Does this sound like your firm? If so, you’re not alone. But social media isn’t a flash in the pan – it’s a key ingredient in your larger online marketing recipe, helping other online marketing techniques work as effectively as possible while boosting your firm’s reputation and visibility. Social media isn’t a fad, it’s not going away, and firms that still fail to take advantage of it will continue to fall behind the competition.

Why is social media so important? Below, we’ve collected the top ten benefits of using social media marketing for business.

1. Social media is the online version of networking.

If you’re trying to wrap your head around what exactly social media is (or what role it might play for your business) you can think of it as a tool for taking traditional networking to the online realm.

Make no mistake, traditional networking through trade shows, conferences, and other events is still important. But the continued rise of social media creates a new way to connect with other professionals and influential figures in your industry. When used successfully, networking through social media can achieve many of the same business goals as in-person networking – but without the restrictions of schedule, geography, or expensive travel arrangements.

By finding the social media hubs where your clients and prospects congregate, you can connect efficiently with your target audiences on a more personal level and carry on real-time (or near-real-time) conversations. In the professional services world, LinkedIn is the most common place to find social media communities and conversations around your industry.

2. Buyers are turning to social media to check out firms before purchasing.

Across the professional services industries, we’ve seen a paradigm shift in the way buyers learn about potential service providers. Buyers have turned decisively toward online sources of information, including social media. 

Your prospective buyers are on social media. And more and more providers are there too. In order to remain competitive, it’s important to go where your buyers are looking. In this case, that means social media.

3. Social media helps you develop your reputation as a Visible Expert^®.

High-visibility experts are changing the way professional services firms go to market, leveraging their personal brands to boost the reputation and visibility of their firms. Our most recent research has shown that these industry leaders deliver a wide range of benefits to their firms, spurring growth, business development, and brand building while raising billing rates and lead generation.

With the power of Visible Experts made plain, the question becomes: How can you grow your own reputation as a Visible Expert, or develop high-visibility experts within your firm? Our research found that social media was a key marketing tool used by Visible Experts to build their personal brands.

4. Social media helps your firm monitor its brand awareness.

Social media isn’t just a platform for connection – it’s also a valuable tool for gathering data. Specifically, social media can offer a powerful way to track your brand awareness online.

This monitoring capability takes a number of different forms. You can track conversation about your firm to see what others are saying about you, and how those sentiments change over time. Social “listening” tools can simplify this process, alerting you to mentions of your firm and even allowing you to compare your own social profile to that of your competitors.

You can also evaluate the effectiveness of the content you’re sharing by analyzing the frequency with which people share or respond to it. Similarly, you can track the expansion of your reach online by your number of followers, fans, and contacts.

5. Social media can help you deliver your content to a wide audience.

Social media is an easy and cheap way to promote your firm’s educational content to a large audience. You might link to a webinar on Twitter or share an insightful blog post on LinkedIn. 

This is an important role that social media plays in a wider content marketing strategy – helping to get the word out. Social media is one vehicle by which new audiences may arrive at your content. If you create something that really helps people in your target audience, they’ll share it with their own friends and colleagues – and help attract new visitors to your content.

However, make sure to balance self-promotion (“Read our new blog post!”) with promotion of others – sharing relevant and educational content from other industry players. On social media, you should observe what is called the “80/20 rule”: 80% of your activity is engagement with others’ content, and 20% is promoting your own content.

6. Social media drives traffic to your firm’s website – and helps increase conversions.

This point builds on the last. Social media can be a significant source of traffic to a firm’s website. Sometimes, new visitors will discover you through your content promotion. Sometimes, they will notice that you are participating in industry conversations – perhaps on a LinkedIn Group or industry Twitter hashtag.

Many of these visitors will already have a sense of you as a firm, based on what they’ve learned on social media about how you think and what you have to say. (Remember how buyers check you out on social media?) This is one reason why traffic from social media can help boost conversions and grow your email list. Social media gives your audience a way to get to know you and then access the rest of your online presence.

7. Social media influences SEO.

It’s likely that social media can actually impact your firm’s rankings in online search results in a variety of ways. Although social media isn’t a known factor in Google’s algorithm, the consensus is that social media contributes to rankings by way of “link potential.”

By sharing your content with a wide audience through social media, you create more opportunities for people in your industry to link to and engage with your content. Links and engagement are two factors that contribute to your site’s visibility in search – social media helps give these and other factors a boost by connecting more people with your content and signaling to Google that your content is relevant.

8. Social media can be used to conduct research.

Social media gives you a wealth of data on your competitors, prospects, potential partners, job candidates, industry trends, and more. That makes it a great platform for marketplace research.

You can check out profiles of both individual professionals and other firms to get a better understanding for their particular expertise, reputation, visibility, reach, and personality. This is a valuable resource when assessing the competition or evaluating potential business opportunities.

To keep up with industry news, you can see what’s trending on social media, follow major influencers in your industry, and keep up with relevant LinkedIn Groups or hashtags. Today, these are the places where many major industry conversations start.

9. Social media showcases your firm’s culture.

Social media gives clients, prospects, professional partners, and potential job candidates a picture of your firm’s culture – through the tone you use, the topics you discuss, and the ways you interact with others in your industry. This is an important way that today’s professionals “get to know” a firm: social media is an opportunity to project who you are what makes you unique.

There are a number of ways to share your culture on social media. You can share video, pictures, and other multimedia to introduce audiences to your team in a more personal, “face-to-face” way. Facebook and Instagram are good avenues for a slightly more relaxed picture of life at your firm – you can show audiences what it’s like “behind the scenes,” highlighting firm social events or professional development activities.

10. Social media can be a useful recruiting tool.

It’s not hard to imagine how sharing your culture might help attract job candidates to your firm. But social media can also help you vet candidates. LinkedIn is particularly useful in this regard, with a Jobs section where your firm can post job openings to reach the right candidates. LinkedIn also gives you a useful way to see recommendations from an individual’s past colleagues and contacts, as well as endorsements of their various skills and a timeline of their work.

Conclusion

Social media is so much more than a megaphone for your message – though it is certainly that, as well. Used effectively, social media can be a platform for gathering key data, bringing in better job candidates, and optimizing your content marketing program. As buyers and other industry audiences increasingly look to social media for information about firms, it grows increasingly vital that professional services providers adopt social media and integrate it closely into their online marketing efforts.

For more insights on social media for professional services firms, check out our free Social Media Guide.

The post The Top 10 Benefits of Using Social Media Marketing for Business appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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.

Now in its eighth edition, the 2023 High Growth Study: Accounting & Financial Services Edition provides much needed insights into the best path forward. The research separates key traits of the fastest growing and most profitable firms from their “low and slow” counterparts—the ones who despite their best efforts, continue to suffer from low visibility and slow growth. In examining the characteristics of what High Growth firms are doing differently, we uncover 4 key advantages in how they use technology to drive growth, the evolving role that marketing plays in those organizations, seismic shifts in how culture is being used to attract and retain professionals, and strategies most likely to make a positive impact.

For many firms, this year is a chance to build a new foundation, putting in place the marketing systems and procedures that will drive success in 2023 and beyond.

About the Study

Every year, the Hinge Research Institute conducts a study of professional services firms to identify emerging trends and determine what the fastest growing, most profitable firms do differently. This year’s study is comprised of more than 700 participants across six industry groups with 145 respondents representing accounting & financial services. Full research reports are available for each of the industries. (Use the discount code, GROW50, and save 50% on a report purchase.)

Most of the accounting & financial services respondents were from the United States but there was representation from around the world.

Meet the High Growth Firms

What exactly is a High Growth firm? We define High Growth firms as those with a minimum of 20% compound annual growth rate over a three-year evaluation period. When we compare these firms to those that experienced little or no growth over the same time frame, we are able to identify strategies and practices that are associated with faster and more profitable growth.

This year, just under a third of the accounting & financial services firms that participated in the study were categorized as High Growth firms experiencing a median growth rate of 30%, in contrast with 10% for Average Growth firms and slightly negative growth for the No Growth firms.

High Growth firms aren’t sacrificing profitability. In fact, High Growth accounting & financial services firms earned a median profit of 26%. By contrast, their No Growth peers produced a profit of 12%. High Growth firms are more than twice as profitable.

What is driving the success of these firms in such a competitive and unpredictable marketplace? Research has identified key advantages in four key areas:

KEY ADVANTAGE 1: TECHNOLOGY

High Growth firms make greater use of marketing and business development technologies. Some of the more noticeable gaps that appeared in the research between the High Growth and No Growth firms were in the areas of CRM, communications, project management, and knowledge management. Of the more than a dozen categories in the study, High Growth firms excelled in all but one … HR management.

At its core, technology enables firms to make better data-driven decisions to accelerate growth. Shockingly, one-third of No Growth firms do not track or report on any business development or marketing metrics.

KEY ADVANTAGE 2: TALENT

Employees at High Growth firms tend to be more satisfied with their company’s culture. It’s no secret that attracting and retaining talent will continue to be a challenge. Firms need to take a fresh look at how they define and implement company culture if they hope to increase employee satisfaction, boost productivity, reduce turnover rates, and earn the distinction of a truly great place to work.

High Growth firms have also found an advantage in filling the gap with the use of outside agencies, firms, and freelancers for nearly all services.

Outsourcing gives businesses access to specific skills on an as-needed basis, while avoiding the cost and commitment of hiring full-time employees. Adopting a hybrid approach provides another very distinct advantage of having access to technologically advanced teams they normally might not—one that helps them stay at the forefront of innovation.

KEY ADVANTAGE 3: MARKETING AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

High Growth firms are spending more on marketing—and the top priority by far is content creation… with brand differentiation, marketing automation and SEO following close behind in the list of top marketing priorities. Ultimately, High Growth firms are generating a greater portion of leads from digital sources than the No Growth firms. But are they doing enough when you compare that to other industries in the study? The accounting & financial services industry actually generates fewer digital leads than any other industry. In comparison, technology & software firms generate 56% more digital leads than accounting & finance firms. While the High Growth firms are doing well, there is still more opportunity in how digital techniques are being leveraged.

Another noteworthy trend is the non-traditional characteristics that make up marketing teams. No longer limited to communication and implementation tasks, the marketing function now plays a crucial role in High Growth firms’ strategy, lead generation processes, and data analysis.

KEY ADVANTAGE 4: STRATEGY

Take a look at the top 5 concerns on the list of anticipated business challenges in the next 3-5 years. While both groups are very concerned about unpredictability in the marketplace, High Growth firms were also worried about addressing the need for new skills and changes in buyer behavior. No Growth firms’ top concern was a shortage of top talent.

Firms should remain agile and be prepared to adjust from either proactive or reactive stance. With the marketplace’s continued instability, it is more important than ever to be flexible. By conducting regular research to monitor marketplace changes and validate their understanding, firms can speed up decision-making and make rapid adjustments if necessary.

We Live in an Age of Uncertainty—and an Age of Opportunity

If business concerns are keeping you up at night, you’re not alone. Uncertainty is the number one challenge facing professional services firms today. And sadly, the somber season isn’t over quite yet. From these key advantages identified in the research, one thing is clear: Navigating through these challenges requires the ability to measure and quantify your technology, your culture, and your marketing efforts from multiple perspectives to identify where the greatest opportunities exist.

Embrace new thinking and champion new priorities. You can start by purchasing the High Growth Study 2023: Accounting & Financial Services Edition report that this article is based upon. Learn more about the technology, talent, marketing and business development, and strategy advantages that the High Growth firms have. Get findings, insights, and tips that you can apply immediately. The High Growth firms in this research found ways to work around uncertainty—and grow. You can too. (Remember to use the discount code, GROW50, to save 50% on your research report purchase.)

The post Navigating Uncertainty: Four Key Strategies for Financial Firms to Thrive in 2023 and Beyond 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.

With the arrival of AI tools like ChatGPT and its competitors, generic content will be increasingly less impressionable—and professional services marketers are going to be challenged more than ever to differentiate their firm’s brand as a service provider and employer.

For years now, professionals have been inundated with an overwhelming amount of unsolicited and unhelpful content. From unrelenting sales pitches filling up email inboxes to random weekly LinkedIn connection requests, the average professional is constantly bombarded with content they have no interest in. However, the situation is only intensifying as these AI tools become more prominently used by marketers.

Here’s the concern for professional services marketers… the pretenders are coming. With the barriers to entry for basic content creation lowered, it is easier for individuals and businesses to portray themselves as qualified service providers, even if they lack the necessary experience and capabilities. This situation rewards those who are larger and louder while possibly putting true experts who are more qualified at risk of being overlooked—and none of us can afford to be overlooked.

Tools like ChatGPT, and those who will inevitably misuse them, are here to stay—so all of us need to at least understand them, and perhaps even use them for our benefit. In the hands of competent experts and content marketers, they present an excellent opportunity to accelerate marketing programs and streamline time-consuming workflows. But there are risks too!

So what should be our top content marketing considerations as we move forward into this new era of AI tools? In this article, we will reflect on these tools’ risks and rewards and outline some strategies to make sure your business stays competitive in this brave new world. Let’s begin by identifying some of the risks associated with these tools.

Risks of Using ChatGPT in Professional Services

There’s no denying the power of ChatGPT can provide marketers for the kinds of work they do day-in and day-out for their businesses. Need to generate some quick social media copy? No problem. Want it to completely rewrite an older blog post? Just plug and play. The simple use cases are endless—not to mention the more advanced automation integrations that are rapidly being introduced to the marketplace.

We recommend taking a good look at your marketing system and identify any places that ChatGPT might simplify or streamline your workflow. Just keep in mind that AI is still far from perfect and comes with real risks. Let’s consider two of them.

Lack of Originality and Depth

The highway to mediocrity is wide—and it just got an express lane.

ChatGPT can generate a lot of content quickly, but since it is trained on an existing body of content, it could produce results that lack originality, personality, and creativity. And the longer your content, the more likely you’ll encounter these issues.

As AI-generated content continues to become more prevalent in our daily lives, readers are likely to be less interested in content that lacks an original perspective or style. Users themselves will have access to these tools, so they’ll have little patience for basic AI-generated content when they’re expecting something more fulsome. If they want a simple answer, they’ll use the tool themselves.

Of course, this won’t stop (and indeed, has not stopped) many from attempting to game the system by pumping out as much AI-generated content as they can on their websites or social media channels. Some will even masquerade as authorities on topics they know little about.

To stand out from all this noise, experts will need to focus on the “leadership” part in thought leadership content. People will gravitate toward those who have unique points of view and are pushing their industries forward. They will look for experts who communicate in a way that authentically represents their perspective as an expert. Marketing teams or experts who rely solely on content from AI-generated output will be left behind.

Inaccurate or Inconsistent Information

Another criticism of ChatGPT is its occasional tendency to deliver inaccurate information. Publishing false information can pose a serious risk for a brand’s reputation. And the risks are particularly acute in the professional services where reputations are built upon trust.

Author and entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa brought this shortcoming of ChatGPT to life in a recent article. Wadhwa asked his son to use ChatGPT to search for “interesting details about [him] and his family.” While the output seemed credible it included troubling inaccuracies, the most staggering being that he was married to a woman named Ritu, an executive at Microsoft. In reality, not only had Wadhwa never met this woman before, his real wife Tavinder had lost her battle to cancer three years before.

Wadhwa and his son repeated the experiment a number of times and continued to get different inaccurate results, including another false marriage report. Wadha reflected, “[Deep learning systems] are often referred to as a ‘black box,’ meaning that the processes and reasoning behind their outputs are not transparent or easily understood. Once a neural network is trained, not even its designer knows exactly how it is doing what it does. This makes it difficult to reverse engineer or understand how the AI system learned what it did.” While ChatGPT can be a valuable tool for coming up with ideas and even producing content, be prepared to fact check its results.

It is worth considering that AI tools’ accuracy will improve quickly, much like the chess-bots that made headlines in the past. At the same time, the law is trying to catch up. Legal cases are exploring the strange new world of copyright protection for content that involves AI, and where such hybrid work crosses a line. AI is one of the harbingers of the fourth industrial revolution, so we can expect many behavioral and institutional disruptions in the coming years.

Professional Services Marketing Strategies for the ChatGPT World

The risks of relying on AI tools are real. But their potential to dramatically improve your marketing efficiency can’t be ignored. We need to consider how these tools will transform the practice of marketing professional services and set some strategies to guide us forward.

Here we propose four strategies that professional services marketers should follow as we continue to step into an AI-saturated marketplace.

1. Thought Leadership is King Now

Just creating a large amount of content won’t cut it anymore… Anyone can do it now. What will matter moving forward is how you position yourself as a thought leader.

At Hinge we’ve coined the term for thought leaders who are visible for their subject matter expertise—Visible Experts^®. We define a Visible Expert as a firm or individual who has attained high visibility and a reputation for expertise in their industry niche. While Visible Experts come from many backgrounds and specializations, at the core of their professional life is a body of knowledge and a perspective that makes them stand out as subject matter experts. And it just so happens that professional services buyers value working with these experts the most.

In the latest edition of Hinge’s research on the changing behavior of professional services buyers, Inside the Buyer’s Brain, we saw that buyers continue to value subject matter expertise and industry knowledge above all other things when they evaluate a potential service provider.

What does this mean for professional services marketers? Well, it means we need to organize our marketing system in a way that showcases the unique knowledge of an expert. In the past, basic content creation could be serviceable—but now it’s time to take it to the next level of sophistication.

Let’s provide an example of what positioning yourself or your firm’s experts as thought leaders should look like. The classic situation might include an expert who writes blog posts and articles for industry publications, has a couple speaking engagements per year, and is a key team member delivering value to your clients. How might you position this expert on your firm’s website?

When Hinge builds websites for our clients, we recommend a strong cross linking strategy between experts and the thought leadership content they produce. Here’s what that looks like:

Blog posts should include the following:

• Blog posts are clearly attributed to the expert
• Users can easily navigate to the author’s expert bio page
• Users can easily find a way to read more by the author

Experts’ bio pages can include the following:

• Professional photography
• A bio that showcases their expertise and experience with the organization
• Links to completed projects/case stories they are responsible for
• Links to services they deliver for the organization
• Links to thought leadership content they’ve produced
• List of certification and awards they’ve received
• Videos of them speaking

Do you see the possibilities? Experts who are positioned as thought leaders will be the ones most likely to break through in the future.

A full Visible Expert strategy extends beyond your website and blog. It includes a strategy that takes into account each expert’s industry, niche, and skill set. Professional services marketers of the future will need to develop the right approach and strategy to help increase the visibility of their experts.

2. Differentiation Will Matter More Than Ever

There are two factors at play in the marketplace today. First, is the rise of more and more competitors engaging in an increased volume of content marketing. Second, is the fact that larger firms are engaging in mergers and acquisitions at record rates. How do we address these factors? With clear differentiators and a strong brand positioning.

Can you answer the following questions?

• Does your business or service line focus on a specific target market?
• Does your messaging clarify how you’re different from your competitors?
• Does your business development team have prepared responses to critical questions?
• Does the aesthetic of your brand reinforce or detract from your positioning?

In an AI-saturated world, it will be more important than ever to set your business apart from your competitors in a way that builds preference for you among your target audience. Are your key messages relevant to your buyers? Are they true? Do you have proof points to support them? Strengthening your brand positioning can make a huge difference.

Not convinced? Well the fastest growing firms in your industry are. When we surveyed hundreds of professional services leaders and marketers at the end of last year, the best performing firms identified content creation and brand differentiation as their top priorities in 2023. Now is the time to take steps towards differentiating your brand.

Another way to improve brand differentiation is to develop a visual identity that both supports your firm’s positioning and differentiators and takes a different direction from your competitors. And look out for cognitive dissonance. There’s nothing more confusing than brands that use words like “innovative” on their out-of-date websites and marketing collateral. Your marketing materials should present your brand in the very best light.

Your brand design can make an impact on the way your business is perceived by your buyers and potential job recruits. A modern, well-designed website, logo, and marketing materials can create an immediate impression that your business as a professional and reputable brand.

3. Less Content, Higher-Quality Campaigns

When searching for answers to their top business challenges, your buyers can struggle to find the clearly articulated, specific information they are looking for. Expert thought leadership delivered as part of a content marketing program can address this need.

In fact, the need for high-quality content has never been greater. However, with so much noise in the marketplace, it can be challenging for marketers to create content that stands out.

One effective solution is to incorporate research-based content into your marketing strategy. Research adds empirical evidence and credibility to your insights and advice. And many buyers are looking for exactly this kind of fact-based information. In addition, since most of your competitors do not use research in their content, it provides yet another way to differentiate your firm’s expertise.

In the image above, you can see how a large, high-quality piece of content like a research report can be repurposed into a number of pieces of marketing collateral. It can be part of an interconnected campaign that can be integrated into many areas of your marketing strategy. These signature pieces of content open up a lot of marketing possibilities for your team and experts.

4. Humanize Your Brand with an Integrated Marketing Strategy

AI and content aren’t the be-all end-all. You can include real-world experiences into your integrated marketing strategy to stand out from automated fodder.

This means leveraging techniques that humanize your firm and experts. These additional techniques should be integrated with the primary cross-channel goals of your firm’s go-to-market strategy. We have five recommendations here:

Speak and network at in-person events

In-person events are back! Attending events allows you to connect with your target audience on a more personal level and build relationships. Prioritize events where you have an opportunity to speak or where your business is operating campaigns like sponsorships and partnerships. If you struggle to find and secure speaking engagements, you may want to work with a public relations specialist.

Write for recognizable publications

Reach a wider audience by contributing thought leadership articles to publications read by your target clients. By writing for outside publications, you increase the credibility of your expertise and demonstrate to your network that you are in demand as an expert. Again, you may want to consider working with a PR specialist with a track record of pitching articles to top publications.

Pursue awards and certifications

Businesses and experts can differentiate themselves from their competitors when they achieve awards and certifications that demonstrate their commitment to excellence. By showcasing their achievements, firms can increase their credibility and visibility within their industry.

Publishing social media videos

Sharing your thought leadership using video on LinkedIn can be very effective for several reasons. To start, video is more engaging and captures the attention of your audience more effectively than text or image posts alone. Videos of you speaking on a helpful topic can convey your message more effectively and increase the chances that your audience will engage with your content.

Feature detailed case stories and projects

Storytelling is an essential part of what it means to be human. Case stories and project summaries provide the real-world impact of your work and help you further differentiate your business. Making these stories accessible on your website and well-organized for use by your business development and marketing teams is essential. Don’t make it difficult for your audience or internal team to understand the impact of your work.

Final thoughts

ChatGPT and its ilk introduce new opportunities and challenges for professional services marketers. These technologies will not replace conventional content marketing but they are likely to increase the level of noise that is coming from competitors and pretenders. Mediocre doesn’t cut it anymore. You need to be great, not good.

The journey from good to great begins with differentiating your brand and positioning your firm’s experts as thought leaders. Of course, these are no easy tasks. You need to be strategic, grounded in a solid understanding of your audience, and equipped with the right marketing tools and resources.

Our recommended approach of an integrated marketing strategy may require more resources than your firm is currently able to handle in-house. In our decade-long research of high-growth professional services firms, we’ve learned that these high-performers outsource the critical services they can’t handle themselves. If your firm’s differentiation, brand or content marketing don’t meet the highest standards, it might be time to look for a partner like Hinge who knows your industry to take your business to a new level of sophistication and visibility.

(Featured image created by Austin using Midjourney)

The post The Pretenders are Coming: How ChatGPT Will Transform Professional Services Marketing appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

If you could light a Bunsen burner under a great brand and distill it down to its most basic substance, you’d be left with the brand’s most valuable asset — its name. Even after other critical elements have evaporated away, a brand’s name still packs a punch. If American Express, IBM, or Coca-Cola were to shut down their businesses today (assuming nothing had tainted their reputations), these brands could be revived a few years from now and still be formidable contenders in their categories. Such is the power of the brand name.

More and more professional services companies are recognizing that their firm name can help them stand out in a competitive environment and contribute to long-term customer loyalty. Over the past five decades a whole industry has emerged to help entrepreneurs and corporations name their businesses and products. Larger naming firms employ linguists and proprietary computer programs to develop hundreds or thousands of potential names and name fragments (called morphemes). Smaller firms rely on their experience, wit, and brainstorming techniques to produce options for their clients. Both approaches can produce excellent names. And very poor names, too.

In this post, we take a closer look at firm names — the good and the bad. Names can be broken into five categories:

1. Coined
2. Descriptive
3. Abstract
4. Acronyms
5. Founder/Partner names

Let’s dive into each.

Free Resource

The Rebranding Guide for Professional Services Firms

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1. Coined Names

A few years ago, names coined from Greek and Latin roots were all the rage, and they still pop up with some regularity today. From Accenture to Zillow, coined names are imbued with latent meaning and are easy to trademark. Trouble is, these names have little meaning to ordinary people who are unfamiliar with classical languages — and they can sometimes be bland and hard to remember. ArcelorMittal and Amedisys don’t exactly roll of the tongue, do they?

2. Descriptive Names

Many names are descriptive of their services. Computer Associates, General Mills, Pre-Paid Legal Services are examples of business whose names reflect what they do. On the upside, people will understand what these businesses do. On the downside, these names can be very generic, making them difficult to trademark. Generic names tend to make poor long-term brand names because they have little traction in our minds. And as companies evolve, these names don’t offer much flexibility.

3. Abstract Names

Other names are pure abstractions, like Amazon, Alphabet, Google, and Karhoo. While many of these are real words, they have little obvious connection to their businesses. Their value comes from their quirkiness, not their connotations. What these abstract names lack in seriousness they more than make up for in the attention they command. They are difficult to forget. There is a danger with these names, however — they have the potential to be perceived as unprofessional, eccentric, or silly.

4. Acronyms

Another popular choice are acronyms — IBM, CVS, and CBS are well-known examples. In almost every case, the name started as something else (a string of founders’ names or a descriptive name) and became condensed over time. Clients, for instance, have a knack for abbreviating long vendor names. The problems with acronyms, however, are legion: they are usually impossible to trademark, they have no meaning or emotional appeal, and they are easily transposed and confused with similar-sounding company names.

5. Founders’ or Partners’ Names

Many companies, particularly in the professional services, are named for their founders or partners (and in larger firms, these names can be a real mouthful). This tradition, which goes back for centuries, makes sense in an industry in which personal connections are all-important. The long-term implications, however, can be problematic. When a named principal dies or leaves the firm, those personal connections are lost. In many cases, as these companies evolve over time, so do their names — as new partners replace old. These transformations can create confusion in the marketplace and makes it difficult to establish a widely known brand name.

This tradition of naming companies for their principals is unlikely to go away any time soon. But firms with an eye to the future may want to choose a name with better long-term branding prospects — one that is short, differentiated from competitors, and unlikely to metamorphose over time. You could select a single distinctive-sounding founder’s name, for instance, and stick with it for the long haul.

Choosing a Good Firm Name

Most experts agree that choosing a good name is important. A name encapsulates all of the content — intellectual and emotional — that people associate with a product or service. Some names make this process of association easier than others. With all of the challenges business owners face, it makes sense to use every advantage at their disposal.

So what’s the right name for your firm? Well, that depends on a variety of factors. Unless you are a startup, your current name carries at least some — and perhaps considerable — equity from its years of use. Adopting a new name at an established firm is no small decision.

But if you are in a highly competitive market with little differentiation among firms, a distinctive name could give you a leg up. In fact, there are a number of reasons you might want to break with the past and introduce a new firm name:

• Your name is easily confused with a competitor
• Your name is difficult to remember, spell, or pronounce
• You are looking for a way to differentiate your firm
• Your name or brand feels stale and old
• Named partners have retired or left the firm
• Your firm is trying to recover from a PR disaster
• You are undergoing a major rebrand or shift in strategic direction

If are considering a new moniker for your organization, you’ll want to choose one that will stand the test of time. Remember, your name has a great deal of potential. It’s an opportunity to establish new associations and expectations as your firm takes on the future.

6 Ways Your Name Can Build Your Brand

1. Differentiate you; contrast you against competitors
2. Aid recall of your brand name
3. Engage your audience
4. Support your positioning
5. Establish your business’ personality
6. Stand for something more universal than your product or service

Read Other Posts in This Series:

• Elements of a Successful Brand 1: Brand Positioning
• Elements of a Successful Brand 2: The Tagline
• Elements of a Successful Brand 3: Personality
• Elements of a Successful Brand 4: Brand Promise
• Elements of a Successful Brand 5: The Name
• Elements of a Successful Brand 6: The Logo
• Elements of a Successful Brand 7: Color
• Elements of a Successful Brand 8: Messaging
• Elements of a Successful Brand 9: Imagery

Free Resource

The Rebranding Guide for Professional Services Firms

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Like all good marketing initiatives, brand tracking should start with a fundamental understanding of your buyers. Our research shows that, while asking a friend or colleague for a recommendation remains—barely—the top way businesses search for a new professional services firm, this approach is being overtaken by digital methods such as web search, and reading online articles/blog posts.

As digital communications continue their steady rise in prominence, it’s imperative to understand how your target audience searches for insights and expertise to address their business problems.

Brand Tracking Tools

Once you understand your buyers’ search channels you can choose the appropriate tools to monitor your brand.

Today, tracking your professional services firm’s online brand is more important than ever. And while the latest marketing technology can often be overwhelming, marketing professionals may already have many of the tools they need to track their digital brand over time.

What is Brand Tracking?

Brand tracking is the process of measuring changes in brand perception over time. It quantifies a return on brand investment and supports brand strategy decisions.

With enough data and the right tools, you can measure this perception almost instantly. For example, consumer brands with large social followings can track their brands in real-time using social listening tools to measure what is being said about their brand, campaign, competitors, and product or service. Unfortunately, most professional services firms don’t have a large enough social following to make this kind of real-time brand tracking practical.

But that doesn’t mean professional services firms can’t utilize brand tracking.

Brand tracking in the B2B space boils down to two main approaches:

1. Gathering/monitoring experiential feedback
2. Surveying your buyers

Both approaches are critically important. Firms that deploy both of these techniques are far more likely to achieve superior results from their brand tracking efforts.

Gathering and Monitoring Experiential Feedback

Capturing the right information at the right time is essential to a successful inbound marketing strategy — and it’s equally important in brand tracking. In-the-moment experiential feedback allows you to take the pulse of your brand. 

By understanding your buyers’ search channels (see chart above) your firm will know which channels you need to monitor for critical experiential feedback.

Brand Tracking Examples

For instance, many professional services firms leverage their website for lead generation. Potential buyers are willing to exchange an email address for premium content — a critical milestone on the buyer’s journey. Measuring content downloads is a good example of operational data that can be tracked over time. But how valuable was the content they downloaded? One way to find out is to send a simple automated follow-up email asking if they found the content useful. Combining these metrics will tell you the quantity of downloads and the quality of the content.

Other methods of collecting experiential feedback include embedding listening posts within your marketing content. For example, you might ask for feedback from your webinar attendees, or put a 1- to 2-question popup survey on your website. Simple techniques like these can help you understand how your buyers view your firm. You can also monitor comments and reactions to digital content, such as blog posts or LinkedIn posts, to gauge audience sentiment toward your brand.

These are just a couple examples of how experiential feedback can be collected at key listening posts along your buyer’s journey. While experiential feedback is a great way to monitor buyer engagement with your brand, it doesn’t always paint the full picture. To get a more holistic understanding of how buyers view your brand, you’ll need to conduct a brand tracking survey.

Surveying Your Buyers

Do you have a solid understanding of how your buyers view your brand today? If you do, then you probably already know what your key performance metrics are. If you don’t, consider conducting a brand survey to establish your firm’s baseline performance. Once your brand baseline is established, your firm will have a great starting point to track brand performance over time.

Only by understanding how buyers see you — your strengths and weaknesses — can you know where to focus your attention. This is where a  brand survey of your audience comes in handy. The data you gather allows your firm to establish powerful baseline metrics such as:

• Visibility/Awareness – How visible is your firm in the marketplace?
• Consideration – Would your prospects consider using your services?
• Relevancy – How relevant are your services to clients?
• Value – How valuable are the services you provide?
• Delivery – How well do you do what you say you will do?
• Loyalty – How likely are your clients to work with you in the future?
• Referrals – Have your clients referred your firm?
• Reputation – How good is your reputation in the marketplace?
• Visibility – How visible is your firm in the marketplace?

Quantitative vs. Qualitative Tracking

To accurately track your brand performance using a brand survey, you will need to ask a mix of quantitative and qualitative questions. Quantitative questions, such as likelihood to refer (NPS) or level of client satisfaction, are asked on a numeric scale and can be averaged across participants. These types of questions are easy to track over time by comparing the delta in averages across multiple brand surveys.

Open-ended (qualitative) questions are also important to include in brand surveys, but they are often more difficult to track. One way to quantify open-ended questions is to categorize the responses into categories or common themes. You then can measure the percentage of participants who mention these common themes, and monitor the changes in those percentages over time.

Tracking Your Competitors

Brand surveys can also be used to keep an eye on the competition. Within the survey you can ask respondents to list all firms they identify as a competitor to your firm. This method demands unaided responses and will likely yield a small number of responses. These are the competitors that are top of mind to your respondents.

You can also use an aided competitor question in which you provide a list of competitors and ask the respondent to select the ones they are aware of. Aided questions are helpful since respondents who are unable to think of a competitor are likely to recognize one or more if the names are in front of them. 

Like the baseline questions about your firm, both aided and unaided brand survey questions can be tracked over time. 

Brand Survey Methods

In B2B brand tracking, there are two main methods of administering a brand survey. The first method is to survey a group of your clients and/or prospects. Typically this is done by emailing a survey link or calling respondents to ask for participation. Using an impartial third party research firm (such as Hinge) for these types of brand studies usually delivers greater survey participation and more insightful, unbiased results. If participation is low, a firm can work with a sample provider to screen and purchase prospects. 

The second common brand survey method is to conduct a post-project survey at the conclusion of an engagement. Post-project surveys are important for understanding your brand perception, and they can also be used to measure firm performance. 

Brand Survey Length and Cadence

Brand surveys, whether standard or post-project, should typically be no more than 10-15 questions in length and last about 5-10 minutes. It’s important to keep these surveys short because respondents are often busy and can become irritated—and less likely to participate in the future—if the survey drones on for too long. 

Standard brand surveys should be administered roughly once a year. In the B2B space, a firm’s client base or prospect list may not be large enough to handle monthly or even biyearly surveys. It’s also important to avoid overburdening your prospects and clients with surveys, as it might negatively affect your brand perception. Lastly, brand tracking surveys can be both timely and expensive. From a financial standpoint alone, it might not be practical to conduct a brand survey multiple times a year.

How to Use Your Brand Tracking Results

Have you maintained your strengths? Are you addressing your challenges? What changes should you make to your brand strategy? By measuring key performance metrics, brand tracking tools can inform the answers to tough questions like these before it’s too late. 

To compete in today’s fast-changing marketplace, you need to continually take the pulse of your target audience. Only knowledge will equip you with the information you need to stay relevant in their minds. Brand tracking gives you essential tools to collect and make sense of these changes. It also offers a powerful way to quantify the return on your firm’s marketing investment.

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But one question that many leaders and marketers have is exactly how much they should spend on a modern, high performance website.

Of course, the cost of redeveloping a website can vary for several reasons. The scope of the project, the features you want, and the goals you want to achieve will impact the overall investment. A basic website with minimal features will cost less than a complex website with advanced features such as custom integrations, custom mapping or filtering, and high-end design elements. Also, using pre-developed templates can save a great deal of money, though they may come with performance tradeoffs such as customization, less relevant user experience and brand differentiation.

Also the experience and expertise of your website design and development partner can impact the cost. Working with top-tier designers, industry experts, and developers will usually cost more, but they are also more likely to produce a higher quality end product and positive business impact.

So how much should you plan to spend when developing your next B2B website?

In this article, we aim to cover all the factors that can affect the cost of developing your next website and the top considerations you should acknowledge as you begin the planning process. But first let’s consider some of the reasons decision makers hesitate to invest in a new website.

Why Leaders Hesitate to Invest in a New Website

For most businesses, a new website is a big decision with major financial implications—and there are several concerns that business leaders might have when considering redeveloping their website.

One concern we hear all the time is how a new website may become outdated quickly and how the cost of regular updates and maintenance can quickly add up. Many business leaders and marketers have horror stories from working with the wrong website design partner who set them up on a difficult content management system (CMS) platform. So it’s reasonable to worry that a new website could cause too many new headaches or become outdated too quickly.

There also might be hesitation regarding the time and resources required to plan, design, build, and launch a new website. The website design process can be long, and leaders may worry about the impact that a website redevelopment may have on their day-to-day operations, particularly if they have a limited in-house marketing team. This is particularly true for larger businesses with many different stakeholders, business lines, and sub-brands that want to be involved in the process.

And of course cost is often a primary factor in any decision-making process. Creating a high-performance website that meaningfully differentiates your brand comes at a cost. This is why it’s important to understand the expected outcomes of the website redesign. What are your business objectives and how can a new website deliver a worthy return on investment?

To overcome these hesitations and be able to decide how much to spend on a new website, you need to consider your desired return on investment. Let’s explore this topic next.

10 Ways a High-Performance Website Generates ROI

Any business leader and marketing team looking to invest in a new website will surely be thinking in terms of return on investment (ROI). High-performance websites can be big investments so it’s essential to understand how your website’s performance fits into your business goals and marketing plan.

Below are 10 ways business leaders can expect ROI on a high performance website:

1. Improved user experience (UX): A new website with a modern design and user-friendly interface can greatly enhance the user experience for customers, leading to increased engagement and conversions. Improved UX design will keep your audiences on your website longer and create a more memorable experience.
2. Increased credibility: A professional, well-designed website can improve the credibility of a business in the eyes of potential buyers or job candidates. Differentiated design and messaging can provide website visitors with a positive impression of your brand and help you stand out from your competitors.
3. Better search engine visibility: A new website built with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind can help a business rank higher in search results, leading to increased organic traffic and visibility. Not all website design partners can provide this service though. So it’s important to work with a partner who can assess your current SEO strengths and weaknesses and outline a path for improvement.

Moreover, a website built with a strong SEO foundation and methodology will be able to respond and stay ahead of the constant changes driven by Google and any other platforms relevant to your audiences.

4. Mobile responsiveness: With the increasing use of mobile devices, it is crucial for a website to be mobile-friendly and responsive to different screen sizes. A new website can be built with this functionality baked in, helping you reach and engage a wider audience. If your website hasn’t been updated in more than 5 years, it’s quite possible that it doesn’t meet today’s standards for mobile responsiveness.
5. Better content management: Nothing can spoil digital marketing efforts like a bad content management system (CMS). A website built with a robust CMS can make it easier for businesses to manage their website content and make updates in real-time without always having to go through a website developer for support.
6. Improved lead generation: A new website with features like contact forms, landing pages, and conversion pages can help a business capture and nurture leads. For B2B and professional services firms, this is often an underutilized aspect of how their website can support their marketing efforts.
7. Increased awareness of services: A strategically designed website can help a business build brand awareness in a way that communicates its value proposition and makes it easy for users to understand the range of services the business offers. Design emphasis on content organization will help guide users to the most important information sooner.
8. Better conversion rates: A new website optimized for conversions can help a business turn more visitors into paying customers or leads. High performance websites are built to drive all kinds of users towards a conversion even if they are at different stages of the buying process.
9. Improved customer engagement: Features such as live chat and interactive content can help a business engage customers and build relationships with them. Websites that are built with your comprehensive marketing and business development strategy in mind will enhance your customer’s ability to engage directly with you without running the user experience.
10. Competitive advantage: In today’s digital landscape, having a professional, well-designed website can give a business a competitive advantage over rivals that have outdated or poorly designed websites.

With all these positive outcomes in mind, how should you budget for a high performance website?

Planning Your Website Budget

As you begin planning your website budget, there are a number of steps you’ll need to take to ensure your process goes smoothly. We recommend you follow these steps to help get the budget planning process started.

Step 1: Build your internal team and assign your project champions

Redesigning your corporate website inevitably comes with many stakeholders. C-suite executives need to ensure the brand positioning is accurately communicated; marketing and business development team members will want to be sure the new website engages users, drives leads, and integrates with the rest of the marketing system; and human resources will want to make sure that the new website supports recruiting and talent retention efforts. You’ll want to identify the points of contact who will provide feedback on these fronts as the website design process gets started.

Although many may be involved along the way, it’s best that you assign a small group of champions who will carry the website development process forward and take responsibility for working directly with the website developer. You want to avoid a “too many cooks in the kitchen” scenario. So while there may be pressure to include everyone at every stage of the website design process, you’ll get better results if you entrust a small team to go through the process.

Step 2: Assess your current brand positioning and messaging

Websites are the center of your digital marketing and business development efforts. Your buyers not only use your website to find your business and learn more about you, they will return again and again as they consider you as a potential service provider. Therefore it is essential that your brand positioning and messaging is clear and differentiated from your competition. If you have branding challenges, you’ll want to address them BEFORE you start the website design process.

Brand challenges arise in many different ways. From mergers and acquisitions to generational changes in leadership, it is common for professional services firms to reevaluate their brand positioning regularly. As the marketplace evolves, it’s natural that brand messaging and design elements grow outdated.

Do your key messages still resonate with your buyers? Is it time to update your logo? Is your color palette too one dimensional or undifferentiated? Businesses with more outdated messaging and brand elements may need to consider working with website designers who also specialize in positioning and rebranding. These services will add to the budget, so plan accordingly.

Step 3: Define your website goals

Once you have established the overall needs of your brand, you can look back at the list of high performance website benefits. What areas do you need to prioritize? Some of the more common items include the following:

• Improving the visual representation of your brand
• Improving brand integrity with unified positioning and messaging
• Increasing your visibility in search engines
• Improving the user experience
• Increasing lead generation
• Improving the functionality and ease of use of your CMS
• Increasing engagement from job candidates

Before approaching a website design partner, you’ll want to document exactly what outcomes you expect to see once your new website is launched and working. Not all website design partners are equipped to handle all your issues. Identifying your goals earlier in the process will help you rule out design partners who are not prepared to help you meet all your goals.

Step 4: Prepare a list of needed website services and desired features

What features will your new site need? And what services will your design and development partner need to bring to the table? There is far more to a high-performance website than its appearance.

Consider what services your team can contribute. For example, how much new copywriting is needed as a part of the redesign process? Is this something your team can do yourself or will you want your website design partner to support?

Some examples of additional services include the following:

• Brand guidelines and design support
• Keyword research and SEO support
• Professional copywriting services
• Technology integration audit and support
• Review of key competitors’ websites

Next are the features that you’d like to see implemented on your website. For example, if you’re an AEC firm, do you want to include an interactive map that shows the locations of your completed projects? Do you need a sophisticated project portfolio? Custom features or artwork can greatly enhance your website’s quality and user experience, but they will come at a cost.

If you’re unsure about the kinds of services and features you’ll need through the website design process, then it’s essential that you work with a partner who can provide you with strategic advisory—grounded in industry understanding—to guide you in the decision making process. Nevertheless, you can always do a little research yourself to see what other top performing firms in your industry do on their websites. Perhaps there is something worth imitating.

Step 5: Begin researching website development partners and soliciting estimates

If you’ve followed these steps so far, you’ll be prepared to start speaking with potential website design and development partners. You will have outlined your team members, the brand assets that need to be updated, your website goals and expected outcomes, and the services and features you want most.

With all of these assets on hand, you can summarize everything in a scope of work statement you can supply to possible partners. At this stage, you’ll be ready to get more accurate estimates for the kind of services you need.

But not all website design and development partners are created equal. Next let’s explore how to select the right partner for your business.

Selecting the Right Website Development Partner

When planning your budget for a new website it is important to spend time evaluating your potential website partners. Choosing the wrong website development partner can be a major risk for professional services and B2B firms, especially those with a more diverse set of service offerings.

Similar to other outsourced industries, website development comes at every price point and level of quality. Many freelancers and website development firms compete aggressively on price. However we would suggest that price not be your only consideration.

Here are a few questions, aside from cost, that you should consider answering when selecting a website design and development partner:

Are they promising a set cost or monthly subscription service?

Many low-cost website developers aren’t transparent about what you get for the quoted cost. While their fee may include design, development and hosting, each of those activities likely includes shortcuts and tradeoffs that won’t be apparent until you are well into the process. Some, such as hosting, may involve performance or security tradeoffs that you will never see until a problem emerges weeks or months after launch. Others, such as using predesigned templates or themes, can make it difficult to differentiate your firm visually.

A low, set cost is usually an indicator that the provider will take a less collaborative and strategic approach during the website design process. For them to remain profitable, they have to take more control in the decision-making process—in turn providing a service that results in less performance and most B2B firms will outgrow the end product quickly. There may be security issues that being hosted in this manner may raise, as well.

We recommend you search for a website partner that provides a base cost and a very specific set of assumptions about what that fee includes. They should also be very transparent about what factors might change the scope and increase costs. This approach is more flexible, and it is more likely to produce a website that aligns with your goals and includes the services and features you need. Moreover, it will take into consideration how much your internal team can contribute to the process when it comes to things like content creation and migration.

In summary, you want to be sure that you work with a website design partner that is more responsive to your specific needs.

Do they understand your industry and your clients?

Not only will the right partner take time to understand your business, goals, and your target audience, they should have a proven understanding of your industry. Have they worked with other firms in your industry? What were the results of those engagements? They should be able to speak your language and understand your unique positioning.

Do they have the right experience and expertise?

Look for a service partner with a proven track record in designing and building B2B websites. The company should have a deep understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities that come with this type of project. Heck, look at their website. Does it reflect the quality you are looking for?

Take the time to look at the other websites in their portfolio. Find examples of the work that are similar to what you aspire to—and if those don’t exist, they might not be the right partner for you.

Also, ask for references and check out the company’s online reputation. Seek out reviews and testimonials to get a better understanding of their work and the results they have delivered for other clients.

Are they strong communicators?

A successful website project requires close collaboration between your team and your design partner. Look for a company that values open and transparent communication and is committed to working with you every step of the way.

While you are assessing them, ask them to specifically outline their plan for communicating with you during the website design process. Will it be at least weekly? Who will be your point of contact? Answering these questions up front can save you a lot of anxiety later.

What is the expected timeline of the website development?

You want to be sure that your website design partner can give you a specific timeline to complete the project. Ask them to provide a roadmap with key milestones for the website development process.

The questions you ask your potential website design partners can ensure that your B2B website project is a success and that your investment delivers the results you need.

The Cost of a High Performance Website

Now that we have considered what goes into the planning process of your new website, let’s turn to what it will cost.

By this point, you understand that there is a lot of planning that goes into the development of a high-performance website. And building it may include more than the base design and development costs. You may need to rethink your brand messaging, explore your audience behaviors, and even redesign your brand identity. In short, many factors can affect cost.

The following estimates are based on our experience building hundreds of high-performance websites and are informed by our understanding of where the website design industry stands today. Below are four general price tiers that cover a range of budgets and expectations.

Under $40,000 – Functional Template Based Site

There are functional websites that website developers can build for you that are not high performance websites. They can be attractive and present your services clearly, but they are often unlikely to include a foundation of research, strategy, and design expertise aimed at generating new leads or contributing much to enhancing your firm’s reputation. In our experience, new websites that are designed for less than $40,000 will not include many strategic elements that maximize the impact of the new website.

Are these websites functional? Probably, yes. But it is unlikely that they will produce additional visibility in search engines, provide a relevant and engaging user experience to your most important audiences, or showcase attractive calls to action that prompt users to contact you.

Websites designed for less than $40,000 are likely to use inflexible templates or themes that have been used again and again for many firms in your industry—limiting your ability to differentiate your brand and or deliver website features that support your marketing program.

$40,000-$80,000 – High-Performance Website

When you begin working with website design and development partners who offer more holistic and bespoke services, the cost of that website development project will likely exceed $40,000.

At this price range, you can expect to receive dramatically more value, service, and flexibility. You should expect not only to work with top-tier designers and website developers but also experienced advisors who understand your industry and who can guide you through a process that takes into account your brand identity and business goals.

Moreover, additional services like professional copywriting and search engine optimization will be available and customizable to your needs. From the features you include on the website to the services you need for support, website development partners at this price tier will customize your scope of work to maximize the value you receive from your new website.

$80,000-$120,000 – Advanced High Performance Website

Website scopes that exceed $80,000 will take all the elements of the high-performance website listed above and add custom design assets and integrations that take your website functionality to a premier tier of performance and user engagement.

This level of work may also involve a full rebrand of your organization. For organizations that have multiple sub-brands, these initiatives could also include a multi-site strategy, providing a unified backend across multiple external-facing websites.

Over $120,000 – Fully Custom High Performance Website

Engagements over $120,000 includes everything in an advanced high-performance website but also may include the highest level of customized features. You’ll find functionality such as deep integration with internal and external databases, HR and recruitment systems, marketing automation and CRM platforms, extensive copywriting services, sophisticated interactive design elements, custom photography and video, and powerful content suggestion algorithms.

At this higher tier of website development, $120,000 is the floor upon which these sophisticated integrations and advanced customization can be applied. Cost can increase quickly to the mid six-figures as these elements are combined together in scope. With larger website trends moving toward headless CMS and built-in A.I., it’s important for future focused firms to evaluate all of the benefits and costs associated with this level of investment.

Final Thoughts on B2B Website Cost

As we’ve discussed, a high-performance website is crucial for any professional services or B2B business looking to establish a strong online presence and drive conversions. However, creating such a website requires a significant investment, and the starting cost can often far exceed $40,000.

That may seem like a lot until you understand what value you are truly getting for your money. That value might include working with top-tier—often award-winning—designers and developers, experts who understand your industry, and advisors who bring a wealth of experience, skill, and knowledge to the table. They understand the complexities of B2B websites, including SEO, lead generation, customer engagement, and analytics, and they are able to integrate these features seamlessly into your new website.

In the end, the cost of working with partners who can deliver a high-performance website is worth it for one reason: it leads to better outcomes. They will help you create a bespoke website that will not only help you stand out from the competition but will also be more efficient, providing a better user experience for your visitors, generating a steady stream of high-quality visitors, converting those visitors into leads, turning many of those leads into loyal fans, and eventually converting some of these fans into valuable new clients.

Keep in mind that developing a website is longer about building an obligatory online presence! To compete in today’s increasingly digital business environment, your website needs to be findable in online search—and deliver the features and content your buyers are looking for in a firm like yours.

Finding a website design and development partner that truly understands the importance of this connection between website design, business development, and marketing will ensure that your website investment, regardless of budget, will yield positive results and a strong ROI.

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The post Understanding the Cost of Developing a New B2B Website appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

There’s an old saying about professional services: “all your assets walk out the door every night.” And that’s also true. Expertise is your product and it’s all you have to sell. Without the right expertise, your company cannot attract and retain clients. The right people provide you with a competitive advantage and can put you on the road to success and profitability. Just as important, great talent tends to attract more great talent.

The Difference Between Talent Acquisition and Recruiting

It’s not uncommon to confuse talent acquisition and recruiting — and that can be a mistake for a professional services firm. The difference is significant. Talent acquisition is a long-term strategy that identifies and addresses business goals, while recruiting is simply the process of filling a specific position or positions to address more immediate needs.

Talent acquisition is about identifying talent in the marketplace and building a pool of potential candidates, sometimes to fill expertise needs that aren’t even requirements yet. Talent acquisition is proactive while recruitment is reactive.

10 Elements of an Effective Talent Acquisition Strategy

To be effective, a talent acquisition strategy must have the full support of your firm’s leadership and complement your overall business strategy. To accomplish that, you’ll need to understand what talents will be required at various stages of business growth and establish a process to attract and engage the requisite talent when needed.

Let’s walk through the 10 key elements of an effective talent acquisition strategy:

1. Research

It’s crucial to roll up your sleeves and do some original research on your market to determine what’s important to new hires. What motivates the best candidates to choose one firm over another? Is it corporate culture? The workplace environment? The benefits? What will give you a competitive advantage? Often the nature of the work and the caliber of colleagues are key.

2. Your employer brand

Nobody likes working for a lousy boss. How current employees feel about the workplace environment and firm leadership will go a long way in helping – or hindering – how you position your company to attract new talent. Your employee brand must be consistent with your overall brand. If your organization has, say, a fun, creative reputation your employee brand better have an equally fun and creative vibe to support and reinforce your firm’s brand.

3. Messaging

What specific messages do potential hires need to hear to seriously consider working at your firm? What are the concerns or objections typically raised by candidates with the talent and skill sets you’re looking for? Are you and your company positioned to successfully address and overcome them? What evidence do you need to be able to present to support your argument?

4. Your Website

These days, your website is the first place candidates are likely to go to learn more about your firm and attempt to determine if it’s a good fit for them. They’ll not only be looking for information about specific positions but to gain a better understanding of your culture and what it’s like to work there. Does your website reflect a place where employees are encouraged to learn and grow? Does it represent both your overall brand and employee brand and convey key messages that promote and reinforce them? Your website can be an effective centerpiece for your talent acquisition strategy if it’s optimized for online search, incorporating keywords best associated with the types of talent you’re looking to attract.

5. Social Media

There is no question social media is the place many people turn to get what they perceive to be honest and accurate information about any number of subjects — and to see who is driving conversations on various platforms. Many firms use LinkedIn and Twitter for business development and Facebook to convey their culture. In fact, research we conducted on high-growth, high-value professional services firms in the course of writing our book, Spiraling Up, revealed that high-growth companies are more likely to rely on online recruiting than more traditional approaches for talent acquisition.

That why it’s important to cultivate positive engagements on social media and regularly share your firm’s expertise there. Sharing expertise and providing something of value not only attracts new clients, it also helps land highly qualified prospective employees.

6. Visible Expertise®

To ensure that your firm’s expertise gets recognized by the right people, it needs to be visible. That means exposing it to the right audience through speaking, writing, blogging, and opening dialogs through various channels. It’s what we call becoming a Visible Expert®. It’s a valuable, effective way to develop new business and recruit new talent. Encouraging staff to become more visible helps the individual and the firm by fostering an environment that supports learning and growth. That kind of proactive, nurturing environment also acts as a powerful incentive for prospective talent to join your team.

7. Awards and Recognition

While having a positive culture and policies in place that can help recruit the best talent does not guarantee that those features will be readily apparent. Prominently displayed recognition or awards from objective third parties, however, can help overcome those limitations. For example, it’s one thing to say your firm is a great place to work. It’s quite another to have an award from a respected industry association or publication that touts your company as a Best Place to Work.

8. Talent Evaluation

Once you’ve attracted talent, how will you evaluate it? Evaluating talent can be challenging because there may be a variety of criteria, some of which can be conflicting because of things such as short-term and long-term needs. What may not be all that important right now may be crucial down the road, so be aware of future potential as well as current, relevant skills and experience. Don’t forget any applicable current and future regulatory requirements, depending on your industry and timing.

9. Promotion

Once you determine what expertise you’re going to promote, you’ll need to figure how you’re going to promote it. How will you make your firm and your experts visible? Of course, there’s no shortage of paid recruiting sites. But think larger. Try exploiting social media not only to recruit for a vacant position, but to build awareness and appreciation for your unique expertise, work environment, and value. Make a clear case for why the best talent would want to work at your firm.

10. Policy Alignment

After addressing the previous nine key elements to a successful talent acquisition strategy, don’t get caught between your desired culture and your formal policies. Do you have policies in place that make your firm a great place to work? Are they at odds with your strategy? Do your policies encourage your staff to share their expertise and become more visible or do they actually discourage it? How much flexibility is there? Policy alignment is critical for creating and supporting the kind of corporate and employee brands that attract top talent.

A Final Thought

Talent acquisition is central to the success of most professional services firms. It’s unlikely that your firm will attain its true potential unless you have a proper, proactive talent acquisition strategy in place. The ten key elements we discussed here provide the framework that will make your strategy as effective and efficient as it can be.

The post Talent Acquisition: How to Develop an Effective Strategy for Your Professional Services Firm appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

Spending time on social media platforms has become almost second nature to many marketers and professional services firms. And as the world continues to lean more and more into the digital marketing space, many of the best ways to engage your network of business connections are on social media platforms.

As much time as many of us spend on social media, you’d think that it would be easy to come up with fresh content to post. For most people, though, it’s more difficult than it seems. But I’ve learned that it doesn’t have to be! 

My secret is to use a social media content calendar to organize my thoughts and strategize our firm’s content. With this tool, I feel more comfortable delivering a social media strategy than I have ever been before. In this post, I hope to educate you on the 5 biggest reasons why you need a social media content calendar to keep you on track.

Importance of a Social Media Marketing Calendar

Hinge’s latest research on the fastest-growing professional services firms shows that these firms are dedicating more time and effort to content creation and social media marketing than their no-growth peers.

Professional services firms are interested in getting the most out of their organic social media marketing efforts. As we’ve discussed in a previous post, using an editorial calendar to organize your thought leadership content is instrumental to your success. The same can be said for social media.

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If the thought of building a social media calendar seems like a daunting and complicated task, don’t worry! We’ll take it one step at a time. Your social media content calendar will become an essential tool that you and your marketing team use on a weekly or daily basis. Be sure to include when posts are published and who is responsible for posting them.

Here are five reasons why your firm needs a social media content calendar:

1. Your Social Media Content Calendar Will Save You Time.

Using a social media content calendar will ensure that your firm is allocating resources in the best, most efficient manner. In addition to tracking what you will post and when, this tool is also an “assignment board.” This will inform individual team members when they are supposed to write content for social posts. It can also trigger team members to engage with existing posts in a timely fashion. Whether you have one person on your team or one hundred people, the best thing you can do to save time on social media content development is to give everyone visibility into your plan. Communication is key, after all.

Using a social media calendar also allows you to plan ahead and research future topics and posts in advance. Because you know what to prepare well ahead of time, you can avoid those last-minute scrambles.

2. Your Social Media Content Calendar Will Keep You Organized.

This may be the best reason for keeping any kind of calendar—especially a content calendar. 

Keeping a record of your posts allows you to see a snapshot of all the topics you’ve covered in the past so you can maintain a fresh perspective and balance the different types of content you post.

By mapping your calendar to specific social media platforms, you can stay organized across each of the channels you utilize.  Whether you use a simple Excel spreadsheet or an all-in-one automation platform like Loomly or Buffer to schedule content across multiple platforms, find a tool that works for you and your team.

3. Your Social Media Content Calendar Will Allow You to be Timely.

An editorial calendar makes it easy to publish content in conjunction with relevant campaigns and events. That way you won’t forget to promote important content for specific occasions or launches. 

For example, do you want to promote new blog posts or other content on social media? What news is going on in your industry that your firm should be weighing in on? What upcoming events or conferences will you be attending?

You can easily include prompts or reminders to post time-sensitive content coordinated with key activities at your firm. This sort of integrated marketing ensures that your clients and prospects see your messages across different platforms.

4. Your Social Media Content Calendar Will Allow You To Be Relevant.

When you plan your social media content in advance, you create time to get feedback from your team members. Your calendar can be easily shared for further input, so you can make sure you’re putting out the most relevant social media posts to achieve both your firm’s marketing and business development goals.

Team members from different departments can use their unique perspectives to inform the choices you make on each platform. For instance, your business development team might have insights on current trends and client pain points that might make your posts more relevant to your prospects. 

Staying plugged into the market and what’s important to potential buyers can also help you increase your ability to close the sale.

5. Your Social Media Content Calendar Will Build Credibility.

Consistency—posting and engaging frequently or on a regular schedule—is critical to building trust and credibility with prospects who may have never heard of your firm before. New followers will quickly learn that you’re sharing educational content and that your firm has the depth of expertise to help them.

Followers like to know when they can expect posts from you, so maintaining a consistent calendar enables you to set and meet their expectations. Your audience will soon be able to anticipate your posts, which can make them feel more connected with your firm and the content you share. This can also help with engagement as you build your following and establish your credibility on each platform.

If you’ve been waiting to create a social media content calendar because you weren’t sure you needed one or didn’t think it would be worth the effort, it’s time to think again. A social media content calendar can elevate your social media strategy to a higher level. Your firm can post, tweet, share and comment more efficiently with just a little extra planning.

How to develop a social media posting schedule

The first step in developing a social media schedule is to look at what the data tells you. Check in on the analytics on each platform and see how you have been performing. Do you notice that your audience on LinkedIn is the most active in the morning but your audiences on Twitter and Instagram are more active in the afternoon? Keep that in mind when scheduling your time to post.

If your individual platform analytics aren’t so clear, a quick Google search will bring you some general recommendations for best times to post on each platform. But beware: your audience may behave differently! 

Some additional elements that you can include in this analysis are: most active days of the week, most active times of the day, how frequently you post each day, and if people engage differently with different post formats (for instance, text versus video)..

Once you’ve established some guidelines for when and what to post, it’s time to do some testing. Monitor your analytics and see what you can learn from them. Whenever you think you’ve learned something, adjust your schedule, post formats or other parameters. It may take some time to determine what schedule works best for you and your audience, but I promise that this is time well spent.

Social media content calendar ideas

Now that you have the structure of a calendar in place, what do you actually share? Here are a few of my favorite types of posts to share on social media—and incorporate into your calendar:

• Short sections from pieces of thought leadership with links to read more
• Individual data points and insights from your latest research studies
• Promotions for upcoming webinars
• Videos of your experts sharing research insights
• Timely promotions of white papers or executive guides
• Mentions of your experts in the media
• Highlights of your company culture

Want more ideas for content to share and tips to help you work smarter, not harder? Take a look at this blog post to learn more about one of my personal favorite topics: using research to solve your content production dilemma.

Final Thoughts

Social media is just like other proven marketing techniques—if you are not consistent and don’t implement your plan, then it won’t make a difference. Using your content marketing calendar to plan your social media activity keeps your entire team accountable for your goals and allows you to make adjustments when new opportunities arise.

The post 5 Big Reasons Why You Need a Social Media Content Calendar appeared first on Hinge Marketing.