Digital marketing for professional service firms
Digital marketing is one the best ways a professional services firm can establish authority. Today is to engage prospects through social media marketing, email marketing campaigns, organic SEO and pay-per-click online advertising.
The perfect combination of these marketing tools is always unique to each company. It’s worth giving some of them a try because you never know which combo will deliver the best results. Consider investing part of your marketing budget into digital marketing.
Digital marketing strategy
Planned and executed correctly, digital marketing strategy can become an invaluable asset to your business. It can help you generate more leads through search engine optimization and online ads. It can increase conversion rates through carefully planned marketing funnels and drip campaigns. It can generate more revenue through a well-communicated brand image to the right target audience.
If your firm has developed a solid brand and marketing strategy, you should have a digital marketing plan in place as well. However, this shouldn’t be the only marketing strategy for your professional services firm. Prudent business leaders do not rely on a single lead generation channel. Great companies test and try out different ways of how, when and where to approach their ideal prospects.
The beauty and advantage of digital marketing is that it is cost-efficient to try a new marketing tactic. With so much data a digital marketing campaign can gather, it only makes sense to try out a different approach and eventually get rid of the one that doesn’t make sense in your particular scenario.
Digital marketing capabilities are vast. As a principal of a professioanl services firm you have a lot on your plate already. When you need a professional marketing consultancy from NYC to help you with your firm’s marketing efforts, feel free to talk to us.
Read on if you want to know more about our social media marketing, online advertising, organic SEO, creative drip email campaigns and other digital marketing capabilities.
Content marketing strategy
Prior to becoming clients, buyers of professional services tend to go through a series of intermediary steps in the process. These steps are part of a so-called marketing funnel.
The classic marketing funnel looks like this: awareness at the top and conversion at the bottom. More buyers interact with marketing messages at the top level; fewer buyers convert into paying clients.
The marketing funnel doesn’t consist of these two steps of course. In fact, every firm, subject to its business model and marketing plan, might have a slightly different funnel. The most common marketing funnel consists of four levels: awareness, interest, consideration and conversion.
The basic idea behind content marketing is to create pieces of content: video, audio, articles, tutorials, Q&As, blog posts, social media posts, etc., that concord with buyers’ intent and expectations at each step of the marketing funnel.
Consider a prospect making two queries. First — “What is content marketing?” Second — “Best local content marketing agency from NYC.” The former question shows no buyer intent. This is either not a member of the target audience or someone at the top of the marketing funnel for this service. We might want to write an article, a video tutorial and FAQ page answering the most common questions a typical prospect might have at this stage.
The latter question shows signs of buyer intent. For questions like this we would want to create and distribute pieces of content that our targeted prospect is more likely to encounter.
That’s the basic idea behind content marketing — we anticipate questions and concerns of your target market and create valuable content. The content itself should be provided in different formats and distributed on different platforms.
We believe that companies should make their clients’ lives easier. Valuable pieces of content are very helpful. They make it easier for potential buyers to choose one service provider over another — find the best fit.
We will help your company create meaningful content for all stages of the marketing funnel. This will dramatically increase your chances of getting to the most important stage of the funnel — consideration.
There are always alternatives. Inaction is one of them. Unless your prospect is considering your offer as a viable option there isn’t much of convincing your marketing effort could do.
Creative Email marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your target audience. Professional & business services firms shouldn’t rely solely on social media. It wouldn’t be prudent to keep all of the eggs in one basket. Having a direct access to clients is crucial for every business.
We’ve witnessed firms building their marketing and business models around social media platforms. Having overrelied on a single channel, they were forced to shut down their firms due to policies and rules change on social media.
You wouldn’t want that to happen to your firm. Your company should always have a contingency plan. It is wise to gather direct contact details of your leads, prospects and clients. Phone numbers and direct emails are extremely valuable and often times underestimated.
If you already have a data base of prospects’ emails, we can launch a creative email marketing campaign. We can create a one-off marketing email blast or build a drip email campaign for your firm.
People love our emails. The open and click-through rates are way above the average across service-based industries. Our creative process is based on research. So please make sure we have access to your previous email marketing stats (if you have any) and have key decision makers engaged throughout the process.
SEO as a marketing strategy
Search engine optimization will work as a great mid-to-long-term marketing strategy. The upside of having a solid SEO is free organic traffic to your company website. The downside is that it almost never produces immediate results.
In case of search engine optimization, you should expect to see results 6 to 18 months in after the initial SEO work is done. But the SEO investment should be ongoing. Many firms cannot afford the long-term commitment. Companies that can — tend to dominate the market and enjoy high rankings on search result pages (SERP).
Our advice is to have a healthy mix of short-term, mid-term and long-term marketing tactics at your disposal. You should establish clear metrics and KPIs for your SEM and SEO, measure them and invest more into those marketing efforts that increase revenue and profits for your firm.
Having a steady flow of organic visitors to your website does not guarantee your business will close more sales. But it is better to have traffic than to have no website visitors at all. When a professional services firm’s website has a substantial amount of visitors we can implement certain tactics to increase conversions from a visitor to a lead, from a lead to a prospect and from a prospect to a paying client.
Search engine optimization is often confused with paid advertising. SEO services do not presume paying for clicks or impressions. SEO is all about good quality content, consistency, competence, technical on-site optimizations and patience.
Search engine marketing campaigns
The pay-per-click (PPC) online advertising model is a short-term marketing strategy to get leads today. It works but it might cost too much if it isn’t managed properly.
PPC ads are auction-based which means that you might end up paying more than your margins can offset. The fiercer the competition, the higher the bids. The upside is that sometimes you could get in front of the right prospects cheaper than your competition. Take a look at this PPC calculator for more information.
There are several factors that affect the final cost of pay-per-click campaigns. The copy of the ad is one of them. The other one is the quality and relevance of the landing page. There are other factors as well.
A well-thought-out PPC marketing strategy will take your business objectives, your margins, your budget, your timeframe and other factors into consideration.
A common mistake of many principals of professional services firms is to expect amazing results from PPC marketing and not have a contingency plan. Our advice is to plan for failure. We can help you manage your expectations.
Apart from making the sale today there are other KPIs that we can expect to hit like getting prospect’s email or phone to be able to market to them later. It is not uncommon for many firms to walk prospects through a series of steps in the marketing funnel before turning them into paying clients.
Social media marketing strategy
Which social media channel is best for your firm? There are so many social media platforms out there that it can be really overwhelming. Luckily for principals of professional services firms who might lack the necessary knowledge of these marketing channels we can share our experience on social media marketing.
Some services are better sold on Instagram. Some audiences are more likely to respond to TikTok videos. Some service offerings would benefit from YouTube tutorials. Some companies should market themselves to talent on Linkedin. Some thought leaders need followers on Twitter. To determine what social media combo your company needs we need to create a social media marketing strategy.
Social marketing is all about consistent engagement, active listening, swift response and being true to your authentic self — your brand. The more genuine and outspoken your company is, the more open and honest your employees are on social media, the more likely your marketing messages will resonate with the right people.
Your firm can benefit from eyes and ears who’d spread the word about you. Social media marketing is capable of empowering your target audience with ways to easily share your content and marketing messages.
Questions & answers ▾▾▾
We do not create content itself. It requires expertise of a particular field — what you’re great at. We don’t want you to repeat general knowledge; we want you to share insights with your prospects. We will show you how to do it efficiently and systematically.
It depends on your web traffic and average cheque value. If you’re looking at a 1,000 visitors per month it might not make sense to hire a specialized SEO agency. Unless the transaction is of high value. But the SEO fundamentals regardless of traffic volume must be solid. Our research shows 39% of 60k+ professional services firms have issues with basic level SEO.
We will select social meida channels that makes more sense to your firm. We will concentrate on the ones which you could be more disciplined about.
There isn’t an exact number that works for every firm. However, there is a sweet spot ( range ) that we can calculate based on your business objectives and metrics. Your prospects don’t want to be sold but they’d appreciate valuable insights from an expert.
We can work out the budget for your PPC campaigns. Refer to the free CPC calulator in Resourses section to get an idea of how the estimate works.
Connect with us to discuss your digital marketing requirements
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