals, but we’ve also created an entire hub for lawyers who want to harness the professional powers of LinkedIn. Check it out!

Facebook Video Marketing

What Is It

You likely know Facebook, the social platform that allows users to create free profiles to connect with friends, family, colleagues… and engage with businesses online.

Though younger generations are migrating towards more video-centric platforms, like TikTok, Facebook is still supreme amongst a more mature demographic, and it includes video.

How It’s Used

You’ve probably noticed a few variations of video on your Facebook feed. Like the other big names in social media, Facebook utilizes an array of video, including:

1. Linked Video
2. Native Video
3. Facebook Stories
4. Facebook Live
5. Facebook Video Ads

Whether you link video content from your firm’s website to convert Facebook audience into your firm’s website visitors, upload video as native files to live on your firm’s page on Facebook, or step out of the box to use the live video feature or the time-sensitive stories feed, Facebook is a tremendous and changing platform that’s making a real push for video.

How to Do It Correctly

There is quite a lot of power behind Facebook’s targeted ads if you want to invest the money in promoting certain videos, but we strongly suggest doing some old-fashioned trial and error with your videos prior to paying to play on Facebook.

Create a few different types of videos that all coordinate with your marketing strategy and upload them in various ways – natively, stories, lives, etc., and see what kind of response you get. Use this data to inform the types of videos you want to create in the future or which videos perform well enough to promote with ad money.

How to Build an Audience

Facebook is a more relaxed platform and is a bit less buttoned up than your average LinkedIn audience. This platform is a great place to have more fun with your video content and grow your audience by showing your law firm’s more fun side. Check out a few ways to grow your audience here.

Instagram Video Marketing

What Is It

How did a photo app wind up on our video marketing platform list? Well, you can thank the ever-changing algorithms and focus on aesthetics for that. Instagram is an app designed for mobile users, and it’s well-known for its artistic appeal.

As one of the biggest content-focused apps, Instagram has lead the pack of social platforms in creativity and offers various options for video now. Instagram’s user base is enormous, and the platform provides a unique opportunity to target your audience and flex your digital prowess.

Don’t worry if your video skills aren’t quite Spielberg level – you can always create video cover pages that fit nicely with your law firm’s existing Instagram grid (ask your gen Z marketing colleagues about the importance of the grid and get ready for a dissertation).

How It’s Used

1. Instagram Stories
2. Instagram Video Feed
3. Instagram Live
4. Instagram Reels

Instagram Stories

These are the time-sensitive videos you see at the top of your social media platforms – the click-through kind meant to be short and sweet and disappear in 24 hours.

These are great ways to feature behind the scenes content, day in the life style, and to re-share posts and videos from other accounts. You can even opt to save your time-sensitive stories to your firm’s highlights on its Instagram profile.

This is also a great way to utilize Instagrams engagement features on stories – try asking your audience a question with a poll or some trivia with FAQ videos – you’ll be amazed by how many responses you receive on videos that feature educational content. Pro-tip: use a direct link to your website on the law firm video your use in stories to help Instagram users become firm website visitors.

Instagram Video Feed

Your IG video feed in your standard native video upload, and videos up to 60 seconds can be posted to live on your firm’s profile. These posts can include tags of people and businesses, garner likes, promote engagement with comments, and you can share these posts to your stories, as well.

Instagram Live

Instagram Live allows users to stream directly to their followers and appear at the top of the platform feed with the Instagram Stories. Law firms can make use of Live to demonstrate interesting yet commonplace processes such as entering court, packing up for big depositions, attending continuing legal education, or prepping for an event.

The Live feature is to promote authenticity and build genuine connection with an audience. Going Live presents risks of the unknown or inadvertently including information or scenery a pre-recorded video wouldn’t, so take caution when going live and make sure people around you know they’re on live streaming video!

Instagram Reels

This is Instagram’s response to the explosion of TikTok, and it’s a super short and sweet way to do video marketing. Instagram’s Reels are 15-30 second clips created on the app or from an upload from your phones library.

We like to use Reels by repurposing TikTok content or creating a very short hype video or succinct overview of a broad topic and direct viewers to our website for the full breakdown of the topics we cover.

How to Do It Correctly

As we mentioned, Instagram is made for mobile users, so portrait mode is key when filming for Instagram. Try to avoid turning your camera/phone landscape.

Like TikTok, you need an engaging hook to grab viewers’ attention, and it’s best to look “Instagram pretty” when you do.

What About TikTok for Law Firm Video?

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it one hundred times:

TikTok is for business, and TikTok is for lawyers!

We know this is a lengthy overview of what your law firm should be including in your marketing strategy, so we’ll save you some time and skip right to the chase on this section and tell you literally everything you need to know about using TikTok to promote your law practice:

TikTok for Lawyers: The Ultimate Guide to Marketing with TikTok for Law Firms

Listen, we know TikTok is new and still feels like the wild, wild west to some more traditional firms, but what if we linked this popular short-form video platform to a widely-accepted marketing concept most every member of firm leadership wants to know more about: SEO!?

Do we have your attention now? We had Attorney At Work’s attention on this subject. Check out the SEO for TikTok article By Aries founder, Jessica Aries, wrote and then try to tell us TikTok isn’t for professional service firms like legal!

Phases of Law Firm Video Marketing Production

We know legal loves a blueprint or formula. You should know the By Aries team’s background is in legal, so we absolutely adore a well-developed plan of action, too.

We’ve outlined below the phases of content development for marketing video to give you a better idea of what law firm video marketing looks like:

1. Keyword Research
2. Scripting
3. Filming
4. Editing & Post-Production
5. Optimization & Upload
6. Promotion

Beyond having a clear batching process for each phase of content development, we recommend having clear call-to-actions that align to your overall channel strategy.

For example, if your goal is to grow your channel, your strategy around your channel on YouTube might be to include subscribers in giveaways and offer them special promotions. Whereas, if your channel strategy is focused on client development, you may include call-to-actions related to downloading whitepapers and guides (like this one) and encouraging your subscribers to learn more about you and your services with special landing pages and offers.

Equipment to Consider

When it comes to equipment, there are so many options out there, we know. That’s why we created the By Aries Video Marketing Hub for Lawyers, which includes recommended equipment for anyone just getting started with the early stages of law firm video marketing.

If you’re looking to generate leads, engage potential clients, boost conversion rates through the right strategy, get a closer spot to the top of search rankings, and promote the benefits of the manner you practice law, then video production at some level must have a starring role in your law firm’s marketing strategy and place on your social media channels.

See How the Big Firms Are Doing Law Firm Video Marketing

Want to know how the biggest names in the legal industry are approaching law firm video marketing… and how you can do it better? We did the heavy lifting and wrapped up all the data in a nice, pretty bow.

We objectively ranked Am Law 200’s YouTube channels based on a weighted scoring of their use of more than 15 accepted YouTube best practices proven to increase engagement and improve ranking in the YouTube algorithm for search, providing you with the blueprint for video success.

Ok, so now you’re convinced of the necessity for law firm video but still need help including this important aspect in an effective marketing strategy for your firm?

Reach out to us to learn more about data-driven legal marketing insight and cohesive strategies to use across your social media channels and email marketing campaigns to engage with existing clients, show up in search engines, and build new business. Honestly, video makes everything more elevated and engaging. Give it a try!

The post Video Marketing for Lawyers | How to Get Started with Video Marketing appeared first on By Aries.

Lawyers often question if using social media would actually be beneficial and if it would make a marked difference in their firm’s and personal brand’s visibility.

We get it. The evolving social media platforms and viral crazes can seem a bit juvenile and daunting, but the numbers really don’t lie. Social media is imperative for business.

We’re not here to convince you that your firm needs social media to succeed in their marketing efforts… because it’s factual; however, we are here to shed some light on why your firm should step outside of its comfort zones and into the newest and fastest growing social media platform: TikTok.

Why Professionals Need TikTok and Short-Form Video

If TikTok makes you immediately recoil, shouting “TikTok is for kids and dances” in objection, we’ve got good news for you. 

Not sure if you’ve read, but Google is no longer the number one search engine in the world anymore for Gen Z. In the top spot now is TikTok, and that ranking has Google concerned. A senior official at Google recently said that Google sees TikTok as a threat.

Now, we know how much lawyers spend to stay on top of search. We see lawyers throwing thousands of dollars into SEO, Google Ads for keywords that matter, and investing countless hours into getting positive reviews on Google, then working hard to optimize their Google Maps listing.

This means, if you’re investing heavily in Search, then you should also be investing in short-form video platforms like TikTok.

What is Short-Form Video

You may have managed to shy away from TikTok until now, but short-form videos are nothing new to any business who already has a social media presence on other platforms. If you don’t have a strategy around short-form video content on your other platforms, let alone TikTok, whew!… YOU ARE IN THE RIGHT PLACE. 

Let’s get to it. Simply put, any video under 60 seconds is considered short-form, with the optimal length between 31 and 60 seconds.

See, nothing scary about that. You’ve probably been creating these types of videos and animated graphics already, right? So what are the different strategies or ways to take advantage of the growing hype behind short-form videos, especially on TikTok?

Here are 6 tips to get started with short-form videos on TikTok and beyond.

Tip #1: Identify Which Platform to Make to Use for Short-Form Video Marketing

Ok, let’s see if you’ve been paying attention. What is the fastest-growing social media platform that uses short-form video? If you guessed TikTok, you guessed right.

Create Your TikTok Account

Start by setting up your account on the platform of your choice (you know which one we mean). We recommend TikTok over Instagram because of it’s easier discoverability and better algorithm. + Instagram is making a lot of updates and changes lately that have driven a lot of people away from the platform, and we’ve found their changes are mostly an attempt to replicate and chase the growth that TikTok is experiencing organically.

Maximize Visibility and Searchability with Your Setup

There are some pretty cool ways you can set your TikTok account up for success before you even create your first post. To learn more about setting up a business TikTok account that will help your target audience find you, be sure to review our Ultimate Guide for TikTok for Lawyers.

A key part of account setup is ensuring that the name on your account is searchable. It may seem weird, but we recommend setting your name on your account to a keyword your clients would type in the search bar. 

For instance: Immigration Lawyer Austin, Texas versus the name of your firm. You’re probably wondering how that is supposed to build brand visibility for your firm. Sounds counterintuitive, right? 

In order to connect your firm with that highly searchable service you provide, we recommend making your TikTok handle the name of your firm. We know it might be a bit confusing if you’ve never laid eyes on the TikTok platform, so be sure to check out our Ultimate Guide we mentioned for a full breakdown of these terms and practices.

Tip #2: Start with Keyword Research Before You Film

OK, so you have your account established and your brain is abuzz with great content ideas. Before you dive headlong into filming your brilliant video, you should do research on your target audience and for what your ideal audience is searching.

Research Your Target Client

You have to identify your target audience and build a specific persona for them. The key attributes that are common in your clients will help you develop the most relevant short-form videos.

Another way to determine what piques your clients’ interest is using the data you already have. If you have done quite a bit of content marketing in the past and your website has a decent amount of traffic, we recommend going back to your old blog posts to identify what content has the most views. This data from your existing content is a great place to start building your new short-form video ideas.

Use What You Already Know Works

Other ways to identify search terms that are popular with your target audience include online tools like Answer the Public and even Google Also Suggests to get ideas of what your target client base is already searching for so you’re able to make content around this topic.

Tip #3: Take Time to Plan Out Your Video Content, So You Spend Time on Your Highest and Best Use Work

Set a Schedule

One of the most common complaints I hear from busy lawyers is they don’t have enough time to do marketing.

This is typically because those lawyers are spending too much time each day trying to do marketing, when instead, they would be much more successful at marketing if they spent 1-hour per week working on strategically planned out marketing, versus trying to do a little each day.

Batch Your Content

Social media marketing, regardless of the platform used, should be planned months ahead of schedule. We recommend batching your video content. What do we mean by batching?

Start with filming all of your TikTok videos for the entire week, which ends up taking roughly one-hour to 30-minutes of your week. It doesn’t have to be perfect, and it can even be a few different takes. Giving the big batch of videos to your marketing team allows them to edit, upload, and schedule in a strategic manner.

If you don’t have a marketing team, then we still recommend the batching technique to save time and sanity. Just note you’ll have to spend a bit more time than 1-hour each week in marketing and should plan for likely 2-3 hours per week of marketing if going it alone in your short-form videos.

Tip #4: The Most Important Part of Your Video is the First 5 Seconds

We know a lot of lawyers who spend a ton of time writing lengthy intros to their videos. We’re not here to shame the power of the plume, only suggest you keep those expanded explanations for your filings and keep it short and sweet on your short-form video. They are called short-form for a reason.

Keep Your Messaging Short

Those mile-long diatribes against injustices won’t work on Tiktok. TikTok is all about the hook – the first 2-3 seconds where you capture the viewer’s attention. You reel them in with matter-of-fact, jarring bait in order to engage them. 

Again, we know it can be tough to curtail the power of the pen. We are just as guilty and have so many videos with long intros, which is how we know for sure that the abridged version of your most popular topics are much more likely to perform well.

You get it, right? People click on the video to learn about the promised topic at hand – right? So keep those hooks (intros) short and to the point.

What a Good Hook Looks Like

A short and engaging hook typically involves the word “You” and some problem, mistake, or mindset shift that needs to happen.

Take for example: “3 things you should never say to an immigration judge” OR “2 reasons why your trademark application is going to get denied” or “why you should never lie on your taxes.”

Notice the hook/intro immediately calls out the viewer and contains the topic of concern at hand. These could be things viewers didn’t realize were problems they had.

Want some more good ideas of hook formulas that work well for law firms? We put together a list of 10 of the best ones we’ve seen on TikTok in this handy guide. Download it now.

Tip #5: Lean Into Experimentation on TikTok

Although you’re a lawyer and you’ll likely want to make substantive content, it’s actually a good rule of thumb to experiment with different types and styles of content on TikTok. Yes, we know that means loosening up that tie and unbuttoning that stiff collar a bit, but it’s worth being a little bit more relaxed.

Some of the best content we’ve come across from professional service firms on TikTok actually comes from professionals who are using unique styles and approaches to content to market their services. We’re not talking Johnny Knoxville level of jacka** tomfoolery. You can be creative and stand out from the crowd without being foolish.

A few of our favorite styles of content that aren’t too formal but don’t require dancing or singing on camera include:

• Text Over Video
• Talking Head
• Trending Sounds
• Green Screen
• News Jacking

When you are willing to try different content types and styles, you learn more quickly what resonates with your audience and what you should continue to do vs what you should not do again. This helps you build more engaging content without wasting time and effort on something that’s not working.

Tip #6: Get Over the Idea that You’re Bad on Video

So many lawyers (and professionals, in general) are afraid of video because they think they don’t have camera presence. We’re going to let you in on a little secret:

Camera presence isn’t a natural talent, it’s a learned talent.

Your first video is definitely not going to be your best video, and that’s ok and to be expected. The more frequently and authentically you show up on camera, the more it all will feel more natural and build a deeper connection with your audience.

It’s important to remember that the point of all this marketing is to build connections and help clients see you’re a real human being who cares about them and helps them resolve their legal matters. So, save the self-shame for another day, because your next clients need your help and won’t know they can hire you if they don’t know you exist.

That’s it. You’re ready to conquer short-form video.

Now that you’ve learned how to use TikTok for your law firm, the next step is to learn how to fit TikTok into a larger marketing strategy. Watch this video where we’ll teach you how to develop a cohesive marketing strategy for your law firm so you can maximize results.

If you’re still a bit apprehensive about taking the dive into short-form video or need to supplement your in-house marketing team with some short-form video enthusiasts, reach out to By Aries to start perfecting your digital presence using short-form video and more!

The post TikTok for Lawyers | Six Tips for Getting Started with Short-Form Video for Lawyers appeared first on By Aries.

TikTok may seem like just a dancing app for teens and tweens, but in reality, it’s a great platform for business and law firms to easily grow their social presence and flex their expertise in a fun and relaxed environment. So, yes, TikTok for Lawyers is a thing.

TikTok is the fastest-growing social media platform on the market today. In fact, according to Cloudflare TikTok dethroned Google as the most popular website in the U.S. in February, March, June, and through this August.

Many lawyers compete and pay thousands of dollars every month to sit at the top of Google for their law practice, yet Google itself is seeing its traffic and visibility waning. This is a great opportunity for those lawyers who are willing to learn how to use TikTok to get ahead of the SEO curve and build their audience without paying the big Google ad bucks.

That’s why we built this guide to be the ultimate TikTok for lawyers guide. Let’s jump into how the platform works and how you can leverage it.

How TikTok Works

TikTok is a short-form video-sharing social media platform. Similar to other social media platforms like Facebook Reels and Instagram Reels, TikTok focuses on short-form video consumption. Popularized by GenZ and its viral TikTok dances and trending sounds, TikTok has proven that short-form video can be a great way to attract an audience.

Because TikTok is a video-sharing platform, creators are encouraged to create short videos ranging in length from 20 seconds to 10 minutes aimed at educational content, entertaining audiences, and inspiring followers. TikTok encourages vertical video content and creators to create videos regularly and consistently. With the average creator creating and distributing daily videos.

The TikTok algorithm is known for helping small creators develop huge followings quickly and is known to continually distribute videos to new audiences making video content searchable, discoverable, and a much more rewarding experience for social media creators. Ask any TikTokker, and they’ll tell you how powerful and precise the algorithm is.

The TikTok Algorithm Explained

The TikTok algorithm is unique in that it allows video content to be discovered by new audiences quickly. But how does it work?

The TikTok algorithm pushes out video content to users’ individual For You Page (a section of curated content within the app) based on users’ interactions with other videos and subject matter. If the video content in the For You Page performs well, TikTok pushes out the video content to additional audiences.

How does TikTok measure performance?

TikTok’s algorithm decides if a video is worth promoting and pushes out to additional For You Pages based on the number of likes, the quantity of comments, amount of shares, and overall watch time of the video.

The greater the percentage of watch time in conjunction with the engagement for the video will determine whether TikTok’s algorithm continues to promote the content.

Each of these metrics is extremely important to ensure your videos get the maximum visibility and viewership and wind up on the For Your Page of the creator’s target audience.

TikTok Lawyers to Learn From

There are several law firms on TikTok and lawyers on TikTok who are really showing up and demonstrating how social media platforms can massively grow your law firm without paying for ads. They are proving TikTok for lawyers can be a successful marketing strategy.

We’ve made a list of our favorite lawyers on TikTok here.

How to Film TikTok Video Content for the Legal Industry

Before you film your first TikTok videos, we highly encourage you to know the basics and best practices around filming your first set of videos.

How to Setup Your Law Firm TikTok Account

1. Create a TikTok account

2. Add your name. Note: This is searchable.

3. Choose a username.

4. Follow other creators on TikTok to get inspired.

5. Comment on other creators’ posts and start engaging with them.

How to Film Your First TikTok Video

1. Choose a topic.

2. Select a compelling hook.

3. Identify the style of your video.

4. Decide if you’re going to use a trending sound.

5. Film in front of good lighting.

6. Film in short snippets.

7. Bring all your snippets together into TikTok.

8. Trim your clips to be hyper short and to ensure each clip follows the next.

9. Add text on-screen relevant to your topic.

TikTok Videos Best Practices

1. Video content should be filmed in vertical format

2. Keep your first batch of videos short – less than 1-minute

3. Practice delivering a compelling hook to your target audience

4. Use good lighting and a tripod to keep your camera steady

5. Rehearse your delivery and get comfortable with filming in small snippets

TikTok Legal Content that Gets Views & Followers

Because TikTok is so heavily focused on a compelling content strategy, having a good idea of the type of video content that performs well on the platform is helpful.

When you’re first starting out on TikTok, we recommend starting with succinct informative legal videos. Lawyers have access to a plethora of legal issues and questions that their clients bring to them daily.

Use your past conversations with your clients daily to inspire your first sets of topics for your video content. For example, we’ve seen successful law firm TikTok accounts answer high-level basic questions around the law and even clear up misunderstandings at a high level with video content focused on the difference between various legal issues or legal topics or even combatting common legal misconceptions.

Several intelligent trademark attorneys who do it well build content around the difference between an LLC, S-Corp, and a Trademark. They point at the screen and add text to explain how each differs from the other and what protections each provides. This type of content is genius and clears up a commonly misunderstood topic in an easy, simple, and relevant way, and requires little to no videography or editing skills.

But if informational videos seem boring to you, you may want to opt to lean into TikTok culture and try a TikTok dance or create funny videos taking aim at the nature of the law and what you do as a lawyer. This is likely to perform well, too, since it’s generally entertaining but also fun to watch.

How to Write a TikTok Social Media Caption & Script

Before we discuss captions more, let’s differentiate between the TikTok caption and subtitles on videos. Both are important, but when we reference the TikTok caption, we mean the social media blurb displayed with your video. When we talk about subtitles, we mean the actual words displayed on the video screen that tracks your audio and/or spoken content.

On TikTok quality content is key. You want to consistently build compelling video content that promotes engagement and drives users to follow you for more. That’s why we recommend you script your content until you get the hang of creating content that really resonates.

How to Write Your TikTok Script

There are a few key elements to a great TikTok script. These include:

1. A compelling hook

2. A quick intro of yourself and what you do.

3. Your content

4. Your call-to-action

Your TikTok script will ideally be short and sweet. It’s important to remember that delivering your content quickly and concisely is so crucial on TikTok because watch time is a key metric for your account’s growth. We’ve put together some tips when thinking about hooks, intros, and call-to-actions to help you achieve success.

To get an idea of what’s working in your industry, look to other lawyers who have had success on TikTok. Take note of the hooks, intros, and calls-to-action they use to prompt their audience to take action. It’s really easy to spot the ones that work well.

How to Write Your TikTok Caption

The social media caption you write on TikTok should reflect the content of your video. The best captions on TikTok incorporate the keywords you want to rank for within TikTok’s algorithm and search.

TikTok captions should be short and to the point. TikTok limits your character limit to 300 characters. So, try to be concise but still include relevant keywords and search terms so your content is discoverable.

In addition to writing a great caption, you’ll want to perform hashtag research to ensure your content gets the maximum visibility possible.

What TikTok Hashtags to Use

How to Use Hashtags

When identifying hashtags, it’s important to perform a search on both the TikTok app and the TikTok desktop. We’ve noticed different videos and hashtags perform differently on each platform.

There are a few strategies that work well when performing hashtag research.

Strategy 1: Use Keyword Data to Inform Your TikTok Hashtag Research

Most law firms and marketing departments will find it easiest to start their hashtag research process by looking at their existing target keywords.

For example, an oil and gas law firm will want to start by researching hashtags around oil and gas law and their location one locations of service.

You’ll want to note down the list of hashtags and their viewer count.

Example Hashtags

• #oilandgas – 381.9m views

• #oilandgaslawyer – 3,578 views

• #oilandgaslaw – 3,575 views

From here, you can start building a list of potential hashtags to use on your TikTok views based on the size of your target audience.

A Note on Hashtag Size:

A large TikTok audience would mean your account can leverage more robust and higher viewed hashtags. A smaller audience would mean your account should leverage smaller hashtags until you’ve built a following.

Strategy 2: Use Relevant Account Information to Perform Hashtag Research

The second way to look up relevant hashtags that will boost your views is to find the top accounts within your practice area and click through their videos to determine what hashtags they use.

This stealth way of discovering potential hashtags is one we like to use a lot here at By Aries. Using this strategy, we can typically find hashtags outside the standard keywords we’d search and discover what types of hashtags get the most traction and visibility.

Example Hashtags

• #oilandgasleases – 1,355 views

• #oilfield – 1.5B views

• #oilfieldthings – 19.5M views

Informed with these new additional hashtags, we can now start to put together a list of potential hashtags to use on our video content that will attract those in our target audience. You must identify hashtags your potential clients would use in order to discover you.

Editing Your TikTok Videos

You’ll have several different options for editing your TikTok video content. You can edit your TikTok natively in the app if you’d like or you can export your video to a professional editing software like Adobe Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve. In addition, there are plenty of iPhone native apps that allow you to edit your video content, including CapCut, Adobe Rush, and InShot.

Our personal tool of choice for editing our short-form video content is Descript.

One of the primary reasons we like to edit our video content within Descript is so we can add captions to our video content. So often, video content is often consumed with the sound off, so having captions on video content is key to ensuring it’s consumable even without sound. Plus, including captions is an inclusive practice that allows hearing-impaired persons to access your content.

How to Add Closed Captions to Your TikTok Video Content

Most of the apps we mentioned above allow you to easily add captions to your videos, but few allow you to do it as seamlessly and easy as Descript. Nevertheless, we wanted to break down a few of the apps we have used and continue to use to add captions.

• Capcut (free) – Use Capcut to add captions to your video from your phone easily and quickly. Capcut is one of the most popular apps for adding captions to your TikTok videos because it’s owned by TikTok’s parent company and is free.

• Descript – Descript is a paid desktop app that will allow you to add captions to your Tiktok videos and edit them like a Microsoft Word document. Yes, you read that correctly. Imagine editing your audio and video content like you would edit a Word document. This is the power of Descript. In addition to editing your videos easily, you can also add captions to your videos, sounds, and other fun elements, like transitions, emojis, and more.

• TikTok (free) – If you’re short on time and budget, then another great option for adding subtitles to your video content is the native captions option in the TikTok app. The only downside to this method of adding subtitles to your content is that we’ve found TikTok’s captions to be less reliable in terms of accurately transcribing the content in your video. So, keep in mind that you’ll likely have to do some editing.

Publishing Your TikTok Video

Once you’ve filmed, edited, and finalized your TikTok video caption, it’s time to actually upload your video TikTok. TikTok is intended to be used on a mobile device, so we recommend uploading all your content via the mobile app. You can publish content via desktop and some social media aggregator tools, but we’ve found the features are severely limited. So, we recommend just using your mobile app.

How to Publish a TikTok Video

1. Upload your content directly into TikTok

2. Add relevant on-screen text (again try to use your keywords here)

3. Add a sound or music

4. Add your TikTok caption and hashtags

5. Choose a Cover design and frame

6. Add a Cover caption

7. Post your video

Once you’ve published your video, it will take a few minutes for your content to be reviewed by the algorithm before it goes live. Don’t worry if, at first, you have only a handful of views on your video content.

How to Measure Your TikTok Video Performance

We often get asked how to measure performance on TikTok. Many lawyers mistakenly believe that if their first few videos don’t go viral, they can’t and won’t be able to make TikTok work for them. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Remember how we mentioned that TikTok’s algorithm pushes video content out to TikTok users based on the engagement the content receives and the watch time?

Given the importance of these two metrics, if you’re not seeing great performance on your TikTok channel it’s important to start by analyzing how those two metrics are performing.

How to Analyze Your TikTok Data

To get accurate metrics on your TikTok account, you’ll want to switch your account from a personal account to a business account. Once you’ve done this, you’ll have access to even more analytics data to help you discern if you’re on the right track with your content.

But how do you find the data? Simply click on the “More Data” button on a video to reveal your video’s analytics via the Video Analysis dashboard.

Your Video Analysis dashboard will tell you how many views your video has received and the number of hearts, comments, saves and shares your video has received. In addition, this dashboard will show you the Total Play Time, Average Watch Time, percentage of people who have watched the full video, and how large your audience reach is.

This data can be extremely helpful in helping you analyze what worked and what didn’t with your video content.

The higher the watch percentage, the more likely TikTok will push this video out, remember? So, creating videos that keep people’s attention from the start until the end and videos that make a quick point will be key to keeping your watch time high, right?

Content strategy is integral to TikTok success, so understanding what content is performing well is critical. Let this data help inform your content strategy as your build out additional TikTok content. And to that same end, lean into the content that is working, since clearly your audience enjoys it.

Next Steps: TikTok for Lawyers

Ready to post videos on TikTok? We hope you feel empowered to leverage TikTok in a new way now. Once you have a firm grasp of how TikTok works, you’ll find that your content overall across various popular social media platforms will improve. TikTok has the innate ability to teach you how to concisely deliver content in a way that educates, informs, and builds trust. There is so much power in that, don’t you think?

It’s important to remember that no matter what other platforms on which you choose to build a following on, it’s essential that you have a comprehensive marketing strategy built around helping you move your followers from TikTok to a consultation with you.

If you’re ready to start building a TikTok account that will bring awareness to your services and generate leads using an informed data-driven marketing strategy, reach out to us or simply view our TikTok for Lawyers services. We have an entire team of marketing professionals ready to help you achieve TikTok success.

Related Articles Worth Reading:

The post TikTok for Lawyers: The Ultimate Guide to Marketing with TikTok for Law Firms appeared first on By Aries.

We predict here at By Aries that short-form video, or micro video content, like TikTok videos, Instagram Reels, and Facebook Reels, are only going to grow in popularity and become the go-to format for all video content in the future. We’ve seen nearly every single social media platform embrace some form of short-form video content.

In fact, we believe more law firms are going to look back on short-form video like they look back on the old days of SEO and wish they had started sooner.

So, if you are a lawyer who sees the writing on the wall and wants to learn how to capitalize and embrace short-form video now to boost engagement, brand awareness, and help promote your services to help you develop business, then we recommend looking to those lawyers who are already doing it well.

We’ve pulled together a list of 10 lawyers who have embraced TikTok and made it work for them. If you think TikTok is just for viral dances, look at the firms and attorneys making big business out of this so-called dance platform.

TikTok Lawyer with the Most Followers

#1 Mike Mandell

The self-named #1 lawyer on social media, Lawyer Mike is a criminal defense attorney based in California. His videos are full of sketch comedy, funny content and entertaining tips and tricks around various legal issues, and provide information that his followers love to consume on all areas of criminal defense. He’s a bit like a one-man Saturday Night Live sketch show, but with real substance. His videos are well-produced, well-written, and well-scripted for maximum engagement.

Takeaway: Mike’s videos are the gold standard of TikTok for lawyers (and this may turn many of you off to his style and approach). That’s totally okay, so if he’s not your cup of tea, keep reading because there are other lawyers on here who take a much more subtle but still effective approach that you can learn from.

The Most Famous TikTok Lawyer

#2 Erika Kullberg

A big law corporate lawyer turned solo practitioner, Erika Kullberg is the exact opposite of Law by Mike and arguably more famous of all those listed here. Erika recently had a full-size ad of her displayed in Time Square and her account is followed by more than 8.8 million people. Her approach to providing video content is a formula she crafted all her own: She reads the fine print, so you don’t have to. She positions herself as someone who reads the fine print on all those terms of service pages and click forms that you didn’t closely read and helps you advocate for yourself against big corporations.

Erika’s videos are so viral that her style and format have been copied and repeated across other industries and professions. Her dual approach to performing as both the lawyer and the enforcer of a terms of service agreement nobody read is a great way to bring the audience into her video content while educating them and establishing her credibility and authority as a lawyer.

Takeaway: Follow Erika for a classy and professional approach to TikTok for lawyers.

The Dancing TikTok Lawyer

#3 Lawyer Kelly

Lawyer Kelly is a family law attorney based out of California who creates short-form video content on all areas of family law, including divorce, custody issues, and other legal issues related to matrimonial law. Her videos are focused on providing value, answering questions from her audience, and commenting on celebrity divorces and social media news. Her videos are effective because she’s authentic to who she is, while conveying valuable information quickly and effectively.

Takeaway: Follow Lawyer Kelly for a masterclass in direct communication that attracts your ideal clients.

The Immigrant TikTok Lawyer Turned Trademark Attorney

#4 Ana Juneja

Ana Juneja is a trademark attorney for e-commerce and social media managers based in Florida. Unlike many of her counterparts here, Ana Juneja does a brilliant job of mixing in trending sounds and TikTok trends into her videos while still conveying value-driven informative content to her followers on social media. Her videos are fun, engaging, and very focused on her core client base and their legal needs. Plus, she has a very interesting immigrant story, which makes rooting for her feel like you’re rooting for a bit of an underdog, although she’s clearly not one. She also has tons of Instagram followers, so she knows social media and uses it to her advantage in business.

Takeaway: Follow Ana Juneja to learn how to incorporate trending sounds and TikTok trends into your video content.

The Simplest Approach to TikTok for Lawyers

#5 Denise the Divorce Attorney

Want to learn how to make TikTok work for you without dancing, moving, or doing much else than talking directly into the camera about legal issues? Then follow Denise the Divorce Lawyer, a Florida-based divorce attorney with over 278,000 followers. Denise the Divorce Lawyer is the poster child for not playing by the rules on TikTok. She shows us how you can build a super popular TikTok by simply answering common legal questions from your clients in a direct and easy-to-follow talking-head style video. She shows us the power of informative videos and how they can be more transformational than singing, dancing, or trends.

Takeaway: Follow Denise the Divorce Lawyer for simple yet professional TikTok ideas.

The Best Friend TikTok Lawyer

#6 Lawyer Paige

Ever wish your best friend from college had her own law practice and could advise you on employment law issues? Well, that’s Lawyer Paige. With over 200,000 followers, Lawyer Paige hands out legal information to her followers like she’s their BFF telling them like it is over a piping hot lemon tea at her breakfast table. She’s direct, yet authentic and approachable, and she answers common legal questions while sharing her life as a lawyer without dancing or making a fool of herself. She’s a TikTok lawyer who isn’t playing to the algorithm. She keeps things real and we are here for it.

Takeaway: Follow Lawyer Paige to see what authentic TikTok marketing looks like.

The TikTok Lawyer Who Engages Across Videos

#7 Ugolord

Ugolord is a lawyer turned legal translator who has coined a specific video style, similar to Erika Kullberg. You’ll notice his videos are reaction videos to various issue from car wrecks and accidents to home damage after a police invasion and warrant search. His video style is a bit goofy and over the top for some, but are very entertaining. But what we find most engaging about his content is how he uses a series of videos to engage his audience. Using a cliffhanger call to action, Ugolord prompts his audience to engage, comment, and provide their thoughts on various legal issues before revealing the answer in a second or series of videos. It’s a brilliant way to get views, set up your next video for success, and engage your audience.

Takeaway: Follow Ugolord for to learn how to engage your audience across multiple videos.

The Most Hilarious TikTok Lawyer for Big Law

#8 Alex Su

Alex Su is a lawyer turned legal technology community manager who makes videos poking fun at law firm culture, big law, and corporate counsel. Known as the most hilarious lawyer on the internet by his LinkedIn followers, his style of video content couples trending audio with TikTok trends, similar to Ana Juneja, but focused on corporate legal environments. His self-deprecating sense of humor and on-point style of acknowledging the absurdity of big law, legal departments in corporate, and law practice, in general, is binge-worthy.

Takeaway: Follow Alex Su for a masterclass in using humor to attract and engage even the most brilliant and sophisticated of audiences.

The Real Lincoln Lawyer on TikTok

#9 Caesar Chukwuma

Want to learn from the coolest and sleekest attorney on TikTok? Then look no further than Caesar Chukwuma, a Florida-based criminal defense attorney. He’s the actual Lincoln Lawyer in the flesh and it’s hard not to gush over how he makes the law look cool. His style of TikTok video is flashy while educational and he answers questions from his audience while weaving in trending audio and sleek suits.

Takeaway: Follow Caesar Chukwuma to learn how to use TikTok as a tool for boosting your cool factor and personal brand.

TikTok Lawyer Positioned for Growth

#10 Divorce Lawyer Jeanette

And finally, we wanted to list one smaller creator who we think is really pouring into TikTok in the best way possible. We stumbled across Divorce Lawyer Jeanette’s videos a while back and have watched her steadily grow her following and audience over the last few months. A Florida-based divorce attorney, Jeanette’s videos are engaging, funny, and also very authentic. She shares personal stories from her life with informative legal videos for her audience. With 16,000 followers, Jeanette feels like one of those people who would really listen to you about your divorce woes, empathize, and then fight like hell for you and it’s for this reason that we included her on this list. Because we think there’s something really special about being able to make a complete stranger believe that about you from just a few videos.

Takeaway: Follow Jeanette to support a budding TikTok lawyer and learn the power that authenticity and personal storytelling can warm clients to working with you.

Get Started: TikTok Videos for Law Firms

Feeling urgent to set up a TikTok account? Let all these new creators and lawyers inspire you to create your form of short-form video content. From how all the platforms are moving, short-form video isn’t going anywhere soon.

However, all these lawyers have already learned to master some of the hallmarks of great content marketing: consistently posting value-driven content that engages with a strong hook and a bold call to action. So, learn from these lawyers and start embracing TikTok as a lawyer.

Ready to get started setting up that TikTok account? We help lawyers and law firms build profitable and sustainable practices using short-form videos, like TikTok. Are you ready for TikTok success and want to attract your ideal clients, engage them in new and creative ways, and make conversion streamlined and simple? Check out our TikTok for Law Firms service offerings today to get started building your TikTok account and creating videos.

Other Helpful Reading:

The post 10 Lawyers on TikTok to Follow in 2022 appeared first on By Aries.

#1 TikTok helps you build a habit of consistency in your marketing

We all know the importance of consistency in our business—we set parameters and deadlines for client response and deliverables, we have recurring meetings, and we nurture our developing business relationships.

Nobody is going to argue that consistency isn’t a necessity in business, so you need to think of being consistent in all walks of your marketing efforts, too, right? That’s where video comes into play.

Marketing videos that attract business and create branding impact have to be more numerous than your firm’s annual holiday video e-card. Setting a goal to create and post more videos allows you to craft a plan and stick to it, and your audience will be asking for more.

#2 Using TikTok helps you polish skills that make you more likable, relatable, and marketable

We’ve worked with firms from all ends of the professional service spectrum, and they all had one thing in common – brilliance. Our clients are bright, ambitious, knowledgeable, industry leaders, and we bet you are, too; HOWEVER…

Having that deep knowledge base in your head and putting it to use on paper doesn’t train you to share your expertise with your own voice, which is kind of important in attracting clients, no?

Creating videos awards you the hyper-awareness of the way you speak, carry yourself, and make eye contact. These are great social skills most have, but you need them when talking shop, which is a skill you must practice.

Building a polished presence online positions you as an authority on your particular service industry. Think about it – the best thought leaders and industry pioneers have the work AND the polished image as proof. We innately see a practiced and powerful speaker as more qualified than someone with little or lacking presence.

#3 Tiktok helps you build rapport

While we stress the importance of sounding sharp and standing tall, we encourage all of clients to get real… people want to work with other people.

No one wants to engage with someone if they have no idea who you are, what you do, how you do it, and why you do it. Firm image is important, but so it appealing to your clients and audience on a personal, relaxed level.

We get pushback on video because clients are afraid of looking silly or they feel it’s not effective… these titans of industry would disagree, and they’re getting real to build their brand and engage their audience.

Don’t be afraid to let down your hair and take a relaxed or even comical approach to your video marketing – we even have some tips for creating killer videos.

#4 TikTok will help you be found in Search Engines

Ok, you might have passed on the previous 3 reasons you should use video, but we bet you’re listening now. SEO, search engine optimization, is seemingly the only marketing tool that every attorney and CEO seem to know and care about… deeply.

We get it. SEO is important, and there’s more than one way to boost your visibility and help your clients find you… VIDEO!

Honestly, don’t just take our word for it – the benefits of video for SEO abound.

So, why does video help SEO rankings?

“First, we know that when Google shows a video thumbnail next to a search result, which it does for 26% of search results according to BrightEdge, users are more likely to click that listing. The presence of the thumbnail makes the result a “rich snippet,” and rich snippets tend to have higher click-through rates than standard snippets.

We also know that Google has been rumored to prioritize search results with video above results without video. While Google hasn’t explicitly confirmed this idea, many marketers agree that their SEO results suggest that it’s true.”

If you’ve been on ANY social media platform in the last year, you know that they are ALL prioritizing video and rushing to build video-creation and editing tools into their app.

You may not be ready to commit to doing business in the meta-verse just yet, but we hope you’re able to see just how powerful and useful (and FUN!) videos are for doing business in the real world. Let us know if you need guidance on creating the most perfect and personable videos. Your digital marketing gurus are here and ready to perfect your digital presence.

The post TikTok for Business? 4 Reasons Professionals Need Video appeared first on By Aries.