I am very pleased to be adding a guest post by the knowledgeable and fascinating Laura Hannan (ask her about her life sometime, it tells like a movie). Laura is a Business Development manager at Chameleon, a digital communications organisation creating results for B2B and B2C organisations across web, mobile, search and social.
If you want to get in touch with Laura use the links below or let me know and I will be glad to pass on your details to her.
Marketing for Professional Services Firms
How do you market organisations online that have traditionally relied on referrals, face-to-face networking and the reputation of individuals or partners?
I think it comes down to your brand.
Professional Services firms are generally made up individual experts and it is from these individuals that people buy.
However, it is an organisation’s brand that attracts the best people to work for them in the first place, so internal marketing of that brand to partners, their marketplace, Universities and Alumni is something that most firms are perfectly familiar with.
With the best people working for them, the brand over time stands also for a place where a specialty lives.
Even the industry I work in, a digital agency, we are just a group of digital professionals. We should be leaning on every individual’s expertise whether they gained that experience within these four walls or not.
Traditional ‘referrals-type’ professional services firms are now relying on search traffic for new business leads. The brand benefits of being at the top of search for your services keywords are harder to measure and therefore often ignored.
Some B2B organisations have been slow to dominate their brand search page. See PwC filling up the page with paid and organic search, link extensions, places and maps.
Online advertising / affiliates where brands can gain a lot of impressions are unlikely to be as effective for professional services firms as other sectors. However adverts focusing on individuals will have more traction, e.g. on LinkedIn individuals by default allow their data to be used in advertising.
ePR and blogger engagement is a great way to promote both the individuals and the brand together. Perhaps try influential websites within your sector e.g. http://www.big4.com/blog/news
Social media is an interesting channel and one we get asked about a lot by B2B organisations, usually asking “what should we be doing?” This is probably another blog post all on its own!
For larger professional services organisation, brand and buzz monitoring can be incredibly effective to react to news/PR/blogs and measure brand reputation and penetration. If someone is saying something negative about your brand, you’ll want to know about it, and if there are positive comments you will want to keep that buzz going for as long as you can.
We’ve been working with Drivers Jonas Deloitte, Kingston Smith and RIBA.
For more chat and debate feel free to connect http://uk.linkedin.com/in/laurahannan or www.twitter.com/laurajhannan
+44 (0)207 422 0059 
