Before we get started, if you want the full picture on what the data says about what works and what doesn’t for professional services marketing, head over to our in-depth research report – The B2B Effectiveness Blueprint: Professional Services Edition. This offers exhaustive data and insights for what’s working today for marketers just like you. In the meantime…
Unlike many other B2B industries, marketing for professional services means growing a firm that sells expertise rather than a product. The core challenge is that most firms offer near-identical services, few clients are in the market at any one time and buyers see little to tell one competent firm from another.
The answer isn’t more lead generation. It’s a mix weighted towards demand and reputation, built on a clear strategy, a distinctive way of working and content clients actually value.
Here’s the short 5-step version:
The rest of this guide works through why professional services is such hard ground for marketing and, importantly, what to do about it.
Growing a professional services firm is difficult. There’s no physical product to point at. Firms sell the invisible, a promise of future results, and confidentiality often stops them showing what they’ve done for existing clients in any concrete way.
There’s the sea of sameness problem. One firm’s services tend to look almost identical to the next firm’s. Often that’s down to regulation. There’s a fairly prescribed way to do a company’s accounts, for example. A client looking to switch often concludes they could pick almost any competent firm and barely notice the difference. For marketers, that makes meaningful differentiation a real hurdle.
There’s the low churn problem. Professional services generally has low churn. Good news if you’re the established firm. Harder if you’re trying to break new ground. The thought of changing accountant fills most business leaders with dread, and that keeps the number of clients in the market small at any moment.
The word of mouth problem. These barriers push firms back onto networking and word of mouth. It becomes more about who you know than what you know or what you do. That’s fine while it delivers a steady stream of good-fit clients. But sooner or later the little black book runs dry. Then what?
There are outliers, but most firms grow in one of four ways:
Too many firms dive head-first into tactics without the foundations that make them work over the long term.
You need a marketing strategy that connects to the wider business strategy. That way everything you do, from blog articles and reports to email and social, pulls in the same direction and adds up to something the firm cares about. It’s how you avoid random acts of marketing. We go deeper in our guides on how to create a B2B marketing strategy that delivers and how to translate your business strategy into a B2B marketing strategy.
Be clear on what a good-fit client looks like. Your best new clients will usually resemble your most profitable existing ones. If you’re moving into new areas, get a real understanding of who buys services like yours. Either way, it sharpens your target and focuses your effort.
For existing and prospective clients alike, getting clear on what they’re really looking for and why, is the whole game.
Firms too often guess at client motivations through their own worldview. But you are not the client. You have knowledge they don’t and a different vantage point. That’s why they hire you.
Spend time interviewing clients and running primary research and you’ll learn what they actually want, not what you’d like them to want. That insight informs your content, your website, your channels, your keyword research, more or less everything. And it’s the difference between making content and making content with real value to the people you want to reach.
Firm leaders naturally expect leads to arrive off the back of marketing. Who wouldn’t? More leads, more income.
The trouble is a brutal truth: not many clients are in the market at any one time. Nobody wakes up on a cold Tuesday and thinks, ‘I fancy changing my accountant today.’
It’s risky, it’s emotionally draining and it kicks off a lot of disruption.
A rough calculation makes the point. The UK has around 5.3 million businesses of under 10 people (micro-businesses) and another 240,000 between 10 and 250 people (SMBs).
Take accountancy. Clients change accountants rarely, maybe every 10 years on average. So in a year, about 530,000 micro-businesses and 24,500 SMBs are in the market. Over a quarter that drops to 132,000 micro-businesses and 6,000 SMBs. In a single month it’s 44,000 micro-businesses and just 2,000 SMBs.
Now set that against roughly 40,000 accountancy practices in the UK.
Numbers shift with your niche, but a good rule of thumb is that around 5% of potential clients are in the market at any time.
That scarcity of in-market buyers tells you two things:
So what should you do instead?
Split your activity into three broad categories:
Weight your effort deliberately. As a starting point, think roughly 10% lead generation, 40% demand generation and 50% brand and reputation building.
This is aimed at the small number of buyers looking for a new firm right now. Short-term focus, this month and next. Messaging plays on buying signals, the ‘looking for a new firm?‘ angle. Tactics lean towards SEO, Google advertising and retargeting, and sometimes Facebook ads, especially for micro-businesses and individual owners.
Here we’re aiming at clients who aren’t in the market yet. Longer horizon, we’re talking the next six months to a year. Messaging is about problem-solving, the ‘how do I do X?‘ content. Tactics include content marketing, SEO and LinkedIn advertising.
This is the long game, think a year or more. Messaging builds awareness and recognition, the ‘when I think of an accountancy for life sciences, I think of that firm‘ effect. This is the home of PR, paid media, LinkedIn ads and high-quality content built around thought leadership on the issues that matter.
Whole books get written on strategy, and our own deeper guides go further: how to create a B2B marketing strategy that delivers and how to translate your business strategy into a B2B marketing strategy.
Here we’ll keep it to a 30,000-foot view.
There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy. But if there were, it would be this: be the firm that’s closest to the client.
Which brings a second brutal truth. No one cares about your firm. They care about their own business. Firms tend to believe clients think about who to work with far more than they do. As a result they credit clients with far more knowledge and interest than they actually have. Neither is usually true.
So spend time understanding clients. What it’s like to be them, what keeps them up at night, what they’re reaching for. The best way is to ask, or have an impartial third party ask for you. Then show that understanding clearly in your marketing, content and positioning.
And be as niche as you dare. It won’t suit every firm. But the competition for a firm serving high-growth biotech businesses is far thinner than for a generalist serving all SMBs. Specialising lets you become the sought-after expert who genuinely understands what clients need.
You’ll struggle to stand out on what you do. You can stand out on how you do it and how you work with clients. For most firms that’s the richest ground for positioning: something important to clients, unique to the firm and defensible against rivals. Get it right and your communications will land firmly within the client’s world, prove you understand them better than the next firm, and make you the one they remember when it’s time to change.
Thought leadership and content is a natural fit for businesses that sell their thinking. The aim is simple to state: be visible where it matters, with content potential clients value. Two halves, worth taking in turn.
The best content in the world is worthless if no one sees it. So work out where your potential clients go for information. It varies by industry and topic. Using a tool like SparkToro, a search on ‘business financing’ surfaces sites like Smallbiztrends.com, Cityam.com and Finextra.com. Shift to ‘sustainability’ and the key sites become Greenbiz.com, Grist.org and Treehugger.com.
Getting in front of those audiences almost always means paying for access. You might hope social posts deliver similar reach for free, but that hasn’t held for years. An unpromoted LinkedIn post reaches roughly 5% of your own followers, never mind everyone else. You need a solid paid distribution strategy.
The other half is content people actually want. The Hinge Research Institute studies how business buyers research work topics. In order of likelihood, they found the key channels are:
That points to a solid starter list of tactics for professional services firms:
Do you need all of them? Probably not. But bet everything on free social and you’ll lose out to firms taking a more rounded approach.
Not all content is created equal. Beyond quality, some works better early in a sale and some later. And you usually can’t tell which stage a given prospect is at, so you need content for everyone from those who don’t yet know they have a problem to those shopping for a new partner today.
That can sound like you need endless content for every possible need. You don’t. But you do need a core bench covering the main stages of the sale.
We’ve covered a lot, and we’re still only skimming the surface. To sum up, five broad areas matter most in marketing a professional services firm:
Because firms sell the invisible (a promise of future results) and most offer near-identical services thanks to regulation. Client churn is low, competitors look alike and few clients are in the market at any one time. That combination makes differentiation and lead generation genuinely hard.
Four ways: selling more to existing clients, charging higher fees, improving retention and winning new-name clients. Real growth comes from new clients, which is where marketing does its most valuable work.
Around 5%, as a rule of thumb. It varies by niche, but the pool of buyers actively looking for a new firm at any given moment is small. That’s why always-on activity beats stop-start campaigns.
As a starting point, roughly 10% to lead generation, 40% to demand generation and 50% to brand and reputation building. The bulk of the effort goes to the clients who aren’t in the market yet.
By focusing on how it works rather than what it does. Since services often look identical, the richest positioning comes from a distinctive way of working with clients: something important to them, unique to the firm and defensible against competitors.
Three types, mapped to the sales cycle. WHY content (thought leadership, research, articles) to raise the issue. HOW content (guides, checklists, tools) to help them address it. And WHAT content (service pages, case studies, testimonials) to show what you offer.
We hope you’ve found this guide useful. If you’d like to talk through how your firm could market its services better, we’d love to. Drop us a line at hello@consideredcontent.com and we’ll set up a time.
Jason Ball is the founder and managing director at Considered. With a multi-decade career in B2B marketing, he’s worked with world-leading brands such as Adobe, Google, EY and Cisco together with niche specialists in technology, manufacturing and professional services.