Proven Business Growth – Jim Cockrum

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If you’re a salesperson, practice lead, business development specialist, or owner in the professional services space, there’s a very good chance you’re looking for real business growth. And, to a large extent, business growth means more leads.

The most productive business development strategy for professional services firms requires a potent blend of expertise and communications that reach buyers who are ready to act. That means leveraging both proven online marketing techniques—and the demonstrated expertise of BD professionals.

What can make a difference in terms of real business growth? How can professional services providers—with clients to help, staff to manage, and hands to shake—assess whether their marketing approach needs a tune-up or a teardown?

Before we explore the answers to these questions. Let’s first look at how buyers are buying professional services—and what that means for business growth.

Making a Good First Impression Online

When decision makers have a problem, they go online.

Online resources like company websites, LinkedIn, and industry blogs give buyers an unprecedented depth of information and breadth of choice about providers. Today, 77% of professional services firms generate new business leads online, and 80% of buyers check out service providers by looking at their website.

When a buyer faces any sort of challenge, they search online. Maybe they find a helpful post on an industry blog published by an unfamiliar firm. Overtime, the buyer follows the blog, attends a free webinar, and receive useful tips in weekly emails from that same firm. If the buyer later needs services in the area covered by these pieces of content, they pick up the phone and reach out.

Figure 1. How Buyers “Check Out” Potential Professional Services Providers

Once, formal references would have dominated this chart. Today, a firm’s website is the uncontested champion, though buyers are typically using multiple resources. In fact, they’re using an average of 3.2 methods—many of which are online. From search engines to social media, buyers have a wealth of ways to learn about providers and solutions—and they’re using them.

SEE ALSO: Are You Invisible? Why Expanding Professional Visibility is Critical for You and Your Firm

Develop Great Content Your Expertise

The fact is your expertise can drive the success of your content marketing long before you talk to a prospective client. And that’s exactly what happens in the most successful content marketing campaigns. And as we learned earlier, content leads to business growth.

Strong content has a couple of key attributes. It should be:

• Educational. This isn’t guerilla promotion. Your content should teach audiences something valuable, not promote your firm.
• Relevant. Your content should speak to target audiences’ real challenges and opportunities. It has to be rooted in a sophisticated understanding of their needs and marketplace.
• Accessible. Content should speak your audiences’ language. Keep it clear and accessible while avoiding unnecessary jargon.

Right away, these three key characteristics should give you an idea of why your expertise is so important: as a business development specialist, you have the ability to ensure that content meets all of these criteria.

Identifying Expertise

Your accumulated experience in your industry is valuable for business growth—often, more valuable than you realize. Knowledge that you take for granted, ideas that may feel like the “basics” to you can provide essential insight to others. So take a step back and assess what you know.

What do you know a lot about? What are the typical client problems you help to solve? What has your experience taught you about the causes of these problems? The answers to these questions are fodder for educational, relevant, and accessible content.

Give It Away

I know it sounds counterintuitive, but you’ll want to give away—free of charge—all that great content. The goal is business growth, and to do that, you want to put yourself in a position to advise your target audience. This is a great way to be introduced to a prospective buyer and spur business growth. Build credibility as a problem-solver in your marketplace, as a knowledgeable advisor. If you do, potential clients may come to you over a competitor.

Educational Content and High Growth

When your firm starts assembling its marketing toolbox, it makes sense to ask, “Which tools work?” After all, if a tool or technique isn’t going to make a demonstrable contribution to the bottom line, then why bother?

For answers, we can look to our studies on the marketing strategies used by average and high growth businesses. Our research shows a major difference in the way high growth and average growth firms approach content and digital marketing more broadly.

The chart below shows how 500 professional services firms focused their efforts, with a stark difference between the high and average growth firms.

Effectiveness Rating: High Growth vs. Average Growth Firms

The top techniques used by high growth firms are dramatically underutilized by average growth firms.

Figure 2. Top 5 digital techniques favored by high-growth firms

• Marketing Video
• Blogging
• Guest Blogging
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Social Media

The research shows that companies that blog regularly see 50% more traffic and 70% more leads. Why? Not only does educational content like blog posts help boost your firm’s credibility and share your expertise, it also helps raise your visibility in search engines—so prospects are likelier to find you when they go looking for solutions.

SEE ALSO: Top 10 Marketing Techniques for Professional Services

Long after you or your firm’s other experts have written and posted a blog, that content keeps working for you by raising your profile in searches and educating potential clients who you might not even know are out there. You can think of robust educational content that will remain relevant for years to come — often known as “evergreen content” — as a long-term investment in your brand, and ultimately in your business growth.

Moving Forward with Content

Content marketing doesn’t work overnight. It succeeds through sustained effort.

Once your team is committed, here are a few ways you can help shape relevant content:

• Identify your typical prospect type
• Isolate 5-6 key concerns per prospect type
• Identify areas of specialty – from a prospect’s perspective rather than a service perspective
• Identify field-facing personnel fluent in the business “language” your ideal customer speaks

With the organizational support to produce quality educational content in an ongoing way, your firm will have much of what you need to raise your visibility among potential clients and make the most of business growth opportunities.

Additional Resources:

• Join the online marketing revolution that is transforming the way professional services are bought and sold. Download our book, Online Marketing for Professional Services.
• In our 2016 Learn how high-growth firms can be 45% more profitable while putting less time and money into their marketing in our 2016 High Growth Research Study.
• Read about How to Drive Organic Growth for Professional Services Firms.

How Hinge Can Help

Hinge is a global leader in helping professional services firms grow faster and become more profitable. Our research-based strategies are designed to be implemented. In fact, our groundbreaking Visible Firm® program combines strategy, implementation, training and more.