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.

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.

Are you ready to be in film?

No matter how you answer this question, you cannot deny that the silver screen is a channel for storytelling and engaging audiences.  The film is a powerful medium for making a human connection.  What are you waiting for?  This post offers four reasons to incorporate video into your professional services content marketing strategy and quit being shy! 

It is time to begin a business development and content marketing playbook. Start the playbook by conceptualizing a rich media experience that spotlights your talent and captures the compelling project story. Blend content and media goals and objectives into an engaging website experience that offers project storytelling.  Let’s realize your vision to nurture relationships interested in working with your talent. 

TO GO OR NO GO ?

Pursuing viable project leads can be like finding a needle in a haystack. The economic recession continues to impact the A/E/C industry greatly.  Tracking and targeting viable leads takes a lot of work.  Efforts go through a series of starts and stop. Rather than spending long hours attempting to stay in front of pursuits that may go on hold, think about transforming your website into a lead nurturing tool that enables you to stay in front of your leads while improving your time and money investment on pursuits.