Chris Dreyer:
Three, two, one. Solocast lift off. What if I told you a personal injury firm pulled in 19 million views in its first month of video and tripled its weekly calls? That's not a year, that's in a single month. Well, it's possible with the right system in place. Today, we're going to break down why a smart video strategy is absolutely essential to your firm's growth, the actual method of producing high volume of video with minimal effort, and if you stick around to the end, I've got an exciting announcement that could solve all these problems for you. This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, a legal marketing agency for elite law firms specializing in personal injury. Let's get into it.
Back in the day, it's like TV, Google, then we eventually had Facebook and that was really it. Go back even further, it's like the yellow pages. Who's in the yellow pages? That's why they were so expensive. That's everybody went. That's where all the attention was. Now you have to show up multiple times. And there was a study where I think it's extremely dated now to where people have to see something or hear something seven times before they make a decision. I believe it's 11 times now. But that basically means that every time that you do omnichannel marketing, you're reinforcing the trust component before they make a decision to hire you. Let's talk about the bigger ecosystem of Google. A lot of times people think of just Google and they think of Google Search. Guess what? They own Waymo, got a lot of data there. They also own Gemini, YouTube. It's the second-largest search engine. Google's number one, YouTube's number two.
Even today, I understand there's a lot more ads and the visibilities change and local services ads and all these things. But when you create YouTube videos, it actually trains Gemini. They control, they own it. They're going to train Gemini, their LLM with your transcripts, with your content anytime you create a video. The other thing that happens is a lot of times when you create a YouTube video, it is actually indexed on Google. When you look at the Google result, back in the day, it was just all blue links, text. Now you've got social media, you've got forum posts and Reddit, you've got different styles of content. And during the scroll, you can actually see video. And that's even in the main index. Not to mention people could click on the video tab up within Google. Very rarely do that unless I'm specifically looking for a YouTube video, but I do do it occasionally. It feeds the entire algorithm.
Video isn't a sideshow in search anymore. Video results now show up in close to half of all Google searches. On top of that, YouTube is the second most visited site on earth behind only Google with 84% of American adults using it. And when a video appears in results, the top listing gets clicked more, not less. But showing up is only half of it now because people trust less of what they see online more than ever. And video is the one format that can earn that trust back.
Because there's such a lack of trust that video's more important than ever. And not only that, social media essentially is video. It's the majority of content. It's not like you're just posting statics and going to have a big following. People want to learn about you, experience and hear different tonalities, and they like the music and things like that to keep them entertained. And the challenge with video is the production and editing. A lot of us, including myself, I'm looking at my neck beard right now, need a good beard shave, we're a little insecure, right? We all have our insecurities. And God love you for those out there that don't have any of these insecurities, but I'd say for the most part of us, we don't want to look stupid. We don't want to look stupid among our peers. And that's why what we're saying and how we're dressed and what have you. So a lot of times it just stops right there and people aren't willing to do the video, the phone on a selfie and do some UGC, user generated content and just post it and let it fly.
Most of us need help. I'm here with my producer. I have a team behind him that we edit the video quality. They make sure they cut all the stupid stuff I say that gets me into trouble. I've definitely said some things that gets me into trouble that we got to cut. So because video's a requirement and a lot of us are like, we need help. We need to know... Most attorneys don't know what a hook is to grab the attention in the first six seconds. And so with the necessity of doing video, it requires production in-house at the office typically because you want to make it convenient. You don't want to have to get in your car, fight through traffic, and go into a studio. And you need volume.
Because of our attention, we're just so distracted, there's so much dopamine everywhere, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, social media channels everywhere, so many distractions that you need to hook them in that first six seconds. And that means a lot of times your content needs to be shorter, reels, TikToks, clips, shorts. I mean, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, like it. And that's why the thumbnails are important is to capture that immediate attention. And because of that, you need volume. It doesn't have to be high-end production quarterly shoots that's going to go on TV. You need a team for your captions, for your graphics, for your edits, and that's the challenge.
A lot of times the friction here is also who do you get to help you? Just like with SEO, you've got different sub-disciplines of content, local SEO, link building, technical SEO. You have to have all these components to make a good campaign. It's very rare to find that skill in one individual. The same as for video, the producer who is helping you with the scripts and the hooks on the opening, the videographer that's shooting from three or four multiple angles, then you got a team that just does thumbnails, and then you have a team that just does the audio, the sound engineering, maybe the editing, and that's just to get them produced. Then you need someone that is competent on submitting to the different channels, but each channel has a little bit of nuance. YouTube's different than TikTok and they have different styles and formats required. So then you need somebody to distribute the content. Well, then you need somebody to optimize the content and then engage with the content to build a community, to build a following, to reply to those individuals because engagement drives the algorithm.
Where I'm going with this is if you're trying to do it in-house and even do your own production, it's hard to check the box on all of those without accruing immense cost. But the thing is, each one of those components requires a level of skill, but not maybe at a full-time employee perspective. So you really think you need a full-time person for thumbnails? Maybe if you're shooting 300 a day like Gary V. But it's one of the best reasons to hire an agency is because they can spread their cost out amongst many clients and give you those capabilities. Now I know what you're thinking here is, "Well, I don't want my stuff to be the same as everybody else's." Correct. That's why you're you, you're authentic. The producer gives you the hook to open and then it's your content, your story, your style, your tonality, your location. Everything is different in how you approach law, in how you approach business, and how you approach care and leadership at your firm. That is the difference between trying to bring it in-house. What are you going to do? You're going to hire three people, four people. And no matter how you look at it, you're going to be at eight to $10,000 a month per head and you're going to try to do volume. It's just not feasible.
There are two ways firms try to do this and both break. You can do it in-house and you can't hit the volume or the quality or you hire a production company, they shoot it, hand you the files, and that's where it ends. Nobody posts it, promotes it, or ties it to search. That's the gap. So here's where this leaves you.
I guess here's where I've been jab, jab, jab, jab, jab, the Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook for Gary V, that book. I guess I've been jabbing for about 10,000 times before here's the right hook. So we just acquired Wildfire Video Group. Wildfire is a tremendous agency. They are now Rankings. And basically what they do is they send a producer right to your office. They bring in all the hooks, the person to lead you. You don't have to go into a studio. And they shoot anywhere from 30 to 90 videos a month, extremely high volume, very well produced, and just distributed across all your social media. And everything that I was talking about is done for you and now Rankings has that capability.
And I'll go another step further. We are producing 3,000 videos per month. So we have the capabilities for volume, for distribution. And the other thing is too, it compliments your search engine optimization because you show up multiple times in the feed, now the main index, because now you have video, you show up. All the social media platforms, they train different LLMs. For example, LinkedIn trains OpenAI a bit more. YouTube is training Gemini. Facebook and Meta are in the game of AI. Now you got X and Grok and basically X owns the Colossus data, which is leased by Meta and Anthropic. When you produce video and you place it on social media, it helps search engine optimization and it helps the LLMs discover who you are, but it is a necessity of social media as well.
And when we're talking about omnichannel marketing and we're talking about even doing Meta ads, if you go and research right now and you say, how do you do Meta ads effectively? Do you think you produce one piece of content on Meta? Most people tell you the targeting stuff, it's so smart with the AI that the disbursement is driven from the creative. So you got to have a lot of creative to see what hits. Post it on organic and you see you get a lot of engagement and comments and then you can take that and use it for ads. So Rankings has acquired Wildfire Video Group. We're going to be talking more about video. We're going to be talking about how it impacts the overall marketing ecosystem today. So this is how Rankings is evolving. We're a search marketing agency that now has some amazing creative services, video design. We are building an end-to-end digital marketing solution. It is digital first. We're not just a search agency anymore. We're a GEO, LSA, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, video marketing agency focused predominantly on you, personal injury law firms.
And because of that, we have insights on what works best, where the best opportunities are, how everything interacts. And we're going to bring our obsession about excellence, quality, production, commitment to results on a month-to-month basis, no long-term contracts, we've got to eat what we kill, we're going to bring that same commitment to video that we have in search. And we're excited to announce that we're going to be bringing video marketing services to Rankings October 1st. And guess what guys? We're not going to just let everybody in because we want to make sure that we can maintain quality. Everyone has natural capacity. So we're limiting it to 12 firms per month and we're only going to do 12. And guess what? That means our clients, we're also going to be talking to you guys first and we're going to have a waiting list. And I know the demand's going to be there. So that's my right hook. Very, very rarely do it, but I think it's an amazing opportunity for many of the firms listening. And so go check it out.
So a lot of video production companies, they'll do the quarterly shoots, the big hero videos. And I think those have a place, especially for broadcast television, but it's like one high-end shoot and then you go put that on TV or programmatic. And we see those as the hero video on a lot of websites or you see the individuals standing on top of the truck and their association with the truck because when you advertise with the truck, you get more truck accidents, but they're these shoots, they're like once a quarter, a couple times a year and you run them over and over and over again. That is not what we do. We do short videos, quick hitters. They're a hook, a concept, and done, and it's volume. It's catered to social media, not to OTT and TV and broadcast television and these big ad spots.
Now, here's the deal. These short videos can end up being phenomenal ads. It can actually drive direction, direct and lead your ad strategy because it's just more content. You want to supply the Facebook library with more creative so that it could choose which ads to display to the consumers during different points of interaction. But that's how we're different. At least I don't see, I think there's a lot of video production companies that are amazing. I think there's some that are really doing some cool things with AI. This is not AI first. This is you. This is human first. This is your authentic self telling your story. That's how we're different.
So here's where this leaves you. Where people look for a lawyer keeps moving and right now it's moving to video and the answers that AI gives them. Sitting down and making a single video was never the hard part. It's everything that comes after that that creates so much friction. And oh yeah, you have to do it dozens of times a month to be effective. Now we've solved all of that for you. We acquired Wildfire Video Group and launched Rankings Video Marketing. One shoot a day at your office becomes a month of video and our search team and ad team gets every piece in front of the people looking for a lawyer. If you want your firm on camera and in front of the people already searching for you, spots are limited each month and our clients get first access. The link is in the show notes. That's it for this one. I'm Chris Dreyer. I'll see you next time.
