“Now Starring…”. Professional Services Joins The Media Business

Lawyers.

Accountants.

Consultants.

They’re professionals. They’re smart. Their expertise is important, but their work is often done behind the scenes; helping clients make tough decisions and navigate complex issues.

At least, until they woke up one morning and discovered they’re in the media business. Okay, they’re not polishing their dance routine for American Idol, or being chased down Rodeo Drive by Paparazzi, but certainly they’re in the business of being quoted in the Journal, or speaking on the conference circuit, or publishing articles; and appearing in video online.

This is pretty cool (especially for the articulate and charismatic). They’re experts and they want to let the world know it. The idea is to get their name out there, and then brace for an eager throng of clients, clamoring for their autograph at the bottom of a big, fat client contract.

But that’s about as likely as an enduring Hollywood marriage. Unfortunately, the media business that covers the topics professional services firms like to talk about and informs their clients is confronting the same thorny problems as the “mainstream” media.

• Declining circulation.
• Falling viewership.
• Decentralized control of content, as represented by YouTube, Twitter and the blogosphere.
• A radical paradigm shift in networking represented by Facebook, LinkedIn and others.
• Weakening of media copyright protections, via digital piracy.

Mainstream media companies are struggling to deal with the collapse of their traditional revenue models. Capturing eyeballs no longer automatically leads to an influx of consumer or advertising dollars.

Similarly, professional services firms are faced with a host of new challenges for marketing their firms. Two demons hamper their progress: channel proliferation, meaning a dizzying choice of places to make their voice heard; and audience fragmentation, meaning its challenging to figure out where their potential clients are focusing their attention any more. All this makes it maddeningly difficult to figure out how to make their firm and their professionals into stars.

It helps to be clear about where they are directing their efforts. Professional services firms marketers should be asking themselves:

• Which trade publications should we be trying to appear in?
• Which conferences should we speak at?
• With whom can we partner for a Webinar?
• How do we use blogging, podcasting, YouTube (and other video channels) to change the nature and format of our dialog with clients and prospects?
• How do we expand and manage networks via LinkedIn?
• And all these questions naturally lead to a more important query: if we do these things, will our clients really pay attention?

Ponder the following factoid, based on our PracticeView tracking of the marketing activity of nearly 200 leading law accounting and consulting firms in 2009. Those firms delivered over 70,000 marketing communications items such as press releases, articles, whitepapers, webinars, conference speeches etc. That’s more than 250 new attempts to gain clients’ attention and interest every single business day.

Essentially, clients are likely suffering from too many messages, dispersed too widely across too many information channels. Clients are already bombarded as consumers – now they’re getting the same overload in their business lives! They are, as a consequence, missing information about the genuinely relevant and powerful insights firms have to offer.

So what to do?

Here are some key questions to answer, and keep on answering, as a means of focusing a firm’s “media” programming:

1. Who is our audience?
2. Which issues do they care about?
3. In which subject areas do we genuinely have something relevant and insightful to say?
4. How do we comment in a way that distinguishes us from our competitors? (Of course that means we need to know what their media programming is!)
5. Which media sources does our target audience pay attention to?
6. In what format do our target audience members like to get their media these days (print, web, audio, video, bite size, in-depth analysis)? Are they open to something new or different?
7. In the age of Google how will clients find our programming?
8. How will we know if anyone read, listened to, or watched what we had to say?

In the age of information overload, it’s crucial to learn to use information in a smart, tailored way. In a crowded marketplace, indiscriminately firing “content” into the marketplace is unlikely to deliver meaningful results. Just like mainstream media and advertisers, professional services firms need to spend time carefully gathering market and competitive intelligence that will guide their activities. They need to consider very carefully not only which media outlets to target, but exactly how to target them. They also need to be willing to experiment and try new things.

While this may sound daunting the upside is that this new environment creates opportunities for highly specialized niche programming. With careful planning and execution they can turn their firm’s thought leaders into media stars within their chosen fields.

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