Let me paint a scenario that may feel frustratingly familiar to your professional services firm:

• Your firm has been around a few decades and built a reputation of doing quality work
• Professional relationships with other service providers and client referrals enabled your firm to grow, even at a low level, in the past
• Today, your revenue growth is flat and the sales pipeline is not robust
• New opportunities are not plentiful
• Larger industry competitors promise more resources, expertise and geographic coverage to prospects that your firm wants to service
• Standing still and doing nothing is not an option but your firm has tried marketing in the past with little-to-no-return.

If your professional services firm has some or all of the pain points above, you need to take a deep breath, rid yourself of any past marketing war stories and open your mind to strategic marketing consulting.

What is Strategic Marketing Consulting?

Strategic Marketing Consulting takes a look at the big picture in order to build the backbone for successful future marketing and includes:

• Positioning: This involves going through a thoughtful process to identify your professional services firm’s sustainable competitive advantages.
• Messaging: Having a memorable, compelling and consistent message to share with clients, prospects and referral sources is critical. If you asked five people within your organization to tell the firm story, would it be similar or vastly different?
• Focusing: Small-to-midsized professional services firms need to practice target marketing in order to build penetration and realize a return on investment.
• Planning: Integrated marketing plans should be created for each target market.  With strategic guidance, the sum of all of the communications should be greater than individual activities done in isolation.
• Measuring: Selecting the right key performance indicators (KPIs) will help to continually fine-tune both messaging and outreach for maximum marketing effectiveness.

Professional Services Marketing Consultant = Strategic Perspective

Either due to budgetary reasons or simply a lack of marketing knowledge, many professional services firms skip the strategy step and move directly to developing collateral, putting up a website and doing some form of outreach.  Unfortunately, this rarely progresses firms towards their business goals.  If you have a relatively inexperienced in-house marketer who is not working with a strategic marketing consultant and/or has targeted, integrated marketing plans, your firm is likely wasting resources.  Marketing is not overhead– it’s opportunity!  Ensure your professional services firm has solid strategic guidance to look at marketing in a whole new light. Check out our free eBook will guide you through which type of marketing provider can accelerate your growth and help you stand out from the crowded middle market.