Let’s begin by exploring different types of buyers, and why they seek out experts in the first place.

Companies use a number of criteria when selecting service providers. And of course, not all buyers use the same criteria. We’ve identified three types of buyers and their motives:

The Bottom Feeders. These buyers are very price sensitive and will always choose the lowest-cost option. They tend to have very low standards and unrealistically high expectations. They rarely make good clients unless your firm is optimized for delivering commodity work at bargain-basement fees. This type of client does not value true expertise and prioritizes cost over all other factors.

The Fence Sitters. This type of buyer lacks confidence in its ability to find the best option to solve their problem. Often they have been burned by a poor choice in the past. Their solution is to cast their net widely—often by sending out an RFP (side note: not all RFPs are created equal. When handled with thoughtfulness and sophistication, the RFP process can be very rewarding to all parties)—to solicit as many options as possible, under the belief this will make their choice easier. In fact, it becomes much harder. The chances of making the wrong decision grow in proportion to the size of the vendor pool. These buyers try to balance cost and expertise. More often than not, they reflexively throw out the high and low bidders and pick an option in the middle. What they tend to get is middling results.

The Expert Seekers. For most firms, this is the ideal buyer. They understand the value of true expertise: a partner who already knows their industry or problem and is equipped to solve it quickly. These buyers are willing to pay a premium for an exceptional outcome and experience. So they seek out the best, often looking for the experts or firms that write or speak with the greatest authority on the topic. It’s not uncommon for these companies to reach out to just a single service provider or expert.

In short, better clients are better attuned to expertise. That’s why making your expertise both visible and highly respected is so important.

But what does it mean to be a Visible Expert?

The first answer is obvious. You have to be really good at something. That means you know as much or more about a subject than almost anyone. And the narrower and deeper your expertise, the fewer professionals in your field can match your knowledge and relevant experience.

Second, you have to act like an expert. When you are in front of a client, you present your knowledge and advice with confidence and in a differentiated manner – meaning other agencies can’t quite replicate your delivery style and impact. When confronted with an objection, you can deliver a sound, well-reasoned response. As soon as you start taking orders from the client, you are lost.

Third, you have to be able to be a clear thinker and communicator. You must be able to explain difficult ideas in easy-to-understand language. And to become broadly known—to generate a following—you will find yourself becoming a teacher. I don’t mean you will teach at a university (though some do). Instead, you will become known through your writing and speaking. You might write the authoritative book on your field, or you might blog. Either way, you are freely giving away your knowledge to build a loyal, trusting audience. Some of whom will eventually hire you.

What’s your firm’s strategy to attract the best clients? If you are taking an expertise-based, thought-leadership approach you may be on to something!

The post Who Are Visible Experts’ Best Clients? appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

If you aspire to be a Visible Expert^®, you will enjoy greater success if you are known as both a writer and a speaker. Public speaking often gets easier with time and experience. But writing—at least good, thoughtful writing—can feel like a painful chore even after decades of experience.

Luckily, all that’s changed. Thanks to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Copilot, your writer self gets to retire to Florida. (Which pool floatie will it choose today?) All those ideas that stubbornly won’t shake loose from your coconut, all those words that spill onto the page like old, crystallized honey, all that editing and rewriting, all that frustration… has vanished.

The word robots are here to save the day.

Everything in the previous two paragraphs, of course, is nonsense. The word robots are ingenious machines that love to do your bidding. And they are amazing at a lot of tasks. But ask them to draft an original blog post that doesn’t read like a cardboard box, and you’ll likely feel that old frustration on the rise again.

No bot is you. You can feed your chatbots examples of your work for style and a detailed outline for ideas and structure. But in the end, the output is, well, awkward. You’ll see all the AI tells: bullet points, bolded terms, cliches, mixed metaphors and those weird, clumsy phrases that would never have come from your fingertips. The problem is them, not you.

Bots don’t have your years of experience. They don’t know what will and won’t play with your audience. And they aren’t creative thinkers. Only you have the bottle of special sauce.

There’s nothing like engaging with the material as it forms from your head. Like clay figures, the ideas and imagery appear a little disturbing and misshapen at first. But with some tweaking here, some carving there, some burnishing here, the piece comes to life. Out of nothing appears a well-articulated idea or well-defended position!

Now, what if all this writing craft isn’t for you? What if you don’t have the time to play Geppetto once or twice a month?

Assuming you are an expert with your own ideas and a point of view, there is another approach. One that has a long history of success. You can hire a ghostwriter.

I know what you are thinking. How is a ghostwriter different from ChatGPT? They don’t have your bottle of special sauce, either.

The answer has three parts:

1. They are human like you.
2. They (presumably) can write interesting copy.
3. They can ask probing questions along the way.

You can spend a half hour briefing your writer—what you want to say, what facts you want to use to support it—and let them go off and do the hard work. Then the collaboration begins to produce a piece that presents your point of view and sounds reasonably like your voice.

A freelance professional writer isn’t cheap. Expect to pay $80 to $150 per hour for a good one. Many firms that value thought leadership will cover the cost. The benefits of Visible Expertise make it all worthwhile.

To many AI evangelists, what I’ve written will be dismissed with an eye-roll emoji. “What a Luddite!” And if I didn’t believe AI tools can play a pivotal role in writing, they would be right. In fact, AI is an exceptional tool to help writers be more productive. AI can help you come up with ideas, support them with evidence and check your work. It can be used to test your argument and strengthen your case. It can even draft short, specific passages of text—just be prepared to revise them.*

In the end, AI is a tool. A powerful tool. Like your computer. And your brain. Only don’t forget to keep using that last one.

*I’m speaking specifically here about thought leadership content like blog posts and articles. AI can produce insightful long-format pieces, such as reports and analyses, when presenting an individual point of view and style is less important.

The post Is AI the Write Answer for You? appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

By “act accordingly,” I mean they give you the permission to conduct your engagement on your terms, not theirs. They take your advice. They work collaboratively with you, and they do it enthusiastically. In short, they view you as a true expert in your discipline.

Clients like these are not born. They are made.

And ideally they are made long before you ever meet them.

Let me explain.

There are a number of ways that prospective clients discover professional services firms. They can be referred to you by current and former clients. They can be referred to you by partners in adjacent businesses—those that serve clients like yours but which don’t compete directly with you. For instance, lawyers and accountants often refer clients to each other. Prospects can meet you at a tradeshow or conference. Or they can see your advertising at the very moment they have a need.

All of these marketing techniques work, but they come with a built-in problem. Even though marketing tactics like these can put you on a company’s radar, the prospect doesn’t really know your firm. You still have to convince them you are worth taking a chance on.

That can mean responding to RFPs, along with dozens of your competitors. Or it can mean preparing elaborate pitches that involve a platoon of expensive team members. And at the end of the day, after the client has selected you, they begin the relationship crossing their fingers that they chose wisely.

Most firms of any size will (and probably should) use some, if not all, of these techniques. But there is another way—one that the most successful firms understand sidesteps this problem entirely. This strategy is not new, but it is widely misunderstood.

The strategy I’m describing is thought leadership. Most firms think of thought leadership as a nice-to-have, a supplement to their “real” marketing program. Often firms take this view because they know creating high-quality content is hard and distracts top talent from lucrative billable client work. These firms may do thought leadership but they implement it haphazardly. They simply don’t recognize its true potential.

When thought leadership is done right, however, you attract a different kind of prospect. These folks have been following you for months or years. They read everything you write. They attend your webinars. They fly to conferences to hear your experts speak. And when they finally raise their hand, they are ready to buy. From you—often only from you.

This approach involves educating your audience and sharing, for free, some of your expertise. At its best, your thought leadership—the topics you write and speak about—has a distinct point of view. It is this distinction that makes your work so compelling and separates what your experts say from other firms in your industry.

Over time, you not only build up a following, you establish deep credibility and trust. By the time these prospects reach out to you, they are bought into your firm and your system. This alignment not only makes the sale easy and quick, it sets up the engagement for success from the very start.

If, on the other hand, you enter an engagement and the client isn’t 100% convinced of your expert status, they can be hyper sensitive to any mistakes you make. Even the smallest error adds friction to the relationship and erodes trust. The engagement can still be salvaged, but that can take heroic measures from (and a toll on) your team.

To sum up, the best clients are those who got to know you long before they engaged you. They learned from your experts, and they came back to the well again and again. When they are ready to buy, you are at the top of their list. And when they engage you, they trust you implicitly, so you can do your best work.

That’s the power of a well-conceived thought-leadership strategy. Is your marketing strategy designed to attract your best clients?

The post How to Create Great Clients appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

Today’s issue is inspired by a reader who, after reading several recent articles focused on our recent High Growth Study findings, asked, “How effective is the Visible Expert framework, as I’ve seen less content on this topic lately?”

The short answer is that it is very effective. But that’s not a very satisfactory response. Let me, instead, share some data from the 2026 High Growth Study that supports my answer.

Let’s begin with this chart:

Top Marketing Priorities for 2026

This chart identifies the marketing activities that the fastest-growing professional services firms plan to prioritize this year. We define high-growth firms as those that grow their revenues 20% or more for three consecutive years. This group of firms grows 4.3 times faster and are 33% more profitable than their slower-growing peers.

The priority listed second most often is “developing thought leaders.” (At Hinge, we call experts who have exceptional visibility in their industry Visible Experts^® —our name for thought leaders.) The fact that many of the best-performing firms are making Visible Expertise one of their top priorities suggests that thought leadership is a concept they know works.

The fact that many of the best-performing firms are making Visible Expertise one of their top priorities suggests that thought leadership is a concept they know works.

But there’s more evidence to unpack in this chart. “Creating content” sits in fourth place. Producing content, such as writing, recording educational videos and producing webinars, are acts of thought leadership. And they are essential components of a Visible Expert strategy.

Then there is the top priority—social media marketing. While this priority covers a wide range of activities, a Visible Expert uses social media extensively (especially LinkedIn) to network with prospects and other experts, publish articles, promote their thought leadership content, publicize speaking engagements, answer questions from people who are seeking expertise like theirs, and more.

By the way, study participants also ranked “promoting thought leadership on social media” as the second most impactful marketing technique in their arsenal (in a tie with traditional advertising).

In short, three of the five marketing techniques that the top performers are prioritizing support Visible Expertise.

We also asked firms what they most wanted to learn more about this year. Here’s how they responded:

Topics and Trends to Learn More About in 2026

Buzz about the promise of AI is everywhere, from the business press to the stock market. And businesses of every stripe are feeling intense pressure to understand it and find new efficiencies. It’s no surprise, then, that AI and automation take the top two spots on the list.

But sitting in third place—and the only item in this top-5 list that has no direct connection to technology or data—is “content creation and thought leadership.” This suggests that many of the high-growth firms that haven’t already deployed a formal thought leadership strategy are very interested in doing so.

There’s one more chart from the 2026 study that correlates faster growth and profitability with Visible Expertise.

How Active Your Subject Matter Experts Are in Producing and Promoting Thought Leadership Content

This bar chart shows the proportion of firms whose experts are engaged in thought leadership activities—such as public speaking, writing blog posts, producing research studies, writing books, developing white papers and participating in podcasts or webinars, to name just a few.

While 47% of high-growth firms have low activity in this area, compare that to the almost 70% of no-growth firms in that category. High-growth firms are 2.6 times more likely to have high Visible Expert activity. And almost 53% of them say their experts are at least fairly active.

High-growth firms are also consistently more likely to provide support and resources across a range of thought leadership activities, from marketing strategy and outreach support to graphic design and video production.

I hope I’ve convinced you that there is a meaningful correlation between firms that practice thought leadership and exceptional business performance. When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Business people seek out individuals who have deep expertise in the problems they are trying to solve. They read them. They listen to them. They watch them. And when they are ready to buy, they prefer those experts over all others.

Guess who benefits? The firm that employs those experts. And the more Visible Experts a firm has, the greater its potential.

Do you have a Visible Expert strategy?

The post The Link Between High Growth and Thought Leadership appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

“What if they get poached?”
“What if they leave and start their own firm?”
“Are they overshadowing our company brand?”

These fears are completely rational. They also may be steering you away from your single greatest marketing asset.

In our research at Hinge, we’ve studied hundreds of high-growth professional services firms, and we’ve given these industry stars a name: Visible Experts®. They are professionals who have a potent combination of deep expertise and high marketplace visibility. And while nurturing them can feel like a risk, the data shows that the real risk lies in hiding your best talent away.

Let’s tease apart these fears and see what’s really going on.

Your Fear Is Real. But Misguided.

The hesitation to elevate individual experts usually comes from three core anxieties:

1. The Poaching Nightmare: This is the fear I hear most often. By making your expert more visible, you’re just putting them on a silver platter for headhunters. The reality? If they’re good, recruiters already know who they are. Trying to keep your experts a secret in the age of LinkedIn is a fool’s errand. In fact, creating a stifling culture where personal brand-building is discouraged is far more likely to send your most motivated professionals running for the exits.
2. The “Solo Act” Split: The next worry is that your newly-minted star will fly the coop to launch their own competing firm. This can happen as non-competes are often difficult to enact to their full extent. But top-tier talent is inherently ambitious. The choice isn’t between them staying quietly forever or leaving. It’s between creating a supportive environment where they can thrive or a stifling hot house that sends them outside gasping for air.
3. The Brand Eclipse: Does an expert’s fame overshadow the firm’s brand? It’s a valid question, but it misses a psychological phenomenon called the halo effect. When a buyer has strong, positive feelings about one of your experts, those feelings transfer directly to your firm. Their star power doesn’t eclipse your brand. It makes your firm shine brighter.

All of this is not to say that these fears never come to fruition. Visible Experts leave their firms for all kinds of reasons. Which is why you should never put all your hopes and dreams behind a single top performer. But more on this topic in a moment.

Moving from Perceived Threat to Proven Asset

Once you move past your fears, you can begin capitalizing on the enormous opportunities that a firm of Visible Experts creates.

• A Marketing and BD Supercharger: Each time one of your experts writes a blog post, delivers a webinar, or gives a speech, they are offering prospects a risk-free way to experience your firm’s expertise firsthand. This builds trust that is difficult to achieve any other way. If, for instance, one Visible Expert can influence 1,000 people a year, ten of them could reach 10,000. They are, quite literally, business development engines.
• A Magnet for Top Talent: In a competitive hiring market, what makes your firm special? A formal program to develop Visible Experts is a massive differentiator. You’re not just offering a job; you’re offering a platform for ambitious professionals to become industry leaders. By actively and enthusiastically supporting your experts’ career-building goals, you catch the attention of top recruiting prospects and incentivize your best people to stay.
• The Ultimate Resilience Strategy: Here’s, perhaps, the most powerful counter-argument to the fear of losing a star player: build a deeper bench. Your goal should not be to develop a single Visible Expert. Instead, cultivate a firm of them. When you have a stable of recognized experts, your organization becomes more resilient. The departure of any single individual, while unfortunate, doesn’t create a vacuum or cripple your brand. You not only protect yourself from losing the face of your firm, you build a portfolio of stars who can reach different audiences and produce visibility that far exceeds that produced by any single thought leader.

Your Next Move

The revolution in professional services marketing is already here, and it’s being led by expertise. The sooner you realize that expertise is marketing, the sooner your firm will prosper.

Stop letting fear drive your talent strategy. The risk isn’t that your best people will become well-known and leave. The risk is that you’ll fail to support them, and they’ll leave anyway—taking their invisible, untapped potential with them. It’s time to stop hiding your greatest assets and start building a firm that’s impossible to ignore.

The post Will Another Firm Poach My Visible Experts? appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

But that’s just part of the story.

In fact, I write for a variety of reasons. Really good ones. And for the same reasons, I think you should become a writer, too. Let me walk you through some of them.

Writing Is Thinking, Only Better

Sometimes I don’t know what I think on a topic. I might have a general idea, even a strong opinion. But it’s not always fully baked. Writing is my test kitchen. It’s the place where I bring a concept and maybe a few initial ingredients that I think will produce something interesting. Then I assemble everything, adding and subtracting ingredients until I have a confection that not only holds together but leaves people wanting more.

The process of writing about a topic forces you to think through a problem. To see the flaws in your argument. To recognize the gaps you need to fill with fresh research. When you are done, you’ll know more than you did before, and you will be able to speak on that topic with greater authority and confidence to clients and prospects.

Writing Sharpens Your Expertise

I’ve written before on the benefits of becoming a Visible Expert^®. Whether or not your expertise is highly visible, you need to keep your expertise sharp. Sometimes this happens through continuing education programs, certification training or conferences. But often it’s up to you to hone your skills.

When you write on a regular basis, you’ll find yourself addressing a wide range of topics in your area of expertise. If you want to be recognized as someone on the leading edge of your field, you can’t always fall back on the knowledge in your memory banks. Your readers—including those who might someday hire you—are looking for signals that you have a strong grasp of the latest trends, techniques and technologies. The writing process is a great opportunity to reach out to other experts or do some professional reading and bring your expertise up to speed and up to date.

It Makes You to Take a Stand

When experts speak, people listen. Why? Because they have a perspective that is authoritative and pointed. If you aren’t taking a stand when you write about an issue, you aren’t positioning yourself as a true expert.

Writing Creates a Connection with Your Audience

In the end, writing is about developing an audience. (This newsletter is a perfect example.) When you write about things your target audience cares about—when you address challenges they experience in their businesses—you begin to forge a bond. They start to trust you. They may even look forward to your next installment. Soon, some of your readers will think of you as the expert in your field. And that’s where this investment can really pay off.

What If You Can’t Write?

People have a lot of reasons for why they don’t write. For instance, you may have the gift of gab, but you just aren’t a skillful writer. Maybe writing is difficult for you, requiring more patience or attention than you can reasonably give it. Or perhaps you simply don’t have enough time in your schedule to plan, draft and edit blog posts, articles and other pieces of content.

Only you can know whether your reason is real, or if it’s an excuse. Before you throw in the towel, think long and hard about the reasons you don’t write. Each of the obstacles I described above can be overcome—if you make them a priority.

You can, with diligence, teach yourself enough grammar and style to write clear, easy-to-understand sentences and paragraphs (here’s a short book on the topic that I recommend). Or take a shortcut. Put your words and ideas down on paper without worrying about how they sound. Just make sure your argument is valid and that you support it with specific details and examples. Then hire an editor to clean everything up.

If you have trouble concentrating on writing, there are a variety of techniques to make it more manageable. For instance, you can start by outlining your piece. Then tackle one small part at a time. Spread these chunks out over a few days if that makes the process less intimidating. Here’s an article that offers a few other ideas to help you overcome a lack of focus.

Don’t have time to write? You may not realize it, but this is often a factor you can control. For instance, try setting aside a block of time each week for writing. You may be amazed how flexible your schedule actually is.

You might also experiment with a large-language-model tool like ChatGPT or Copilot to do the writing for you. Just be sure you include a detailed outline of your argument and supporting information in your prompt. Your goal is to produce a piece that has a point of view that is your own—rather than a synthesis of material that’s already on the internet. In the end, you want your expertise to shine through.

Sometimes, however, your challenges are very real, and none of these solutions will work for you. Maybe you don’t have the energy to change your habits. That’s okay. There’s still a way forward.

Here’s how it works. Use your role as a subject matter expert and let a ghost writer do most of the heavy lifting. You will still need to take some time to organize your thoughts—a rough outline may be enough. Include your main point or theme, a list of supporting points and evidence, and what next steps, if any, you want your reader to take. Then schedule an interview with your writer. Walk through your outline in detail and answer any questions. When the writer has finished the first draft, go through it together. Rinse and repeat until you have a final product you are happy with. This approach to writing is very common in the professional services, so don’t hesitate to use it if it fits your style and budget.

Are you ready to build a following of loyal fans? People who trust you and your advice? Whether you blog, produce a regular column in an industry publication or publish high-quality content on social media, there’s no better way to accomplish this goal than to write. Take it from me—building a lasting relationship with clients and prospects through the written word can be a beautiful thing!

The post Why I Write. And Why You Should, Too. appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

We’ve written before about the journey an expert takes from relative obscurity to prominence. We call these individuals Visible Experts^®, but you can use any label you wish—thought leader, industry expert, even grand poobah if that floats your boat.

Today, I want to talk about how to think about your expertise. If you want to achieve extraordinary visibility, after all, you can’t be an ordinary expert. You have to stand out in some meaningful way. This may sound daunting at first. But it’s not difficult to achieve. You just need to figure out where your talents lie.

5 Types of Visible Experts

In our best-selling book, The Visible Expert Revolution, we identified five types of Visible Experts:

The Bridge Builder

A Bridge Builder spans two different areas of expertise, connecting ideas from both. This combination of knowledge makes this expert truly unique.

The Laser

This expert is highly specialized in a very specific area. Not many businesses need their services all the time, but when the time comes, this is the preferred choice.

The Curator

A Curator expert gathers the best information from multiple sources. Often, Curators have access to an extensive network of experts.

The First Mover

These individuals are the first to pioneer an area of expertise. Businesses turn to First Movers for the latest innovation or new idea.

The Contrarian

A Contrarian takes novel points of view on industry issues and challenges clients to make bold or unconventional moves.

Chances are, you either fall into one of these camps already or there is one that particularly suits your personality and style. There are, however, some experts who combine aspects of two types. In our book, we tell the stories of many real-world experts who cross these boundaries, including the architect Carl Elefante. Carl is both a bridge builder and a first mover. Here’s how he describes himself:

“I was one of the first architects to merge the disciplines of historic preservation and sustainability. I am changing the way today’s architects think about existing buildings and how to use them in a way that is environmentally sound, inspiring and equitable.”

A Path Forward

Once you’ve figured out what kind of expert you are or want to be, what do you do with that information?

This is where it gets interesting. Now—perhaps for the first time—you have a way to talk about yourself. To define yourself in the marketplace. Or at the very least, you have an important foundation to build upon.

Suppose you are a CPA who is also interested in technology. You may be an excellent Bridge Builder candidate. Even if your knowledge of technology isn’t as deep as your accounting expertise, you can begin shaping your career to include both of those areas. Where do accounting and technology overlap? What are others writing about on the subject? What are the implications for the industry and the clients you serve? And where can you claim an island of your own in this archipelago of ideas?

At this point you are well on your way. You can stand for something. You will have a unique perspective and no end of interesting things to talk and write about. You may not be a Visible Expert® yet, but you are outfitted for the rewarding journey ahead.

The post Are You Wasting Your Expertise? appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

We have written extensively about how to turn ordinary experts into high-visibility industry stars. But that’s not what we’re talking about today.

Instead, we want to make a different point. While not everybody has the interest or discipline to become an industry standout, any expert can—and, we would argue, should—be a marketer.

To explain what we mean, let us first let you in on a little secret that most marketers don’t fully appreciate: Expertise is the thumping heart of professional services marketing. It’s not SEO, or email, or social media. It’s not networking or referrals. In fact, none of those things would do any good were it not for the one thing that makes professional services unique—the deep, specialized knowledge experts use to solve their clients’ problems.

This is a truth not universally acknowledged. Many marketers and senior executives don’t recognize the wealth of marketing capital trapped like an oil reserve inside their organizations. Expertise pervades every corner of their business. Yet from a marketing perspective, it sits there, unknown, unexplored and untapped.

The Hidden Value of Expertise

When businesses seek out a professional services provider, they are usually looking for a range of characteristics, such as efficiency, responsiveness, past performance and good fit. But above all, they are looking for true expertise.

Evaluating expertise, however, is not easy. You can’t listen to a sales pitch or visit a firm’s homepage and determine if what they say about themselves is true. How, then, do buyers find qualified providers and select one firm over another?

In many, and maybe most, cases, buyers need to experience the expertise they are about to invest thousands of dollars in. But how do they get this critical exposure?

This is where all those experts come in.

They write the blog posts, put on the webinars, deliver the speeches and conduct the free consultations or demos that give potential buyers a taste of your firm’s expertise. Some prospects become so impressed with your expertise that they come back to sample it again and again.

How to Make Your Experts into Marketers

Chances are, not every expert on your team is a gifted writer or confident speaker. And even if they were, some experts are so in demand they have little time to dedicate to time-consuming marketing activities. But they can still contribute expert content. They just need a little help.

Start thinking of every expert on your team as a subject matter expert. Then you can pair them with someone—usually a professional writer—who can turn their ideas into content. The experts’ investment is small. They provide the raw materials up front, usually in the form of an interview or rough outline, then they review the drafted piece before it is published. Playing this limited role, they can produce a high-quality piece of content in a fraction of the time it would take them on their own.

Suddenly, you don’t have to rely on the two or three individuals in your firm who are willing, often inconsistently, to work late to produce all your valuable content. You have an army. Now, that thing that prospects want so badly (expertise) is available in spades.

With so many resources at your disposal, you can now produce content on more topics that your audience wants to learn about. You can do it more quickly. And you can deliver it in more channels than ever before. Moreover, because you can spread out responsibility you can do it without burning anybody out.

This is how experts become marketers. It’s also how stuck firms learn to grow and grow and grow.

The post All Experts Are Marketers (Or They Should Be) appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

Low visibility creates a challenge for firms that want to thrive. While generating additional work from existing clients can be relatively easy, creating a dependable flow of new clients can be more challenging. There are a variety of reasons for this. You might experience some or all of the following at your firm:

• Ineffective marketing
• Over-reliance on referrals
• Over-reliance on in-person networking
• A seller-doer business model that restricts business development time
• Lack of a well-known industry expert
• Poor business development materials
• A website that doesn’t communicate the firm’s sophistication
• A single signature service overshadowing other services
• Lack of differentiation
• A sea of competitors

The list above is by no means exhaustive. Firms have found endless ways to minimize their visibility. But this list does hint at some solutions. So let’s consider three of the best ways to boost your firm’s visibility.

3 Ways to Make Your Firm More Visible

There are no quick fixes that will suddenly expose your business to large new audiences. You can, however, start laying the foundation for a more prominent firm today. Let’s explore three of the most effective ways to start building visibility.

1. Turn your experts into thought leaders. Your experts are your most valuable marketing resource. And most firms woefully undervalue them in this respect. When you create a firm of Visible Experts®, you create a direct channel for buyers to experience your expertise firsthand. Encourage your experts to write blog posts, speak at events, and present webinars on topics your audience cares about. In fact, firm leadership should go further and actively support and incentivize these activities. Often, individual experts can reach more new people more easily than a “faceless” firm, so each one multiplies your visibility. This builds trust, elevates your firm’s reputation and establishes a reliable source of new business opportunities.
2. Be a good partner. When it comes to building your audience, you don’t have to go it alone. Collaborating with a non-competing organization or trade association gives you access to their audience—and a tacit endorsement. You can collaborate in a variety of ways. Mutually beneficial activities like co-hosting webinars, conducting joint research, or cross-promoting content can significantly expand your reach and deliver a reliable flow of new business opportunities. You can also sponsor a partner’s events and exhibit or speak at trade shows and conferences.
3. Build a website that sucks… in a ton of new prospects. Your website is the first place a prospect goes to size you up, so it must inspire confidence. It’s got to both look great and differentiate you. An important way a site kindles trust is by showcasing your expertise. But it can be so much more than a credibility builder. It can attract and nurture new audiences, too. A proven way to attract new visitors is to regularly publish expert educational content on a blog. Some firms also have a library of more in-depth thought leadership content. By incorporating modern SEO and AI search techniques, you can help people researching business problems with tools like Google, ChatGPT and Copilot to discover your expert writing and videos. Over time, they begin to see you as an authority on the problems you solve. Eventually, when they need to hire a firm, you are the first one that comes to mind. And don’t worry. This strategy still works, even in a world where clicks from Google are in decline.

These strategies aren’t just discrete items on a to-do list. They’re a powerful, interconnected system for solving the visibility puzzle. Your newly minted thought leaders can co-present webinars with your strategic partners, and all that amazing content can live on your powerhouse website, attracting new prospects while you sleep. Stop letting your competitors get all the attention. It’s time to start building a firm that’s impossible to ignore.

The post 3 Ways to Make Your Firm More Visible appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

We explained how this works in a recent newsletter published on LinkedIn:

“In many, and maybe most, cases, buyers need to experience the expertise they are about to invest thousands of dollars in. But how do they get this critical exposure? This is where all those experts come in. They write the blog posts, put on the webinars, deliver the speeches and conduct the free consultations or demos that give potential buyers a taste of your firm’s expertise. Some prospects become so impressed with your expertise that they come back to sample it again and again.”

Many of those prospects ultimately become clients—the kind that respect your expertise and advice.

Today, I want to expand on that article and explain why building a firm of multiple thought leaders—individuals we call Visible Experts^®—is the key to abiding success.

Imagine, for a moment, a world in which you have not one, not two, but a dozen or more Visible Experts on your team. What would that mean?

For one thing, it would mean you have many more opportunities to connect with prospects in a personal way. Each time one of your experts gives a speech, publishes a blog post or delivers a webinar, they are influencing the way a reader or listener thinks about a problem. If a single Visible Expert can reach, say, 1,000 people a year, ten of them could reach 10,000.

The math is not only easy, it’s exciting! If even only a fraction of a percent of those people become clients in a given year, that adds up to a lot of revenue—and, in most professional services industries, substantial potential add-on revenue as you grow the relationship.

Another implication of a broad thought leadership program is its value as a recruiting tool. Most firms talk about career growth in a conventional way: mentoring, training, and so on. But if you have a formal Visible Expert or thought leadership program, you set your firm up as something truly special: a place where experts are trained and positioned to become high-profile industry leaders. The kind that clients and peers look up to.

Now, you may worry that stars like these are ripe for poaching by other firms. Or if they become too successful, they may want to peel off and start their own businesses. True. Both of these things could happen.

But consider the alternative. Suppose you decide to hide your best talent. You include no names or bios on your website. No photos. No email addresses. As far as the public knows, they don’t exist.

Try as you might to eliminate poaching, your experts still have LinkedIn profiles—you can’t keep your people from maintaining those. And if they are on LinkedIn, head hunters will find them.

In addition, if you’ve created a stifling, closed culture, your best people are eventually going to leave for firms where they have more freedom and can build their personal reputations. You are likely to lose great people faster than you can replace them. Talk about unintended consequences!

When you implement a firm-wide Visible Expert program, however, you actively, enthusiastically support your experts’ career-building ambitions. By embracing these ambitions you actually incentivize your best people to stay. That doesn’t mean all of them will, of course. A few may be seduced by bigger money at larger firms. Or, wanting to make their own mark on the world, a particularly bright star may exit your constellation to establish one of their own. But nothing you do was going to stop those departures, anyway.

An organization-wide thought leadership program not only instills loyalty, it establishes a reliable and durable source of new business opportunities. By creating channels for buyers to experience your expertise first-hand, you elevate your firm above the rest that rely on unproven marketing messages, personal charisma and the reach of their business development teams to drive new opportunities. And through the halo effect, as the reputation of your Visible Experts rises, your firm’s prospects improve at the same time.

The sooner you realize that expertise is marketing, the sooner your firm will prosper.

The post Why Every Firm Needs Multiple Thought Leaders appeared first on Hinge Marketing.