Creating Engaging and Valuable Law Firm Videos

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Are you an attorney who wants to get into the social media space? In this podcast episode, Jim and Tyson discuss the importance of creating engaging and entertaining content for law firm videos and social media. 

Creating social media content is a difficult skill to master. It takes time and effort to not only understand how certain apps work but also what type of content is going to reel people in. Social media can be used to attract clients, especially those of a younger demographic. 

Tyson and Jim explore the idea of creating entertaining videos and if it will lead to more viewers and clients. One thing to consider is creating TikTok content that is a mix of fun and legal advice. The fun aspect allows viewers to get to know you as a person and then the legal advice will showcase the expertise.

Tyson and Jim talk about how viewers do not like the “ask” in social media content. The point of social media is to attract people to view your content and subscribe. The last thing people want is to have to go the extra mile for a creator all the time if they are asking their audience to do something. Sprinkling in the “selling” is a good way to get your message across. Giving away your best tips and advice will get people to listen. It is a risk because nobody wants to give everything away for nothing in return, but Tyson and Jim promise it is the best way to get the views without throwing things in people’s faces.

When creating content on apps like Tiktok, it is important to include all the necessary information without taking too much time. Make sure to address the question, provide a solution and have a call to action. It is really important to ensure videos are kept short. No one is going to listen to a video if it is too long because you lose the viewer if you do not get the point.

To be successful on social media, it is important to understand the rhythm of the platform. What are people talking about? What are the trends to know and follow? Get to know your audience and understand what they want to see and what questions they need answered. As attorneys, find out what legal advice people want to know. Is it about immigration, privacy, criminal or copyright? From here, you can create content in a way that will help you attain more clients.

Take a listen!

Jim’s Hack: Read the book $100M Leads: How to Get Strangers to Want to Buy Your Stuff Alex Hormozi 

Tyson’s Tip: Get your personal life organized through a Kanban board. Tyson suggests having columns for buckets such as “new task”, “doing” and “done” and using sticky notes to fill the board.

Episode Highlights:

• 2:09 The significance of creating engaging and interesting videos
• 5:42 Balance entertaining content with informative legal content
• 10:04 Giving away valuable content to attract clients
• 18:35 The need for law firm videos and social media content to be short
• 19:56 Advice on how to make TikTok videos interesting by following trends
  

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Transcripts: Creating Engaging and Valuable Law Firm Videos

Speaker 1 (00:00:01) - Run your law firm the right way. The right way. This is the Maximum lawyer podcast. Podcast. Your hosts, Jim Hacking and Tyson Metrics. Let's partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 2 (00:00:24) - Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. I'm Jim Hacking.

Speaker 3 (00:00:28) - And I'm Tyson Matrix. What's up Jimmy.

Speaker 2 (00:00:31) - I'm ready to go. I've got some legal things that I want to talk about, ways that people can make their firm run better. That's what we do here at Maximum Lawyer. We help law firms grow and improve and do better. And who better to talk over these kinds of topics than you? Tyson Matrix.

Speaker 3 (00:00:48) - My homeboy. What's up? So dorky this morning, but I'm good with it.

Speaker 2 (00:00:53) - We're generally dorky. Yes, that's all good. So how have you been? What's what's new in law Firm land?

Speaker 3 (00:00:59) - Uh, we are nearing the end of our big project when it comes to our system overhaul. So that's what's new. It's not done, but it's very, very close.

Speaker 3 (00:01:09) - And so we're going to we're actually going to our quarterly meeting is on the 20th and we're going to roll it out soon and then we're going to start to do some more testing. And pretty I know we're pretty excited. What about you.

Speaker 2 (00:01:22) - Had a very interesting yesterday. We were interviewing a couple of potential h.r. Managers and the last guy to come in, he had to wait about an extra ten minutes and it was very interesting because he observed some of the team members and he's like, i think maybe they could be working a little harder. So it was, it was quite, quite something where he actually used the time that he was waiting for the prior interview to end. And he's just observing, observing, observing. And he had some comments for us. It was it was pretty great.

Speaker 3 (00:01:52) - That is very interesting. I I'm sure your employees don't want to hear that. That's interesting, though.

Speaker 2 (00:01:59) - So let's let's switch to our topic today. So today we're talking about how people can make their videos and their social media more engaging and less boring.

Speaker 2 (00:02:09) - I think this is a really important topic. It's something you had texted me about a while back, about the amazing things that happen when people make their videos about interesting topics that people actually care about, as opposed to your $78,000 car accident settlement that nobody cares at all about. So I thought it would be a great topic for us to cover on today's show.

Speaker 3 (00:02:32) - Yeah. So here's I want to read the full I only give people the full context because this is the text exchange. So I text you. I said, here's a question and this was weeks ago. And I said, Here's a question. If we created videos that focused more on entertainment than on the legal side of things with this lead to more clients, and you said, sounds like a good podcast episode. And I don't know if I want to use the person's name in this. You can tell me if you think it's okay, but and you said like, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:03:01) - I don't think you need to.

Speaker 3 (00:03:03) - You said like blank's show and whatever goofy blank has been up to.

Speaker 3 (00:03:10) - So, so it's an interesting thing because I'm going to use one example and then I'm not because it's not the example I was thinking of though whenever I send the text. So Brown and Crouppen in Saint Louis, they're the big volume firm. They do this show where they go to like a restaurant and they have this chat and it's it actually has a lot. They get lots of views. But the question really is, does that lead to clients? But really what I was more thinking of is not necessarily that type of a show. That's that's an example of entertainment. I was thinking more of the like the TikTok lawyer, like those types Are those are those effective? Like if we were to create entertainment or entertaining content, is that more effective at conversion than your typical what's the statute of limitations of an injury case in Missouri type of a video? You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (00:04:05) - Sure, sure. And you know, I don't think most law firms can at the stage we're talking about pull off lawyers at lunch, kind of a show.

Speaker 2 (00:04:14) - I think that's a pretty big endeavor where you have sound people and camera people and all that stuff. That's that's probably a big ass. So I think that you're narrowing it down is really helpful. You know, I made a video the other day, a TikTok and and I were in the front yard just getting ready to do one. And we're like, Well, what should we do? And a tree branch had fallen down. And so I got I picked up the tree branch and it was probably about 6 or 8ft long. And I just ran at the camera with her and I didn't even know what I was going to do with it. But I was I was like making an announcement against USCIS. So it was just something funny. And most people really, really liked it. And then one guy said this was in a very lawyerly advertisement, which is fine, it's fine. And I think that I think the key is to mix it up. Like I just I've been getting prompts from TikTok that keep saying Tiktoks longer than one minute have been getting great engagement.

Speaker 2 (00:05:02) - So I said, okay, let's test it. So I just sat out and after I got out of the car, when I was up against my brick background at the office and I just talked for three minutes straight, no edits right into the camera about this one little legal issue. Can people get to stay in the United States even after divorce? And so I just talked because that's something that's been bothering people on our show. And I think the important thing is. Is that you mix it up and that you have some that's fun, some that's very lawyerly. You know, to Brown and Crouppen point, I was on the treadmill yesterday and on Saturday, and I guess they buy ad time and they have a show which is just lawyer sitting around talking about the law. So so it's important to do both, I think.

Speaker 3 (00:05:42) - Yeah, that's a good point. And I didn't I didn't know that Brian Crouppen was doing that. And I wonder if they're doing that now because they were going too heavy on the entertainment side.

Speaker 3 (00:05:50) - And I think having to balance. I think you're right about that. But here's a question, though, that I was I was really pondering When's the last time you bought something or hired someone in the service industry? I'm kind of I'm talking about like professional services. When's the last time you hired someone in the professional services industry based upon some show that they did on YouTube? Well, I.

Speaker 2 (00:06:15) - Really think that that's that's putting a lot of weight, a lot of baggage on your content. And I think that's really a dangerous mistake to make because you don't ever want your sales letter or your landing page or your TikTok or your one video to have to carry that much burden. What do I mean by that? What I mean is that you don't have to go from the actual video to sign up right away. And that's that's that's not a good way to think about it, because what you really want to do is to breed familiarity. You want them to get used to you. They want to get used to your voice, used to your passion, used to what's important to you.

Speaker 2 (00:06:53) - And if you think you're going to be able to hit a home run and create this awesome piece of content that's going to make the the floodgates open and people come running to your office money in hand, saying, Can I please hire you? I think that's that's just a really bad mindset. I think what you're looking for much more are walks and singles, little, little bitty successes, that sort of repetition and like I said, familiarity. And that's that's where I think it comes in. Now, the other thing I think that's important, based on your question to think about, is we are not our clients. We are not I mean, we might be, we might be, but the majority of people that I want to talk to right now are between 20 and 35. They're about to get married or they just did. And they are consuming TikTok in a much different way than Amani and I are watching Netflix at 9:00 at night before we go to bed.

Speaker 3 (00:07:48) - Yeah, I think that I think you raise a good point because my thought is, is whenever I initially sent the text to you was I'm thinking, okay, you're part of the issue is getting the eyeballs right.

Speaker 3 (00:08:00) - There's a multi prong issue with this right my and it's a it's an issue to solve it's a problem to solve where what we're wanting to do is we want to lead them down the path where they're wanting to hire us. At some point. It doesn't have to be right then. So, okay, see, you're getting the eyeballs with the entertainment and then you're getting that familiarity. So we're becoming familiar with you and then as you sort of guide them down the path, you mix in the legal knowledge that you're talking about that way that they're aware of you. So now that they've remember you because of the entertainment standpoint, they know about you as an immigration lawyer because of the immigration that you've sprinkled into it. And then whenever that time comes, they know how to reach you. Now, actually, I guess they don't necessarily that's that is I think that is the element that I feel like I'm sort of missing. I'm trying to figure out where do you where do you fit in the the call to action? Where does that fit in? Because you've got this really good sequence where, like, if you and I have a bunch of videos, your video is way outperform my videos.

Speaker 3 (00:09:07) - And I think that the key difference between a lot of your videos in my videos is that yours are more entertaining, to be honest with you. Like mine are legal heavy, yours are entertainment heavy. Yours get a lot more eyeballs than mine do. I think we both do decent when it comes to conversion, but I'd say that your way, your conversion is way better. So where do you fit in that conversion model?

Speaker 2 (00:09:28) - So you're asking about the right hook. So Gary Vaynerchuk book is Jab, jab, jab, right hook. And so, you know, the right hook is the part that people really don't like. They don't really like the ask. And I really struggled with this for a really long time. I spent a lot of time talking to Dean Jackson and listening to him and Joe Polish talk about, you know, when you when you make that ask for the conversion that especially introverts like me, that really causes some anxiety. Right? And so to me, you have to sprinkle it in, but always now you want to be what I call sideways selling.

Speaker 2 (00:10:04) - I don't know where I pick that up, but, you know, everybody is so done with the overt selling that you have to give away your best content, give away your best content, not not fluff, not crap like give away your best content, give away your best tips and say you have to honestly believe in your heart or it'll come. Through. I'm going to give this away. And 90% of the people who watch this are not going to hire me. They might try to do it themselves. They might go with somebody else. But for the 10% that do hire me, they're going to know that I know my shit. Like when I saw that TikTok this morning, I talked for two minutes straight. No edits. I just. I know my stuff. I know what I wanted to say. And it's going to resonate with people this it's going to resonate with the right people that this guy knows what he's doing. And so I think that when it comes to asking for the hook, when given the hook, you have to weave it in there and you also have to make it so that you're omnipresent and people know how to find you.

Speaker 2 (00:11:06) - Like you don't need to be totally overt about it. But I do have a call to action at the end of every one of my videos and it's not Call me and hire me. It's if you're thinking about it, calling it hiring us, that's fine. But also I have all these other things that you can do. You can join our Facebook group, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, you can come on my Immigration Answers live show where I answer people's questions 3 or 4 times a week for an hour for free. You know, there's things for people to do that is not, hey, let's get into bed together. It's hey, let's go have coffee.

Speaker 3 (00:11:35) - All right? Let's have fun for a second. You and I like having fun. All right. I'm going to give you a topic for immigration, maybe a question. You do a quick TikTok cut, right? And with your call to action at the end, you go with that?

Speaker 2 (00:11:48) - Yeah. I don't really do a lot of call to actions on Tik Tok just because it's so short.

Speaker 2 (00:11:51) - And I think that that's dangerous. But for YouTube, I can.

Speaker 3 (00:11:54) - Okay, you two. Okay, let's do it. Let's YouTube. This is going to be the video of the YouTube. So I have a girlfriend that is in India. I want to bring her to the States. My question is, is that I'll give you an easy one. How much is it going to cost me to get my girlfriend from India to the United States?

Speaker 2 (00:12:12) - No, let's do this. Let's say this. I want to bring my girlfriend to the United States, but I'm not yet divorced from my spouse.

Speaker 3 (00:12:18) - Okay. Even. Even better. All did you see.

Speaker 2 (00:12:21) - That came up on the show the other day? Right. So.

Speaker 3 (00:12:24) - Oh, fantastic.

Speaker 2 (00:12:24) - Oh, good. Can I bring my girlfriend to the United States when I'm still married to my soon to be ex spouse? Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States out of our offices in Saint Louis, San Diego, Washington, DC.

Speaker 2 (00:12:36) - In today's video, we're going to talk about that thorny issue of I'd really, really like to sponsor my girlfriend to come to the United States, but I'm still married. So then I would talk about what you have to do to get divorced. USCIS will not allow you to file any applications unless you are legally divorced. Now, you'd be surprised how often people fall into the trap of thinking, Well, I can file for my fiance, even though my divorce is not yet final. This is. This is a case that cannot be approved and it might not get caught right away. You might not get caught until it gets to the embassy. But at some point, somebody's going to figure this out and your fiance's case is going to be dead on arrival. You're going to lose all your time, your effort and your money, But most importantly, you're going to lose that heartache of separation that's going to be twice as long because you didn't do things properly. So, you know, we've handled cases like this all the time.

Speaker 2 (00:13:24) - If you are thinking about hiring us or would like to hire us, feel free to give us a call. (314) 961-8200. If you are not thinking about hiring us, we have tons of great free resources for you. You can join our Facebook group. It's called Immigrant Home. We have 10,000 immigrants in there who are talking about the immigration process every single day. Doesn't cost a thing. You can post questions sometimes people answer and they talk about processing times, how long cases take at certain embassies. We have our YouTube channel where I upload three new videos every week talking about questions just like this one. You can subscribe to that YouTube channel. That way you'll get alerted whenever we go live on our YouTube Immigration answer show. And if you want to get in the waiting room, if you want to be able to ask me a question, text the word show to 314470 3300. That way you'll get a text alert whenever we announce the next show and you'll be first in line to ask me a question for free.

Speaker 2 (00:14:13) - All that being said, I hope you like this video. If you have any questions, leave us a comment. Otherwise, we'll see you next time.

Speaker 3 (00:14:19) - And cut. Excellent. All right. So if we break this down, I don't know if you've ever broken it down. What I heard was, okay, you asked the question that's on the person's mind. Right after that, you introduce yourself as to who you are. Then you circle back to what the issue of the video is. You kind of talk about the what the legal question is.

Speaker 2 (00:14:40) - I highlight the fear and the problems.

Speaker 3 (00:14:43) - The fear and the problems. Then you get into sort of what the conclusion would be and then you get into the call to action or actually before you get to the call to action, you actually say you you say these are the cases that we handle every day. So you show what is it? You show authority is what you're doing. And then after you've shown authority, you are giving your call to action.

Speaker 3 (00:15:04) - But it's more it's not it was not a very direct. You did give the phone number at one of them, but then you did give that two prong if you're looking to hire someone now gave the call to action. If you're not, you want other videos, go over here to this. So you did give them different channels, you gave them different off ramps, I guess is a way of putting it. So you gave them different offerings. I think it's really kind of a cool way of doing it because my mine are usually here's the here's here's the call to action.

Speaker 2 (00:15:30) - Here's the contract slide, bitch.

Speaker 3 (00:15:32) - Yeah. So it's funny because if I were to break mine down, it's question conclusion, call to action. It's really just kind of in your face, ready to go. Yours is more casual, kind of. Kind of bring you along for the ride, which I like.

Speaker 2 (00:15:47) - All that being said, there are people who are really doing cool things on TikTok, and I think that everyone needs to understand that most consumers are sophisticated enough that if you are in enough places, they'll find you.

Speaker 2 (00:16:00) - You don't have to beat them over the head with how to find you. And that point you made about. Separating out the people that want to hire us versus those that just want free content. You have to say to yourself, it's fine either way. And actually it's my marketing team and intake team that are begging me to make clear, Don't call the office if you're not serious about hiring us because we're getting we get inundated with too many people that just say, I'm in, I'm an Indian, I want to be a citizen tomorrow. And they don't really have a plan. So we really are trying to segment out and try to. And what I say is the reason I do the free show 3 or 4 days a week is to keep us from having to do free consults. So, you know, I want to create content. I want to share the information. I want everybody to be able to understand and learn from other people's questions and mistakes. But if you're serious about hiring us, then you call.

Speaker 2 (00:16:47) - And that's really important for us.

Speaker 3 (00:16:48) - So it sounds like both of us are in agreement, though, that making the videos more entertaining is the way to go. And would you agree with that?

Speaker 2 (00:16:56) - Oh, my God, that's like a total softball. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, it takes a while to get more creative and you have to have sort of fun with it. You can't be too stodgy and you don't want to be boring. And I think that's the cardinal sin of marketing is being boring because people are just going to scroll on past and you. And another point that Gary Vaynerchuk makes all the time is you really need to understand the rhythm of the platform that you really know. The things that work on TikTok won't work on on Instagram reels, won't work on YouTube. It's just different. You have to you have to actually learn and appreciate the platform. And one of the fun things about TikTok is while your video is waiting to upload, you can watch other people's tiktoks.

Speaker 2 (00:17:37) - And so some of my best ideas come from from tiktoks of others.

Speaker 3 (00:17:41) - So okay, so this is I feel like I'm interviewing you, but that's fine. Another thing is like how this is a two pronged question because you may be able to answer in the same way and the same response. But all right. So I noticed that a lot of the successful videos on TikTok, they have like a shtick, you know what I mean? Like, they've got like a thing that they do. And it's it's there's one guy that he's like a home improvement guide. So he does this at the end of he's got this little thing where he throws the thing over his head like he's got his own little shtick. So that's part of it. It's like, do you need your own little shtick is part of the question. The other part of it is, how do you be entertaining? Like what? Like what are some things that you can do to make sure that the videos are entertaining? I noticed that yours are kind of goofy.

Speaker 3 (00:18:18) - You got your own kind of style. It's like really close in your your like face is really close to the camera. Yeah, like that. You have to, like, make the face of the camera. So I would say like, that's sort of your shtick. Do you think that that is necessary, that you have a shtick and then like, what else can you do to make it entertaining?

Speaker 2 (00:18:35) - Well, it has to be short. It has to be concise. It has to make a point. It has to be hard hitting. And people are going to are inundated with this stuff. So I think that I don't know that being entertaining is something that you can teach, but I think you can take solace in the fact that if one person is asking that question like the one that you had, other people have that question. So just know that you're speaking to those other people that have that same question. If comedy is not your shtick, you're right. I mean, there's people that have complete branding.

Speaker 2 (00:19:02) - I don't know if you remember that lady. We had Andrea martinez on our show. She's that pink lawyer and she does tick tock every day and she does stuff that I would never do. And she says things that I would never say. But her whole law firm is female. They all wear pink. It's like a whole thing. And it translates well to tick tock. So, I mean, I've got a face for radio. I have no business having 80,000 followers on TikTok other than the fact that we're we try to keep it fun. And when when nor edits my videos, this is the truth. You should really think soon about having Jackson be in charge of your TikTok channel because he knows the rhythm, he knows the trends, And he's going to be able to say, you can you can piggyback on other people's hot topics by making it interesting. And that's really what all those TikTok, the three people we've had on our show talking about TikTok, that's what they all talked about was, you know, writing the trends, seeing what people are watching and being fun.

Speaker 3 (00:19:56) - Very good. All right. Let's let's wrap it up from there. Before I do wrap things up, I want to remind everyone to join us in the big Facebook group. Just search maximum lawyer on Facebook. You can also check out our YouTube channel. We do all these videos on our YouTube channel. So check us out there. Make sure you subscribe and like all of our videos. And if you want a more high level conversation, go to the Guild, Max Law Guild. You can join us there. Just a lot of great people in the guild sharing all the biggest, best secrets on a on a daily basis. So join us there. And while you're listening the rest of this episode, if you don't mind giving us a five star review, we would greatly appreciate it. Help spread the love. Jimmy, what's your hack of the week?

Speaker 2 (00:20:34) - Just last week, Alex Ramos came out with his new book. It's called $100 Million Leads. I'm about a third of the way through it on Kindle and Audible and it's really, really good.

Speaker 2 (00:20:45) - And I've enjoyed all of his stuff. In the book itself, he's talking about how you get people to want to buy your stuff. So it's how do you get them to raise their hands? So his first book was $100 million offers. How do you create offers that people find interesting and now it's on to how to get them to want to buy your. Stuff, and his next book is going to be on conversion. So I think a lot of people go sort of too crazy about Alex from Ozzy, but I think he's really smart. And I think that that it's a good place to start if you're if you're starting from scratch. There are some new concepts he has in there, but it's all good stuff.

Speaker 3 (00:21:22) - Yeah, I agree that people could go too far with him a little bit, but it's because they don't. They take one little nugget of what he says and they stretch it a mile. I think I agree with you. Super smart. Him and his wife are both super, super smart.

Speaker 3 (00:21:34) - And so I'm going to check that out. I see that you can get the collector's edition for $100. I'm going to check it out. I heard it come out. I did not. But for my tip of the week actually has to do with like getting your personal life organized because there's you're a small business owner, small law firm owner. Your personal life bleeds into your business life and vice versa. So what Amy and I have started to do is we've taken we've used Kanban boards for the office, they're all virtual kingdom boards. We've actually taken a physical Kanban board and we have it in the office at the house. And so everything that we do, everything that needs to be done goes on a sticky note on the wall and then we kind of move it from from face to face. So it's a tip for people to, if they want to help get their personal lives organized, just create three columns on the wall. New task, doing and done. Boom. Put them on a sticky note, slap on the wall and then there you go.

Speaker 3 (00:22:26) - So that is my tip of the week, Jimbo.

Speaker 2 (00:22:30) - It's tough, brother.

Speaker 3 (00:22:31) - All right, man. Have a great day. I'll talk to you later.

Speaker 1 (00:22:35) - Thanks for listening to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Stay in contact with your host and to access more content, go to maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.