Content Marketing: Earning Credibility For Professional Service Providers

Years ago, I published an article in a business magazine about self-publishing as a marketing tool. As a result, I landed two clients, submitted several proposals, and made reprints for my marketing materials.

In one instance, a reader who later became a client had already made a decision to hire a competitor, but reconsidered when she came across my article. “It made the difference,” she said when she contacted me. “We knew from reading your article that you could help us.”

What really made the difference? My article was published in a trusted media outlet, not merely on my own website. This bestowed a level of credibility and gravitas that tipped the scale in my favor and closed the sale.

Validate Your Expertise

Building trust is never easy, especially when everyone claims to be an expert. As more and more professional services firms flood the Internet with e-books, blog posts and webinars, professional service firms must do more to establish their credibility than (according to the current mantra) creating and distributing “quality” content.

What others say about you matters more than what you say about yourself. For professional services firms, it’s not enough to publish content on your own website or blog. It’s imperative to establish a presence on credible third party media.

Have a Strategy

Content marketing programs should be designed to achieve specific business goals and tailored to your marketplace and prospects. Professional services firms in particular should build their content marketing strategy around the following goals:

  • Establish industry expertise and thought leadership

  • Attract inbound sales leads through traditional and online channels

  • Boost search engine findability and optimization

  • Provide materials to aid the sales process

Once you’re clear on your business goals, you can develop a content marketing strategy to lead your efforts. For example, I’m currently helping a healthcare management consultant launch a new firm. Our primary goal: establishing his firm’s national reputation around helping companies implement the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare).

To achieve this goal, our marketing strategy includes securing speaking slots at business conferences, publishing op-eds in national newspapers and pitching articles and webinars to industry associations that position my client as a credible thought leader (and potential consultant) among corporate decision makers.

Of course, content plays a role. Our blog posts, articles and webinars support our overarching strategy of establishing my client as a thought leader around businesses healthcare reform and helping corporate America interpret, navigate and implement the Affordable Care Act.

Media Still Matters

Credibility (not content) is king. A blog is a great place to demonstrate your expertise, build your personal brand and expand your network. But anyone can publish a blog. Not everyone can earn a platform for their expertise in top media and trade outlets, earning an implied endorsement from sources your prospects trust.

Despite the rise in social media and online news sources, gaining earned media coverage still remains one of the most effective ways to reach buyers and build an industry-wide platform. When you develop a strong message around your expertise, and approach the media as a partner in the newsmaking process, your ideas, opinions and content can appear in newspapers, trade magazines, top blogs and websites that position your business as a true thought leader.

My clients are often surprised to learn that media outlets will help you spread the word about your business. Moreover, by combining content marketing with public relations, you’ll leap ahead of your “online-only” competitors who believe that third party credibility is no longer necessary.

A Journalistic Approach

Many content marketer evangelists tell businesses to see themselves as media companies. They applaud the “death of media intermediaries,” instructing companies to communicate directly with customers and prospects who desire nothing more that a compelling “story” and relevant information.

Yet, prospects are not stupid. They know content marketing is meant to advance sales. And as more firms develop and flood the Internet with content marketing e-books, blog posts and webinars, professional service firms it’s getting harder to establish credibility.

The most effective content marketing takes a journalistic approach. This means being as objective as possible, proving both sides of a story, and providing context. It means telling prospects not only what to do, but when not to apply your advice, even if it means turning away a potential sale. Fill your content with research, data, studies and statistics. Interview other experts and find case studies that support your thesis.

This is how the traditional media make the news. It’s also how to get increasingly savvy prospects to embrace your content marketing, which should avoid overt (or subtle) sales pitches, hyping one approach (yours) or providing irrelevant proof points that stretch your case.

It’s not enough to articulate your expertise. Your content marketing program must be build around third party project a credible halo of authority and trust within your industry.


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Market Research…As Easy As Picking Up The Phone

I hear statistics all the time such as…”80% of all small businesses fail in their first year.” Does this mean that small business success is largely the victim of bad luck? On the contrary, I believe most business failures result from charging into the marketplace with untested assumptions.

The answer lies in performing sufficient market research, which can be as easy as picking up the phone.

Market research removes the risk and guesswork of developing your business, products and services, which I explain in my book, Get Slightly Famous:

Once you have a working idea of the market you’d like to serve, you need to dig deeper to test your assumptions. The process starts with market research: analyze your best potential customers, your competitors, your market’s predisposition toward your products and services, and your ability to serve these people so well as to make you their vendor of choice.

Market research can provide relevant information for establishing a solid foundation under any business. Even if you have been in business for years, it’s a good idea to stay up-to-date with market research that might help you understand where your market niche is going.

Market research can, among other things, help you understand your potential customers, the likelihood that they’ll buy your products and services, why they’ll buy them, and how much they’ll pay. Market research can also help you evaluate your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, thereby providing one of the keys to dominating your niche.

I’ve always held that market research is the most underutilized secret weapons for small business success. This became especially relevant when, several years ago, I helped the owner of a start-up software wholesale business prepare for launch.

During our first meeting, it didn’t take long to see that his entire business model was based on untested assumptions about his target market. I instructed him to postpone launch and call several potential customers to ask them what they thought of his positioning and marketing strategy.

The results were profound. Not only did my client see how easy (and eye opening) simple market research can be for testing assumptions about your target market, it also enabled him to reposition his business and redesign his marketing strategy.

Here’s a summary, in my client’s own words, of his experience and results:

I’ve finally learned that the secret to positioning and growing any company for success is conducting as much market research as possible.

Prior to conducting market research for my company, I developed services and marketing strategies that were based on my assumptions about what customer’s wanted from my company. I was about to launch based on these assumptions when you strongly suggested that I take time to do market research.

Following your advice, I created a list of the top 10-12 companies in my geographic area with the most potential of needing our services. I took several days and called each one, asking them a series of questions and took copious notes.

I asked each company how much they paid for services like ours, what their profit margins were, how much software they purchased per month, and what the top 3-4 most important aspects they expected their software vendors to have. I also asked what trade journals they read, what websites they visited, who there top vendors were, etc.

These simple conversations enabled me to visit the competitors’ websites and thereby create my product prices, return policies, shipping policies, etc., based on what these vendors where doing.

When I talked with each prospect, I explained my company’s business model and asked them if they thought it was appealing, or if they saw any flaws in my model.

To my surprise, I found out a few surprising things. First of all, my original marketing strategy was going to be solely based on how cheap our prices are, because I thought that price was the most important buying factor for our potential clients.

As it turns out, almost everyone I talked to told me that fast and reliable shipping was the most important thing to them, followed by an extremely efficient customer service department as the second most important thing. Price actually came third.

Based on this information, I completely changed my marketing to focus on our fast FedEx shipping services and 24-hour customer support response time. I also discovered that I could increase my profit margins by 15% without hurting sales and dramatically increase our profits every month.

I never would have known this was possible had I not taken the time to conduct this research!

Another great advantage to talking directly with prospects and customer’s is that they will tell you exactly how to sell them on your services. They will stress what is most important to them, and if you record the conversations, you can copy exactly what they say word for word in your marketing campaigns. It’s extremely powerful.

Needless to say, I am very happy with my market research results. It has helped me establish a company that is tailored to provide exactly what potential prospects are looking for, and it has given me invaluable information that I can use for marketing, profit projections, and word of mouth marketing.

The market research that I conducted has given me a complete idea of who my customers are, what they want, and how to sell them. It’s made all the difference in the world.

Getting Close

As you refine your market niche, you need to develop an insider’s understanding of your prospects. This means personally experiencing the world your clients and customers live and work in, so that you really understand their daily concerns.

Like my former client, actively explore how your customers live, work, and spend their time. Get to know the key players within your niche, and understand the structure and dynamics of of your market.

By challenging your initial assumptions and getting personally involved enough to see through the eyes of your prospects, you can avoid the “80 percent” failure trap and build your business on a fact-based foundation.


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Case Studies in B2B Content Marketing

Mari Gottdiener specialized in getting credit bureaus to address and correct credit report errors. After struggling to find clients throughout the general population, she discovered that mortgage brokers were ready-made prospects. They had an ongoing need for her services on behalf of their loan applicants.

Mari decided to become a resource for the national mortgage broker industry. She began networking with brokers at trade association meetings, and gave presentations at several mortgage offices. She published several articles in mortgage trade publications, one of which catapulted her speaking career and landed a nationwide web seminar that brought clients from all across the country.

Her efforts paid off and, in less than six months, she became a recognized lending industry expert in 15 states. “The more I focused on being the person who fixes credit problems for mortgage brokers, the easier it became to define what I could do for them,” said Gottdiener. “Now, my name gets passed around, and I’ve developed a special reputation within that market that makes getting business easier than ever.”

The Power of Stories

I’ve opened many talks with my story about former client, Mari Gottdiener. I’ve found it much easier to summarize the basic tenants of my Get Slightly Famous marketing model with a short, compelling vignette rather than reciting bullet points. Almost without exception, I’ve received compliments on Mari’s real-world success story because it perfectly illustrates how getting Slightly Famous can transform a business.

Case studies cut through the clutter. Case studies are powerful additions to any business website, presentation, article or blog post. Case studies tap the powerful human need for stories, vividly illustrating how your company has created results and conveying information in a way that bullet points, facts, pie charts, or spreadsheets alone never could.

Wired for Story. According to author Lisa Cron, stories ignite the brain’s hardwired desire to learn what happens next. Like a good story, effective case studies move readers from an initial challenge faced by a main character (your client) and then showing how your company (the hero) provided a solution. By providing a “plot” that your prospects can identify with, case studies tap into our deep desire to see a character move toward resolution.

Case studies are powerful content marketing tools. As content becomes a commodity, and your marketplace swims in information overload, case studies help your company illustrate how it delivers value. Instead of merely stating the facts, you can develop case studies that convey narrative accounts of your work that get and keep your prospects’ attention.

Case studies illustrate your expertise. Although it has become de rigueur to list past clients on company websites, your credibility skyrockets when you expand your accounting of client results into case studies that tell stories about how your firm helped a company just like your prospect overcome a problem and find a solution.

Energize Your Content Marketing Mix

Case studies can function as content marketing tools that attract and engage prospects on your company website, as vignettes for public speaking engagements, and sales talking points that help prospects envision how your company solves problems.

As B2B purchasers start their research online, case studies act as attention getters that help your firm make the vendor shortlist. Moreover, as your prospects share information about prospective companies within an organization, your well constructed case study can find its way to the desks of top decision makers.

Choose situations that broadly represent your target market. Describe the customer’s situation both before and after they worked with you, and be very clear about the results you achieved for them. You want your potential clients and customers to put themselves in the place of past clients and customers, and see themselves receiving similar benefits.

Provide a simple problem/solution narrative that resonates with target prospects. Business case studies should follow a proven structure, with a beginning (your client’s challenge) middle (how your firm developed a solution) and end (how your firm improved your client’s situation) including insights readers can apply.

Demonstrate your approach to problem solving. A case study should vividly the strategy and steps you brought to your client’s situation. When creating case studies, distill your process down to its essence; avoid going into minute details and instead focus on the most important elements that illustrate your good judgement and expertise.

Text and Multimedia Formats. Case study content can be multi-purposed in text, image, video and document types: web page, PDF, Word, PPT, Slideshare. Case studies can be included in ebooks, white papers, guides & best practices, webinars and conference presentations.

Using reprints in new ways is limited only by your creativity. Include case studies in your press kit to promote speaking engagements. Include case studies prominently on your website, use them as blog posts and include them with proposals to give your firm a competitive edge against the competition. Send case studies to trade associations, accompanied by a quick cover letter, for possible publication in industry newsletters, websites or blogs giving you even more exposure.


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