Professional Services Marketing: Creating Your First Campaign

Many professional service organizations are often hesitant to embrace the newer digital marketing channels. Some believe they won’t be able to see a good return on their time and effort investment while others are concerned that those efforts may put their business in the wrong light. While professional service companies, like all organizations, need to be selective on which channels are more appropriate to use (eg, a law firm might not be the best match for Snapchat), digital marketing can absolutely be an effective way to drive business for a variety of professional services.

Interestingly, law firms generating 60% or more of their leads online are 2x more profitable, and firms generating 40% or more of their leads online grew 4x faster than those with no online leads.

Professional services marketing through online channels is a legitimate, and often critical way to grow your business.

From blasts to campaigns

Many professional services have experimented with the basics of online marketing, often in the form of email or news “blasts”. While one-off bursts can be effective from time to time, they don’t keep your clients or prospects in regular contact with your organization and limits the effectiveness you can bring in delivering value from that channel.

Overall, your business goal is to attract and retain clients, and you can do this by changing your blasts of information to a more regular cadence, perhaps unique monthly campaigns, with particular goals and objectives designed in advance. In addition, work to coordinate those foundation emails with cross-channel communications, in the form of content, or social media, etc.

Creating a campaign

Creating a campaign only takes a few steps:

1. Have a clear goal for your campaign to accomplish. You need to be able to pinpoint what your success metric is.  For example, one goal could be to boosting your online ratings. Through a series of targeted emails, ask clients to leave a review. You can then select other channels, perhaps direct messages through social media during the same campaign period, all driving to the same goal of attracting x number of new reviews.
2. Determine what will attract clients to act. If you are asking clients for reviews, what will persuade them to provide one? You can prompt clients to leave reviews through the form of soliciting “feedback”, with the review site as the platform. Keeping it timely helps, as they are more likely to share thoughts just following an interaction rather then months later.
3. Decide what channels your campaigns are most appropriate for. When sharing your message you have many different options to reach your audience, including email, social media, blog, and coupon sites, just to name a few. Depending on your campaign goal and intended audience, one channel may be preferable over another, or it may be wise to use a few channels. In our review example, choosing the more direct, targeted channels may be more successful.
4. Analyze your campaigns success. Unlike marketing one-off communications, campaigns can continue over time, and it’s critical to ensure you see what worked and didn’t work in order to make them as successful as possible each and every time. Go back to your original goal. For review generation, if your goal was 5 new reviews, and you received 8, that’s a success. If you only received 2 reviews, you might want to reassess how you are communicating to clients.

Get started attracting more clients with your professional services marketing campaigns. Take the work out of campaign management with the help of the LocalVox platform, which can help you distribute your campaigns on publishing platforms, social media and coupon and deal sites. It can also grow your email lists and track your search ranking, helping you establish your marketing and accessibility online.

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