What Do Leaders of Professional Services Firms Expect of Their Marketers? 

The professional services sector is highly competitive, sometimes fragmented, and often dominated by national players formed through rollups. If you lead a middle market CPA, law, engineering, or other professional services firm, you know the challenges of competing in a field like this.

That’s why more professional services firms are turning to modern marketing to drive revenue growth.

You Expect Marketers to Understand What You Do

When I meet with prospective clients in professional services, I hear a common complaint: “Marketing doesn’t understand our business.” That manifests itself in lots of costly ways. Your marketers might create content that uses the wrong terminology in the wrong way or doesn’t convey what makes you different. So you end up doing a lot of rework—taking your time and attention from critical functions like meeting with prospects, closing deals, and doing billable work.

They should be willing to take some of the same trainings an early-stage professional in your field takes, so they can walk in those shoes.

They should talk to your customers to understand why they chose you and how they’re benefitting from your services.

They should get their hands dirty.

Of course, it helps if you choose a marketing partner that’s worked with clients in your industry and can avoid the learning curve. But at a minimum, they should have deep experience in professional services and a proven process for understanding your business.

(On the other hand, be wary of marketers that have ONLY worked in your industry. Their limited breadth of experience will limit their perspective—and that can limit your results.)

You Expect a Better Way to Staff Your Marketing

A mid-sized professional services firm needs to leverage all the disciplines of modern marketing but can’t afford to staff up like a big competitor. When professional services firms approach us, they’re in a quandary about how to solve that.

You Expect Marketing to Help You Compete for Top Clients

Even if you haven’t been rolled up into a big firm, you still want to compete for bigger, better clients. Professional services firms that want to compete on a larger stage expect marketers to strengthen their brand recognition and credibility so they can go after the best business.

If you want to differentiate yourself in a consolidating market and go up against bigger players, you need marketers that understand how to develop and execute a thought leadership strategy that draws leads into the funnel and nurtures them throughout their buying journey. Whether it’s an educational blog on the hottest trend in your industry, a gated guide that delves deep into a topic that’s on your buyers’ minds, or a compelling case study that gets your client doing the talking for you, your marketers need the skills and experience to get it done.

You Expect Marketers to Be Strategic, Not Tactical

That’s why professional services firms expect their marketers to lead with strategy, not an arbitrary list of tactics. They recognize the value of conducting due diligence, researching the market, assessing the competition, and creating an ideal customer profile. That groundwork sets the foundation for developing a strategic marketing plan that becomes the roadmap to executing, optimizing, and measuring results.

You Expect Marketing to Attract Talent

Your professional services firm can only grow as fast you can add the right talent to your team. And in today’s tight labor market, that’s a major challenge.

What does that have to do with marketing? Everything.

Successful professional services firms expect their marketers to not only attract ideal buyers, but also attract ideal employees. They recognize that marketing can develop an employer brand that makes the company attractive to candidates and engaging for the current team.

Generating leads and attracting candidates are entirely different functions—one B2B, the other B2C—and most in-house teams aren’t equipped to do both equally well. If you want to leverage marketing for both objectives, the fractional marketing model can be a great solution.

You Expect Marketers to Measure and Report on Results

For instance, is your marketing driving more traffic to your website? Are you bringing more marketing-generated leads into the pipeline, at a higher velocity? Are you converting more of those leads to sales? What’s your average cost to acquire a new customer?

Expect your marketing partner to provide not only strategy and execution, but the analytical tools to measure success against the metrics that matter to your business.

You Expect a Trusted Advisor to Guide You

Marketri is the trusted partner for professional services firms that want to turn marketing into a revenue-generating engine. Our professional services marketers help leading firms differentiate their offerings and generate a predictable pipeline of sales-ready leads.