15 Top Shelf Ideas That Are Forever Changing the Way Professional Services Do Marketing

How Enterprising CPA, Consulting and Other Professional Services Firms are Making Huge Strides Towards Delivering More ROI

The other day, I had the opportunity to counsel a “newbie” to the world of professional services marketing. As he was picking up the lunch tab, I felt obligated to offer my sage advice, including how to hide under your desk during tax season, and still appear productive.

One of the topics we explored was what was it took to do great marketing. He also asked me to give some tips to help the firm grow, but there’s only so much free advice I’ll give for a club sandwich!

But here’s what I told him: the key to being successful was to build bridges between the way the firm was traditionally marketing itself (referral relationships and networking) and new technologies and approaches like inbound marketing.

Then, I shared what I consider to be the 15 best ideas that separated enterprising professional services firms, from ordinary and mundane firms … that co-incidentally happen to be competing for awareness, leads and new business from the same base of prospects.

So, here’s what I consider to be the best, top shelf ideas that enterprising firms are deploying today. Please add your comments below!

Alan’s 15 Top Shelf Ideas

1.      Content Marketing – Whether executed in the form of blogs, videos, whitepapers, on-site newsletters, and so on, enterprising firms use content for purposes ranging from boosting search engine rankings to lead generation to building personal brands of partners and subject matter experts.

• For more information, download The Partner’s GUIDE to Content Marketing here.

2.      CRM – Prospect tracking, lead scoring, “touch trails”, and other information is being captured and used by enterprising firms in CRM systems like Sales Force to help move prospects down the sales from lead capture to client.

3.      Email segmentation and Targeting- Every professional services firm in the known universe uses email to communicate to suspects and prospects, but enterprising firms are generally light years ahead in adapting and using technology to segment email lists and target messages by factors ranging from interests to stage of relationship.

4.      Google’s Ranking Algorithm – Enterprising CPA, consulting and law firms stay on top of the ever changing way that Google and other search engines do their search engine rankings. That’s important because high rankings drive high traffic.

5.      Inbound Links and Link Building – Enterprising firms are very active in “white hat” link building, because the greater the number of inbound links to a website, the more relevant that site becomes in Google’s eyes, and relevancy is key to how they do their search engine rankings.

6.      Inbound Marketing- Simply put, enterprising firms are making radical changes to their marketing program, all built around best inbound marketing practices for getting found first, converting site visitors to leads and continually monitoring, measuring and making change based upon metrics.

7.     Landing Pages and Call to Action Buttons – Enterprising firms look to their website for lead generation. They do this by creating offers for their thought leadership in the form of a whitepaper (for example), draw attention to the offer by placing call to action buttons onsite and off site, and then drive visitors to landing pages where the offer is delivered in exchange for contact information.

8.     Lead nurturing and Automation – Lead nurturing and automation is currently a hot topic in the marketing departments of enterprising CPA, consulting and engineering firms. Using marketing technology, an automated system of lead “touches” is set up and published, leading a prospect down the sales funnel until they are deemed sales ready. This is an advanced marketing technique.

9.     Marketing Analytics – Gone are the days where anecdotes or false indicators could be used to measure the success of a marketing initiative or the effectiveness of a marketing budget. Today’s enterprising professional services firms employ a wide range of marketing analytics measuring everything from site visits to led conversions, using a wide variety of tools.

10.   Marketing Software and Technology- Enterprising firms invest in marketing technology like that offered by HubSpot – an all in one marketing solution for integrating firm marketing activities. There are a number of other platforms available, each of which is helping to bring professional services firm marketing out of the dark ages and into new territories.

11.   Mobile Devices – Enterprising firms know that mobile search and the ability to have a presence engineered for mobile devices is becoming critically important. They’re investing in .mobi sites and capabilities because of how quickly this communications channel has reached into our personal and professional lives.

12.   PPC Advertising – Enterprising firms are spending their paid media dollars a lot smarter because of the ability to use highly targeted pay per click advertising on a variety of online platforms, ranging from search engine result pages to social media sites.

13.   Search Engine Optimization – Firms that have not spent the time and resources to optimize their website are going to fall well behind the curve when it comes to getting found. This is Marketing 101 in an era where traditional marketing channels like paid advertising and Yellow Pages are experiencing drastic reductions in their effectiveness.

14.   Social Media – Enterprising firms are making social media a central part of their marketing program, particularly in regard to using LinkedIn for joining communities whose membership includes prospects, and using Facebook for purposes like recruiting. A huge mistake that firms make is to believe that social media is a set it and forget tactic – that’s not true.

15.   Website as a Marketing Hub – Enterprising firms know that the days of using a website as nothing more than an online brochure are long gone. Today’s websites are marketing hubs, and serve as the centerpiece of the firm’s entire marketing program and effort.

Then We Had Dessert

So, as we were working our way through dessert, our conversation turned to a discussion of how much our online lives have blended into our personal and professional lives. And with a last sip of coffee, I told him that I believed that when it comes to marketing, many professional services firms act as if they have some sort of magic shield insulating them from this new reality, even when the truth is that they aren’t sheltered from the huge, transformative movements driving this blend.

As we left the restaurant, I wished him well in his new endeavor and left him with one last piece of invaluable advice: make sure that he had first dibs on the new year’s crop of advertising specialty samples when the tchotchke lady came a-callin’!