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Using Content Marketing in the Professional Services Industry
Your content marketing strategy should be approached a little differently if your business offers professional services, like practicing law, medicine, or performing some form of consulting work.
This is because you’re largely capitalizing on expertise to serve your clients, not just pushing product benefits. Demonstrating that expertise is going to be crucial to building trust with your audience, which in turn leads to inbound inquiries.
That being said, let’s nail down who your audiences are, since there are actually TWO primary groups you’ll want to target. From there, we’ll look at some tactical strategies you can employ to start using content marketing for professional services on different media channels.
First Up: Who Are You Attracting?
“Clients” is the obvious answer here. You’re definitely going to need messages going straight to the people who are going to be writing checks for you. It’s the other, not-so-obvious target that may actually bring the most value to your business development, however: referral partners. This group is going to be made up of professionals just like you. They won’t be in the same industry (those are competitors), but tangential ones. Here are a couple of examples of these symbiotic, “you help me, I help you” relationships:
- Estate Attorney + Financial Planner
- Cardiac Surgeon + Family Practice Physician
- Business Consultant + Enterprise Software Salesperson
You can see a trend in these relationships, where one professional is usually a specialist and the other provides more general services. In the case of the first example, a single financial planner may have a variety of go-to attorneys in different practice areas so they can best serve their client when the need for legal assistance arises. Alternatively, the estate attorney probably has relationships with a number of financial planners in the same role, so that he or she is maximizing the probability of a referral coming through. Think about which role you can play for your network – the generalist or specialist.
Don’t think you’re fooling anyone, fish. We all know you swim better than you climb. Stick with what you’re good at! |
In both cases of communication (client or referral partner), the main goal is to advocate that you have the audience’s best interests at heart. For clients, that means solving their problems thoroughly and quickly. Referral partners are going to need assurance that you know what you’re doing, and, when they hand off their client, that you’re going to reflect positively on them… by solving the client’s problems thoroughly and quickly.
Now, you and I know that you’re wholly capable of meeting those needs without a problem. The issue is that they don’t know. In content marketing for professional services, your main goal for messaging is to demonstrate that you’re the expert. Another name for …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
