Marketing is one thing, but strategic marketing really allows professional services firms to get traction in the marketplace because it allows them to take advantage of their competitive advantage. So, in this two-part video series, Liz Harr sharesthe remaining five of the top 10 strategic marketing tactics that professional services firms can use.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Marketing is one thing, but strategic marketing really allows professional services firms to get traction in the marketplace because it allows them to take advantage of their competitive advantage. So, in this two-part video series, I’m going to be sharing the remaining five of the top 10 strategic marketing tactics that professional services firms can use.

The first one I want to talk about is around a new business model. Technology really has allowed firms to think very creatively about the way they sell and deliver services. Think about online learning as a new tool that can be tacked on to a traditional way of providing advisory.

Or another example of a different business model is perhaps in a consulting firm, their consultants are distributed across the globe but not in a traditional brick and mortar office, thereby giving the firm a global footprint. So, a new business model is really a way that firms can compete. Second is marketing automation.

Now, the word automation always makes us think that it’s something that’s canned. But marketing automation is very strategic in the sense that it allows firms to be very deliberate and very specific about the type of marketing that they put in front of their prospects. Third is outsourced marketing. And the reason this is so strategic is because strategic marketing requires very, very specialized skillsets and numerous skillsets at that.

So, outsourcing allows firms to focus on the core while outsourcing the skills that they don’t yet have in-house. Fourth is around hyper-targeted advertising. LinkedIn and other channels have created such strong filters that allow firms to be very, very specific and tightly target the audience that they’re sending content to.

And fifth, speaking of content, is producing signature content. So, the extent to which your strategic marketing plan can focus around a signature content, content that ties very tightly to your brand and what you’re known for is the way to go. And this can come through not only blogs but a webinar series, podcasts, a book, speaking, a series of speaking engagements.

But tying your expertise to signature content is a top practice of high growth firms. So, if you’d like to find out more about the 10 strategic marketing practices that I talked about in these two video blogs, I encourage you to check out all the marketing training that we’ve designed specifically for firms like you in Hinge University.

I hope to see you there.

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Marketing is one thing, but strategic marketing is the type of marketing that works best because it takes advantage of your competitive advantage. So, in this two-part video blog, Liz Harr is going to be talking to you about 10 marketing strategies that really deserve prioritized attention because they really work.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Marketing is one thing, but strategic marketing is the type of marketing that works best because it takes advantage of your competitive advantage. So, in this two-part video blog, I’m going to be talking to you about 10 marketing strategies that really deserve prioritized attention because they really work.

First is around promoting what matters most to the professional services marketplace. And that is expertise, the extent to which you can devise a marketing system that brings visibility to your expertise so you’re educating rather than selling is a top marketing strategy followed by high growth firms. Beyond expertise is like another layer of that specialization.

So, a second strategic way to approach the marketplace is to lay a stake in the ground around a niche specialization. This could be a specialized approach to solving a problem that your target audience is having or a specialized role that you work with within your target audience.

Third is around being everywhere where your audience is. We call it 360-degree marketing. You probably hear that term all the time, but what it’s really talking about is being ever-present where your audience is learning. And we’ve found in our research that the sweet spot between digital and traditional is 60/40, and having both digital and traditional techniques in your marketing system is what being ever-present is all about.

A fourth strategy to consider is the way you offer your services to the marketplace. Bundling or integrating certain services is the way that you can compete and rise above the noise of all the other competitors. Think about tacking on training to a particular advisory for example. And a fifth strategy to consider is what we call sub-branding.

Now, this is helpful to firms that along the way, along their growth evolution, they’ve discovered that they can easily and profitably serve a new market, but maybe serving that new market isn’t quite in alignment with your overall brand strategy and could dilute it.

So, firms that find themselves in this position can create sub-brands that still have an association with the parent brand, but allow them to easily and seamlessly serve this other newer market without causing brand confusion. So, if you’d like to find out more about how you can adopt strategic marketing and incorporate that into your planning, I encourage you to check out all the marketing training we’ve designed specifically for professional services firms in Hinge University.

Hope to see you there.

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What is brand design and why does it matter to professional services firms? In this video blog, Karl Feldman is going to walk you through this important element of your business.

TRANSCRIPTION:

What is brand design and why does it matter to professional services firms? I feel a bit like I’m going to go on to a talk about, you know, what is art and why does it matter?

But we’re going to focus it a little bit more than that today. Brand design, for Hinge, and the way we think about it, is more than just visuals, you know? Often, when you think of design, you think of the visual identity, logos, and colors, and all of those things. But I’m going to encourage us to take a little different tact on that.

Think about brand design as designing the experience of your brand. So visual identity is just one element of that. Brand design encompasses everything from the client experience, to language, to even the way your firm’s folks engage with clients and prospects, and even potential recruits.

So brand design is really thinking about your brand, and what it means, and how that experience is from a lot of different angles. And why should we care about that? Because it is what your brand is to your most important audiences when you’re not there.

All of the things that you work on and the methodical approach to brand design help to create an experience that’s consistent with your beliefs and values as a firm, and where that connects to clients’ and audiences’ issues, and how you help solve those issues.

So it’s very important. The difference with brand design from, you know, just the individual elements is that it’s part of a considered process to get there. So with that said, the best place to get started with brand design is to select the key stakeholders within your firm that really understand how your brand can engage with its most important audiences.

Think of the strategic leaders, the folks that really get behind how your brand evolved and will continue to evolve into the future. From there, it’s time to get outside. So often, research is a way to get objective insights on what your audiences really care about and what are the most important listening posts along their experience with your brand that you should really be paying attention to.

So that is just the beginning of the brand design journey. But if you’d like to learn more, I’d encourage you to check out hingeuniversity.com. We’ve got lots of practical information on there that you’ll find helpful along your journey.

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Competitive advantage is everything. So, in this video blog, Liz Harr is going to talk about three competitive strategies in particular.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Competitive advantage is everything. It’s how you win new business. It’s how you thrive and stay alive in the marketplace. And a competitive strategy is one that helps you bring visibility to those advantages that you’ve developed.

So, in this video blog, I’m going to talk about three competitive strategies in particular. And the first is a cost advantage strategy. Now, this is pretty simple. It’s where you enter the market as the lowest-cost provider of the service that you provide, and here is the double-edged sword to this. This strategy works when you’re in a commoditized environment and lowest cost is valued by your audience.

But that’s also why it’s a very short-lived strategy. Technology allows a lot of newcomers to this space, and they can easily out seat you as the lowest-cost provider. The second is a differentiation strategy. Now, trying to find out how you are truly and meaningfully differentiated in the marketplace is super challenging for professional services firms as a whole, but it is a top way that high-growth firms enter the marketplace.

And we found in our own research that high-growth firms are three times more likely to adopt this as a strategy. And a third strategy that I want to talk to you about is around specialization. Focusing on a niche specialization is a common practice of high-growth firms. And they’re tending to specialize around things like solving a specialized problem or working with a specific role within their target audience.

So, these three strategies are the top strategies we find that help professional services firms take advantage of their own competitive advantage. And if you’d like to find out more, I encourage you to check out a course we developed on this called The Visible Firm. And you can find it in Hinge University.

Hope to see you there.

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Let’s talk about how to find the best keywords and talk about some easy, free tools that we can use to get there. Yeah, I could talk all day about the strategy, but today we’re going to focus a little more practically.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Let’s talk about how to find the best keywords and talk about some easy, free tools that we can use to get there. Yeah, I could talk all day about the strategy, but today we’re going to focus a little more practically.

And one of the first things you can do that you probably are familiar with is Google Auto-Populate. Any time you search, if you pay attention when you start typing, Google will start to recommend possible phrases and related searches. Now, this is pulling from a lot of different algorithms and things behind the scenes in the black box that is Google, but often you can find some really good clues to round out your keywords into relevant phrases.

You just have to look at it and see what is going to be most relevant to your strategy. Another place to look at, just in general searches, is at the at the bottom of the page, looking at related searches and related search terms. This is similar to Auto-Populate, but it may give you some clues to relevancy, and you can even mine a few pages deep to see some other options as you go.

A more traditional tool that’s been used and continues to evolve is the Google Ads Keyword Planner. Even though this is geared towards PPC, typing in potential search phrases can give you some good clues to volume and strength of your options. Right in line with that Google Search Console will also give you insights on what you might be using already and help you pair down a list of potential keywords and phrases.

Last but not least, if you haven’t heard of Google Trends, I’d suggest you check it out if nothing else just for fun, because it keeps track of what trends are happening in Google searches around the world. So what might be popular, what’s the trend over time, how much volume? So you can follow all of the pop trends on there.

But in our world, if you’re looking to actually strengthen your keyword strategy, you can look at Trends and help to select some of your keywords and phrases, and see what might be trending up, what you might put some more emphasis behind. So it can be a very valuable tool. And in Trends, you can also set alerts as well to see when something is going up or on the uptick.

So you can re-emphasize certain phrases and keywords as they they get into the stream in the world at large. If you’d like to learn some more practical tips, I encourage you to check out hingeuniversity.com and make your way to online courses.

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In this video blog, Liz Harr is going to be talking to you about a practice that is widely utilized by high-growth professional services firms, and that is partnership marketing.

TRANSCRIPTION:

In this video blog, I’m going to be talking to you about a practice that is widely utilized by high-growth professional services firms, and that is partnership marketing. What I mean by partnership marketing is aligning your marketing and your business development efforts with a non-competitive organization that serves the same audience you do.

And by aligning these efforts, you are tapping into that resource to bring in more qualified leads. So I’m going to talk to you about five ways that you can leverage partnership marketing. And the first way is to write a book together on a signature topic. Now, if you have a well-developed content strategy, this is something that you should consider.

Because if you have a well-developed content strategy, it means you’re known for specific things. And when you’re known for specific topics, writing a book together is a no-brainer. Second is to consider webinars. Co-produced webinars is not only easier on the budget and easier on people, but it’s more engaging for the audience to hear from a couple different perspectives.

Third is to consider conducting some kind of research together. And when you do this, just like with webinars, it’s much easier on the budget. But if you have the right partner, you’re able to tap into the perspectives of your target audience and then produce research that is very meaningful to them.

Fourth is to co-market each other’s blogs, because think of this as guest blogging where you each produce blogs for each other’s websites, but you also promote each other’s blogs through social media, and generate lots of visibility that way. Now, the first four strategies that I talked about are really around producing content.

The fifth one is to organize a specialized program. And what I’m really talking about here is a specialized way that your target audience can experience the services that you and your partner provide. Perhaps there’s some sort of online learning or training that gets combined with the consulting services that you provide.

But a specialized program with your partner can really help you compete in the marketplace and help you stand out above competitors who are doing the same thing that you are. Now, if you’d like to learn more about how you can leverage partnership marketing, I encourage you to check out the marketing training we’ve designed specifically for firms like you in Hinge University.

I hope to see you there.

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Few firms that operate in the professional services landscape would argue with the value of developing a competitive strategy. And in this video blog, I’m going to share five steps with you that we at Hinge have found to be particularly effective.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Few firms that operate in the professional services landscape would argue with the value of developing a competitive strategy. And in this video blog, I’m going to share five steps with you that we at Hinge have found to be particularly effective.

First is to consider your business situation. This is really the first step. Consider whether you are a firm that’s been in the space for a couple of decades and you have a well-known, very visible brand known for particular things. On the other hand, you could be a startup and a relative newcomer to the space.

This is your starting point for figuring out what you’re going to do to develop your competitive strategy. Second, and this is probably the most important thing, is to research your target audience and the firms with whom you compete. It’s important to do this because it helps you understand two things.

One is, how is your target audience learning, buying, and making decisions when they’re looking for a firm like you? And two, what does your target audience experience when they’re out there looking for firms like you? Those are your competitors. Once you’ve done that, then you’re ready for step three. And this is to identify your differentiators.

If you’ve done your research correctly, you’ll come out with a good understanding of not only what you can genuinely own as a differentiator, but what’s going to meaningfully set you apart from the competition. Now, fourth is something that not a lot of firms do and this is to validate your competitive strategy.

So, once you’ve identified your differentiators, which are in fact, your competitive advantage, you want to validate that, and you can do it in a couple of ways. One is to identify or weave in your differentiators into your win themes and start tracking whether you’re winning new business on those. And how are your prospects responding to the competitive strategy that you’ve just put forth?

Another way that you can validate is through formal research. You can have research done where your audience is interviewed and they, in turn, validate what’s meaningful to them. Last, you’re ready to wrap up all of the first four steps into an implementation plan. What of your competitive strategy that you’ve developed?

What does it say about the techniques that you should be using to bring visibility? What tools might you need with what kind of budget, and what kind of skills do you need on board to implement this? Now, if you’d like to find out more about how to develop a competitive strategy and the steps you should take, I encourage you to check out the course we developed in Hinge University called the Visible Firm, hope to see you there.

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Today, I want to talk about how to make marketing a team sport. In some of our prior posts, we’ve talked a little bit about how the model is changing from an individual activity Rainmaker model to a team sport where multiple people are working together within your overall marketing program.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Hi. Today, I want to talk about how to make marketing a team sport. In some of our prior posts, we’ve talked a little bit about how the model is changing from an individual activity Rainmaker model to a team sport where multiple people are working together within your overall marketing program.

So, the question is how do you pull that off? Well, it all starts with presenting the “why change?” argument and what does the future look like? What will this team look like when you get it all together and why is that a good thing for the organization? Now, there are a lot of good reasons why they are building a unified brand, developing a one-firm approach, more flexibility and so there are a lot of good reasons, but you need to present that to people so they understand and have a reason for thinking, “Yeah, that might be a good idea for us to change.”

Then you need to get the policy buy-in for a change for the overall change or a test. Now, our experience is that sometimes it’s a lot easier to get buy-in to test out this team model than to make a wholesale change, but other organizations already have a sense that this is the right thing to do and are ready to go, but you need to get that policy buy-in.

So, because it’s going to be a change, it’s going to impact a lot of people. The third step is to identify the gaps in skills. So when you look at your overall marketing plan, where do you have strength? Do you have a lot of people that are good speakers? I remember this one organization that really had multiple people who were very good speakers and you can leverage that in your marketing, but are there areas where you don’t have the skills?

Maybe a marketing automation or maybe developing the overall strategy or research on your clients? Those could be areas of skill gap, for example. So, get those identified, get them down on paper. Then you can figure out how to engage the resources to close that skill gap. Sometimes those resources are right under your nose.

There are people who have an interest in being involved in marketing, but no one’s asked them. They have a desire, but that hasn’t been used. So, sometimes you can just find them. Other times you’ll have to do some training or you may need to get outside resources to build out your team. Draft a resource, perhaps it’s an independent consultant or a firm or an agency who can provide these kinds of specialized skills you’ll need.

Then finally, with that team, you can begin to put together your operational plan. Who’s going to do what and how often? Now, one of the key things to remember here is make sure you don’t have incentives that work against you. For example, if people are tracked on their billable hours, make sure that there is an allocation for that and that’s something you’ll have to do at the policy level so that people can justify spending their time.

But the bottom line is when you put all of it together, it’s a much more efficient way to run a marketing department in the era we’re in now, where the client is a lot more informed and has a lot more opportunities than before. Now, if you want to dig deeper in this, I recommend going to HingeUniversity.com/courses

Take a look at the variety of things that are offered there, and you’re going to see that there are a lot of things that can help build up your team and give them the skills they need to be successful. Thank you and good luck.

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Today I want to talk to you about two models for your business development and marketing. One of them is what we call the “rainmaker model,” and the other is what we call the “team sport model.”

TRANSCRIPTION:

Hi. Today I want to talk to you about two models for your business development and marketing. One of them is what we call the “rainmaker model,” and the other is what we call the “team sport model.”

Let’s look at how those are the same and different. Well, when I was getting started in professional services marketing, which is a long, long time ago, there was really only one model, and that was the rainmaker model. And the characteristics of that model were each individual person who wanted to become a partner in a firm would try to be the rainmaker.

They would try to develop individual personal relationships with people to become, eventually, the person’s trusted advisor and to be able to leverage those personal relationships to bring in new business. Now, marketing roles in that scheme was relatively limited. Their role was basically to support the rainmakers, to schedule events for those and to help them with the networking.

But the focus of the rainmaker was always to build the practice, leveraging their personal relationships. And that was the fundamental model for many years throughout professional services. But that model has really needed to evolve, because the technologies behind marketing have changed dramatically. People, the way buyers search for services and evaluate people have changed dramatically.

So what today’s professional services marketing firm really needs is a much more integrated approach that looks at the firm as a whole and draws upon the talents of many people, not just an individual person. Because if you’re only dealing with one person, they’re only as good as the thing they do most poorly.

However, if you’re dealing with a team, the team as a whole can put that together. And different members can have different roles in the process. So within the team model, that’s the focus is the team as a whole. You’re trying to really make the expertise that your firm has visible to the outside world. And you do that through speaking, through presentations, through publishing, and so forth.

But in the end, the goal is to develop visible experts, people throughout the firm who have expertise that is understood by the marketplace. The focus is then on how the team as a whole works, and the marketing role is to lead that team to help develop the overall structure of your process and the roles people play.

You’re trying to build up the reputation of the firm as a whole, and the firm’s brand becomes your primary asset. So you can see how this kind of a model offers much more flexibility and is much more suited to the way professional services are marketed and purchased today. If you’re looking for more on this, we recommend going to the Visible Firm Course in Hinge University, that’s hingeuniversity.com/visiblefirm.

And there I think you’ll be able to find some good tips on developing a new model that’s going to fit your firm and the marketplace we operate in today. Good luck.

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Today, I want to talk to you about seven steps to a differentiated marketing strategy. Now, this is part two of a two-part presentation we did. The first session, we talked about the first three parts of it.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Hi. Today, I want to talk to you about seven steps to a differentiated marketing strategy. Now, this is part two of a two-part presentation we did. The first session, we talked about the first three parts of it.

Now we’re going to pick up with Step 4 in the differentiation, defining and refining your service offerings. Now this is a step that a lot of folks miss or they just kind of skim over because if you started with an understanding of your audience and what makes your firm different, that will help you understand what are the service offerings we should be offering.

So if you’re not coming up with at least one or more new service offerings based on this, then maybe you’re not looking carefully enough. Maybe you’re not understanding the full needs of your client because almost everyone we run across comes up with new service offerings based on a new understanding of their client.

Then you need to identify the marketing techniques you’ll be using. How will you get these messages across to your clients? Now, if you did the research that we talked about in the earlier step, you would have the opportunity to be able to ask them, “Where do you look when you have a business issue that you’re trying to research?Do you look online, do you search it?Do you go to webinars?Do you look for blog posts?”

And this will help you understand what techniques are most likely to reach your target audience most efficiently. Which brings us to the sixth step is to identify any new tools you’ll need, or skills you’ll need, or new infrastructure. Let me tell you what I mean by those. The tools are things you’ll use to convey your message. It might be new wording on a website, it might be a one-sheet that you hand out to potential prospects, or it might be a guide for executives.

The skills are the things you need to do to be able to implement the plan. For some people, it’s sharpening speaking skills or writing skills, for others, it may be developing business development skills. But we know that the high-growth firms have a skills advantage and we want to make sure that you get that advantage too.

And finally, there’s the infrastructure, which is the kinds of things you need to be able to put in place, like a marketing automation system or a CRM system. These are the kinds of things you need to be able to efficiently run a marketing program and differentiates your firm on a high level. And then finally we get to documenting your operational schedule and budget that you’re going to use.

This will become your marketing budget. How often are you going to do which technique on what schedule and with what budget allocated to it? That allows you to update your experience as you go along. So, I would recommend every time you do a technique or every time you do a new webinar or a speaking engagement, you make the notes about how successful was that particular thing And when it’s budget time next year and you’re looking at what you want to do, you’ll be able to make the adjustments and not just forget them in the rush of a busy, busy day.

So we hope this is helpful, but if you want to dig deeper on differentiating, and positioning, and messaging, we recommend that you go to hingeuniversity.com/differentiation and check out the course there. I think you’re going to find it very helpful. Good luck, and happy marketing.

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