For many professional services firms the answer is neither. They choose a strategy that combines elements of both approaches. This strategy is called differentiated marketing.

Differentiated Marketing Defined

In Differentiated Marketing a firm pursues multiple target markets using different marketing strategies for each. This approach can be contrasted against two alternative strategies: 1) undifferentiated marketing (or mass marketing), in which a single marketing strategy is used to address multiple target markets; and 2) niche marketing (also called focused or concentrated marketing), in which all marketing resources are focused on a single segment of a larger market.

To illustrate these different marketing approaches imagine that an accounting firm has three service lines, and they market each service using a different marketing approach. The first service is tax filings, which they market with an undifferentiated approach. They pursue all market segments using the same set of techniques, including face-to-face networking and encouraging referrals from existing clients. They bill hourly for this service.

Their second service line, outsourced bookkeeping, targets a single market niche — small family-owned restaurants. To reach this segment, the firm attends restaurant trade shows, partners with trade associations, and invests in online advertising. The firm sells this service as packages carefully priced for this niche market.

Their third service line is operational business consulting. Here they use a differentiated marketing strategy. For one target segment, family-owned restaurants, they use the same strategy as the bookkeeping service, and they sell their consulting services as part of a fixed-price monthly package. For a second segment, small manufacturers, they use a different strategy: they focus on cultivating referrals from bankers, and they price their services on an hourly basis. Different target markets, different marketing approaches — each tailored to the needs and preferences of that target market. That is the essence of a differentiated marketing strategy.

Differentiated Marketing in Professional Services

The professional services industries are particularly well suited to a differentiated marketing approach. Many services can be applied to multiple target markets. This means there are a lot of opportunities to focus on an attractive segment.

Most services can also be tailored to fit the unique needs of a particular segment. So you can adjust your offerings without having to retool a factory or write off inventory of manufactured goods.

Perhaps most importantly, buyers of professional services usually prefer firms that are familiar with their industry and the specific challenges they face. This behavior gives niche focused strategies a distinct advantage. And a differentiated marketing strategy allows you to address multiple segments with carefully tailored services and marketing plans.

It is true that implementing multiple marketing strategies can be more complex and costly. And it requires discipline to plan and execute a differentiated strategy. But the upside can be tremendous.

When choosing between providers, professional services buyers are most likely to choose the firm that has the strongest track record of solving problems like theirs.  Naturally, the advantage goes to the niche-focused specialist.

Differentiated Marketing Examples

A Consulting Differentiated Marketing Strategy: The AIM Institute

The AIM Institute (AIM) specializes in advising Fortune 2000 companies on product development and launch strategies, and they use differentiated marketing to engage two different audiences.

To address its decision-maker audience (strategic leaders/influencers), AIM has produced targeted educational content, including an ebook entitled, “Leader’s Guide to B2B Organic Growth” and an associated video series. AIM also publishes a special executive-level blog that shares “stories from the trenches.” It reads like a CEO sharing battle stories and insights to another CEO running a large company. All the marketing tools and techniques used with this audience focused on how executives like to learn. Messaging covers product launch strategies—and how these strategies contribute to growth.

For its practitioner audience (tactical implementers), AIM has developed a series of specialized workshops that are more practical in nature. These workshops focus more on product blueprinting and de-risking rather than on B2B organic growth. 

An AEC Differentiated Marketing Strategy: Woodard and Curran

Woodard and Curran is an ENR Top 100 engineering firm offering a diverse range of services and industries ranging from nuclear energy to manufacturing automation to city-wide urban renewal projects. It realized that it could not keep using a single marketing strategy to engage itsdisparate clietele. But the firm did not want to move forward without some hard facts to guide their marketing.

So it took a step back and conducted brand perception research across several industries to better understand buying behavior and audience issues. It also conducted demand research around specific services such as outsourced environmental health and safety services for private Fortune 100 firms to gauge prospect interest.

This strategy enabled Woodard and Curran to build a messaging architecture that addressed specific objections, anticipated responses, and offered proof points–all organized by target audience, roles, and services. The engineering firm then rolled out vertical-specific marketing plans, channels, and content.

For instance, those Fortune 100 firms received a personalized, multi-channel outreach strategy — including traditional mailings and small in-person events. Municipal audiences, on the other hand, were targeted with LinkedIn content distribution promotions that allowed Woodard and Curran to stay in front of their audience even during RFP blackout periods.

When to Use a Differentiated Marketing Strategy

When does it make sense to seriously consider using a differentiated marketing strategy? While there are no hard and fast rules, here are some situations when it might be an attractive option:

1. You have outgrown the niche you are targeting. The niche is too small to sustain the growth you desire. A differentiated strategy allows you to add additional niches without losing the advantages a niche play enjoys.
2. You are losing your competitive advantage in an undifferentiated market. The services you are offering to your largely non targeted market are becoming more commoditized. It’s harder to win new clients.
3. Your margins are shrinking. Differentiated services tend to have higher margins and are easier to defend against undifferentiated competitors.
4. You want to simplify your service offerings. Differentiated services are more targeted so they tend to have less client-to-client variation. This makes them less costly to deliver.
5. You want to maximize the overall value of your firm. Well targeted niche players typically offer the greatest strategic value to a potential buyer. A differentiated strategy allows you to accumulate these valuable niches and maximize the value of each by tailoring your marketing strategy to wants and needs of individual segments.

How to Develop a Differentiated Marketing Strategy

A differentiated marketing strategy requires that you develop a separate marketing plan for each segment you are targeting. We recommend using a strategic marketing planning process similar to the one outlined in this post.

Here are the key steps in the 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. What is the business reason behind your selection of a differentiated marketing strategy? What will success look like? How ill you decide which segments to target?

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. This type of research helps you decide which segments to target. Client or persona research helps you better understand your target clients and how they select a firm. That is our next step.

2. Research your target client segments so you understand their buying behavior, motivations and priorities.

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 and decision-making. They misconstrue clients’ real priorities and they rarely understand how clients choose new providers. Research can set the record straight on all these counts. And it can help you evaluate and price  your service offerings..

When you are doing research, focus on your best, most desirable clients within each segment. Which ones do you want more of? Research will equip you to find more clients like them. It will also help you learn how your clients search for new providers and where they get their information. These insights will help you in subsequent steps.

3. Position your firm 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. Keep in mind that this positioning must work for all of the segments you are targeting.

Positioning starts with identifying the factors that set you apart. These factors 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.

Some differentiators may only be relevant to a single target market. That is okay. But you must have at least one differentiator that is relevant to each segment you are targeting. You can’t have a differentiation strategy unless you are different in some meaningful way. 

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 firm’s brand. 

Each of your target markets is likely interested in different aspects of your service offerings or firm. So you will need to develop different messaging for different audiences. All of your messages should be consistent with your positioning, but they may focus on different benefits or 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 sharpen a competitive advantage in each of the target markets you have selected.

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. You gathered this information in the target client research that you conducted in Step 2. Once you understand how and where your prospects are looking for information about issues they are facing or service providers like you, you can reach them in 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 blend of traditional and digital techniques works best.

Figure 2. A balanced approach to marketing includes both digital and traditional techniques.

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 demand new tools and infrastructure. It’s time to add any new ones you may need or replace 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 you need a new website 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 trade show 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 promote one of your team members for a speaking event: a bio, professional photos, 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 differentiators and positioning.

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 deliver 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. Your choices are learn, retain or hire. 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 for each of your target markets. 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 use 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 post, emails, trade shows, 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 in 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.

Figure 3. Summary of the 7 steps to a differentiated marketing strategy.

A Final Thought

A differentiated marketing strategy is not right for every firm. Smaller firms will likely be better served by a niche strategy, for example. Yet many firms can enjoy the competitive advantages of a niche strategy while diversifying across multiple target audience with well-tailored marketing campaigns. Yes, differentiated marketing is more complex marketing. But it is a challenge that is well worth the effort.

The post Differentiated Marketing for Professional Services appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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.

M&As are especially popular in the professional services space with the growing wave of retiring Baby Boomers and a rapidly changing economy and marketplace.

So what is the impact of all these mergers? More importantly, does an M&A make sense for your firm?

At Hinge, we’ve studied the factors that drive premium valuations and high growth and uncovered some facts that may surprise you.

Strategic M&A: Seeking a solution to a business problem

There are essentially two kinds of mergers and acquisitions: strategic and financial.

A financial merger or acquisition is pursued, as the name implies, for financial reasons—often to pick up some quick cash or as an investment. But I’m not really interested in financial M&As for this particular discussion.

Strategic mergers and acquisitions offer a solution to a different business problem. Perhaps the acquirer is looking to grab a new product line, add some additional facilities, enter a new market, or gain expertise and intellectual property. For professional services firms, a strategic M&A is often about gaining credibility, adding intellectual firepower, or changing the balance of power in a particular market.

The bottom line is a strategic merger yields value for both the acquired and the acquiring firm. To reluctantly use a hackneyed phrase, it’s a “win-win” for both parties.

So what does a strategic merger look like? Here’s a good example:

A few years back we were researching firms that received unusually high valuations. One caught my attention. It was a smaller firm that specialized in top-secret work and had deep experience and contacts in one of the intelligence agencies. This firm was sold for an eye-popping 10-times revenue.

When we asked the acquiring firm why they were willing to pay such sums, their reasons were perfectly clear.

The target firm offered must-have qualifications and contracts with a must-have client. Not having these capabilities would put the acquiring firm at a significant disadvantage when competing for upcoming work. In short, they believed the long-term value for the acquiring firm was much greater than the inflated purchase price.

That’s a strategic merger.

But when is it advantageous to proceed with an aggressive growth strategy of mergers and acquisitions, rather rely on disciplined organic growth?

When M&A Works as a Growth Strategy

Mergers and acquisitions make perfect sense in a variety of situations. For example, maybe an opportunity presents itself that requires fast, decisive action. Or maybe a competitive threat compels a defensive move to get bigger, faster.

Here are five situations in which mergers and acquisitions have proven useful as a growth strategy:

1. Fills critical gaps in service offerings or client lists

When the marketplace changes in response to external events or new laws and regulations, it can create a gap in a firm’s critical offerings. It is a prime opportunity for a strategic merger.

After 9/11, the national security and defense industry lacked the relevant skills to match rapidly changing federal requirements. Companies quickly realized they would be sidelined without the skills and experience necessary to meet the new security demand. The firms with the requisite experience and relevant client lists suddenly found themselves strategically valuable and highly sought-after acquisition targets.

2. Efficient way to acquire talent and intellectual property

Many industries are seeing an acute shortage of experienced professional staff. Cybersecurity, accounting, and engineering are just a few examples that immediately come to mind.

The reality is, intellectual property (IP) is the new currency of modern business. Once squirreled away and carefully guarded, IP is now actively bought and sold. For many companies, the acquisition of a firm and its IP is the quickest path to market dominance—or at least a roadblock to competitive incursions.

3. Opportunity to leverage synergies

A strategic merger, if done as part of a thoughtful growth strategy, can result in synergies that offer real value for both the acquired and the acquiring.

There are two basic types of M&A-related synergies: cost and revenue.

Cost synergies are all about cutting costs by taking advantage of overlapping operations or resources and consolidating them into one entity. In a strategic M&A, a number of areas are suitable for cost-cutting, such as redundant facilities, workforces, or business units and areas of operation. But cost synergies can also result in an increase in buying and negotiating power thanks to the larger combined budget.

Revenue synergies alter the competitive balance of power and create opportunities to change market dynamics, sell more products, or raise prices. Companies can take advantage of revenue synergies and make more money in many ways, including the following:

• Reduce competition
• Open new territories
• Access new markets (through newly acquired expertise, products, services, or capacity)
• Expand the customer base for cross-selling opportunities
• Develop sales opportunities by marketing complementary products or services.

4. Add a new business model

Many professional services firms are based on a billable-hours business model, but that is certainly not the only option. Some firms generate revenue as a fixed fee or through performance incentives. Others may employ subscription models (popular in the software industry).

Of course, the value of an effective M&A growth strategy is not just about how you are paid. A merger may also offer a new type of service, such as brokerage, insurance or money management. If you’re considering a new business model, the easiest way to develop and test it out is to acquire a firm that’s already using the model successfully. That way you avoid possible missteps from inexperience.

5. Save time and long learning curves

Much like adding a new business model, a strategic M&A may help you save considerable time and expense in your growth strategy.

Let’s say you’re considering a new service for your business. Your firm is fully capable of developing and delivering that service on its own, but it will take more time, money, and resources than you’re willing to devote. It might be easier and more cost-effective to simply acquire the capability.

Not only is this a practical and smart shortcut to the sought-after service and expertise, you also acquire a built-in customer base and target audience. Bingo!

When M&A Falters as a Growth Strategy

But not everyone succeeds when mergers and acquisitions are part of the overall growth strategy. Sometimes a solid strategy is derailed by problems in implementation or flaws in the logic or reasoning behind the strategy.

Let’s explore how an M&A growth strategy can go wrong:

1. Cultural clash

Different firms have different cultures. No surprise there. But the difference in cultures can be problematic.

You can guard against culture clash by being clear about the culture you want and using all tools at your disposal to ensure you achieve it. For example, education, the right incentives, and a focus on your employee brand is most helpful when looking at a possible merging of corporate cultures.

2. Loss of differentiation

Avoid mergers when the features—and benefits—that make one firm valuable are not relevant to the other brand. Rather than add critical assets, capabilities, or value, the acquired or merged firm dilutes the brand and competitive advantage.

A merger should be the result of a carefully researched brand analysis. It should NOT be an ego-driven trophy deal.

3. A major distraction

Mergers and post-merger integrations are resource-intensive activities that usually involve some of the most senior people in the firm. If they are not prepared for it, they can easily be distracted by other critical, but less urgent activities.

The potential for distraction is greatest—and most profound—after the deal is done and the focus moves to integration. If senior management gets too distracted, you risk having the merger flounder as well as damaging the underlying business.

4. Marketplace confusion

Let’s say Firm A, a highly respected accounting firm that specializes in manufacturing, acquires Firm B, a cybersecurity firm with specializes in helping retailers. The acquisition seems very strategic. Seeing an opportunity, the combined firm, A+B Associates, tries to add retail to their specialization. The result is a confusing marketplace.

Does A+B still specialize in manufacturing? Are they no longer an accounting firm?

The confusion can be even worse if the only rationale for the merger is growth for growth’s sake. The whole confusing mess could be avoided with a solid, research-based plan to position the merged brand and help current and potential customers understand the rationale and benefits of the merger.

5. Loss of brand strength

If the marketplace is confused, the strength of your brand will suffer. After all, brand strength is the product of a simple equation:

Reputation x Visibility = Brand Strength

Where reputation is what you’re known for and visibility is how widely you are known for it. Understanding this equation can help you avoid the perils of diminished brand strength.

An ill-timed merger can quickly diminish the strength of both the acquiring and acquired brands. Here’s an all-too-typical example:

Brand M, which has considerable visibility in the Midwest, wants to expand into the Southeast. To accomplish this, Brand M acquires Brand S, a southeastern-based firm. But there is a problem. The Midwestern brand is unknown in the southeast, so its overall brand strength is actually diminished by the acquisition. And, when the southeastern firm adopts the brand identity of Brand M, its brand strength is also diminished. Everybody loses.

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So how do you overcome this problem? Sometimes a gradual transition to a new brand is the right answer. Other times a concerted focus on building the visibility of the new brand in the market where it’s less known is the key.

Watch out for situations where you must change both the focus of the reputation and increase visibility. These are the most challenging mergers.

Developing Your High Growth Strategy

Achieving high growth starts with a true understanding of the marketplace as it really exists and how your firm is actually perceived (not as you’d like it to be perceived). Do your research and understand fully what each firm—the acquired as well as the acquiring—bring to the equation.

In the end, a successful high-growth strategy will include the following elements:

It is forward-looking—A good strategy is not just a response to what has been. It’s about what can be achieved. Where do you really want your firm to go? How will you get there? What needs to happen to do it?

It doesn’t require complete consensus—If absolutely everyone thinks it’s a great plan, then you’re not taking appropriate risks.

It does require buy-in—Senior management must be on board and embrace what needs to be done. Without management buy-in, any strategy is doomed to failure. But don’t forget your employees. Workers at all levels should be enthusiastic about what the firm is gaining and where it’s heading.

It focuses on implementation—High growth requires careful implementation of every aspect of a business strategy and plan. Follow through with implementation.

If M&A is a part of your growth strategy, focus on the emerging culture and brand and carefully shape the new firm. And consider carefully how the merged firm will generate organic growth.

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The post Mergers and Acquisitions as Part of Your Growth Strategy appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

In this post, we’ll try to clear away some of the confusion and lay down a path to success. Let’s start with what professional services marketing automation (MA) means.

 Marketing Automation Defined

Marketing automation is the use of sophisticated software platforms to automate both routine and complex marketing processes, reducing costs and improving effectiveness. It allows firms to simultaneously personalize and scale their marketing programs.

The feature sets in marketing automation platforms vary widely. Some of the most common features include:

• Email marketing
• Forms and landing pages
• Database of leads, prospects, and clients (CRM)
• Campaign management and cross-platform integration
• Lead scoring and management
• Social media marketing
• Search engine optimization support
• Content marketing
• Analytics

The world of marketing automation is changing rapidly. Let’s review some of the trends driving those changes. These insights should help you anticipate emerging opportunities and inform your planning.

Marketing Automation Trends

1. Marketing automation adoption is growing fast.

The marketplace for B2B marketing automation has experienced rapid growth over recent years. As Figure 1 shows, it is reasonable to expect that trend to continue. That growth is clearly impacting professional services. Our most recent High Growth Study shows that marketing automation falls into the top five marketing priorities for High Growth firms in 2023.

Figure 1. Global marketing automation software market, by enterprise size, 2014 – 2025 (USD Million)

Source: Grand View Research

This trend is not surprising given the importance of nurturing relationships and building trust in the professional services business development process. Increasing the visibility of one’s expertise is a key way to nurture prospects and win new clients — and marketing automation is ideally suited to support these goals.

2. The sophistication of the underlying technology is rapidly increasing and creating a knowledge gap.

As advanced technologies such as speech recognition, predictive analytics, sophisticated testing and artificial intelligence become more integrated into marketing automation software, these platforms will become more and more capable. Even today, these advanced systems often offer more functionality than most firms know how to apply. And this trend is only likely to get worse as more advanced features are added in the coming years.

This situation has created something of a knowledge gap — and many professional services firms understand they need to address it. Firms will need to tackle this need with additional training or by engaging an outside resource. Firms that fail to make the most of their MA investment, however, are likely to experience disappointing results.

3. Industry-focused marketing automation platforms and applications are likely to proliferate.

As marketing automation vendors proliferate and competition intensifies we expect to see the introduction of more systems and applications targeted at a particular industry (or other niche) as a strategy. For example, Unanet CRM by Cosential offers a system designed specifically for the needs of AEC firms. And Higher Logic has built a platform to serve the unique needs of membership organizations. This movement toward specialization makes sense for the platform developers, who want to differentiate their products from the tidal wave of competing products, and it makes it easy for professional services firms to find a suitable MA platform for their clientele. We expect to see this trend toward specialization to continue.

4. Firms that do not embrace digital marketing are falling behind.

Marketing automation has grown out of the digital transformation of communications and evolving buyer expectations. As you might expect, professional services firms that embrace digital techniques tend to outperform those that do not.

The fastest growing firms are much more likely to embrace digital marketing strategies. And those that do not are at a competitive disadvantage. Their marketing activity is likely to be more costly, less effective and reach a smaller audience. In a highly competitive marketplace this is not an enviable position.

Marketing Automation Strategies

Marketing automation can help you accomplish many of your strategic marketing goals. The trick is to understand which strategies make sense for your firm. Understanding your strategic goals also helps you identify what metrics to track and optimize. Here are the strategies most aligned with the needs of professional services.

1. Attracting more new leads. A very common goal for many firms, developing a flow of new leads is something that most MA systems are well suited for. Often this involves some combination of SEO-optimized content, social media and guest posting to drive visibility. With the ability to automate implementation and track sourcing across platforms, you can measure success and optimize your program accordingly.
2. Better qualifying new leads. As you attract more prospects, some will be qualified and ready to engage. Others are far from it. How can you tell the difference? Part of the answer is in the content you are sharing. If it is well targeted, you will find that your better prospects will be naturally attracted to it because it speaks directly to their needs. You can also try lead scoring. Most systems with CRM capabilities will automatically assign leads a readiness score based on predetermined behavioral criteria. These two mechanisms work together to accomplish your strategic objective of cultivating better-qualified leads.
3. Segmenting your database for better targeting and more personalization. All prospects have different needs. It doesn’t make sense to treat them the same. However, when you have a single gigantic list, it can be hard not to. That is one of the best uses of these systems. They provide tools to automatically segment your list by demographic or behavioral criteria. And when you layer criteria, your marketing strategy effectively becomes “personalized.”
4. Nurturing your leads to develop better opportunities. Some professional services industries work on very long closing cycles. You could easily spend years waiting for a potential client to need your services. Professional services are not impulse purchases. Fortunately, managing a nurture or “drip” campaign is something these systems do well — so much of your middle-funnel nurturing can be automated. The timing and content of these “touches” can be programmed in advance so that little ongoing attention is required.
5. Identifying sales-ready opportunities. At some point, many of the leads you have been nurturing will need the services you provide. If these individuals have been well nurtured, they will know how you can help them, and your firm will be top of mind. When the time is right, they will reach out to you. There are also a number of techniques to probe for interest. For example, you can configure the system to send out a free consultation offer from time to time. In this way, you can look for opportunities while minimizing your time investment.
6. Making your expertise more visible. In the professional services we have a major marketing challenge. We sell expertise. As valuable as that is, however, expertise is invisible. So how can a prospective client learn about your expertise? The best way is to demonstrate it — to make it visible and tangible. This can be done by educating your audience, using blog posts, webinars, videos, public speaking, social media and the like to show people who are interested in your area of expertise how you solve problems like theirs. Marketing automation is an ideal tool for delivering this information to the right prospect at the right time.
7. Improving client retention. Many professional services are episodic. Clients need a firm from time to time, but not continuously. From a firm’s perspective, maintaining an on-and-off client relationship when you are busy working with other clients can be difficult. Further, many past clients may not realize the full range of your firm’s expertise and seek out someone else to do work you could easily handle. Marketing automation, however, provides some relief by automating many of these ongoing interactions. Good programing outperforms good intentions.
8. Tracking and optimizing marketing investment. Figuring out what works in a marketing context has always been challenging. The tracking capabilities of today’s modern MA platforms help answer that eternal question. Cross-channel integration allows you to track and optimize your strategies, providing the insights you need to improve your ROI.
9. Increasing productivity of your marketing team. This is an easy one to score as a win. By their design and functionality, professional services marketing automation systems almost always have a dramatic impact on marketing team productivity. That’s what they were designed to do: take the repetitive drudgery out of marketing campaigns. Of course, they need to be set up initially — an often laborious process — but after that, the time savings accrue every day.
10. Saving billable time. The battle between billable time and business development has long been a fixture of the “seller-doer” model. Potential clients want to meet and get to know whom they will be working with. As the person with the expertise, you are the product. So if a prospect is screened, qualified and nurtured in advance of interacting with the billable professional, that saves a lot of non-billable business development hours. Better-qualified, better-educated prospects maximize billable time.

When you reflect on this list of strategic marketing priorities, it is easy to see why marketing automation has enjoyed so much growth and innovation. It turns strategies that would be costly and hard to implement into practical realities.

The Marketing Automation Process

While the promise of automated marketing is music to many professionals’ ears, the reality is often very disappointing. There is a simple reason for this sad state of affairs.

Bad marketing, automated, is still bad marketing.

But there is a better way. We believe that many of the common problems associated with professional services marketing automation can be avoided by following a systematic process. Let’s run through the key steps.

Step 1. Research your target audiences.

The most effective marketing automation strategies are grounded in an accurate understanding of your target audiences. There is no better way to accomplish this than through structured, systematic research.

As practicing professionals, we feel that we know our clients well. But personal experience can easily lead you astray. You will likely be overconfident and miss blind spots in your understanding. Firms that do systematic research on their target audiences grow faster and are more profitable.

Where should you focus your research? As much as possible, you should try to understand the full client journey. A client satisfaction survey alone does not help you understand which issues motivate your clients and drive their firm selection process. Where do they go for new insights? Which conferences do they attend? This type of information will be invaluable as you build your automation strategy.

For a quick overview of the most productive areas of research, check out this post on the top business research questions. To dig deeper into the research process and understand which research approaches are best suited to your needs, download our guide to professional services research.

Step 2. Identify your strategic marketing goals.

Sadly, many firms approach marketing automation with only the foggiest idea of what specific business goals they want to accomplish (see Marketing Automation Strategies above). Let’s say you want to grow a specific practice or the firm as a whole. What should your strategic marketing goals be?

The obvious answer is that they should be aimed at solving the specific issues that are inhibiting growth. The research that you just completed in Step 1 will be immensely helpful in providing answers. In one case, the issue may be insufficient visibility with your target audience. In another, it may be a depressed closing percentage. How can you tell the difference?

Start by organizing your analysis in the context of a marketing funnel (see Figure 2). Examine each stage of the process to determine where your practice or firm is falling short.

Figure 2. The marketing funnel

Do you have too few leads? Are they well qualified? Is your nurture process effective? Do they convert into business opportunities? Are they easy or difficult to close?

We also find it very useful to benchmark your performance against high-growth firms from within your industry. This exercise allows you to identify where you have strengths to build upon and where there are areas of weakness that need attention. Equipped with this information, you can formulate your strategic marketing goals and put them in their proper business context.

Step 3. Identify your marketing techniques.

The marketing techniques you select should be driven by your strategic marketing goals and the characteristics of your target audience. You should be able to find this in the research you did in Step 1.

Lets say that your marketing challenge is low visibility within your target audience. What is the best way to increase visibility? First, try to discover what issues are they concerned about. What conferences do they attend? Do they prefer webinars or seminars? What social media are they using?

As you consider how to reach your audience, you will want to explore the full complement of professional services marketing techniques. The best results are typically achieved when you have a balance of traditional and digital techniques that fit both your audience’s preferences and your marketing strengths.

Fortunately, you have choices. Most traditional marketing techniques have digital analogues.

Figure 3. Online and offline marketing techniques

As Figure 3 illustrates, you can do face-to-face networking or social media — or both. Speaking events or webinars are both possible.

Don’t be swayed by your personal preferences or what your marketing automation vendor wants you to do. Your guidance should come from your audience profile and what they prefer. Marketing automation is useful in supporting many strategies. Your marketing strategy should drive your software selection, not the other way around.

Another criteria for selecting your marketing techniques is effectiveness. Some marketing approaches are simply more effective than others. Each year we conduct a study that identifies the most effective techniques for professional services firms. By combining this perspective with your audience’s preferences, you can find a set of techniques that give you a real advantage over your competitors, most of which continue to market “the way we have always done it.”

Step 4. Develop your content strategy.

This is one of the most frequent failure points in unsuccessful MA deployments. Delivering bad content more efficiently is hardly a win. Garbage in, garbage out.

MA automates and personalizes the delivery of your content. It doesn’t tell you what that content should be. That’s the job of your content strategy.

Your content must accomplish two tasks. First it must be relevant to your audience. That usually means that it deals with a topic of deep interest to your target. It could be a problem that their whole industry is struggling with, for example. But not every issue your target audience wrestles with is relevant to the services your firm offers.

And chance are, not all of the services you offer are of equal value to your firm. Some services have higher margins or naturally lead to an expanded relationship. So the issues you choose to write and speak about must also be relevant to your firm’s marketing goals.

The resulting overlap is illustrated in Figure 4.

Figure 4. What topics should you develop content around?

You are trying to identify the issues that serve two goals: 1) they are of great interest to your prospects; and 2) your firm’s key services help solve them.

There is another dimension you must consider when developing your content strategy. Your content must address all of the stages of the marketing funnel (see Figure 2 above). You should have content that attracts new prospects, engages prospects over time, and convinces ripe opportunities to become your clients. Where many MA programs stumble is that they focus only on content suitable for one stage — attracting interest, for instance, but not nurturing or closing.

Step 5. Organize the marketing flow.

At this point, you know what marketing techniques you will use, what issues and topics you want to focus on and which types of content you will deploy for each stage of your pipeline. Now it is time to organize the flow through the marketing automation system.

This activity is often referred to as workflows within the MA world. What behavior triggers a follow-up action? When a website visitor clicks on a specific offer what happens? What data is tracked? What follow-up content is sent? When is it sent? What other action is taken?

As you can see, documenting workflows involves a lot of detail and a lot of specificity. That can be a challenge. But the benefits are real. Once set up, your MA system is completely scalable and works around the clock. It delivers your content and any follow-up messages automatically. No need to have a team of support people on staff. Your MA system never sleeps and never “forgets” to follow-up.

Step 6. Select and program your marketing automation platform.

At last, it is time to select your marketing automation platform. I know, you probably started this journey by selecting a platform months ago. That might have been a bad idea. Why? Platform capabilities vary so much that unless you know exactly what functionality you need (which you just determined in the last step) you are in danger of selecting an ill-suited solution.

Sometimes systems lack a key feature, or they may be overly complex and expensive for your needs. Thoroughly understanding what you need a system to do prevents these embarrassing mismatches. Also, don’t forget to consider what sort of tracking capabilities you will need. Having the right analytics empowers you to optimize your marketing program over time.

Once you have selected a system, you can complete the programming. This means configuring the workflows and establishing functions such as lead scoring criteria and the timing of follow-ups. If this is your first attempt at automating workflows, some of these decisions may well be best guesses. Don’t worry too much about that, as you will soon have the opportunity to test and improve upon them.

Step 7. Optimization cycle — test, track and adjust.

Up to this point, our discussion of the marketing automation process has focused on the selection and setup of your system. Now it is time to start harvesting the benefits by optimizing it’s operation and performance.

If you have followed the steps outlined above you have a thoughtful and well-documented strategy. How is it performing?

Start by tracking the initial performance of the system. What is happening to website visits? How many downloads are you getting? What is your conversion percentage?

While you can track myriad variables, we recommend that you start simple and focus on a just a few key metrics. Those will be the metrics that reflect the strategic goals you established earlier.

Fortunately, many modern MA platforms come with robust reporting tools and dashboards. These provide good starting places and allow you to establish baselines for performance.

Once you have established your baseline performance levels, you can begin to test and optimize. Brainstorm ideas for improving performance. Then test them to determine whether your experimental improvement actually makes a difference. Some systems provide testing tools built-in — for example, tools that allow you to A/B test two versions of an email or landing page.

When you find a variation that outperforms the baseline, the winner becomes the new baseline or “control” that you will try to improve upon in subsequent tests. In this way, you will be able to troubleshoot issues and optimize performance.

A Final Thought

Marketing automation here to stay, and before long it will be a standard part of all professional services marketing programs. When properly implemented it is a way to both personalize and scale your marketing strategy. It is also well suited to building the awareness of your firm and establishing trust over time, which makes it a great match for any professional services firm.

Of course, there are challenges and pitfalls. No MA system will turn bad messaging into good leads. Your strategy must be built on a solid understanding of your target audiences and your firm’s strengths and weaknesses. And there is that yawning skills gap. Platforms are only as effective as the wisdom and skills of the team that sets up and operates them.

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The post Professional Services Marketing Automation: A Roadmap for Success appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

This intense dynamic of increased responsibility coupled with unyielding marketplace uncertainty is causing many to reassess their marketing strategies and budgets.

At the highest level of this reassessment there is an important question to answer: Is now the time to lean down and make cuts to marketing efforts or is it a time to expand and increase marketing investment?

In this article, we will review findings from Hinge’s latest research report, the 2023 High Growth Study, and present a research-backed answer to this question. Spoiler alert: the research suggests you should NOT cut your marketing budget this year.

The Marketing Advantage of High Growth Firms

Benjamin Franklin is often quoted as saying, “an investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” This is why Hinge continues to invest in conducting our annual High Growth Study.

Understanding the challenges outlined above, we want to provide professional services marketers with practical insights to guide them as they continue to develop their marketing programs. At the center of the study is a focus on the marketing behaviors of the world’s fastest growing professional services firms (we refer to them as the High Growth firms). We want to understand how some firms are growing 3X faster than their average growth peers.

So when it comes to this question about marketing investment and resourcing, what do the High Growth firms do? Well here’s the headline: Despite an industry-wide pullback in marketing spending, High Growth Firms are investing more.

First, let’s comment on the industry-wide pullback. As you see in Figure 1 below, for the first time in four years, our High Growth Study has measured a decrease in the amount of revenue professional services firms are dedicating to marketing. 

The reasons for this pullback no doubt relate to some of the primary challenges faced by professional services firms (marketplace uncertainty, a shortage of top talent, etc). But not all firms are pulling back on their marketing efforts!

As we’ll explore below, there are three important ways that High Growth firms are continuing to invest more in their marketing and business development efforts than their competitors. Let’s break each of these research insights down one-by-one.

Insight 1: High Growth firms spend more on marketing

One result we have seen across years of High Growth studies—as well as some of our industry specific budget studies—is that the High Growth firms dedicate more revenue towards their marketing initiatives. Our research prompts respondents to consider a marketing budget that does not include compensating employees. For example, below in Figure 2, High Growth firms reported dedicating over 17.5% more of their revenue towards marketing than No Growth firms.

Insight 2: High Growth firm employ more marketing talent

As we mentioned above, much is asked of today’s professional services marketers. The standards of modern marketing programs increase every day. High Growth firms have responded to this challenging marketing environment by employing more marketing talent inside their firms. Beyond simply spending more on marketing, they are diversifying their marketing capabilities and positioning themselves to accomplish more.

Here’s what the data says: While No Growth firms employ 1 marketing resource per 34 team members, High Growth firms employ 1 for every 20.

By employing more internal marketing talent, the High Growth firms open doors for more sophisticated marketing campaigns. An increased number of specialists (website, SEO, graphic design) ensure that firms can truly build integrated marketing plans that work.

But as we’ll see in the next insight, employing internal talent is not the only way High Growth firms leverage talented specialists.

Insight 3: High Growth firms outsource more to fill critical gaps

The third area where High Growth firms stand out from their peers is in how they work with outside agencies, freelancers, and consultants. In nearly every category that we researched, High Growth firms were more likely to consult with resources outside of their firm for marketing support. You can review these categories in Figure 3 below.

What are the main points of emphasis here? Well there are some categories where High Growth firms were far more likely to work with an outside firm than No Growth firms. Let’s look at the data another way and see what we can learn.

Here are the top 5 categories ranked by the largest delta between High Growth and No Growth firms:

• Thought leadership content (120%)
• Research (116%)
• Strategy development (72%)
• SEO (67%)
• Graphic design (53%)

As a leader overseeing marketing activities, now might be the right time to reconsider reinforcing your marketing efforts with outside support. Specialized skills like graphic design and support with search engine optimization (SEO) can be a great place to start if those are pain points for your team. But High Growth firms put emphasis on working with consultants that help them with the big picture of their marketing programs—support or advisory in the creation of high-quality thought leadership content, research to help them reduce uncertainty and guide decision-making, and/or consultation with developing their marketing strategy.

What’s next?

Let’s return to our original question… Is now the time to increase or decrease your firm’s investment in marketing? If you look towards what the High Growth firms are doing, then it’s hard to see a case for anything other than increasing investment.

Consider the three insights together: High Growth firms dedicate a higher percentage of revenue to marketing, employ more marketing talent internally, and are also more likely to outsource and work with agencies. This three punch combo may shed some light on how these firms build marketing programs that drive their firms towards greater growth and profitability.

In your particular scenario, it may be unrealistic to try to increase your marketing investment in all three of these areas right away. Increased investment does not mean losing your strategy. You still need to take a strategic approach to building their marketing plans. Without a strategic plan, your marketing efforts may be scattered and ineffective. You want a marketing plan that allows you to continuously measure your progress, adjust your approach as needed and make data-driven decisions.

But if there is an internal discussion about your marketing investment, use this data to your advantage. Also, take a look at some of the additional resources provided below and reach out to us here at Hinge if you’d like to discuss growing your marketing plan with us. We’re here to help.

The post Why You Should NOT Cut Your Marketing Budget This Year appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

We are used to hearing that a firm’s most important asset is its people, not necessarily the brand. But people come and go. And unless an individual’s reputation and industry presence is so strong that they impact the entire firm’s marketplace position, “people” only get you so far.

Your brand is what prevails over time and beats the competition.

Strong brands hinge on strong differentiators. Differentiators are the foundational components of communicating your brand clearly and consistently. If there is no difference between what you say about your firm and what competitors say about their firms, you have a weak brand. Unfortunately, this can have a negative impact on your firm’s growth and profitability. In our own research, we’ve found that high growth firms are 3X more likely to have a strong, easy-to-understand differentiators.

And within the realm of professional services, technology services firms struggle to articulate the right technology differentiator. With often complex service offerings with even more complex acronyms and terminology that describe those offerings, technology firms too often fall back on differentiating around being a “trusted partner” and having “best-in-class people.”

Here is a quick test to see if you have a true differentiator. Think of some way you believe your firm is different. Then ask if a potential competitor could ever say the opposite. If the answer is “no,” it is probably not a good differentiator (this is why having great people and offering great client service don’t pass this test).

Remember that a truly strong differentiator must pass three criteria: It must be true. It must be relevant to your clients. And it must be provable.

Let’s first peel away some very common misconceptions about what makes a bonafide technology differentiator:

• Your differentiator is not your firm’s name.
• Your differentiator is not your logo or tagline.
• Your differentiator is not your website or marketing collateral.
• Your differentiator is not your mission statement, culture, or core values.
• Your differentiator is not your people.

Instead, each of these are tools that help your differentiator communicate your brand. But they are not differentiators in and of themselves.

How do you then come up with relevant brand differentiators, ones that support your brand and help you stand out in the marketplace?

Our research points to five key factors around which firms should consider building their differentiators to achieve brand strength:

1. A Well-Defined Target Audience

While it’s tempting to think of your firm’s differentiators as having universal appeal, it’s rarely the case. It’s far more strategic to build your differentiators around a clearly defined and well-understood target market. To be meaningful, a differentiator must be relevant to “someone.” No differentiator can try to be relevant to everyone. Many professional services firms are reluctant to specify a target audience. They do so at their own disadvantage.

2. Relevance to the Success of the Target Audience

Your differentiator must also be seen as being relevant to the success of your client. It’s not enough to be nice people or even knowledgeable and helpful. Those fall into the “nice-to-have” category. The real driver of a successful brand through relevant differentiation is your ability to define the problem, solve the problem, and make your clients successful. You aren’t just a bystander. You are a contributor to your clients’ success.

Research Report

Inside the Buyer’s Brain, Technology & Software Edition

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3. Proof Through Marketing With Informative Content

Content marketing involves providing a steady stream of useful information to potential clients or influencers. Think educational rather than promotional. Over time, potential clients learn how you approach problems and develop trust in your firm. When they need assistance, your firm is at the top of their list. Content marketing relies on winning clients by sharing something of value rather than trying to persuade or “sell” them. As such, it is a great way to call out your differentiators, build a brand, and generate leads.

4. Promotion of Your Visible Experts^®

While your people in general are not a strong differentiator on which to hang your brand, many firms have legitimate experts that become well known and influential among their target client group. While small in number, we call these fortunate few Visible Experts. By deliberately developing one or more of these high-profile experts, a firm can dramatically increase the power of its brand.

The strength of a Visible Expert’s personal brand transfers to the entire firm by virtue of the “Halo Effect,” so well known in the marketing community. In the same way, as a university becomes more prestigious when it has a Nobel Prize winning faculty member, so too a professional services firm benefits by having a nationally known industry thought leader on its team.

5.  Soul Searching Your Expertise

What industry verticals do you already have strength in? What kind of services are you good at delivering? Where do you offer the most value and enjoy the greatest success? Most established firms have a large number of industry or service combinations to consider, since growth has often been opportunistic.

Because the differentiators on which you develop your brand are so central to the ongoing success of your firm, they should be a matter of focus and investment. In reality, this is rarely the case. Because so few competitors are giving brand building and differentiators the attention they require, you have a great opportunity to benefit and gain a meaningful competitive advantage.

Free Resource

The Differentiation Guide for Professional Services Firms

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The post 5 Key Factors to Pinpoint Your Technology Firm’s Differentiators appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

Yet we all know that we should do more. They can be an important part of your content marketing strategy. If done well, they can attract new prospects and help close more business.

Here are some of our favorite tips to make the process easier and much more effective.

1. Involve the client very early.

Some clients will shy away from participating and others have firm policies against them. But for many clients, being considered as a case story will be a strong positive.

They can look forward to special treatment and the possibility of increased visibility. This not only helps you gain cooperation, but it also encourages you to collect helpful information about the “before” situation.

2. Identify the client.

This is a huge credibility booster and should be done if at all possible. Yes, there are some circumstances where you cannot for ethical or legal reasons. But for many situations it is possible. And when you can, it is very helpful.

3. Use a quote.

Getting a direct quote from the client is another great way to add believability and credibility to your case story.

Also consider including a quote from the professional in your firm that worked on the client’s project. This helps make the case study seem more tangible and easier to identify with. 

4. Include keywords in the title and body copy.

Conduct keyword analysis of your case story’s topic and include them when you are writing. This will help search engines find the case story and spread the word. Include your identified keyword or keyword phrase both in the title of the case story and 2-3 times in the copy.

Some common keywords include the name of the client’s company and the nature of the service you provided. 

5. Tell a story.

Good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They also have a struggle against the odds and a turning point. If it is too easy, there is no tension or suspense. Will it work or not?

While we are not suggesting turning your case stories into literature, a little bit of old-fashion story telling will go a long ways toward increasing reader interest and engagement.

Explain the client’s challenges and why your professional services firm was the right fit for their needs. Describe how you helped the client and try to paint a clear picture of what it’s like to work with your firm. And most importantly, show results and that you were able to deliver on your promises.

6. Use numbers.

Numbers add credibility in a way words just can’t. They can be useful in describing the magnitude of a challenge, the process you used and, of course, the results you achieved. Don’t be concerned if you don’t have perfect documentation. Even a few numbers help.

7. Use imagery.

Often overlooked, this is a great way to communicate a setting or give you a quick feel for a client. While most professional services do not easily lend themselves to a picture of the service (try photographing an audit or a computer program), there are other alternatives.

How about a picture of the client’s facility or their product? Think broader and you will find interesting visual content to spice up your case story.

8. Avoid jargon.

Have mercy on your readers and avoid industry jargon and acronyms. A surprising number of readers will not understand what you are trying to communicate.

Assume you are writing a case story for your aunt to read and you won’t be far off. The key here is to lay the situation out simply and to make your success easy to understand for any reader. Make your case stories easy to skim. Use short sentences, descriptive headings and bullet points.

9. Use video.

This is an increasingly common approach to telling a professional services case story. A professionally produced video can communicate a client’s experience and enthusiasm in a way that words alone cannot.

Video is especially appropriate if you have a high profile client who is excited about your service.

10. Get professional help.

You do not have to do it all alone. Using a professional to write a case story or edit a draft you have written can be a very smart move.

Given the obvious role that case stories can play in your content marketing campaign, it’s essential to get it right. For many firms, a single new client pays for all the case studies you’ll need to write. 

Writing a case story doesn’t have to be so painful. By using some of the tips we’ve outlined here, it can actually be interesting—and very profitable for your firm.

Marketing Planning Guide - Third Edition

The Marketing Planning Guide for Professional Services Firms

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The post Top 10 Tips For Writing A Case Story appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

An important body of Hinge’s research, Inside the Buyer’s Brain, Fourth Edition, found that most buyers who are trying to select a firm rely heavily on a firm’s relevant experience and expertise. These factors are represented by two of the top three bars in the chart below. This makes intuitive sense — if buyers know you are an expert in your service area, they are more likely to buy from you.

Just like any personal relationship, business relationships require continual maintenance.  A mutual benefit and ongoing communication are important ingredients to success. In the long run, having close and trusting contacts will give you an edge, especially when other marketing tactics aren’t working.  Here are 5 keys to building and maintaining business relationships:

1. Routinely Reach Out to Important Contacts

It is impossible to have weekly or monthly conversations with all of the contacts in your CRM system.  But you can focus on the valuable ones.  Pinpoint your best clients, partners, and vendors and continually check up on them. Express your interest in their business and let them know that you are here to help. If you want to keep the relationship alive make this outreach routine.  If you let too much time go by, your eventual contact will seem less genuine. And don’t ignore the power of your LinkedIn connections. When executed properly, a social media strategy is the digital sister to in-person networking – and it can be fast and efficient way to ensure your are routinely reaching out.

2. Offer Help Before You Ask for Help

Building business relationships doesn’t mean tapping into your resources whenever you need something.  If the only time you ever contact a former client is when you have a new service offering, your gesture won’t seem authentic.  Similarly, if you call your vendor only when you are looking for a good deal, don’t expect to get one.

Spend time figuring out how you can help your important business contacts. What value can you offer to spark the conversation?

3. Ask for Feedback

Instead of assuming your clients and vendors are happy, ask! Open communication is a basic component of any relationship. When you ask your contacts how they feel, you promote a two-way conversation that can uncover areas for improvement.  Some firms conduct client satisfaction surveys to gather feedback.  But usually it’s best to pick up the phone and talk to your closest contact at a firm.  If this is your top client, you want to make sure they are content.

4. Find Ways to Connect with Less Valuable Contacts

As new contacts enter your world, try to build trust over time with email marketing.  Because you can’t interact with everyone in your email address book on a weekly basis, leverage technology to do some of the work for you.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems allow you to set up email sequences that will routinely send email to your contacts. This is no substitute for a real relationship, but it will at least keep your firm on the top of people’s minds.

Note that this does not mean blasting your list with non targeted emails.  Instead, focus on educational content that your audience will find relevant and practical. There are two types of emails to consider:

1. Educational emails provide content that is meant to be informative. These emails give something of value to the reader without asking for anything in return. Because educational emails are highly valued by your audience, they should make up about 80% of the emails that you send out.
2. Offer emails are for when you want the recipient to do something, such as download a presentation or paper, and you are hoping to move them to a deeper level of engagement. Whether this engagement is a meeting or trying out one of your services, you want them to take a specific next step. Although offer emails should account for the other 20% of emails, you wouldn’t want to send these until you’ve created value for your audience. And offer emails should only go to folks who have already downloaded several pieces of your content. Unless specifically requested, you absolutely would not want an offer email to be sent to someone you just met at a networking event.

Here are a few tips we’ve discovered for highly effective email marketing:

• Ensure the look and feel of your email reflects your brand at every touchpoint.
• Ensure they are mobile friendly.
• Segment your distribution list so you can be strategic about which emails go to which list.
• Remember the 80/20 rule. No matter how many or how few emails you send out, the balance of them (80%) should be educational, while the remainder (20%) are offers.
• Make sure you have a way for people to unsubscribe.
• Consider the subject line carefully. To encourage high open rates, go with 40 characters or less, and be very clear. Subject lines aren’t the time to be too clever or leave too much up to the reader’s imagination. Just say what the email is about. Trust us, the payoff will be there.
• Lastly, be aware that there are certain trigger words that can send your email straight into the spam or junk folder. Words like “cheap” or “sale,” and sometimes even “free,” when placed in the subject line can signal the email is spam and it won’t get through the filter.

5. Educate, don’t sell.

If building relationships requires trust and credibility, then educating – as opposed to selling – is a big enabler of professional services relationships.

And the most effective way to educate is through a consistent flow of thought leadership. By definition, thought leadership marketing makes your expertise highly visible to the public. Regardless of whether your experts are publishing on your blog, in other publications, on social media, or elsewhere, their association with your firm makes you more visible to potential leads. The depth of content required to build your profile as a high visibility expert means that potential buyers have the opportunity to learn a lot about your firm before making initial contact.

This level of visibility and expertise increases the trust and credibility of your firm. Think of it this way: there’s a reason that popular brands at a grocery store sell better than store brands, despite typically coming with a higher price tag. People trust what they know.

In your experience, what are some other ways of building business relationships in the professional services?

The post 5 Keys to Building Business Relationships 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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