Making your Accounting, Consulting or Law Firm Remarkably Different From Your Competition

4 Ways to Create Tangible Differentiation

Here’s a little marketing challenge for your never ending quest to be a better professional services firm marketer. It’s a three-partner:

• Part 1 – answer this question:  What makes your accounting, consulting or law firm remarkably different from your competition?
• Part 2 – visit a few of your competitor’s websites and see if they’re saying the same thing.
• Part 3 – answer this question: if you’re all saying the same  thing about what makes you different then how, exactly, are you different … especially in the eyes of a prospect?

There’s been a fascinating discussion in the Professional Services Marketing group in LinkedIn on the topic of differentiation in professional services firms. It started with this question: “What are the best examples that you have seen of companies that really manage to stand out from the crowd in their marketplace?”

Well, some fifty conversations later (and that’s pretty cool for a LinkedIn discussion ... I wonder if that’s some kind of record!), here are the three key takeaways:

• Differentiation is good
• Most firms fail miserably at their attempt to differentiate because it’s hard to define, hard to promote and hard to pay off the promise
• If you’re going to try to differentiate put your chips down on niche marketing

I believe that differentiation can come in intangible forms, like reputation; or in tangible forms, a number of which are discussed below. Differentiation of intangibles is tough to market. That’s why so many professional services firms websites basically say the same thing like “the quality of our service is superior” or “we put the client at the center of our core values”… yada, yada,yada.

Intangible differentiation is earned, not given or achieved though marketing. It’s the stuff that referrals are made of, and can be found at the core of word of mouth marketing.  It’s not the responsibility of a CPA firm marketer to develop intangible differentiation, but it is their job to create and publish the communications that deliver the message of differentiation.

Frankly, this is a pretty tough mission without a substantial marketing budget for branding.

But when it comes to finding and promoting tangible differentiations we enter into the territory of marketer’s nirvana!

Here are a couple of examples:

Market a service or product that no one else is marketing – I’ve seen (and helped) firms market some pretty innovative services, with a special emphasis on helping clients and prospects with regulatory compliance issues. There’s a never ending supply of brand new standards or regulatory change that offers opportunities for creating a service – or a product – that will differentiate your firm and generate revenue.

Service a niche that nobody else is serving – think smaller rather than bigger. One of my favorite examples of thinking small and getting big results is a CPA firm that targeted county Medicaid offices, offering a combination of audits and training to uncover ineligible recipients. The firm won, their clients won, and every one of this firm’s competitors was asleep at the wheel.

Be the thought leader via content– visible experts create differentiation for their firm. Partners and subject matter experts that are committed to content marketing deliver traffic to the firm’s web site, leads, and a means to separate their bona fides from every other SME competing for the same pool of prospects. We saw one partner get hundreds of new visitors to his website bio page after a white paper he wrote on new proposed IRS regulations was promoted and published.

Productize – taking a service (or even bundling a package of services) and turning them into a product that can be branded and promoted has proven to be a successful differentiation tactic for quite a number of firms. For example, instead of saying that your firm “specializes in tax and business planning for construction companies”, why not create “The XYZ 360 Degree Profit and Performance Review for Contractors”. Same services, different packaging, more opportunities to do great marketing.

There are a number of other ways that you firm can approach a strategy of differentiation – be the low cost provider, be the high cost provider, be the most credentialed provider, create and market a propriety approach or technology … and so on.

Regardless of whether your firm is striving for tangible or intangible, the differentiated position, product or service you’re promoting has to be meaningful to your clients and prospects.  Nobody cares that you have “more left handed CFE’s than any other firm in northeast Ohio”, or that your “mission is to be your  clients’ experts”. 

Your firm’s differentiation has to be promoted with sizzle and great copy writing. And it has to be supported with inbound marketing budget and resources because your clients and prospects are searching online for answers and solutions.

At the end of the day, differentiation has one objective: give someone a compelling reason to start a conversation with your firm.