By Jason Westall (Head of Marketing and Communications at mmadigital)
Unless you’ve been in hiding for the last few years, you would have experienced the exponential growth of online video in some form. Its appeal is obvious: it’s malleable, offers businesses the opportunity to highlight their idiosyncrasies in seconds rather than hours and allows consumers to engage without having to read laborious chunks of text. This was emphasised recently in a study (Forrester – Read Here) that suggests 1.8 million words is the value of just one minute of video!
The overwhelming rise in popularity has prompted many online giants to alter their platforms to keep up with growing demand. Google has already begun to make video a key component of its algorithm, now featuring footage in its search results, while Facebook continues to pump more money into challenging YouTube’s monopoly on views.
With Cisco announcing that by 2017, video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic, it is now becoming crucial for businesses to use video if they wish to satisfy their audience’s information and entertainment needs.
So how does the legal sector deal with this growing expectation and how do they make sure they are getting the most out of the video they purchase?
To answer this we have put together 10 top tips, that should help to boost your video ROI and improve your level of enquiries:
(1) If you have testimonial videos of your clients, make the most of them by adding them to key landing pages. According to information gathered by WebDAM, customer testimonials have the highest effectiveness rating for all types of content marketing, especially when emotion is evoked. As the majority of us are visual learners, you can be certain that if you present your audience with a quick video rather than text, they are more likely to engage with your key messages and stay on your website longer.
(2) Upload your videos to YouTube. We cannot emphasise this enough. With 4 billion views on the platform everyday, and with 50% of users watching at least one business video every week, you need to make the most of it. Add to this YouTube’s parent company (a little company called Google) incorporating its videos in search results, it reinforces the importance of uploading videos to the world’s second biggest search engine.
(3) Make sure your videos are Search Engine Optimised (SEO). Things like: writing subtitles for your videos, rewriting meta data, adding a channel description, linking the videos to your company page, are all ways of making sure search engines understand what your video is about and what kind of search terms should be associated with it.
(4) With YouTube and social media platforms increasing their functionality and opportunities in terms of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, you can find a plethora of cost effective ways to promote your videos. You can try ‘boosting’ a piece of content on Facebook, feature a video in a Linkedin sidebar or show a ‘pre-roll’ advert before a YouTube video. Parallel this with an abundance of clever targeting options and you will certainly see results with very little cost.
(5) PPC aside, you can also post video across your social media platforms to improve organic growth and increase your engagement rates. Take Twitter for instance, which plays host to around 300 million users, it offers the opportunity to embed YouTube videos into tweets and encourages users to share Vine recordings via its platform. One study from Moz reports that tweets that include a visual element (image, video, GIF) are 70% more likely to gain clicks.
(6) Add video to your Facebook page to cement brand image. Show a ‘behind the scenes’ peak of your office, a recent event, a customer testimonial or perhaps an interview with a team member. Audiences who have ‘liked’ your page are already in a position where they want to see more from your brand, so take advantage of this by giving them the opportunity to share visual content via their newsfeed. This will attract a wider audience.
(7) Research from Forrester found that when marketers included a marketing or explainer video in an email, the click-through-rate (CTR) increased by 200% and improved email open rates by 19%. So use video in your email marketing campaigns to make them stand out, but just make sure these are mobile responsive.
(8) A huge percentage of websites in the legal sector have a team page, but many are lifeless and can be counter-productive if they are not executed correctly. Try using video to show a more human side of your team, this will allow you to differentiate yourself from your competitors and will give you the chance to show why you’re different without writing reams of text.
(9) Place video on your homepage. It’s the first thing a lot of your visitors will see, thus its important that you keep them engage from the outset. Research from ReelSEO shows that homepage videos tend to increase conversion rates by 20% or more and keeps visitors on sites for an average of two minutes longer than without.
(10) And finally, make sure to use explainer videos next to contact forms. As we have reiterated, video is far more approachable than text, and certainly in the legal sector there is a lot of language that can be daunting for the layperson. An explainer video will help to reassure your audience, and when placed in the close vicinity of a contact form, will hopefully boost your enquiries.
If you would like more information about increasing enquiries, video production, web design and plenty more digital services, get in touch with mmadigital by emailing MMADGITAL.
We will also be speaking in conjunction with NatWest throughout October about how firms can plan for the future, so join us by registering for free here: http://www.mmadigital.co.uk/natwest