Before you dive in to the data, a quick note on what you’re seeing here.
This is a stripped down version of the findings of the B2B Effectiveness Engine research for the professional services sector. It is closer to a ‘lean and clean’ version than the full report.
If you want more analysis, prettier graphics and a PDF download option, head over to the full report here.
For professional services firms, email is the most popular demand generation tactic. Yet, shockingly, it ranks 24th for effectiveness. SEO is the second most popular lead generation tactic and lands at 25th on the effectiveness scale.
There’s an uncomfortable pattern here: the tactics firms reach for first are often the ones delivering the least.
Most marketers don’t want to admit it, but the professional services sector tends to run on habit rather than evidence. Firms keep doing what’s easy, what’s familiar and, more often than anyone says out loud, whatever the partner down the corridor has always done.
To test that, we surveyed more than 1,000 senior B2B marketing professionals across just under 40 tactics, at 95% confidence with a margin of error of plus or minus 3%. This is the professional services cut of the data (just over 250 responses).
The gap between common practice and genuine effect turned out to be wide. Here’s what the research shows.
As mentioned above, when we set how often a tactic gets used against how well it actually performs, the relationship all but disappeared.
| Tactic | Popularity rank | Effectiveness rank |
|---|---|---|
| Email marketing (demand gen) | 1st most popular | 24th most effective |
| SEO (lead gen) | 2nd most popular | 25th most effective |
| Content syndication (brand building) | 37th most popular | 3rd most effective |
So email and SEO are super popular but actually perform pretty badly. Content syndication, by contrast, barely registers on the popularity scale at 37th, yet it’s the 3rd most effective brand-building tactic. Across the study, what the crowd favours and what the evidence rewards keep diverging.
Not well if current behaviour is anything to go by. The research on brand-building versus activation is about as robust as marketing evidence gets. And professional services marketers are largely setting it aside.
| Benchmark | Brand building | Activation |
|---|---|---|
| Binet and Field 60/40 rule | 60% | 40% |
| LinkedIn B2B Institute (all B2B) | 46% | 54% |
| Professional services marketers (actual) | 32% | 68% |
Professional services firms are putting just 32% of budget into brand building and 68% into activation. That falls short of the 46/54 benchmark for B2B and it’s a long way from the classic 60/40 split.
The reason this matters comes down to the 95:5 rule, drawn from John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. At any moment, only about 5% of buyers are in-market (probably less for many PS firms). So spending more than two-thirds of your budget chasing that 5% while neglecting the 95% who’ll buy later isn’t really a strategy, it’s impatience with a budget line attached.
Offered a list of nine possible objectives, the average professional services marketer committed to four. This tends to scatter effort rather than concentrate it.
| Objective | % selecting it |
|---|---|
| Increased revenue | 62% |
| Increasing market awareness of the firm | 55% |
| Increasing demand for services | 43% |
| Lowering the cost of acquiring clients | 26% |
| Shortening the sales cycle | 22% |
Increased revenue leads at 62%, while shortening the sales cycle trails the field at 22%.
The primary objective looked much the same across the board, but high performers leaned noticeably harder on brand equity, reducing churn and customer lifetime value.
The lesson is to choose a small set of objectives and let them carry real weight. They have gravity. Whatever you measure, and whichever tactics you back, will end up bending towards them. So it’s worth choosing carefully.
Fewer than in any other sector we studied. Professional services lags badly here. And even among those who have a strategy, there’s a steep fall-off between owning one and being funded to deliver it.
| Strategy milestone | % of professional services marketers |
|---|---|
| Have a marketing strategy from business strategy | 52% |
| Have it signed off by senior management | 37% |
| Have the budget sign-off to execute it | 24% |
Only 52% of firms say they have a strategy that flows from business strategy. 37% have secured approval. And just 24% hold the budget to actually deliver it.
Strategy matters. A lot. High performers with a robust strategy reached 79% success in lead generation against a 43% average, 72% in demand generation against 44%, and 71% in brand building against 41%. Not small differences.
In a word: positioning. If there’s a single thing worth fixing above all others, this is it.
Just 34% of professional services marketers meet the bar for genuinely differentiated positioning. Top performers are more than twice as likely to clear it (somewhere between 52% and 69% of top performers claim real differentiation, against 23% to 24% of average performers).
The flip side is stark. If your positioning is untested, your odds of being a high performer sit at just 1% to 3%. This isn’t merely low, it’s close enough to zero to treat as zero. Effective positioning needs both halves in place: tested with clients and reviewed against competitors.
Why does it weigh so heavily? Partly because of what Bain calls the Day One List. Their research shows clients pick from the shortlist of firms they already knew before doing any research roughly 90% of the time. Matt Dixon’s work adds that 40% to 50% of deals end in no decision at all.
Put those together and the message is plain. If you’re not already lodged in the client’s mind, you’re rarely in the deal. Which is why, if you only get one thing right, we’d argue it should be positioning.
Only 58% of professional services marketers do any market research. This is lower than other sectors in the study. And top performers are around 28% more likely to invest in it. Unlike elsewhere, every research type showed some positive effect here, though five stood out.
| Research type | Uplift in likelihood of being a top performer |
|---|---|
| Researching individuals on the buying committee | 52% more likely |
| Researching your ICP and personas | 39% more likely |
| Segmenting potential buyers | 30% more likely |
| Researching the key outcomes clients want | 29% more likely |
| Researching broad views of customers and prospects | 28% more likely |
Researching the people on the buying committee was the single biggest lever.
Demographic targeting, by contrast, is largely wishful thinking. Research from MIT and Melbourne Business School found gender targeting is only 42.3% accurate, and getting more specific (say, targeting senior IT decision-makers by profile) lands at just 7.5%. For much of that spend, you’re paying to miss the people you’re aiming at.
Again, the answer is: rarely the ones they currently do. Respondents were asked about 32 possible measures. The average professional services marketer keeps an eye on six. The real question is which six.
| Most popular measures | Most effective measures |
|---|---|
| Brand awareness | Marketing ROI |
| Social engagement | Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) |
| Conversion rates | Customer lifetime value (CLV) |
| Number of website visitors | Brand equity |
| Market share | Closed-won |
Not one of the five most popular measures makes the top five for effectiveness. Social engagement ranks 29th for effectiveness and conversion rates 28th. The best measure also shifts with deal size: NPS rates highest for deals under £10k a month, while MQLs come top for deals over £50k.
Firms gravitate to social engagement and conversion rates because they’re cheap to track and easy to move. Neither tells you whether you actually won the work. The more useful habit is to track what closes rather than what clicks.
The average professional services marketer uses six lead generation tactics. This climbs to 11 among the those focused on MQLs and 13 among those who’ve researched their ICP. Even so, the five most effective tactics for deals under £10k and for deals over £50k overlap on only two.
| Most popular lead gen tactics | Most effective lead gen tactics |
|---|---|
| 1. Email marketing | 1. Analyst relations |
| 2. SEO | 2. Content syndication |
| 3. Your own primary research | 3. Custom landing pages |
| 4. Paid social media advertising | 4. Top-of-funnel content |
| 5. Online articles and blogs | 5. Online articles and blogs |
| 6. Organic social media updates | 6. Sales enablement |
| 7. Sales enablement | 7. Retargeted advertising |
| 8. Videos | 8. Reseller programmes |
| 9. Webinars | 9. Bottom-of-funnel content |
| 10. Case studies | 10. Analyst and third-party research reports |
Analyst relations is the single most effective lead generation tactic.
We were genuinely surprised to see top-of-funnel content land fourth. Professional services and thought leadership are easy bedfellows. Of course, because every firm produces it, it is likely to be that much more difficult to stand out. The bar is simply higher. It’s probably why so many of the effective tactics revolve around gaining greater reach, breaking through to the people that matter.
The average professional services marketer runs five demand generation tactics, rising to six among the revenue-focused and 11 among those focused on closed-won.
As with lead generation, the lists for the smallest and largest deal sizes overlap on only two tactics. This is a reminder that the right mix depends heavily on the size of the work you’re chasing.
Overall, reach, once again, does the heavy lifting.
The average professional services marketer runs five brand-building tactics, rising to ten among those who’ve researched their ICP. Curiously, firms with awareness as a primary objective use fewer (just four).
Again, reach reigns supreme.
| Most popular brand building tactics | Most effective brand building tactics |
|---|---|
| 1. Email marketing | 1. Programmatic advertising |
| 2. SEO | 2. Content syndication |
| 3. Case studies | 3. Your own in-person events |
| 4. Your own in-person events | 4. Media advertising (non-social) |
| 5. Online articles and blogs | 5. Third-party review sites |
| 6. Paid social media advertising | 6. 1-to-1 or 1-to-few ABM |
| 7. Organic social media updates | 7. Email marketing |
| 8. Videos | 8. Organic social media updates |
| 9. Webinars | 9. Your own primary research |
| 10. Third-party events and tradeshows | 10. Case studies |
The effective list is dominated by tactics that put the firm in front of the right people, over and over.
That reach can be broad, such as through content syndication, paid advertising and social media, or narrow and high-value, through ABM.
Either way, high-quality content in professional services has become the price of entry rather than a differentiator. Why would a client read your report when a McKinsey or a PwC piece is a click away?
The firms that win are the ones that can reliably get their content in front of the people who matter.
The study distils everything into twelve. Here they are, blunt and in order.
01. Be clear about your marketing strategy. Make sure it flows from the wider business strategy and has executive support and the budget to execute.
02. Sign up to meaningful objectives. They will bias what you do, what you measure and the results you achieve.
03. Do not simply track the things that are easy to measure. Be very sceptical of data from any source with a vested interest in how you spend budget.
04. Understand what clients really care about, not what you wish they cared about. Research it and focus on it 100%.
05. Spend more time on the 95% of clients who are not in-market than the 5% who are. The numbers do not lie.
06. Build brand and mental availability first and foremost. The Day One List shows why this is job number one for professional services marketers.
07. Develop a distinctive positioning supported by a range of brand assets, from identity elements to brand personality to the quality of the content you create.
08. Prioritise reach over personalisation. Market to the broadest possible market for your services. Distribution matters a lot.
09. Invest in achieving excess share of voice against your competitors. It is a proven way to grow your brand.
10. Be consistent yet creative over time. Find new ways to say the same thing and repeat, repeat, repeat.
11. Do not pass non-leads to business development. Poorly qualified email addresses are not leads and they will undermine your authority.
12. Use tactics that work, not just tactics that are easy and popular. There is finally solid research to tell which is which.
These statistics come from The B2B Effectiveness Engine, the largest in-depth study of real-world B2B marketing effectiveness to date. It surveyed more than 1,000 senior marketing professionals and tested just under 40 tactics across lead generation, demand generation and brand building, with results carrying 95% confidence and a margin of error of plus or minus 3%.
The Professional Services Edition focuses specifically on professional services marketers (around 250 respondents).
The work was produced by Considered Content, a B2B thought leadership agency that’s worked with professional services firms ranging from the very large to the highly niche. Our philosophy is straightforward: out-think the market rather than outspend it.
You can read the full Professional Services Edition report or reach the team at hello@consideredcontent.com.
What’s the most effective B2B marketing tactic for professional services? It depends on the discipline. Analyst relations tops the effectiveness list for lead generation, online product and service configurators come top for demand generation, and programmatic advertising leads brand building. The thread running through all three is reach. The most effective tactics get the firm in front of the right people.
Is email marketing effective? Not relative to how much it’s used. Email is among the most popular tactics in professional services marketing, yet it ranks 24th for effectiveness in demand generation. This is another reminder that being popular and being effective are two different things.
How should professional services firms split brand and activation spend? Well, they currently allocate 32% to brand and 68% to activation. The LinkedIn B2B Institute benchmark is 46% brand and 54% activation, while the classic Binet and Field rule suggests 60/40. On any of those measures, most professional services firms are under-investing in brand.
Why does positioning matter so much? Only 34% of professional services marketers have genuinely differentiated positioning, yet top performers are more than twice as likely to be truly differentiated. And firms with an untested positioning have only a 1% to 3% chance of being high performers. Add the Day One List finding that buyers choose from a known shortlist around 90% of the time, and positioning becomes the highest-leverage thing a firm can address.
How many buyers are in-market at any one time? About 5%, according to the 95:5 rule from John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. In PS firms with long client tenures, this in-market figure may be significantly lower. The remaining 95% are future buyers. This is exactly why brand building aimed at the whole market matters more than activation aimed only at the few buying today.