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Clients rarely hire a firm. They hire a person they’ve heard of, met at an event or been referred to, then check the firm’s website to confirm the choice. That’s true whether you’re an accountant, an organisational psychologist or a recruiter.
Professional services marketing has to manage the gap between the partner and the firm. Partners’ reputations bring the work in. The firm needs a brand that keeps the work when a partner retires, moves on or steps back. Promote only the founder and the business is exposed. Hide the people behind a logo and you lose the trust that won the client.
Search works differently here too. A handful of searches a month for the right term can beat thousands for a broad one, if you can trace the enquiries. If you run a law firm, our law firm marketing page is a better fit.
Most consulting firms start as one respected person with a business name. As the firm grows, clients keep asking for that person, which caps the work you can take on and makes succession hard. The fix is a firm brand with its own reputation, introduced gradually so clients don’t feel a switch.
If you’re a sole practitioner planning to stay that way, skip the branding project. Your name is the brand, and a strong LinkedIn profile will serve you better.
Accounting firm marketing, recruitment agency marketing and consulting share a search problem. The terms that win good clients get few searches, while broad terms bring students, job seekers and price shoppers. Our SEO strategy picks the handful of terms that match the work you want, then builds pages, articles and links around them.
For People Solutions, a career transition and psychometric assessment consultancy, we focused on high-value but low-volume keywords. That work earned 1st position rankings for 11 key industry terms. ‘Career Transition Consultant’ jumped 53 positions and ‘psychometric assessment’ jumped 20.
Your partners know more than anything we could research, and clients can tell when an article was written by someone who’s never done the work. We interview your experts, draft in their voice and send it back for a technical check. Nothing goes out under a partner’s name until they’ve read it and agreed with it.
If your partners can’t give an hour a month to content marketing, don’t publish thought leadership at all. Generic articles with a partner’s name on them do more damage to a reputation than an empty blog. Put the effort into case studies and service pages instead.
In professional services, LinkedIn is where referrers, clients and future hires check you out. Partner profiles reach further than company pages because people connect with people. So we start with profiles (headline, about section, featured work), then plan a posting rhythm partners can keep up in a busy month.
LinkedIn Ads come later, for specific goals like filling a seminar, promoting a report or hiring graduates. Recruitment firms get double use from paid social, promoting the firm and its open roles on Facebook and LinkedIn.
A professional services website has three jobs: show who the people are, explain the services in the client’s language and make contact easy. Every form, phone number and email link should be tracked, so you know which pages and searches bring in work.
For recruitment firms, we can connect your WordPress website to your recruitment software, such as JobAdder.
When a firm has several partners, each with a following, the brand has to hold them together without flattening them. When a founder plans to step back, it has to carry the relationships through the handover. Both start with agreeing what the firm stands for beyond any one person.
Our brand strategy work usually starts with a partner workshop. It ends in positioning, tone of voice and a rollout across the website, proposals and LinkedIn. If you’re two years from a partner exit, start now. Clients need time to meet the next generation.
Some clients now ask ChatGPT or Gemini to explain a psychometric test or suggest an outplacement provider before they contact anyone. Those answers draw on pages that explain a topic clearly and on outside sources that mention the firm.
Our generative engine optimisation work makes your expertise easy for those tools to read and cite, using the same expert-checked pages that rank in Google. We think this will matter more for advisory firms each year. We’re watching it closely, and we won’t promise placements nobody can guarantee.
We’ll look at where your enquiries come from, which searches are worth chasing and what your partners’ profiles say about the firm.
Usually, if those searches come from the clients you want. A low-volume term can be worth more than a popular one when each enquiry could become a long engagement. When we took on People Solutions’ SEO, we built it around high-value but low-volume keywords, and it reached 1st position for 11 key industry terms. We’d check the searches match your services, then measure enquiries instead of traffic.
With your Google Business Profile and reviews. Ads can wait. Local clients search for an accountant near them, and the map results often appear above the websites. Fill out every service, add real photos of the team and ask happy clients for a review once their return is done. If you then want more of one kind of client, such as small business or SMSF work, build pages and SEO around that niche.
Only when someone leaves or retires. Partner profiles bring in work, so keep building them. Make sure every partner’s LinkedIn, speaking and articles point back to the firm, and that the website shows the bench of people behind each partner. Over time, clients start asking for the firm. When we did Kaya Group’s brand, its founder had an excellent industry reputation, and our work moved that reputation onto Kaya itself.
Track every form, call and email click on the website, and ask new clients how they found you. For People Solutions, we measured form submissions and email clicks year on year, and both rose. We set up tracking first, then report monthly on enquiries by page and source. You’ll see which services and channels bring in work, and we’ll agree together what to cut.
Yes, because you market to two audiences at once: clients with roles to fill and candidates looking for work. Candidates need a fast job board linked to your recruitment software. Clients need proof you understand their sector and their hiring pressures. When we built Scotford Fennessy’s WordPress site, we integrated it with JobAdder, and since the relaunch the job board has been the highest-performing page after the homepage.
By agreeing the strategy before anyone sees a logo. We usually speak to each partner on their own first. Then we run a workshop to settle what the firm stands for, who it serves and how it should sound. Design comes after that’s signed off. The debate becomes whether the work fits the agreed strategy, which is easier to settle than personal taste. Most partner groups find that far less painful than arguing over colours.
building your marketing strategy
Partners bill by the hour, so we plan around their diaries. Expect a workshop at the start and short interviews for content, then approvals that fit between meetings. Your account manager batches requests into one clear email instead of a trickle of questions. If a month is taken over by year-end or a big engagement, we adjust the plan.
Anything that explains a process, a test or a regulation gets checked by the person on your team who knows it best. We write, they correct, and nothing goes live until a Distl lead approves it. It takes longer than publishing whatever a tool produces, and it’s why clients and peers trust what goes out under your name. Partners keep final say on anything carrying their name.
We set up tracking for forms, calls and email clicks by page and source at the start. Reports lead with the enquiries each service and search brought in, and traffic sits in the background. Each quarter we sit down with the managing partner and decide what to do more of, what to cut and what to test next. If a channel still hasn’t produced enquiries after a fair test, we’ll say so and move the budget.
Brand workshops and partner interviews happen face to face, in your office or ours in Jolimont. Photo shoots use our network of Perth partner photographers, briefed by the team who knows your firm. You’ll know the people working on your account by name, and they’ll know your partners, your service lines and the clients you’d like more of. When a partner retires or joins, we’ll sit down with you and plan how to tell clients, staff and referrers.
Tell us which work you want more of and who brings it in today. We’ll show you how to make the firm as findable and trusted as your best partner.