On the contrary, too many new management consulting firms’ brandings efforts are hasty and unclear. Branding is tough, after all, and a learning curve is to be expected. But a murky brand can put you at a competitive disadvantage right from the start.

The need for thoughtful attention to branding doesn’t end once a firm is established, either. As your services evolve and your marketplace changes, you must continually reassess your branding to ensure that it is aligned with your goals and the realities of your industry.

Otherwise, you may lose competitive ground, while sowing confusion about who you really are and what you really do. But like I said before, branding is tough, even for the most successful firms.

Even if you once built a great brand, you might not know how to rebrand in a transformed marketplace. So here are 7 branding ideas that can you help you shape your brand the right way.

1. Understand your field’s unique challenges.

Branding a consulting practice is significantly different from branding many other types of professional services. It has its own opportunities and its own challenges.

Chief among the challenges is the fact that many of your audiences may not know very much about what you do – at least not by default. Most people have some idea of what a law firm or accounting firm does. But management consultants often offer very different sorts of services, and there is less general cultural awareness of what those services consist of.

As a result, firms need to spend more on marketing and business development. In fact, management consulting firms tend to spend a higher percentage of revenue on marketing than firms in other professional services industries, like accounting and AEC. Since you’re typically selling expertise and advice, it’s essential that you help your audiences understand exactly what kind of advice and expertise you offer.

2. Remember what makes up your brand.

It’s hard to fine-tune your brand if you don’t know what it is in the first place. Whenever you brand or rebrand a business, you must remember that your brand isn’t something vague or imprecise. In fact, it’s so specific and quantifiable that you can express it as an equation:

Brand = reputation x visibility

A positive reputation for your management consulting firm can take two forms. People might regard you generally as a “great firm,” or people might know you for your expertise.

Expertise-driven reputation is a particular asset, since it connects directly to your service offerings. One of your audiences’ biggest questions is always going to be, “What do you do?” A reputation for expertise helps you answer those questions clearly.

Your reputation for a specific type of expertise also has another advantage. A recent study in the accounting industry shows that it dramatically increases the likelihood of receiving an actual referral.

3. Experts have an advantage.

Speaking of expertise…
When it comes to boosting your brand, there is simply nothing like having individual Visible Experts^® on your team. Research shows that firms with Visible Experts build greater visibility and command higher rates. Indeed, the presence of high-visibility experts drives success for the whole firm.

New business development is a particularly high priority for management consulting firms, since by the nature of the work, many clients are not repeat engagements. Visible Experts help generate more leads and cement your credibility in the marketplace, making it easier to close more sales and grow.

4. Your brand should be based on reality.

It’s not uncommon for people to develop grand visions for their brands, but it’s important to make sure your branding is rooted in reality.

What do I mean by “reality”? Start with in-depth research on your clients, prospects, and influencers in your industry. Then move on to study your competition as well.

The tough fact is that you are the worst judge of your own brand. It’s almost a universal rule – most of us are simply too close to our brands to view them objectively. That’s why it’s so important to base your branding decisions on empirical evidence rather than opinions. This way, you can create a brand that truly serves the needs of your business.

5. Position your brand based on real differentiators.

For management consulting firms, research is the gift that keeps on giving. Not only does it help you ground your branding in the reality of the marketplace, it helps you identify or find new and relevant differentiators that will set your firm apart from the rest of the pack.

In the course of your research, ask questions like:

• What issues are your clients facing today?
• What are they talking about?
• What do your competitors specialize in?
• Are there areas of unmet need in your marketplace?

The answers to these questions will help you identify differentiators on which to build your new brand.

Some of these potential differentiators may be qualities that you already hold, but need to start emphasizing in your marketing. Others may be opportunities – areas where you can decide to be different. You may find, for example, that there is an opportunity to specialize in an unfilled niche or provide services through a novel business model.

Either way, your differentiators must pass three tests. They must be 1) true, 2) relevant to your target audience, and 3) provable. If you can prove to clients that you are different in a way that helps meet their needs, you’ll be positioned for success.

6. Reflect your brand positioning in all of your communications tools and all of your educational content.

It should be clear by now that a brand is much more than a logo and a tagline. It’s the soul of your firm, and in order to do its work, it needs to suffuse everything you do – particularly your public messaging and educational content.

Think about the various channels through which you communicate with and educate audiences. These might include:

• Website
• Marketing collateral
• Pitch decks
• Proposals
• Newsletters
• Blog

Every single one of these marketing channels needs to be fundamentally aligned with your branding ideas. You need to talk about your firm in a consistent way – ideally guided by well-crafted branding guidelines. Otherwise, your message will become muddled and audiences will grow confused about who you are and what you’re trying to say.

7. Build the visibility of your brand in multiple channels over time.

You might announce a new brand in the course of an hour – but real results take time. Your brand will need to work in the marketplace organically and across many channels, which is to say that people will have to encounter it through your website, social media, and their general experience of you.

To drive this process and reinforce your expertise, you can use a variety of tools. Search engine optimization can help you use targeted keywords to draw visitors to your website. Social media is a great way to engage directly with audiences and communicate in a way that aligns with your brand.

Not all brand-driven communications are online, either. Through public speaking, articles, and seminars, you can help build visibility for your expertise and cement your brand.

Ultimately, all seven of these branding ideas work together and reinforce each other for accumulated effects – visibility and growth. Through strategic and deliberate branding, you can help your firm stand apart and get ahead.

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The post Top 7 Branding Ideas for Your Consulting 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.

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

 Marketing Automation Defined

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

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

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

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

Marketing Automation Trends

1. Marketing automation adoption is growing fast.

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

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

Source: Grand View Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marketing Automation Strategies

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

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

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

The Marketing Automation Process

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

Bad marketing, automated, is still bad marketing.

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

Step 1. Research your target audiences.

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

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

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

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

Step 2. Identify your strategic marketing goals.

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

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

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

Figure 2. The marketing funnel

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

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

Step 3. Identify your marketing techniques.

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

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

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

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

Figure 3. Online and offline marketing techniques

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

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

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

Step 4. Develop your content strategy.

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

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

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

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

The resulting overlap is illustrated in Figure 4.

Figure 4. What topics should you develop content around?

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

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

Step 5. Organize the marketing flow.

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

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

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

Step 6. Select and program your marketing automation platform.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Final Thought

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Google Auto-Populate

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

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

2. Google Related Searches

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

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

3. Google Ads Keyword Planner

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

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

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

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

4. Google Search Console

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

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

5. Google Trends

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

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

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

6. Google Analytics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is Inbound Content Marketing?

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

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

Examples of Inbound Content Marketing

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

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

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

The Case for Inbound Content Marketing

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

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

Inbound content marketing cultivates potential customers in three ways:

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

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

Inbound Content Marketing Helps Prospects Find You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Content Marketing Helps Prospects Evaluate You

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

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

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

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

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

Content Marketing Helps Close the Sale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Main Problem with Inbound Content Marketing

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

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

Organizing Your Team of Experts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tears of joy.

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

Implementing an Inbound Content Marketing Plan

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

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

1. Have you identified your target clients?

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

2. Have you researched your clients recently?

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

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

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

3. Is your brand positioning differentiated from your competition?

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

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

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

4. What are your firm’s marketing strengths?

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

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

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

5. Is your marketing infrastructure working for you?

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

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

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

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

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

6. Are you continuing to update your content?

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

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

7. How are you challenging your team?

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

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

A Final Thought

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rise of the Expert Through Content Marketing

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

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

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

Outsourced Marketing Defined

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

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

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

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

Who Uses Outsourced Marketing, and Why?

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

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

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

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

Levels of Outsourced Marketing Activities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 Benefits of Outsourcing Marketing

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

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

3 Risks of Outsourced Marketing

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

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

Typical Outsourced Marketing Services

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

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

Inside the Outsourced Marketing Department

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

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

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

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

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

Should You Outsource Your Marketing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

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

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

Digital Marketing Strategy vs. Digital Marketing Techniques

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy

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

1. Start with your business goals

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

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

2. Research your target audiences

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

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

Potential Clients

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

Influencers

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

Referral Sources

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

Talent

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

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

How do you prioritize audiences?

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

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

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

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

How do you research target audiences?

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

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

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

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

3. Develop your digital marketing strategy

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

Differentiators

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

Market Positioning

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

Key Messages

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

Content Strategy

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

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

4. Select your digital marketing techniques

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you set specific digital marketing goals?

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

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

How do you know what to track?

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

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

How do you develop a digital marketing budget?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which Digital Marketing Techniques Are Most Effective?

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

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

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

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

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

Three types of content seem to have the greatest impact:

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

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

Content Marketing and Your Digital Strategy

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

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

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

A Final Thought

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

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This is a tragedy. An effective marketing team can have a profound impact on a modern professional services firm. When well staffed and well functioning, a marketing department can drive growth, profitability and a premium valuation. In short, the role of your marketing department in your firm’s success cannot be understated.

What’s the best way to build such a valuable function? We believe it’s built upon a clear understanding of what to expect from your marketing department and what resources and support it will require. But first, we need distinguish marketing from the sales function.

Marketing vs. Sales in Professional Services

One of the first steps is to be clear about the language we use to describe a marketing department and how it differs from a sales function. The reason that this distinction is so tricky is that many firms do not use traditional language to talk about these concepts. Sometimes the term business development is used to refer to the sales function. In other firms, business development refers to both the marketing and sales function. In this article, we are going to use the traditional definitions.

Marketing is the process of understanding your marketplace and competitors, defining your firm’s market positioning, pricing and services, promoting the firm to your target audience and explaining how they might benefit by working with you. Put another way, marketing is about offering the right services with the right benefits to the right prospects.

Sales is the process of qualifying your prospects and convincing the right ones to buy your services. It’s about turning business opportunities into clients.

While this difference seems pretty simple on the surface, there are a few areas that can cause confusion. In some organizations, for instance, the sales function is also responsible for generating and nurturing leads until they become viable business opportunities. As you will see below, we have some strong opinions about this practice.

Marketing Department Functions

So what exactly should be the role of your marketing department? What should you expect from your marketing team?

Whether your team is in-house, entirely outsourced or a combination of the two, your marketing team has five core functions.

1. An understanding of your target market and competitors

Marketing should always start with the market. You should expect Marketing to be able to give you detailed and specific descriptions of your target markets and your key competitors in those markets.

But you already know all about your competitors and clients, right? Wrong. Unless you are already doing systematic, structured research, you are kidding yourself. Anecdotal experiences can lead you astray.

Our research shows that internal staff almost always inaccurately perceive their market and their clients’ true feelings and priorities. In fact, firms that do objective research on their markets and clients grow faster and are more profitable.

A professional marketing function can commission this research and allow you to make decisions based on marketplace reality, rather than hunches and wishful thinking.

2. A strategy to drive growth and profitability

Once you have a research-based understanding of your firm and its place in the market, your marketing department should be able to help craft a compelling strategy to drive growth and profitability. That strategy may require adjustments in your target market, service offerings (see the next point, below), and marketing plans.

Your strategy should clearly identify compelling competitive advantages (your differentiators) and a clear market positioning (are you the premium-priced leader or a value-driven alternative?). Think of these as tools to describe your brand. How do you want to be known in the marketplace? As you wrestle with your options, expect to be challenged with new thinking and bold choices.

You will also need a marketing plan. This plan will map out exactly how you are going to build the visibility of your brand and generate the new opportunities your business development (sales) team will convert into new clients.

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3. Which services to offer and how to price them

Historically, many firms have left the key decisions about what services to offer and how to price them to individual operating executives or the finance and accounting function.

Decisions about service lines and pricing are important elements of a growth plan. They should be informed by an overall research-based strategy, not individual client requests. Why? It is too easy to get over-extended trying to be everything to every client. You will soon lose focus and experience, increasing costs as you struggle to provide an ever-expanding array of services.

Innovation and client responsiveness can all too easily become undisciplined dabbling. A strong marketing department plays a leading role in maintaining that balance.

4. A steady flow of new leads and opportunities

More leads! Better opportunities! Who doesn’t want a steady flow of well-qualified new business prospects? Fortunately, that is exactly what you should expect from marketing. While some firms assign lead generation and nurturing to the sales (business development) function, we think that is a bad idea in most cases. The time horizon for lead generation and nurturing can be a long one. Nurturing leads can take months, even years. Sales are almost always placed on a much shorter operational cycle (“what can you close this month?”).

Your marketing team should turn your overall strategy into a formal plan to generate new leads and nurture your existing prospects until they become well-qualified opportunities. This plan should look ahead at least a year and be guided by clear, trackable metrics (more on this below).

Be careful that you do not continually add new “marketing ideas,” underfunding campaigns, or other unplanned initiatives that may derail the plan. If you fall into any of these traps, you cannot expect the plan to work, nor can you hold your marketing team accountable.

Also, be patient. Lead nurturing can take time — sometimes a very long time. Don’t focus only on immediate results. You will need new clients next year, and the year after as well.

5. The ability to monitor and optimize implementation

This is the piece that makes everything else possible. If you can’t measure your results, you are likely to lose sight of your progress during the marketing process. Building a strong brand and full pipeline takes time.

With the appropriate tools and cooperation from the Business Development team, Marketing should be able to track lead generation, nurturing, opportunities, proposals, and closes. The entire pipeline can then be optimized over time.

If you are not tracking results, it is too easy to continue unproductive programs or unwittingly discontinue efforts that are working. Tracking keeps you honest and allows you to make the most of your limited resources.

What you need to provide

At this point, we have identified what benefits Marketing can provide to your firm. But what do they need to be able to deliver these results? The answer is straightforward. They need four basic things:

1. Talented people. Your marketing team must include people with the right skill sets and experience. If you don’t have these talents in-house, you may need to outsource parts of the process or do some hiring. We’ll discuss these options when we cover how to structure your marketing department, below. A word of caution here: marketing professional services is its own specialty. Don’t expect someone with general marketing expertise to understand the unique rules and dynamics of the professional services marketplace.
2. Adequate resources. Your team must have sufficient resources to do the job right. Underfund the effort and you will not get the results you deserve. The requirements are not excessive. Our research shows that high-growth firms spend no more than average on marketing — and yet they are still able to deliver outstanding results. But don’t expect superior results with stingy resources.
3. A seat at the decision-makers’ table. The kiss of death is investing in your marketing then ignoring your team’s advice. It happens more often than you would think, especially in flat organizations, such as partnerships, where decision-making is diffused among many people. If your decisions are broadly consensus-based, you may be better off delegating marketing decisions to a single partner or a small committee.
4. Patience and cooperation. Once the previous three considerations are in place, you will see impressive progress. But there is a catch. Just like any other functional area of your organization, Marketing needs cooperation and a bit of patience from the firm. Support your marketing team’s efforts over time and you will reap the rewards.

These four basic requirements lay the foundation for marketing success. But what does an effective marketing department look like?

Marketing Department Structure

Structuring a modern professional services marketing team is not easy. At many firms, marketing is a relatively new function — one, regrettably, that is not always highly regarded. In addition, many firms are working in a very competitive and rapidly evolving marketplace. When they lack marketing agility, firms put themselves at risk.

To keep things simple, let’s focus on the three aspects of departmental structure that are most relevant to professional services firms: the Role of marketing, selecting the right Resources, and Reporting Relationships. 

1. Role of Marketing

At different firms, marketing comes in different guises — from a low-level support function charged with basic implementation responsibilities to a comprehensive team of specialists who deliver the full spectrum of strategic and operational skills. In our experience, the more comprehensive its marketing function, the more success a firm enjoys. (Keep in mind that marketing expertise does not necessarily need to reside in-house. See Resource Requirements below for the details.)

At many firms, a key decision revolves around lead generation and nurturing. Do these functions belong to marketing or sales? We believe that marketing is their proper home.

Why? Many, many firms today employ the Seller-Doer Strategy, so their busy professionals lack the time and focus to carry out a long-term program. Better to leave these tasks to individuals whose attention is not divided between business development and project delivery. Make lead generation and lead nurturing a prime role of the marketing department.

2. Resource Requirements

Where will you find the people with the specialized skill sets and experience needed to pull off the comprehensive vision we believe is so important? Well, you have two choices: staff up your in-house team or outsource the skills you need.

The in-house approach is appealing from an accessibility perspective. And if a person is fully utilized there can be some cost savings. Of course, no single person is likely to possess the full range of skills you need to implement a modern marketing program. So you are faced with the challenge of filling in the gaps. But how?

One avenue is training. This is, or should be, a given. Technology is always evolving and new research findings continually challenge our long-held beliefs and assumptions — what worked five years ago may not be what is most effective today. That means ongoing education is a must.

But even if you scrupulously train your marketing team, you’ll still need outside help on occasion. In fact, our recent research has shown that high-growth firms tend to spend more on outsourced resources than their slow-growth peers.

How do you decide whether to outsource a marketing function? Ask yourself a series of five questions about each function that is a candidate for potential outsourcing (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Questions to determine whether you should outsource a marketing function.

A few firms outsource all of their marketing so that they can concentrate their internal resources on core functions only. However, most firms employ a mixed model in which some functions are handled internally and others are outsourced. Specialized services that are not used on a regular basis are often the best candidates for outsourcing. Examples include research, strategy development, analytics, or the development of a new website.

3. Reporting Relationships

Whom should the marketing department report to? Many firms struggle with this question. The answer may depend on the role and resources choices you make.

At firms with limited marketing personnel, it makes sense to have the department report to the head of Administration or Sales (Business Development). The latter situation works particularly well when Marketing’s primary role is to support Sales. In neither of these cases, however, is Marketing in a position to make a major contribution.

As the marketing role increases in sophistication, it should be allowed to influence major strategic decisions. This can be accomplished by having Marketing report to a senior partner who has responsibility for both Marketing and Sales. Having a single point of decision-making minimizes conflict and makes it easier to align goals and priorities. It also gives Marketing a seat at the table when major decisions are being made.

A variation on this theme is to have the Marketing leader report directly to the CEO or Managing Partner. This gives them visibility into the firm’s strategy, which can only make marketing more effective. This reporting relationship is also well suited to our vision of Marketing as a key function that can drive the growth and profitability of the firm as a whole.

A Final Thought

In many consumer-facing industries, marketing is a core function that the rest of the organization is built around. These companies evolved in that direction because it gives them an advantage in financial performance. Perhaps there was a time when professional services firms did not need the perspective and discipline that marketing offers. No longer.

With the rise of digital communications, the collapse of geography, and the proliferation of new competitors and business models the pressure is on. The advantage will go to the firm with the greatest marketplace visibility and the best value proposition. And that is exactly the promise that marketing can deliver.

What role is your marketing department playing in your firm’s success?

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For a sign of the times, just look at the explosive growth of LinkedIn. To date, there are over 849 million LinkedIn members, compared to 467 million users in October of 2016. More and more of professional life is moving online – and the professional services world is no exception. Increasingly, the firms that succeed are the ones that learn to leverage online marketing effectively.

So what are ten of the top advantages of online marketing, and how can you bring those benefits to your firm?

Before we explore the strengths of online marketing, we have an important question to answer.

What is online marketing?

Online marketing is the use of a diverse and evolving set of Internet based digital techniques to reach targeted audiences. These techniques include (but are not limited to) content marketing, social media, websites, search engine optimization, online video, email marketing, paid search, and more.

Many of these tools work best together: for example, publishing educational content on your firm’s blog and then sharing it to start a conversation on social media. Perhaps your blog post uses a YouTube video to illustrate a key point. If it’s successful, this piece might help drive up your website’s ranking for Google searches on the topic.

As you can see, effective online marketing is really a complex ecosystem of techniques that can help your firm achieve greater visibility and credibility. But let’s get even more specific. What are some of the most important advantages of online marketing for professional services firms today?

Advantages of Online Marketing

1. Online marketing gives you many ways to demonstrate and build expertise.

For professional services buyers, the single most important factor in selecting a provider is expertise. Often, the challenge lies not in acquiring the requisite talent, but projecting that expertise to the marketplace.

The web is such a powerful platform because it allows you to use content to get your message across and demonstrate expertise in topics relevant to your target audience. You can accomplish this offline as well, but online tools make it much easier to reach a wide and relevant audience. Blogging, social media, and webinars all allow you to educate your audience on topics that matter to them, illustrating your expertise in the process.

2. You can use online marketing to establish and build relationships more effectively.

Online marketing allows you to create new relationships in a targeted way that simply wasn’t possible twenty years ago. Email marketing, keyword phrase targeting, and other strategies can help you target a tailored message with laser precision to, say, the CIOs of the hundred largest businesses in your industry.

Beyond targeting messages, you can use LinkedIn Groups to network and converse with other industry leaders in an ongoing way. Online tools allow you to both meet new clients, colleagues, and influencers and strengthen relationships with those you already know.

3. You can target specific verticals or niches using online marketing.

Just as you can build relationships in a targeted way, online marketing empowers you to target a highly specific vertical or niche, delivering your message to a wide audience that needs your services. You can do this relatively inexpensively by targeting keywords in educational blog posts, or participating in groups or industry hashtags on social media. Online marketing allows you to zero in on a niche easily and efficiently.

4. Online marketing isn’t tied to geography or time zone.

Online marketing techniques can be used in an asynchronous way, meaning your audience doesn’t have to be constrained by geography. To meet a potential client or contact in person, you have to be able to travel and synchronize your schedules, with all of the expenses that this can entail.

Speaking at industry events, for example, can be a powerful way to build your reputation, and is often worthwhile – but it’s also a major effort that can significantly disrupt an entire day (or multiple days). Giving a webinar to a similar or larger crowd, however, may take no more than an hour out of your day at the office.

Another advantage of this asynchronicity is that it empowers your audience to engage with your message on their own terms. They can learn about your expertise at their own pace through your blog or social media presence, and when they’re ready to explore your services, they know where to find you.

5. Online marketing is less expensive to use.

With online marketing, there are no travel costs, and you don’t have to pay for printing to distribute materials. Server costs, by contrast, are relatively low.

Some of your advertising costs can be replaced by online marketing tools, as well – and these online tools usually “pull more weight” by integrating with the rest of your online marketing program. Guest posts on industry blogs or publications, for example, can drive traffic to your site, build your reputation, and fuel conversation on social media.

6. The Internet is the most common way people check out your firm.

In fact, we conducted a survey of over 1,000 buyers of professional services for a more complete understanding of how purchasers check sellers out in today’s marketplace. We found that the second most common way professional services buyers check out firms is online.

7. Online marketing allows you to be everywhere your clients look.

Today, it’s important for you to be where your potential clients are looking. More and more, that means your firm needs a robust and diversified presence online. From our research, we found that purchasers are looking for experts online in a number of ways, including in search engines, by reading online reviews, on social media, through webinars, and more.

Maybe your clients tend to ask their peers about the strongest firms in your field – but once they’ve learned a bit about you, if they search for you online, you have to be easy to find. If you don’t have an online marketing component, potential clients will go looking for more information about you – and they won’t find you.

8. You can use online marketing to reach influencers and “invisible” prospects.

There are many people who influence the selection process, even if they might not be the final decision-makers. Some of these individuals may be professionals within your target firms, while others may be well-respected industry figures.

By the same token, you may have unrecognized or “invisible” prospects out there of whom you’re simply not aware. You likely know that certain firms would be good matches for your service, but there are usually others who are equally promising matches – they’re just geographically distant from you, or don’t participate in the same industry events, or you just haven’t crossed paths.

By using content marketing, they can find you, even if you don’t find them. Posting blog posts on a particular set of challenges or opportunities – and including the right keyword phrases so search engines pick up on them – allows you to “plant a flag” in the topic, helping the right audiences find your work and your firm.

9. Firms that generate leads online achieve greater profits.

Our in-depth studies of lead generation strategies for professional services firms has found that firms with online marketing programs are more profitable, on average, than those that do not.

Until about twenty percent of leads are generated online, profitability stays more or less the same. But after twenty percent, profitability begins to rise steadily along with the percentage of leads generated online.

10. Firms that generate leads online achieve faster growth.

Similarly, our research shows firms that generate leads online grow at a faster rate.

We found that firms’ growth rates rise along with the proportion of leads generated online, up until the point where forty percent or more of leads originate online. Firms that generated between forty and fifty-nine percent of leads online grew at four times the rate of those with no online leads.

Conclusion

Online marketing provides a suite of powerful tools to help grow your firm’s reach and reputation – and ultimately, your firm itself. By fully leveraging the advantages of online marketing through tools such as content marketing, social media, email marketing, online video, and more, you can create a powerful lead-generating machine that puts your firm on the path to greater profitability and success.

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

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

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

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

Marketing Planning Process Defined

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

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

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

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

Importance of Marketing Planning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benefits of the Marketing Planning Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 7-Step Marketing Planning Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Examples of offline marketing:

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

Examples of online marketing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Examples of Marketing Planning

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

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

Step 1: Understand your business situation

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

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

Step 2: Research your target audience

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

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

Step 3: Position your brand

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

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

Step 4: Define your service offerings

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

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

Step 5: Identify your marketing techniques

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

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

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

Step 6: Identify new tools, skills and infrastructure

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

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

Step 7: Document your schedule and budget

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

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

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

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

Top Marketing Planning Tips

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

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

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

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

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

Happy planning!

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