Getting the Most from Your Law Firm’s Livestream

Video is becoming a must-have in the content world. It’s increasingly popular and important, and your target audience now expects to be able to find information easily via video media. In a recent survey from Livestream and New York Magazine, results showed that four in five people say they would prefer to view a video from a brand than to read a blog. Videos are more engaging, visually interesting, and offer an easy way to humanize your firm and the brilliant minds in it. Whether produced in advance or streamed live, videos add an innovative element to your law firm’s marketing mix.

Law firms are just beginning to turn to livestreaming to report on new laws or trending topics in their industries of expertise. The key is not only creating great video content that interests your audience, but understanding that the work doesn’t end there. The most popular live streaming channels are Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube – but what we’re going to suggest will work with any streaming site or app out there. Here are a few of our favorite tactics for getting the most of your live streaming content.

1. Do your best on the basics. This means making sure the video is properly saved. As soon as the broadcast airs, you’ll need to ensure it’s available for replay. Create a strong title and description, and choose an interesting thumbnail. Remember that once your live video saves to your social profile, its thumbnail image is automatically selected – so put some thought into it and grab attention right away. Cross-promote on your various social media channels, and upload any videos you’ve created onto a single YouTube channel so that you always have a collection to reference.
2. Edit your livestream for optimal viewing. Because of the popularity of video content, audiences have come to understand the difference between recorded videos and livestreams. For a non-live video, viewers expect higher quality and presentation. They also tend to invest more time in watching a single video. On the other hand, viewers are more understanding of a livestream. They don’t expect perfection, or that companies use a video production team for this type of content. Accordingly, they tend to spend less time on them. If you save the video, you can edit for later, which is critical. You can chop it into shorter sections that are easily digestible online and more likely to be viewed. There are several video editors available, such as YouTube Editor, iMovie, or PowerDirector. Using these, you can do things like trim and split the content, extract audio, or add a transition.
3. Repurpose to gain inbound links. Blog posts that include video are much more likely to attract inbound links. Providing a summary of the video is an easy way to write a blog post, and you may get new perspectives to add once you read the comments. Make sure you have a transcription and make that available online. If the video has a natural call to action, create an email campaign around it. You usually can’t embed a video directly in an email, but you can craft messaging that will lead to the video or a landing page that hosts it. Podcasts are trending in several industries, and the legal one benefits from these because they position experts as thought leaders and allow easy access to information. Simply turn the video into an audio file, or use the editing tools mentioned above to polish the audio and then extract it.
4. Pay attention to comments and questions. Hopefully you’ve promoted your livestream and will get some live people commenting or asking questions. These are invaluable because they provide key insight into potential clients’ needs and questions. You have the ability to provide helpful answers with links to your site during the livestream. Afterward, add the questions you saw along with answers to an FAQ page, or send an email to the attendees with some of the hottest topics. Tip: FAQ pages tend to be attractive to search engines, so this is an easy way to grab some content for that area of your site.
5. Remember to test and refine. Ramp up your livestream’s success by promoting through social media and repurposing the content in the ways we’ve mentioned. But don’t stop there – constantly review metrics and look at traffic and engagement. From there, you can see what you want to try more of and what isn’t worth the time.

Takeaway

No matter what you do with your video content, simply creating it and putting it online isn’t enough. In business, it’s always ideal to do more with less, and maximizing your law firm’s efforts around livestreaming are a great way to do that. If you need help coming up with content ideas, or are not sure what to do with it from there, we have lots of ideas – just ask!