The Law Firm Marketing Minute
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The Law Firm Marketing Minute
Best Of: How Lawyers Can Master YouTube feat. Jeff Hampton
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🚨 Lawyers are sleeping on YouTube — and it’s costing them serious business. In this “Best Of” episode, Jeff Hampton breaks down how he turned YouTube into a $2M+ client-generation machine without big budgets, fancy gear, or viral gimmicks. From long-form trust builders to short-form awareness plays, Jeff lays out exactly how solo and small firm lawyers can use video content to attract, convert, and retain ideal clients — even if you’ve never hit record before.
đź“Ś Key Takeaways:
- Long-form videos build trust — shorts just build visibility.
- YouTube outperforms ads and SEO when done with strategy and consistency.
- There's a replicable, step-by-step framework any lawyer can follow to win on YouTube.
👉 8 Ways to Get Clients FAST
📆 Schedule Your Strategy Session
🔎 Find Jeff Here
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Mr Beast used to say do 100 videos and don't pay attention to who watches. Put those videos out and then make each video 1% better than the last one. I'm going to tell you there is a prescription for having a great video.
Speaker 2:Hello everyone, welcome to the Law Firm Marketing Minute. As always, I'm your host, smike, and today, great, great topic I'm very excited to talk about because I think personally that YouTube is one of those platforms that isn't utilized enough by lawyers and law firms and luckily, I have someone who knows YouTube inside and out, who also agrees with me, and we're going to talk about that today. So, jeff Hampton, welcome to the podcast today.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Michael, Appreciate it man. Thanks for the invite and looking forward. I always love talking YouTube.
Speaker 2:No, absolutely Absolutely. Well, I guess let's get to know you for the audience sake. What's your background and, kind of like, what was your motivation to get to where you are today?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I went to law school, came out and first worked at the district attorney's office for five and a half years as a prosecutor, tried a bunch of cases, got some trial experience and then left to start my own criminal defense practice and for the first I was actually a little late to the YouTube game. Late to the YouTube game there. You know YouTube's kind of um, you know it's been around for a good while now but in reality I didn't. I was doing what everybody else was doing for a long time, just trying to do the SEO game, trying to do everything I could on the ads front and just try to swim in the same pond as all the other big fishes. The downside is you get outspent by those fishes sometimes, um, especially if you're the little guy. But in spite of that, what we were able to actually grow the practice to about three. Let's see, I think we had a total of myself, my partner Brandon and we had two attorneys and about four staff or five staff members.
Speaker 1:And then the pandemic came right and for us what happened? Is it kind of? I found two different types of people during that period of time. Some people are just kind of sat it out to saying I hope this is going to be over in some time in the near future. What it did for me, though, is it gave me a chance to sit down and assess what is everybody else doing and what are people not doing, and so, when I realized, on YouTube, I was looking, and I saw that I saw that a lot of attorneys were I mean, not a lot, but a few attorneys were doing YouTube, but it was like short vanity videos, like two minutes, and it's almost like little mini commercials, but no lawyers were really giving value. They weren't actually providing value and talking to someone and giving them whether it's a rundown, like a checklist, something that actually they take home with them and they feel like they got value out of.
Speaker 1:So I started doing that. I basically I started looking at the camera and treating it like a consultation, and just started recording five to 10 minute long videos. I started doing FAQs from client questions that I know that come up, and something weird happened. About three months into that, I had to do probably about 20 videos, I would say, but about three months into that, I started getting phone calls and people would say, hey, who is the guy on the YouTube video? And then I would say, well, let's get on the call. Right, who is this person? And then I noticed that my conversion rate I was closing at 25 to 30% higher on YouTube calls than on cold leads, and the reason why is because these people had watched a 10 minute video. Then they turn around and watch I would learn two or three other videos, so they would kind of go down the rabbit hole a little bit here, and then they already knew a little bit who I was. They already saw my personality, they knew about my expertise, and so it was at that moment I realized, okay, I'm doubling down on this. And since then I also have done.
Speaker 1:I have another practice known as STR Law Guys. It's asset protection, nationwide asset protection law firm for Airbnb owners, and I use the same process with that one owners and and I use the same process with that one. And so what it's essentially done is YouTube has has been able to give an additional 2 million a year for the criminal defense practice and revenues anywhere between a hundred to 150 calls extra per month. And then and I can, you can do the, you can do the numbers, let me put it this way A lead on average to pay for it on Google in my area, $200 to $220 per call, so you can do the math on what the value of that is. And then, on top of that, I did it for the STR Law Guys brand, and even though I don't even have 5,000 subscribers for that brand, it still generates an additional $30,000 a month in new business.
Speaker 2:An additional $30,000 a month in new business. Yeah, that's crazy. I can see just from if I'm putting myself in one of our listeners' shoes just listening to that bit right there. I mean that was like front to back. That was like, hey, wake up call, if you're not taking YouTube seriously, here's your wake up call kind of deal, whether it's YouTube or Instagram, tiktok, linkedin, facebook, whatever the case is, these things require capacity, they require time, and time is something that a lot of solo and small law firm owners do not have a lot of. However, there are things that you really do need to have, like a marketing plan, and, yes, we realize that it might take time out of your day. So what we've done is created a free marketing plan template that you can use for your law firm.
Speaker 2:Check the podcast description, download it, get started today. All right, let's get right back to it. Why do you think? I mean, like you said, you know YouTube's been around for a while. I mean YouTube was like one of the oldest ones. That's still like, really popular today. So you know we think about like Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter now X which have been around for a very long time and lawyers are utilizing. You know they're very heavily on there. Why do you think that they don't put or they haven't put as much attention into YouTube?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, look, I think part of it is because it's a lot easier to create an Instagram reel. It's a lot easier to create a TikTok post that's 60 seconds long, or something like that. And here's the way I break this down. I have nothing against short form content I'm good with that. But what I like to do is I want to batch record what I need to record and then I don't want to have to go. If I can, I don't want to have to repurpose or I don't want to have to rerecord new content for different platforms, because, as a busy lawyer, I don't, you know, many times we don't have time. I'm managing these other two firms as well Don't always have time to be able to just create specific TikTok content or just Instagram content. So here's what I recommend people do, just quite frankly, is, if you start creating long form content let's say it's five to 10 minute long videos Then what you do is your editor because this is what we do is we then carve up the most power packed portions of that 10 minute video. We carve those up into shorts and then we repurpose them on TikTok, instagram. We also put them in YouTube shorts.
Speaker 1:But, remember, my biggest thing is, I like to try to conquer one platform. It's very difficult to be amazing at all platforms. I mean, I just you don't have the time of the day because they're all a little bit different. But what do shorts do? Shorts create visibility. So what are people doing? They're swiping, right. So if they swipe and they see you and they'll go, oh, that's interesting, that's cool. And then what do they do? They keep swiping.
Speaker 1:Now, so reality of it is that creates awareness, but it doesn't build trust.
Speaker 1:So what I want to do is build trust with a viewer where they don't just become a new viewer, I want them to become a returning viewer, talking about now, about my constitutional rights, and they're going to click.
Speaker 1:So I, you know, I think of the short form content as a little bit of like that dopamine hit, like you know, that's why people swipe and that's why it works and it's good. It's good to start there because it'll help, you know, get you comfortable in front of a camera. But I say the reason why Mr B said this recently, which I thought was funny he said that somebody interviewed him and he said what you're going to see in the next 10 years is service businesses, particularly professional service businesses. They're going to wake up and realize the power to blow up their business on YouTube and he said the reason why is because there's experts out there that if they package their content the right way, you can't spend enough money to get the visibility and the awareness and the trust through organically that you could ever do trying to spend it on ads. You just wouldn't have enough money to do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. You said something there and this is something that we talk about all the time the power of content multiplication, right, that's almost like the content hack, right. It's like, hey, you have got, you've got this long form content and you've got great bits within it. Like there's your content right there. We actually just did a, we actually just did an episode about that, where, you know, I was kind of explaining going through that process. So you talked about, you mentioned that there's the difference between just being on YouTube shorts, which causes awareness, and then the aspect of of gaining that trust, right, and the trust is really what you want, cause that's what warms the audience up to you, that's what makes them come back. So, like, what's that? What's that switch? Like, you know you can, you can you have to start out of the awareness, right, because they don't trust you if they're not aware of you. So, like, what's that? That switch? Like, how do you make that switch from awareness to trust?
Speaker 1:So what I do if someone comes to me brand new YouTube channel never had a YouTube channel at all what I'm going to give you. I'm going to give you the quick blueprint of what I would sell. Tell someone to do. The first thing to do is to sit down and, under the 80, 20 principle, what is the 20% of your services, your service areas as a lawyer that provides you, or whatever practice areas that provides you, 80% of your revenues, and whatever those things are then I want you to sit down and I do this with every agency client that I have that come in, whether it's coaching or whatever is going on. I'll sit down and I'll say now I want you to sit down and write down the top 20 questions from clients, cause you're already working with clients, you already got a law firm, you already know what some of this is doing here. Write down those top 20 questions about that 20% and then now what we're going to do is you bring those to us, we sit down and we look at it and what do we find out?
Speaker 1:Okay, what are the pain points? I need to know your customer avatar, who is your actual client avatar? What are their concerns, if we want to know what their pain points are, and we know what their worries are like. For me, I know what they are. Someone's afraid of what they're afraid they're going to lose their job. They're afraid they're going to lose their freedom. But really the biggest underlying issue is shame. They don't want to feel shame with their family. They don't want to have to turn around and say I was arrested for something. You wouldn't believe how many people come to our office and they don't want to tell their wife that they were arrested. They don't want to tell, they don't want anyone to know any of this, and so they want someone to help rescue them from the shame. And so when you recognize that's the underlying, they want someone to help rescue them from the shame. And so when you recognize that's the underlying psychological issue, it helps you then frame your video content, and so what I tell people number one is to start narrow, handle those practice areas that are going to make you the money SEO them. You can optimize them, and there's many good tools that you can do that. You can use the keyword planner to figure out what's the highest search-based keywords and you can then come in and make that as part of your title, your description, and it's really not that hard to do because here's the great thing there's not many lawyers doing this. So I guarantee you, if you were to sit down in your niche right now talking to attorneys and look on YouTube to find out who else is doing what you're doing in your area, geographically let's say Texas, or let's say you're going to find a handful whereas how many hundreds of them are doing ads on google, how many hundreds of them are trying to win the seo game and blogs and all that stuff. This makes it very easy to start not only um, not only being seen on youtube, which is the second largest search engine in the world, but then you also begin to be seen by google on long tail searches for videos, because Google owns YouTube. So when you start adding that together, it's playing the game where no one else is playing, because there's an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage.
Speaker 1:Now the next part is on this. Once you've exhausted that, because I'm going to tell you you go back in my old videos, go to Hampton Law, look at my older videos. They're embarrassing, but you'll also notice they were terrible thumbnails, terrible titles, but if you'll notice it was. It's a ton of practice areas. I mean you'll just see. I mean probably a hundred videos that I did Cause. I mean you know you're learning as you go I didn't know what I was doing at the time as you learn these practices. But but what it did is it established a very strong foundation that when people are looking for this content, if they've been arrested for you know you name it shoplifting guess what they're going to only find my video. That's what they're going to locate. And so when that process is put in place, then you get the immediate low hanging fruit of search.
Speaker 1:Once you've exhausted that, then you go broad. And when I say you go broad, what I mean by that is now you can go okay, how do I package my content? Where? Here's my expertise, here is pop culture, and somewhere in the middle I can introduce my expertise but grab people's attention. One of the best examples of that is one of my newest videos that I have is basically how to handle cops if they want to search your gun safe.
Speaker 1:Well, what do I get to talk about in that? Gun owners very interested in that Like, yeah, how do I handle it? Can they force me to open it? But I get to talk about fourth amendment, search principles. I get to talk about the single purpose container exception to the fourth amendment. There's all these areas I get to incorporate and even throw in some case law, but yet it's had 270,000 views in the first three days. Oh, wow, you see what I'm saying. Once you go narrow and you've exhausted the narrow part because you need to do that to build your business then you can establish your social proof by going broad. And now you start growing. You start not you are able to grow your, your subscriber count. But more important subscribers is views. You have the view count, the algorithm. 98% of my views come not from people searching but because the algorithm is suggesting my videos out to people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you talked about you. You touched on real quick. Um, you know, hey, if you go back to your old videos, you'll see that you talked about you. You touched on real quick. Um, you know, hey, if you go back to your old videos, you'll see that. You know, you, you had a lot of trial and error going on and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:And you know something that I say a lot to our audience is that, hey, listen, like you know, on, just on social media in general, not just YouTube and social media in general. You see all these influencers out there, right, who they post like once a week or once every two weeks or whatever, and they still get a lot of views and a lot of and a lot of people think, oh my gosh, I only got to post like once a week, once every two weeks, and I'll be good, right, but it's like no, you have to go back in their journey and see where they started, Right, they don't always just, you know, start like that. They have a lot of trial and errors going on that they get through. So I'm glad that you said that, because you know it's it's not, you know they say, you know it's a overnight success. That took like five years to do or something like that, right when it's like people don't recognize until they see the success. They don't see that that beginning of the journey.
Speaker 1:And let me tell you something. That's why, eventually, you know my, the production company that I have, and then the coaching side of it YouTube Rainmakers. What we ended up doing is a lot of people come to us and have this idea like, hey, you know, I want the shortcut, the easy, the easy shortcut to success. First of all, there's no shortcuts to anything. No shortcuts, no hacks, no secrets they do not exist. There are ways you can partner with people and learn practices, where I do believe starting another channel because a good example of that is what I did with STR Law Guys that it was quicker and easier to implement some of these things once you've learned previous lessons. So there are ways to take best practices and stand on other people's shoulders and be able to incorporate that into there so you don't have to make all the same dumb mistakes like I did. But that you still got to build the brand, you still got to build your authority, and that takes time.
Speaker 1:And I tell people Mr Beast used to say do a hundred videos and don't pay attention to who watches is what he used to say.
Speaker 1:His whole goal was this and I do agree with this to some extent which is put out videos. You know that your avatar you're looking after your specific customer avatar you know that they value that because you're already talking to customers and then put those videos out and then make each video 1% better than the last one, if you just make it a little bit better, find a little bit better way to improve it, whether it's the title, whether it's the thumbnail, whether it's your intro. Because I'm going to tell you there is a prescription for having a great video, cause I have one of my videos that's over 5 million views. We launched it at the end of January and what it is is the first 30 seconds of your video determine the success of the whole rest of the video. Wow, and here's the amazing part that video is 20 minutes long and it has 5 million views and yeah, and the title what to do whenever cops want to see your guns.
Speaker 1:Wow, now sounds like the most basic thing you could ever think of, right? But then it's got an engaging thumbnail where you've got cops at your front. That's somebody's front door, opening a door, saying we won't ask again.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, that emotion triggers.
Speaker 1:It creates curiosity. It puts you in a first person point of view where you can imagine you're the person in that thumbnail that just opened the door, shocked by a police officer that's there. And then what does it do psychologically? It pushes your eyeballs down to the title and once you look down at that title, the curiosity says huh, click. And then in the first 30 seconds of that video, I not only hook, I have a hook that grabs people's attention to make sure they invested in the right video. Is this clickbait or is it the right thing I'm supposed to be watching? The second thing is I set the stakes. If you don't watch this video, when cops show up, you can end up in jail or worse, right? And then the third thing is I give them a quick summary. If you you know, in this video I'm going to cover these following things we get to the end. You'll be equipped and ready if a cop shows up at your door, and so what it does is you see that retention graph on YouTube and the YouTube studio stays really high, right? So you keep people in that first 30 seconds. And then, on average, even on a 20 minute video after 5 million views, seven minutes. Average watch time seven minutes. So I mean what that tells YouTube is.
Speaker 1:Youtube has two goals Keep people on the platform, keep watching, and to predict what the viewer wants to watch and so what you. The algorithm does not have to be your enemy, it can actually be your friend. Once you figure this out. The algorithm wants to promote good content that converts, and once you do that, you don't have to work hard. Even now, what is it? We're in October. I launched that video in January. That video still gets between 700 and 1500 views per hour. Oh wow, now I mean, what was that? Nine months later, we're still looking at 700 to 1500 views per hour.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's incredible. That's incredible. Let's talk about, like, some of the ways that, once a law firm is able to, you know, figure out their journey and their systems and processes to create YouTube content consistently, you know, they've kind of started growing an audience, um, a faithful audience. What are some of the ways a law firm can use YouTube to leverage their firm? Like, just some some of the more simple ways, I guess.
Speaker 1:Well, so I mean the, the very basic thing to do is, once you start creating um and it's this is going to depend on what type of law you're in, okay, so here's the area that I really found extremely helpful for my asset protection business. So sales cycles are very different for different types of law. So, for instance, criminal, the sales cycle is like 48 to 72 hours. I mean, when somebody is going to jail, family members are calling like you don't have a long time to. It's kind of in the moment, right, it's an urgency issue. Asset protection sales cycle might be two to four weeks. Someone might be looking to take a little bit of time and deliberate on that.
Speaker 1:So what I started doing on those videos is incorporating. I want to push people. What is my call to action? If my call to action is not necessarily always to set up a phone call, sometimes my call to action is to build an email list. So what I will do is set up a lead magnet and I'll say, hey, listen, if you, if you'd learned some of these new lessons about LLCs and whether or not you needed a trust for your Airbnb, check out my, the, check out the free resource I provide to you down below. That gives you the three-step guide on how to get started.
Speaker 1:What happens is you end up having a lot of people. They click on it. They have to give their email address. It goes into HubSpot where now I'm able to take that information in HubSpot and I create targeted email campaigns that are automated for the next two weeks, where I basically indoctrinate them and educate them and nurture them over the next couple of weeks. And then what happens is they have subsequent additional videos, additional copy, pre-written, and that's where I'm able to make the additional 30 to 40,000 a month on a small channel, because now you own your real estate. Essentially I own that person's email address so I can remarket to them, I can introduce them other partners that I work with and earn affiliate relationships income from. There's so many ways that if your sales cycle is longer, that YouTube becomes the open door to be able to gather an email address and then remarket to them.
Speaker 1:If you're dealing with more of a quick turnaround situation where you're looking at criminal defense or something like that, I have to recognize what that call to action is, which is, I need to get them on a call, and I need to either get them to on a call or over to my website so that I can get them the answers that they need. So when I found that I'll take the video and then create a good blog from the video, from the transcript, and put the video on the actual blog or on the practice area page on my website, then guess what people do? The dwell on time for the page and the bounce rate goes down. They dwell on the page longer and now people are watching the videos and that's a much higher conversion. We all know video converts higher. Oh for sure, yes.
Speaker 1:So when you incorporate that into your website and your GBP, I will post videos on GBP If you do postings on there, where I've had people say I saw your little video on the Google listing and I was like you know. So you can incorporate videos anywhere within your normal structure. And we even use YouTube videos as part of uh educating current clients on issues. So current clients like if they've got a normal question, like a question that might come about, what to expect in court. We have a video that talks about that on one of their emails they receive when they sign up. They get that they, and so it's a. It's a way to help also cut down on time pressures internally within the team. If you create those videos and not all of them have to be active, some of them can be unlisted.
Speaker 2:That's very true. Yeah, absolutely, and just real quick for any of our listeners out there that don't have an email newsletter if you get the emails, you need to be able to utilize them to your advantage, so email newsletter is a great way to do that. Awesome, jeff. Any last thoughts for our audience Anything that we didn't touch on that you think that they could very much benefit from?
Speaker 1:So one of the things I want to tell people when you start creating these videos, be careful what you put in the description, because I'm not into doing this for vanity's sake. I don't want 285,000 views on a video if it doesn't make my law firm money. So the number one reason I'm doing it is for this. So here's the thing what you put in your description will make the difference between whether people call you or not. So two things I'm going to advise you to do. Number one put your phone number and make it a call rail number on your video. Put it on there so that people see it and you're going to be able to. Actually, if you have a tracker number, you'll know the number of calls that are coming in. And then, in the description I put, I make sure I put in there the website and the way that they can work with me.
Speaker 1:So because if you just put a bunch of text in there, if you just put a bunch of there, people are not going to scroll all the way down and look in that description. You want to make it super easy for them so that they know where to go by, by simply adding a phone. Let me put it this way by simply adding a phone number at the top of the of the video, we had a three X increase in calls. Wow. So you have to make it easy on the viewer. You got to. You know it's. It's how to call a law firm for dummies. You literally have to make it as simple as possible. No, you don't want to create any sort of headwind, you want it to be a tailwind. So if you do that, make sure and add that in in addition to the great value you're going to provide, you'll be shocked at the calls you get.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's a. That's a. That's an amazing tip right there, and I know that you have so much more that you could share with the audience. Just unfortunately, based on time, however, where could the audience find you and get in contact?
Speaker 1:and maybe ask you questions. Of course, you can always reach out to me on LinkedIn. Just look up Jeff Hampton, you'll see me there. It says YouTube Rainmakers. You can visit YouTube Rainmakers the website as well, com. And when you go there we have some free resources that help you get started. And then I have a new channel I just started, called YouTube Rainmakers, where I go through some of the practices that I've used for my law firms. That gives you a little bit of education on it. But, yeah, reach out anytime. I'm happy to answer those questions.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, Jeff, I appreciate you being on the podcast and I know that our audience definitely will benefit from this.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you, michael, appreciate it.
Speaker 2:All right, everyone listening. Have a great day, have a great weekend and we'll see you guys next week.