How Branding and Marketing Your Professional Services Is Like Climbing the Corporate Ladder
The steps you take to brand and market your professional services firm is not radically different from your steps up the corporate ladder. In either case, it's typically not an overnight accomplishment – and if it is, you've probably done something disingenuous or otherwise illegal to get there. Is that the "60 Minutes" van outside?
Selling services is selling people – primarily yourself and secondarily your firm as a group of diverse people with a similar, cohesive goal. So, where do you start building that brand and planting the seeds that grow the elusive word-of-mouth success?
Start with your cube neighbors. Do they know what you're about and what you're doing? Can your employees, associates, partners, accountant, attorney, and current customers recite your elevator pitch? Are you staying in contact with them with news, developments, accomplishes? It's a captive audience and they can be your biggest advocate.
Do not set off the BS alarm. Start with talking in plain English, everywhere. On your website, in written and oral communications, in your collateral material. Buzzwords are for you and your comrades. The people do not get them and glaze over when you use them. Not a good thing.
This is the first step to what James Gilmore and Joseph Pine term "exceptional authenticity" in their book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want. Gilmore and Pine remind service providers in particular that "people tend to perceive as authentic that which is done exceptionally well, executed individually and extraordinarily by someone demonstrating human care."
Become that helpful, smart coworker. Be a thought leader in your area of expertise and give away your ideas at every turn. Become an expert and the media, other influencers, and eventually the right customers will stop by your cube and form a line.
Use the web as a forum for raising your stature. Blog, write and distribute white papers and case studies about what you're doing (psssst – see the MCT blog). Speak at events. Call reporters back within five minutes when they do call you.
Tell your story until your voice fails – or until you are promoted. Individual self-promotion and professional services self-promotion is essentially the same thing. The key is creating and refining efficiency in your message – meaning discovering and developing your spiel, then creating all the fun stuff – logos, taglines, websites, printed materials, ads and press releases.
