A look at Growth, Thought Leadership, and Digital Marketing for Professional Services and SaaS Firms During the Pandemic Recovery
Take back control of your business’ future.
It’s fair to say that 2020 threw us all one heck of a curve ball. While the historic year may be safely in our rearview mirrors, professional services firms are still managing through the impact and longer-term implications of the pandemic. Even those companies that have comfortably settled into their “next normal” are dealing with challenges and situations that simply didn’t exist before last year.
The reality is your clients have new opportunities to address and new challenges to tackle because of the pandemic. And as their trusted service provider your company does, too.
Now’s the time to ensure your growth strategies, thought leadership initiatives, and lead generation tactics are aligned.
In this three-part eBook, we take a close look at sales and marketing best practices for professional services firms looking to thrive in the COVID-19 recovery period. We start with examining growth strategies—what’s realistic in 2021 given the impact on your clients’ industry and businesses as well as your own? Then we illustrate how you can align your thought leadership strategy with your growth plans. And we show you how to use the words you’re publishing to support the growth trajectory you want to see this year. Finally, we explore how digital marketing activities are essential tactics in your growth plan. You’ll learn how to leverage the new digital playing field to your best advantage to stay on track in your growth journey.
With this eBook, you get everything you need to be strategic and purposeful when it comes to generating the leads and building the business you want in 2021 and beyond.
Chapter 1: Resetting Growth in the Post-COVID-19 Era
For most professional services firms, the pandemic pushed 2020 revenue down. Recapturing growth in 2021 will require being more purposeful about where and how future growth will be delivered.
Between 10/7/2020 and 11/22/2020 we ran a pulse survey, just seven questions, of 156 professional services firms, to gauge the impact of COVID-19 on revenues. It gave us an interesting sense of how the pandemic has affected consulting, accounting and legal firms, and how they’ve responded. In fact, 52% of the responding firms stated that they expected some amount of revenue loss in 2020. And 17% said that revenue loss would be substantial (more than 30%). While 19% of responding firms expected to grow revenues last year, the vast majority of firms (81%) expected either a sideways or down year.
The central question most firm leaders need to be asking themselves right now is, “How do we get back on a growth trajectory?” As I see it, firms need to be more purposeful about growth than ever before. If you haven’t already, there are three key steps firms need to take right now to get back on the path to growth in 2021:
- Fully Assess the Impact on Your Clients
- Realign Growth Targets
- Isolate Growth Strategies
#1 – Fully Assess the Impact on Your Clients
There’s a standard marketing statement that professional service firms often fall back on, “We truly understand our clients’ businesses.” But do you really? Over the years, I’ve found many firms think they know what’s happening but they really don’t. Accounting firms see tax issues. Legal firms discuss risks and contracts. Even many consulting firms are often only privy to one narrow slice of what’s happening—leadership dynamics or operational challenges. But do you really know how a client’s revenue and profit has been affected by the pandemic? Do you understand what strategic or operational changes they had to make to pivot their business? Do you fully understand and empathize with the stress your client executives have been managing through?
If you’re looking to unlock 2021 growth the best place to start is with your active client base. You need to build a comprehensive picture of how this pandemic is affecting their business and what it means to your relationship going forward. You need answers to at least a handful of key questions:
- How has their revenue changed?
- How has it impacted their strategies and plans going forward?
- What new problems have emerged or become exacerbated?
- What problems that seemed big before the pandemic have slipped in priority?
- What is the emotional context around those issues within the client’s leadership team?
- Heading into Q2 2021, how would they most like your help?
This process should help you identify possible opportunities within your client base and establish a revenue retention target for 2021. Maybe much of your revenue growth can be found within your existing client base. If not, you’ll have a better sense of how much revenue will you have to replace in 2021 just to be on par with 2020.
#2 – Realign Growth Targets
By this point, you clearly know the revenue impact on each of your markets and practices in 2020. But what will 2021 look like? Depending on the size of your client base, your client outreach and analysis may give you a good sense of what’s happening within the broader markets you serve. If not, reach out to other industry influencers to gauge what they’re seeing or conduct some research of your own. Even a simple survey, like the one I outlined earlier, can help you get a better sense of which markets continue to face significant headwinds and how leaders are responding accordingly. If you want to look further out (2-3 years) consider tapping into secondary research sources or commissioning a larger study. Do whatever amount of research you deem appropriate to make informed business decisions about where to allocate your resources in 2021 and beyond. If you need to make a pivot into new markets or new offerings now is the time to get things headed in the right direction. Also, use this as an opportunity to identify macro marketplace issues you should be addressing with your thought leadership plan in the coming year.
Now, of course, is the time for firm leadership to step back and make some choices to get marketing efforts back on track. Firms need to formulate answers to a number of key questions:
- How have our ideal clients changed, if at all?
- Where are the biggest growth opportunities for the firm in the next 12 months?
- What big marketplace issues and client problems do we need to own?
- How do we want to allocate marketing resources based on growth priorities now?
Regardless of how you do it, you have to get back to setting purposeful growth targets again. Establish revenue growth targets for the firm and its key markets and practices. Translate those back into the number and value of opportunities you need to deliver that revenue growth. And identify the number of quality leads you need to drive into the system to make it happen.
#3 – Isolate Your Growth Strategy Going Forward
Through the second and third quarters of the year, many firms were just focused on how to survive and operate in a highly confusing and disrupted environment. Many senior leadership and delivery teams were working from home; trying to manage and drive collaboration within a distributed workforce was a new thing. Many marketing plans were tossed aside as partners and consultants from across the firm overwhelmed marketing teams with requests for new thought leadership and digital campaigns. Most marketing units responded—putting in lots of extra time and energy to make it happen. But many marketing teams became largely reactive; playing a game of proverbial whack-a-mole to keep up with the requests coming from all around them.
If you haven’t already, now is a critical time to make sure marketing strategies are aligned with your firm’s desired growth goals—especially if the firm is expecting a much different growth trajectory than it’s historically experienced. Over the years many firms have fallen into a simple and predictable marketing model—relational business development supported by a broad mix of self-published, perspective articles. Maybe that model has successfully delivered 8-10% annual growth. But half of that strategy has become incredibly difficult in a pandemic. And firm leadership is targeting 20% growth in the year ahead. With the goal posts moved, the strategy has to change. Now might be a good time to look at developing research-based thought leadership, developing external publishing relationships, or considering paid content promotion. Regardless, firms need to develop answers to a few key questions:
- Will the strategies we’ve used in the past achieve the growth targets the firm has going forward?
- What other “new channels” could we begin developing?
- What new strategies should we be considering?
- What level of marketing investment will be required to hit those growth targets, especially if those targets have become more aggressive?
Closing Thoughts—Get Purposeful About Growth Again
With what’s increasingly looking like a “K-shaped” recovery, now more than ever it’s critical to be purposeful about how much your firm wants to grow, how and where it sees growth opportunities, and the strategies you plan to use to get there.
Chapter 2: Realigning Thought Leadership for the Post-COVID-19 Era
COVID-19 turned the thought leadership taps on full force. While the virus is probably going to stick around awhile, companies are settling into their next normal and pulling back a bit on the outpouring of insights. Now’s the time to take stock of your thought leadership strategy and processes and ensure they meet the needs of your business in 2021.
If you’re like many firms we serve, you published more thought leadership content over the past two quarters than you produced in the previous two years. And, that content may have been all over the place. With markets changing at an alarming pace and more people at your company sheltering at their home offices than out in the field, organizations had both the motivation and the time to push out a lot of words on a lot of topics. In the rush to publish, quality control and strategy sometimes fell by the wayside and marketing departments often felt like they were doing more tactical execution than strategic content development.
While coronavirus probably isn’t going to make its exit anytime soon, it’s safe to say that the dust is starting to settle. Many companies are moving beyond survival mode and starting to migrate back to a ‘business as usual’ mindset. The fast and furious pace of content development has slowed, too, as leaders’ schedules are becoming fuller. For those of us who play a role in managing the thought leadership process, this is the perfect time to stop, catch our breath, and make sure all content is strategically sound going forward.
Here are four exercises you can do now that will help content do its job well and deliver the greatest value for your business going into the new year:
- Gut check your POV
- Use growth targets to guide the process
- Decide who should contribute
- Polish and share the content development process
#1 – Gut check your POV
In one way or another—or perhaps in a LOT of ways—your business looks different now than it did at the beginning of 2020. Whether what you do and how you do it has changed marginally or significantly as the result of COVID-19, you need to decide if your firm’s point of view makes sense in the context of new market conditions. Ultimately, all content you develop should adhere to and reinforce this POV—or the unique philosophical belief that separates you from the competition. POV really is your firm’s differentiator and should thus be central to all your messaging. So, take the time to make sure this cornerstone can still bear weight.
The good news is, in many cases it can and it will. The pandemic may have even reinforced the soundness of your way of thinking or your firm’s unique approach, as it has done for several of our clients, including TBM Consulting. TBM has long emphasized the importance of speed in achieving operational excellence, and, as the company’s COVID-19 resources page states, speed matters even more in the pandemic. If your business is in a similar situation, this is a good time to communicate the soundness of your firm’s perspective and its resilience in any market conditions.
In other instances, it may be necessary to tweak or more significantly adjust your POV. This is especially true if you operate within an industry that has been fundamentally altered, like retail or travel. Or if your philosophy was tied to the importance of close personal interactions—that’s obviously going to be a problem right now and for some time going forward. If you made a big pivot in response to pandemic conditions or if the way your firm traditionally has gone about solving problems for clients doesn’t resonate or work in the COVID-19 era, consider doing some insight gathering or even commissioning some research to get a better sense of what’s changed for your clients and how your approach or philosophy may need to adapt in turn.
Remember that you don’t necessarily need to scrap your POV and start over—you may just need to reframe it to better address current market conditions. For more on how to hone your thinking, see this recent article by Jason Mlicki on the 7 elements of a compelling POV.
#2 – Use growth targets to guide the process
While POV has a lot to do with your whys and your hows, growth targets are more about the whos and the whats. And these may be different now, too, then they were in Q1 2020.
In Chapter 1 Jason Mlicki discusses the importance of resetting growth for the post-COVID-19 era. He invites companies to answer some critical questions about what growth is going to look like for your business in the new year, including:
- Where are the biggest growth opportunities for the firm in the next 12 months?
- What big marketplace issues and client problems do we need to own?
The answers to these questions should directly map to your content topics and your content calendar. After all, the ultimate purpose of thought leadership marketing is to attract and generate quality leads—people with whom it’s worth having a conversation and who will ultimately turn into new clients and new revenue for your business.
This is who your content needs to be talking to and what it should be talking about in order to fill the funnels you need and want filled. Anything else is really just noise.
#3 – Decide who should contribute
Once you have a buttoned-up content calendar with topics that align nicely with your firm’s specific growth targets, it’s time to assemble all the players. During the heat of the pandemic, you may have been blessed with more time, attention, and input from your firm’s senior leaders than usual. However, that has probably yo-yoed back now, and these leaders may be even harder to pin down than they were before COVID-19.
To prevent bottlenecks and to keep content fresh for the new year, think about others within your organizations whose voices should be part of the thought leadership conversation. This may include:
- New subject matter experts who have surfaced due to shifts in your company’s whats, whos, whys, and hows. For example, if you have a new or more prioritized service offering right now, get team members from that line of business talking about it.
- Anyone who is leading or involved in structured research your firm is doing to adjust or confirm your POV. These people will be closest to any new insights you are turning up and can help explain what the data mean.
- Sales people, customer service people, or in-field consultants who are closest to your customer. In lieu of or in addition to formal research, the people in your company who interact with your customers every day are excellent resources for helping you understand your client’s current mentality. They are also great at providing detailed examples to support or lend more color to your content. Because the business environment and client sentiment are likely to be volatile for some time yet, it’s a good idea to check in with these people on a regular basis and make sure your content is staying in tune with your clients’ and prospects’ reality and that it is speaking to their greatest needs.
#4 – Polish and share the content development process
If your firm’s content development process got muddied during the crisis, you’re not alone. Some steps and measures definitely got sidelined and we’ve heard of companies publishing PowerPoint slides just to meet the influx of demand to get information out.
At the same time, you may have stumbled into new habits or ways of doing things that actually improved the process and that will stick. For example, at Rattleback we began doing copy development in tandem with data visualization work to expedite the timeline on some key research reports. We found that it’s a smart step that actually improves the final output, and we will continue to make it part of our permanent working process.
As you plan for the new year, use this time to take back the reigns on your content development process if you need to, think through everything you’ve learned during the crisis, and define the parameters for your thought leadership efforts going forward. Especially if you will have new contributors in the new year, now is the time to set and communicate the ground rules for how the process is going to work at your company.
Here are a few parts of the process we use at Rattleback that consistently help us generate quality thought leadership content for the clients we serve:
- Work with subject matter experts to flesh out the topic and develop a structured outline for the piece.
- Organize the outline so that it checks the following boxes:
- Defines the problem or issue in the marketplace. This problem or issue should specifically relate to your firm’s growth targets for the year. (See #2 above.)
- Discusses what, specifically, is complicating that issue for your clients right now.
- Talks through a resolution(s) to the issue that:
- Reinforces your firm’s POV
- Is actionable with specific advice clients can apply in their business
- Provides easy-to-digest chunks of information or steps
- Whets the appetite and makes the reader want to dig deeper or learn more
- Uses examples as proof points for the solution.
- Incorporates sidebars or checklists to reinforce key points and provide the reader with quick takeaways.
- Flesh out the outline by pulling in additional subject matter experts or contributors to fill in any blanks. In-field consultants and salespeople are usually great sources for examples.
- When the outline is complete, move into prose with a solid piece of content that meets a need in the market and reinforces your firm’s POV. If you struggle to fill in all sections of the outline—i.e. if you can’t define the problem, complication, and resolution and back it up with examples—consider sidelining the piece until you can.
Closing Thoughts: Develop Thought Leadership that Pulls its Weight in 2021
Coronavirus may be with us for some time. But businesses need to return to successful growth, and sooner rather than later. Developing and marketing high quality thought leadership content will be critical in driving that growth and bringing in the qualified leads your business can help right now. Use this time as you plan for 2021 to lay the groundwork for successful thought leadership marketing that will help get you the results your business needs.
Chapter 3: Rethinking Digital Marketing in the Post-COVID-Era
If you’re like most professional service firms, the first six months of 2020 were focused on trying to survive a COVID-19 world and navigate what it meant to “go digital.” But with the tides slowly changing, it’s time to step back and take a serious look at how digital marketing changed the landscape of your business and focus on transforming your digital activities for continued growth well into the new year.
It’s safe to say firms that put digital marketing on the backburner prior to COVID-19 had some difficulties adjusting to a digitally-focused marketing environment during the pandemic, forcing them to take a reactive approach to these efforts. And unfortunately, this shift in the state of marketing is only the tip of the iceberg. The days of overlooking digital marketing are gone and the need for a sound digital marketing strategy is stronger than ever. It’s time to get proactive so that your firm is not only prepared for what’s to come, but can ensure continued growth from digital marketing efforts post-COVID-19 and beyond.
Three ways to do so, include:
- Make effective use of your existing email database
- Accelerate your use of social media
- Continue investing in paid search
#1 – MAKE EFFECTIVE USE OF YOUR EXISTING EMAIL DATABASE
At the onset of the pandemic, as the world struggled to adjust to what would soon become the new norm, many firms completely halted or significantly slowed down their marketing activities. And seeing as the primary growth goal of most firms we work with is lead generation, this decline in activity did not sit well. Some marketing functions were able to quickly re-align their internal strategies and pivot to or firm-up digital activities such as search engine marketing (SEM) and SEO, while others turned to our old faithful friend: email. Marketers often feel discouraged building and nurturing a database for years with little to no return, but times like this is where this database can be most useful and for those with a “the time is now” mindset, saw returns on engagement.
In fact, in September 2020 RSW published survey results that suggest 64% of B2B marketers believe garnering business from existing clients has been one of the most effective marketing tactics during the pandemic. You may be wondering how. Well, in the beginning, many firms tackled the topic of a pandemic head on, providing their customer base with important changes related to the industry as a whole or a particular business and/or function, which for the most part, was well-received. However, those who came out ahead, seeing growth in email engagement as time went on, made sure to:
- Only push out value-based information and content designed to help the customer make decisions, whether early in the pandemic or at the downturn, without a clear ask or being too salesy.
- Send targeted, personalized emails to those who proved to be interested in what they had to say. In fact, 74% of marketers have stated that targeted personalized increases overall engagement.
So, take advantage of this time and use it as an opportunity build relationships with those who know you but aren’t engaged. Doing so now will pay off in the future.
#2 – ACCELERATE YOUR USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Pre-pandemic, social media usage was on the rise, but once stay at home orders and lockdowns ensued, usage soared. Unfortunately for some firms, capitalizing on this uptick wasn’t possible due to marketing budget cuts. In fact, nearly 25% of businesses had to pause their social media activities the first six months of 2020 in order to retain employees or focus on other marketing activities deemed more business-critical. But what may have not been realized is the impact social media would have on engagement and conversions. The firms that were successfully able to navigate the use of social before COVID-19 did these four things well:
- Focused on the social platforms most frequented by their target audience rather than all social channels and published frequently
- Pulled information in via social listening and used it to identify opportunities and react to customer needs
- Developed fresh content with messages that resonated during unprecedented times
- Shared compelling information and insights beyond products and services offered by the firm
Social media has not only given firms a platform to showcase who they are and what they know by way of content in the form of videos, but it’s allowed them to build networks based on customer interests and needs. And now, more than ever, people are looking for connection so if your firm has the ability to reach the customer where they’re at in a compelling way, the chances of them leaning into you or your business increases exponentially.
#3 – CONTINUE INVESTING IN PAID SEARCH
For many firms, one of the first marketing activities to submit to a lesser spend or be cut completely at the onset of COVID-19 was paid media, if there was even a budget at all. This in turn created an opportunity for those firms already investing in paid search to maintain or expand their efforts at a lower cost. At the same time it allowed firms without a strong online presence to up their digital visibility fast and inexpensively. And firms that were able to retain funds to start or continue paid efforts saw results. In fact, a recent HubSpot report showed that 68% of marketers stated that paid advertising is “very important” or “extremely important” to their overall marketing strategy.
To be successful in this arena firms must take these three steps when it comes to paid search:
- Set realistic goals based on your audience, budget and timelines
Who you want to target, how and when ultimately affects performance and if your firm doesn’t have the budget to target the right people at the right time, paid efforts can fall flat. Ahead of diving into a campaign, know what it will take to reach these goals so that you’re better equipped to meet them. - Align these goals to your overall marketing strategy
If the goals set for your paid campaign don’t align with the firm’s macro marketing goals, your ROI may be sub-optimal. - Continuously optimize your keywords and ad copy for better performance
As the marketing environment continues to shift, your firm’s message will shift and so will how your audience searches. Staying apprised of these changes and adjusting with the times is crucial.
CLOSING THOUGHTS—DON’T GIVE UP ON TRADITIONAL DIGITAL MARKETING, SIMPLY REIMAGINE THEM
How firms are using digital marketing to grow their business is nothing new, but in unusual times, marketers have to refine the ways in which digital channels are used and do it well in order to see results.
This year, grow on purpose.
Whether revenue was up, down, or sideways in 2020, it probably felt a bit out of your hands to at least some degree. This is the time to get focused on driving the leads you need now to build the business you want in 2021 and beyond. When you’re mindful about setting your growth agenda and defining the tactics you will use to execute it, you can reach and connect with the right customers for your organization’s future.
About Rattleback
Rattleback works with professional services and SaaS firms to establish their growth strategies, develop the thought leadership content that enables those strategies to succeed, and drive the lead generation programs that turn strategies into realities.
We have worked with early revenue start-ups, middle market, and tier one firms such as Infosys, L.E.K. Consulting, and Dale Carnegie.
