What is a Brand? A Professional Services Firm Perspective

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

For most professional services firms, your brand is arguably your most valuable asset — and perhaps the least well understood.  It’s not too surprising, given that few professional services firms are run by executives with a marketing background.

As a matter of fact, many professionals have never had a single marketing class in their entire formal education.  Further, their advancement and promotions have been centered around their ability to close new business based on personal relationships and referrals.  Branding considerations seem far removed.  Big mistake.

Why Formal Brand Definitions Fail

Consult a marketing textbook and you are likely to find a brand defined as the sum total of a customer’s emotion and experience with your firm.  You’ll probably find the discussion abstract and not very practical.  It seems far removed from the day-to-day realities of bringing in new clients and recruiting staff.  In reality, the opposite is true. Your brand has a direct impact on building your firm.

What a Brand is Not

Let’s first peel away some very common misconceptions:

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In-house vs. Outsourced Online Marketing

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

There are a lot of very good reasons for a professional services firm to consider an online marketing program. As our recently published online marketing study shows, firms that have robust lead generation programs

• grow up to 4X faster;
• are 2X more profitable; and
• are able to effectively recruit new employees.

 
These benefits apply across all professional service industries, from accountants to management consultants to technology firms and government contractors. It simply makes good business sense to go online. The only question is how best to do it?

Outsource online marketing or stay in-house?

It’s an important business question that your firm must answer. In a previous post in this series we made the case for outsourcing your online marketing.

We also explored the typical costs to outsource online marketing. Now it’s time to pull those strands together and determine the right strategy for your firm.

Let’s walk through the decision making process step by step.

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What Does It Cost to Outsource Online Marketing?

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

Online marketing offers a compelling value proposition. In a recent study of 500 professional services firms we found online marketing is associated with faster growth and higher profits.

More specifically, we found that firms that generate at least 40% of their leads online grow up to four times faster than their peers.

But these amazing findings weren’t limited to growth alone. The study also showed that this same group was 2X more profitable than firms that produced lower levels of online leads.

The challenge for most firms, though, is implementing these programs in a way that guarantees results and delivers a meaningful return on investment. One answer is to outsource some or all of the functions.

But how much will it cost to do it right? Below, I lay out a few common scenarios and give you some working budget ranges:

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Should Your Firm Outsource Online Marketing?

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

A recent study of online marketing for professional services firms shows that professional services firms that generate at least 40% of their leads online grow up to 4X faster and are twice as profitable. This offers a compelling case for online marketing. But before a firm can achieve these results, it has to overcome some important hurdles:

• Most firms are unsure how to do online marketing effectively
• They lack adequate time to devote to the tasks involved
• They may not have the right skill sets on staff

 
One way firms can address these shortcomings is to outsource their online marketing. So let’s dig in and see what’s involved.

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Website Planning Guide Part 4: Define Goals for Conversion

By Sean McVey

Stop thinking of your website as an online brochure that presents basic information about your firm.

Start thinking of your website as a marketing tool with clearly defined, measurable goals.

Once you’ve determined who you are marketing to, you must then decide what you want visitors to accomplish while on your website.  After all, a web visitor doesn’t really matter if they don’t take action.

What are Goals and How Can I Track Them?

In most web analytics programs you have the ability to track a specific action of a web visitor.  For example, a common action to track is web contact form submissions. You should consider this a goal because it moves a prospect closer to a sale.

When you set up important actions as goals in your analytics program, you can begin collecting data that will help you understand whether or not your website is generating and nurturing leads.

With analytics in place, can you see how many visitors have converted on a goal, and you can determine where those visitors came from.  This information allows you to answer questions such as: 

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Use Your Strategic Marketing Process to Shake Up Your A/E/C Firm

By Sylvia Montgomery

With less than 10 weeks left in the year, business planning is well underway for many firms. The strategic marketing process can look slightly different for each firm in the A/E/C marketplace. However, at the end of the day the goal is to:

• Reflect on what’s worked and not worked in the past
• Determine how to generate new business
• Grow the firm

 
Recently, I attended the Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference for the Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS). One of the many benefits of participating in an SMPS conference is that you get to mingle with both industry novices and seasoned marketers. There’s a great deal of discussion about what is and isn’t working for A/E/C firms and how to best encourage an organization to change and adopt new marketing approaches.

The keynote address was presented by Mark Zweig, Founder and CEO of ZweigWhite and a leading management expert for the architecture, engineering, planning, and environmental industries. Mark spoke about the need to shake things up in a business and how a leadership team can determine if it’s time to approach things differently. His candid and colorful discussion included a list of the Top 10 Signs You Need to Shake Up Your A/E/C Firm:

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