All of our clients and prospective clients KNOW they should be “doing more marketing.” They know that marketing, supported by a consistent sales effort, is what will drive new business into their firm. However, many times they are also operating under the misconception that they can handle their marketing efforts using non-marketing trained staff in their firm. If you practice in a large firm, you will have the good fortune of having access to a literal army of marketing people to help you.
But what about the firm’s with 30 or fewer billing professionals? It’s likely that lack of time and a general lack of marketing knowledge will derail the best of intentions. So how is a firm of this size supposed to grow? By hiring an outsourced marketing firm who can not only develop a creative and unique marketing strategy for the firm, but can take the reins and handle the implementation – – that is, the implementation that doesn’t require face-to-face meetings. We reserve those tasks for the professionals themselves.
What is an “Outsourced Marketing Department?”
When we use the term “Outsourced Marketing Department,” we are talking about hiring a team of professionals to serve as your firm’s marketing department. From your director of marketing to every function you would expect to find in your marketing department – literally a team that will take care of your marketing efforts from A – Z. So what we’re really talking about is outsourced branding, outsourced social media, outsourced communications, outsourced database management, outsourced….. you get the idea! So why does outsourced marketing work for so many firms?
- We ARE Your Marketing Department – An outsourced marketing department IS your marketing department without you having to incur the expenses including salaries, computers, software, office space, and many other items. We marketing people are rather expensive to have around. So why buy, when you can rent?
- Depth of Skill – Generally speaking, if you “hire a marketing person,” you will likely bring someone in who has skill in one or two areas but does not have the comprehensive experience of an outsourced marketing firm. Many firms think, “Well, we’re new to marketing so let’s start small and just hire someone out of college.” Think Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. We say, “Big mistake!” Why? Because someone out of college is not going to have the breadth and depth of experience you need to develop strategy, and pursue implementation in many different areas, as described in PSM’s Four Pillars of Marketing™.
- We Drive and Motivate – When you work with an outsourced marketing firm, our success is determine on the results we help your firm generate. Therefore, we are very interested in driving the marketing efforts forward full speed ahead. Your outsourced marketing team will coordinate meetings, follow up with individuals, report to your management committee, and engage everyone in the firm to actively participate in the firm’s marketing efforts
- We Manage your Budget – Not only do we help you create a marketing budget, we help you manage that budget and evaluate any solicitations you receive to advertise, support, sponsor, or in any other way, spend your money
- Marketing Technology – We are up to speed on all of the important technology you need in your marketing department. We help you make the right decisions on marketing technologies including databases, website platforms, domain name registrations, social media, Skype, blogging platforms, Search Engine Optimization, website analytics, and a host of other technologies you need to sustain your marketing efforts
Depending on how you answer the following questions, your firm is either a good candidate for working with an outsourced marketing firm, or you are not. If you prefer, you can take a quick survey we developed to see if your firm is a good candidate for an outsourced marketing approach. A few thoughts for your consideration:
- Marketing Committee – Does your firm have a marketing committee? This is sometimes a good thing and other times not.
- Motivation – How motivated is your firm to attract new clients? If there is no firm-wide motivation, you will likely not see stellar results.
- Sales Culture – Are your professionals actively engaged in personal networking and relationship building?
- Past Experience with Marketing Firms – Did your firm have a bad experience by spending a lot of money and not generating results? Sadly this will affect your interest in working with the right firm who will actually generate results for you.
- Cross Marketing – How confident are you that your firm is fully serving the needs of its existing clients?
- Revenue – How happy are you with the firm’s overall revenue? If your raking in the dough, it’s unlikely you will be motivated to, in your view, “change it if it isn’t broken.”
- Commitment – How committed are your professionals to building their practices?
- Grades Matter – If you were to assign a letter grade to your firm’s marketing prowess, what grade would you give? Generally this says it all. If you’re not getting an “A” in marketing, there is room for improvement!
- Challenges – Do you have good perspective on where your firm struggles with marketing including what’s worked and what hasn’t worked in marketing?
- Succession Planning – Do you have a clear successor if your senior professionals are close to retiring?
By understanding what an outsourced marketing department could do for your firm, and whether your firm would be a good fit for this unique approach, you will be better able to determine what your next steps should be. To learn more, read about The Anatomy of an Outsourced Marketing Engagement. We would love to discuss your unique situation. Contact us to learn more.
The Anatomy of an Outsourced Marketing Engagement
So hopefully, Part I of this series has convinced you that by outsourcing your marketing department you will be in a better position to do what you enjoy: serving clients and attracting new business into your practice. Because outsourcing the marketing department in a professional services firm is not the norm, most firms fall into the, “let’s hire someone out of college to do our marketing” trap because they fail to really grasp the benefits of how an outsourced marketing relationship works. The purpose of this post is to define, with clarity, what it looks like to have a marketing engagement that happens to not reside physically within your office space. When PSM begins work with a new outsourced marketing client, we have a proven process we use to get the ball rolling.
Phase I – Strategic Marketing Assessment
Whether you are a lawyer, financial advisor, or other professional, you wouldn’t dream of giving advice to a client if you didn’t have all of the facts. A Strategic Marketing Assessment allows us to ask all the right questions and gather relevant documents. Be prepared to share:
- Materials – All marketing materials currently in use
- Website – Your outsourced marketing firm should thoroughly review your website and messaging contained therein and make recommendations for improvements. At PSM we do a website audit for each client.
- Communications – Communications the firm uses in its outreach to clients, prospective contacts, referral sources and other important audiences
- Ongoing Client Communications – Any proactive communications sent to clients and friends of the firm over the past three years
- Biographies –Biographies of all professionals
- Client Feedback – Received from clients over the past two to three years
- Revenue – Total revenue by professional and by service area for the past three years
- Accounts Receivable Summary – To make sure you have a process in place to minimize AR balances if applicable
- Intake Documents – We need to review how you open new files, and how your clients retain you to work with them
- Marketing Expenses – Marketing budget for the past three years
- Marketing Technology – Learning more about your marketing technology including its CRM (if one exists) and website back end editing capabilities
- Advertising – Samples of any paid advertising the firm has done over the past three years
- Public Relations – Review press coverage and articles written by board members and members of CLI over the past three years
- Social Media – We will review and develop an audit of all the firm’s social media activities
- Speaking Engagements – Review of presentations given by your professionals over the past three years
- Events – Summary of any events the firm has sponsored over the past three years
- Strategic Marketing Questionnaire – At PSM we use a tailored Strategic Marketing Questionnaire to gather other relevant information needed to develop a Strategic Marketing Plan. The Strategic Marketing Questionnaire PSM uses will ask you to present:
- Successes in marketing
- Top ten lists (current clients, prospective clients, referral sources)
- Criteria for your A-level clients and referral sources
- Best current clients and referral sources
- Marketing frustrations
- The value you bring to your clients
- Niche areas of expertise within your field
- Key accomplishments
- Client services provided
- Representative experience
- Competitive analysisIndustry and association involvement
- Writing and speaking experience
Phase II – Development of a Strategic Marketing Plan
Once we have reviewed and thoroughly analyzed everything in the assessment phase, your outsourced marketing firm will develop a comprehensive marketing plan for the growth of your firm that will include:
- Growth and revenue history and goals
- Target audiences – To whom we are marketing
- Key messages on why clients should hire us and why referral sources should send us business
- Marketing objectives – Specific and measurable
- A proposed marketing budget for the current year and for future years
- Implementation tactics under the Four Pillars of Marketing ™:
- Retain and grow relationships with existing clients and contacts
- Develop new business
- Increase name recognition in the marketplace
- Targeted client and contact communications
Phase III – Implementation of your Strategic Marketing Plan
For each client we determine the number of hours the marketing department will need in order to implement the tactics identified in the marketing plan. What do we implement? It is different for every firm and described in depth in the Strategic Marketing Plan. For an extensive list of the activities we perform for our clients at PSM, you can take a look at our PSM Services A-Z. Generally speaking, your outsourced marketing department will include:
- Marketing Director – Leading, managing, and strategizing with your firm’s highest levels of leadership
- Project Manager – The mortar between the bricks of the firm’s marketing program. This person manages the entire outsourced marketing team as they deliver services throughout the year
- Graphic Designer – This important person will help us design and refine your firm’s branding and overall visual identity
- Copywriter – It is critical to communicate by reinforcing the messages developed in the marketing plan.
- Website Developer – To move your website to the next level, this person provides turn-key services from domain name registration all the way through the process of designing and developing your website
- Database Specialist – Helping the firm to establish and populate an e-communication database of contacts, clients, and referral sources
- E-Communications Designer – Works closely with the copywriter to develop creative and visually appealing client communications
- Search Engine Optimization Guru– Every website needs to be optimized to be found online. We integrate SEO into every website we build for our clients
- Social Media and Content Strategist – Find content and post every day on all of your firm’s social media pages. We also help clients engage with their visitors
Phase IV – Measuring Results of Marketing Engagement
Our motto is “If you can’t measure it, you likely shouldn’t do it!” Your outsourced marketing department will help you evaluate and measure every marketing activity they propose. The best way for us to show you how we do this, is to have you look at a tool we developed on How to Measure the ROI of Marketing. Your outsourced marketing department should lead the charge in communicating regularly with you about the results your marketing program is producing.
The Economics of Hiring an Outsourced Marketing Department – It’s a Bargain!
For over 25 years PSM Marketing has delivered marketing department services to clients across the country. Whether you are in the legal, solar energy or recruiting industries, there is no doubt that hiring a company like PSM to serve as your outsourced marketing department will save you money, produce revenue growth, and eliminate the need to manage an in-house marketing team.
There are many clients we work with who didn’t know outsourced marketing was an option for them, as well as a healthy number of clients who have had bad experiences with freelancers or agencies. Why? There just aren’t very many outsourced marketing firms in the country that focus specifically on professional services firms. Marketing the time, talent, and expertise of your lawyers, solar engineers or recruiters requires a unique understanding of how to “sell the invisible.” Generally, your “product” is your people and the expertise they deliver – not a product or widget. Selling the intangible benefits of working with qualified professionals requires significant experience working with professional services firms.
What Happens in Many Services Firms?
Generally marketing is not at the top of the priority list for busy professionals. Rather, they would prefer to serve clients and do their work. However, today’s competitive demands require professional services firms to proactively build their individual and firm name recognition. This requires a sophisticated, strategic approach to marketing. Even so we have often heard statements like:
- “We have a really great administrative assistant who knew how to do desktop publishing, so we now work with him to do all of our marketing.”
- “Over the years we have hired different people to help us with our website, social media, graphic design, copywriting, communications, SEO…… but we lack consistency in our branding.”
- “We have one person in marketing who just graduated from college and they need a lot of guidance and direction we can’t give them.”
- “We paid a lot of money to a website company and now all we have is a nice website with no real marketing around it.”
The Cost Justification of Outsourced Marketing
Let’s talk dollars and cents. The average salary for a law firm marketing director in Minneapolis in 2022 is $161,000. But what does a marketing director need? Well for starters, a team of other professionals including copywriters, graphic designers, social media specialists, website developers, and SEO professionals – to name a few. Add to that the marketing director’s benefit package (usually an additional 33%) and the office space required for a marketing department. Don’t forget all those Macs and other marketing technologies required to staff an in-house marketing department and you quickly bounce up into the $500,000 per year range.
Outsourcing your marketing to a firm like PSM Marketing will allow you access to an entire marketing team dedicated to YOU for far less than the salary of one marketing director. With PSM Marketing’s fixed fee model, full outsourced clients generally pay anywhere from $8,000 to $10,000 per month – maximum of $120,000 per year.
Our Experience: Your Outsourced Marketing Department
You might wonder what’s included in that fee of $120,000 per year. Your marketing team will be comprised of:
Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) or Director of Marketing – to oversee everything and to develop the strategic assessment and marketing plan for your firm. Part of this process is designing the marketing implementation timeline for the next 12 months.
Project Manager – At PSM Marketing, your project manager is the mortar between the bricks of your outsourced marketing engagement. That person works closely with your outsourced CMO to manage the delivery of all services including:
- Advertising – digital or print
- Analytics – on everything we do from SEO analytics to communication campaign results
- Client Satisfaction – creating electronic surveys to keep your finger on the pulse of your client’s satisfaction
- Communications – including e-communications and updates to write, design and distribute
- Copywriting – including blog posts, articles, ads, web page content
- Database Development – Client Relationship Management (CRM) or communications (MailChimp)
- Graphic Design – including branding and logos, collateral materials, trade show booths and more
- Proposals – we assist our clients on developing winning proposals for new business
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – increasing search engine ranking and driving qualified leads
- Social Media – content curation, blurb writing, posting and engagement
- Survey Development – for embedded interactive surveys on your website
- Training – on all areas related to marketing
- Videography – including video shoots, video transcripts, creation of YouTube page development
- Website – planning, development, maintenance, and updates
Outsourced Marketing…It Just Makes Sense
The long and short of it is – hiring a marketing director and a marketing team can be cost-prohibitive for many companies. Plus, it’s unlikely that even one very experienced hire would have all the skills you need to deliver full marketing department services to your firm and its professionals. Outsourcing your marketing department to PSM Marketing will provide a cost-effective way to access all the marketing services you could need, while paying a fraction of the cost to staff an in-house marketing department. We would welcome the opportunity to discuss how outsourcing your marketing department can provide real-time access to every marketing resource you need to grow your business yet cost far less than the salary of one marketing person.