In this blog, Simon Marshall, founder of legal marketing agency TBD Marketing, and Catriona Collier, Managing Director of strategic marketing consultancy Flare Insight, share their thoughts on what it takes to craft impactful and results-driven content marketing campaigns in the legal and professional services sectors.
What role do competitor analysis and gap analysis play in legal content marketing?
Competitor analysis is an important yet often overlooked aspect of effective legal marketing. Many firms feel so certain in their knowledge of who their competitors are that they fail to assess whether this accords with reality – they fall into the trap of focusing exclusively on the firms they want to look and sound like, rather than checking to see who is actually eating up their work.
This is hugely relevant when it comes to creating and delivering effective content marketing campaigns, because you need to establish the correct assessment baseline in terms of who you should be comparing yourself to in terms of both content delivery and outcomes. There’s no point engaging in aspirational marketing and going up against a Goliath when you only have a David-sized budget.
Gap analysis is all about finding availability in the market to highlight topics that haven’t yet been covered, either by yourself or your competitors. Firms try to position themselves as unique, which they ultimately cannot do effectively; but what they can do is campaign as unique, which is where gap analysis comes into play.
The trick here is to market to sweet spots by using more than one dimension. For example, if your firm is known for environmental law and technology, then it makes eminent sense to leverage this in your campaigns by highlighting that few firms can match your expertise in environmental tech. Leveraging your credibility in this way will often give you a very specific competitive edge that rival firms will find difficult to blunt.
When you identify white space, the best thing to do immediately is to insert a placeholder to mark this as your territory. Ask a partner to talk to the trade press about your topic, or issue a holding article so that your firm’s name becomes associated with this area right off the bat. You can then get to work producing the relevant content, but also use the lead-up to publication to ‘tease’ the topic to prick up the ears of your target audience and create a sense of anticipation.
What are some of the most common mistakes you see in content marketing campaigns?
One of the most common mistakes we see is that the material takes too long to get to the point; the reader has to wade through a lot of ‘exposition’ about the pedigree of the firm and other extraneous facts before getting to the heart of the matter: what the product or service is, and who it is aimed at.
Which leads us neatly onto another common mistake: leaving the target audience too broad. Though there is nothing wrong with not being completely specific, it does behove marketers to narrow the ballpark in terms of who the relevant audience is by being relatively explicit about it.
As an adjunct, too many firms make the mistake of not addressing their content to their existing audiences because they are too bent on bringing in new clients: they cast too wide a net, which earns them a meagre haul. Of course it is important to capture new audiences in order to drive sales – but in all likelihood, your ideal new client won’t be too dissimilar to your favourite existing clients.
By creating content aimed at the real people you already enjoy working with, addressing their pain points and making them feel seen and understood, you not only remain front of mind with key clients but are also likely to attract new potential clients with similar needs.
What role does scoping play when planning campaigns?
Proper scoping is another critical factor that sometimes doesn’t get the attention it deserves. When planning a campaign, it is vital that firms ask themselves from the outset what the desired outcome is; what service line they want to promote; what demand they are seeing; what is new on the market, rather than looking backwards; what the budget is; and who in their team is responsible for the respective elements. In order for a campaign to be successful, these building blocks all need to have been put in place.
Essentially, it is about sense-checking. You have to establish what it is you actually want to achieve, and then ask yourself whether the things you plan to do are actually likely to lead you to your objective. If you cannot codify your desired outcomes as KPIs, there is little chance of creating a campaign that works. And if your campaign fails to deliver on your KPIs, then you are unlikely to be given the same budget in future. So, as a wise old saying has it, measure twice and cut once.
How important is it to be innovative in your content marketing campaigns?
It is important to be innovative in the sense that the worst idea in the world is to copy the content marketing being done by other firms. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the content put out by your competitors will have been designed expressly for that specific firm and be a good fit for their business – you need to design your own content that fits your business. And secondly, you are only ever really seeing the tip of your competitors’ marketing iceberg.
The fact is that the vast majority of their real marketing endeavours will be locked away behind paywalls, or be delivered to specific targets in emails and direct messages on LinkedIn. You would therefore not be copying the real substance of the marketing, nor the months of BD and competitor analysis that preceded and informed it, but only producing a pale facsimile. This is poor practice and unlikely to yield any useful results.
That being said, there is absolutely nothing wrong with recycling your own content. Repeating things that have worked well for us before is not a sin. We don’t always have to reinvent the wheel. The Harvard Business Review has been published for over 100 years and remains the pre-eminent piece of thought-leadership for the global business community – yes, it has changed and adapted over that time, but at its core is still essentially the same esteemed publication. Why mess with a winning formula? In fact, it is downright wasteful to move on to the next big campaign before you have really maximised the ROI on your last one.
The key to extracting the greatest possible value from your existing campaign materials is to position your content across multiple touchpoints using several different formats, each of which emphasises shareability. There needs to be a focus on how people interact both with the content itself and with each other. Some people love videos, others won’t ever click on one. Some people will always prefer the succinctly written word, while others need five paragraphs of reassuring spiel before they commit. But whenever a connection is made between content and consumer, the more shareable that content is, the wider it is likely to travel as it gets forwarded throughout people’s networks. In this way, you can give your existing content a very long afterlife indeed.
Is there a danger, then, of creating novelty for novelty’s sake?
Absolutely. One of the problems that marketing teams often find themselves confronted with is that they grow bored of their own campaigns long before their audience has. But it is crucial to remember that you are not the target audience and your own diminished emotional reaction doesn’t matter. What really matters is what is being reflected back to you by the intended recipients of your content.
It is therefore important that you stay the course and repeat your key messages for as long as it takes for you to see solid evidence that these have become embedded in the minds of your audience. Only then can you afford to tone your messaging down.
However, it is crucial that these key messages are all about the client, and not about you: the benefits to the client, the pain points they have, the actions they need to take, and so on. Talking about your firm is tantamount to creating noise that drowns out the all-important signal.
As a corollary to the above, you mustn’t be afraid to kill off a campaign if you realise it isn’t achieving its desired outcome and is unlikely to do so if continued. However, this should be a last resort, and can hopefully be avoided by proper scoping at the beginning of the project and by setting up checkpoints throughout the campaign itself to establish whether you have drifted off course and, if so, adjust the coordinates accordingly.
