The law of average – why your firm is anything but. A guide to 21st Century Professional services marketing.

Professional Services Marketing – some tips

When your average Jo thinks of ‘professional services’ they probably start out with an image in black and white, add in a pin striped suit, crusty offices with carpets still telling the stories of the 80s heydays, of bare walls and piles of files containing paper. Of long boozy lunches, inappropriate behaviour and a slap on the secretary’s backside.

Is this really the professional services firm of today? The lawyer, accountant, recruiter? It certainly shouldn’t be!

Over the past few years, Journey has been lucky enough to work with a new breed of professional services firms. Lawyers who disrupt the playing field with fresh ideas, accountants who not only set the pace, but reinvent the rules in how it is executed. Recruitment companies who view the world from the client AND the candidate’s perspective.

All of these firms have one thing in common – they’re entrepreneurs. They don’t want to do it how it’s always been done, they want to change how it is done. Not only developing a great image for themselves, but improving the image of their industry, pulling ahead of their peers and appealing to the wider audience – with a new message. ‘We understand you’. Yes that’s right, it’s that simple.

When I look at the firms we are lucky enough to work with, what is the single, most positive attribute they have on show? It’s just that, understanding what their clients want, listening to them and adapting their services to their client’s needs, not shoehorning them into a ‘one size fits all’ offering – whilst of course delivering a first class service.

For a while, this new breed of firm has been able to dine out on their ‘joie de vivre’ so rare has it been in their industry, but with so many of these disruptive and often ‘boutique’ or ‘specialist’ firms on the rise, it is more important than ever to ensure they convey exactly what their ‘pièce de résistance’ is.

Pretty soon, the perceived norm will shift, the disruptors will have disrupted and the tectonic plates beneath the surface of these industries will have changed the landscape forever. Understanding your clients will become the expectation, not the exception, being seen to be part of their wider management team will be the norm.

How then do you delve deeper? Really establish that personality behind your brand? Delivering that succinct message that runs through every living, working part of your business from your networking events through to your first meeting with a prospective client?

At Journey, we love working with entrepreneurial businesses, getting under their skin, challenging them and pulling out those true nuggets that set them apart from their closest competitors. So, next time you consider yourselves to be far from average, remember that average is changing – the heat is rising and you need to stay one step ahead.

We can help you stay well ahead of average.