It's always a good idea to integrate your marketing efforts, presenting a unified presence to your clients and prospects. When interacting with your audience via social media and email marketing, take the opportunity to refer to your other channels, establishing as many forms of contact with your audience as possible. You'll then have a variety of ways to keep in touch and disseminate your messages. In addition, clients are likely to find available their preferred method of interacting with your brand. This increases the likelihood that they'll welcome your updates and keep in touch, one way or another. 

What’s the best way to predict the future? Some say it’s to create it. From a business standpoint, that means using analytical information regarding client engagement to help shape the future. That’s how we amassed this list of nine branding trends, which you should incorporate into your 2014 marketing game plan.

To grow your business without becoming mired in a time sink, a clear strategy must guide your content marketing effort. It’s easy to get caught up in the daily rush to create new content and maintain a presence on all social media. Instead, be purposeful. Think focused rather than frantic. Ensure each content is effective, leading to your conversion goals rather than going for quantity and achieving little. Feed your prospects the right, high-quality content at critical points in the sales cycle, and you can lead them through to the services agreement. Create content answering objections that each client persona typically has at specific decision points in the sales-nurturing process. Your content should:

If your business grows slower than you would like, your firm may need a marketing makeover. See if you recognize any of the signs that indicate that it's time to rethink your marketing strategy and get back on the path to success:

Rule No. 1 of lead nurturing: Don’t squander your leads. You’ve worked hard and followed tips on this blog to bring them in through SEO, social media, blogging, etc. These efforts are not solely about creating content – and if it’s the thing you’re focusing on, you are not using these methods to their fullest potential.

Successful social media strategies for professional services firms must be targeted and meaningful. If you are with a small to medium-sized firm, you don’t have time to waste by spreading your social media efforts too thin. In addition, there are so many great social media marketing tips on the Internet today that it is difficult to read through all these articles to arrive at the right combination of activities that makes sense.

If you are developing your content marketing strategy for the coming year, always remember this effort involves highly strategic, consistent creation (sometimes curation) and distribution of valuable content to attract and keep a targeted audience of clients and prospects. 

Most professional services firms have an email list--and they don’t do much with it. Often these firms send out general interest newsletters or keep in sporadic touch with industry touch points and companies on the list. Much more gold to be mined in those email cases that your firm has been accumulating. Email marketing is a powerful tool to gather information and help deepen relationships. 

Images can bring businesses and professionals closer to their social media fans, followers, clients, and prospects. Photographs, especially photos, have always had an arresting quality: now they’re more accessible than ever to create and highly sharable. Images, infographics, and video serve as excellent shorthand to say a lot quicker and as perfect shortcuts to bringing people closer faster.