Marketing for professional services firms, built around fit
Your problem is rarely enquiry volume. It is that too many enquiries are the wrong size, the wrong sector, or three months from doing anything.
Working with professional and advisory firms
Client advertising spend under management
Certified on Google Ads
More enquiries is easy. Better ones is the work.
Professional services firms can almost always buy more enquiries. What they usually cannot do is buy the right ones, and the cost of a wrong one is higher here than in most sectors because a partner or a senior fee earner spends real time qualifying it.
That changes the economics. An enquiry that costs sixty pounds to acquire and forty minutes of a senior person’s time to reject is not a cheap enquiry. It is an expensive one that does not appear anywhere in the marketing report.
So the goal is deliberately fewer, better qualified enquiries, which is an uncomfortable thing to report on if nobody has agreed that in advance.
| Source | Leads | Qualified | Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads | 142 | 88 | £61,400 |
| Organic search | 96 | 54 | £38,900 |
| Google Business Profile | 61 | 44 | £24,150 |
| Paid social | 38 | 19 | £9,800 |
What works for professional services
Four things, and the last one is usually the one nobody wants to hear.
Qualify openly
Say plainly who you act for and at what scale. It costs you enquiries you did not want and almost none that you did, and it is the fastest available improvement.
Answer the real question
People search their problem, not your service line. Pages that answer the problem in full are what make somebody decide you know what you are doing.
Measure the matter, not the form
Enquiry to qualified, qualified to instruction. Without those, cost per enquiry rewards whichever source sends the most unsuitable work.
Respond faster
Somebody looking for an adviser is contacting three firms. The one that replies within the hour wins a disproportionate share, and this is usually cheaper to fix than the marketing.
An enquiry that costs sixty pounds to buy and forty minutes of a partner's time to reject is not a cheap enquiry.
What the first quarter looks like
Agree what qualified means
A definition that fee earners and marketing both accept. This argument is worth having early, because every number afterwards depends on it.
Connect the enquiry to the outcome
Source carried into your CRM or practice management system, and the instruction coming back out, so reporting can reach cost per client.
Rewrite the pages that qualify
Service pages that state who you act for, at what scale, and what happens next. Fewer enquiries, materially better ones.
Report on instructions
Cost per qualified enquiry and cost per instruction, with what we tried and what we learned, including what did not work.
What firms ask us
Will qualifying on the page reduce our enquiries?
Yes, deliberately, and your cost per enquiry will go up. Cost per instruction should go down. Make sure whoever reads the report understands that before we start, or you will be asked to undo good work.
Our work is confidential. Can we still market it?
Yes. Anonymised matter types, the shape of the problem and how it was approached carry most of the persuasive value, and none of it requires naming a client.
Is content marketing worth it, or is it saturated?
Genuinely useful writing on the questions your clients actually ask still works, because most firms publish thin summaries of legislation instead. The bar is lower than people assume.
How do we measure something with a six month cycle?
Push an intermediate stage back to the platforms rather than waiting for the instruction. Qualified enquiry or proposal sent gives the bidding something to learn from within weeks.
Get in touch about marketing for your firm
Tell us what a good instruction looks like and how many enquiries you turn away. That is usually where the conversation gets useful.
