As you read this blog, countless professional services businesses are experiencing a steady flow of revenue leaks that they never realized. And their brand is to blame.

Most leaders of professional services firms don’t wake up thinking about their brand. But they NEED TO…because in this sector, your brand can mean the difference between standing out from competitors and growing your company vs struggling to attract profitable business.

We’ve each spent decades providing strategic marketing direction to professional services businesses, both large and small. Based on that experience, we review why a strong brand is a revenue-driver, how to spot a brand that’s contributing to revenue leaks, and practical steps for plugging up those leaks with an impactful brand that ensures you rise to the top in a crowded, competitive market.

Your Brand: It’s Not Just Cosmetics

First, let’s define what we mean by “brand.”

Contrary to popular belief, your brand isn’t just your logo and tag line. It’s the sum total of how you present the business to your ideal customer, and the sum total of their experience with your services.

The most often overlooked brand elements are among the most vital to your growth, including:

• Your positioning statement: An elevator pitch that defines what you offer, who you serve, and the challenges your offerings solve. Your positioning statement articulates a predictable promise your buyers can depend on.
• Your messaging: The narrative that explains your brand to customers, typically centered around a few brand pillars that are true, provable, relatable to your ideal client, and distinguish your business from competitors.
• Your brand voice and tone: A guide to “how” you say what you say to buyers, which should reflect your business’s unique personality and how you want clients to perceive you.

Along with your visual identity (including logo, colors, fonts, and images), these elements collectively form a cohesive brand that tells a relevant, compelling story about your professional services firm, and conveys your unique differences among competitors.

A strong brand clearly communicates what sets your firm apart and does so consistently across every channel and touchpoint. It reinforces your value proposition in a way that’s both memorable and aligned—from your website to your proposals to your team’s elevator pitch—so prospects immediately understand why you’re the better choice.

A Strong Brand = A Strong Top Line

Together, all of your branding elements play an important role in generating revenue and driving growth. A strong brand helps you attract new clients, retain existing clients, and cross-sell and upsell services to drive more revenue from your current base. If your marketing partner is steeped in analytics, they can demonstrate these linkages with measurable KPIs, such as website traffic (e.g., whether it’s increasing or decreasing, and where leads are coming in vs falling off), lead conversion rate, and the percentage of leads that turn into closed deals.

A strong, relevant brand also yields more pricing power. If you demonstrate that your firm is better at solving a client’s business challenges, you can command higher pricing because they’ll be willing to pay more for your expertise. It even improves employee engagement and retention, since premier talent wants to work for businesses at the top of their game.

Conversely, a stale or irrelevant brand can do a lot of harm—contributing to missed new business opportunities, high staff turnover (which reduces traction and distracts you from growth), and poor client retention (raising your customer acquisition cost and reducing your profitability). A poor brand also makes you less resilient to market fluctuations and downturns, threatening your long-term viability.

Where Professional Services Firms Misstep on Branding

If you’re busy leading an engineering, accounting, financial, or other services firm, you probably haven’t given much thought to branding—even if you have aggressive growth goals. As an expert in your discipline and likely a practitioner yourself, odds are high that you spend much of your time delivering services or managing operations.

Branding (and all aspects of marketing) tends to fall far down the priority list, especially if you’ve grown primarily through referrals and believe that’s sufficient to drive future growth. But even buyers who come through referrals do their homework. After all, your firm may not be the only recommendation they receive. If they check out three firms’ websites and can’t tell a noticeable difference, how can you expect your firm to turn that lead into a loyal client?

Beyond that, a referral-only strategy creates an unpredictable pipeline, places you at risk every time a key employee leaves and takes their long-standing relationships with them, and often attracts the wrong-fit clients.

Why a Strong Brand is a Must for Professionals Services

Though branding often takes a back seat in this sector, it’s essential for professional services firms because:

• Buyers want to do business with a firm they view as credible and trustworthy.
• They need confidence that your employees are experts in their field and recognized thought leaders who understand and know how to solve their business challenges.
• They must be able to distinguish your firm from competitors, which is especially tough when you sell an intangible service vs a tangible product.

Signs That Your Brand is Inhibiting Growth

How do you know when your professional services brand is contributing to invisible revenue leaks? There’s no magic answer, but signs like these are good indicators:

• Your positioning doesn’t clearly differentiate your firm from others in your field.
• Your messaging is irrelevant to your audience or provides no compelling reason to do business with your firm.
• Your visual identity is flat, inconsistent, or outdated.
• Your brand isn’t consistent across various formats (e.g., you look and sound different on your website vs your sell sheets vs your proposals).
• Leaders across the business all describe your brand promise differently, with no consensus on what you stand for or what sets you apart from competitors.

Turning Your Brand into a Revenue Driver

A great first step in plugging the invisible revenue leaks that stem from your brand is to conduct a brand audit. The audit examines your business’s brand in the context of your market, target audience, and competitors to ensure you’re conveying a compelling impression of your firm and clearly differentiating yourself in a crowded space. (It’s always eye-opening when you ask multiple stakeholders to articulate the firm’s brand promise, and you hear many different, often conflicting, answers.)

The brand audit should also review your voice and tone, to assess what they convey to prospects about what it will be like to do business with your company.

A brand audit sets the stage to conduct a deep-dive due diligence process that analyzes your strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities (SWOT), along with the state of your industry and the competitive landscape. This discovery effort provides the data to inform your marketing strategy and go-to-market plan—the foundational components you need to engage in revenue-generating marketing.

Fractional Marketing: The Key to Preventing Revenue Leaks

Fractional marketing is the ideal approach for professional services firms that want to stop these invisible revenue leaks and engage in modern marketing that drives growth.

A fractional marketing agency can audit your brand, take you through a strategic brand positioning exercise, and develop branding strategies that help your firm drive more leads that represent your ideal customer profile and ultimately close more deals.

As a fractional marketing agency with deep experience in the professional services sector, Marketri is the ideal partner to unlock your growth through modern marketing techniques and effective branding strategies.

• We drive high ROI by tying your branding updates to tangible revenue outcomes.
• Our flexible, scalable model provides C-level strategic marketing expertise on a fractional basis, so you can avoid the high cost of FTEs.
• We’re entirely data-driven, using market research and competitive intelligence to inform your brand strategy and go-to-market plan.
• We’re strategy-focused, ensuring that every element of your brand aligns with your business goals, ladders up to your strategy, and resonates with your ideal client.

Is your professional services brand bleeding revenue or building revenue? There’s only one way to find out. Contact Marketri to arrange a brand audit. Then learn how our fractional marketing can help you attract quality leads, command premium pricing, and retain top talent.