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Professional Services Marketing Blog
How 90 Minutes in a Hot Room Can Help Your Business
By Sylvia Montgomery
Many of us have come to accept that some form of exercise is needed to maintain a healthy lifestyle. After experimenting with a number of routines, I’ve settled on Bikram yoga. What is most interesting about Bikram is the condition in which you practice it — a fairly large studio room set at a temperature of 105–118 degrees and approximately 40% humidity. It’s a total mind–body struggle that lasts 90 minutes in which students perform 26 poses, two sets each.
Lying on my mat during a recent class, it dawned on me that marketing, especially in professional services, is a mind–body struggle, too. All of the activities that you know your firm should be doing from a marketing and business development perspective become the “mind,” while the day-to-day fires become the “body.”
When running a professional services firm, there is a constant struggle between delivering a piece of business today and a more strategic activity like clarifying your differentiation or understanding what your clients say about your firm. The “body” focuses on today while the “mind” knows there are activities it should be doing but is neglecting.
Social Media and Your Professional Services Marketing Mix
By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.
It seems that just about every conversation I have with a professional services CEO these days eventually turns toward social media. Now perhaps it’s because I’m a social media butterfly (those of you who know me can stop convulsing with laughter now). No, I think it’s because social media is a topic so pervasive in the press (business and popular) that we feel like we’re missing out if we don’t embrace it.
As leaders of our firms, we should be… well, leading. Then along comes this phenomenon — time intensive, intimidating, and not clearly related to important business outcomes. Is it just an expensive waste of time? So we talk amongst ourselves, looking for something solid to grab on to.
Well here’s something solid. A new study on Integrating Social Media into the Marketing Mix was just published by ITSMA. If your not familiar with ITSMA, it’s the association focused on marketing IT services. The survey is comprehensive (277 slides!), but I want to focus on just a handful of take-aways.
Should Your Services be Free?
By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.
It’s a provocative question to be sure, but one that you may have to face sooner than you imagine. I’ve just finished reading Chris Anderson’s new book Free:The Future of a Radical Price. Chris Anderson is the editor of Wired magazine and the author of another very influential best seller The Long Tail about the market potential of very niche products in the internet age.
In Free, Anderson argues that the rapidly falling cost of internet based products and services is having a major impact on business models in general and pricing in particular. While this is easy to see in the world of search or data storage, how does “free” impact professional services? By my reading, there are two key impacts.
First, “information wants to be free,” as Anderson aptly observes. What once was knowledge “closely held” by professionals is now a Google search away. From health care to technology, the information barriers are coming down.