Despite the overwhelming amount of information and opinions across LinkedIn, podcasts and numerous business books, one question still sits on the lips of virtually every professional services marketer today: What actually works in the real world?
It’s odd that, a quarter of the way through the 21st century we should still be asking the question. Professional services marketers have never had more access to performance data. We’ve got dashboards and technology galore. And, collectively, we run thousands of campaigns and initiatives every single year.
Of course, there are plenty of people willing give us their hot takes.
The answer is thought leadership.
The answer is AI.
The answer is <insert latest shiny thing>.
Wait a few months for a ‘new’ approach to climb the hype curve and the answer will be something else entirely. Fortunately, the person or company promoting it will have a course to sell you or a community you can join or a cutting-edge piece of martech for you to invest in (all at a low monthly subscription rate).
It’s bonkers.
We’ve worked with a wide range of professional services firms. They’ve included giants such as EY, Grant Thornton and Simmons & Simmons as well as a range of niche consultancies. As a result, we like to think we know what works and what doesn’t. But with all the conflicting ‘evidence’ on offer, we can’t afford to be complacent.
Do we believe in content just because we happen to do content?
Are we overestimating the power of differentiation because we have a programme for that?
Are we just as much a victim of our own biases as all the influencers clogging up your LinkedIn feed?
Uncomfortable questions for sure.
And the big one: What if we’re wrong?
Maybe it was another “XYZ is dead, do this instead” post on LinkedIn that did it. Whatever it was, we finally decided to park our egos at the door and go looking for answers.
So, we commissioned the world’s largest in-depth study of real-world B2B marketing effectiveness.
Go big or go home.
We asked over 1,000 senior marketing pros a wide range of questions about their efforts. We asked about their approach to strategy. We asked about how they gained customer insights. We asked about how they measure results.
Then we went further and quizzed them about the specific tactics they use for brand building, demand generation and lead generation. We asked which deliver value and which are turkeys. And we had them rank the effectiveness of just under 40 different approaches.
The result became the B2B Effectiveness Engine.
The data in the Engine allows us to split high performers from everyone else. We can look at what they do differently and what is simply table stakes. We can see how tactics for professional services differ from technology and manufacturing. And we can analyse how tactical choices are affected by deal size and objectives.
The B2B Effectiveness Engine has quickly become the foundation for how we do business.
Thing is, we never planned to publish the findings.
The Engine was an internal tool. Something we hoped would separate us from the hundreds of other B2B agencies. But as we began to talk about it, whether in person or on podcasts and webinars, the one request we got over and over was to publish a guide to the findings.
Eventually we buckled. What you’re reading is the result.
In this in-depth report, we’re going to identify exactly what works in professional services marketing today. Not because we believe it (in fact, some of the results majorly reset our beliefs) but because this is what senior marketers just like you have told us.
There’s a lot here. However, it is still just a fraction of the data we gathered. Success differs by sector, deal size and objective among other things.
What works for a consulting firm targeting SMEs with an average monthly spend of under £10k will be different from a large accountancy practice selling £1m+ business transformation projects to large enterprises. It will be different again for a similar-sized business in manufacturing or technology.
There is no single ‘B2B’ and one-size-does-not-fit-all.
While we won’t be able to give every permutation (you’ll need to speak to us about your specific objectives), we can paint a broad overview of some of the major factors that separate peak performers from the also-rans.
In the following sections, we’ll split the research findings into what we term the upstream foundational elements (strategy, measurement, differentiation, objectives etc) and the downstream tactics used across brand building, demand generation and lead generation.
We’ll identify the factors that appear to make a significant difference to success. And we’ll explore some of the tactical recipes that deliver the greatest results for today’s firms.
One of the overriding findings of this research is that popular does not equal effective in professional services marketing.
We see over and over that what’s top of the most popular charts is often near the bottom of the most effective lists. It’s like our parents always said, just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean you should too.
To illustrate:
And on and on it goes.
If you’re not currently seeing the results you need for your firm, hopefully you’ll find something here to help.
If you really are killing it (as they say on LinkedIn), the data will show you why. Spoiler: it might not be for the reasons you think.
And if you simply want an antidote to all the garbage you see posted online, we’ve got you.
Let’s get started.
How does your firm compare to the data?
Find out how your efforts compare to the highest performers in professional services, take the B2B Effectiveness Scorecard.
This quick and easy tool uses a cut-down version of the data to enable you to get an overview of where you stand. It’s completely free and we promise not to hound you afterwards.
By now, many marketers have already come across Les Binet and Peter Field’s research into marketing effectiveness. If not, you’re missing a trick.
Published as The Long and the Short of It, the pair analysed whether short-term tactical activity (‘activation’ as they term it) or long-term brand building delivers greater impact for today’s businesses.
Of course, this isn’t a case of either/or.
They found the optimum mix is that around 60% of your budget should go to brand building and the rest to activation. It became known as the 60/40 rule.
But that’s going to be skewed by all the B2C data right? Yes, but not as much as you may think.
Working with the LinkedIn B2B Institute, the pair re-examined the data. They found that in B2B, the optimum split is that 46% of marketing budget should go to long-term brand building and 54% to short-term activation.
To complicate things a little, for the B2B Effectiveness Engine, we split activity three ways:
Demand generation has become a somewhat contentious term. Some claim it doesn’t exist, others that it is the only game in town.
For our money, demand generation does exist but is distinct from ‘demand creation’ in some important ways. (Call us if you want a lively discussion on this.)
Adding in demand generation makes for a less clean-cut split than brand vs activation. We could certainly have saved time and money by avoiding the distinction.
So why do it? Well, our experience has shown that given that only around 5% of potential buyers are in-market in any quarter, most marketers will need to focus their attention longer term.
Importantly, however, we’re not always talking about the very long term that brand building deals with.
We’ve called this demand generation to match the wider industry (though ‘demand acceleration’ is probably a more accurate term). It’s where you are marketing to potential clients who may be aware they have a problem but are not yet sure they should do something about it. Or if they are beginning to make plans, they’re uncertain what their options are.
And let’s face it, this is why a lot of clients engage a professional services firm in the first place.
Both demand generation and lead generation are forms of activation, just with different time horizons. So how do our respondents split their efforts?
In professional services, we see 32% of marketers’ focus going to brand building and 68% going to activation. This falls significantly below Binet and Field’s 46/54 target split for B2B.
Professional services marketers devote slightly less effort to branding than technology marketers but slightly more than those in manufacturing.
And to get a little more granular, if we look at demand generation versus lead generation, the split is roughly 44/56 (lead/demand).
What are you trying to achieve? In the research, we gave respondents a choice of nine different objectives. They were free to select as many as they liked but we also had them specify their primary objective.
On average, professional services marketers are focused on a combination of four different objectives. This is about the same as other sectors we studied.
Perhaps unsurprising in our more bottom-line-focused times, the number one cited objective is increased revenue (selected by 62% of respondents).
In second place comes increasing market awareness of the firm (55%). Increasing demand for our services lies in third place (43%).
At the bottom of the table, shortening the sales cycle/increasing pipeline velocity comes last on 22%, a little ahead of lowering the cost of acquiring clients on 26%.
But that’s the average. Things shift for higher performers.
When it comes to top performers, the differences are typically a matter of degree.
Increasing revenue still rules and increasing market awareness of the firm scores higher. But we see greater emphasis on increasing brand equity, lowering churn and increasing client lifetime value.
In terms of the primary marketing objective, there is relatively little difference between top performers and also-rans.
Not surprisingly perhaps, those with different objectives make different tactical choices.
If we look at demand generation, marketers with a primary objective to increase revenue are more likely to use email, paid social media advertising and online articles.
Those with a focus on greater market demand are more likely to select primary research, thought leasdership and loyalty programmes.
In reality, these are not the highest-performing demand gen tactics. But it goes to show that what you have as your primary objective will inevitably skew your tactical decisions.
Read any marketing textbook or take any course worth its while, and you’ll quickly learn that having a marketing strategy is one of the fundamentals of success.
If you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve for the business, why do marketing in the first place?
In this regard, professional services marketers fall far behind those in other sectors. Just 52% say they have a marketing strategy that flows from the firm’s business strategy.
The importance of this snaps clearly into focus when we split out high performers from everyone else:
Just because you have a strategy doesn’t mean you have the backing and budget to execute on it.
When we probed deeper we found that the number of professional services marketers whose strategy has been signed off by senior management dropped to just 37%.
This is important.
There are too many studies showing business leaders having too little faith in their heads of marketing. Often this comes down to a perception that marketing is out of touch with the wider commercial realities of the firm. It may be unfair but perception is reality.
Having tough business-level conversations with the firm’s management about marketing’s role is a key marker of success. Gaining senior leadership agreement ensures marketing is clearly seen as a core part of the organisation (not a nice-to-have add-on that can be axed when times get tough).
You’ve got a strategy. You have sign-off. But do you have the budget to execute?
Just 24% of professional services marketers say they do.
This is a worryingly low number. If you have to endlessly go to battle for money to do your job, you’ll always be a hostage to the quarter-to-quarter fortunes of the wider firm. And this is in an environment where what you do today may not show results for three or four quarters at best.
If the strategy is clear, if it’s directly linked to the firm’s success, and if senior management agrees, there should be no reason why budget can’t be invested to execute on it.
Today, it’s difficult to move without coming across the rule of thumb that just 5% of buyers are likely to be in-market at any one time. This is called The 95:5 Rule and is based on research by John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. (It’s less of a hard-and-fast rule and more a signpost of what you’re up against.)
Now let’s add another: The Day One List.
The Day One List is based on research from Bain which found, “buyers already have a list of potential vendors in mind before starting the search process, and 90% of the time end up buying off that day one list.” And it gets worse. According to Matt Dixon (of Challenger Sale fame), 40% to 50% of potential deals end in no decision.
Why are we telling you this?
In a nutshell, there are very few clients in the market at any one time and almost everyone who is already has a clear preference for the firm they’ll ultimately choose.
Say, for example, you target enterprise buyers in ~1,000+ employee businesses in Europe. Of course, your real addressable market is likely to be a subset of this. But let’s go with the bigger number.
There are approximately 10,000 companies you could talk to. But just 500 of these are likely to be in-market in any quarter. And if you are not on the Day One List, around 50 may consider engaging your firm.
These same 50 will also consider buying from all your competitors. (Oh, and half of these opportunities will end in no-sale.)
These are not great odds.
As a professional services marketer, you have a choice. You could invest most of your time and energy competing for those 50 in-market clients. Or you could build a brand to get you on the Day One List.
Again, this is a Long and the Short of It question. The answer is that you should do both. But too many professional services firms do too little of the long and too much of the short.
This is why the B2B Effectiveness Engine data shows such a massive positive impact of having a clear, differentiated position in the market. Sadly, however, just 34% of professional services marketers meet the criteria for having a differentiated positioning.
Between 52% and 69% of top performers say they are truly differentiated. Conversely, just 23% to 24% of average performers say the same. Basically, you are more than twice as likely to be in the top-performing groups if you’ve got your firm’s positioning sorted.
This is why we tell clients that if they only get one thing right, positioning is the one to go for.
This is a critical distinction. When we look at the data, it is only when you have a positioning that is both tested with customers and reviewed against competitors that you see this advantage.
If you have only tested it with clients or only reviewed it against the competition, you are far less likely to be in the leading groups. And if you think you’re differentiated but haven’t tested it at all, you have just a 1% to 3% chance of being in those high-performing groups.
Getting positioning right has a powerful knock-on effect on everything that comes after. Those that hit the gold standard here see greater effectiveness from virtually every tactic they use
It’s that important.
Customer insight should be one of marketing’s superpowers. The more we understand our clients’ worlds, the more effectively we can talk to them about what really matters.
But all too often, these ‘insights’ are actually assumptions. Things we believe to be true because that’s how it looks from within the firm (or because that’s what the business development team tells us). There is no substitute for going out and actually speaking to clients with an open mind and no agenda other than to learn.
The good news is that across the B2B Effectiveness Engine data, we see 58% of professional services respondents conducting some kind of market research. However, this is significantly lower than other sectors (the number for technology is 74%).
Here again we see a clear difference between top performers and everyone else. The most effective marketers are, on average, 28% more likely to invest in research than their less effective colleagues.
So then the question becomes, what research are they doing and which delivers the greatest value?
We gave respondents the choice of 9 different types of customer research. The top five most popular are:
But that’s popularity, what about effectiveness?
The good news here is that all of these are more likely to be used by top-performing professional services marketers. However, the top five most associated with being a leading performer over an average one are:
All the other types of research we ask about also have some positive impact, just to a lesser degree — something we don’t see in other sectors.
At the bottom of the list, two stand out: researching what the market thinks of your services (just a 14% bump) and pre-testing campaigns (9%)
The third-place showing for segmentation is interesting.
It makes sense. Having meaningful market segments can help you be more focused in your messaging and more efficient in how you use your budget.
However, when this is linked to high degrees of personalisation, the impact becomes far more questionable.
An academic study from MIT and Melbourne Business School found that something as basic as gender targeting is only accurate 42.3% of the time. You could toss a coin and do better.
The accuracy for something more specific such as senior IT decision makers? Just 7.5%.
What the work of Binet and Field and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute both show is that increasing reach leads to greater sales and market share growth. You succeed by marketing to the widest number of potential buyers in your market. So, researching your market to overly-segment it may well be counterproductive.
There are many, many things we can measure in marketing. We ask about 32 of them for the B2B Effectiveness Engine. Everything from the classic MQL and pipeline to cost per lead and conversion.
On average, professional services marketers are juggling 6 different measures to judge the effectiveness of their efforts.
But as we mentioned at the outset of this report, popular doesn’t equal effective. In fact, none of these make the top five for effectiveness. None.
Perhaps more worryingly, the second most popular (social engagement) ranks just 29th for effectiveness. And third-placed conversion rates comes just ahead in 28th place.
When we dive deeper into how respondents’ rate the effectiveness of different measures, a very different list emerges.
Here are the top five:
Again, these will change by deal level. Net Promoter Scores (NPS) are the highest-rated measure for deals under £10k per month recurring. For deals over £50k, it’s marketing qualified leads (MQLs) that come out on top.
What you choose to measure is likely to affect your tactical choices (and therefore your effectiveness). It’s only natural. You will skew towards what you believe will hit the numbers.
Professional services marketers who use MQLs for example, are more likely to say that online articles, sales enablement and 1-to-1 and 1-to-few ABM are top tactics for demand generation.
Those who opt for closed:won will say it’s paid social, 1-to-1 and 1-to-few ABM, and email.
This is regardless of whether the tactics are the actual highest performers.
What gets measured matters.
If you’ve skipped the earlier sections and simply jumped ahead to get the juice on tactics, please go back and check them out.
Ensuring the foundational upstream factors are right will likely do more to improve your effectiveness than any magic combination of tactics. Specifically, the big three of strategy, differentiation and customer insight have a significant impact on everything else.
But if you have taken all that on board, what are the highest-performing tactics in lead generation?
Well, it depends. Sorry.
We see significant shifts in effectiveness for tactics across different deal levels. What works hardest for a £10k per month engagement isn’t the same as what will help land a £50k+ per month one.
If we compare the top 5 list of the single most effective lead generation tactics for deals under £10k per month and the top 5 for deals over £50k per month, just two tactics appear on both lists.
We don’t have the scope to cover every single permutation. We’ll just talk about tactics for professional services as a whole. If you want to know the ideal combination for your specific circumstances, get in touch.
We asked respondents about their use of just under 40 different tactics. On average, professional services marketers are using a combination of 6. This increases to 11 for those who measure success by MQLs and up to 13 for those who’ve invested in researching their ICP.
The top 10 most popular lead generation tactics are:
But these are just the popular options. Just two of these are on the top 10 most effective list.
Drumroll…
The top 10 highest-performing lead generation tactics for professional services firms are:
We’ll be honest, some of these fundamentally challenged our thinking about what works and what doesn’t in lead generation.
We’d never really thought about the role of analysts in professional services marketing. Technology sure, but not professional services. To be honest, we’re still getting our heads around this.
Despite the fact that top-of-funnel content is one of our specialisms, prior to this research we would never have recommended it for lead gen. And yet it came in fourth place.
However, when we step back to consider the findings of the Long and the Short of It, the top 10 is perhaps not so surprising.
Achieving reach is fundamental to marketing success. So it makes sense that half the tactics on the list are focused around getting in front of potential clients that are outside the firm’s current orbit.
Top-of-funnel and bottom-of-the-funnel content are both a clear way to differentiate your brand to a potential client. They show you have expertise that others don’t and that you know how to apply it.
If lead generation is about the 5% of clients who are in-market this quarter, demand generation is about the ones who aren’t right now but who could/should be in the next year or so.
It’s a woolly definition admittedly. As mentioned previously, there are also some who say that there is no such thing as demand generation, there is only lead generation (or lead capture as they’d describe it) and brand building.
They may have a point.
We would argue that in many markets there is an important group that has a need but doesn’t yet fully understand it, the impact it is having on their business or the solutions available.
This will be less so in highly mature markets (eg auditing for listed companies) and more so in less established ones (eg niche consulting engagements).
For these clients, the task is to clearly demonstrate that they have a problem, that it is important and urgent, and that it can be fixed.
More accurately, this would be called demand acceleration.
If you are in the ‘demand generation doesn’t exist’ camp, you can safely skip this section and move on. If not…
As with lead generation, we see deal size having a significant impact on tactical effectiveness. (None of us should be too surprised by this.)
Similar to lead generation, when we compare the top five tactics for the lowest level deals with the same list for the highest, just two tactics appear on both.
There’s a pattern forming.
Again, this is from a list of just under 40 different tactics. On average, professional services marketers use a mix of 5 for demand generation. This varies depending on what they measure and their objectives. Those with a revenue prime objective use 6. Those that track closed:won use 11.
The top 10 that win the beauty parade for popular demand generation tactics are:
We see just 3 of these also appearing on the top 10 list of the most effective tactics. Which are…
The top 10 highest-performing demand generation tactics for professional services firms are:
A lot of the focus in effective professional services demand generation is around nudging potential clients into action.
While we were surprised to see configurators come top, they do offer a way for a potential client to see what an engagement may look like before being baffled by the experts. It’s important to note that relatively few firms use this tactic (around 10%) — but those that do, rate them highly.
Again we see tactics that boost reach performing strongly.
Analysts, resellers and media advertising all get the firm in front of a wider audience. (See the previous section for why this is so important.)
Less surprising was bottom-of-the-funnel content. This is where a potential client can gain a more concrete idea of how a firm can help them address the issues they are facing.
It makes the intangible tangible.
If lead and demand generation represent tactics focused on the immediate and mid-term, branding is primarily about long-term enduring activity.
To be clear, brand does affect immediate sales. The Day One list research proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt.
If 90% of clients buy from firms they already knew before doing any research, you need to do whatever you can to be on that list.
But brand building works on a different time horizon. It’s about the always-on, perpetual activity that compounds over time.
This is why we see such a massive difference between those firms that have a differentiated positioning and those that don’t. As we said earlier, if you get just one thing right, this should be it.
So what does the data say?
We see leaders in brand building are far more likely to invest in customer research.
This all makes sense of course. The better you know your customers, the better you can position your firm in a way that matters to them. But not every type of research nets a positive effect.
Five in particular are worth noting:
Again, we see differences in the effectiveness of specific tactics at specific deal sizes. The #1 most effective tactic is different for each of the four bands we track.
For the lowest deal sizes, email is judged the most effective (bucking the trend of it being a poor performer in most circumstances). In the mid-range, SEO leads the way. And for larger deals, paid advertising comes out on top.
The average number of tactics used for brand building is 5. As with lead generation and demand gen, those who have researched their ICP use more (10). Although, surprisingly, those with awareness as a primary objective use less than the average (4).
But which tactics?
The top 10 we see used most often for brand building are:
But as you may be bored of us saying, popular and effective are often very different things.
When we look at effectiveness (without taking deal level into account) the top 10 are:
To build a brand in professional services, you need to get in front of the people that matter. And you need to do it again and again.
We see many of the most effective tactics being the ones that help deliver this. This may be to a broad audience (content syndication, paid advertising, social media). Or it may be to specific high-value opportunities (ABM).
But what about content? This has been the traditional go-to tactic for most firms — write a thought leadership report and distribute via PR and social.
We see primary research on the list of course. Creating your own data-rich IP will always perform well. It helps ground your thinking in the real world. And, when we look at the list of the single most effective tactic for brand building used by the top performers, top-of-funnel content comes in joint-second place, tying with in-person events.
The reality today is that creating high-quality content in professional services is simply the price of entry. Certainly, high performers do a better job than the also-rans but the bar is now set very high.
Why will a potential client look at your content when they can simply go to a McKinsey or PwC?
With so much noise in the market from other firms, the winners will be those who can reliably get their content in front of potential clients.
We’ve covered a lot in this report. And yet it feels like we’ve only scratched the surface. So much of the learning from the B2B Effectiveness Engine data is affected by specifics and context.
The best approach for your firm will come from a combination of getting the upstream elements right, determining what to measure (and being clear why you’re measuring it and what the knock-on effects will be), and selecting an optimum mix of tactics for your deal level and available budget.
Basically, it’s about finding what works for your specific firm and challenges.
The beauty of the data is that it can give you a better place to start from. If you can separate out poor-performing tactics and focus on the ones that actually deliver success, you face a process of fine-tuning rather than scattergun random acts of marketing.
So what could a blueprint for effectiveness look like for today’s professional services marketers?
Ensure it flows from the wider business strategy and has the executive support and the required budget to execute.
These will bias what you do, what you measure and impact the results you achieve.
Especially if it comes from a source that has a vested interest in how you spend budget.
Not simply what you wished they cared about — research this and focus on it 100%.
The numbers don’t lie.
The Day One List powerfully demonstrates why this should be job #1 for today’s professional services marketers.
From identity elements to personality to the quality of the content you create
Market to the broadest possible market for your products — distribution matters (a lot).
This is a proven way to grow your brand.
Find new ways to say the same thing and repeat, repeat, repeat.
These are not leads and will undermine your credibility.
As we’ve shown, there is now, finally, solid research to show which is which.
Of course, the devil is in the details. There is an entire programme of activity in each of the 12 above.
However, the data and findings in the research show that while there will never be a one-size-fits-all approach to professional services marketing, there are approaches that will deliver greater effectiveness than others.
Some, like positioning and brand building, are difficult to do well but deliver compounding effects year after year.
Others, such as specific tactical choices are often about separating the popular from the effective — doing less of the former and more of the latter.
We hope you’ve found value in the B2B Effectiveness Engine data. It may be that you now have everything you need. In which case, good luck (and let us know how you get on).
But if you think you could do with some additional help, we’d love to talk. We’ve worked with professional services firms from the very large to the very niche. Of course, we may not have worked in your specific focus area but chances are we’ve helped a firm with similar challenges.
01: Our Fast-Track Positioning programme can get you to a distinctive position in the market fast — this is fundamental to building a brand that can compete for Day One List status.
02: We can use the B2B Effectiveness Engine data to help you plan a more effective approach for your specific challenges — going beyond the limitations of this report, we can look at your market, strategy, objectives, deal size and budget to help identify the optimum mix of tactics for you.
03: And we can help you publish world-class content of all types — the kind of content that will clearly demonstrate why you should be on any client’s Day One List.
The first step is to schedule an initial call. There’ll be no hard sell, no PowerPoint, no agency BS — just an honest conversation about what you’re trying to achieve and some thoughts about possible ways forward. Simple as that.
You can contact us at hello@consideredcontent.com or book a convenient time slot to talk right now.
Speak soon.
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.