When you’re marketing your law firm online, it can be intimidating to realize the actual amount of information you are competing with — especially when it comes to video, where search is not nearly as refined. Does great content automatically rise to the top? Why are there so many cat videos in my feed? Is it even worth producing quality content?
It’s easy to get discouraged, especially when your carefully crafted campaign, in any medium, is temporarily subsumed by something that has just gone viral (insert favorite meme or political gaffe here. Butt-dialing reporters, anyone?). But three things can help you combat that:
- First, keeping focused on why you are creating the content.
- Second, keeping in mind the long game.
- And third, listening to your audience and iterating as they dictate.
Which Brings Us to Littler Mendelson’s Video Prowess
Littler is one of the law firms that have gone big into video, so much so that they built a studio in their Kansas City office (which serves as the firm’s global services center). It employs several videographers (including grads of USC’s prestigious film school) and regularly produces a variety of content. Except for filming certain large events, Littler produces all its video in-house.
I spotted one of their campaigns, “Littler 2 the Point,” on Twitter (which is how @COMMSdog and I know about the cat video epidemic). It also runs on LinkedIn. These videos are short (90- to 120-second) explainers. Some are on more general topics, such as what employers should do when they receive a harassment complaint, while others dive into the granular vagaries of FMLA leave.
Attorney Kevin O’Neill runs Littler’s Learning Group, which offers training for clients and related resources, such as executive coaching. The Learning Group is a practice group within the firm. The video projects, with “Littler 2 the Point” as just one of five different channels, began as educational outreach and client training resources, rather than marketing or social media campaigns.
Littler 2 the Point:
“We decided early on that multimedia such as video was the best teaching method,” O’Neill said. And it didn’t take long to see that some of the shorter content was ideal for social media.
“We have been hearing from our clients their desire to consume content via video, and we also see from our video analytics that when we push out video content, we receive a high level of engagement and views,” said Jennifer Klein, Director of Public Relations and Communications at Littler.
The firm launched “Littler 2 the Point” this past July. “For the few that we have actively pushed out, we’ve had 9,000 views and 36,000 impressions,” Klein said. (Impressions are opportunities to have your content viewed. Views mean that your content has been seen.)
“They’ve driven a larger audience to our site, where they are apt to explore our other offerings,” she said. Since January 2019, the firm has had 31,000 video views and nearly 116,000 impressions across its body of video content.
“We can see a correlation that traffic picks up on our website when those videos are pushed out,” Klein said. The firm’s News & Analysis page has a filter for video content, so those that prefer that medium can quickly find and watch what they need. It also links to long-form on-demand webinar content.
What works for Littler is that they have enough experience to know that different video formats appeal to different audiences, and yet all perform a valuable training function. Hence, the “Dear Littler” series, modeled after Dear Abby (or Dear Prudence, depending on your generation). It started as a print product and later moved to video. It was the firm’s first campaign to debut on social media.
Dear Littler:
Littler has also used video effectively in internal and external communication campaigns, such as “Littler Celebrates” and its video on women at the firm.
Littler Celebrates:
Women’s Video 2019:
The Social Media Strategy
“About a year ago we started pushing out client-accessible, client-friendly, consistently branded, high-quality video. We worked with client relations to get the right look and feel,” O’Neill said.
The first social media play was “Dear Littler.” And as the communications team refined the social media campaign, O’Neill’s crew was refining the formats. Each team’s knowledge informed the other’s output. For example, the firm’s “Littler Learning Points” was meant for a “captive” training audience. They are 10 to 12 minutes and done in a TV news format. But snippets of those were perfect as social media tidbits. Klein reports that:
We see the highest level of engagement on LinkedIn. Twitter is second, though that is more of a slow-moving channel for gathering followers.
She goes on: “We also use Facebook, but primarily for internal communications and recruiting. LinkedIn is what has given this campaign its bang.” She and O’Neill have weekly meetings to chart their production and promotion schedules.
Klein continues to tinker with the campaigns, paying close attention to her social media analytics. She and O’Neill agreed that diversity and inclusion content does particularly well. “We had a cross-over moment with ‘It Gets Better,’” O’Neill said. “Those videos were very powerful and very affirming. We got a lot of great feedback and support based on those pieces. They helped us learn how to move our content into different formats, and be more concise with our delivery as well.”
Littler has produced a vast amount of video content. “Our firm leadership is really invested in this, and recognize the importance of this communication channel, both internally and externally,” Klein said. “They see this as much of a priority as we do.”
Illustration ©iStockPhoto.com
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