I’m speaking as a marketer raised on selling and advertising soaps who now works mostly with boutique professional firms / professionals running boutique firms. So why am I saying that many such firms need to cut their marketing spend now? What level of devilish marketing intrigue is this?
Many moons ago we did some deep research into professional service firm marketing and garnered a lot of press coverage for our findings that c.£80 million of this was wasted. The fundamentals as to why that money was wasted haven’t changed much, even if the amount has spiralled upwards. What we saw was a lot of money being spent on communicating, but very little intelligence going into saying anything worthwhile. The firms wasting money were talking about the same things as everyone else. They even stuck to the same four colour palettes and used the same turns of phrase. They were spending lots of money saying nothing more than “Look at me, I am shouting!”
If you think this is possibly your firm, then now really is a good time to cut (this part of) your marketing budget. It’s highly unlikely that branding and shouting generic things about yourself will help you right now. And now is not the time to be profligate with cash.
Of course I am not saying cut your marketing budget outright. Just spend it on intelligent marketing. What counts for professionals now, especially boutiques, is how you build working relationships in your market. Many of the firms we know struggle to maintain the business development activity levels they want, even without a lockdown in place. So spend to make sure your activity levels don’t drop. What activity levels should those be, when you can’t meet anyone any more? That’s where the intelligent creativity and experimentation come in. Find new ways to start conversations with old contacts and new. Spend on those. Take the opportunity to make those conversations work for your business. You will avoid the endless cup of tea meetings syndrome because you can’t physically meet, but don’t just replace those with endless Zoom beer meetings. Invest in the training and processes that build better working relationships with referrers and invest in helping your colleagues recognise someone who wants to instruct you and how to help them over the finishing line.
So there you have it. I confess that I don’t want anyone to cut their marketing budget, I just want them to spend more intelligently.
by Paul Griffith
