The Case for Change | The Lawyer Report | Turtl
[Research] Explore the trends and challenges facing law firm marketers looking to use content to drive business outcomes for firms.
THE CASE FOR CHANGE
Why law firms need a **fresh approach** to maximize the value of their content
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It may be old news to say that the traditional law firm model is changing as we have all read about or experienced the ongoing shift in the legal sector. However, it is worth stating that the legal sector is undoubtedly going through its most significant change in recent times.
The genesis of this market shift is rooted in the aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis which forced law firms to re-think their operational models and look deeper for efficiency gains as their clients continued to squeeze on price. Additionally, firms needed to find new ways to engage their clients in an increasingly competitive market, which has seen entrants from the Big 4 accounting firms and the evolution of new legal companies. And finally, the rise in legal technology solutions, to deliver the desired operational efficiencies, is driving competition in ways that law firms have never seen before and with a profound impact.
All these factors have come together in a perfect storm that is driving law firms to evolve. While the focus has been on delivering efficiencies to the legal process using a range of technologies, the most successful and forward-thinking firms are leaving no area of their operations un-touched, including their business development and marketing capabilities.
Turtl, in conjunction with The Lawyer, surveyed business development and marketing professionals at leading law firms to ascertain their approaches to the production and delivery of thought leadership, client briefings and other marketing collateral. The key aims were to gain an understanding of the levels of satisfaction with their current materials and rates of client engagement, to understand the key pain points they face and to outline what factors could contribute to a better future.
Methodology
The survey is based upon 68 responses from senior business development and marketing professionals and partners from the top 200 UK law firms. Survey responses were backed up by one-to-one interviews with marketing professionals to uncover the key issues facing the effective use of thought leadership and other digital marketing activities.
When asked what formats firms use to deliver their thought leadership online, 63 per cent stated that long form scrolling web pages were their predominant method for content delivery followed by 32 per cent who continue to use the oldest format of all, the PDF.
If someone is reading offline you can't see how much of the PDF they've read, which bits they linger on and find interesting or how long they spend reading it. Furthermore, we think a lot of people that come through social do so on their way to and from work, so they are probably looking at things on mobile and PDF
is not great for mobile
Rebecca Scully, Head of Marketing Communications
Gowling WLG
These results suggest that law firms have not yet embraced the full capabilities of the digital world we now live in and are failing to engage audiences in the same ways that they are likely to be digesting content on a personal basis. Having said that, respondents do recognize the drawbacks of their current approach.
Which of the following formats do you most commonly use to deliver your thought leadership online?
Although podcasts, video and social media are all digital channels that are widely used today, most law firms have yet to engage with these channels of communication. However, the results showed a glimmer of the future with a small number of respondents indicating they use these alternative formats and channels.
Similarly, the methods of production currently used by firms closely mirror the formats used to deliver their content, with firms sticking to the tried and trusted standard templates backed up by the in-house design team or external agencies.
And it is here that some of the problems really start to become clear.
Firms are sticking to the tried and trusted standard templates backed up by the in-house design team or external agencies
What are the main methods of production for your thought leadership, client briefing and other marketing materials?
While standard templates are most likely to conform to house style and support the firm’s brand identity, they are also most likely to suffer from two fundamental problems. Firstly, once the house style has been designed, these templates are often set in stone, never to be re-visited, or at best only receiving small tweaks every now and then. Secondly, and exactly because they become stale, every user applies their own changes to these templates to make them more current, thereby breaking the very house style that the templates were put in place to manage.
Adoption is the biggest issue in the sense that, particularly in law firms, people all have their own ideas of how they want it to look, there is sometimes a resistance to a standardized approach.
Fred Banning, Head of Corporate Communications
Pinsent Masons
So, enter the in-house design team who are then tasked with the job of managing these templates, often with little or no remit to do anything other than cosmetic changes. These teams are then asked to provide ‘design’ support to the end user, trying to change the look and feel of their marketing collateral to break away from the corporate norm and make their work stand out and be noticed.
However, this often fails, usually due to the restrictions of the templates and the formats they support, resulting in growing frustration at the capabilities of the resources made available. The seasoned content creator will rarely go down this well-trodden path more than a couple of times before breaking ranks and calling in an external agency to ‘do something different’ to their work. This might be driven by a partner who realizes the impact a stand out piece of content will have in the crowded market or by an ambitious business development manager seeking ways to open the eyes of their practice area. Either way, these pieces of content while effective with clients, are costly and time consuming to produce and often push the boundaries of brand identity to the limit.
The brand and the content have to work hand in hand, so you don't lose brand consistency. There has got to be enough flexibility in a brand to enable a variety of content, and you need to have enough flexibility in the content to reach the right people.
Rebecca Scully, Head of Marketing Communications
Gowling WLG
Those that don’t push these boundaries end up producing content with a generic feel to it with each firm delivering PDF files or transposing that long form content directly onto a web page for readers to scroll.
Do you have enough flexibility in your content production process?
- Yes, we have lots of autonomy.
- It depends on the project.
- No, it's a restricted process that churns out generic content and we need to find a way to change this.
Respondents indicated that their current methods of measuring client engagement relied upon visits to a web page, click-through rates from email campaigns and downloads of documents from their websites. Whilst these all give an indication of client awareness, they say little about true engagement with a piece of thought leadership or other marketing collateral as they do not tell you whether the piece was read, which sections readers concentrated on and perhaps most importantly, how many people the original communication was forwarded on to.
What metrics do you currently use to measure the value and impact of your thought leadership, client briefing and other marketing materials?
Respondents recognized these shortcomings and indicated that in the future they would like engagement metrics around the number of unique readers (with 61 per cent ranking this in their top three most important metrics), identification of the most read chapters within a publication, where 46 per cent selected this in their top three and the sum of the time spent reading, where 51 per cent of respondents selected this in their top three most important metrics.
What metrics would you like to use to measure the value and impact of your thought leadership, client briefings and other marketing materials?
It has for a long time been surprising that law firms paid such little attention to the performance of their business development and marketing activities, perhaps preferring to rely instead on the assumption that the name of their firm, strong brand recognition in the market and client loyalty would be sufficient to guarantee widespread readership of their thought leadership and client briefings.
What we'd like to measure better is what people are looking at, what they're reading and what can we learn from that. This is as important as return on investment because it helps inform future strategy.
Rebecca Scully, Head of Marketing Communications
Gowling WLG
However, in the modern era of digital communications and a highly competitive struggle for people’s time, blind faith can no longer be a strategy for success. More tangible measures of engagement are required if marketers are to create informative communications that resonate with the target audience. Moreover, if they don’t find ways to be more targeted in their communications, they will lose out to more savvy competitors from outside the traditional law firms who have been focused on these challenges for several years.
The next measure the survey looked at was to gain an understanding of the levels of satisfaction with regards to the quality of the materials produced and the rating of the perceived level of engagement by clients.
One would assume that firms are happy with these measures or they would have made changes. However, as the chart shows, this is not the case. Respondents' spread of satisfaction of their current marketing collateral indicates that many are not overly satisfied, for whatever reason, with the materials they produce with 27 percent of respondents rating their materials as five or less, 39 percent rating then six or seven and 34 percent rating their current materials between eight and ten, although only 2 percent rated their content a ten.
How would you rate the current level of client engagement with your thought leadership, client briefings and other marketing materials?
Comparing these production quality satisfaction ratings against those for client engagement throws up some interesting differences. In this instance, 39 percent of respondents rated client engagement five or below and only 15 percent rated client engagement eight or higher. These results suggest a disconnect between the marketer’s confidence in the quality of their materials and the success of engaging their audience or put another way, even those marketing teams who believe they are producing good content cannot be sure their clients are reading it.
How would you rate the current level of client engagement with your thought leadership, client briefings and other marketing materials?
These findings further underline the importance of employing more effective methods of identifying engagement with thought leadership, client briefing and other marketing collateral, a factor that featured highly when respondents were asked to rate the key pain points they experience in their marketing activities.
Thus far the survey has identified a disconnect between perceived content quality and the engagement of client audiences with their thought leadership and other marketing materials. The survey then went on to dig a little deeper by looking at the main pain points business development and marketing teams came up against.
Ranked highest, by 52 percent of respondents, was the concern about being able to capture new clients and contacts through their interaction with the firm's marketing materials. These concerns highlight the difficulty that firms have in tracking individual engagement with their content and underline the problems of using PDF files: once the PDF has been downloaded by one person, you lose sight of who else in a target client engages with the content.
In second place, with 38 percent of respondents selecting it as their first choice, was the question “am I reaching the right audience?” This concern resonates with the feedback received on methods of measuring success and one that is underpinned in the old school approach to the production and delivery of content.
The root of this concern lies in the ongoing methods of production, delivery and measurement of client engagement. Surely this is reason alone to look for new ways to develop, deliver and measure the impact of thought leadership and other marketing collateral.
Following closely, with a combined 45 percent from first and second choice responses is the concern of maintaining a consistent brand identity across offices and practice areas. Again, a concern that manifests itself in the current production methods employed by many law firms and a further reason for a fundamental shift in approach from business development and marketing functions.
Please rank the following areas of concern in the order of importance
The chart below shows the distribution of the perceived level of partner engagement in marketing activities. Although 26 per cent of respondents indicated a high level of engagement (a score of 8 or above), 25 per cent rated partner engagement as poor (a score of 5 or below), and the remaining 50 per cent fall somewhere in the middle. These results show there is some way to go when it comes to encouraging partners to invest their time in these activities.
How would you rate the current level of partner engagement on the creation and delivery of your thought leadership, client briefings and other marketing materials?
While it is difficult to pinpoint a single reason for subdued partner engagement in these marketing activities, it is possible to suggest some of the most likely reasons. The level of effort required compared to the relatively poor output is seen as a difficult hurdle to overcome.
Engagement and appreciation of value are typically very good, the main pain points are really around time, resource and availability from partners as well as other stakeholders, especially when it comes to more involved complex pieces of thought leadership.
Ed FitzGerald, Director of Brand Marketing & Sales
RPC
Partners in law firms are well known for being intelligent, detail-oriented high achievers, with anything less than 100 percent often being perceived as failure. Is it any wonder then that if the final output of all their hard work has a mediocre quality to it they will not engage in future activities of this nature? Furthermore, if the business development team are unable to provide strong, numerical evidence for the success of their work it will be hard to persuade partners to invest their time and energy in the future as it takes their attention away from direct contact with clients. And finally, if the financial cost of producing these materials to the highest quality is high then partners might be far less willing to invest, particularly if the client engagement with the final product is hard to quantify.
Are you satisfied with the average time it takes to produce a piece of thought leadership content within your business?
- Yes, we have a refined, efficient process.
- It could be better.
- No, we need to find a better solution to roll out as soon as possible.
The assertions above are backed up by the concerns raised over the funding of future marketing activities. Conveying the value of these activities to partners was the first or second choice for 81 percent of respondents when asked to identify the main hurdles for obtaining funding while finding the time and people to create new materials was the first choice for 63 percent of respondents.
What are the main hurdles you face when seeking funding for your thought leadership, client briefings and other marketing activities?
These responses suggest that the hurdles faced over obtaining funding are strongly related to the lack of robust measures of client engagement. If partners could be shown just how many of their clients were reading their publications and what sections of those publications they were spending their time on then funding may be more readily available.
If the issues surrounding production and delivery were removed then the issues of finding the time and the people to create these new materials could also be reduced.
The ideal world scenario is one where we can draw the line between the content we invest in - or the thought leadership we invest in - and the revenue that it ultimately yields for the firm.
Fred Banning, Head of Corporate Communications
Pinsent Masons
Answers to this question generated some enlightening responses with the concern (or lack of) over cost, ranked 5th by over half (53 percent) of respondents, suggesting that the cost of working around standard templates and the use of external design agencies, while a contributing factor, is not the most important factor in preventing the frequent creation of thought leadership and other marketing publications.
In contrast to the lack of concern around costs, the three factors most likely to prevent the creation of thought leadership articles and other marketing collateral are the difficulty in securing partner commitment, the identification of the right topic and the time it takes to research and write suitable content. All three of these responses were consistently ranked highest by respondents with little difference in order of importance.
These results suggest that the current production and delivery methods employed by many law firms are not the major impediment to the creation and delivery of marketing materials despite the concerns that respondents raise over these factors. Rather, it is the persistent model of ‘command and control’ exerted by partners over the marketing function that might act as the greatest impediment to content creation. Presumably, this persists as partners believe they are the ones that need to create the relevant content as it is, inevitably, of a legal nature.
Which of the following deters you from undertaking the development of more frequent thought leadership and marketing publications?
This belief that thought leadership must come from the pen of a partner is an interesting and worrying possibility to consider as the new competitors entering into the legal market, in the shape of the legal companies specializing in technical automation of legal process and outsourcing of legal expertise, are not bound by these partnership models.
These new entrants are producing marketing content focused on factors other than legal issues in the form of a commentary on how legal services can be delivered more efficiently, the benefits of automation and the competitive advantages to be gained from employing a highly experienced but flexible work force – in other words, the view that clients want to read about a firm's legal expertise may well have been superseded by a desire to understand more about process optimization and cost control.
If the purpose of any piece of marketing collateral is to generate new client leads or business then law firms may need to broaden the scope of their thought leadership and marketing activities beyond legal expertise (the forte of partners) to other areas, such as their abilities to deliver legal advice in an efficient and technologically driven way. By doing so, they could remove some of the key impediments to the development of more frequent thought leadership activities.
Moving on from production methods and pain points the survey asked questions to ascertain what a better future would look like. When asked to select their top three success factors, respondents overwhelmingly pointed to capabilities that they cannot currently deliver such as identifying potential new clients and contacts (35 percent), demonstrating ROI (24 percent) and generating detailed analytics on audience interaction with the content (13 percent).
We would get things out very quickly where possible
Amanda Wadey, Head of Practice Development
RPC
These are all features that would be extremely beneficial in alleviating many of the pain points that were highlighted earlier, including the difficulties in persuading partners to ‘sign-up’ to developing new thought leadership campaigns and the effective measurement of client engagement.
Not just is the content being engaged with, but to what degree, what are the actions users take off the back of that, and in the ideal world we’d get to a point where we can actually track that right to revenue
Fred Banning, Head of Corporate Communications
Pinsent Masons
Interestingly, managing costs and ensuring brand consistency stood out at the bottom of the list of important success factors with only 5 percent and 2 percent respectively of respondents selecting these in their top three.
What would be the most important success factors for changing the way you produce your thought leadership and marketing publications?
Respondents primarily focused on creating easy to read content, delivering content to clients faster and creating innovative ways of delivering content to clients
When asked what would differentiate their marketing content from competitors, respondents primarily focused on three criteria: creating easy to read content, delivering content to clients faster and creating innovative ways of delivering content to clients.
Which of the following do you consider to be important markers of differentiation from your competitors?
These three criteria underline the perceived need for change across the respondents to the survey. They are looking for change in production methods, to speed up delivery to clients, alongside a move away from long-scroll web pages and PDF files, to create easy to read content.
However, in order to achieve these two core priorities, they need to find new ways of delivering content that addresses these concerns.
Survey respondents said that they are looking for change in their production methods
Looking beyond thought leadership
LOOKING BEYOND THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
The idea of delivering content to clients in new ways stretches beyond the traditional marketing collateral and can be deployed to the bread and butter of the business development team in the form of more engaging client pitches. It would even seem sensible to prioritize the optimization of this content as it is a direct driver of winning new business.
Which of the following methods/formats do you most frequently use for delivering client pitch materials?
The survey showed that, as with their marketing materials, law firms are still tied to the traditional methods with the PowerPoint slide deck still ruling this space. Only 11 percent of respondents indicated that they were using online digital content as a method for delivering client pitch materials.
Delivering content in a way that can be tracked and measured would provide huge benefits to the client pitch team as they would be able to ascertain more accurately the degree of interest in the materials produced, by measuring the time the client spends reading the content and which parts of the content the client was most interested in, while at the same time getting a deeper understanding of how many individuals the client shared the content with and how they in turn engaged with it. Having this information at your fingertips before a meeting could lead to a far greater level of understanding of the client and their requirements.
Which of the following statements best reflect your current pitch creation and delivery process?
These factors are highlighted in the table to the right which shows that law firms currently focus on tracking win/loss rates rather than tracking the movement of pitch materials around the client's organization.
Furthermore, respondents also indicated that their focus was on the creation and maintenance of a library of marketing materials to support the rapid creation of client pitches. A move to online content would reduce the burden of maintaining such a library of marketing materials and would also negate many of the issues around brand consistency and time to develop materials that have been raised throughout this report.
From the survey results provided, it is clear that law firms are still using the same formats for distributing thought leadership and other marketing materials as they were 10 or 15 years ago. At the same time, these firms are wrestling with the problems that these forms of distribution bring.
Rigid templates designed to ensure brand consistency lead to brand dilution, and poor measurability of the impact and effectiveness of thought leadership publications leads to an uphill battle to get partners to agree to future pieces of work.
However, the biggest impediments to new thought leadership projects came from time constraints in researching and writing new pieces alongside securing the time and commitment from partners.
These results suggest that thought leadership is recognized as an important aspect of business development but the teams responsible for these projects are looking for ways to speed up the creation and delivery process. At the same time, they are seeking far better engagement metrics to help engage partners in future projects.
Furthermore, the appetite for change away from standard templates, long scroll web pages and large PDF documents reaches beyond the thought leadership and other marketing collateral into the more tangible client pitch activities that the business development and marketing teams are tasked with delivering.
This all suggests that the legal sector is not just open to change but is craving change which will be driven by access to the appropriate tools for getting the job done quickly and efficiently.
Please contact Turtl for information on the tools that can help deliver client content and measure client engagement.
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