Just Say No - The War on Misaligned Content (Part III)

Are you a solo practitioner or small professional services firm struggling with your content to drive growth strategies? The Marketing Strategies 4 Growth newsletter offers weekly insights generated from more than 20 years of professional services marketing experience.

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This is the final edition of the Marketing Strategies 4 Growth series on content misalignment at professional services firms. Every Wednesday, each new edition of this newsletter provides insights into marketing challenges and current marketing- and growth-related trends.??

You can read Part I and Part II of this series on content misalignment to ensure you have all the bases covered. How do you avoid the mistake of having your published content disconnected from your organization's mission, vision and growth goals???

To wrap up this week, I review the hazards of overemphasizing sales messaging in content, failing to adapt content to your firm's evolving services and, finally, not creating content that aligns to your business' powerful brand differentiators. Let’s go!

7. Overemphasis on Sales Messaging?

Your branded content should be informational and helpful. That's it. Full stop.

If a blog or video (or whatever content format you develop) demonstrates a clear, compelling value proposition for a reader or viewer who has an aligned need, you have done your job. That accomplishment increases the likelihood of creating interest in a new visitor or, for a prospective client in an advanced stage of a buyer’s journey, differentiating your brand in comparison to that of other service providers.??

This should be a simple and straightforward process.?

Sadly, it’s not. The desire or impatience for a sale has compelled a lot of content creation that doesn’t inform or clarify as much as pushes, cajoles and attempts to strongarm buyers into decision-making more beneficial to the seller. No one likes to be pushed, and these days any educated buyer will find an attempted hard sale more than just off-putting, but genuinely disrespectful and demeaning. The behavior is counterintuitive to the sales process and yet…and yet…we still get a lot of that through a poor understanding of the buying process and, subsequently, content cheapens itself and fails to pursue its necessary goal.??

In 2013, author Dan Pink published an insightful book about sales called To Sell Is Human which nailed the coffin shut on the death of an old-fashioned sales model whereby salespeople were the informed individuals about products and services upon whose knowledge potential buyers had to rely. In today’s digital environment, as Pink points out, information-packed websites, social media, discussion groups, online reviews, influencers, watchdogs and a variety of other resources available to buyers have created a balance between what a salesperson and a buyer know.??

The new model pushes salespeople in the direction of doing what they should have been doing all along: helping informed buyers make the right decisions for them based on some intangibles – personal preference, values, worries and a variety of other subjective factors.??

I really can’t say if an enlightened age will ever befall us when the older sales model of pushing decisions onto potential buyers will ever entirely die. However, in the meantime, please don’t let your content use too much marketing or sales language. “We are the best…” “We are the only one…” In most cases there is too much subjectivity to ever know whether, in fact, you are the best for anyone's buying process.??

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RECOMMENDATION: Be helpful with your content. That’s it. Understand that your focus when developing content isn’t to cajole into a?direct sale but to create conditions within the mind of the buyer – appreciation and a trust in your brand’s expertise – so that when the time is right to make a purchase, they’ll be inclined to come back to you. Don’t try to force a buying timeline with hyperbole about how great you are. A buyer's timeline is their business and how you present your content and brand will have an impact on which way they go. ? ???

8. Failing to Adapt to the Mission's Evolution?

Strategic product or service launches at professional services firms are often accompanied by go-to market strategies that feature custom content detailing the service, its benefits and its differentiators from other market offers. Misaligned content or, worse yet, a content planning process at an organization may treat launch-related content as a thing apart from standard operating planning procedures rather than as a new, critical consideration for planning future content AND redeveloping existing content.?

Consider:

• A firm with a nonprofit audit and tax practice launches a CAAS service line with wide-ranging outsourced services. While the firm’s marketing team develops content promoting the new service line, the existing nonprofit content also requires redevelopment. A potential buyer who reviews a website’s nonprofit offerings may decide they are happy with their current auditor; but they may need outsourced accounting support, which they would not know the firm offers if existing content is not redeveloped to incorporate messaging regarding the new service.?
• Similarly, another firm that has an estate planning practice may recruit a certified valuation analyst (CVA) who can deliver valuation expertise for the personal representative and attorney of an estate. As soon as the CVA joins the firm, an audit of the existing estate planning content should be a must to determine if additional messaging and links can draw potential buyers to learn about the firm’s new CVA professional.??

Recognizing that an audit and redevelopment of existing content during and after a product or service launch can greatly enhance the value of that content also increases the likelihood the launch will be successful. More delivery systems are created to communicate knowledge about the launch and the value of the new offering. This is an area where content marketing can provide decent leverage when pursuing sales and strategic growth goals.???

RECOMMENDATION: A set-it-and-forget-it approach to content creation is a bad move. Keep a log of your existing content since an evolution in your company’s product or service offerings may require a ‘call to arm” of sorts from your existing content to expand its job and convey a deeper message than what led to its creation in the first place. Review your content log occasionally – get to know it as well as you can. Every business evolves and may even change course from a strategic planning process. ?

A great example to consider now is the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act which, barring any changes in policy, has many provisions set to expire at the end of 2025. Your firm had better be getting ready to do a deep dive into the blogs and videos your firm created back in late 2017 that announced the provisions since soon they’ll need an update, an overhaul or just need to be sent to the trash bin. ?

Read more insights about professional services content marketing on the Kovacs Communications blog.

9. Failure to Connect Content to Larger Organizational Goals?

A great deal of content supports the value of an industry or service line (see the example above from a go-to market strategy for a new service line). But just as, in the previous example, it misses an opportunity to align the new content with existing content, it’s equally a mistake to not align the new content with the organization's branding differentiator.?

One firm I supported was large enough to have professionals who had expertise in multiple areas of business and individual accounting. But the firm was also small enough that all the professionals knew and worked with each other. Collaborations and conversations about clients were easy to have – it was not an overly bureaucratic place.?

So it was easy for the company to communicate the brand value that it was a one-stop shop capable of serving many individual and business needs and that clients wouldn’t necessarily have to shop for other service providers once they’d engaged this one firm for a single service.?

As a result, every piece of content that does NOT manage to convey value like this – the value offered by the organization as a whole – misses a tremendous opportunity and, as I mentioned above, isn’t facilitating a sales process. Here are a few examples of how content that shares helpful information reflective of an industry practice area or service line can also convey high-level corporate messaging.?

• A case study discussing how an existing individual tax client became the personal representative for an estate and needed to file a Form 1041 and needed a methodology to determine the value of estate assets, which the firm delivered.

• A video focused on financial planning best practices for a married couple in their mid-50s emphasizes the tax planning work of the firm’s CPAs and the investment management work of the firm’s RIAs.?

• A blog outlining a step-by-step process for how an in-house nonprofit accountant can prepare for an audit also mentions the time- and cost-saving opportunities for the nonprofit to use an experienced outsourced accountant, which the firm offers.

Every content example in the bullet points above highlights at least two areas of service expertise available to the audience within that firm. Any audience member drawn to the content due to one need will have communicated to them other opportunities WITHIN the organization.

Brand message? “You can get more expertise here than the expertise you just came here for. Wow, isn’t that convenient.” ????????

RECOMMENDATION: Your content should spring from more than just your industry or service line expertise but also your corporate brand message. ?Each white paper, video, case study and even testimonial may seem to have a simple, straightforward purpose. The messaging behind your content – the essence of what drives its creation – is often more complex. Be mindful of your brand and its messaging and what that requires from your content. This is a strategic choice as it can play a powerful role in sales optimization. ?

This ends my series on the hazards of misaligned content which, as you can tell, also means not missing opportunities to drive high-level value through your content. As mentioned above, you can check out earlier editions of Marketing Strategies 4 Growth to read Part I and Part II of this series. ??

As we approach 2025 (anyone but me enjoying the autumn nip in the air?), I’m starting to read about content marketing projections in the new year from brands such as Salesforce and the Content Marketing Institute. I’ll be back next week to highlight some of their findings.

Thanks for reading. I specialize in delivering content marketing strategies to tackle problems that solo practitioners and small professional services firms face to get things unstuck and back on course for growth.

Joe Kovacs, APR ([email protected])

www.kovacscommunications.com

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? 2024. All rights reserved. You may not reproduce this article, or any part of it, without written permission from Kovacs Communications.