Production and delivery
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Measuring success
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.
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.
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.
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.
Satisfaction with the current state
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.
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.
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.