You may be assigned to develop a marketing plan for your firm or department. Often, this leads to a list of marketing tactics, as opposed to strategy. A strategy is not just a blog post or golf tournament. Those are tactics that you use to execute your strategy. If you don’t have a larger strategy to guide you, you will be guessing about what marketing efforts you should do, and worse, may not know how to track what is working.
In this article, I will dig in deeper to explain what strategy is, how to develop it, and how to use the strategy to develop your specific marketing efforts. I also walk through an example specific to professional services firms.
Who is Your Ideal Client?
If you have written a business development plan for your firm, you have most likely identified a list of your current and ideal clients. This list of clients might be too broad, or the list might include varied markets or industries.
For this example, let’s say you provide civil engineering services. Your ideal client isn’t just anyone who needs civil engineering services.
What makes a client ideal for your specific type of work? If you specialize in roadway draining design for State DOTs, your efforts, resources, and fees will be different than a civil engineering firm who design drainage plans for residential houses. Working for a private developer to design a small parking lot may not be your ideal client. Your firm’s expertise is better suited to work for a State DOT or large municipality—who have consistent projects with rigid standards who specialize in.
You don’t have to guess who your ideal client is. You are already working with great clients. Review your client base and ask yourself:
- Who are your most profitable clients?
- Who refers the most business to you?
- What are the common characteristics that you find in those clients?
Once you have this list of common characteristics, it doesn’t mean that this will be the only client type you serve. However, it does make it easier to develop your marketing strategy and messaging around this client type and the results you can deliver for this client type.
What is Your Core Message?
Now that you have your ideal client identified, the next step is to develop a core message. This message asks, “What problem does my firm solve?”
Let’s stay with the civil engineering firm example. Your potential clients will automatically assume that you know how to design drainage systems for roadways. But this doesn’t really address the problem that the potential client has.
For DOTs and municipalities, the biggest problem about roadway drainage and working with civil engineers is about something beyond the basic service of developing the plans. Clients do not like having delays in the design plans or surprise design requirements that affect the construction budgets. When they hire a firm to handle their civil engineering, they trust that the solutions and plans the firm provides will be constructible and in-budget. Clients may hate to find surprises during construction that cause re-design. These are the real problems your clients have.
So, your core message is not, “We provide civil engineering services for State DOTs and Municipalities”—of course, you do! Instead, your message needs to be something like “Our design is completed on time with no surprises during construction.” Or, “Design solutions that can be constructed within your budget.”
These are very generalized statements just used to demonstrate this example. I would highly recommend finding out what your ideal client’s specific biggest problems are and identify how your firm solves those. The more specific to your ideal client, the more powerful the message will be.
The core message should be featured prominently in all marketing efforts. This includes above the fold on the homepage of your website, in cover letters, and headlines of brochures. It’s a key element of strategy because this is a way you can differentiate your firm in a way that your clients care about. It goes beyond just what services your firm provides.
Using Strategy for Marketing Efforts
If you go to most engineering or architecture firm’s website, you will first see a list of services. Your ideal clients don’t need a list of services up front. Eventually, they may want to know the nitty-gritty details of your exact services, but for now, they just want to know how you can solve their problems.
Back to the civil engineering example: If a potential client needs a drainage solution for a new roadway, they know they need a consultant for that. They may or may not know what type of consultant or even what level of drainage mitigation they will need. The client may just be looking for advice and expertise, to know exactly what type of consultant to turn to.
The civil engineering firm, then, wants to establish themselves as the local source of expert advice. This is where landing pages come in. The civil engineering firm can publish “The Guide to Roadway Draining in ABC State”—a landing page that consolidates all their content around roadway draining in ABC state into one place.
This landing page will rank in Google as a result for someone looking for roadway drainage in that state or local area. Now you become their go-to source for roadway drainage. You develop a relationship with them, and they come to trust you.
The landing pages are a way to draw people in who might not even be looking to hire a consultant just yet. But then, your expertise is what builds trust and positions your firm as the leading in that topic.
This is just one marketing effort that you develop using strategy first.
Now You Can Turn to Tactics
Tactics allow you to fill in the gaps to meet your clients where they are. If your ideal client finds expertise by searching the web, you need to create a landing page described above. You need testimonials from other similar clients on your website to build trust. Having content on several social platforms provides information in lots of places and proves legitimacy as a business. Having third-party reviews, rankings, and awards show that others vouch for your expertise. These are tactics that align with the larger strategy.
Putting this into Action
You can create a process around this. Either you can do this yourself or hire a marketing consultant to help you create this.
It starts by interviewing your clients and analyzing your competitors. Then build client personas and establish a core message and promise that will speak to each persona. If your firm offers multiple services or works with different markets or industries, you will have multiple client personas.
Once you have the client personas and core message, you need to map out specific landing pages and determine how to make the content the voice of your strategy.
Then identify the gaps in your current marketing approach to meet the clients where they are looking for providers. This will include both online and offline tactics. This will give the ideas of what other tactics to move your marketing forward based on a solid strategy.
To document this approach, you can develop a marketing plan as outlined here.
Your Turn
What is one way you can use strategy first to develop your next marketing effort? Comment below.
