Video is a great way to communicate online, in emails and even through text messages. According to Yans Media, people retain about 95% of the information given in a video compared to only 10% when read.
The more complicated the topic and the more competitive the industry, the more you need to leverage video to help your audience understand and retain your information. Online platforms and social media algorithms favor a video post because that is what their audience wants to see. You don’t need to be on all platforms, but there are several that will benefit legal professionals more than others.
YouTube is always the first place you should upload a video. It’s the second most used search engine and is owned by Google, the most used search engine worldwide. The main benefit to YouTube is that you are able to optimize your videos for the search engine keywords that will help you be found online. You can optimize the title, tags and descriptions with keywords that are indexed by Google.
It’s also a great place to present and inform because you can offer a variety of videos, from longer videos lasting an hour to their new feature, #Shorts. This is a new service that highlights and promotes videos less than a minute in runtime. One interesting fact about these types of vertical videos is that they have approximately a 90% completion rate — meaning that they almost always get watched until the end. This is easier to accomplish with the shorter format. Plus, the shorter length makes it easier to record and upload multiple videos.
YouTube has largely modeled this format on TikTok, a platform where going viral is almost always the goal and getting followers is actually easier than it sounds.
If YouTube is the more generalized website to find videos of all sorts, then TikTok is like a small town where everyone quickly learns your name. TikTok’s growth through the pandemic showed that this platform isn’t just for high schoolers but for everyone.
“The more complicated the topic and the more competitive the industry, the more you need to leverage video to help your audience understand and retain your information.”
According to Hootsuite, TikTok was the No. 1 downloaded app in 2020, hitting two billion global downloads in August 2020. It’s not just people posting cute dog tricks or their dance moves. Ocean Spray, the almost century-old beverage company, got 15 billion media impressions through TikTok in only one month. Although users primarily search and follow funny and entertaining content, this demonstrates there is still a lot of benefits to legal professionals being on this platform.
The other platform legal professionals need to focus on is LinkedIn. It boasts 810 million active users with 63% of those users accessing their account weekly and 22% daily.
And videos get noticed, generating more than 300 million impressions and earning an average of three times more engagement than text posts. That’s what the algorithms want to see — engagement. The more people engage with your posts, the higher they are going to rank on someone else’s feed, which is the opening page when you first open a social media platform.
If you’ve already been doing these things but struggle with knowing what markets to target and how to quantify the effect on your business, you should look into psychographics, or classifying people based on psychological attributes. These go beyond primary classifications like age or location and seek to understand what your consumers want, what drives their behavior and what makes up their values and their motivations.
This type of information can be wildly useful when it comes to targeting specific consumers or groups to advertise to. While using qualitative methodology is nothing new per se, using it to break down the average consumer is a more recent trend in business. It essentially allows businesses to micro-target customers on an individual level — somewhat like Facebook or Instagram advertising but an even deeper dive, looking at the present and the future.
One pro tip that remains the same for every video — be they long or short, advertising or educating, one platform or another — is to make sure to use captions in every video. First, you want to make your content accessible to everyone, and second, about 80% of viewers on social platforms watch videos on silent. It’s important to immediately capture their attention, cause them to click and turn up the volume. Captions can look like standard CCs with a black background and white Arial font, or they can conform to your brand’s colors and fonts. Either way, just be sure to preview them to make sure they are readable when placed over the video.
Simply put, video is the easiest way to engage with potential clients by connecting to where they spend their time — on their smartphones. Get found easier and be remembered through quality video marketing.