Firm marketing (Part Four): Enabling the masses and refining your marketing strategy
The final instalment in this firm marketing blog series is finally here. In Part Four, I’ll talk about three different subjects: the personal incentives for marketers, refining the marketing process and offering feedback.
Enabling the masses
Not everyone will be keen to step up to the marketing plate. When you work within a firm, you likely have a specific skillset that’s dependent on your qualifications, training, experience and industry — marketing may not be one of those skills. Marketing team members can be incentivised to do this very important job, and the good news is that their contributions themselves will be valuable to their portfolio.
Through marketing, these team members will learn valuable lessons and gain valuable assets that they can carry with them throughout their professional career:
- Through understanding how to market to clients, they better understand your client portfolio, their needs and concerns, and how to manage the relationship positively. They become a trusted team members within your firm, not just a marketing team member.
- The ability to market for a firm can help them to grow their own client list. While marketing for an entire firm and themselves as an individual will be different, the foundation has been laid.
- As a professional, they’ll need to build their own peer network in order to grow their career. Marketing is a big part of how this happens.
Refining your strategy
Now that you’ve got firm marketing being funnelled out to clients and on multiple channels for promotion, you get to sit back and let the clients and leads start rolling in…or do you?
No, in fact the marketing work has just begun. Once marketing has been done, it’s now time to measure how well the strategy is actually working. This is done through analytics, or the assessment of data related to marketing.
By assessing the statistics surrounding your marketing (you can do this through paid services, social media specific services or even through Google itself), you understand the answers to these important questions:
- Are we promoting content on the right platforms?
- Is our content reaching the right audience?
- If marketing is failing, is it an issue of distribution or the content itself?
- Who is actually finding our content?
This information needs to be abalysed and shared with your team – enabling the masses to refine and improve their own skills and approach to benefit your overall firm marketing. If you find that the numbers are in your favour, that’s great! It means that you can utilise your current strategy again and again until you see your numbers start to swing negative.
Offering feedback
Based on the data and response to the firm’s marketing strategy, feedback will need to be given to the marketing team, or even the firm at large. The content of this feedback is based both on the data you discovered through analytics, as well as incoming leads and client feedback.
If the issue appears to be the platform (for instance, Twitter isn’t giving you the lead generation you hoped for, but LinkedIn is), simply switch focus to the successful platform. The person in charge of authorising content posting should be able to go through what content has been released and make note of what should be changed or edited.
Sometimes the feedback is for the firm at large — if a certain piece of content relevant to a service the firm provides is very successful, all partners within the firm should know that this service has garnered a lot of interest. The opposite is also true; when a piece of content related to a service receives a lot of criticism, how that services is handled should also be considered. In fact, it’s a good idea to report this to the firm through your internal communications – opening everyone’s eyes to marketing and, potentially, attracting new team members or contributors.
The important takeaway is that based on all of this — analytic data, incentivising marketing and giving feedback — the face of your firm’s marketing could change. A successful marketing strategy is one that has been tested, and one that is being led by marketers who are happy and satisfied in accomplishing something great for their firm — and themselves.