The 70% Solution: A New Approach to Professional Services Marketing

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

Sometimes you run across a blog entry that really captures a point you wanted to make.  That’s just what I experienced with a recent post by Ian Brodie.  Ian, a professional services marketing consutant from the UK, is a smart chap and a highly recommended resource in our recent book, so it’s not surprising that he has some terrific insights.

In his blog post, Ian reported that he gets 70% of his new business from the web.  This speaks eloquently to the power of a high performance website and a well executed social media presence.

Can your online web presence replace traditional referrals?
It’s a very good question. For most firms, referral business is their leading source of new business, typically accounting for 50-60% of total business.  New business directly from their website usually accounts for a fraction of that amount.

But that’s starting to change.  At Hinge, web generated business is now our single biggest revenue source.  Referral business in is second place.

So how do you make the most of this opportunity?  Here are some of my key takeaways:

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One Way to Measure Professional Services Marketing

By Sean McVey

Ecommerce websites typically track a metric called conversion rate. This is the percentage of visitors that purchase the product. For example, if 100 customers visit a product page and 10 of them click to purchase, the conversion rate would be 10%. 

As professional services marketers, we like to borrow this metric and apply it to the service world. Except instead of tracking purchases, we are tracking the percentage of visitors that contact us through our site. In other words, we are tracking online leads. By tracking the number of leads that come in through your website, you can directly measure the site as a lead generating tool.

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Social Media + Business Analytics = Successful Weight Loss

By Rusty Luhring, Guest Author

A year and a half ago I set out on a quest to lose weight, motivated by my doctor’s threat to put me on statins to lower my cholesterol — and the desire to improve my appearance for the upcoming beach season.

I learned two key lessons:

1. Posting your weight every day on Facebook for 30 days is a powerful motivator.
2. Supplementing the motivation with knowledge gained through analytics allows you to make good food and exercise decisions every day.

 
For me, this combination allowed me to take control of my weight for the first time in my adult life.

I lost 30 pounds in six months, and have kept it off (and then some) for another year.

These same principles are applicable to running a successful business:  shining the spotlight on key drivers of profitability and cash flow help motivate the entire organization to drive those measures in the right direction.  You have to back this up with good record-keeping and solid analytics.

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Why Link Building is Critical to Your Website’s Success

By Sean McVey

Although there are many factors contributing to your search engine rankings, perhaps the most significant is the number of high quality links pointing to your site.

Google and other search engines see links as votes.  Every website that links to your web page is a vote for your authority.  Of course a link from a credible site like the New York Times is going to be much more beneficial than a link from a no-name site.  Nonetheless, it is important to do what you can to have other sites point in your direction.

Running a link building campaign kills two gigantic birds with one stone.  Not only are you increasing your search engine chances, but you are also driving traffic directly from those other sites to yours. Here are a few popular methods for acquiring links:

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Keep Your Website’s Navigation Simple

By Sean McVey

Your website’s navigation may make sense to you, but will it make sense to new visitors?  Research by User Interface Engineering indicates that 60 percent of the time people cannot find the information they are looking for on a website. More often than not, the site’s main navigation is just not clear.

There are times where creativity can really set your brand apart, but naming your navigation links is not one of them.  Web visitors click on links when they know where they will end up.  That is why keeping your main navigation as simple and understandable as possible is vital.

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Fighting the Home Page Battle

By Sean McVey

Your home page is the most valuable online real estate your company has.  No other page serves so many purposes or receives so much attention.  As a result, the intuitive action for most companies is to cram as much information on there as possible so that nothing gets missed.

The problem with this method is that the more information you include, the less attention the brain gives to each piece.  In other words, you are diluting your most important messages by adding too many options for the visitor. Your most important points get lost in the smoke of battle.

Designing your homepage is a compromise.  Determine which messages and calls to action are truly important to your end goals and which are distracting.  In the end, if you are losing the big picture message, then something is wrong.

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