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.
Key concerns
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.
Partner engagement
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.
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.
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.
Seeking funding
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.
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.
Deterrents to frequent thought leadership articles
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.
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.
What good looks like
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.