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Marketing is one thing, but strategic marketing is the type of marketing that works best because it takes advantage of your competitive advantage. So, in this two-part video blog, Liz Harr is going to be talking to you about 10 marketing strategies that really deserve prioritized attention because they really work.

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Marketing is one thing, but strategic marketing is the type of marketing that works best because it takes advantage of your competitive advantage. So, in this two-part video blog, I’m going to be talking to you about 10 marketing strategies that really deserve prioritized attention because they really work.

First is around promoting what matters most to the professional services marketplace. And that is expertise, the extent to which you can devise a marketing system that brings visibility to your expertise so you’re educating rather than selling is a top marketing strategy followed by high growth firms. Beyond expertise is like another layer of that specialization.

So, a second strategic way to approach the marketplace is to lay a stake in the ground around a niche specialization. This could be a specialized approach to solving a problem that your target audience is having or a specialized role that you work with within your target audience.

Third is around being everywhere where your audience is. We call it 360-degree marketing. You probably hear that term all the time, but what it’s really talking about is being ever-present where your audience is learning. And we’ve found in our research that the sweet spot between digital and traditional is 60/40, and having both digital and traditional techniques in your marketing system is what being ever-present is all about.

A fourth strategy to consider is the way you offer your services to the marketplace. Bundling or integrating certain services is the way that you can compete and rise above the noise of all the other competitors. Think about tacking on training to a particular advisory for example. And a fifth strategy to consider is what we call sub-branding.

Now, this is helpful to firms that along the way, along their growth evolution, they’ve discovered that they can easily and profitably serve a new market, but maybe serving that new market isn’t quite in alignment with your overall brand strategy and could dilute it.

So, firms that find themselves in this position can create sub-brands that still have an association with the parent brand, but allow them to easily and seamlessly serve this other newer market without causing brand confusion. So, if you’d like to find out more about how you can adopt strategic marketing and incorporate that into your planning, I encourage you to check out all the marketing training we’ve designed specifically for professional services firms in Hinge University.

Hope to see you there.

Elizabeth Harr