Successful Professional Services Marketing
Business professionals from a non-marketing background sometimes say that “all marketing is the same” or “if it worked in x company it must work in y”. All marketing most certainly isn’t the same and campaigns/strategies must be adapted significantly in order to be successful. A couple of examples for you to consider. If you had worked at a big multi-national company like American Express and their strategies were built around brand awareness then you would have been involved in large scale campaigns like Sports Sponsorship and TV Campaigns. Now say you moved job to a small family business with 10 employees and turnover less than €750k. Are you going to pursue the same strategies that were deemed successful with American Express? Of course not. You have to adapt your approach to target a more specific type of customer. Lets be even more specific.
Say you worked for a financial services firm in Ireland that were fairly proactive on the marketing front. Say it was Davy Stockbrokers. Now say you moved to an Educational Company with a focus on marketing e-software educational services. How much of what you used previously will you apply to the new position? Some aspects may be universal like Content Marketing and Newsletters but are you going to go down the line of Seminars and Personal Events. Probably not. So you will have to tweak your strategies to fit the new mould. Here are 10 tried and tested strategies that will work for Professional Services Marketing:
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Newsletters – One or Twice every month. Keep them regular and focus on educating people on information that isn’t easy to access.
- Direct Mail – The trick here again is to try to educate people on information they don’t already hand. Try a market research study and post out the results to a targeted list.
- Seminars – Host your own events and invite selected targets to attend. Keep the topic positive and informative. Monthly or Quarterly. Host in conjunction with a business organisation to help with attendee numbers.
- Content Marketing – This is one that works for all business. Keep your website/blog updated regularly. Post 2-3 new pages a week and as one prominent marketer said recently “sucker them in with good content”.
- Networking – A slow burner there is no getting away from it but successful in the long run. Pick 1 or 2 groups and stick with them for a year. Get to know everyone in the group well and then referrals will follow.
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Social Media Marketing – Regular and Often is the standard. As a business at least 3 posts per week. For business to business Linked In should be the main focus. Keep extending your connections and groups. For consumers Facebook & Twitter work better.
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Public Relations – The goal of all small businesses is to get in the press as in most cases it is free of charge and can result in good exposure. Creativity rather than costs is the driver here and think of clever ways to get your message in the public domain.
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Online Marketing – Google Adwords and Facebook Ads should be the starting point. Allocate a small budget to each and keep your campaigns very targeted from the start. Expand out thereafter if needed.
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Referral Programmes – Encourage current customers to spread the word on your behalf. Give then an incentive to do so either through a customer loyalty discount on their bill of a voucher off for their referral customer to use.
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Have A Great Website – Your website is your shop window so keep it looking well. Make sure its clean, easy to use, relevant content, videos, downloadable content, uses a “funnel approach”, plenty of call to actions and gets your story across.
With the exception of the referral programme, which will likely yield the best results, all of the above strategies will contribute in a small way towards your overall success. If everything is undertaken in tandem there will always be something positive happening and always a constant drip of new enquiries as a result of ongoing campaigns. Keep a constant catalogue of marketing activities in progress and you will be successful. For further details on how we use the above for ourselves and for our clients contact us at www.avidpartners.ie. Call us on 0818 303087, email us at advice@avidpartners.ie or fill in the enquiry form below.
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