In this post we will explore how to make thought leadership content the centerpiece of your strategy and how to execute it successfully. Let’s start by getting clear about several key terms.

Thought Leadership Defined

Thought leadership is the process of developing specialized expertise and novel insights into a subject matter area and then sharing those perspectives with audiences for the purpose of educating and influencing them. Thought leaders shape the attitudes and behaviors of their followers.

Thought leadership can take many forms and have many purposes, such as social change or political influence. When focused on commercial objectives, it is often labeled as thought leadership marketing.

Thought Leadership Marketing Defined

Thought leadership marketing is the process of increasing the visibility of specialized expertise and accelerating market influence to accomplish marketing goals, such as building brand strength or generating new business. It is accomplished by creating insightful analysis and content and making that thought leadership visible to your target markets.

Thought Leadership Content Defined

Thought leadership content is how experts communicate their specialized knowledge and insights to their followers. It makes their intangible expertise visible and sharable and greatly increases their trust and marketplace leverage. Thought leadership content can be shared in a wide variety of formats (see Examples of Thought Leadership Content below).

Because of its educational nature, B2B thought leadership content is rarely overtly promotional in tone or substance. Over time, a stream of useful thought leadership content builds the expert’s visibility and influence.

Examples of Thought Leadership Content

Here are some examples of the most useful forms of B2B thought leadership content and the best uses of each type.

1. Books. Nothing says thought leadership like a business book on your area of expertise. If it is also a best seller, it can be a powerful tool for expanding your visibility as well as credibility. Books are a great way to capture your key ideas in a format that allows you to explore them in some detail.
2. Research reports. Original research is arguably the most trusted form of thought leadership content. It almost always provides new insights and is highly regarded in B2B organizations because it is objective. If it addresses an important issue facing the target audience, it is likely to be widely shared as well.
3. Guides and White Papers. Guides and white papers are generally longer pieces, often running from 10-25 pages in length. They are aimed at a specific segment of your target audience and take a comprehensive view of their subject matter. They are a great vehicle for explaining how you think about and solve for a specific issue.
4. Webinars and Speaking Engagements. Webinars and speaking engagements are great ways to expand your followers. They tend to be educational in nature, so they also do a good job of conveying your expertise. Many thought leaders report that speaking engagements are their single most effective approach to generating new business opportunities.
5. Educational Courses. Doing educational programs and courses is a good approach to conveying the full depth of your expertise. While some live formats may have limited enrollment, they often make up for it because of their depth of engagement. Digital courses, while less interactive, can offer greater reach and visibility. Also, partnering with a trade association or educational institution, can add extra credibility to your offering.
6. Blog posts and articles. Blog posts and articles tend to be shorter than guides or white papers and therefore easier to produce. They can be broad or narrow in their focus, so are very flexible. Their greatest strength in that they are typically open source and searchable, so they are easier to find and key to expanding the visibility of you thought leadership.
7. Podcasts. While a relatively new format for thought leadership, they are growing in popularity and impact. For experts that are naturally verbally oriented and love to talk about and explain their area of expertise, they can be a snap to produce. In addition to developing your own podcast series, you can also consider guest appearances on other experts’ podcasts. Interacting on podcasts is also a great way to develop your relationships with other thought leaders.
8. Opinion pieces. While often overlooked, opinion pieces are well suited to presenting thought leadership perspectives. Where better to express a contrarian view on a hot topic? Add some data from your original research and you have an excellent piece of thought leadership content.

Now that we have reviewed some examples of thought leadership content, lets examine some of the benefits and challenges of building your B2B content strategy around thought leadership.

Benefits of Thought Leadership Content

A thought leadership-based content strategy has a lot of benefits for the individual expert as well as for their firm. Here are some of the top benefits.

1. It positions you as an expert and innovator. By authoring thought leadership content, you are obviously positioned as an expert with new ideas. But the added benefit is that your firm also gains in status because of its association with the thought leader.
2. It helps increase visibility of you and your firm. Just as thought leadership content increases the visibility of the expert it also increases the visibility of your firm as well. Think improved reputation and increased visibility of that reputation. That is a recipe for a strong brand.
3. It attracts qualified new prospects. When properly promoted, thought leadership will attract new prospects who are looking for help in solving the challenges they face. Your insightful content shows them that you understand their challenges and that you have solutions to offer. As a matter of fact, we find that these inbound leads are typically the most qualified as they are approaching you because they understand how you can help them.
4. Business is easier to close. The same familiarity that helps attract new prospects also makes it easier to convert them into clients. You start out with credibility and often a great deal of trust. If you don’t “unsell them” you will very likely end up with a new client or customer.
5. You can charge higher fees. Our research studies of high-profile experts shows that their clients are willing to pay much higher hourly rates for more prominent experts [insert VE fee chart]. In other words, the more visible and prominent you become as a thought leader the more clients are willing to pay to work with you or your firm.

6. It attracts new employees. One of the often-overlooked benefits of thought leadership content is the role it can play in attracting new talent. The best people want to be in a firm where they can learn and grow. Thought leadership is a strong signal that your firm is a great place to consider.
7. It fosters career growth. Encouraging employees to create thought leadership content is a great way to foster career growth. The expert also benefits in that their personal brand is greatly enhanced and new options and opportunities come their way.

Now let’s look at the other side of the coin. What are the challenges of a thought leadership strategy?

The Challenges of Thought Leadership Content

Even with all the benefits, thought leadership is not a panacea for the B2B marketer. Here are the key challenges and some thoughts on how one might go about addressing them.

1. Creating thought leadership content is not easy. Creating a stream of insightful high-value content is clearly challenging. In fact, our recent study of professional services firms showed that creating valuable content was the number one marketing priority. In many organizations the subject matter experts are among the utilized members of the team. Well explore some ways around this dilemma when we cover creating your thought leadership content strategy below.
2. Thought leadership creates controversy. Almost by definition thought leadership is about change and new ways of doing things. As such it pushes against ingrained attitudes and the interests of established players in the marketplace. Throw in a pinch of contrarian attitude and it is easy to see why thought leadership can create controversy. Of course, content that just restates conventional wisdom is both very common and not really thought leadership.
3. You can’t be a thought leader without followers. As a thought leader you can have the most insightful content but if no one sees it or they cannot understand your insights you will not have followers. No followers, no impact. The best thought leaders also tend to be great communicators. They know their subject matter so well that they can explain complex concepts simply. This is a key skill set for thought leaders. Add to this the need for adequate promotion and the challenge of creating and holding the attention of your audience becomes clear.
4. New ideas become old. As your thinking gains traction, it will be adopted by more and more people. At some point it is no longer new and innovative thinking. It becomes conventional wisdom or “best practices”. Time for a new idea. For many thought leaders this is a turning point. Can you continue to produce new, insightful content? In the next section we will explore some strategies for producing better thought leadership content.
5. Competitors will copy your ideas. For many thought leaders this is the most vexing problem of all. It’s super frustrating to see your arch competitor copy your ideas and present them as their own. And, of course, if they have avoided outright plagiarism there may be little you can do about it. The cure for this is three-fold. First, make sure you capture your ideas and document them to obtain appropriate legal protection for your intellectual property. Second, promote your content widely (see below for promotion ideas) so the marketplace recognizes it as yours. And third, use it to your advantage. This is clear evidence of the quality of your ideas. Use it to bolster your differentiation.

How to Produce Better Thought Leadership Content

Producing a steady stream of high quality, insightful content is not easy. If it where we would not be adrift in a sea of mediocre, self-serving fluff that characterizes so much of what passes for thought leadership today.

Fortunately, there are steps that you can take to up your game. We will build upon some recommendations from our earlier article on thought leadership marketing and add some new ones.

1. Narrow your focus. The narrower the focus of your expertise the easier it is to master the subject matter in a way that facilitates greater insight. This also works when preparing a presentation or article. Going narrower and deeper into a subject allows for you to develop helpful perspectives in a way that a broader treatment can easily skim over.
2. Do original research. Original research is the most trusted form of thought leadership content. But it also has an important role to play in generating new insights. Imagine the power of have answers to some of the key questions facing your target clients. New research findings raise intriguing new questions even as they answer some of the existing ones. Let the data be your guide to thought leadership.
3. Take a contrarian perspective. Conventional thinking favors a consensus. This is the so called “best practices” thinking. But sometimes the greatest insight comes from taking a different, unexpected view. If most people espouse X, consider the case for Y. There is often great insight to be harvested by exploring the counterintuitive or overlooked.
4. Mash up your expertise. Try applying the methods or thought process from one discipline to another subject matter. Put together seemingly unrelated findings or methods of inquiry from different disciplines and see what new ideas emerge. Building bridges between seemingly unrelated fields is a top strategy for many well-known experts.
5. Network with other experts. One of the best ways to sharpen your thinking is to interact with other experts. They can challenge your thinking and give you new ideas and insights to consider. Partner with an expert from a related field to make your content more dynamic and interesting. You are sure to gain some new perspectives.
6. Answer the tough questions. What are the toughest questions you get from your clients? Concentrate on answering one of the toughest ones. What research could be done to get a definitive answer? Is there a better way to think about it? Perhaps a contrarian perspective will give you a new insight. High visibility experts often cite audience questions as the top source for generating useful thought leadership content.
7. Recycle. A great insight should not be shared in one piece of content and then ignored. Use your best ideas in multiple pieces of content. Different members of your target audiences prefer different content formats so sharing similar insights across multiple content formats makes a lot of sense and extends the reach of your thought leadership.

How to Promote Your Thought Leadership Content

To maximize the visibility of your thought leadership, you must promote your content. Think of it this way. Your content makes your thought leadership tangible. Promotion makes that content visible to your target audiences.

How do you effectively do that? We have identified ten promotional techniques that work especially well with thought leadership content.

1. Email. Email is the most direct way to communicate with individual members of your target audience that you already have a relationship with i.e., they have given you their email address. This makes it an ideal format to nurture prospects by sharing relevant thought leadership content.
2. Social Media. One of the most popular promotional strategies, sharing valuable content on social media can both widen your visibility as well as nurture specific relationships. Larger pieces of content can be broken into small sharable tidbits and promoted over time and across multiple social media platforms.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The first place many professionals look when they have a business challenge is a search engine. This makes SEO and ideal tool for increasing the visibility of your content. Another advantage is that the people who find your content will be those that are looking for that specific type of content. You will discover members of your target audience that you did not anticipate.
4. Paid Advertising. Paid advertising works in a similar way as SEO except that you need to specify your target audience demographics. If your advertising message is well crafted it will then attract the right members of the target audience. Paid advertising works well when you have a time linked event, such as a webinar, or need to rapidly accelerate visibility, such as with a new product launch.
5. Public Relations. Both traditional and digital PR have important roles to play in amplifying visibility. If the media outlet already has credibility with the target audience, you will benefit from the association just as the readers or listeners will benefit from your insightful thought leadership.
6. Networking. Networking with members of your target audience is a great way to build relationships. As it turns out, it’s also a great way to promote your content. Following up after a conversation with a piece of thought leadership content you have discussed is often a big win. It’s relevant, personal, and clearly shows your expertise.
7. Partner Marketing. Partner marketing is partnering with another professional or organization to promote thought leadership content. You will benefit by exposure to the partners audience just as they will benefit by exposure to yours. Partners typically offer different, but complimentary, services to the same target audience.
8. Online Reviews. For certain categories of B2B products, SaaS being a prime example, online reviews are great ways to increase visibility of the product. This process can also work well for thought leadership content. Books and podcasts would be two good examples.
9. Guest appearances. Being a guest on someone else’s thought leadership vehicle (such as a podcast or webinar) has a double benefit. First, you get to share your thought leadership directly with their audience. Second, you will often be able to promote a new piece of your content, such as a book or research report, as part of the appearance.
10. Speaking Engagements. When high visibility thought leaders were asked about how they get new clients speaking engagements topped the list of most effective strategies. It too has multiple benefits. You are sharing you thought leadership directly with the audience in a high-credibility context. The organization to which you are speaking has typically promoted your presentation and added their stamp of approval. Also, in the case of in-person events you often can interact directly with the audience before and after your address. Talk about a great networking opportunity.

Developing Your Thought Leadership Content Strategy

Now that we have covered the basics of thought leadership content, let’s look at how these threads come together in a thought leadership strategy. There are six key elements in a thought leadership strategy. This is true whether you are a single individual or whether you are planning for a business unit or an entire firm.

Let’s review each of the key components.

• Purpose or Goals. This section answers the question as to why we need a strategy in the first place. What are we trying to accomplish? Are we trying to increase new business or position the firm differently? Obviously different goals will have different metrics to track success.
• Target Audiences. Who are we trying to influence? Decision makers in client organizations are a common target. But don’t forget the internal influencers who have a lot of power in modern B2B decision making. In many circumstances journalists, reviewers, industry analysists or other thought leaders may be important targets as well.
• Expert Positioning. How are you positioned as an expert? What are you an expert in? Who do you help? Why do they choose you? As an individual, your expert positioning will normally be expressed as your brief bio. On the firm level this is typically a formal positioning statement which is reflected in your “About” statements on your website and firm overviews.
• Your Issues. Here we identify which specific target client issues you will focus your thought leadership on. What big challenges will you write and speak about? It is important that the issues you identify are important to your target audience and that you have solutions or perspectives that can add value. In most cases you should limit your focus to a small number of issues (1-3 is common) so you can gain thought leader status more quickly.

• Your Perspective on the Issues. What is your perspective on the issues that you are focusing on? The essence of thought leadership content is that you are offering a new perspective. For example, at Hinge we focus on research driven marketing solutions, so our thought leadership always starts with an insightful piece of research at its core.
• Your Visibility Plan. The final component of your strategy involves planning around gaining visibility for your thought leadership content. It considers what format your content should take (e.g., webinars vs. podcasts), how often you will produce it, and how you will promote it. You should make sure that your decisions take into account audience preferences, or you will waste a lot of effort.

Should You Use Outside Help?

Developing and executing a thought leadership strategy is very effective, but it is not easy. Apart from the discipline required to maintain your mastery of the subject matter there are the important issues of strategy development and content creation to consider. Are there easier, more effective ways to solve for these challenges?

Our research on high growth professional services firms provides some answers. The chart below shows outsourcing done by High Growth firms (those growing by at least 20% annual growth rate) compared to the outsourcing practices of their No Growth peers (those firms showing no growth or shrinkage). High growth firms do much more outsourcing across the board.

Note the categories most closely tied to thought leadership content strategy (strategy development, research), content production (thought leadership content) and promotion (SEO, Public Relations). In all these categories, High Growth firms are much more likely to use specialized outside resources. So, the data is clear. Outsourcing key aspects of your thought leadership content strategy, production and promotion is associated with faster growth and higher profitability. Doing it well really does pay off.

What Cannot Be Outsourced?

The thought leadership part. Your marketing partner cannot be the thought leader on your behalf. You must have the expertise. Turning that expertise into polished content? That you can get help with. But delivering on that promise is up to you.

The other component that cannot be outsourced is integrating that thought leadership into service delivery. If the products and services you deliver don’t reflect that thought leadership you will disappoint you clients. You must walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

A Final Thought

Thought leadership is a very appealing concept. To many B2B firms it sounds like an ideal fit. And for many firms it is a good fit and a smart strategy. But to get effectiveness from a thought leadership approach it must be done well. Your thought leadership content must be both relevant and insightful and lead a client to considering your firm or solution to meet the challenges they’re facing.

Good thought leadership starts with good thinking and good analysis. But that alone is not sufficient. You must find a way to make your insights visible to your target audience or you will find yourself in the position of being a thought leader without any followers.

The post B2B Thought Leadership Content: Elevating Your Brand’s Authority and Driving Business Growth appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

While the B2B community still thrives on word-of-mouth referrals for winning new business, prospective clients – even in the most traditional industries – have learned to turn to digital channels first when they’re looking for someone to solve their problem. Digital channels give open, unobstructed access to what buyers of B2B services prioritize most when judging your fit for their needs – your expertise. This is echoed in our own research. In Hinge Research Institute’s  2023 survey of the marketing practices and priorities of high-growth professional services firms, we found that high-growth firms prioritize making their expertise more visible, and they do it through valuable, educational content.

Why the uber focus on content? Isn’t there enough noise out there, where every firm has a blog and posts on social media? While the digital universe allows us to fake many things, you can’t easily fake expertise. You can certainly try. Just because you have a blog however doesn’t mean your blog is informative. Herein lies the primary set of reasons for why B2B content marketing strategies can fail.

What is a B2B Content Marketing Strategy?

Before I get to those reasons, let me put some definition around what I’m talking about.  A B2B content marketing strategy is an online strategy that elevates thought leadership – the written manifestation of a firm’s expertise – through the routine publication of free, valuable, educational content. This type of educational content is then used to attract new leads, nurture existing leads, and build preference for the firm.

However, content marketing is only as valuable as it is on par with topics that are relevant to a firm’s target clients. When a firm develops content that resonates with what audiences are grappling with most – content that is tightly tied to the challenge that woke the target decision maker up at 4 in the morning, it accomplishes three things:

1. Demonstrates a deep understanding of issues its prospects care about
2. Engages its audience
3. Builds trust

The more often a firm produces relevant content, the more engagement it creates, and the more trusted it becomes. In many cases, leads that are nurtured through content marketing become “converts” to a particular firm’s approach or way of thinking. Sometimes they will even hire a firm they have been following without soliciting competitive bids.

Bottom line: educational content is the new currency of the professional services marketplace. Content marketing is the strategy that turns that content into profits.

When content marketing fails

If content marketing is associated with all things good: profitable, results-oriented marketing that carries a relatively lower level of effort than some traditional marketing, client loyalty and so on, why aren’t more firms on board? Because it’s also associated with a high rate of failure – which in turn yields a high dose of skepticism about whether content marketing is a worthy investment.

With that, I’d like to point to 8 primary reasons that B2B content marketing strategies fail.

1. Content that isn’t relevant to the target audience

The most foundational reason that content fails is when it’s not important or relevant to the target audience. Content won’t perform in the way I described above when it’s written only in the context of what you know and what’s important to you. It’s only when you produce content that intersects what you know with your clients’ key priorities that it can be truly relevant.

A second guiding principle around producing relevant content is discipline. Writing about everything you know won’t cut it either. Rather, think from your audience’s perspective. They’re trying to figure out what you’re an expert in. Just like listing 20 services and even more sub-services in the navigation of your website produces a suboptimal and confusing user experience, when you produce thought leadership about everything under the sun that relates to those multiple services, prospective clients are left wondering, “what does this firm really do?”

Instead, keep a visual in your head much like the figure below. Think about the couple of services that are really critical to your firm’s growth, intersected with the challenges and problems that keep your prospective clients up at night. This exercise will help you uncover some finite set of issues around which you should then produce your thought leadership.

Here are several criteria to consider when choosing your topics:

• Relevance to your customer and your services
• Aim for issues where there is lack of consensus on the solution
• Write on topics that are not likely to go away in the short-term
• Avoid issues that are already “owned” by a competing firm

2. Content that is more promotional than educational in nature

How many times have you come across a firm’s blog, only to find it full of posts about the new office move, latest hires, or direct plugs for their services? To be sure, there is a place and time for all of that promotional content. But buyers of professional services don’t want to be sold or marketed to until they’re ready – so if that’s all they have access to as they come across your firm for the first time, you’re not likely to hear from them again. On the other hand, if in that first impression you wow them with expertise that potentially solves their problems, the experience is game changing.

Absent of educational, relevant thought leadership, a content marketing strategy really isn’t a strategy at all – it’s just a big promotional brochure. By creating a content strategy focused on sharing expertise (as opposed to selling product), you’re encouraging prospective clients to enter into your sales and BD funnel where you can continue to share that expertise and ultimately build enough trust that you turn them into a client.

3. Content that doesn’t take into account how your customer wants to learn.

Speaking of a funnel, winning new business is about creating a journey for prospective clients to follow as they learn about your organization. The challenge to marketers is to know where prospective clients are on their journey. There is no one point of entry, nor is there a singular journey that fits all of your prospective clients.

This is why content strategies done right are so valuable – they are the atomic particles of all your digital marketing efforts. Take a look at the funnel below. Educational thought leadership flows in, across, and throughout the entire sales funnel. It’s the shiny rock that attracts the attention of those who’ve never heard of you, and the glue that keeps them along for the ride, convincing them you’re the solution to their problems.

A key component to consider in your content marketing strategy is research. It is well known that research can help marketing, business development, and senior management teams develop more informed plans and strategies, it can also be used as the foundation for many premium pieces of content to generate more visibility, trust, engagement, and best of all, leads. Research studies, either custom, commissioned studies or data that has been licensed from other groups, can be used throughout your sales and marketing funnel. One single research study has the capability to be broken down into countless pieces and can be shared alongside nearly any other message you broadcast within your strategy.

4. Content that exists only on your website.

For an effective content marketing strategy, you need to do more than just post your content on your website. At minimum, social media channels where your audience is networking should be a home for your articles and blogs. This is important because, according to our research, your buyers check you out on social media as they’re learning about you as a fit for their organization. The more you promote your content via social media, the more prospective clients and referral sources will see it — and over time, come to recognize your organization for its quality content and expertise.

You should also consider pursuing publishing opportunities in digital publications your audiences read – or where your competitors are placed. Having someone else stand behind your expertise goes a long way in convincing your audience that you are worth their time – not to mention the excellent contribution backlinks from published articles can make to your website’s domain authority.

5. Content that customers can’t easily find.

Even the most thoughtfully written and produced content will fail if prospective clients never find it. Therefore, before you produce the actual content, do some research about which keyword phrases mirror your audience’s search activity. By using those keywords in your content’s headlines and body copy, the content will appear higher in their searches.

Remember that when deciding on which keyword phrases to use, you should find ones that are relevant to the topic, and that your organization can rank for. (If you’re new to the process and strategy of selecting keyword phrases, you may want to check out this article.)

6. Content that is random or ad hoc.

One of the biggest transgressors of a B2B content marketing strategy is the randomness with which content gets written. To borrow from the first reason I stated above, you should avoid filling your content funnel with all that you know or even all that you love. Even if Tom is super passionate about topic X, Tom shouldn’t spend company time writing about topic X unless it fits in strategically in the intersection of what your audience cares about and your organization’s growth priorities.

One very practical way to maintain discipline around your strategy is to build an editorial or content marketing calendar. Sounds simple, but not everyone takes this step. Organize thought leadership titles around that finite number of issues you should be known for (again, think about the Venn diagram above), and match those well-researched keywords that you want to – and can be – found for. By creating and adhering to a content calendar, you’ll help your content writers focus their energies strategically.

7. Content that’s inconsistent.

Consistency is vital to credibility, so be sure to develop content standards and styles that you can live with, and then enforce them as new content is created, no matter who in your organization creates it. The content calendar I just mentioned is a big part of helping your firm avoid the “set it and forget it” syndrome.

We commonly get asked the question around how much content needs to be produced. The right rhythm and cadence for your firm will be so dependent on your resources as well as how aggressively you need to track to greater growth and visibility. If you are just starting out, twice a month isn’t awful. On the other hand, if you find the competitive landscape to be formidable, or you are desperately trying to unveil your firm from the cloak of invisibility, you’ll need to produce content more frequently. There is no magic number. The final point I make below on consistently measuring and tracking will help you understand how your audience is receiving your content, which in turn will help you determine the right cadence.

8. Content that’s not being measured.

Finally, content marketing strategies are vulnerable to failure when firms have no measurement of their performance. The figure below illustrates the virtuous cycle of content marketing, in which you continually test your content, measure how it’s performing, learn from what works, and then factor those lessons into the next round of content.

A continuous improvement model for content creation

A common challenge is understanding which metrics to track. We recommend that you monitor several types of metrics.

• Visibility metrics — These will help you gauge how visible you are to your target audience. Common visibility metrics include total website traffic (web traffic rises with increased visibility), social media traffic and attendance at events.
• Expertise metrics — These tell you if your audience is exposed to your thought leadership content (i.e., are you successfully demonstrating your expertise?). Common expertise metrics include blog views, downloads of your premium content, guest posts, webinar attendees and attendance at speaking events.
• Impact metrics— These can include raw (not yet qualified) leads or inquiries, “sales-ready” opportunities and actual proposals submitted. Your firm may describe these stages differently. It does not matter how you define your lead stages as long as you are consistent and capture the full new-business cycle. You’ll also want to track wins, losses, and even higher level metrics such as monthly revenue so that you keep a pulse on how your content strategy is (or isn’t) contributing to the bottom line.

What type of content should be in my B2B content marketing strategy?

We find the most effective approach to content marketing is to provide a wealth of freely available material—no commitment, no registration, no cost. Most of this material will be short-format pieces, such as blog posts and articles.

So how do you get started? What kinds of content can you create?

For most firms, blogging is the easiest and most productive way to get started. Because blog posts can be any length and less polished than, say, a magazine article, they can be produced and published quickly. If commenting is enabled, blog posts also provide a great way to interact with your audience.

But blogs only scratch the surface. Here are some other important content marketing vehicles to consider as you retool your marketing plan:

• Webinars. By themselves, webinars offer a good way to demonstrate your firm’s expertise, educate your audience and cultivate interested leads. If you record your webinars, they can be added to your library of content so that web visitors can view them at any time.
• Articles and white papers. Perhaps the most familiar form of thought leadership, these medium-length pieces are still valuable. Unfortunately, they have a reputation for being dry. So do your best to make them an easy read.
• Social media. Social media, especially LinkedIn and Twitter, can be important channels to speak directly to your audience, answer questions and promote your educational material.
• E-newsletters. Many people prefer to receive educational content by email inbox. In return, you get their email address and the ability to expose them to more of your expert material.
• Ebooks. For the ultimate credibility boost, publish an in-depth study of a topic. Usually, you will want to put something this valuable behind a short registration form.
• Kits and guides. These medium-length pieces make terrific offers on your website, in pay-per-click ads and in email marketing campaigns. Put them behind a registration form so that you can collect leads.

There are many other formats you can use to package information, but these are some of the most popular and most effective.

At Hinge, we freely distribute our research studies, which is arguably the most valuable content we produce. We do so to generate valuable buzz and inbound links. We recommend such longer pieces require registration. That way the reader trades some basic contact information (sometimes little more than their name and email address) for the piece. The reader gets valuable information and you build your list of leads. A fair trade.

Conclusion

Every client, prospective client, and referral source has specific topics they’re interested in and want to learn more about. As they search for answers, they are also looking to find trusted, accessible sources of that information. Creating relevant content addresses this need, and can also help clients vet you as a potential vendor. Still questioning the role of valuable content? Our research shows that even with a referral, 23.5% of prospective clients rule out firms simply because of poor quality content. And, by avoiding these common pitfalls as you’re developing content marketing strategy, your organization can improve how it meets your prospective clients’ need for information on essential topics. More importantly, you will also convey a level of expertise and accessibility that will make them want to do business with you in the future. Best of luck on your journey!

The post Why do B2B Content Marketing Strategies Fail? appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

Unfortunately, more than 90% of that information is now presented to webmasters as simply “(not provided).” So what are webmasters and SEOs to do in this age of unknown and incomplete data?

The good news is that search engines are much smarter than they used to be and are able to understand the intent of what a user is searching for, without having to use “exact-match” search results. Because of this, content publishers can focus more on the experience of their readers as opposed to stuffing keywords in content in order to be found in search engines.

That being said, utilizing proper keywords on your website and in your content is still extremely important and can still be useful in achieving greater search engine visibility.

Let’s explore some methods that are still available to webmasters, SEOs, and online marketers that can be extremely helpful in identifying the best keywords for optimizing content.

1. Google Auto-Populate

While you might be thinking how difficult Google is making your life by not providing valuable keyword data, there are still features such as Google’s auto-populate function that can help searchers complete their thoughts while at the same time providing valuable keywords to webmasters. Searchers will often start by typing in a particular query only to end up choosing what Google auto-populates in the search box.

This is the best place to start your research, as you will most likely want to find out what kind of content already exists about the topic you are crafting content around. This is also a useful method for identifying long-tail keyword phrases that may be more difficult to identify in keyword planner tools. Who better to give you suggestions about keyword opportunities than Google?

2. Google Related Searches

Similar to the auto-populate function, Google provides “related searches” at the bottom of most SERPs or “search engine results pages.” This should also be one of the first things you look at when starting keyword research.

Don’t be afraid to search for multiple variations of keywords and keyword phrases. This is also a helpful exercise to start understanding how the search engine is thinking about certain words and what words are being associated with one another.

3. Google Ads Keyword Planner

The Google Ads Keyword Planner is where most webmasters start their more in-depth research. You can start by searching for a new keyword of your choice.

You will then be presented with the average monthly searches, competition, and suggested bid for the keyword you typed in as well as other suggested keywords and phrases. The number of alternative options usually depends on the popularity of the subject.

For example, you will see far more alternative suggestions for “keyword research” than you will for “cogeneration plant engineering.”

Unless you are putting together a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, the only truly useful information presented here are the suggestions and the average monthly searches. The competition is only broken down by low, medium, or high and is most times not a reliable metric for determining how difficult it will be to rank for a particular keyword. Instead, I would recommend Moz’s keyword difficulty and analysis tool for this.

4. Google Search Console

There is a place where the true webmasters live: Google Search Console. This is where you find the top queries that are being searched for as well as the top web pages that are being found via search.

You can find the top queries that have driven traffic to your site over specific periods of time with this tool. You can also see the content that has driven the most traffic to your site over the same amount of time.

5. Google Trends

Google Trends can be useful in choosing the correct variation of a particular keyword. This tool will display the overall “interest over time” of a keyword and also includes a forecast for certain terms.

Interest over time is represented as a number between 0-100 at certain points over time. It reflects how many searches have been done for a particular term relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don’t represent absolute search volume numbers.

Below is a comparison between the terms “search engine optimization” (blue), “search engine marketing” (red), and “content marketing” (yellow). Notice that “content marketing” has been a more a popular search term than “search engine marketing”.

6. Google Analytics

While most of the keyword data found in the organic section of Google Analytics is labeled as (not provided), there is a section under “Acquisition” that contains your Search Console data if you have linked up both platforms.

It is located under “Search Console” → “Queries.” This information is similar to what you will find in Search Console.

Even with Google hiding most of its keyword data in Google Analytics, there are still many resources that Google offers (for free) that can be extremely useful for webmasters and SEOs to identify relevant keywords for optimizing their content.

Start by using these tools to help identify useful topics and keywords, then create and share great content that appeals to your audience. Remember, if your content is not useful and shareable, it doesn’t matter how many keywords you can identify. The goal, above all else, is to drive traffic to your content and have others naturally share and link to your content.

The post How to Find the Best Keywords for Optimizing Your Website Content appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

As Earth perishes from drought and famine, the protagonist played by Matthew McConaughey embarks on a time-sensitive journey across the universe in search of a new home for humanity. Midway through the movie, McConaughey and the team of scientists arrive at their first planet to explore, one situated in close proximity to a black hole. Because of this proximity, the planet has 130% of earth’s gravity and also experiences an extreme time dilation, making it so that one hour on the planet equals 7 years on Earth! The stakes are high and every second matters. Without summarizing the whole movie, I’ll limit my plot synopsis to mention that things do not go to plan for the team that visits the planet. Too much time passes. 

The scene that stuns me is actually the one that follows this thrilling sequence on the planet. When McConaughey and team return to their spacecraft, he is greeted by the one team member who stayed behind to study the planet from above. He is now an old man. 23 years have passed. The emotion of this scene is remarkable, not only because of the intense action, but because the movie awakens us to the realities of the powerful forces at work in the universe—time, space, and gravity.

The mysterious force of gravity is the most vivid analogy I can use to describe the power of a successful inbound content marketing plan. Similar to how larger bodies of mass in space have increased potential pulling power of gravity, at Hinge we’ve used an inbound content marketing program for years—and have witnessed first hand the way it can pull buyers towards a firm’s brand.

In this article, we will enter the gravity well of inbound content marketing. We’ll explore why and how inbound content marketing is one of the most powerful ways professional services firms can enhance their visibility and reputations today. We’ll define inbound content marketing, discuss its benefits and challenges, and provide you with a roadmap to implementing your own inbound content marketing program.

By the end of this article, you will have a better understanding of how inbound content marketing works and how you can begin harnessing this powerful force at your firm. 

So journey with me! Let’s begin by providing a definition of the term inbound content marketing. 

What is Inbound Content Marketing?

Inbound content marketing is a marketing strategy that involves creating and sharing valuable and relevant content with a target audience for the purpose of educating them on your individual/corporate expertise and capabilities.

This is in contrast to outbound marketing activities, which involve more traditional forms of advertising such as television commercials, print ads, direct mail, and even paid social media ads.

Examples of Inbound Content Marketing

Examples of inbound content marketing can include a combination of many different marketing techniques, including the writing of blog posts, production of videos, publication of whitepapers, and more. An inbound content marketing program can range in size depending on the amount of bandwidth a particular team has for implementing the strategy. Regardless of its scope, every inbound content marketing strategy has the same goal—to provide your target audience with accessible content that helps them solve their business problems while simultaneously demonstrating your expertise.

Let’s review a real-world example… this blog post! I am writing this blog post with the intention of ranking for the keyword “inbound content marketing.” This article is completely free for anyone to read and my intent is to educate you on everything I know about inbound content marketing. I also intend to demonstrate my expertise on the subject through my experience delivering content marketing programs at Hinge. 

But is inbound content marketing still relevant to today’s buyers? Let’s take a look.

The Case for Inbound Content Marketing

We can’t pretend that content marketing is anything new, so why should professional services marketers care about it today? Is it an outdated approach?

When trying to solve big “why” questions like this, we at Hinge like to turn to the data. Does data on professional services buyers support investing in an inbound content marketing program? The answer is a resounding YES! And for more than one reason.

Inbound content marketing cultivates potential customers in three ways:

1. Finding you
2. Evaluating you
3. Closing the sale

Let’s take a look at recent data on professional services buyer behavior and see how strategic inbound content marketing enhances the power of your brand.

Inbound Content Marketing Helps Prospects Find You

It’s not a surprise that over the last decade buyer behavior is gradually shifting to the digital environment. One of the consequences of this is that the ways potential buyers find you is expanding into a more diverse set of channels. In the chart below, we see the list of the top ways buyers search for solutions to their work-related problems.

Professional services marketing has always relied on a strong backbone of networking and referrals from peers and colleagues. But today we find that other channels are increasingly important too! 

Let’s focus on the second channel: buyers are turning to search engines like Google for answers. Nearly tied with the perennial top channel, referrals, search engines play an essential role in the business development environment today. So the question to ask is “when your buyers turn to search for problems, will your firm appear in the results?”

For most professional services firms, ranking in search engines is a real pain point. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technical marketing skill that requires ongoing dedication to build traction. And it is here where we find one of the primary use cases of inbound content marketing. High-quality content that is relevant and practical has the best chance of ranking on Google. And of course, higher rankings on search engines means people interested in your expertise are more likely to discover you.

The visibility rewards compound overtime too. As marketing teams produce more and more content on their websites, their ability to rank for more competitive keywords gets stronger. Organic SEO benefits are possible too as people share your content or add backlinks to your content on their websites. 

Looking back at our Interstellar gravity metaphor, the more content you publish to your website, the more mass you’re adding to your digital planet. If it’s the right substance, then you’ll start pulling in the right audience to engage with your firm’s brand.

As I mentioned above, buyers are using many channels to search for work-related problems today. So while we highlighted SEO, let’s also look at how other content-based techniques help professional services firms increase their visibility.

The research shows that buyers are turning to channels where they can listen to an expert speak on a topic (e.g., podcasts), read blog articles, and consume premium content in the forms of guides, ebooks, webinars, and/or videos. All of these channels can be part of an integrated inbound content marketing program.

While outbound strategies might be the fastest way to getting new eyeballs on your brand, marketers have known that organic visibility is always preferable. It is a slower approach. But buyers searching for solutions and finding your original thought leadership content is an excellent way to be found and begin a relationship.

Content Marketing Helps Prospects Evaluate You

The benefits of inbound content marketing aren’t limited to being found. Our research shows that content marketing also plays a key role when your business is being evaluated as a possible service provider. The chart below shows what buyers care about most when evaluating you as a service provider. Can you find the connection with inbound content marketing?

When comparing two or more firms, buyers are looking most often for industry knowledge and subject matter expertise. In the high-stakes environment of evaluating firms, what brings buyers comfort is knowing that a service provider has a rich understanding of their industry and that they have the expertise to solve their particular problems.

High-quality thought leadership content, written by competent experts at your firm, fills this gap. Potential buyers want to understand your firm’s unique perspective. What separates you from the competition? You can educate them and validate your expertise with accessible, relevant content.

It’s important to take into consideration that buyers will continue to consult your firm’s website and engage with your brand throughout the evaluation process. They will pass your information and website URL to their colleagues. They may subscribe to your email list and receive promotions you send out to your list. During this evaluation period, continuing to validate your firm’s expertise is key.

Content that engages prospects directly like webinars can be particularly potent pieces of your inbound content marketing system for these individuals considering your firm as a service provider. Oftentimes this is the weakest part of a content marketing strategy. But investment into content marketing techniques that help to nurture relationships is essential.

Content Marketing Helps Close the Sale

We understand that at the end of the day deals need to close. And while many may consider the objective of closing the sale to be left to partners and business development representatives, data shows us that your inbound content marketing techniques can benefit here too.

In our study, we asked professional services buyers what “tipped the scale” for them when they made their final selection decision. Here are the top five deciding factors:

1. Existing relationship
2. Relevant experience/past performance
3. Talented staff/team skills
4. Knowledge of industry/subject matter expertise
5. Client service (flexibility/responsiveness/timeliness)

Once again the data points us at three things that intersect with a strong inbound content marketing program. 

We see that buyers want proof of experience and past performance. Case stories and project overviews are great examples of content that can address this need. For example, in Hinge’s monthly webinars, we try to include  client stories and results as a core part of the content.

Number three on the list is your talented team and the skills your team possesses. A strong content marketing program is an effective way to demonstrate your team’s  expertise on particular issues. When your experts are also contributors to your content marketing program, buyers get a small sample of what it might be like to work with your team. The content has validated the team members and their expertise in a public way that can give buyers an opportunity to familiarize themselves with your team before even working with you. 

Then on the list we see number four appear again—knowledge of industry and subject matter expertise. The inbound content marketing techniques you implement provide prospective buyers with confidence and validation when making a buying decision.

So from the top of your marketing funnel, where you attract new prospects, all the way down to the bottom, where you close the sale, an inbound content marketing program can play an important role for professional services marketers. 

The question is no longer why should you do inbound content marketing, but why don’t you? In the animation below, you can see my reaction anytime a marketing team begins to give up on their inbound content marketing program.

The Main Problem with Inbound Content Marketing

One thing is true about inbound content marketing that hasn’t been mentioned yet… it’s challenging. There’s no getting around the fact that building a high-quality inbound content marketing system comes with a cost. Time, effort, and lots of testing are required to maintain a growing inbound content marketing program. But one challenge with inbound content marketing stands above the rest.

The most common thing we hear when we work with our clients on their content marketing program is how hard it is to engage their experts in the content creation process. In the world of professional services, our top experts are the people most qualified to contribute powerful thought leadership content… But they are busy delivering work for their clients and selling more work. So how do we get them to participate in our content marketing program?

Organizing Your Team of Experts

Of course there is no one answer to the problem of engaging your firm’s thought leaders. Every expert is different. Some have ambitions to raise their professional profile while others are unconvinced that their thought leadership will benefit the firm. However, there are two primary strategies professional services marketers can implement to engage their experts in the content creation process.

First, you need to make sure that the experts understand why thought leadership content benefits both them and the firm. For starters, you can reiterate some of the data and points from earlier in this article. Educate them on your potential buyers and the role that high-quality content plays in the buyer journey of your prospects.

If that’s not enough to convince them, then educate them on some of the other benefits that come with being more visible with their expertise. Below in Figure 4 we see data from another research project we did on highly visible professional services experts. We asked them what benefits they enjoy the most from being thought leaders. 

The second strategy for engaging experts in the content creation process is to make it easy for them. From experience let me tell you… it’s never good to simply send an email to a colleague and ask them to write a 1,000 word blog post. Unless you are working with a true content creation fanatic, you will likely not get a positive response. Instead, you need to demonstrate to the expert that you can help them make the process smooth. 

If the assignment is to writing an article, then a top way to ease the burden on your expert is to engage an outside industry writer to take on the heavy lifting. Schedule an interview with the writer and the experts. To prepare for the interview, draft an outline of the piece. Schedule an interview between the expert and the writer, record it, and ask the expert to talk about each section of the outline. Allow the writer an opportunity to ask questions. In this scenario, the writer tackles the labor of writing and allows the expert to function more as a contributor and editor.

This concept of making things easier on your expert extends across all kinds of content. You want to work to the strengths of your experts. If they are strong speakers and presenters then lean into content creation that gives them the opportunity to use that gift. Record video interviews for social media clips, bring them on as webinar guests, or support their efforts to secure more speaking engagements. 

Demonstrating to experts that you are taking their strengths into consideration will go a long way into making the content creation process better for your team. Here is how an expert will react when you make the content creation process easy for them.

Tears of joy.

Quality content creation will never come without its challenges. But with creative thinking and an expert-centered approach, you’ll be able to prevail.

Implementing an Inbound Content Marketing Plan

At this point you may be inspired to continue to develop your firm’s inbound content marketing program. As we have mentioned above, the benefits are plenty and the challenges can be conquered. So what are the steps you have to take in order to implement a successful inbound content marketing plan?

While we go into deeper detail in our article on brand development, let’s summarize the key factors that can make or break your inbound content marketing program. And let’s do so by asking some important questions. If you can answer these questions, then you’ll be well on your way to creating a robust inbound content marketing plan.

1. Have you identified your target clients?

No one can be all things to all people in marketing. Years of experience and research on professional services marketing have revealed to us that firms that grow faster and are more profitable often have a narrow focus. They solve specific problems for a particular group of target clients. As a marketer focusing on building a strategy, having a clear understanding of your target clients is non negotiable.

2. Have you researched your clients recently?

The fastest growing firms are also companies that are more likely to have researched their clients recently and more often. Understanding your target clients and the problems they face is an important aspect of running your business and also developing an inbound content marketing strategy.

The marketplace is changing faster than ever right now. But still many firms insist on carrying on without conducting ANY forms of research on their clients or marketplace. We believe this is a mistake.

Client research yields insights that translate directly to your marketing strategy. Understanding, for example, how your current clients found you can help you decide which marketing techniques to double-down on and which to kill. 

3. Is your brand positioning differentiated from your competition?

This is another question that is hard to answer without research. One thing we find through our Visible Firm program with our clients is that their competitive landscape is much larger than they think it is. Professional services firms consistently underestimate the number of competitors lurking in their ecosystem.

Therefore, it is crucial that your brand positioning is differentiated. This differentiation will be reflected on your website and in all your messaging and brand assets. Your team should be equipped with brand guidelines and key messages that keep them aligned on what makes your firm unique.

Strong brand positioning will also guide your marketing efforts when it comes to selecting issues and topics to write about. This differentiated, research-based approach is much better than creating content in a vacuum.

4. What are your firm’s marketing strengths?

Once you’re able to answer the three questions above with confidence, then you can  consider which marketing techniques inbound content marketing techniques to use. Here you’ll want to turn your attention inward and assess your team’s strengths and weaknesses.

When evaluating your team’s skill set, think about marketing techniques in three categories: writing, speaking, and networking. While networking may not have a lot to do with inbound content marketing, speaking and writing certainly do. Selecting marketing techniques that align with the strengths of your team is the goal. And if possible, develop a visibility plan for each of your experts so they have a clear path forward.

For example, you may want to consider guiding your most skilled writers towards the creation of more technical, in-depth content. This could come in the form of a white-paper, research report, or guide. Your gifted speakers, on the other hand, may be more suited for strategies that lean into social media content. Platforms like LinkedIn continue to give additional exposure to original video content.

5. Is your marketing infrastructure working for you?

You can create excellent content and still miss the mark if your primary brand assets and infrastructure are outdated, broken, or completely missing. Inbound content marketing programs extend beyond the pieces of content themselves. They rely on many pieces of infrastructure which support them and extend their impact. 

At a minimum, your firms should have these key pieces of marketing infrastructure to support a robust inbound content marketing program:

• High-performance website
• CRM 
• Email marketing/automation
• Active social media channels

The most common shortfall for professional services firms is their website. In a recent article, I listed 21 traits of poorly designed websites that you can use to assess your own website. When it comes to your content marketing program, your website is the primary hub. If you invest time in creating a piece of unique content, it should have an easy-to-find place on your website so that your prospects and clients can access it.

Your marketing infrastructure and brand assets need to work in harmony with your content marketing strategy. Avoid any disconnects that would make content inaccessible to your target clients.

6. Are you continuing to update your content?

A piece of content is never finished. This is another common mistake we see when we work with our clients and research the competitive landscape. Content you create is always available to be reviewed, updated, and republished at a new time and date. Moreover, longer pieces of content can be broken down into smaller pieces and reused elsewhere—social media, webinars, even videos!. 

Let’s consider a blog post as an example. If you posted an 800 word blog post one year ago but it is yet to get any SEO traction, perhaps this is an opportunity to try again. Leaving the article there with no updates is not going to make it magically improve. So revisit the post. What was the original intent? Is the post keyword-driven? Is there more that could be added to the article? In our experience, the answers here are almost always yes. 

7. How are you challenging your team?

Finally, when an inbound content marketing program is running well, consider how your team might tackle bigger challenges that enhance your reputation. Should your firm start a podcast? How about a series of webinars? Or maybe you could consider commissioning original research on your industry that could be turned into a number of different pieces of content (see below).

Your inbound content marketing program will never arrive at its destination. There are always more ways to increase your firm’s visibility and enhance its reputation. As a marketing leader, be sure to continue to challenge your team to accomplish all it can building a strong content marketing program.

A Final Thought

We’ve made the case and shared why you should leverage the gravitational force of an inbound content marketing program. The benefits are innumerable. The challenges exist but can be overcome. 

Inbound content marketing reaches your prospective buyers in a way that most outbound techniques cannot. By the nature of how these marketing efforts are designed, when buyers find you organically because of your subject matter expertise, they are more likely to trust you as a service provider.

Of course, we know the journey is not simple. And you may want some support. If you’d like to speak with a Hinge expert on how to develop your firm’s inbound marketing program, then reach out to us. We’d love to hear from you.

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For years, professional services have been marketed through personal relationships, referrals and a variety of networking and educational events. It was all about who you knew.

But all that is beginning to change. There is a new generation of buyers on the scene who have grown up with the Internet at their fingertips. They expect to be educated for free. They expect transparency in their professional services providers. And importantly, they expect to find a firm that fits their needs exactly, whether they work in Bangor, Maine or Bangkok, Thailand.

As a result, marketing today is no longer about who you know, but what you know. And how well you can spread the word.

The Rise of the Expert Through Content Marketing

This trend has provided fertile ground for a new, Internet-fueled incarnation of an old concept: the high-profile industry expert. More and more experts are rising from obscurity to become well-known names in their fields. We call these stars Visible Experts®, and they are leveraging content marketing to power their rise to prominence.

Interestingly, the rise of content marketing has also driven the development of outsourced marketing. Today, the skills required to market a firm are vast and varied. And because many of them are driven by technology, they require a great deal of expertise to keep up with the pace of change. Many firms don’t want the headache of keeping on top of all this change. So they turn to outside marketing firms to fill in the gaps, or even take the reins. In fact, we’re seeing evidence that firms are spending roughly 3 times as much on outsourcing today than they were two years ago.

Before we dig into this phenomenon and its implications for you, let’s begin with a definition.

Outsourced Marketing Defined

Outsourced marketing is the practice of contracting an organization’s marketing functions to an outside firm. Both strategic and operational functions can be, and often are, delegated to a third-party marketing partner, which has the specialized expertise, tools and professional staff to provide a complete suite of marketing services. And because it is responsible for the program’s performance, the outsourced partner usually reports regularly on the program’s performance.

Of course, professional services firms rely on different degrees of outsourced marketing, from handling everything in-house to outsourcing every function (see Levels of Outsourced Marketing Activities below).

For example, one marketing function commonly outsourced by professional services firms is website design. Very few firms have the expertise in-house to design and develop a complex website. It is a task best suited to a firm that designs and builds websites every day.

Some businesses, on the other hand, outsource every aspect of their marketing. This allows their leadership and professionals to focus intensely on their core business. They rely on their marketing partner to propose the strategy, implement it and report on its progress. Their marketing firm is a critical partner in their success.

Who Uses Outsourced Marketing, and Why?

Outsourced marketing is common in professional services firms of all sizes and across all industries. Even individual experts and practices within larger firms often seek outside marketing expertise.

There are many reasons firms outsource some or all of their marketing. Here are a few of the most common situations:

1. A firm can only devote a limited number of hours each week to marketing and they want to improve the quality and consistency of their marketing.
2. A small firm has no budget for a full-time marketer. Outsourcing frees up valuable, often billable, time they can spend serving their clients.
3. A large firm understands that outsourcing certain functions, such as content marketing, can be cheaper and higher quality than doing it themselves.
4. A marketing department uses an outside marketing firm to take over routine, repetitive or tedious tasks, such as designing and setting up email campaigns, so that they can focus on more strategic tasks.
5. A firm wants top-drawer marketing. Outsourcing to a reputable partner provides access to a team of highly skilled experts across a wide spectrum of marketing disciplines.
6. A firm’s partners are tired of investing in marketing yet never knowing if they are getting results. Their new outsourced marketing firm provides full accountability, measurement and reporting.
7. Leadership believes their marketing department is out of fresh ideas. So they hire an outside firm to provide marketing strategy, as well as implementation support in areas the in-house team is weak. Everything is handled by professionals who keep up with the latest trends, technologies and techniques.

For more reasons, check out the section below on the 5 Benefits of Outsourced Marketing

Levels of Outsourced Marketing Activities

Many firms outsource marketing functions in a haphazard way. Often, outsourcing decisions are reactive — filling unexpected gaps in resources. Firms don’t always understand that outsourcing can be a strategic asset, one that can vastly improve the efficiency and quality of their marketing. But to make the most of it requires at least some advance planning.

To help you better understand your situation, we have developed a scale of outsourced marketing maturity. Marketing tasks tend to be either specialized or routine. Specialized functions are needed infrequently and require a relatively high level of skill. Routine operations are conducted on a regular basis and require less skill, though they are not necessarily easy to implement or manage.

This scale is a tool you can use to determine your firm’s level of investment in outsourced marketing. It is not a measure of marketing sophistication (for instance, a Level 5 is not necessarily better than a Level 1), nor do individual levels correspond to firm size. But if you are evaluating outsourcing as a strategy, this scale can help you understand how you compare to other firms.

Level 1 – All functions in-house. This level tends to apply to firms at both extremes of sophistication — those that do little marketing at all and those with large, highly skilled marketing teams.

Level 2 – Some specialized functions outsourced. Usually this approach is used by firms that try to handle most of their marketing inside the firm even if they aren’t expert at them. These firms outsource only when they don’t have the skills to carry out a particular task (such as designing and coding a website).

Level 3 – Outsource specialized functions. Retain routine operations. These firms want experts working on the most technical aspects of their marketing. A relatively low-level in-house marketing team takes care of the more straightforward tasks.

Level 4 – Most specialized functions and some routine operations outsourced. Firms at this level maintain a very small marketing team to handle a few tasks that they want to keep close to home. But the majority of their marketing is conducted by an external firm that coordinates with the in-house team.

Level 5 – All functions outsourced. At Level 5, all marketing, including much of the strategy, is handled by a third-party team. This team works closely with management to align the marketing strategy with overall business objectives. Firm management is kept apprised of performance at frequently, regular intervals.

5 Benefits of Outsourcing Marketing

Why is outsourced marketing so popular with professional services firms? As it turns out, the reasons are rooted in the changing nature of professional services marketing, itself. Here are five compelling reasons that firms invest in outside marketing:

1. Marketing is not a core function of most professional services firms. Professional services firms tend to be run by accountants, attorneys, management consultants, engineers, or other professionals in their fields, not marketers (though there are some exceptions, to be sure). These professionals are often unfamiliar with the latest marketing trends and techniques — and they may not be inclined to become experts in yet another specialty.
2. Effective content marketing requires a growing, diverse skill set. Once upon a time, firms could get by with home-grown talent. Scheduling networking events and attending an occasional trade show require few specialized skills. Today’s marketing, however, requires highly developed technical expertise such as search engine optimization, landing page design, offer development, website analytics, persuasive writing and marketing automation — to name just a few.
3. Outsourced marketing is less expensive. While the fees for outsourcing may seem high at first, they can, in fact, be quite cost effective. You get access to a very diverse, high-quality set of skills without having to hire, train and supervise a team of specialists. You are only paying for what you need when you need it. And since you are using the talents of experienced specialists, they are also likely to produce better outcomes.
4. It helps keep your most valuable resources focused. Traditionally, professional services firms have relied on their most valuable people to write thought-leadership content and do the networking required to generate new business opportunities. But these demands take away from a professional’s billable time — an unending source of frustration for marketing directors everywhere. Outsourced marketing is changing that balance. An hour-long interview with an expert can provide enough information for an entire content marketing campaign. This can save many painful hours that experts might otherwise spend writing content themselves. Further, the outsourced marketer typically produces a superior outcome.
5. Outsourced marketing provides a single point of accountability. With the ascent of content marketing comes the rise of trackable marketing. Modern analytics and marketing automation tools let you track results very accurately. Accurate monitoring allows for clear accountability. In short, your outsourced marketing partner is accountable for results. That should be music to every managing partner’s ears.

3 Risks of Outsourced Marketing

Like any investment, outsourced marketing comes with certain risks. Here are three of the possible costs associated with outsourced marketing:

1. Internal morale and accountability issues. Depending on what functions you will be outsourcing, your existing marketing staff may feel threatened when you bring on a new marketing partner. In addition, your team may not be used to the pace and pressure of a results-oriented marketing program. To manage these problems, you will need to clearly define people’s roles, let staff know that they are part of a larger team now and explain that success depends on everyone doing their part.
2. Less on-site access to the marketing team. In some, but not all, outsourcing situations the team performing the marketing function may be located off site. This arrangement may or may not be new to you, depending on your firm’s remote work policies. Getting used to working with off-site partners on a daily basis may be frustrating and a difficult adjustment.
3. Potential higher cost. Most outsourcing advocates report that outsourcing costs less. After all, it allows you to avoid the long-term costs associated with hiring and supervising new personnel. You pay for only the services you need. Some firms, however, find that outsourcing increases their marketing costs. We believe this happens when firms do not sufficiently fund marketing to achieve success. When they began an outsourcing program their costs are higher because they are now paying for the resources it takes to generate results.

Typical Outsourced Marketing Services

We turn now to the core marketing functions of a marketing department — all of which can be outsourced. Keep in mind that there are many different ways to describe the wide range of marketing functions. For example, you can outsource a senior marketing executive or a particular operation, such as telemarketing.

1. Research — Includes researching your marketplace, competitors and clients. Research can uncover a wealth of insights into market opportunities, buyer personas, service relevancy and pricing. It can also help you understand your employer brand and recruiting strategies.
2. Strategy — Covers a wide range of high-level guidance for every level of the organization, such as overall firm-wide growth strategies, go-to-market strategies for specific practices, personal development strategies for individual professionals and succession planning. It also includes developing differentiators, positioning and messaging to different audiences.
3. Creative — For the most part, this function encompasses graphic design and writing. It includes logos and brand identity, marketing materials, website design and development, marketing copy, signature content pieces and anything else that requires a creative touch.
4. Training — Building business development skills is a continual challenge at many firms. This category includes training relevant staff in business development techniques, CRM and marketing automation technologies, networking, social media and other marketing- and sales-related skills.
5. Operations — This consists of running day-to-day marketing operations. Examples include content production and editing, public relations, social media support, events, webinars, email campaigns and database support.
6. Analysis — You can’t fix what you can’t measure. An effective modern marketing team has to be able to track, analyze and report on every aspect of its program — such as online analytics, email performance, lead generation, opportunities, proposals and wins/losses. Armed with this information, your team can adjust your plan as needed.

Inside the Outsourced Marketing Department

How is a typical outsourced marketing department structured? Now, I’m not talking here about individual freelancers — they require direct supervision from your team and have limited strategic value. I’m referring instead to Level 3, 4 and 5 engagements on the outsourced marketing maturity scale. How would such an arrangement function?

To keep everything running smoothly, you need an account person (or team) that handles ongoing communications and manages your engagement. Competent project managers can make a tremendous difference in the quality of your partnership.

Of course, the outsourced marketing team will include individuals who do the work. Typically, these will be specialists in critical areas: research, strategy, design, social media, SEO, writing and so on.

There should be QA process that double checks all work before you ever see it. It’s far too easy for embarrassing mistakes to sneak through without it.

A critical component of the engagement is reporting. You and your account team should be meeting on a regular basis — usually once a month, though it can be as often as once a week — to review work in progress, go over performance metrics and discuss any adjustments or changes in course. Reporting not only provides an opportunity for the teams to collaborate and monitor progress, it establishes accountability on both sides, as well.

Should You Outsource Your Marketing?

Is outsourced marketing right for you? It’s a question more and more professional services firms are asking. Most firms already outsource at least a few tasks, such a graphic design and writing.

In many industries, competitive pressures like automation, legislation and market changes are forcing them to revisit every aspect of their operations, including marketing. Other firms want to move away from staffing non-core functions in which they don’t necessarily excel, focusing on the things they do best, instead. There is also a well-established and growing trend of offloading key tasks to subscription-based services.

As you review your marketing program, look at each piece and ask yourself the following questions:

1. Is this activity central to what we do?
2. Do we know how to find and manage the talent it requires?
3. Does it have a steep learning curve? And can we afford to climb it?
4. Does managing this function feel natural?
5. Can we afford the fixed overhead?

If you can answer yes to all five questions, that function should probably remain in-house. A single “no” puts a function on the fence, and you should think about how good a fit it is for the talent and time you have on your team. Could a specialist do it better? If so, is the extra quality worth the potential cost? What would your internal resource do instead?

If you answer with multiple “no’s” to the five questions, then it’s a good candidate for outsourcing.

Conclusion

Outsourced marketing is an important way that professional services firms today keep up with the pace of change in the marketplace. While some firms use it to address distinct, short-term needs, others turn to outside marketing firms to deliver the sophistication, power and performance they could never attain with in-house resources alone.

Chances are, you will be using outsourced marketing resources, yourself, in the near future — if you aren’t already. As you consider your needs, use this post to guide your conversations, and be sure to check some of the valuable resources we link to in this piece and the sections below.

The post Outsourcing Marketing for Professional Services Firms appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

While that may sound like a trick question, recent research has produced tangible, practical answers that can help firms make smarter marketing decisions. And a notable theme of these findings is that every professional services firm needs a digital content strategy to address the way modern buyers look for professional advice and services. 

Many traditional, “tried-and-true” marketing techniques (think sponsorships, face-to-face networking events, print advertising, trade shows) no longer generate sufficient results to sustain a growing practice. Even firms that embrace online marketing often do it wrong, wasting precious time and money.

So how should you market your firm? And where should you be spending your marketing budget?

Before we can tackle those questions, we need to understand how buyers behave in today’s market.

A Marketplace in Transition

The way people find and select professional services is changing quickly. And this transition has real implications on how firms like yours should approach marketing. 

For instance, today’s service buyers ask for referrals less often than in the past. In fact, referrals grew only 9% in the last two years when they had previously dropped 16% over the previous five year period. This means that the almighty referral—the holy grail of business development for so many decades—is starting to lose its primacy as the business world evolves. 

Today’s buyers also say they value professional services 33% more. However, the relevancy of these services has dropped by more than 10.5% since 2020. (Data from the Inside the Buyer’s Brain, Fourth Edition research report.)

What’s going on?

As a younger, more tech-comfortable generation moves into companies’ buyer and influencer roles, they bring different behaviors and expectations with them. Accustomed to using Google and social media tools at home, they arrive in the workplace expecting to find valuable, free advice online, as well as an array of easy-to-find buying options. They also use these tools to vet their buying options—reviewing potential vendors’ websites and asking peers in social media for their opinions and experiences. 

The data shows that buyers are increasingly searching online for business-related insights and help—and they do so at a higher rate than just a year before. As digital tools get even better at meeting buyers’ expectations, these trends are likely to continue into the future.

To address changing buyer behavior, firms need to adopt a thoughtful digital content strategy—one that reaches these tech-savvy people at every stage of their buyer journey.

But what exactly do we mean by “digital content strategy”?

What is a Digital Content Marketing Strategy?

A digital content marketing strategy is a plan that helps a business create and distribute digital content to reach new audiences, build greater credibility, generate more leads and achieve its overall strategic marketing objectives. This plan connects firms with the increasing number of potential buyers who are using digital tools and looking online to solve their business challenges. Often, it is part of a larger content marketing strategy, which also includes non-digital tactics, such as public speaking and writing books. 

Digital content can take a wide range of guises, such as blog posts, online articles, webinars, educational videos, online tutorials, courses and podcasts. Because content can be time-consuming to produce, many strategies include only a subset of these options.

A digital content strategy, however, is more than a collection of content pieces. A strategy also dictates what topics the pieces will address, how often they are produced, how they are exposed to the appropriate audiences and how each piece of content can potentially convert the consumer into a business lead.

Why is Digital Content Important?

Today’s buyers are increasingly going online to find their next professional services partner. While in some cases this means they searched online for their problem and Google returned a list of possible vendors, more often than not the path from problem to problem solved is longer and less direct. 

A professional services sale can take months or years to develop. When businesses have less urgent problems, they tend to allocate fewer resources to them—often going online to research the problem and potential solutions. In the process, they encounter websites, blogs and free educational materials that put their problem in context and describe various solutions. Some consumers will find a source of expertise they trust so much that they return again and again for more information and advice. This behavior is the reason a digital content strategy is so effective.

Over time, these returning consumers (we use the word “consumers” rather than “readers” because the content they consume could be text, video or audio) begin to rely on and trust their information source. When the business challenge eventually becomes urgent, one firm will jump immediately to their mind—the firm they have been following for months or years.

Studies by the Hinge Research Institute have shown that the most successful firms usually use a mix of digital and traditional tools in their marketing strategies. Increasingly, however, this mix favors digital techniques. Figure 1 shows that many of the most common traditional marketing techniques have digital equivalents. 

Figure 1. Digital tactics (green) often have traditional marketing counterparts (blue)

High-performing firms are moving toward digital because they understand their buyers. Today, almost 70 percent of buyers say they use digital channels to research their business problems (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Likelihood buyers will use digital or traditional channels to research a business challenge

And they are using digital at similar proportions to evaluate professional services firms so they can make informed decisions (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Likelihood buyers will use digital or traditional channels to evaluate service providers

The implications of these data are huge. An overwhelming percentage of professional services buyers are using digital channels and tools to find their vendor candidates, then using digital tools again to evaluate them. If your firm isn’t visible in these channels—and you aren’t delivering messaging that buyers want to hear—you are going to be at a severe competitive disadvantage.

Digital is the marketing medium of today and tomorrow. Established firms that think nothing has changed are in for a rude shock.

Now, you may be wondering what goes into a digital content strategy? And how do you create one? That’s what we’ll dive into next.

Components of a Digital Content Strategy

Define Your Business Goals

Every business strategy has to start with your goals, and your digital content strategy is no different. And if you don’t have clear goals today, you should ask yourself what you would like to change about your business. Here are a few questions to get you started:

• Do we need more quality leads? 
• Do we want to expand our reach into new geographic markets? Or do we want to build market share in our local area? 
• Is our reputation in need of a boost?
• Do we hope to move away from commodity pricing and charge premium fees for our services? 
• Do we want to evolve our business and become known for a different set of services?
• Are we trying to grow our business? Or do we focus on raising our margins?

Whatever your business goals are, you can use them to orient your strategy and help you decide if a particular decision, technique or tool is going to take you closer to your destination. With these goals in your sights, you’ll also have a better sense of what metrics and outcomes you will need to monitor.

Research Your Audience

To deliver an effective digital content strategy, you’ll need to produce content that your prospective clients actually care about. And aside from mindreading, there is only one reliable way to get inside their heads: conducting research on your audience.

At Hinge, we’ve learned that most firms have little real knowledge of their clients’ changing needs. By conducting research, however, they can learn what issues are important today, what clients are worrying about in the near future and what services they wish you offered. 

Now, not all research is alike. You will need to decide up front what type of research you will conduct to get useful insights. To understand your audience, we would recommend only two types of research:

1. Surveys. The king of quantitative market research. While the paper survey isn’t quite dead, most surveys today are conducted online. Online survey platforms give you the ability to branch your questions depending on how a subject responds, randomize the order of questions, send automated invitations and reminders, and other useful tools. 
2. Interviews. Live interviews are the gold standard of qualitative research for a good reason: they give the interviewer the latitude to ask follow up questions and dig deeper when there is more to learn. Interviewees tend to give more detailed and nuanced answers than they would in a standard text-based survey. While you could conduct interviews in person, it is far more practical to do them by phone (or video conference). 

If you can afford to go the interview route, we encourage you to do so. While more expensive than online surveys, personal interviews generate the highest quality information. But surveys can produce a wealth of useful data, too. For the best of both worlds, use both techniques—you can reach a large sample and extract deep qualitative insights.

Who should you research?

Who should you be talking to in the course of your research? Consider reaching out to these three key audiences:

1. Current clients. Within this group, think about what roles, industries or other segments you need to hear from.
2. Influencers. These are the folks who have critical input into the final selection decision but are not the final decision makers.
3. Referral Sources. These are people who recommend firms to prospective buyers. Keep in mind that they may work in a different industry from your clients (for instance, lawyers often recommend accountants to their clients, and vice versa).

Who should conduct the research?

While you may be tempted to reduce costs by conducting the research yourself, there are good reasons to hire an outside firm or professional researcher to do it for you. First, your clients don’t want to hurt your feelings, so they may be less than honest with you or try to tell you what they think you want to hear. Second, you probably don’t have the skills to get the most from your research. A skilled interviewer can coax a surprising amount of valuable information from a subject, and she knows how to probe for deeper insights when necessary. And third, it takes skill to design a statistically valid questionnaire and make sense of all the data you collect. It is very easy to generate misleading results.

What questions should you ask?

You may decide to cover a range of topics in your research, but there are a few specific topics you should include in your questionnaire:

• What challenges are your clients facing today? And what worries them about the future?
• When they need business-related information, where do they turn? What do they read? What do they watch? What events do they attend?
• What do they look for in a service provider? How do they choose one over another?

Identify the Issues You’ll Own

Producing high-quality content is hard, and you can’t afford to waste your precious time. Instead, you need a strategy to help you decide what to write about. The first place you should look for guidance is your audience research. If you’ve done it right, it should point you toward issues and challenges that interest your target audiences. 

We usually recommend that firms identify two to five big issues that they will write and speak about. The issues can’t be so broad that they lack a focus, but they can’t be so narrow that you will quickly run out of angles to explore, either. If some of your issues—or your take on them—are unconventional or controversial, so much the better. If possible, try to find subjects that aren’t already getting a lot of coverage so that your voice has a chance to be heard. And remember, your issues don’t have to be evergreen. For instance, you may decide to write for a few months on an emerging industry challenge. Once the challenge is resolved or fades from public view, you may decide to move on to other issues.

Here are a few sample issues:

For an architecture firm:

• New Trends in Higher Education Design

For a staffing firm:

• Attracting Top Executive Talent in a Contracting Job Market

For a management consulting firm:

• What Executives Can Learn from the Coronavirus

For an engineering firm:

• Engineering Against Catastrophe

These issues provide plenty of room for a firm to produce dozens of blog posts, articles, and webinars under each. At the same time, they are compact enough ideas that it would be easy for a person to associate them with a specific firm: “Oh, they are the experts in engineering buildings that can withstand hurricanes and earthquakes.”

Dive into Keyword Research and SEO

One of the central tenets of any digital content strategy is making your content findable in online search. To accomplish this, you need at least a basic knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO). (If you are interested, you can find an excellent SEO primer at Moz.) And you need to research a list of SEO keywords that relate to your expert issues (see previous section). You will use them to develop specific topics under each of your issues. In other words, you need to develop your content first for your target audiences, but you need to do this with Google firmly in mind. You will incorporate your keywords (or variations) into your blog post titles, for example, and use them in the body of your text. While keywords are only a small part of SEO, they are a critical component that directly influences what you write and talk about.

Decide How to Package Your Content

As I mentioned earlier, you can produce content in a wide range of formats. But which ones will be right for you? Content falls into two broad categories, and to attract new people and convert them into leads, you will need to address both of them:

1. Flow Content: Short, frequently published content (such as blog posts) is used to attract regular, ongoing traffic to your website. It is open to everyone.
2. Premium Content: More substantive, higher-value downloadable content (such as executive guides or research reports) is used to generate leads. This type of content is usually free but requires a form fill to access it.

Here is a list of some of the more popular content types. Note that some can fall into either content category, depending on their perceived value and how they are positioned.

Flow Content

• Blog Posts
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• eNewsletters
• Tutorials
• Videos

Premium Content

• Executive Guides
• Webinars
• Ebooks
• Research Reports
• White Papers
• Demos
• Videos
• Courses
• Tutorials

At the very least, you will need a blog and one piece of valuable content. That gives you a place to publish your flow content (blog posts) and a piece of premium content you can use to convert your most interested readers into leads (responding to an offer in your blog posts, readers fill out a form to download the content). 

What you do with those leads depends on your strategy. Most firms will follow up with emails promoting other relevant content, encouraging the consumer to stay engaged and return again for more expert content.

Develop a Content Calendar

The most common reason content strategies fail is that people get distracted and never fully implement them. I won’t lie: a digital content strategy takes commitment. And one way to keep yourself honest and stay on track is to lay out a detailed calendar specifying what you will do on any given day. Planning this way allows you to set a rhythm, so you can get in the habit of developing content on certain days, carrying out promotion activities on others, et cetera. 

A calendar also allows you to plan in advance what topics you are going to write or speak about. If you are blogging, for instance, you can plug the exact titles of your blog posts into your calendar—when the time comes to write, you are ready to go.

At Hinge, we use an Excel spreadsheet for our content calendar, but you could use a digital calendar (or even a paper one!) if that’s more convenient for you. Whatever tool you use, don’t skip this critical step. You can only hold yourself accountable if you have a detailed plan to measure your progress against.

Promote Your Content

Once you have produced a piece of content, it’s important to share it with the world. If you employ SEO, you can do this passively—waiting for Google to index your post and—eventually—deliver readers. But you are likely to have more success if you actively promote it, as well. Here are a few ways you can do that:

Email Marketing. Promote your latest post or piece of premium content to your email list. If you don’t have an email list, your digital content strategy will help you build one. Here’s an email marketing guide to get you started.

Social Media. LinkedIn and Twitter are ideal tools to share your latest content with your followers. You can also publish content on the LinkedIn platform to reach new audiences. Check out this LinkedIn guide for more information.

Guest publishing. Look for opportunities to write for outside publications and blogs. Not only can you expose your ideas to new audiences, but you may be able to link back to content on your blog or website. These so-called “backlinks” can give your content a powerful boost in Google.

Measure Your Results

Every strategy should specify how you will measure success. Which metrics you track will depend on what goals and techniques you chose in your strategy. If you are seeking more leads, for instance, you’ll want to track qualified and unqualified leads. You may also track premium content downloads and contact form fills.

If you are trying to build visibility and reach, you might track organic web traffic over time, how many keywords you are ranking for, which keywords rank on the first page of Google, where new prospects are located, how many visitors you get to your blog and other visibility-related metrics.

Your team should review your metrics on a regular basis—weekly or monthly are common cadences. Don’t forget to monitor how closely your team has followed the content calendar. This kind of social pressure is often the best way to keep everyone motivated and on track.

If you notice any problems—a particular tactic isn’t generating acceptable results—don’t hesitate to try something else. That is the ultimate reason you measure your results, after all. No strategy should ever be set in stone.

What’s Your Next Move?

Buyers of professional services are moving quickly and inexorably toward a less personal but more convenient digital marketplace. For many firms, making this transition is difficult and painful—and an alarming number of firms have hardly begun. 

But a digital content strategy can open up myriad new opportunities, too. Firms can use educational content to demonstrate their expertise and build a significant national or international following without ever leaving their hometown. In some cases, prospects will hire a firm based solely on the reputation they cultivated through their content. That’s true power!

If your firm hasn’t yet taken the digital content plunge, there is no better time than now. People are hungry for expertise like yours. And by giving away some of it for free, you can build a loyal following that will bear fruit for years to come.

The post Digital Content Marketing Strategy for Today’s Professional Services Firm appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

In this post, we will review the role of digital marketing in professional services firms’ growth plans and suggest an approach to develop a winning digital strategy for your firm. Let’s start by reviewing some key concepts.

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a plan for using digital marketing tools and techniques to achieve a firm’s strategic marketing objectives, such as brand building or new business development. Digital marketing strategy is often a part of an overall strategic marketing plan that incorporates both digital and traditional (offline) approaches. Common digital techniques include search engine optimization, digital advertising, email, webinars, social media, websites and mobile apps.

In the growing digital marketing space you will often hear people talk about strategy and techniques interchangeably. While this practice may be fine in the consumer products market, it misses some important distinctions relevant to professional services marketers.

Digital Marketing Strategy vs. Digital Marketing Techniques

Digital marketing strategy is the high-level planning and strategic choices that set the direction for positioning your firm in the marketplace and the key messages you will deliver to your audiences. Your high-level strategy should be the same in both the digital and offline worlds.

Digital marketing techniques are the specific digital platforms and tactics you use to deliver those messages and engage your audiences. An example of a common digital technique is using search engine optimization to draw online traffic to specific sections of your website.

From LinkedIn postings to webinars and podcasts, potential clients are finding new ways to educate themselves and evaluate professional services providers. Digital techniques and tactics are fluid and can change quickly.

Strategy is more stable and covers the long term view.  While a strategy may require minor adjustments along the way, its fundamentals should change little, if at all, in the course of a year. That said, occasionally major disruptions — such as mergers and acquisitions or intensified marketplace competition — can shake up the marketplace and require you to reassess your strategy. But that is the rare exception.

Later in this post when we talk about how to develop your digital marketing strategy we will address both strategy and techniques. Both are important when it comes to producing measurable results with your digital marketing efforts.

Digital Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

Since the advent of digital marketing for the professional services there has been an ongoing debate: which is better, digital or traditional? Over time, it has become clear that this is a false choice. Most professional services firms need a mix of both.

You have some important choices to make. You will need to balance your offline and online presence.

Figure 1. Many traditional marketing techniques (blue) have online counterparts (green).

As Figure 1 illustrates, most traditional offline marketing techniques also have digital analogues. Traditional speaking engagements have a corresponding webinar alternative. There is print and digital advertising. Each marketing approach has advantages and disadvantages.

Figure 2. Strengths and limitations of digital and traditional marketing.

Our research has shown the fastest growing and most profitable firms tend to use a mix of both. But be cautious. Don’t spread yourself so thin that nothing you do has an impact. Dabbling doesn’t work well. Going deeper with fewer techniques typically delivers better results.

When selecting the best tools for your situation, consider which approach is most likely to reach your target audiences. Also take into account the effectiveness and efficiency of your various options. We’ll discuss this selection process below when we cover researching your target audiences and selecting marketing techniques.

How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy

In many ways, the process of developing a digital marketing strategy parallels the process for developing your overall strategic marketing plan or your marketing budgets.

1. Start with your business goals

Strategic marketing, whether digital or traditional, starts with your firm’s strategic goals. What are you trying to achieve? Do you want to grow the firm? Are you trying to gain visibility for your brand? Position the firm for acquisition?

You’ll want to understand which segments of the practice are you targeting with your digital strategy. Most firms have a range of client types that buy a variety of specific services. Which ones are you targeting with your digital strategy? Which segments will be the easiest to reach? Once you have narrowed your choices, it is time to get a deeper understanding of your target audience.

2. Research your target audiences

The next step in preparing a digital marketing strategy is to identify and research your target audiences. The value of this research is evident when you consider that high-growth professional services firms are more likely to perform frequent research as their slow-growth peers.

Your target audiences are the groups of people you need to reach to execute your digital strategy. Here are a few common examples of target audiences:

Potential Clients

This target audience could be further segmented by industry, role or other persona characteristics, if those distinctions are important.

Influencers

Individual influencers, and sometimes a formal selection committee, often advise the final decision maker and can be valuable targets in a digital campaign.

Referral Sources

In some circumstances, referral sources can be so influential that they become de facto decision makers. Industry analysts and influential thought leaders can also pay a pivotal role.

Talent

In many industries, talent shortages can severely impact a firm’s ability to deliver on its promises. This makes potential employees or subcontractors important target audiences. Think of these efforts as building your digital employer brand.

After considering all the possible people you need to reach, you may find that you have more target audiences than you can reasonably address. So how do you prioritize and select audiences?

How do you prioritize audiences?

Many firms conduct research on multiple potential audiences or market segments to help them choose the most responsive markets. We call this Opportunity Research and it goes well beyond simply looking at the growth rate of different segments.

Research questions might explore the competitive environment, potential clients’ buying behavior, your firm’s brand strength within various markets and other factors that might illuminate the likelihood of success within alternative market segments.

Your level of experience with a segment can be important as you prioritize your audiences. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. The firm that believes “everyone” is the right target for its service is at a distinct disadvantage. Its efforts will be spread so thin it will have no impact on anyone.

In most cases the target audiences for your digital marketing strategy will be the same as your overall marketing targets. Once you have identified your target audiences it’s time to learn more about their behavior and digital footprint.

How do you research target audiences?

There are two broad types of research that can help you develop a winning digital strategy. The first approach is called secondary research. In this approach you search for research studies that have already been conducted by another organization. Trade associations or publishers often release studies about specific industries. Similarly, there are many organizations that sell relevant research on market size or trends.

For example, Hinge publishes research on marketing practices for professional services firms that provides useful marketing budget benchmarks and lists the most effective marketing techniques.

The second approach is primary research. In this type of research, you commission an original study of your target audiences. Primary research is more expensive, but it has the advantage of addressing the critical questions that are most relevant to your specific circumstances.

When you combine primary research with high-quality secondary research, you get the best of both worlds: a full, well-informed view of your audiences. This market intelligence dramatically reduces risk and makes marketing more of a science than an expensive guessing game.

3. Develop your digital marketing strategy

An effective digital marketing strategy framework has four key elements. If you have already done this work for your overall marketing strategy, it will likely be very similar for your digital strategy.

Differentiators

What sets your firm or practice apart from your competitors? Often, the research you performed earlier will help you discover differentiators that you may not have been aware of before. For example, you might learn that the unique way you deliver the findings of your assessment is unusually helpful to clients. Alternatively, you might choose a differentiator. For example, you might decide to specialize in a specific industry or type of service.

Market Positioning

The next element of your framework is the market positioning of your firm. How is your firm positioned relative to key competitors? Is your firm the low-cost alternative? Are you the specialists that command top dollar? Your positioning is built upon your differentiators. They are the bricks that build the house that is your market positioning. Your positioning gives your audiences the cohesive and compelling story they need to prefer your firm over your competitors.

Key Messages

What key messages do each of your audiences need to hear? These will likely vary from audience to audience. For instance, potential employees are probably going to be interested in different things than your referral sources. But be careful. Key messages must not contradict each other — and should all be consistent with your firm’s overall market positioning.

Content Strategy

Content is at the heart of most professional services firms’ digital strategy framework. Content is the way you communicate your expertise, build trust and demonstrate to potential clients how you can help them. This is the section of the plan where you specify what issues and topics you will focus on. This content becomes the fuel for social media, webinars, blog posts, emails and other digital marketing techniques.

Once you have documented your overall strategy, it’s time to select the digital marketing techniques and tactics you will use to deliver key messages to your target audiences.

4. Select your digital marketing techniques

Which new digital technique should we try this year? This is where a lot of firms begin their digital marketing planning — and it’s almost always the wrong place to start. Unless you make the effort to understand your business situation, audiences and high level strategy first, you will almost certainly make some counterproductive choices.

Your research into your target audience will tell you which digital platforms your different audiences are already using. Why choose Twitter if no one in your target audience is on it? And do you really want to ignore the platform that 60% of your target audience uses?

Also, different techniques tend to have different levels of efficiency and impact. Our research on high-growth firms shows that some techniques simply work better than others. (We’ll discuss this below in the section on the effectiveness of digital techniques.) When presented with two competing alternative techniques to reach your target audience, you can choose the option that has been empirically shown to deliver more impact.

How often should you publish blogs or offer webinars? What effort will be required from your internal team? What sort of external resources will you need? What about training? How about software or a new website?

Answering these questions often involves wrestling with both your business goals and the resources required to achieve them. Reality has a way of imposing limits, and inevitably you will strike a balance between what you want to achieve and what is possible in your situation.

In today’s professional services firm, marketing is a team sport. No individual or even department can do it all. That means that you need a range of resources to help you execute your plan. The marketing team, billable professionals and outside resources must work together to produce the desired result. Many configurations are possible as long as you have the necessary time and skills at your disposal.

Once you have selected your marketing techniques and have determined their required frequency and level of effort, you can anticipate if you will need any new marketing infrastructure, training or outside support to make the plan a reality. You are also ready to set specific goals and tracking mechanisms.

5. Set specific goals and determine how you will track them

You might think that it makes logical sense to select goals before techniques. But here is the catch. Each technique lends itself to certain tracking mechanisms.

While some high-level goals, such as acquiring ten new clients per month, applies to all of your marketing, other goals, such as getting 20 LinkedIn shares each week, are technique specific — you have to know you will be using LinkedIn before you can set that goal. Modern technology makes some metrics easy to track, so when it makes sense, take advantage of what is readily available to you.

How do you set specific digital marketing goals?

Knowing where to set goals is something of an art form. On one hand, you must take into account the current level of baseline performance. What is reasonable to achieve given your situation?

On the other hand, you must consider what it will take to achieve the business outcome you desire. The level of impact you need from a marketing technique will also influence how much effort it will require. You can’t expect a major impact from a minimal effort.

How do you know what to track?

At a high level there are four areas of tracking that makes sense for most professional services firms. Let’s take a look at each of them.

1. Business Outcomes. Business outcomes are based on the high-level business goals that we explored in the first step of the digital marketing strategy. Revenue growth, number and type of new clients, profitability and new leads are all examples of business outcomes. In many ways, these measures track the success of your digital marketing plan. These metrics can typically be tracked in firms’ financial, CRM or marketing automation systems.
2. Visibility. Most professional services firms want to increase the visibility of their expertise. In our experience, the single most representative measure of visibility is external website traffic. The more people who know of your firm, the more website traffic you will receive. This measure can be further refined by looking at traffic to certain sections of the website. For example, you might monitor traffic to the careers section of your site to track the visibility of your recruiting campaign. Other measures of visibility might include traffic to your social media pages or the growth of your email database. You might even develop an index that incorporates all of these yardsticks.
3. Expertise. Tracking changes in your perceived expertise can be tricky, but it is possible. To do so, you need specific, tangible indicators. For example, you could track how many people download your white papers, view your blog posts (assuming that your blog posts demonstrate your expertise) or attend your speaking events. After all, people who consume your educational content are showing an interest in your expertise, and by quantifying that interest you can get a measure of how much people trust your ideas and perspectives.
4. Implementation. Another variable to track is how well you implement the marketing techniques in your plan. Are the events happening as scheduled? Are your designated articles actually being published? Often, the reason a technique is not working is that it is not being implemented as planned. This kind of information is also very helpful in problem solving and adjusting your implementation.

How do you develop a digital marketing budget?

At this point in the process, you should understand your firm’s business goals, have researched your audience and have developed an overall strategy for your brand. You should also have selected the best techniques to reach your audience so you can deliver appropriate messages at the appropriate frequency using the appropriate resources. In addition, you should have determined how to measure results against your goals.

The next step for many folks is to develop your digital marketing budget based on this detailed plan. On one level, this is a relatively straightforward exercise. You can ask specialized vendors to provide estimates for one-time infrastructure projects such as a website or a new marketing automation platform. But don’t make low cost your primary deciding factor. Many firms have wasted precious resources on “cheap” marketing tools that were woefully ineffective.

Estimating costs for recurring activities, such as blogging or article placement, can be a bit more challenging since many more people may be involved over a longer period of time. For instance, one of the biggest challenges can be tracking down busy subject matter experts and managing their critical role in the marketing process. Estimating costs like these can be tricky.

Once you have collected these cost estimates, you should have an overall spending level that you can benchmark against your industry peers or against high-growth firms. How do they compare?

If you find that they are relatively well aligned, you may be done with your budget. If, however, you find that your budget is significantly lower than the relevant benchmark, look first for missed items. Did you forget something important? Are your costs unrealistically low? Are you planning frequent enough marketing activities to meet your goals? Is the quality of your planned resources adequate to return the desired results?

If your budget comes in much higher than the benchmark, make sure you aren’t double counting some expenses. Next, see if the discrepancy is the result of one-time expenses (such as a research project or a new website). Also, are you are planning reoccurring activities more frequently than you need?

If you find that you need to reduce your budget, try eliminating one whole technique or initiative rather than trimming across the board. In our experience, it is more effective to do fewer things but do them better.

Which Digital Marketing Techniques Are Most Effective?

The effectiveness of a digital marketing technique is related to its level of adoption by your target audience. If your potential clients aren’t on Twitter, why spend resources on it? If your audience does not use it, the technique simply cannot work.

Similarly, if the technique is not used correctly you may not see the impact you seek. Digital marketing is not immune to incompetence. Training and experience do matter.

Those two cautions aside, some digital marketing techniques enjoy high levels of adoption and impact by the fastest growing professional services firms. According to our ongoing research on high-growth firms, here are the top five digital techniques:

• Keyword research/search engine optimization
• Conducting and publishing original research
• Speaking at targeted conferences or events
• Presenting in educational webinars
• Networking on social media

One thing that is apparent from this list is that most of these techniques are heavily dependent on high quality original content for their success. What types of content work best?

Three types of content seem to have the greatest impact:

• Assessments and/or consultations
• Product or service demonstrations
• Original research

As we discussed earlier, this puts content marketing at the center of most professional services digital strategies.

Content Marketing and Your Digital Strategy

A content marketing strategy is designed to make your expertise more visible by producing and distributing material that is interesting and valuable to your target audience. This content can come in many formats, such as blog posts, articles, white papers, webinars, videos and e-books.

In most cases, your content should be educational, useful or entertaining, rather than promotional or sales-oriented. Educational content gives prospects a taste of your firm’s expertise and what it might be like to work with you (do you come across as authoritative and formal or friendly and approachable?).

Useful, high-value content is the fuel that propels successful SEO, social media and lead generation. And importantly for the professional services, it is a very effective tool to build trust and engagement.

A Final Thought

Digital marketing is changing the way professional services firms go to market. It has made it easier for firms of any size to compete against larger, more established players. And for firms that want to reach new markets, it practically eliminates geographic barriers. Digital marketing gives firms new and exciting ways to communicate their expertise and value proposition to their most prized target clients — and find the specialized talent they need to grow and prosper.

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And in fact, it is. Whether you are an accounting firm or a technology powerhouse, you face a lot of competition from many directions. New technology, commoditization, and unrelenting price pressure add to the fun.

The way to escape this pressure is to develop a sustainable competitive advantage. A strong competitive advantage can help you win more business and command premium fees. It even increases the value of your firm.

But how do you pull it off? That’s where strategic marketing comes in.

What is Strategic Marketing?

Strategic Marketing is the use of marketing disciplines to achieve organizational goals by developing and maintaining a sustainable competitive advantage. It addresses high-level considerations such as what markets to target, which services to offer, and how to price and promote them.

The strategy and its associated tactics are often documented in a marketing plan. Marketing management is the process of implementing that plan — delivering the strategy at the tactical level.

In my experience, most professional services firms focus on marketing management and rarely engage in big-picture strategic marketing. The results are predictable: their so-called “marketing strategy” is a series of poorly planned, opportunistic activities that do little to establish a true competitive advantage.

Strategic Marketing Examples

To help you understand how strategic marketing works, let’s take a look at an example of non-strategic marketing and then compare it to a well-executed example.

Strategic marketing, gone bad. Imagine a mid-sized accounting firm. They are eager to grow but have no real plan for how to accomplish it.

Their “marketing plan” is little more than a list of activities and their associated costs. There is no overall strategy that ties these activities to their growth objectives. They have tried a variety of marketing ideas drawn from conversations with peers and trendy techniques they have read about. There is no systematic strategy or process that guides their use of marketing resources.

The firm offers the services their clients routinely ask for, and they look to competitors to gauge the effectiveness of their pricing and marketing materials. They believe that superior client service is why clients choose them, but they have never done any systematic research to verify this assumption.

This follow-the-herd marketing mentality, of course, does nothing to differentiate the firm from all the other mid-sized firms out there. Sadly, this way of thinking is all too common.

Now, let’s contrast this approach against a similarly sized firm that has taken a strategic approach to its marketing.

Strategic marketing done right. Now imagine another mid-sized accounting firm. They also want to grow organically. But they have decided to do that by differentiating themselves from other accounting firms to gain a sustainable competitive advantage.

They start by conducting systematic research into their best clients. This knowledge allows them to identify existing strengths they can build upon. Based on this business analysis, they decide to specialize in the hospitality sector — an industry where they have a solid track record of success and a handful of high-profile clients.

As their understanding of the sector grows, they begin to offer specialized bundled service/software packages to complement their full suite of traditional audit, tax, and consulting. Their fastest-growing segment is their new, high-value operational consulting practice for hospitality businesses.

The firm identifies topics of intense interest to their target clients, and they write and speak on these issues regularly at industry events. Their superior knowledge of the industry and specialized services give them a distinct advantage when they speak with prospects.

Today, the firm offers regular industry-focused webinars and has clients all over the country. They command premium fees and are growing at about 5X the industry average.

As these two examples show, strategic marketing can affect many aspects of a firm’s policies, priorities, and operations. These changes can transform a firm’s fortunes.

New Marketing Strategies for Higher Growth

Professional services buyers are changing. As consumers, we have grown accustomed to searching online to educate ourselves and find products and services. We expect transparency online, and we are used to finding exactly what we are looking for. Many of us also rely on social media and peer reviews to validate our choices.

It’s no surprise, then, that these changing expectations are transforming B2B sales. Potential clients are looking to solve their problems and determine who has the specific expertise they need. To get answers, they search online, attend webinars, talk with peers and attend conferences. Because online research is quicker and easier than soliciting advice and referrals the traditional way, it is becoming increasingly popular.

So what do these changes mean for professional services marketers? Simply put, our marketing strategies need to reflect the new realities of buyer behavior.

Let’s look at ten of the most promising new marketing strategies to consider for your marketing plan. Some involve new technology, while others are a fresh take on an evergreen idea. Each of them addresses some part of the new normal and is worth considering.

1. Increasing the visibility of your expertise

Expertise is the fundamental product that your clients buy. It is the top selection criterion and drives the final firm selection in three out of four new firm searches. But expertise is invisible. You can’t see it, touch it, or measure it directly. A potential client must experience it.

While some experts have become highly visible in their fields, their rise to prominence is often a gradual process over the course of their careers. In our research, we have learned how prospects come to encounter and judge expertise — and we uncovered specific strategies and tactics that dramatically accelerate the visibility of true expertise. Many firms use strategic marketing to build the visibility of their experts.

2. Niche specialization

Professional services have always had specialists and generalists. But practical limitations such as geographic location and marketing reach have limited specialists’ advantages in the past.

That is changing. New communications technology (such as free video) and the widespread adoption of remote working have changed the playing field. Niche specialization has gained the clear upper hand.

3. 360˚ marketing

“Be everywhere potential clients look for help” is more than a slogan. It’s the foundation of most marketing strategies. But where clients look is changing. Increasingly, they are looking online — so the obvious conclusion is that you need to be online, too.

Our research has shown that firms that use a balance of both traditional offline and online digital marketing techniques grow the fastest and are more profitable than those that employ only traditional marketing strategies. So while face-to-face marketing should be part of your marketing equation, an uninformed belief that “our clients don’t go online” can be dangerous to the health of your firm.

4. Product/service bundling

Clients need to find solutions to their challenges. Sometimes that solution takes the form of a software and services combination. Increasingly, professional services firms recognize that by pre-packaging a product/service combo they can create a lot of value for their clients.

Of course, you don’t have to bundle software with a service. It could be hardware or training, just as easily. The key is to come up with an integrated solution that saves the client time and money or produces another important benefit.

5. Sub-branding

Perhaps you’ve noticed another market segment that you could serve easily and profitably. But there is a problem. Serving that market would dilute your brand positioning. What do you do?

For an increasing number of firms, the answer is to develop a separate brand devoted to the new market segment. Often, these new brands have some relationship to the parent brand, hence the sub-brand label. While common in other industries, this marketing strategy is now gaining more traction in professional services.

6. New business models

Advances in technology have created the opportunity for new business models. In fact, technology has reshaped entire industries. From music to retail to transportation, the Ubers, Airbnbs, and Amazons of the world are redefining how business is configured.

Professional services are ripe for similar innovations. Artificial intelligence offers the possibility of dramatic changes in the cost and availability of services. Alternative pricing structures are obvious areas for experimentation, though there are many other avenues for creative exploration. The key is to think in terms of value to the client.

7. Marketing automation

This is another area where technology has dramatically altered the marketing playing field. Firms now have access to a rapidly growing set of tools that can automate big chunks of the marketing process. The big challenge in professional services marketing has been to balance the need to remain billable with the need for personal attention to business development.

Marketing automation is addressing that challenge. With proper planning and preparation, the lead generation and nurturing process can be largely automated. This changes everything, including the individual professional’s role in the business development process. Marketing is evolving from an individual event to a team sport.

8. Outsourced marketing

Stick with your core. Concentrate on what you really do well. For many firms, that area of competence does not include marketing. While many industries have already been deeply involved in outsourcing, professional services have lagged behind. Some firms are still warming up to the whole concept of marketing.

This makes outsourcing an interesting alternative. Firms that lack a well-established marketing function can adopt outsourced marketing with relative ease. And because modern marketing demands a wide range of specialized skills, outsourcing to a sophisticated marketing agency can deliver a strategic advantage.

9. Hyper-targeted advertising

Historically, advertising has not worked well for most professional services firms. Many B2B markets are difficult to target, and traditional ads have not been good at conveying expertise. But all of that is changing.

Today, online advertising can target specific companies or positions within well-defined niches. And, of course, you can easily link to downloadable content that demonstrates your expertise. This means that you can hyper-target a message that communicates your firm’s expertise. New strategies are emerging that would have been impractical even a few years ago.

10. Signature content

Signature content refers to content that is unique to your firm and of high value to potential clients. Examples include annual industry surveys or a ranking of companies in your target industries. Many firms have also been built around a best-selling book. A few firms have even published their own print magazines or journals.

More recently, we have seen the emergence of specialized series, such as podcasts or webinar series, as another route to signature content. And while blogs have become quite common, some firms have gone above and beyond to make their blogs “must-reads” for their prime targets.

The key to using signature content as part of your marketing strategy is to make sure that it is truly valuable to your target audience.

Next, let’s turn our attention to how you turn these new ideas and insights into a coherent strategic marketing plan.

Creating Your Strategic Marketing Plan

Creating a strategic marketing plan can be daunting, especially if you are new to it. In a previous post, we broke down the marketing planning process into seven essential steps. Here’s a summary of those steps:

1. Understand the business situation your firm is facing

Marketing should help you achieve your business goals. If you don’t have a clearly defined set of goals, then your marketing is likely to be unfocused and unproductive.

If you haven’t yet identified your business objectives you can use techniques such as SWOT analysis and various types of market research to uncover the opportunities available to you.

Once you have goals in your sites, you can use them as a compass to steer your marketing program in the optimal direction.

2. Research and understand your target clients

It’s all too easy to fool yourself into believing that you already understand your clients’ needs and priorities. But like so many things in life, clients are in a constant state of change. Last year’s top challenge can easily be trumped by some new disruptive force. The only way you can find out what’s going on between the ears of your target audience is to conduct periodic research that’s designed to uncover these insights.

Without this kind of research, you might build your marketing strategy around a flawed set of assumptions — with potentially disastrous consequences. And client research almost always uncovers a few surprises. Often these can play a pivotal role in your market positioning or messaging. So think of research as the foundation upon which you build your entire plan.

3. Position your brand in the marketplace

Positioning is about staking out a place in buyers’ minds. It’s about creating a connection between your firm and an idea — for instance, a specialty or some other distinctive quality of your business. At the same time, it’s about creating a contrast between your firm and competitors who might otherwise be perceived as similar to you. In the end, positioning is a boon to buyers, giving them a reason to pluck your firm from a poorly differentiated pack.

Your positioning begins with a set of differentiators, which your research can help you identify. A differentiator must pass three tests. It must be:

1. True — Clients can smell a made-up differentiator a mile away.
2. Provable — It must be supportable with evidence.
3. Relevant — Your clients must care about it. There’s no room for differentiators that offer no obvious value to clients.

Once you’ve got a list of differentiators (most firms can identify 3-5), you can develop your positioning statement — a short paragraph that cooks your brand down to its essence. It should describe who you are, who you serve, how you are different, and why clients choose you. As you move forward, your positioning statement will be your brand compass, providing guidance as you talk and write about your firm.

4. Define and refine your service offerings

If your clients are changing, then your services need to evolve with them. That’s how you create and maintain your competitive advantage.

This could mean revamping existing services or creating all-new ones based on your research findings. You might even automate some of your processes so they can be delivered more efficiently and at a lower cost.

5. Identify which marketing techniques you will use

Research can help you understand not only what challenges your clients to face, but how they consume information, as well. Insights like these can help you select what channels you use to promote and distribute your expert content. This powerful strategy, which we call building visible expertise, leverages your firm’s natural expertise to create greater exposure and generate trust.

Achieving a high level of visibility requires a balanced approach to marketing. According to our research into high-growth firms, a 50/50 blend of offline and online techniques generates the best performance. Whenever possible, you should use both types of marketing techniques to demonstrate your expertise, rather than always pursuing a conventional selling strategy.

Here are some examples of offline marketing techniques:

• Networking
• Speaking
• Meetings
• Print Publications
• Direct Mail
• Cold Calls
• Print Advertising
• Associations/Trade Shows

And here are a few online technique examples:

• Social Media
• Webinar
• Phone/Video
• Blogs/Online Publications
• Email
• Search
• Online Advertising
• Groups/Online Conferences

As you choose your portfolio of marketing techniques, make sure you address all stages of the sales funnel — getting new prospects, nurturing existing prospects, and turning prospects into clients.

6. Identify the new tools, skills, and infrastructure you will need

As your marketing evolves, the tools you use will also need to change and keep up with the times. Here are some common tools you may want to evaluate or upgrade:

• Website
• Marketing Collateral
• Marketing Automation
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Social Media
• Video
• Email
• Speaker Kits
• Proposal Templates

Don’t forget to upgrade your skills, too. Even the best strategy will accomplish little if you don’t fully implement it.

7. Document your operational schedule and budget

A plan worth carrying out is worth putting down on paper. In detail. Be sure to include specific deadlines, expected results, and how long each task should take so that you can assess your progress. Then pause periodically to make adjustments and optimize your processes.

Your plan should include both a marketing calendar and a marketing budget. The marketing calendar should describe every activity required to implement your plan. Whether your calendar covers the current quarter or an entire year, it should include every upcoming marketing opportunity, such as:

• Conferences & tradeshows
• Speaking events
• Webinars
• Blog posts
• Marketing emails (single & campaigns)
• Ad campaigns

Of course, you know what happens to the best-laid plans. Be prepared to update your plan frequently.

Your marketing budget should try to account for the costs associated with each tactic. In some cases, these costs will be known, while in others you will need to estimate. It’s always wise to plan for contingencies, too — adding 5-10% to your overall marketing budget should account for unforeseen expenses and marketing opportunities.

Strategic Marketing Management

No strategy, however well-conceived, can succeed unless it is actually implemented. This is why marketing management is so critical to the fate of your plan.

As you may recall, marketing management is the process of translating your plan into results. It is also where we see so many professional services firms stumble. In this section, we will review the key steps in managing your strategic marketing campaign. We’ll put special emphasis on how you can overcome some of the most common challenges you are likely to encounter.

1. Identify appropriate resources

This is where a lot of campaigns have problems. They never get the appropriate resources to fully implement their strategy. The two biggest shortfalls are time and skills.

Let’s start with professionals’ time. In theory, it should be easy to allocate some of your subject matter expert’s time to marketing and business development. And doing so can increase the visibility of your firm’s expertise. Yet these requests run into two major hurdles.

First, many firms incentivize their professionals to value billable time over business development. While this is understandable, it can be short-sighted. This problem can be overcome by either changing the underlying policies (which may be very easy or very, very difficult) or engaging other resources to minimize the expert’s time. For instance, you can hire a professional writer to interview the expert and draft a blog post for him or her.

The second hurdle is that some experts lack critical skills in writing, public speaking or networking. To remedy these challenges, you can either train your experts to overcome their weaknesses or, again, hire relevant talent to support them.

Many firms do not have the full set of skills needed to run a contemporary strategic marketing campaign. This poses the challenge of securing the skills you need. One option is to hire and train individuals in the relevant skills. An increasingly popular alternative is to outsource some of the requirements to an outside organization. While a full discussion of the pros and cons of outsourcing is beyond the scope of this article you may want to check out our discussion of outsourced marketing for a fuller treatment.

Whichever alternatives you choose, the key takeaway is that you have to provide sufficient resources to make the approach successful. Fewer initiatives, fully implemented, always outperform a slew of under-resourced activities. Do less, but do it well.

2. Track implementation

What gets implemented? Did your monthly webinars all happen as originally scheduled? Are your weekly blog posts published on time, or do they always slip?

Tracking the actual implementation of your strategic marketing plan serves two important functions. First, by making the tracking public, it motivates people to deliver on their promises. Social pressure is an important tool to make things happen.

Second, tracking helps you identify choke points and troubleshoot problems. It also saves you from making misjudgments, such as concluding that a technique is not effective when in fact it was never fully implemented.

Implementation tracking does not have to be complicated. Simply tracking whether activities happened or did not happen is a good start. Later, you can get more sophisticated and track other important variables, such as attendance at events or the quality of presentations. You’ll also find that the implementation track sets the stage for tracking the performance of your entire marketing program.

3. Track results

Marketing results are the outcomes you want your marketing plan to deliver. For example, you may have a strategy to increase the visitors to your website or to increase the number of new leads you generate each month. Both of these would be considered marketing outcomes.

One of the most important considerations is to make sure that you are tracking the entire marketing funnel (see below). This is critical because it gives you information on the full cycle of marketing results and allows you to troubleshoot the implementation of your strategy.

A common challenge is understanding which metrics to track. We recommend that you monitor several types of metrics.

• Visibility metrics — These will help you gauge how visible you are to your target audience. Common visibility metrics include total website traffic (web traffic rises with increased visibility), social media traffic, and attendance at events.
• Expertise metrics — These tell you if your audience is exposed to your thought leadership content (i.e., are you successfully demonstrating your expertise?). Common expertise metrics include blog views, downloads of your premium content, guest posts, webinar attendees, and attendance at speaking events.
• Leads — These can include raw (not yet qualified) leads or inquiries, “sales-ready” opportunities, and actual proposals submitted. Your firm may describe these stages differently. It does not matter how you define your lead stages as long as you are consistent and capture the full new-business cycle.
• Wins and losses — This data can help you understand how proposals turn into new clients (you might call this your “closing percentage”). Be sure to track this metric separately for new and existing clients. Existing client proposals should have a much higher closing rate.

4. Troubleshoot issues

The next step in the strategic marketing management process is troubleshooting issues that arise during implementation. The most common type of problem is a marketing technique that fails to deliver the expected results. While there is no single way to troubleshoot an issue, asking the questions below can reveal the root cause of the disappointment.

• Was the technique well implemented? This is often where the search begins and ends. In my experience, the top reason that strategic marketing programs fail is that they are not fully implemented. If it’s not implemented, it will not work!
• Has enough time passed to evaluate it? Not all marketing techniques deliver their full impact right away. For example, a typical nurture campaign could take several months and involve 6-8 touches.
• Were there any impacts? Were there any impacts at all? You might just need to recalibrate your approach. For instance, an activity designed to generate qualified opportunities might produce raw leads, instead. Knowing that there were some results, even if they were not the ones you were hoping for, can be useful in making program adjustments.
• Where did the chain of impacts end? One result (e.g., visibility of your expertise) may produce another impact (e.g., new leads raising their hand). This, in turn, leads to another impact (e.g., opportunities). Think of this as an impact chain. So the key question is, where does the chain break down? Are you getting enough traffic but not enough leads? That signals a problem in your conversion mechanism. Are you getting enough leads but they are unqualified? Probably a targeting issue.

Once you have completed your troubleshooting, you can move on to making appropriate strategy adjustments.

5. Make adjustments to strategy

Adjustments to your strategic marketing plan typically take one of three forms:

• Build on areas of strength. What tactics are working as planned? Which are most effective and efficient? If you have a technique that is producing the desired results, you will undoubtedly want to do more of it. You may also consider using related techniques to build on your success and make implementation more effective and efficient.
• Rebuild or replace areas of critical weakness. Where has implementation faltered? Some of these will be important for success. For example, you will need to communicate on a regular basis with prospects who are in the nurture phase of the marketing funnel — so making email work may be central to this effort. We call these critical weaknesses, and they need to be improved. You have two choices. First, you can repair areas of critical weakness. This might involve replacing or retraining staff. Second, you can replace that function with an outsourced solution.
• Drop areas of non-critical weakness. Finally, you have areas of weakness that are not critical to the overall success of the program. Given that you can work around them, the most prudent course of action may be to replace these techniques with others that are better aligned with your strengths — or simply drop them altogether.

Once the adjustments to your plan are complete, you are back to the beginning of the management cycle

Conclusion

Strategic Marketing offers professional services firms a chance to control their own destiny. Rather than waiting for lightning to strike, you can systematically create an environment in which you have a true competitive advantage. At last, you will be able to serve clients that are a good fit — and which produce the greatest rewards. And after all, isn’t that what marketing should do for your firm?

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However, the marketing planning process that works well for consumer products, industrial goods, or not-for-profits is not well suited for professional services. This is a lesson we have learned after many years of working across these fields.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at what it takes to put together an effective marketing plan specifically for professional services firms like yours.

Of course, there’s more to a marketing plan than a list of ideas to promote your firm. You need to follow a specific process — one that produces a plan custom-tailored to your needs.

Before we get into that process, however, let’s clarify a few key marketing planning concepts.

Marketing Planning Process Defined

A marketing planning process is a systematic approach to developing marketing goals, strategies, and implementation tactics. It may be adapted to a wide variety of situations, from the launch of a new firm or practice area to the repositioning of an existing firm — even the routine planning of new business development activities.

Depending on your specific situation, certain phases of the process may take on greater or lesser importance. For example, when launching a new practice area it’s prudent to focus on its strategic components. This is sometimes referred to as developing a go-to-market strategy. 

When focusing on repositioning your firm in the marketplace, often called rebranding, you will most likely need to emphasize both strategic and tactical elements to increase the visibility of your new brand.

Once a year, most firms update their marketing plan or marketing budget, and they spend the majority of their time evaluating current performance and adjusting tactics. While they may take a cursory look at the bigger picture, few firms retool their entire firm strategy each year.

Importance of Marketing Planning

How important is marketing planning for professional services? Some would make the case that marketing planning, and indeed any marketing, is a waste of time and resources. They would argue that professional services marketing is all based on referrals and repeat business. In this view marketing is a non-essential activity, a kind of nice to have.

This view is often held by executives with long histories in professional services, some of which may be in senior management positions. The only problem with this view is that it is not consistent with the data. In other words, it is wrong.

There are two lines of research that support the importance of marketing planning. The first of these is research into the behavior of professional services buyers conducted by the Hinge Research Institute.

This research shows that while referrals remain important, their significance has been steadily declining for a number of years. This is especially true since the global pandemic has made remote interaction the norm. Further, the key selection criteria favors firms that demonstrate superior relevant expertise over those with a strong referral. And importantly, the visibility of professional services firms has waned. So from the perspective of your buyers, the marketing process is more important than ever before.

The second line of relevant research comes from our studies of the fastest growing and most profitable professional services firms. In this research series we ask the question ‘What do the fastest growing firms do differently than their slow growth peers?’

What we learned is that not actively tracking marketing results or that basing their plans on historical data from previous years are associated with slow growth and lower profitability. Conversely, firms that track marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) and return on investment (ROI) of their marketing spends are more likely to be high growth (20% or greater compound annual top line growth) and high profit (25% or greater profitability).

The importance of marketing planning clearly shows through. If you want to follow your prospective clients’ lead and enjoy superior growth and profitability, the marketing planning process is essential. Now let’s focus on the specific benefits of a systematic professional services marketing planning process.

Benefits of the Marketing Planning Process

It’s important to take a thoughtful, step-by-step approach to your marketing plan. Done right, it can yield a number of valuable benefits that can jumpstart success:

1. It encourages you to revisit old habits and assumptions. In a changing world, you have to learn to adapt — doing things the way you’ve always done them is not a winning strategy. A good marketing plan should take you, to some degree, outside your comfort zone and question everything you’ve done to date and why you thought it would work. Just because you’ve “always done something that way” doesn’t mean it’s effective or even a good idea.

2. It reduces risk by adding new facts. The process of developing a marketing plan forces you to reexamine your marketplace, your competition, your target audience, and your value proposition to prospects. This kind of focused research reduces risk because it compels you to evaluate your business model and marketing program before you commit time and money to them. According to our studies of professional services marketing, firms that conduct systematic research into their target audiences grow faster and are more profitable.

3. It provides accountability. Marketing planning makes both your marketing and business development teams set specific targets and measure their progress toward them. Management is accountable for providing enough resources to ensure the marketing plan has a reasonable chance to succeed.

4. It is proactive rather than reactive. Planning ahead puts you in control of your marketing so you can maximize its impact. However, it’s important to be agile enough to react to changing circumstances. Having well-documented plans makes it easier to change them.

5. It can become a competitive advantage. High-growth firms use their marketing strategy as a differentiator. By giving some thought to what makes your firm unique, you should be able to develop compelling differentiators — one or more clear reasons to select your firm over an apparently similar one.

The 7-Step Marketing Planning Process

1. Understand the business situation your firm is facing. The purpose of marketing is to enable a firm to achieve its business goals. If you do not start with a clear understanding of those goals and any constraints that limit your ability to achieve them, you will be unlikely to succeed.

Look closely at the factors that affect your standing in the marketplace:

• Has an influx of new competitors slowed your growth?
• Is price sensitivity squeezing the margins on your existing services?
• Are you competing in a commoditized market?
• Are you poised to lose key players to retirement?

These are just a few of the key business drivers of marketing strategy.

Often, you can use a SWOT analysis to organize and evaluate your business drivers. Within this framework, observations about the firm or practice are categorized as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, or threats. You want to do everything you can to root your planning process in reality. While that may seem obvious, many firms spend little time on their SWOT analysis, relying instead on personal beliefs and anecdotal experience.

There is a better way. Start conducting regular, systematic research into your marketplace. Firms that do this kind of research at least once a year grow faster and are more profitable.

Different types of research apply to different stages of the planning process. For example, opportunity research compares the viability of different markets or target audiences. Client or persona research helps you get a better understanding of your target clients and how they select a firm. When we assist clients with the planning process, we often combine several types of research into a comprehensive package we call brand research that can be applied throughout the planning process.

2. Research and understand your target clients. It’s rare to meet practicing professionals who do not believe that they fully understand their clients, their needs, and their priorities. Sadly, they are almost always wrong about some key element of their clients’ thinking, decision-making, or real priorities and they rarely understand how clients choose new providers.

For example, you may realize that your clients value you as a trusted advisor. What you may miss, however, is that almost no potential client goes looking for a trusted advisor. Instead, they are almost always looking for someone to solve a specific business problem.

If you understand that key distinction — and build your marketing plan accordingly — you will win more new clients, and then evolve into their trusted advisor. Remember this every time you see a competitor position their firm as trusted advisors. They’ve got things backward.

When you are doing research, focus on your best, most desirable client segments. Which ones do you want more of? This will help you isolate which important benefits you derive from them and equip you to find more clients like them. It will also help you learn how your clients get information and search for new providers. This will help you in subsequent steps. 

3. Position your brand in the marketplace. Successful positioning rejects conformity. At its best, positioning elevates a brand above the fray so that people can’t help but take notice. The human brain instinctively looks for things that are different and unexpected. So a brand that stands in stark contrast to its competition will attract people’s attention and have a distinct advantage in the marketplace.

This starts with identifying what makes you different. These are called your differentiators, and they must pass three tests. Each must be:

• True— You can’t just make it up. You must be able to deliver upon your promise every day.
• Provable— Even if it is true, you must be able to prove it to a skeptical prospect.
• Relevant— If it is not important to a prospect during the firm selection process it will not help you win the new client.

It’s best to try for three to five good differentiators. If you have fewer than that, take heart. Sometimes one great differentiator may be enough.

Next, you must use your differentiator(s) to write a focused, easy-to-understand positioning statement. This is a short paragraph that summarizes what your firm does, who it does it for, and why clients choose you over competitors. It positions you in the competitive market space and becomes the DNA of your brand. 

Each of your audiences (e.g., potential clients, referral sources, potential employees) is interested in different aspects of your firm. In other words, different messaging needs to be developed for different audiences. All of your messages should be consistent with your positioning, but they may focus on different benefits and overcoming different objections. 

4. Define and refine your service offerings. Often overlooked in the planning process, your service offerings can get stale. Evolving your services over time is how you develop and hone a competitive advantage.

As clients’ needs change, you may want to create entirely new services to address those needs. Your research may uncover issues clients are not even aware of yet, such as an impending regulatory change, suggesting a range of possible service offerings. Or you might change or automate part of your process to deliver more value at a lower cost with higher margins.

Whatever these service changes turn out to be, they should be driven by your business analysis and your research into clients and competitors.

5. Identify the marketing techniques you will be using. This starts with understanding your target audiences and how they consume information. Once you gain insight into how, where, and when your prospects are looking for information about services like yours, you can identify and exploit their preferred channels. It’s all about making your expertise more tangible and visible to your target audience. We call this Visible Expertise.

Achieving high-level visibility requires a balance of marketing efforts — our research has shown that a 50/50 blend of offline (traditional) and online (digital) techniques work best.

Examples of offline marketing:

• Networking
• Speaking
• Meetings
• Print Publications
• Direct Mail
• Cold Calls
• Print Advertising
• Associations/Trade Shows

Examples of online marketing:

• Social Media
• Webinar
• Phone/Video
• Blogs/Online Publications
• Email
• Search
• Online Advertising
• Groups/Online Conferences

In addition to balancing your marketing techniques, be sure to create content for all levels of the sales funnel — to attract prospects, engage them and turn them into clients. To keep things as efficient as possible, plan to use content in multiple ways. For example, a webinar could be repurposed as blog posts, guest articles, and a conference presentation.

6. Identify the new tools, skills, and infrastructure you will need. New techniques need new tools and infrastructure. It’s time to add any new ones you may need or revise those that aren’t up to date. Here are some of the most common tools:

• Website – Modern marketing begins with your website. Your strategy should tell you if a new website is needed or if adjusting your current messaging or functionality will be sufficient.
• Marketing Collateral – You may need to revise your marketing collateral to reflect your new positioning and competitive advantage. Common examples of collateral include brochures, firm overview decks, one-sheet service descriptions, and tradeshow materials.
• Marketing Automation – Software is making it easier and easier to automate your marketing infrastructure. In fact, marketing automation tools can be a game-changer and essential to building a competitive edge.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)  – Online search has transformed marketing. Today, every firm that conducts content marketing needs a solid grasp of SEO fundamentals — from keyword research to on-site and off-site optimization.
• Social Media – Adding or upgrading your firm’s social media profiles is often required. And don’t forget to update the profiles of your subject matter experts.
• Video – Common ways to use video include firm overviews, practice overviews, case stories, blog posts, and educational presentations. If your subject matter experts have limited time to devote to developing content, video may be an efficient way to use the time they have.
• Email – You’ll need a robust email service that allows you to track reader interactions and manage your list — it may even be built into your CRM or marketing automation software. Also, take a look at your email templates and decide if they need a refresh.
• Speaker Kits – If your strategy involves public speaking or partner marketing, you may also need to develop a speaker kit. A speaker kit provides everything an event planner might need to select one of your team members for a speaking event: a bio, professional photo, sample speaking topics, a list of past speaking engagements, and video clips.
• Proposal Templates – Proposals are often the last thing a prospect sees before selecting a firm, so make sure yours sends the right message. At the very least, make sure you’ve included language that conveys your new positioning and differentiators.

Don’t forget the skills you will need. Even the best strategy will accomplish little if you don’t fully implement it. Many leaders find it challenging to build a full marketing strategy with just the right balance — and it can be even more challenging to keep teams up-to-date on today’s ever-changing digital tools. The fastest-growing firms use more outside talent.

7. Document your operational schedule and budget. This is where your strategy gets translated into specific actions that you will take over time. Your written plan should include specific timelines and deadlines so that you can measure your progress against it. Did a task happen as scheduled? Did it produce the expected results? These results will become the input for the next round of marketing planning.

You will need two key documents, a marketing calendar, and a marketing budget. The marketing calendar should include every tactic you will be using to implement your plan. It can cover the upcoming quarter or even the entire year. Begin by entering any events you know about, such as annual conferences and speaking events. Include every regularly scheduled blog posts, emails, tradeshows, webinars — everything in your plan. Recognize that you may need to adjust your calendar regularly, possibly as often as weekly. The purpose is to build consistency and predictability. Leave room for last-minute changes — but don’t get too far away from your plan and budget.

To build a budget, start with the tools and infrastructure we just mentioned. For recurring elements such as advertising, estimate the cost for a single instance then multiply by the frequency. Use benchmarks when available, and don’t forget to allow for contingencies, typically 5-10% of the overall budget.

Examples of Marketing Planning

To help you understand the marketing planning process in more detail we will run through two real life examples. We’ve changed some of the identifying details, but in all other respects these capture the process in action.

The first is a small technology consulting firm that has grown through referrals from current and former clients. The second is a large accounting firm with multiple practice areas and industry verticals. We’ll walk through each of the steps in the planning process to demonstrate similarities and differences in how planning is done.

Step 1: Understand your business situation

Our small technology firm has reached the limits of their referral base. Growth has slowed and they are not sure how to revive it. Their clients are from multiple industry sectors with the highest concentration in manufacturing.

The large accounting firm has many audiences with little concentration in any industry. Their goal is to grow their advisory practice as the other service lines are becoming progressively more commoditized.

Step 2: Research your target audience

Our small consulting firm is faced with a decision. Who should their target client be? To answer this question they looked at their manufacturing clients and compared them to the other clients. They learned that the manufacturing segment was a better match with their experience and valued their services more highly because of their industry experience and understanding.

Our large accounting firm sampled their advisory clients, that were their highest business priority, as well as clients from other segments. They learned that their advisory services were indeed well regarded, but few clients were aware that they even offered this service.

Step 3: Position your brand

Other than “doing great work” our technology consulting firm had few differentiators. They made a decision to focus on their area of greatest strength and positioned themselves as specialists in working with manufacturing firms. They would accept work from existing non-manufacturing clients, but focus all their marketing push towards their chosen area of specialization.

Although somewhat aspirational, the accounting firm decided to position themselves as an advisory firm that also supports their clients with other services. Their business priority is to focus on selling advisory services to their existing tax clients.

Step 4: Define your service offerings

Our technology consulting firm realized that they would have to broaden their service offerings to the manufacturing community. Their research suggested that process automation would make the most sense for them. This required hiring a new staff member with that experience and skill set.

The accounting firm was already offering advisory services so did not feel a need to broaden their portfolio of services. What they did need was to crosstrain their existing tax professionals in pitching and offering some basic advisory services.

Step 5: Identify your marketing techniques

There are a wide variety of marketing techniques to choose from. The primary goal is to use the techniques that allow you to be found where your prospective clients are looking for business advice and insight. You will get this information from your research.

Our small consulting firm is focused on techniques that help them be found during web searches. This involves producing valuable content and making sure it is “findable”. This includes using search engine optimization (SEO) and paid digital advertising. They also supplement this with attending two key manufacturing conferences.

The large accounting firm is in a position to employ more techniques. They are focused on developing more valuable educational content around advisory services. These are a series of webinars on different issue areas where advisory services would be very valuable. The webinar series is accompanied by an executive guide which lays out how to make best use of advisory services. These will be targeted to existing tax clients and new prospects.

Step 6: Identify new tools, skills and infrastructure

The technology consulting firm needed several new tools. The website needed a total upgrade to reflect the updated focus. Marketing collateral and case studies needed an overhaul and new SEO and digital marketing campaigns needed to be set-up as well.

As we mentioned above, the accounting firm will need a training and skill development effort to allow for the needed cross selling of services. There will also need to be a new webinar infrastructure and staff training to allow for a smooth transition to this new marketing strategy. An updated advisory brochure is also planned for the near future.

Step 7: Document your schedule and budget

In this step we consider the timing of your marketing efforts (your marketing calendar) and their cost (your marketing budget). Consider both one time and ongoing costs separately.

Our small firm example layed out the one time costs and estimated the time and budget needed for ongoing marketing efforts. As a small firm their marketing expenses are relatively higher as a percentage of revenue than are typically found at a larger firm. Also, since this is their first real marketing plan, there is also more one time set-up expenses than would be found in an organization with an established function.

Our large advisory oriented accounting firm will go through the same process. Here there are a number of one time expenses to set up the infrastructure, train people and produce the needed content. After the initial materials are produced the implementation expenses are much reduced. Here again the marketing calendar lays out the schedule and the budget captures the costs.

These two examples show how professional services firms can produce specific actionable marketing plans using the seven step process. Now let’s turn our attention to some of the top marketing planning tips. These will help solve some common planning challenges.

Top Marketing Planning Tips

The planning process can be daunting. Here are a few tips to make it go more smoothly. 

1. Start with a review of how the world has changed since your last planning process. This will put needed changes into context and prepare your team to consider new ideas. For example, what marketing strategy has your competition put into place and what new competitors, if any, have appeared? Have your sales and revenue changed? Have you introduced new services? Any change in your marketing environment requires a change in marketing plans.
2. Focus on the problems you solve and the value you can bring, not the services you provide. Remember, prospects will not care about you and what you have to offer until they realize the value you can provide them. That means focusing on what their problems are and how you can solve them. They’re not buying your services, they’re buying your solutions.
3. Always lead with research. Knowledge is power. The more you know about your market, your clients, your prospects, and your competition, the more you can address them in your marketing plan. Research reduces risk. Invest in it and you won’t be sorry. But remember, professional services are different. Consumer-style research won’t work for B2B professional services.
4. Expertise wins new clients and attracts top talent. Potential clients don’t want to hire amateurs — they want to hire the best talent their money can buy. By making your expertise visible and compelling, you’ll be ensuring prospects talk to you first. Also, the best employee talent wants to work for the top firms. If your firm is seen as an expert in its area, you’ll be sure to attract the best employees, too. 
5. Expertise is best conveyed by visibility and making complicated topics understandable. The more your firm’s experts are seen and heard — and the more prospects turn to them for a clear understanding of complex topics affecting them — the more new business you’ll attract.

We call these people Visible Experts^®, and our research shows that buyers seek them out when they have a specific problem or challenge that requires a solution fast.

6. Use marketing techniques that have been proven effective. Once again, a little homework goes a long way. As discussed earlier, find out how prospects like to receive their information and then include those channels in your marketing plan. Don’t waste time and money using channels that potential clients aren’t using. Above all, make sure your website is current, is easy to navigate, and contains the kind of valuable content that attracts the right target audience.
7. Most marketing does not work because it is not correctly implemented. Even the best-laid plans can go awry if they are under-resourced, under-funded, and poorly implemented. Make sure you have the right plan in place and the resources and talent needed to successfully implement it. If you don’t have the ability to implement in-house, partner with an outside resource that does.
8. Select fewer initiatives but fully resource the ones you do select. Focus on the quality of your efforts rather than delivering quantity. If you want to try a new technique, decide which old one you are going to stop (or pause). It’s far more effective to focus on a few highly targeted techniques than take a shotgun approach and implement a dozen half-baked marketing initiatives.
9. Make sure you can attract the talent you will need. Employer brand is an often-overlooked but crucial element in any marketing effort. Professional services firms that can attract and retain the right talent have a major strategic advantage.
10. Track each stage of the marketing pipeline. Do not measure short-term impacts only. Your marketing plan should align with your firm’s overall business development strategy. We’ve seen good results from marketing plans that contain specific milestones, offering a long-term roadmap to grow your firm.

The right marketing plan and tools give professional services firms the power to expand their horizons and reach audiences in distant markets. But your marketing plan has to be flexible. Online marketing gives you the power to recognize what is working and what isn’t, and you need to be prepared to make adjustments on the fly. But don’t discard traditional tactics that have been working for you just because they are old. Carefully consider every technique’s role and value in your marketing, then use research and your best judgment to select the best ones for your plan. Just don’t bite off too much, or you may drown in a sea of possibilities.

Happy planning!

The post Marketing Planning Process for Professional Services appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

In this article, we will not recommend specific digital marketing platforms or technologies. Selecting the right technology and feature set for your business is complex and beyond the scope of this blog post. Instead, we’ll focus on the types of marketing technologies and digital techniques today’s most successful firms use to deliver their marketing programs. If you are late to the digital marketing revolution, or wondering what to focus on next, this article will give you a lay of the land so you understand what technologies you need to build a digital marketing strategy that produces exceptional results.

To set the stage, let’s begin with a definition. 

What Are Digital Marketing Solutions?

Digital marketing solutions are online activities and technologies used to carry out a firm’s marketing strategy. Usually, these solutions incorporate cloud-based technologies to collect data, automate complex processes, interact with prospects and deliver insights in near-real time. Unlike conventional marketing solutions, which involve time-consuming manual processes, expensive physical marketing collateral and face-to-face interactions with business prospects, digital solutions—once the initial setup investment has been made—can reach wider audiences, more quickly and less expensively than their traditional counterparts. Digital solutions can complement, and in many cases replace, related traditional marketing techniques.

Benefits of Digital Marketing Solutions

Most traditional marketing techniques have digital equivalents. For instance, direct mail and email serve similar functions, as do print advertising and online advertising. But digital marketing techniques have a number of benefits that their traditional counterparts lack:

• They are more efficient. By their nature, digital platforms can easily handle complex and tedious tasks that would take people a great deal of time to complete. Bringing new efficiencies is usually the top reason a firm invests in digital marketing technology.
• They cost less. While some digital solutions have high setup costs, they are relatively inexpensive to operate in the long run. Even when you take into account ongoing subscription fees, digital marketing solutions cost less—in many cases dramatically less—than resource-intensive, traditional marketing approaches.
• They are easy to scale. Most traditional marketing techniques are difficult to scale. For example, in the past, a firm’s growth was limited by the number of people their principals could meet in person. Digital solutions eliminate obstacles to growth like these, and they are designed to scale with you.
• They are more powerful. Digital solutions give you flexibility and options that simply are not possible in a traditional marketing environment. You can test an approach, determine whether or not it works and quickly change tactics—giving you unprecedented control over the entire process.
• They work around the clock. Digital marketing never sleeps. It’s always working hard for you—day and night, even weekends!
• They expand your reach. The internet and digital technologies have largely eliminated geographic barriers to business markets. In many industries, it is just as easy to do business with a company in another state or country than the one down the street.
• They are more measurable. Every digital solution comes with extensive analytics, so you can see what’s going on, often in real time. One of the biggest challenges in traditional marketing is figuring out whether your investment of money or time is generating results. The potent combo of digital marketing and analytics makes it far easier to connect results to specific marketing activities.

So is traditional marketing dead? The short answer is, no. Not by a long shot. By definition, professional services firms are collections of individual experts. As a result, there will always be value in meeting people face to face—or, in our new post-Covid world, by video conference. In fact, Hinge’s own research has shown that the fastest-growing firms rely on a mix of both types of marketing.

The Top 10 Digital Marketing Solutions

1. High-Performance Website

Today, no professional services firm would consider going into business without a website. But many of these websites are passive, little more than online brochures. What if your website could be an active participant in your firm’s fortunes? It can. And it should. A high-performance website is the centerpiece of your marketing program, the place where new prospects discover you, learn to trust you and eventually decide to hire you. It engages people at every stage of the sales funnel. Most of the digital solutions in this top-10 list have some connection to your website.

Key features of a high-performance website include:

• A blog focused on delivering practical educational material on business challenges that are relevant to your audience. Your blog posts should focus mostly on challenges that your firm’s services can solve, though they can also be used to build thought leadership. For example, you might write about coming trends or the future of your industry. Most of your posts should be written with SEO keywords in mind.
• A library of longer, high-value content, such as executive books, guides, webinar recordings, research reports and mini courses. Typically, these materials are gated behind a simple form. This type of content is primarily used to turn web visitors into new contacts, though it can also be used to nurture existing contacts
• A thoughtful offer strategy, in which you present appropriate calls to action—additional educational content, demos and free consultations—depending on the context and where the web visitor is likely to be in the sales funnel.
• Integration with other digital solutions, such as your CRM and marketing automation platform. A well-configured marketing stack should minimize manual work (for example, downloading a .csv file from one platform and loading it into another).
• A sophisticated design. Signal to prospective buyers that your firm has credibility in spades. Because people respond subliminally to visual stimuli, design can be a powerful persuader. If you look like a leader, there’s a good chance you’ll be perceived as one, too.

2. Content Marketing

A professional services firm is a collection of experts, and developing content is the most important way your experts can contribute to your firm’s marketing program. Content is the heart of every modern marketing strategy. And content marketing is the way you plan and deliver it.

Most content marketing programs begin with a firm’s blog, where SEO techniques (see below) are used to attract hundreds or thousands of people who have a problem you can solve and send them to your website. While most will never turn into clients, a certain proportion will need services like yours at some point in the future. Your blog is their entry point. If you publish a lot of high-quality content on similar topics, these highly motivated individuals will return again and again.

Each blog post should have a call to action (CTA) pointing to a relevant gated piece of high-value content, such as a longer format guide or ebook. That way, when a reader wants to learn more about a topic, they can exchange a small amount of personal information—most importantly their email address—for a more in-depth piece of content. You just turned a web visitor into a new contact and they just deepened their relationship with you. Over time, some of these readers will turn into fans. And eventually, when they need to hire expertise, your firm will be at the top of their list.

While blog posts are critical to content marketing, there are many other formats content can take, including videos, speeches, books and ebooks, webinars, courses, articles, white papers, guides, kits and e-newsletters. And that just scratches the surface.

One challenge is how to get a bunch of busy experts to sit down and do the writing. Sometimes the answer is as simple as setting aside time in their schedule to do the work. Another common approach is to hire an outside writer or team to draft the blog posts and guides for you. If you get a writer who knows your industry, all it takes is an interview with the subject matter expert to produce a high-quality piece of content.

3. Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the digital marketing solution that makes web content more visible. Its principles can be applied to almost any web page, but it is particularly effective in making educational expert content rank well in Google and other search engines. And most of that educational content is blog posts. It’s not unusual for a very high percentage of a firm’s web traffic—up to 80 or 90 percent—to enter the site through blog posts.

There are two main approaches to SEO: on-site and off-site. To have the best chances of achieving good results, you will need to address both.

On-site SEO is relatively simple. For each page you want to optimize, you research a keyword that you want to rank for in the search engines. Then you incorporate that keyword into your web copy, headline and page title. When you use on-site SEO, you are making it easy for Google to understand what the main focus of your page is, which is the first step in ranking well in the search results for your keyword. If you are very lucky, this is all it takes to achieve a premium ranking. But the vast majority of the time, you have more work to do. That’s where off-site SEO comes in.

Off-site SEO is straightforward too, though it’s a lot harder to pull off. This involves getting other websites, preferably sites with a high domain authority, to link back to your page. Google sees these links as “credibility votes” for your content. Sometimes these links happen without any action on your part. Somebody reads your post, then they write a post of their own and link back to yours. But often, you will need to take a more proactive approach to get these backlinks. There are many techniques SEO professionals use to generate backlinks, and they are rarely simple. Here are a couple of examples: Write a guest post on somebody else’s blog, then link back to a piece of your own content. Or use a tool that searches the web for broken links in third-party blog posts related to your area expertise. Then reach out to the person who manages the blog and offer a replacement link (to a relevant piece of your content), fixing their problem and yours at the same time. There are many more techniques you can try, as well.

4. Customer Relationship Management System

A customer relationship management (CRM) system allows you to keep track of all your new business contacts and every interaction you have with them. When integrated with your website, you can see who downloaded pieces of content, filled out forms and is engaged with your content. The more sophisticated platforms can do much more, from tracking phone calls and emails to lead scoring and predicting revenue.

CRMs also allow you to segment your list by industry, size, role or any other category that you want to break out. This is very important when doing email marketing, as you may want to send different messages to different market segments.

CRMs are a critical tool for sales and marketing. They help you qualify leads, track business opportunities and decide which prospects to prioritize. At the same time, they provide a powerful, flexible interface between a firm’s website and its marketing automation platform.

5. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation gives firms the ability to reach select audiences with messages, offers and campaigns that are tailored for them. By automating these tasks, marketers can do more with fewer resources. Marketing automation tools can address a wide range of communication channels, including email, social media and text messaging.

Email is a core component of a content-based strategy, and automation solutions give marketers the ability to set up campaigns in advance, test different message configurations to a small segment of the list, then automatically send the most successful version to the rest of the group. These tools also allow you to set up multi-step nurture campaigns. When a web visitor, for instance, signs up for a piece of content, a nurture campaign can automatically follow up with additional related content over a period of days or weeks. That’s a great way to engage a warm audience and build trust over time.

Similarly, large multipost social media campaigns can be set up at up front, then sent out automatically according to a predetermined schedule.

To get the most from these tools, you will want to take advantage of features that test and analyze recipients’ behavior so you can adjust your approach and deliver even more resonant messages next time.

6. Social Media

One way to think of social media is as the digital analog for face-to-face networking. LinkedIn, by far the most popular business-to-business social media networking platform, provides many ways to meet and interact with professionals at every level of an organization. And because LinkedIn is the de-facto business network, virtually all of your clients and prospects are on it already.

But social media plays a vital role in content marketing, too. It is an excellent way to spread the word about your content and make your expertise more visible. And social media’s sharing tools make it a snap for your readers to send your posts to others in their network.

If you have to choose one social media platform to focus on, make it LinkedIn. In fact, according to Hinge’s latest buyer research, this was the only platform to grow in adoption over the past two years. When you are ready to expand beyond LinkedIn, consider expanding your activity on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

7. Webinars

If you are looking for an ideal way to share your expertise with a highly interested audience, you can’t do much better than a webinar. These video sessions, usually streamed live, position you as a knowledgeable domain expert. At the same time, they put one or more faces to your firm, giving your audience an idea of what it might be like to work with you. You can configure the software to allow questions, and you can even conduct real-time polls to make the sessions more interactive.

Most webinar attendees leave highly motivated, so be sure to include a clear call to action in case they want to take the next step in the relationship. If you record your webinars, consider sending a link to everyone who signed up, whether or not they actually attended. These recordings also make great free, gated or paid content on your website.

Should you charge for your webinars? That depends on your goals. If your goal is to reach the broadest possible audience and build visibility, make them free. You’ll get more attendees. If, however, you have a captive audience who is willing to pay to learn from you, or if you want to raise the perceived value of your webinar content, charging a fee—even a very high one—may make sense. You could even cap the number of attendees to position the event as exclusive.

8. Digital Advertising

Digital advertising solutions include a range of platforms and techniques for advertising on the web, in search engines and on social media. Digital ads have two major advantages over traditional print, television and radio advertising.

First, is cost. Traditional advertising is notoriously expensive. That’s because it requires a series of expensive services, including design, production and distribution. Digital ads, by contrast, are relatively lightweight—often text only or text and an image. You can spend as little or as much as you want on digital advertising. Want to test a pay-per-click ad for one week at $10 a day? Easy. Want to invest a million dollars a month on a splashy social media campaign? That’s your choice.

Second, is performance. Because most traditional ads have no direct connection between the ad and the outcome, it can be very difficult to determine if a specific ad delivered the expected results. But digital ads have a built in way to see results as they come in. That gives you power to immediately stop ads that aren’t working, and tweak and test your better performing ads to improve their results.

There are a variety of digital ad platforms to explore—from search engine advertising to social media ads to remarketing. And all provide robust demographic targeting options so you can get in front of just the right people. When you are struggling to reach a particular audience, digital advertising is worth exploring.

9. Web and Marketing Analytics

Web analytics are an essential tool if you want to understand who is visiting your website, where they are coming from and what they are interested in. While you can’t identify an individual visitor by name, that’s not the best use of web analytics, anyway. Rather, you should be looking for broad trends—where are most people entering, what kinds of content are they consuming, how much time are they spending, how are they moving through your site? By asking questions like these, you can make well-informed, strategic changes to your website and your marketing program.

Web analytics is dominated by Google Analytics, a free solution that any website can use. For most firms, this is all you need. It’s powerful, feature-rich and made by the folks SEO is intended to impress. However, if you need specialized functionality or even more power, there are a bevy of other applications on the market that may better meet your needs.

Marketing analytics allow you to measure and report on the performance of your marketing program. Often, these tools are baked right into digital marketing solutions, such as your marketing automation platform, social media tools and CRM. Equipped with data from your analytics you can become a much smarter marketer. While they may not explain why your customers behave the way they do, analytics allow you to see how they behave in different situations. Often, this is all the insight you need to deliver a better experience and build engagement.

If you want to integrate your analytics into a single platform, or need more powerful features, check out one of the many third-party digital marketing analytics tools on the market. There’s something out there for everyone.

10. Video

Some people are visual learners, and when given the choice between written content and a video they will always choose the latter. But it is far from the only reason to incorporate video solutions into your marketing program. Video is the most engaging format on social media, and it is shared far more often. According to Twitter, “Tweets with video attracted 10x more engagements than Tweets without video.” And these trends apply to all social platforms, including LinkedIn.

Then there is its flexibility. Video can be used and repurposed in so many ways: on your website, on social media, even at live events. You can even publish video blog posts—and if you need to make them more SEO friendly, simply add a transcript below the video. On LinkedIn and other social media platforms, you can add closed captions to make your video accessible to people who don’t have the sound turned on.

What Does the Future Hold?

With each passing year, these digital marketing solutions become smarter. Artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to appear in many platforms to handle certain functions—such as automated responses and predictive analytics—that in the past would have been done by people. As AI matures, it is likely to transform marketing, allowing firms to find, attract, qualify and nurture prospects faster, more efficiently and with far greater individual customization.

At the same time, a powerful counterforce is making some marketing tasks more difficult. New privacy laws, such as Europe’s GDPR, the California Privacy Rights Act and Brazil’s LGPD, target the data-collection machinery of digital marketing solutions, and the industry is still wrestling with the implications. As data privacy regulations become more widespread and accepted, marketing technologies will likely adapt by identifying and better addressing the needs of your best prospects. Marketing will become less about convincing unmotivated people to buy and more about customizing and optimizing the buyer journey. People who raise their hand and express an interest will be given more ways to experience a firm’s expertise—in contexts that are more relevant and meaningful. In theory, this could shorten the sales cycle and make closing the deal far easier.

No doubt, these solutions will evolve in ways most of us can’t even imagine. Which is more reason to start build a sophisticated digital marketing strategy today. The way professional services firms are found, vetted and selected has changed dramatically in just a few years. And this trend is only going to continue. If you invest in some or all of these digital marketing solutions now, you will be ahead of the curve. Today, less than half of firms have, or are in the process of installing, a robust digital infrastructure. That’s means you have a golden opportunity to build a powerful digital competitive advantage.

The post Top 10 Digital Marketing Solutions for Today’s Professional Services Firms appeared first on Hinge Marketing.