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Professional Service Firms: Market to the
Clients You Already Have
Professional services firms have
awakened to the need to market themselves as a means of acquiring new
clients. However, once the client’s added to the list they’re too often
simply ‘communicated with’ rather than ‘marketed to’, and that means
missed opportunities.
Communications are important. Sending clients a regular newsletter three
or four times a year is always a good idea. But that doesn’t necessarily
equate to a genuine marketing effort.
Think back to the general rule that it takes five times as much expense
to acquire a new client as it does to retain an existing one. This tells
us that we still have to keep spending to retain clients, even though
the amount is a lot less than it took us to acquire them.
The cost of your communications to existing clients has to be viewed as
an ongoing marketing expense that’s a part of doing business. It may
help to create a separate marketing budget item that identifies these
outgoings as ‘retention’ rather than ‘acquisition’ so the two can be
compared for their effectiveness.
Now consider the difference between communicating and marketing. When
you communicate to someone you’re simply sending them a message. News
about what your firm has done and who’s joined it are typical messages
of this nature. But is this really marketing anything? The answer is
‘no’.
Now consider a marketing communication. What it does is to sell
something. It’s not about the sender; it’s about the recipient, and
about the benefits the recipient can get from something the sender has
to offer.
Most firms offer a variety of services. It would be unusual for a single
client to take advantage of all these services, and it’s also highly
possible that some clients source some of the services you offer from
other providers.
You need to create a marketing
strategy to existing clients that will sell them more of your services
and get them to buy from you what they’re getting elsewhere. This
is what marketing to existing clients is all about, and it can be a
solid revenue-builder if it’s done effectively.
Review every client and identify the services they’re now acquiring from
your firm. You should know them well enough to at least guess at what
they might be sourcing from other firms that you could now provide. Even
better is to find out what they’re acquiring from other firms that isn’t
in your current list of offerings but could be added without incurring
too great an expense.
What you’re doing now is creating the basis for a list of marketing
targets that is also a list of what it will take to generate more
business from your existing client base. After all, you’ve already
created the customer and these are the clients that will be the most
cost-effective to generate more revenues from.
One technique that accomplishes this is to survey your existing clients,
preferably by engaging the services of an outside firm of market
researchers. They can ask questions that will give you valuable
information about your own firm’s performance and how well you’re
already meeting clients’ needs.
You’ll also gain those useful insights into what other firms offer that
you’re not offering. If your clients are buying them there’s a definite
market out there to at least consider.
Growing the business that you do with an existing client will also
contribute to the growth of the relationship between your two
organizations. Your offering can be custom-tailored to meet their
specific requirements so it becomes extremely difficult for any other
firm to capture their interest.
Marketing isn’t a magic ‘fix’ for your own shortcomings if you’re trying
to get a client to leave their other supplier of a service. Your product
has to be at least equal to what they’re sourcing from somewhere else,
and hopefully better. You need to find out what your competitors are
doing well and work to exceed their offering.
You also have to accept that some relationships your clients have with
other suppliers is so strong that you’d never be able to break that
bond. The most important result of your research will be to find out
what your competitors are doing so you can add it to your list of
services, even though its greatest appeal may be to the new clients you
acquire.
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