Marketing Professional Services, A Struggle or Not?

Marketing Professional Services, A Struggle or Not?

The world of multiple #professional services and decision-makers, service of diverse industries experts and government regulations. Marketing professional services has always been a struggle while some firms are successful at #marketing, sales and business development.

Although they do not have or use the same approach, it’s of vital importance to understand key concepts of #marketing professional service before you start to introduce your services to the world. However, Understanding and creating customer relationship is one of the premier components of business management. #Professional service firms exist in many different industries.

They include lawyers, advertising professionals, architects, accountants, financial advisers, engineers, and consultants, among others. Basically, they can be any organization or profession that offers customized, knowledge-based services to clients.

Do you ever wonder why some firms do not struggle with #marketing and business development? Or you think is magic? If you take a closer look at them you will find out that marketing is not magic but commitment, consistency and patience in whatever approach you decide to adopt for your business, Marketing is who you are and how you do business, as most people think or believes that marketing is selling to someone at a cost. Your firm’s culture plays a critical role in your marketing result, this describes who your firm is and the way you do what you do in your organization, your clients, how you set priorities, deal with problems and how you embrace change.

What to do

Planning, one of the key factors to your marketing program is a written plan. This should start with your firm’s mission, vision, and core values. the nicest thing about not planning is that failure always comes as a complete surprise. If you do not plan, the gains and losses from failing to do so are not going to be visible but until later, therefore, your marketing does not fail at that given moment.

Every professional services firm is faced with task to find new clients and new opportunities, there are two types of firms and the ways in which they make their marketing decision, the firms whose marketing tactics are tied to their immediate needs and random opportunities, the other firms, change is hard or this is the way we have been doing it. So let make a few minor adjustment to the same thing.

Also another is that the CEO would brainstorm and come up with accumulated #marketing ideas to be used at that period. Your marketing plan should be able to identify your firm’s internal strengths and weakness as well as external opportunities and threats. This is referred to as SWOT analysis. This would help your firm to understand it marketing environment and also to know how prepared your team members are to champion the initiative, the best markets to go after, can your firm actually provide the needs of this #market as identified, skills and staffing needs, resources, pricing and profitability. This are essential element to include in your marketing plan.

·        Know your business

·        Determine target market

·        Analyze competitors

·        Set goals

·        Outline strategies

·        Set a budget

·        Go to work, be determine and consistent

 Planning is the bedrock of every successful business and this should be paramount to every professional service firms in other to achieve a successful business growth.

#abiodunanani #marketing #sales #passion #life #customers #professional #services

Set your marketing budget, marketing budget tends to vary industry by industry, some are bottom up while some top down. Irrespective of the line in which you fall. It’s essential for you to have a marketing budget as this is critical to your success, Marketing budget is beyond sponsoring events and advertising but how you measure and manage what you invest in acquiring new customers and reconnecting with existing ones. It can also help you identify opportunities to optimize the tactics that result in the most bang for your marketing buck.

Set your marketing strategies, your strategy is your result and ideas that set the direction for your overall marketing, such as how your firm is positioned in the market place and the key messages you deliver to your audiences. So it needs to be concrete and realistic. It must be able to define what you want to achieve and it has to be measurable in other to know when you have accomplish them. Your strategy could be to develop a new service niche, change the make-up of existing client’s base, improve employee communication and listening skills, improve turnaround time for tax returns, grow through acquisitions, increase visibility and name awareness, obtain a return on investment. Whatever your strategies you have set for yourself, it must be measurable. Remember that your strategy act as the foundation for designing your marketing program and you should be prepared to change them as condition and circumstances change.

Lastly, to make sure that your strategy becomes everyone’s strategies, you have to involve everyone in strategy session in other for your team to know how their daily activities are aligned with the goal of your firm, the more they participate the more they feel the sense of ownership and they will begin to champion the objective.

Set your goals and objectives. No matter how good your marketing plan looks you need to set your marketing goals and objectives as your business needs exposure to grow. Firms who set goals are 88% more likely to report success than those who don’t. Creating them might be difficult atimes but it’s essential to align them with your business goals, your goals and objective needs to be measurable, smart, attainable, clear and realistic. And by so doing, you and your team will know exactly what you are working on and what you want to achieve.

Your #marketing goals and objectives are the end point of your marketing #strategy. However, they are expected to be centered on identifying how many leads you need, Improving brand reputation, how much revenue you need to generate from your marketing effort, increase profits, optimize brand positioning, how many opportunities you need, how many traffic you need to achieve your goals, timeline to achieve them, action and desired outcome etc. according to Mareo McCraken “ goals provide clarity ” without them, we drift aimlessly from task to task, without a clear understanding of how our work makes a difference.

Research your target audience, researching your target audience is one of the major things to do in marketing professional services as this are people you need to reach to execute your marketing strategy. Your competitors might have already done such research and put it into action, you don’t have to panic feeling that the market is already taken or dominated. If you found out they already targeted the same market you do, research and learn about the ways they market or advertise to their potential clients and draw out a strategy on how you can promote your bran or how you can distinguish yourself. Often, your target audience will be based on specific factors like location, age, Industry, income, how much demand is there for the services that you offer to the market, what services does your market value the most, who are your competitors, what advantages do you have over your competitors.

Select your marketing techniques, now that you have a well-defined strategies and goals. How do you know what to do to attract customer without going bankrupt or making massive mistake, you hear rumors that some specific marketing techniques is must for your kind of business and you start to imagine if this would work before you run out of cash and patience.

There are over 50 internet and traditional marketing techniques for your business. However, to choose the most suitable for your business can be challenging sometimes, to consider most profitable techniques for your business you need to put some factors into consideration, which is the purpose of your marketing and the objective, your target audience, your audience buying circle, and so. Some effective marketing techniques to try out below

Relationship marketing and word of mouth

Email marketing

Networking events

Professional association

Paid and print advertising

Social media

Conference and tradeshows

Search engine optimization

Cold calls

Sponsorship and speaking events etc.

Once you have selected your marketing techniques, you can then determine if you will need new marketing infrastructure, training or outside support to make the plan a reality.