Bob Buday's blog

We know many professional firms whose lead streams remain soft.   And they are worried (as they should be) because they realize thought leadership marketing is not a lead-generating spigot that can be turned on or off.  Developing a compelling, research-based point of view on any topic can take many months.  Marketing that POV can take many more months – i.e., securing good conference speaking opportunities, getting an article in a prestigious management journal, writing and placing shorter opinion articles in well-read publications, and the like. 

So what do you do?

First, there is no magic bullet that will generate dozens of good leads in days or even a month.  If there was, I’d be selling it and making lots of money from it. If you do see something that purports to do that, I suggest kicking the tires hard and holding tight to your wallet before deciding to purchase it, whether a telemarketing firm, a business developer with a great Rolodex, or an advertising firm.

Yet there are several things professional firms can do to jump-start the lead stream.  They range from being easier to harder to do, but all can be done in three to five months if the right conditions exist.

Here’s my list, starting with the easiest:

1. Sharpen your firm's market positioning statement.  Clearly explain on your website what your firm is about, what it does and for whom, the types of benefits you generate for your clients, and why you’re very good at doing what you do. If communicating this succinctly and clearly is a struggle (and it is for nearly every professional firm I have worked with) but nonetheless you have many happy clients, you have even more reason to do this:  You are a firm that’s just waiting to be discovered because you are misunderstood.  But only you can clear up the misunderstanding.  I read lots of professional services websites (especially consulting and IT service firms) and I often have to work hard at understanding what I’m reading.  Someone who comes to your website through a search engine (rather than a colleague’s recommendation) is less likely to spend time trying to figure out what you do and how you could help them.  Save them the trouble.

2. Create a strong white paper.  Take a service or practice that has a number of recent successful client engagements and codify the expertise you are delivering in a compelling white paper.  In professional services firms, I have seen the phrase “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” apply to experts who are doing great work in part because they have rare expertise and/or a superior approach to doing that work.  The “smoke” you need to look for are professionals in your firm who are head’s down, very billable and getting repeat work.  They don’t have time for marketing because they’re too busy delivering work.  Seek them out, assign someone to ghostwrite a compelling white paper about the problem in the business world they address and how it should be addressed, then ask them if some of their clients would be open to serving as case studies in the paper.  (You’ll be surprised by how many clients say yes, if they have control over what is said.)

3. Market your white paper through social media and other online marketing tools.  Use your white paper in an online marketing program that focuses on social media to seed the ideas. (You can read more on this process in a recent article we published.  I know it’s long but even my wife tells me it’s worth the read.)

Those are my ideas about how to jumpstart the lead stream.   We and three Bloom Group affiliates have even created a new service to do this, which you can find here.

What techniques have you used that generated quality leads quickly? What approaches have you tried but didn't work, and why?  We’d love to know.

It’s easy to get caught up in the social media hysteria and believe everything you learned about marketing is obsolete.  We heard a similar line a decade ago, when e-commerce and e-everything were going to Amazon every bricks-and-mortar business out of business.  I think Wal-Mart is still in business, last time I checked.  And Barnes & Noble.  And CBS, Disney and HBO. And many other old-school "dinosaurs" that "just don't get it."

While we believe the practice of marketing is fundamentally changing because of the Internet, we know some practices will never change because they are at the core of what motivates a buyer to buy.  And one of them is the need for a compelling reason, clearly communicated.

What does this have to do with thought leadership marketing?  Everything.  We see all sorts of soothsayers urging professional services firms to start tweeting, blogging, Facebooking and LinkingIn. But we don’t see any talking about having something substantive to say.

So we’ll say it.  If you don’t have a point of view that is new and substantiated with examples (something executives refer to as “proof”), you can tweet about it all you want but buyers will ignore you.  As they should.  Creating great content – powerful points of view backed by irrefutable evidence – is far more important than being facile with Facebook.

It’s great to see professional firms that get it.  Recent research from ITSMA, whose followers hail from the IT services sector, shows IT services firms now see the value of great content.  They said “thought leadership development” was more important to their marketing strategy than any other tactic this year.  In fact, they rated it more important than online video, social networks, and online communities. 

What puzzles me is why so many overlook the need for great content, which we talked about in a recent article.  Is it that marketing is a more interesting topic than content development?  That style trumps substance in marketing circles? (Don't take that harshly.)

I'd love to hear some good rationales.

Fiona Czerniawska is one of the best authorities on the consulting business.  She has been both a critic of consulting firm practice and a force for positive change.  From the London perch of two companies (first Arkimeda, now Source for Consulting), Fiona has written several books on the industry.

She generated a lot of buzz three years ago after releasing a study on the content that nearly 40 major consulting firms posted on their websites.  Called “White Space 2007,” she and her colleages reviewed more than 3,500 articles to understand what they were writing about, who was producing the most content, and who had the best content. (The winner on both quantity and quality was McKinsey, which is no surprise.)

Now her firm is selling the latest incarnation of the study, which evaluates 13,000 articles of 30 consulting firms.  And instead of a PDF or printed report, subscribers will buy a year’s license, with updates made regularly. 

What’s different from 2007 in what consulting firms are writing about?  Zoe Stumpf, one of Source for Consulting’s staffers, told me that the firms they reviewed are publishing more material of broad interest – across all industries – rather than of interest to just one sector.  Some 60% of the content today is “generic” vs. “specific.”  And that’s a complete reversal from 2007.  

Today’s favorite topic?  The recession.  Consultancies are publishing very little now on growth. I think today’s “white space” is topics that are about both efficiency  and revenue.  I don’t see them as mutually exclusive, although they are usually treated that way.  Those who can address them in one, substantive point of view are far more likely to gain an audience.

We hear lots of complaints these days about white papers – how long they take to produce, how much they cost, and (more important) how little client interest most of them generate.   Marketers at several consulting and IT service firms have told us they wonder if their self-published articles are having much, if any, impact.  Yet they continue to churn out them out, not knowing a better alternative.

There is a good reason that it’s harder to have impact with white papers:  There are just too many of them.  While we haven’t found any estimates on the number of business white papers produced every year, there are signs that the number has been rising.  One of them is the huge increase in Google search results on the terms “white paper” or “white papers” – from about 1 million in 2001 (according to white paper blogger Michael Stelzner, see here) to about 360 million today.  An explosion in white papers means that getting executives to read yours is far more difficult today.  

But we don’t think you should give up on white papers.   In fact, a great white paper posted online can have a long and useful marketing life.  But to have such white papers, marketers need to do two things.  First, they need white papers with much better content – especially ones with truly novel points of view and case studies of companies that have followed the authors’ prescriptions and benefited mightily.   Second, they need to distribute them very differently.  They should focus far less on mailing them to clients and prospects, and far more on getting credible sources in the online world to endorse and link to them – popular bloggers, social networks, online publications hungry for good content, and others. 

We’ve taken our own medicine on this second point and have found a marked difference in readership – i.e., many more coming to our two latest white papers after reading about them in their favorite blog, social network or other online influencer, than readers we generated by distributing them directly.  

In fact, these two white papers are on the very topic of white papers. You can read them here. 

Trying to figure out how your professional services firm can dodge the economic meltdown bullet? (Sorry to mix metaphors.) The only thing that matters is what your clients need right now. Not what you think they need or might need. And what your clients need is help in two areas:
1. Cutting costs, fast.
2. Boosting the productivity and effectiveness of key operations, fast.

That’s it.