Content Marketing for Professional Services
Gone are the days when it was as simple as establishing a decent website, handing out business cards, and waiting for the referrals and sales to roll in. In today’s world, your organization is vying for attention from others located all over the world – which means you need to adopt a globally significant digital strategy to stand out from the crowd.
So, how does a professional services organization separate themselves from the hungry masses, all vying for the same dollar? By establishing their expertise. In order to achieve search engine rankings, drive inbound leads, and support your social media strategy, you need amazing and authoritative content.
Content Marketing for Professional Services
What is content marketing?
In a nutshell, content marketing is an online strategy which includes the publication of valuable informational or educational content – for free. That content is published and updated on a regular basis, for the convenience of consumers. The intent is to establish consumer relationships through the attraction of new prospective customers, to nurture existing client or customer relationships, and to help a brand establish and grow trust by maintaining its reputation as an industry expert.
It’s pretty simple – when a brand creates and publishes content which is both helpful and relevant to its targeted audience, it achieves several goals:
- It demonstrates in-depth expertise and understanding of topics related to their business.
- It attracts new and prospective customers.
- It creates an opportunity for audience engagement.
- It builds consumer and audience loyalty and trust.
The professional services market is undergoing significant and fundamental changes, moving further and further from the realm of traditional referrals, and towards the practice of shared knowledge. Customers and consumers rely more and more on web-based searches and information to inform their decisions, using the power and convenience of digital to vet potential professional services. Which means your organization’s reputation pivots on your ability to describe and share your expertise clearly, concisely, and with authority.
Content marketing for professional services is absolutely essential.
Remarkable storytelling will allow you to convey your expertise directly to a wide and varied audience. It will also allow potential customers the ability to familiarize themselves with your brand’s personality and approach, before making an inquiry. It will help your audience vet your professional services before even making first contact – which is why quality content is an absolute must!
While the need for effective content marketing is not difficult to understand, creating remarkable content is not quite as easy. Deciding what information to share can be a challenge, and requires quite a bit of discernment. While the information must be helpful and relevant to your audience, you also don’t want to reveal information which might offer you a competitive edge.
Effective content marketing for professional services will walk the line between providing information which is helpful and valuable to consumers, and reserving the trade secrets and pro knowledge that establishes industry leaders. And, while blog posts are the most utilized form of content marketing for professional services, webinars, eBooks, white papers, social media posts, and newsletters can also be valuable formats for conveying information.
Regardless of the format you choose for sharing your stories – your content marketing publications must be incredibly well-written. An incomprehensible, poorly-written, or unprofessional post can actually damage your organization’s credibility, and should be avoided at all costs.
For more information on what works, what to avoid, and how you can optimize your content marketing for professional services, contact the experts at Strongpages, today. We’ll help you provide your audience with the with the high-quality, professional content they demand.