So many professional services firms struggle with digital marketing.
For many of them it’s because they’re already specialists - just not in marketing. The first challenge is providing great service to existing clients who need their specialisms.
That is not an easy challenge. Scaling the delivery of world class service within a financial advisory firm, an architect’s studio, or a legal office is tough work.
This means marketing can find itself taking a back seat.
But it doesn’t have to. Marketing can be effective and efficient - you just need to follow the right playbook.
In this Lately article, we’re going to walk you through the simple playbook that forms the foundations of marketing growth for professional services firms. We’ll cover:
As with any business, in order to attract new customers, you need to figure out why people buy products or services from you.
For some companies, it's because you're fun, easy, or cheap.
For others, it can be the opposite—premium brands, exclusivity, status, and other expensive signifiers.
For a professional services firm, most of the time you're selling on trust. Someone trusts that you know more than they do about a particular specialism. They trust that you've done it before, that you've seen it go well, and that you've seen it go badly.
They are paying you for your expertise, and in that case, trust becomes a very valuable commodity for you.
If trust is central to your brand, then you want to make it central to your brand’s communications, which means factoring it into any marketing or sales activities you plan to do. If you are a law firm, for example, and your marketing copy reads poorly—or even worse, has a mistake in it—a prospective customer will immediately associate you with a lack of attention to detail. That is exactly the opposite impression you want to give.
This trust is often reflected in the names that professional services firms choose for themselves. It’s often the last names of the partners—the most trustworthy, reputable, and qualified people in the business.
The logos tend to focus on those names, rather than looking like a social media or mobile app icon. The color schemes are often muted and classy, rather than vibrant and garish.
All these small choices are intended to communicate trust.
That’s our starting point.
Now that we’ve established our core driving theme, it’s time to work out who we actually want to market to—who we want to close.
If you’re starting from scratch, you might want to leave this question fairly open-ended. You can do a market analysis and estimate what services are being undersupplied, or what groups of people are being priced out or not catered to.
But before you have enough customers, it’s probably wise not to go too narrow.
If you’re an established professional services firm, however, you have existing revenue and a client base that you can analyze and understand.
There are a few steps you can take to try to figure out who your best customers are. In some cases, it will be simple, while in others, it’s more complicated.
Initially, you can look at a list of your customers and see whether there’s an obvious correlation between them, or whether they can be easily grouped into different categories. These categories might be materially distinct and could perform differently or independently.
For many businesses, this will simply require a quick look over the data. For others, however, you can take a more detailed approach.
A simple method might be to sort the customers by the amount of money you make from them and hide any irrelevant data, focusing instead on the revenue each customer brings. Ideally, you’d also want to know where that customer came from, how much it cost to acquire them, and how long it took to close them as a customer.
Additionally, consider how much they’ve paid you for a one-off engagement or how much they are paying for an ongoing engagement. You can also include how long they’ve been a customer and, if available, any kind of customer health score.
You can run complicated statistical modeling on these datasets if they’re large enough, but if you know how to do that, you already know how to proceed. If not, start with revenue and begin to figure out what commonalities link your different customers together. Are there certain groups of customers who are easier to get, faster to close, who give you more money, and stay for a longer period of time?
All marketing centers around content. For some companies, it's detailed reports or opinionated blog posts. For others, it’s TikTok videos or high-quality graphic design.It could even be that the content you're focused on is earned media—like customer reviews that you can take and operationalize. But content is the core of what marketers do.
A quick question you can ask yourself is: What content can we produce?
Yes, in the best-case scenario, you could publish a best-selling book on your area of expertise, and that might drive future sales. However, that might be a two-year project before it even hits the shelves.
In many ways, it’s best to start with what you can do now and work from there. What you do have at your firm is industry expertise. If you can write a couple hundred words on a topic—perhaps a topical news story or a question that clients frequently ask—those few hundred words can be really valuable.
You can choose to optimize them for SEO, or you can use them as a base content asset to repurpose and produce more content from. The more you build this library of content, the more you’ll have to tie together and create future content.
Work out what you can do and go from there. Content you create today will make creating content tomorrow even easier. Just start.
Some kind of regular cadence will set you on your way. This could be blog posts, videos, or audio. Start a podcast, upload to TikTok—whatever makes you happy, wherever you think your customers might see it, and whatever you can do consistently and reliably while adding value.
This theme of consistency is one we’ll continue with. I would argue it’s one of the most important things you should consider for your social media.
When someone goes to the social media page of a law firm, wealth manager, architect, or any kind of professional services firm, what are they hoping to see there?
Are they hoping to see hilarious content they can sit down and watch in the evening? Are they looking for the best jokes they can giggle at and share with friends? Are they expecting to be updated on the news of the day?
No, probably not.
There are some excellent examples of professional services firms that do, roughly speaking, all of the above. But they’ve made a very big investment into their social content and have a very mature marketing process, with social media as a key growth channel for them.
The main thing a customer wants to see from a professional services firm is life.
People want to see that you’re active. They want to know your office hours, see that you’ve attended a conference, or notice that someone in the firm has won an award. They want to see that you’ve been mentioned in a reputable media outlet.
They also want to see that you create content about the areas where they need advice or services.
But most of all, they want to know that you’re there. They want to know that you’re a well-run organization, that you’re responsive, and that you execute things well.
If you’re posting regularly, repurposing content from other sources and longer-form content you’ve produced yourself—maybe snippets of videos or appearances you’ve done on other people’s media or shows, or perhaps your own—it instills trust in your prospective and existing clients.
Most importantly, it doesn’t give someone a reason not to use you. You check all the basic boxes they have in mind and deliver on them.
This is what Lately AI does, and it’s why so many professional services firms use Lately to run their social media for them. Lately automates your social media but leaves it open to be edited by your marketing manager or social media team.
This means you can feed in all that great long-form content you’ve produced, and Lately will automatically generate social posts in your brand voice and schedule them, ready to go across different social platforms in ways that work for those platforms.
If you post video content, you can feed a long video into Lately, and Lately’s AI will find what it thinks are the most valuable parts of the video, snip them down, provide captions to go with them, and schedule them as social posts.
All of these posts can be automatically set to go live, or they can sit in an approval queue for someone on your social media team to double-check and approve before they are posted.
This means huge time savings for marketing teams at professional services firms, as they simply need to review and approve the posts. They can also easily edit the posts where they think it's useful to do so.
This guarantees consistency, professionalism, and a multimedia, omnichannel presence for your firm.
It’s why so many professional services firms use Lately.
While that describes why professional services firms use Lately on a day-to-day basis, the real reason they come to Lately is strategic. It’s because one of the core things Lately is doing is repurposing.
For a professional services firm attempting to execute a digital marketing strategy with a small team, repurposing is your golden ticket. Repurposing is how you turn a little into a lot.
Effective repurposing is ideal for companies that have valuable core assets they want to leverage to drive marketing.
It means you can send someone from your firm to appear on a podcast, and while you now have that podcast as an asset you can market, you also have snippets from that podcast that can be marketed as well. Perhaps snippets that you’ve made and snippets that the people who produced the podcast have made—two different sets.
Maybe the podcast is both audio and video, meaning it’s on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, and more. You can make audio snippets and video snippets.
Perhaps you take sections of the podcast, pull out the transcription, turn it into a blog post, and repurpose it from there.
Maybe that same post becomes a long post on LinkedIn, or a multi-post thread on X (formerly Twitter) or Threads.
Perhaps you turn some of these assets into PDFs you can send to prospective clients in the sales cycle.
Maybe you can even create a dedicated page on your website hosting the podcast and the transcription to rank with SEO.
That one core asset—quality content with a deep, personal connection to your firm that emphasizes your expertise and humanity—can then become so many other things.
This is best practice in digital marketing when you’re a small team, especially if you’re an army of one in the marketing department.
Repurposing is your key to success, and Lately is an automated repurposing machine, using AI and neuroscience to maximize your content and improve it over time.
One of the key drivers of success for a professional services firm is outbound activity.
Sometimes this can be seen as pure sales, other times as sales and marketing combined. Digital marketing, however, plays a huge role in making many outbound activities successful.
For example, outbound email or LinkedIn messaging. In these cases, you want to provide prospects with materials where they can learn more—case study PDFs, links to explainer videos, or perhaps just a great website, a great social media presence, and an active blog or resources page.
The better your own content, the better your own brand—the more regular, more human, and more trustworthy it is—the better your outbound campaigns will perform.
When you have an effective repurposing strategy for high-authority, high-trust, long-form core content assets, that’s when you should start incorporating outbound efforts. This allows you to leverage not just the core assets, but the shorter, more digestible, bite-sized repurposed assets.
You can send a one-minute video snippet to a lead on LinkedIn, provide a PDF case study, or share an infographic about market performance. All this content helps you maximize your outbound efforts and really fill up the top of your lead funnel.
This is a tried-and-tested playbook for digital marketing, especially for professional services firms. Leverage your authority and trust.
Create content that shows who you are and why someone should trust you—why they should hire you to help them—and then put that content everywhere, in every form you can. You can call it omnichannel, surround sound, 360—whatever buzzword you prefer. At the heart of it all is repurposing.
Now, Lately can’t repurpose every single thing you want to do. It can’t take a podcast and produce a case study PDF—yet. But Lately can do about 75% of the repurposing you need, and nearly 100% of the repurposing you'll want to do for social media.
It does this automatically, saving you time to focus on the remaining efforts. Everything is either set to post automatically or waits for approval.
When you're a high-trust business, you want to keep your finger on the pulse of what's being posted—and we understand that.
If you're a professional services firm and you want to know more, get in touch with Lately and see how we can help.
Welcome to Lately, the world’s first Deep Social platform, powered by Neuroscience-Driven AI™. Lately is one of the fastest growing social media tools within the professional services sector, and has users from so many more verticals too. But why do wealth managers, interior designers, and legal firms all love Lately?
Lately instantly creates a unique, customized voice model needed to reach any target audience, on any channel, in any language or regional dialect.
Lately automatically predicts top highlights of any text, video or audio and clips them up into dozens of pre-assembled, high-performing social posts.
Lately IDs, adapts and schedules for peak performance times, optimizing for individual social platform algorithms – days, weeks or even months in advance.
Lately means 1200% more engagement, 200% more leads, and 40% more sales.
Try it now for free here or contact us to book a demo.
