What’s your WHY?
WHY do you want to use video as a media to market yourself and your law fi rm? Understanding the answer to that question will help you create marketing messages that attract your ideal clients and consumers. Let me show you how…
Why do you do what you do?
Why are you an attorney who helps injured people?
Why do you have an office, a staff, a partner?
The answers are numerous and varied.
The answers to those questions will help you see why your marketing messages are either attracting or repelling your ideal clients. It’s either/or. Either they’re attracting them and you’re getting calls or you’re repelling them and you’re not.
The choice of media to used to create your marketing message is just as varied as your reasons why you do what you do.
I’m writing this article on an overcast cold Sunday afternoon with beautiful piano music playing in the back-ground. I recently celebrated my birthday and was reflecting on my why.
Let me share with you WHY I created my first lawyer marketing video.
I left my firm in 2002 and took all the cases I was working on with me. My partners were great, but I realized I worked better on my own. I thought my legal superpower was trying cases and generating new cases from referrals. That worked well for about two to three years.
An Unsettling Wake Up Call
I’d settle a case and notice that I wasn’t replenishing my caseload. It was taking much longer to get referrals I relied on to pay my bills and generate profit. One Friday evening my secretary came to me and said if I don’t find another way to bring cases in, I won’t be able to afford her salary and the rent.
That was an unsettling wake up call for me.
I was a solo practitioner with a secretary/paralegal who, up until then, thought being a good lawyer was all I needed to generate new business. I was sorely mistaken. That urgency and panic forced me to start looking at different ways to make the phone ring.
I found a ‘guaranteed’ way being offered by some guy I’d never heard of. It involved sending color coded and time urgent letters to potential clients with sequential form letters warning them that if they didn’t sign up now, they’d lose their right to sue. That was a waste of a few thousand dollars that I didn’t have to spare.
I was getting desperate looking around for answers. I couldn’t call my competitors here in New York to ask what was working for them since they wouldn’t tell me. I decided I had to take out an ad in the Yellow Pages. Everyone else in the New York Community was doing it, therefore it must be working!
Wrong again. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I was easily convinced that this was the answer to my question of how to make the phone ring. “Just sign right here and we’ll bill you $25,000,” is what the rep told me. What did I know about marketing? Nothing.
That money got me a half page color ad on page 8 of a super-competitive attorney section in our Yellow Pages. The only calls the ad generated were from people who had already called the seven attorneys whose ads appeared before mine and been rejected.
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At the end of the year, I managed to get one call that generated a PI case and a fee that allowed me to cover the cost of the ad for that year. I didn’t have the money to pay for this crap. Lawyers were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for their full-page ads and double truck ads. I couldn’t compete with them. I didn’t have the money.
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Then there were lawyer TV commercials. Every channel. Every day. Every time slots. One after the other. Prime-time TV ads. “Been Injured? Call Us…” I had no money to compete with the big PI law firms who were spending a fortune advertising on TV in the New York market. Besides, I reasoned that a consumer could never tell the difference between one lawyer ad and another.
In 2004 I began to learn about a concept called education-based marketing. I realized that I could use my website to teach and educate my potential clients and consumers before they ever came into my office.
I had never heard of anyone else doing this. I thought this might be cool. I started writing articles on my website about how medical malpractice and accident cases worked in New York. I kept searching for other lawyers doing the same thing in New York and nobody else was doing it.
This Education Thing Would Work From Time To Time
Every now and then I’d get a call from someone who said they were searching online and came across my website. They had questions about their matter which was like what I talked about in my article. Would I be willing to talk to them? “Of course,” was my answer.
Since my caseload was dwindling and I didn’t have money to compete with the big boys, I kept writing articles for my website. I noticed I had more and more free time to write these articles as I wasn’t getting cases using my traditional ‘hope and pray’ method. Remember, I had not become an avid marketing student yet.
Because of my intermittent success with generating a few calls with my informative articles, and because I had more free time on my hands, I kept writing. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was slowly building a library of useful articles on my website. That started a snowball eff ect that would help with search engines years later.
My WHY is slowly coming into view. Stick with me here…
Over the next two years I was barely maintaining my practice. I wasn’t spending money on advertising or marketing because I didn’t have any to spend. I was looking for ways to bootstrap my practice. There were no legal marketing conferences I could go to yet. Th ere was nobody teaching out-of-the box marketing for solo and small law firms at that time. There were no legal mastermind groups I could join. That’s because there were none.
Funky New Website Changes Legal Marketing Forever
In 2006 a quirky little website came online. Its’ tagline was “Now accepting user generated video content.”
“What the heck is that?” I thought.
I explored the website to see if any lawyers had any video content on it. A few lawyer TV commercials and a few CLE lectures were on it. That was it. I found both to be very boring and couldn’t understand why anyone would voluntarily want to go to a website to watch a lawyers’ TV commercial.
Oh yes, I should tell you the name of that website…YouTube.
At the end of 2006 Google bought YouTube for over $1 billion dollars. Hmm… Very interesting.
I began to ask why would a search engine buy a nascent video website for such an astronomical amount of money. They clearly knew something I didn’t.
The more I investigated YouTube the more excited I’d get. I began to think of how I could use this website to help me get new cases online. I’d daydream during depositions wondering how I could use this new media to generate cases. I kept coming back to the articles I was writing for my website.
Educational articles.
Articles that taught my readers something they didn’t know. Articles that (hopefully) would prompt a reader to pick up the phone to call me for more information about their legal matter.
I began to wonder if I could somehow do the same thing using video as the media instead of an article on my website. I reasoned that since people loved watching TV, they might be interested in a video talking about these educational topics. I didn’t know. I also didn’t know anyone I could talk to about it either.
Nobody Knew The Answers
I had more questions than answers.
I had no idea HOW to create a video or even how to get it online. Th ere was nobody teaching how to do this.
Was it ethical? Would I need to get permission from my bar association to do this? I couldn’t fi nd any lawyer in the country who had done this who I could call to ask.
I needed answers fast. But I couldn’t fi nd anyone who had the answers. So, I did what any entrepreneurial attorney would do. I scrounged through the NY advertising ethics rules. There was nothing about video marketing and there wouldn’t be for years to come.
That forced me to look closely at what restrictions if any the rules said about what media was acceptable. There were no defi nitive answers since lawyers typically advertised on TV, radio, magazines, direct mail, client mailings and other traditional methods. There was nothing specific about video.
After much research I concluded that the media didn’t matter. What mattered was what I was saying that had to conform to my states’ ethics rules. I stuck to what my rules required. No puffing. No boasting. No bragging. No bad-mouthing. Besides, I wanted to use these videos to teach and educate my ideal consumer.
My why should be coming into focus now…
1. I had no money to compete with the big boys spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on marketing.
2. I knew nothing about advertising or marketing other than my poor attempts at copying other lawyers doing what everyone else was doing.
3. My caseload was way down, and I was desperate to do something that would change my circumstances.
4. I didn’t know anyone who had the answers.
5. I could find no other lawyers who were doing what I wanted to do…create an educational message using online video to attract my ideal clients.
6. Since there was nobody who could help me create my educational video, I had to learn how to do it from scratch. That was fine since I had the time and didn’t really have the money to pay someone to do it anyway.
Are you beginning to see my why?
I was desperate and thought I found a new way to communicate with people who were actively searching for information. As a bonus, it was FREE! It wouldn’t cost me a dime to put my video on this new website called YouTube.
As it turns out, it was free. But when I look at the value of my time, that certainly wasn’t free. I spent endless hours trying to mechanically figure out how to create video and then put it online. I didn’t see it at the time, but this was the beginning of the video marketing revolution for attorneys.
Looking back at that early time, I’m proud to have been one of the pioneers in this field.
Now let’s fast forward eleven years and then I’ll get back to why your why is so important.
As of 2019:
Videos Created: 300
Calls generated from my videos: Yes
Cases accepted from my videos: Yes
Referral network created across the country: Yes
Profit generated: Yes
Amount generated for clients: $12,500,000 (solely attributable to generating cases from my videos)
Lawyers Video Studio was created to help other law-yers create educational video as I had done. Over 4000+ videos created for other attorneys across the country.
Ok, let’s get back to why.
Your why should focus on teaching your viewers.
· Don’t teach them about you and how great you are.
· Don’t teach them about how long you’ve been in practice.
· Don’t teach them about the great results you’ve gotten.
Instead, teach them about their problem. Show them that you know all about their problem.
Explain to them the details of what can go wrong with their problem if not handled correctly. Help your ideal client understand other similar cases where you’ve helped people in their exact situation. The more you teach and explain, the more trust you will generate with your viewer.
Your Why Should Be To Generate Trust With Your Viewer
Why?
Because without your viewer trusting you, they won’t watch your entire video. Without trust, they won’t ever call you. Without trust, they won’t watch a related video you created. I figured this out by default.
I didn’t have the marketing savvy to understand this when I first started on my video marketing journey. But I knew enough NOT to talk about me and my firm. I knew that my viewers simply wouldn’t care how long I was in practice or what prior results I achieved or what awards I had received.
All my competitors however were focused on creating marketing messages that said, “come to me because I’m great and I’ve been in practice for 25 years.” I soon figured out that none of these ads and marketing messages ever talked about why a consumer should come to that lawyer or law firm. That was when I realized your why is so important and will immediately help you distinguish yourself from all your colleagues and competitors.
By the way, telling your viewers about your why will also generate trust. They’ll see you as a human being. They’ll see you as compassionate. They’ll bond with you because you’re sharing something of interest to them.
With every marketing message you create, telling your why will help you generate trust. The media you use is incidental. I just happen to have gotten very proficient using video to tell my message. Others prefer articles or radio or podcasts. A well-known direct mail marketer Brian Kurtz always said, “Never rely just on one marketing channel to market your business.”
Take that knowledge and use it for every marketing channel you can. You may think your why doesn’t matter much. But to your viewers, it does. Your why will help you generate trust that will prompt your viewers and readers to call your office and say “I just saw the attorney on video talking about this problem. I have the same problem. Can I talk to him please?”
What’s your why? Till next time, see you on video! ◆
