No, you should never allocate your entire budget to one marketing channel. Our experience has been that video marketing will strengthen and make your other channels more effective. Adding video to existing or new content will improve your SEO (search engine optimization) efforts as well as your pay per click and other paid advertising.
Video humanizes you to your prospective clients and reaches them visually and with sound. Viewers will stay on your page longer and will experience you and your knowledge using multiple senses.
Ginsberg Law Offices functions as a real life laboratory for video marketing and our experience has been that both paid and organic website visitors reference the videos they have seen on our website and blog pages over 90% of the time. Currently, we are only buying traffic for our workers’ compensation practice. Analytics show a 20 to 27% bump in case inquires in the 14 days following the release of a new video and placement of that video in a new or existing web page or blog post, along with our on-going social media distribution.
Our experience, by the way, has been that currently SEO is the least predictable marketing channel, perhaps because Google is constantly changing the rules and because there appears to be an inherent randomization factor with organic results for local legal topics.
Why is this? Remember that Google rose to prominence by displaying the most relevant results to a search query. Per Google’s original patent, the most accurate and relevant sites were those that had the most relevant incoming links. This concept should sound familiar to lawyers – the most cited cases are the ones that carry the most weight with courts (if you have ever “Shepardized” a case or used West’s citation service you will understand the concept).
Today, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of law firm websites that offer accurate and reliable information about legal topics. Incoming links to a geographically constrained law firm website are more likely the result of an SEO campaign than purely organic activity. So, faced with an environment that is inherently local where multiple law firms publish accurate and reliable FAQ type information, it makes sense that Google would rely less on incoming links and therefore randomize organic results for legal topics.
Remember, as well, that Google only makes money when you participate in an auction based pay per click market. There is a disincentive for Google to allow a local law firm to dominate the organic rankings anymore.
This is why Ginsberg Law Offices no longer pays an SEO consultant – we get much better results from measurable paid advertising and video focused SEO.
However, if you are getting measurable results with SEO in your market, we would suggest that you supplement your written content with video and test the results.
Similarly, if you are driving traffic to landing pages or web pages with paid advertising, you should run a split test whereby half of your paid traffic goes to page without video and half to a page with video. We get better results with a page that contains video but your results may vary.
In sum, our experience has been that a relevant video will enhance other written content marketing that you may do, while also generating traffic from video platforms alone.