Professional services firms using a content marketing strategy will traditionally have written blog posts to rank for specific, individual keywords that relate to their business.
But with people now searching using longer, more complex terms, search engines now favour topic-based content. And this means that professional services firms need to take a smarter approach to their content marketing strategy.
The solution?
Pillar pages.
In professional services marketing, building trust with your prospects is key. You're selling a relationship - and the most important thing, in any relationship, is trust.
With that in mind, it’s no coincidence that many professional services firms traditionally won their business through referrals and word of mouth. But, in the digital world, we have to build trust differently. We have to work harder to earn it.
This is why many professional services firms today have adopted a content marketing approach. By providing your target audience with interesting, educative, and helpful content, you can position your company as a trusted source of authority and as the ‘go-to-guys’ in your field.
Inbound marketing is an effective way for professional services companies to generate traffic and leads and to position themselves as experts in their field.
A blog is fundamental to a successful inbound marketing strategy. But eBooks are the next part of the process - they are an excellent way to turn visitors into leads.
Research by the CMI consistently shows eBooks to be one of the most effective forms of content. And the bonus? They’re relatively inexpensive to produce.
Professional services firms have traditionally relied on referrals to grow their customer base. However, this method curbs your potential reach - your network is limited to your current clients and who they know.
And with 71 percent of B2B buyers starting their search online with no provider in mind, it's no wonder more and more professional services companies are moving to a content marketing approach in a bid to reach a wider audience.
The idea is simple: creating useful, informative and valuable content increases your likelihood of being discovered by potential clients looking for what you do.
But your content needs to be aimed at the right people - your target customers. It needs to attract (and maintain) their attention.
Technological and social changes have swept old methods of marketing away in every single industry and professional services marketing is no different. If you haven’t reviewed and changed your marketing strategy in the past decade, then you are getting left behind.
In this post, we look at some of the areas where professional services marketing has changed and what you can do to refocus your marketing efforts to remain competitive.
Clients are now savvy, short on time and keen on online tools that can make their working life easier and save them the effort. Your marketing strategy has to reflect this – old ways have changed, gone, and new approaches are the only ones with a chance of success.
Video can be a powerful asset for professional services marketing. The right approach for your campaign will depend heavily on your video marketing strategy.
Whether your intention is to raise awareness of your company, simply convey complex information, or share customer endorsements, visual media will bring your message to life.
This post explores some of the styles that work best for professional services.
Your website is where potential customers flock to find more information about your business and all that it has to offer, and it’s likely your homepage will be their entry point.
Research shows that 80 per cent of professional services buyers visit a company’s website to evaluate them as a potential provider.
So, if you're a professional services company your website needs to be giving off all the right messages.
Your website is a product of your business, and therefore a reflection of your work. A poorly designed website gives the impression you don’t care for your customers and are ok with mediocrity.
The point is, your website can make or break your business.
Take Apple for example. As one of the largest global technology companies, you’d expect them to have a well-designed and responsive website, right? Otherwise, how could anyone trust their products?
Cake. Yum.
Who doesn't love it? Sponge cake, fruit cake, gluten-free cake, chocolate cake. So many options!
You specialise in each area. And you make damn good cakes. But no one is eating them, because no one knows where you are. And now they’re out of date, and going stale...
What I'm trying to say is, it's all well and good creating remarkable content, but what’s the use if no one is going to see?
That’s exactly why some bloggers recommend spending as much time promoting your content as you do writing it.
The best bloggers for professional services understand the need take a professional approach. Business in this sector depends on the level of trust and authority you can convey to your potential clients (and to your existing clients). So just casually throwing a few words together will simply not bring the results you are looking for.
In this post we are going to look at three essential elements that contribute to a polished and effective professional services blog.
As a B2B marketer in the professional services industry, pressure from partners to bring in new opportunities means you need to deliver. But referrals aren’t what they used to be, and you can’t afford to sit and wait for them to come in.
The professional services industry has traditionally relied on referrals to fuel business growth. Trust and good relationships are created and built upon through hours of networking and recommendations from current clients. However, while word-of-mouth is still an effective tool, it is no longer enough on its own.
With 64% of the UK’s population of over 65 million active on social media spending an average of 108 minutes a day on one or more social networks, you can’t ignore social as an essential way to connect with people and businesses (Keith Herrington).
But, get social wrong, and it can cause more damage than good to your reputation and your business. Your strategy for social needs to cascade down from smart goals set out in your professional services marketing strategy. Here are some tips to maximise the potential of LinkedIn for your professional services firm:
Most professional services companies know that the best way to get more business is to get their best people in front of prospects – face to face. In such a situation, their expertise, knowledge and consultancy skills will go a long way towards making the sale. This is why networking events work so well for professional services – prospects can talk to your best people, and the benefits of a mutual relationship become obvious.
Unfortunately, you only have so many best people, and their time is in demand; the number of profitable networking events is usually small, and events require a physical presence that takes time out of the office.
Furthermore, time pressures on executives, managers and buyers have massively increased to the point where they are often unable or unwilling to spare the time for networking events, on travel, day-long conferences and so on.
No professional services company can survive without new business, and securing those leads is the highest priority for most B2B marketers. With traditional methods proving less effective, companies are turning to inbound marketing – but what type of content should you produce? How should you go about it? And what’s the best way to deploy it to generate the most leads?
At its core, marketing is storytelling. Telling stories allows you to connect with your target audience; to create and build meaningful relationships. Stories paint a vivid picture of your brand, products and services; they show why you are the best choice.
In professional services marketing, telling stories enables you to garner trust in a digital landscape, where online capital counts for so much. From B2B case studies to blog posts and eBooks, there are various ways you can incorporate stories into your marketing efforts.
Regular content creation is at the heart of modern marketing, but maintaining a constant stream of useful and engaging content can be challenging. This is especially true in professional services where you may feel interesting topics may be few and far between.
So how can you generate ideas for content?
Firstly, look at how to find out what your clients want to read about. You can create as much content as you like, but it will only be truly effective if it satisfies a need – if it gives your clients the answers to the questions they are asking.
Secondly, look at types of content that work for professional services – starting with a type often makes creating the content for it much easier.
Professional services marketing is not immune to the broader changes transforming the marketing techniques of the current generation of marketers. In every sector, marketing has changed. Older techniques, such as advertising, direct mail, flyers and trade shows, are not producing the same results they did in the past and are proving expensive and uneconomical. And while some traditional techniques, such as business networking, are still delivering new clients, they are time-consuming and require a physical presence that limits their scope and range.
So the newer channels of digital marketing – social media, opt-in newsletters, blogging and the like – are becoming the most effective way for any business to reach new and existing clients.
But these new marketing opportunities are not without their pitfalls; social media, in particular, is a potential minefield for the professional services firm. And even some of the biggest of corporates can get it wrong. But we know that high-growth professional services firms focus more on social media than average growth firms. So in this post, we will look at the social media pros and cons for professional services marketing.
Anyone familiar with sales or marketing will recognise the traditional model of the sales funnel. It can also be represented by the acronym AIDA: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action.
As a model, it was developed in principle in 1898 by American advertising advocate E. St. Elmo Lewis - in the days before the Internet, before television and even before radio. So it’s hardly surprising that this century-old model may need re-thinking.
In professional services marketing, the funnel was traditionally "fed" with leads from networking and referrals from clients. While business is still generated using this approach, the funnel has changed radically - with some even saying that the sales funnel is dead.
Referral: the act of directing someone to a different place or person for information, help, or action, often to a person or group with more knowledge or power (Cambridge Dictionaries Online).
Referrals have traditionally been used to garner business for professional services firms. Trust and good relationships are created and built upon through hours of networking and recommendations from current clients. And this approach remains a highly valuable way of acquiring work.
However, while word-of-mouth is still an effective tool, it is no longer enough on its own and, in the current climate, fewer clients are being won using this technique. In short, traditional marketing methods are no longer as impactful as they once were, as the Internet has fundamentally changed the way people research and buy from professional services companies - and, indeed, businesses across all industries.
So perhaps you’re finding that you are reaching fewer people and are beginning to wonder how you can make more connections again.
Now, prospective buyers seek out information about a company online before committing to doing business with them. Like the referral system, trust and genuine relationships lie at the heart of this new model – but it is powered by content and marketing automation rather than conversations and handshakes.
Let’s take a look at what this means for your organisation and how you can adapt, to successfully thrive in this changing environment.
“A revolution is underway” (Hinge Research Institute).
Fortunately, it's not a bloody, violent one, but for professional services marketing change is afoot.
Traditional marketing methods - such as referrals, advertising and direct mail - are becoming less effective as more and more individuals and companies rely on online resources and searching the web to guide them through the buyer’s journey.
Within this new system, content is king. In order to attract (and keep) the attention of the people that are looking for the solutions you provide, it’s necessary to create useful and educative content that tells them what they want (and need) to know.
So how can you achieve this? Probably the best option is to appoint a content writer or writers to craft the excellent content you require. This person or persons might be a new hire, or they might already be within your company. In fact, you might be surprised to find that you already have more content writers than you think.
But what benefits will a content writer bring to your professional services marketing? Well, they can help you to achieve a number of things…
It’s not so long ago that most professional services work was won through referrals. Not just from client recommendations, but also from hours of networking invested over the years, building relationships with introducers and intermediaries.
Referrals still work of course but, for most firms, fewer clients are won in this way today. In fact, tougher regulation in various sectors has made referral for new business almost impossible. Tighter controls recently imposed on the legal sector are testament to that.
Maybe therefore your firm is not growing at the same rate as it used to.
