Online Marketing Survey for Professional Services Firms

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

Is online marketing a winning strategy for your firm? Will it help your firm grow faster? Which tactics produce bottom line results and which are a waste of time?

Finally, some answers are on the way. We are currently conducting the first study (that we are aware of) to tie the use of online marketing (from social media to search engine optimization) to the growth and profitability of professional services firms. Please take 5 minutes to complete the online survey. Your response is important no mater how much or how little online marketing you do.

Why this study and why now?

You may be aware that our previous research identified a group of professional services firms that were growing up to 9x faster and were 50% more profitable than their peers. One of the tantalizing findings was that the high growth, high value firms tended to invest more resources in their website. We want to know more.

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5 Lessons Michelangelo Can Teach Us About Online Marketing

By Sean McVey

Spending two weeks in Italy got me thinking: Are there any lessons can we learn from the artistic geniuses of the Renaissance and apply to modern day marketing?  Is this a stretch?  Perhaps a bit… but it’s also fun.

So after admiring countless works from the Renaissance man himself, I came up with 5 lessons we can learn from Michelangelo about online marketing:

1. Learn From Past Greats – Today’s best practitioners are inspired by great artists of the past.  Michelangelo spent hours every day stroking and observing the ancient Belvedere Torso statue from the 2nd century, and he used it as inspiration for several great works.  When you are planning your online marketing efforts, always consider what others have done. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to have success online.  Evaluate competitors, watch and read free resources on the topics of social media and SEO, and find ways to apply proven strategies to your marketing.

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What’s All the Buzz About Engagement?

By Dane Frederiksen, Guest Author

There’s a lot of buzz around the concept of “engagement” these days. In an increasingly crowded and fragmented online marketplace, marketers are on the lookout for new ways to capture their audience’s attention. And video is proving to be a terrific engagement tool. Let me illustrate my point with the metaphor of a bee and a flower:

• The bee wants nectar (see, it’s Googling “delicious nectar” right now!)
• The flower wants to spread it’s pollen (its message)
• The flower has nectar that bees want, but so do other flowers
• The flower wants to give the bee pollen, so it invests in a little “marketing”:

1. It creates petals that bees find attractive — and that stand out from other flowering plants
2. It keeps the bee engaged by supplying something of unquestionable value … nectar

 
The bee hangs out for a while until it gets full, bored or is late for a meeting. And the flower gets to spread it’s marketing message — er, pollen — to the bee.

Your well-designed website is the flower. But to attract prospective clients and employees — the bees — you need to hold their attention and give them the information they seek in an entertaining format. (Ask yourself, “would I honestly rather read an article or watch a video that contained the same information”?)

But getting those prospects to your website presents it’s own bee-flower challenge. Fortunately, video offers an answer. When used in email, video dramatically improves open rates. And video blog posts and tweets stand apart from the usual text-based pieces. In addition, video lends itself toward sharing, especially among the fast-growing mobile crowd. Videos go viral, articles don’t.

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Inbound Marketing for Professional Services Firms

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

There is a big shift underway in how we market professional services. I’ve blogged about it as the move from traditional to digital marketing. One of the key features of this evolution is the emergence of the concept of inbound marketing.

Put simply, inbound marketing is a strategy in which potential clients find you. It’s contrasted with outbound marketing techniques such as advertising, trade shows, direct marketing and networking in which you actively seek out new clients. At the core of inbound marketing is the notion of developing content that is so compelling clients will find you as they search for solutions to their business problems.

While sharing expertise has long been a staple of professional services marketing, two technological trends have moved it to center stage. The first of these is the rise of search engines. Got a problem? Gallop to Google. The second is the rise of social media.

Taken together, content, search and social have made inbound marketing a viable strategy for professional services firms. Need some proof? See if these results don’t open your eyes.

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Why Your Professional Services Website Doesn’t Generate More Leads

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

The holy grail for most professional services marketers is being able to generate qualified leads in a scalable and cost effective manner. For most firms that translates into generating leads with digital marketing.

Does your website generate enough qualified leads? If not, you are probably falling prey to one or more of these fatal mistakes:

1. You don’t believe it’s possible.

This is the biggest single barrier for most professional services marketers. They haven’t given their website sufficient attention, so it’s not working. Since it’s not working nobody believes it can work. In virtually every study that we have seen, professional service providers can use the web to generate qualified leads or teaming partners for government contracts. Networking doesn’t work if you don’t network. Direct mail doesn’t work if you don’t send anything out. It’s no different for digital marketing.

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Online Video for a Changing World

By Dane Frederiksen, Guest Author

In a funny commercial for Best Buy, consumers are astonished at the speed at which their technology becomes obsolete. Do you remember when electronics stayed relevant even after you lost the receipt and threw out the packaging? Well, those days are over. Today, constant change is a consumer-society reality we all have to live with. 

Moore’s law states that the number or transistors that the electronics industry is able to place on an integrated circuit doubles every 2 years. This means that every 2 years, devices get faster, smaller and smarter (cue Terminator music). Just look in your pocket. The first iPod was a giant brick compared to today’s tiny Nano — which probably holds more music, but also could get stuck in between your teeth!

So what does this mean for us business folks? Sure, your iPad 2 is well on its way to becoming a dinosaur. But there are also implications on your most important marketing tool: your company website.

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