5 Insider Tips for Selecting a Professional Services Marketing Firm

By Lee W. Frederiksen, Ph.D.

What's the best way to select a professional services marketing firm? Should you hire a marketing consultant or a marketing firm? Is it important that they have professional services marketing experience? These are just a few of the questions that we see firms struggle with as they try to find the right resource to help them reposition, re-brand or grow their firm.

Most consumer-facing brands have well developed marketing departments with a sophisticated understanding of their needs. This is not the case with most professional services marketing. Many firms have lightly staffed marketing departments (or no formal marketing staff at all). Typically, they need more resources they don't know how to select a marketing firm that is well suited to their needs. The result is too much disappointment and too few results. Interestingly, firms that grow the fastest and are the most profitable are more likely to use outside marketing resources.

Here are five practical tips to improve your odds of a successful experience.

1. Be as clear as you can be about what you want to accomplish, and scale the resource accordingly.

The bigger the desired outcome, the the more sophisticated the resource you will need. The most common mistake is to expect a small project (e.g., a new brochure) to have a major impact, such as accelerating new business or repositioning the firm. By the same token, a solo marketing consultant is going to have a very rough time effectively re-branding your firm. It's just too big a job and requires a too diverse set of skills.

2. Does the marketing consultant understand your problem well enough to solve it?

Do they understand your industry? Do they have an explanation for why you are getting the results you are getting? Another way of evaluating this criteria is to think of it as a diagnosis. Do they understand what is wrong so they are in a position to recommend a workable solution? If you are not convinced that the marketing consultant has the right diagnosis, you are not likely to be happy with the cure. Our research shows that one of the important reasons that professional services buyers are unhappy with providers is that they don't understand the situation and solve the key problem.

3. Has the resource done it before?

You might think that with the emphasis on past experience that is so prevalent in the professional services arena, this would be a criteria that everyone would expect from a marketing firm. Well, you would be wrong. I'm constantly amazed at how often professional services firms hire marketing consultants who have limited relevant experience. This is easy to evaluate. Don't make the mistake of brushing over it. Professional services are much more complicated to market then most consumer products.

4. Make sure the firm takes it own medicine.

We've all seen the marketing consultant with a weak website or the bad brand. Remember, they are in the professional services business too. If they don't do a good job with their own materials what makes you think they'll do a good job with yours? If they make excuses about being too busy with clients' work to attend to their own marketing, don't buy it.

5. Try before you buy.

The best way to know if you are likely to be satisfied with a marketing partner is to sample their work before you commit to a major, long term relationship. Listen carefully to their analysis of your situation and recommendations for change. Read blog posts, research or books they have published. Do you resonate with their approach? Try them out on a small project and see how they do. This is perhaps the single best way to test a potential longer term relationship. If they can't impress you in the short run, they are unlikely to be able to in the longer term.

Apply these five tips and you will save yourself a lot of false starts and frustration.