Over the past five years, the marketing playbook for professional services has changed. Professional services marketers are working feverishly and at breakneck speed. High stress and tight deadlines are always factors in the industry's traditional marketing methods. Traditional methods tend to be print collateral, including brochures, statements of qualification, postcards, and any other media marketers gratuitously provide to prospective clients. These methods often suffer from a mismanaged message due to intensive labor, cost constraints, and focus on collateral production.

Inbound marketing methods offer new opportunities and a more practical approach to being flexible and adaptive in meeting market requirements for quality content. These methods use technology to create, deliver and measure content effectively. The idea is to provide content to capture the interest of a firm's prospective clients – these methods are proving to be a revolutionary shift in the marketing paradigm. As an added benefit, inbound marketing methods significantly reduce the time and cost associated with traditional methods.

Once a firm identifies the ideal client profiles, it is time to discover what distinguishes a professional services firm from the competition.  The market is subject to perpetual change.  Client behaviors change, and new rivals will always enter the market, altering the competitive landscape. Analyzing the competition is the first step to crafting a formidable content marketing strategy.  Let’s begin with the questions that help shed light on how a firm shapes up against the competition.

Do you send out regular email communications?  Have you ever been motivated to roll out a market segmentation effort to be more effective in your firm's message?  Segmentation aims to classify groups within your contact database to deliver content that appeals to specific group interests.  This article discusses how market segmentation should be a part of every inbound marketing strategy.

You decided to Make Every Keyword a Winner to embark on an inbound marketing strategy for your professional services firm. Now that you have a log of the ideal keywords, where do these phrases go?

People looking for service providers begin their quest by using a search engine. According the Pew Research Center’s Internet and Life Project (September 2010), “Many Americans begin their purchasing experience by doing online research to compare prices, quality, and reviews…they start their fact-finding and decision-making on the Internet.”

Traditional marketing and business development methods for professional services need to be fixed. You no longer need large marketing and business development budgets to make a difference.

Most traditional business development efforts include “prospecting” and "go/no go" stages.  While many professional services firms may call these stages different names, there are always activities to (1) discover a new lead, (2) speculate as to the level of interest during the pursuit, and (3) determine the viability of the lead (go/no go). Below are sample prospecting and go/no go stage workflows for reference.

Many people think it sounds silly to tweet. While tweeting may sound silly, Twitter is a wildly popular communication channel for quick and easy exchange with mass audiences. This post gets down to the Twitter basics and explains why this channel needs to be included in your social media tools for professional services marketing.

Mapping a process will provide vital insight.  As a consultant who applies new and exciting technologies to energize marketing activities, I like to work with client teams to develop process maps.  The way a team works, and its unique processes, drive each new technology initiative.  Without this understanding or discovering the process, it will negatively impact the rollout. 

Let's assume you gave your LinkedIn profile a makeover, and you've begun to strike up conversations, answer a few questions, and make connections. Now it is time to incorporate LinkedIn into your engagement plan. The objectives are simple – LinkedIn is a channel for connecting with clients and generating leads with new prospective clients.

It is time to think about your professional services' social marketing strategy. The following are steps to incorporate LinkedIn into your game plan.