In last week’s webinar, we discussed The Top 5 Brand Building Strategies for professional services firms. The strength of a brand can be boiled down to the following equation: brand strength = reputation x visibility). But after defining what makes a professional services brand with this simple equation, what does brand success look like? With significant benefits like higher frequency of referrals and a higher close rate, brand building is worth prioritizing.
The Top Brand Building Strategies
1. Content Marketing. When it comes to building your brand, content marketing is one of the most important tactics you can use. Not only is content marketing less expensive than traditional outbound marketing, it also works. Thanks to content marketing, your firm will:
- Demonstrate its expertise to both prospects and competitors.
- Get found more easily on search engines.
- Qualify and nurture more leads.
- Become more transparent and relatable to clients and followers.
- Save time, because your content is always working even when you aren’t.
Developing a strategy is the best way to keep your content creation on track and organized. Determine your topics alongside a promotion plan to make sure you’re always prepared with fresh, new content. Creating content in conjunction with specific lead nurturing campaigns can also work wonders on your conversion numbers.
Need more convincing? Firms that generate at least 40% of their leads online grow four times faster. And firms that generate at least 60% of their leads online are twice as profitable.
2. Develop Visible Experts℠. Developing a Visible Expert within your firm can have an extremely positive impact on your brand. Take Joe Pulizzi, for example. As the creator of The Content Marketing Institute, he attributes his success to finding a niche and distinguishing himself.
Now, thanks to his status as a Visible Expert—a professional with high visibility and a reputation of expertise in their industry niche—his company is not only able to exist, but excel. In addition to an increase in leads and partnership opportunities, Pulizzi was able to increase his billing rates by 1000% over the last three years.
3. Cultivate Blogger and Partner Relationships. This involves building your brand by taking advantage of the already existing audiences of relevant blogs and partners in your industry.
By writing compelling and educational blog posts for industry blogs that have a similar target audience to yours, you can gain visibility and drive more traffic back to your website.
Similarly, partnering with prominent firms allows your firm to leverage their relationships to build more traction online. By demonstrating support for one another publically, you can reach each other’s target audiences at the same time. Consider hosting an event together, conducting a research project or sharing content to each other’s audiences.
4. Seek High Profile Clients and Case Stories. Dramatic results can make for great brand building. Actively seek out high profile clients and invest in the kinds of results that can be widely and impressively shared. The better your results, the more capability they have as a brand development strategy.
5. Dominate the Social Media Space. Participating avidly in social media gives your firm the opportunity to achieve several brand-building strategies at once. You can share and promote content, engage with industry leaders, find and cultivate partner relationships, and research and directly engage with prospects. Your social media platforms can act as the mouthpiece of your branding, giving you an opportunity to put a voice behind the actions of your firm.
The most impactful brand building strategy combines several of these strategies that are complemented with traditional ones as well.
To learn more about the top five brand building strategies and hear about some real world examples of each in practice, download the slides and listen to the entire presentation here. And for a more in-depth look at how to build your professional services firm’s brand, download the Brand Building Guide for Professional Services Firms for free.
On Google+ or LinkedIn? Follow us +HingeMarketing and join us on LinkedIn.
