Professional services brands today are at risk of eroding. Over the past five years, we’ve witnessed firm reputation and visibility scores decline throughout the industry. How can professional services firms overcome this challenge, and improve their brand in the marketplace? The answers aren’t the same as they used to be.
Traditional marketing techniques are giving way to strategies that are designed with modern clients in mind – and the old ways are no longer enough. So what are the top techniques for professional services firms today?
Before we consider the best marketing techniques, it’s important to nail down what exactly we mean by the term “marketing technique.”
Defining Marketing Techniques
Simply put, a marketing technique is anything you do to bring in new business or increase your firm’s visibility and reputation.
We’re not talking about strategies for closing sales once you have the opportunity – marketing techniques are all about generating those opportunities in the first place. These are methods for targeting promising markets, building your brand and generating and nurturing leads to drive faster growth and higher profits.
There are many different marketing techniques both online and offline. Major offline examples include trade shows, networking and in-person speaking engagements.Key online techniques include a firm’s website, ongoing search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, and industry webinars.
Taken together, online and offline marketing techniques allow you to reach clients wherever they may be. Traditional, offline networking has been an important part of the professional services industry for some time, but these days crucial relationships are forged more and more often through social media like LinkedIn.
1) SPECIALIZATION AND NICHE TARGETING
Our research has repeatedly shown that the fastest-growing firms tend to be specialists in a carefully targeted niche – an area of the industry that they understand thoroughly.
Not everyone recognizes specialization as a marketing technique, but in fact, it is among the most powerful. Why? Specialization impacts every aspect of your business, from the audiences you target to the messages you craft. Specialization makes all of your marketing efforts easier, because it tends to define exactly what you do and distinguish you from the competition.
2) A LEAD-GENERATING WEBSITE
A website carries your identity and message to an ever-growing online audience. But it can do more. A lead-generating website is carefully crafted to serve as the hub of your online marketing efforts. Attractive, easy-to-find content is served alongside relevant offers designed to convert visitors into leads, all integrated into a comprehensive lead-generating and nurturing ecosystem. In fact, our latest research shows that going to a firm’s website is the second most common way buyers “check out” a professional services provider, with almost 80% reporting have done so.
3) SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)
Going hand-in-hand with a lead generating website is a thoughtful strategy for search engine optimization. SEO is really an umbrella term for a variety of techniques designed to make sure that your valuable content gets in front of the right audiences online.
And one of the most important of those strategies is to ensure that your content really is valuable. There is no shortcut here. You must develop well-written content that is truly useful to your specific target audience.
There are also a host of important technical issues to attend to. Your website must be structured and tagged properly and pages should contain the appropriate keywords to signal to the search engine what it is about. It is indeed an art and a science.
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