Are you contemplating a blog for your professional services firm?  According to a 2012 State of Inbound Marketing Report by HubSpot, in a survey of 972 marketing professionals, 81% of businesses reported that their company blog is helpful to critical for their business.  

Marketing automation focuses on nurturing leads from the top of the inbound marketing funnel to becoming prospective clients at the bottom of the funnel. Prospects typically get a score based on their activity level when provided with regular campaign messages via email. These periodic campaign messages nurture the prospective client from initial interest to services award.  Marketing automation combines email marketing with a structured business development lifecycle.

Are you interested in getting an instant return on your website investment?  If the answer is "yes!" you should consider adding landing pages and content that delivers value to your website.  These website elements will help you “pump up the volume” of prospective clients.

Let's imagine a prospective client is looking at your firm's statement of qualifications. We'll assume you presented an incredible body of work. Your prospect skims through the content, browses the impressive case study images, and admires the incredible layout. After reviewing the material, the prospective client concludes that you are a qualified resource for professional services. 

A competitive analysis aims to report competitors' strengths and weaknesses in your market. A thorough evaluation will greatly assist any firm looking to create strategies that will help gain an advantage, identify ways to hinder competitors from entering the market, and exploit any weaknesses in a competitor's service offering.

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.”