Content Marketing Strategies Every Professional Services Brand Should Use

Content marketing can be extremely effective at putting your professional services brand on the map. And if you think about how consumers interact with digital media, this shouldn’t be too big of a surprise.

According to data from 2021, 85% of Americans go online at least once a day, with 31% reporting being online almost constantly. 

So, if you consider that finding information, watching videos, researching educational resources, and finding inspiration rank among the top reasons for using the Internet, it becomes completely logical why businesses are spending more and more of their marketing budgets on producing and distributing quality content.

But here’s the deal: exceptional content marketing success is only possible if you employ a strategic approach. When running a professional services business, this approach will have to differ from the run-of-the-mill posts utilized by ecommerce brands.

So, if you want to take your reach (and conversions) to the next level with content that will delight your target audience, here are the content marketing strategies every professional services brand should use.

Create and Reinforce the Market for Your Service

When investing in marketing, many businesses make the mistake of focusing on creating sales. 

But the fact is, shopping (whether for products or services) isn’t an instant, made-in-the-moment decision — at least not in most cases. Instead, it’s a gradual process where prospects slowly move from the awareness to the purchase (and post-purchase) stages of the sales cycle.

To see real results from your content production efforts, you need to align your strategy with your audience’s position in the buyer’s journey. In many cases, this means doing the groundwork that will create and reinforce the market for your service.

So, how can you implement this tactic in your content strategy?

Well, instead of thinking about selling your services to your audience, start by exploring ways to show them they need your brand’s assistance.

For example, check out how Academic Influence does it on its Resources page. 

Instead of simply creating content that promotes its machine learning-supported approach to ranking colleges and universities, this brand focuses on answering its target audience’s most frequent questions. Then, it subtly introduces its services, presenting them in a way that’s genuinely relevant to students looking for guidance and has the highest likelihood of resulting in a conversion.

Source: academicinfluence.com

How do you apply this tactic to your content strategy? 

Start by identifying your ideal customer’s pain points. Then, create resources that will help remove those pain points and position your service as a viable solution that could help them reach their goals more quickly and efficiently than taking the DIY approach.

Build Interactive Diagnostic Tools to Capture Email Newsletter Subscribers

A slightly more advanced way to implement the tactic discussed above is to upgrade the content formats you employ to address and solve your target audience’s pain points.

By investing in interactive content, you can achieve higher engagement rates on your pages. Plus, these resources can also serve as a highly efficient lead capture mechanism, which is a great investment. After all, most people need several brand interactions before arriving at the purchase stage of the buyer’s journey.

For example, if you’ve identified a common pain point that frustrates your potential customers, why not build an interactive tool (quiz, calculator, converter, etc.) to help people find the answers to their needs in exchange for an email address? 

This way, you will instantly position your service brand as a dependable business that helps people solve their pain points. You’ll also build a high-quality email list you can nurture into customers with a value-driven, curated email marketing strategy.

Need inspiration on how you could do this? Check out the Ideal Nutrition Calorie Calculator. 

This business knows that its target audience understands that managing weight requires adapting their caloric intake. So, it makes it easy for anyone to calculate their ideal daily consumption. Ideal Nutrition is also aware that optimizing macros can be challenging — especially when sticking to a slight deficit. That’s why it created an invaluable tool for helping its audience get answers to their questions.

Source: idealnutrition.com.au

Pro tip: By adding a simple CTA on the results page (or including a sign-up form before that page), Ideal Nutrition could significantly improve newsletter sign-ups or directly boost conversions for its meal plan services.

Create Exceptional Differentiation with Exceptional Content

The Internet is filled with invaluable content. Just consider the fact that there are 7.5 million new blog posts published every day. Statistically, most of those have got to be average, at best.

However, if you want your professional services brand to stand out, you need to show your audience that you are an absolute expert at what you do. 

In fact, demonstrating authority is one of the best ways to earn your target audience’s trust. And it’s no secret that brand trust is one of the key factors when making buying decisions for more than 80% of consumers.

One excellent tactic you can employ to differentiate your brand is to invest in exceptional content. 

Dedicate a portion of your marketing budget to producing valuable resources, unique insights, educational articles, or even data or science-backed research findings. Any of these formats can be a superb way of demonstrating your brand’s capability and credibility. Plus, they can be an excellent way to attract a more discerning audience to your brand.

For example, if you check out Australian Business for Sale, you’ll see that the brand heavily invests in its Magazine publication. The fact that this is a unique and high-quality resource doesn’t just establish the brand’s immense expertise and authority. It also adds a level of prestige to Business for Sale’s services, enhancing visibility and making it the logical choice when compared to the brand’s competitors.

Source: businessforsale.com.au

Do you need to create a quarterly publication to achieve similar results? Well, if you have the resources, then sure — you can go for it. 

However, you can also achieve similar results by creating in-depth monthly reports, quarterly surveys, annually updated whitepapers, or any other resource that will demonstrate your credibility and present your target audience with insights they can’t get anywhere else.

Ensure Product and Conversion CTAs Are Logically Placed

Investing in content marketing to raise brand/service awareness or enhance business credibility are excellent tactics to implement in your marketing strategy. Nevertheless, the ultimate goal of any marketing campaign is to secure conversions.

That’s why it’s crucial that you purposefully think about the conversion elements you use in your content. Then, optimize them in a way that will increase your chances of acquiring new customers.

One common mistake many marketers make is not paying attention to user needs and preferences when placing CTA buttons in their content. 

The issue is that a poorly-placed call to action could come off as too aggressively sales-oriented, making you lose your prospects’ trust and harming your chances of boosting sales.

So, is there a right way to place conversion elements within your content?

Well, if you want to get it right, the one thing to prioritize is customer experience. 

Research shows that people are more inclined to buy from (and remain loyal to) brands that demonstrate customer understanding. So, if you want to emphasize your service brand’s dedication to meeting and exceeding customer needs, why not start by only using product and conversion links where it genuinely makes sense?

Check out how Aura does it. 

Instead of using its Ultimate Guide to Retail Arbitrage on Amazon to push its product, this brand prioritizes educating web visitors. Then, in a section of the article dedicated to the importance of winning the Amazon Buy Box, this brand links to its service, which can help them do this. 

Source: goaura.com

By implementing this easy technique in your content efforts, you can ensure that your CTAs don’t just float around without any context. Instead, they’ll appear in logical spots, where your web visitors will be likely to see their value and click on them.

Create Enough Content for Early Stage Leads

We’ve already mentioned the importance of aligning your content to your target audience’s position in the buyer’s journey. However, one common mistake many marketers make is that they don’t produce enough content for early-stage leads.

The fact is, not all of your potential customers are going to be ready to book your service. And many won’t even know that your service exists.

So, if you are to convince them to spend their hard-earned money with your brand, it’s crucial that you directly address their pain points (to attract their attention). Then, explore natural opportunities to mention your brand’s services and how they might offer solutions.

Check out how Pinch does it in this post on How Many Units of Botox for a Lip Flip. 

This brand knows that its early-stage prospects understand the purpose of different cosmetic procedures. However, most of these leads aren’t yet sure how much (or how often) they need to undergo these treatments. That’s why Pinch presents an in-depth guide on everything they can expect when booking such services. Toward the end of the article, the brand subtly mentions that these procedures can be professionally done at home, inviting readers to consider booking with Pinch to get the best possible care without inconveniencing themselves.

Source: bookpinch.com

If you want to use this strategy in your content efforts, note that the best place to mention your services doesn’t have to be the end of a post. 

You can easily introduce readers to the benefits of booking your service during the early stages of an article as well. Just make sure that your pitch isn’t overly aggressive but focuses, instead, on helping your prospects solve their pain points as efficiently as possible.

Confidently Compare Your Service to Your Competitors

When buying products or services, most people compare several viable options to find the one that suits their needs best. So, if you want to invest in content to help your professional services brand stand out as the best choice for your audience, don’t be afraid to lean into a bit of comparison.

Ultimately, there’s no way around the evaluation stage of the buyer journey. You’ll need to explore content tactics that will help emphasize your service’s superiority over those offered by your competitors.

For example, one easy way to point out everything your brand does better is to publish a long-form blog post that compares your service to its alternatives — like in the Best Unlimited Video Editing Services article by Vidpros. 

This is a great way to win over evaluation-stage-buyers, as it will enable you to position your service as best-in-class. It can also present the chance to mention specific aspects of your service that are better than what prospects will find elsewhere (or mention crucial flaws in your competitors’ offers).

Source: vidpros.com

Or, if you need an even more effective way to show your service’s effectiveness, you could employ formatting techniques to make the content easy to consume and more likely to lead to a conversion.

For example, Medical Alerts Buyers Guide uses tables to compare the Best Mobile Medical Alert Systems of 2024. The format makes it exceptionally easy for consumers to see the pros and cons of each service provider. Furthermore, by using third-party affiliate links throughout the article, this brand ensures that each conversion benefits its bottom line, thus maximizing the ROI on its content marketing strategy.

Source: medicalalertbuyersguide.org

Create Detailed Service-Focused Video Content for Social Media

When it comes to the best content formats for engaging your audience (and introducing them to services they hadn’t even known existed), nothing beats video.

Just look at Semrush’s State of Content Marketing report for 2023. You’ll find that 45% of marketers say that video is their top-performing format, significantly outperforming articles, success stories, online events, and podcasts. 

And what’s the best distribution platform for video (especially short-form)? Social media.

So, if you want to elevate your content marketing strategies to help your professional services brand attract a wide audience into the buyer’s journey, consider investing in service-focused clips for social media.

For inspiration, look to Danny’s Green Surface Cleaning. 

Instead of heavily investing in PPC ads or blog content, this cleaning business focuses its content efforts on YouTube. Essentially, it publishes both short and long-form videos, focusing on a variety of cleaning jobs. Thanks to the entertainment value of this type of content, the business managed to attract more than 14k subscribers, with thousands of views on each video. Most importantly, the impressively growing compilation of new in-depth cleaning content clearly shows the marketing strategy is working in terms of attracting new customers.

Source: youtube.com

The best thing about this strategy is that you can easily adjust it to your brand’s needs. 

Sure, your brand’s services may not have the same ASMR potential as pressure washing. But, if you can find something you and your customers are passionate about (and create good content about it), you’re guaranteed to see success. After all, it’s not for nothing that they say passion is contagious.

Don’t Forget About SEO Best Practices

Lastly, as you explore tactics that will help you market your professional services brand through content, don’t forget the most common way people discover resources in the first place.

According to BrightEdge, 51% of all content consumption comes from organic search. So, if you want your prospects to discover your content in the first place, ensure exceptional visibility.

Naturally, the best way to do this is to optimize content pages for search engine rankings. Adhere to SEO best practices, most notably: 

• Always begin the production journey by conducting thorough audience and keyword research. 
• Prioritize creating high-quality, in-depth resources that offer unique value. 
• Optimize content pages with meta tags. 
• Align headlines with your targeted keywords. 
• Create topic clusters to establish topical authority. 
• Pay attention to technical page performance by investing in your site’s UX.

Ultimately, these tactics won’t require too many resources. But, taking the time to make your resources user and search-engine-friendly will help you maximize your reach and attract a higher volume of web visitors, giving you an extra advantage in boosting awareness about your professional service brand’s offer in a way that actually aligns with your prospects’ current needs and pain points.

Final Thoughts

Even though it’s not always easy to get it right from the start, content marketing offers exceptional potential — regardless of your ultimate goals.

However, to maximize your chances of achieving a satisfactory ROI, always prioritize content that creates value for your target audience and positions your service brand as the authority in your niche. That way, your content efforts will lead to higher conversion rates and play a positive role in your branding strategy. They’ll help in establishing your business as a reliable service provider people will want to support and buy from for years to come.