The Eyelet.

It’s a fact. The internet has completed its transformation from a text based medium into a fully interactive tool that relies heavily on video. ComScore released a survey in early 2011 which showed that the average user of Google consumed an 283 minutes of video online in January 2011 alone. That equates to almost 57 hours a year and those numbers are only increasing.
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In my last two posts I’ve described the role of marketing in a professional services firm as being that of facilitating change management (See Marketing Professional Services is Change Management and Content Marketing: Content that Educates). A prospective client is embarking on a journey. That journey is likely one of moving from a place of frustration to a place of greater advantage. Well executed marketing slowly moves a prospect down the process of buying and positions the firm as an expert along the way. By the time the prospect is ready to buy, the firm has credibly established its expertise, reduced competitive influences and increased the likelihood of closure.

Change Management Requires Two Forms of Content
This process is largely enabled by the professional services marketer through two forms of content:

1. Content that Educates
2. Content that Motivates

Content that Motivates Helps An Educated Prospect Envision the Future
Imagine your prospect standing on an empty road. To her right is where she’s been. To her left is where she’d like to go. She’s consumed a lot of your educational content and she can start to imagine a future that is better than her past. But, that picture is fuzzy. While she can picture what’s to the right in stunning detail, what’s to the left is still a bit unclear. It’s simultaneously exciting and a bit frightening. She senses that it’s a better place to be, but she’s not entirely sure what it looks like.

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A few days ago, I wrote a post describing the marketing of professional services as change management. Well executed professional services marketing slowly moves a prospect down the process of buying and positions the firm as an expert along the way. By the time the prospect is ready to buy, the firm has credibly established its expertise, reduced competitive influences and increased the likelihood of closure. In that post, I described two forms of content the professional services marketer needs to provide to facilitate that process:

1. Content that Educates
2. Content that Motivates

Content that Educates: It Starts with Questions
The process of change the potential buyer is about to go through starts with a point of dissatisfaction or a point of curiosity. Those things he’s curious about take the form of a question and should be the root of the educational content you strive to create. In my last post (referenced above) I described a hypothetical engineer at a large producer of electrical power who is responsible for plant emissions. We’ll use him again here as our example. Though the questions he asks himself are surely more technical in nature than these, what he’s likely asking might sound something like this: Read more

If your firm is anything like ours, you have tried several different approaches at measuring your performance over the years. As a type of professional services firm ourselves, only our senior associates were typically engaged and aware of our financial performance. But even we weren’t confident that the right things were being measured and reported – until recently. Last year, we were introduced to two separate notions related to driving a professional services firm towards its goals that lit a fire under us: Read more