The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing for Professional Services Firms

Most professional services firms clearly understand the benefits that digital marketing can bring to their business. In any case, it is obvious to even a blind man that people are spending more time online than they previously did and Covid-19 has further increased the time spent online.

While knowing the benefits is fine, implementing it for your firm in order to enjoy these benefits is quite a different story.

If you are a custodian of a professional services brand and would like to implement Digital Marketing for your business, here is where to start.

1. Identify Your Business Goals

The right place to start is strategically highlighting your firm’s business goals- what are you looking to achieve? Visibility? Leads? Conversions? In some cases, it may be all 3.

Whatever your goals may be, have them spelt out in detail, as this will enable you to target and measure success or otherwise of your actions better.

2. Create your Digital Marketing Strategy

It’s no secret that your line of work makes you besties with documents of several pages, but this is not one of such.

Putting together a strategy for your firm is simply a task that requires you to put aside some planning and thinking time to answer a few critical questions, and provide answers to some others. This exercise will help you identify your businesses’ purpose and to bring a focus for your digital marketing efforts. It will provide a framework, a guidance for the entirety of your marketing actions.

A competent digital marketing strategy has four essential elements:

A. Differentiators: What sets you apart from the other Law,
Engineering, HR, Accounting or Consulting firms? What is your unique selling point?

B. Market Positioning: This is an offshoot of your differentiators. Your market positioning provides your audiences with a cohesive and compelling story they need to prefer your firm over your competitors.

C. Key messages: For success on this route, you ought to have key messages for each of your unique audiences. The same
message for a regular client being served to a prospective influencer won’t cut it.

D. Content Strategy: Once you have documented your overall
strategy, the next step is to select the right content strategy and tactics you will use to deliver key messages to your target audiences. This is the mode through which you will communicate your expertise, build trust, and demonstrate to potential clients how you can help them. Is it via videos, blog posts, infographics, email marketing, podcasts, etc. or just two or all of these? What tone will it carry? How often will you share?

Furthermore, it is point worthy to note that social media is an integral part of any digital marketing strategy. In defining your Social Media core, you will need to provide answers to some of the questions below:

Who is my target audience?
This will depend on the kind of customers you are looking to get into business with and/or how much you are willing to invest in digital marketing. Whatever you do, you want to go where your target audience is most comfortable. For most professional services firms, LinkedIn and Twitter are always good social media platforms.

What is my message?
What themes, topics, or narrative will my content be based on?

What channels can I realistically commit to?
If the Noun ‘impact’ excites you, then you should consider conducting a
thorough research and deciding based on the platforms you can realistically commit to and the one where your target audience is most comfortable with. There are lots of Social Media platforms and if you do not have the personnel and investment to cover all, it is best to select a few. It is not a good practice to spread yourself thin.

What am I trying to achieve on each of these channels?
how else would you measure your wins unless you first clearly spell
out your aim?

How will I measure my success?
Evaluation is essential and you should know from the beginning, the metrics you are going to measure to judge digital marketing drive successful.

Consider this a ‘welcome package’: How to Develop A Digital Marketing Strategy (Template Included)

3. Conduct a Target Audience Research

Another important step in putting together a digital marketing strategy for a professional service firm is conducting a detailed target audience research.

There is no business if you don’t know who you’re selling to. Your target audience research will cut across your current and potential clients, referral sources, and industry influencers, and each will go as detailed as their unique behavioural patterns – who they are, their pain points, what they are looking to achieve, how they spend their free time, yes, that detailed.

Ultimately, there are two kinds of research you can do. The first approach is the Secondary Research, which is simply sampling your target audience based on research already carried out by a similar firm in your field. The other is the Primary Research, which requires you to conduct an original study of your target audience.

A combination of both research styles is known to birth the best results. You get a rounded well-informed view of your audience, making your digital marketing efforts more of a science than an amateur guessing game.

4. Set Specific Goals and Determine How You Will Measure Them

When it comes to measuring how well you are faring in the pursuit of your goals, it is important to do so using the right metrics, and not have your analytics based on/limited to vanity metrics like the number of likes, followers, shares, views, etc.
Check out this article on the real marketing metrics you should measure for accurate data.

5. Use a Marketing Software

Effective digital marketing for professional services firms is based on three pillars – Strategy, Content and Software. The Software is the tool that drives the implementation of the strategy and the content and having the right software cannot be overemphasized.

A marketing  tool like Hubspot offers you a platform to build landing pages for your campaigns, share your social posts and measure them, reach out to your prospects and customers through email marketing, research and grow your SEO visibility, build sequences, marketing automation, CRM etc.
If you are still running your marketing manually, then you should consider getting a software to multiply the success of your digital marketing efforts.

IN CONCLUSION:

What better season to take a swing in the direction of digital marketing than in these times of Covid-19 when physical sales and interaction is limited and people are spending more time online?

With a solid inbound marketing strategy and a formidable digital team and/or agency to help implement the day to day deliverables, you are well on your way to making your brand the top-of-mind choice for your industry.

Looking for help in putting together a digital marketing strategy for your firm and implementing it for success? Book a free consultation with any of our consultants here.