You’ve heard the phrase a million times, right? “You have to differentiate your firm.”

All leaders say it, and some also believe it. But very few firms actually do it in a way that matters. And when they don’t, the consequences aren’t subtle. They’re brutal.

So what is brand differentiation? And more importantly, why does it matter?

What Brand Differentiation Actually Means

At its simplest, brand differentiation is your competitive advantage. It’s the real reason a buyer chooses you instead of that beige, paint-by-committee firm down the street. But there’s a twist in that road. In professional services, the advantage of being different isn’t static. Your differentiator yesterday may be invisible tomorrow because the market moves fast and buyers aren’t sitting still.

Differentiation isn’t a one-and-done check-the-box exercise. It’s continuous. It’s strategic. It’s what separates firms that grow from firms that get stuck in commodity-land where the only differentiator left is price.

Why Differentiation Matters

If your firm can’t clearly explain how you’re different in a way buyers actually care about, your only choice is to compete on price. And competing on price is a race to the bottom no one wins.

Hinge’s research actually shows that fast-growing firms — the ones well ahead of the pack — are three times more likely to have strong differentiators. Strong differentiators don’t just set you apart, they help you speak directly to the right audiences.

That means differentiation can be a growth engine.

“We Already Do Great Work” Isn’t Enough

Here’s where most firms unintentionally sabotage themselves: they fall back on phrases like:

• “Our people set us apart.”
• “We’re trusted advisors.”
• “We strive for excellence.”
• “We provide fantastic service.”
• “We have a proprietary process.”

Sound familiar? These may all be true. But being true isn’t the same as being differentiated. If every firm says the same thing—and many of them do—then none of them are actually standing out. And buyers stop paying attention.

Buyers expect quality work and professionalism. Your differentiator has to be something above and beyond that baseline to deliver true impact.

The Differentiation Test

To have a meaningful differentiator, it has to meet three criteria:

• True — You actually do it.
• Relevant — It matters to your buyers.
• Provable — There’s real evidence behind it.

If a potential differentiator fails any of those tests, it doesn’t help you. It just adds noise.

How Do You Find a Real Differentiator?

There are two paths:

• Discover a strength you already have but haven’t leaned into.
• Decide to build something new that makes you distinct.

And by the way, discovery doesn’t mean guessing. It means talking to your clients, understanding what actually matters to them, and seeing where your firm lines up in ways others don’t. That’s the difference between something that sounds good on a webinar and something that actually works in the market.

Examples that Stand the Test of Time

Effective differentiators come in many flavors. Here are just a few examples:

• Specializing in a particular industry or service niche
• Focusing on a specific audience
• Using a unique business model that flips the script on the competition

The real magic happens when you blend two or more of these. Niche expertise plus a novel way of delivering value, for example. That’s when buyers don’t just notice you, they remember you.

Differentiation isn’t a buzzword. It’s your strategic lever for growth, visibility, and pricing power. Firms that lean into it thoughtfully don’t just survive, they thrive. Firms that don’t? They get stuck in the murky middle where nothing sticks and price becomes king.

The real question isn’t whether your firm should differentiate. It’s what kind of differentiated future you want to build.

The post Why it Pays to Be Different appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

I’ve written about this challenge before, including a strategy to differentiate the undifferentiated firm. But today, I want to introduce a different approach. One that we’ve begun using with our clients—with excellent results.

We first encountered this concept in The Brand Flip by Marty Neumeier. If you aren’t familiar with Marty, he’s written some of the most insightful and accessible books on branding of the past 20 years.

The idea is simple, but its potential is incredibly powerful: What single claim can you make about your firm that none of your competitors can match? The trick is to formulate it as a concise statement:

We are the only [your category] that [your primary differentiator].

Filling in the first blank is easy. It’s the second one that trips up most leaders. They will either throw up their hands or try to load it up with a raft of flotsam, jetsam and cliches.

The problem is that most firms in a given category aren’t that different from each other. Your Only Statement is a simple tool that can help you crack free of the logjam and set your own course.

You have two levers here:

1. Your category (how you define what you do)
2. Your differentiator (the one thing you do differently from others in your category)

If you are struggling with differentiation, you can adjust either of these levers—or both. Let’s look at each in turn.

The Category Lever

Suppose you run a CPA firm. You could narrow your category by specializing in a specific industry (such as startup technology companies) or service line (such as fractional CPA services).

Note that adjusting your category likely means committing to real change—not just a new set of marketing messages. It almost certainly means shrinking your potential audience. The upside, of course, is that the audience you serve will consider you better qualified than a generalist firm. This perception can make it easier and faster to grow within the category. You may even be able to command premium pricing.

The downside is that, depending on the makeup of your category, specialization may make your business more susceptible to market fluctuations. This vulnerability is especially true for firms with a strong industry focus. This weakness, however, is offset somewhat by your perceived authority.

The Differentiator Lever

Once you have settled on your category, you can tackle the second blank in your Only Statement. You will likely have a list of potential candidates. If not, sit down with your team and draw up a list.

Next, evaluate each candidate and ask these three questions:

1. Is this truly unique?
2. Is this something your audience really cares about?
3. Is this hard for another firm in your category to copy?

If an item on your list seems to meet all of these criteria, try it out in your Only Statement. How does it sound? A successful Only Statement should send a shiver down your spine and make you wonder, how did I not think of this before?

If none of your candidate ideas fit the bill, keep trying. Use the three questions above as guides. Look around at firms in other industries for inspiration. Maybe there’s a business model that’s never been tried in your niche. If you’ve conducted research on your clients, read the verbatims. Or just pick up the phone and talk to your clients. Why did they choose you? What makes your firm special? What could you do differently that would change the game?

What Does a Real-World Only Statement Look Like?

It’s one thing to talk about an Only Statement in abstract. But what do real ones look like? Let’s consider my firm, Hinge. We made deliberate decisions that affected both our category (who we choose to compete against) and our core differentiator.

Here’s our Only Statement:

Hinge is the only research-based branding and marketing firm for professional services designed to elevate the visibility of firms and their experts.

Notice how we define our category. “Branding and marketing” is too broad. “Branding and marketing for professional services” would work, though it includes a dozen or more major competitors.

We believed we could define our category even more narrowly.

Most of Hinge’s clients are attracted to the independent research we conduct on their industries. Each year, we produce our signature High Growth Study, and from time to time we release smaller studies on specialized topics. We build and adjust our programs and advisory based on this body of research. Because conducting this kind of research is hard, very few firms do it—in fact, none of our competitors do.

So we decided to define our category as “research-based branding and marketing firms for professional services.” We are in a category with exactly one member—us. We enjoy dining alone.

Now, not every firm will be able produce a category this tight, and that’s perfectly okay. Remember, your category is just one lever. Now let’s see how Hinge handled the other one.

When it comes to our core differentiator, we chose Visible Expertise®. We not only wrote the book on it, we have designed our two signature programs around this concept: The Visible Firm^® and The Visible Expert^®. Nobody else offers marketing programs like these. And because we went to the trouble and expense of trademarking the term Visible Expert, nobody else can use it.

Let’s look at a couple of other examples.

Populous is an international architecture firm with a difference:

We are the only global architecture firm that specializes exclusively in stadiums, arenas and events.

Their category is “global architecture firm.” Most firms their size have achieved their scale by adding more and more services. That’s what makes Populous’ core differentiator so effective. Even with more than 1,500 employees and 32 offices on four continents, they have maintained a laser focus. They specialize in designing sports and entertainment venues, as well as producing large-scale events.

Not all firms can have such a strong industry focus. But that doesn’t mean they can’t have a killer Only Statement. Here’s an example of the Only Statement for a customer experience (CX) firm that brings a unique set of services to the marketplace.

We are the only CX consulting firm that provides all the advisory, research, training, certifications, technology and implementation expertise a business needs to deliver an efficient, coordinated customer experience.

This firm’s category is “CX consulting”—one that has many competitors. However, they create barriers to competition by offering services that require non-typical specialized expertise, such as CX certifications and research. Because they offer a complete suite of CX services—from CX training to technology integration—they stand alone in the traditional CX consulting category.

Creating an Only Statement for your firm will expose the strength or weaknesses of your firm’s positioning. For firms with weak positioning, this exercise also provides the clarity you need to begin the process of changing your firm so that it can compete in the marketplace on its own terms. That’s the promise and the power of your “only.”

Free Resource

The Differentiation Guide for Professional Services Firms

Download Now

The post What’s Your “Only”? appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

We conduct research like this for five reasons:

1. To learn about the firms that buy our services
2. To position ourselves as thought leaders
3. To differentiate our firm
4. To provide a well of ideas for content
5. To implicitly make the case for our services

In a moment we will describe each of these reasons. But first let us explain what we mean by research.

When we say research in this context, we mean formal research on your target audience. There are many other kinds of research—market viability research, client satisfaction research, pricing research, to name just a few. While each of these can answer specific questions you may have, they can’t be used in as many ways as audience research.

Why? Because when you conduct research on your audience, you can collect data that will also be interesting to the people you serve.

For example, suppose you are an accounting firm that wants to understand how prospective clients in your region are feeling about the economy. That’s very useful information for you as you plan for growth or decide whether to enter a new market. But those are valuable insights for your clients, as well. Because you are surveying organizations just like them, the information is relevant and meaningful as they do their own planning.

Now let’s turn to the reasons Hinge conducts research. We suspect your reasons would be no different.

Why We Conduct Research (And Why You Should, Too)

1. We learn about the firms that buy our services – Buyer behavior and preferences–how they build their lists of firms to consider, how they whittle down those lists, and how they make their final selection–are always changing. By conducting regular research on our audience, we can see those changes, as well as emerging trends. Equipped with this intel, we can adjust our marketing accordingly.
2. It positions us as thought leaders on a topic our audience actually cares about – When you publish original research you elevate yourself to a different level. At Hinge, our research gives us the data and credibility to claim we understand how high-growth firms market themselves differently. As a result, we are perceived as pioneers and thought leaders in the type of marketing and branding that leads to profitable growth.
3. It differentiates us – Conducting research like this isn’t easy. That’s why so few firms do it. It’s also why the market leaders do. When you offer something valuable that your competitors don’t, it can be a very tangible way to separate your firm from the rest. At the same time, our professional advice and services are supported by real data. Hinge’s research is a pillar of our differentiation strategy.
4. It provides a well of ideas for our content – Content marketing can be difficult for some firms to sustain. When you do audience research, however, you have a deep pool of insights you can dip into to inspire a stream of blog posts, webinars and speeches. Thank you, research!
5. It makes the case for buying our services – Often, prospective clients know they need services like yours, but they struggle to convince the stakeholders in their companies. We hear over and over again how useful our data was in making the case to hire us. And even if a buyer wasn’t considering our firm at first, the fact that we were the ones with the data often put us on the list.

You don’t have to conduct as much research as we do at Hinge to make a difference. Some firms put out a study once a year, or even less often. Like publishing a book, research gives you an opportunity to talk about your firm in a different way—and can change the way people perceive your business. That’s powerful!

The post Why Every Firm Needs Research appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

When asked to explain what makes them different, most firms seem to work from the same playbook. Maybe some of these so-called differentiators sound familiar to you, too:

• Our people are smarter, more senior, more seasoned, more motivated, etc.
• We are more collaborative; we involve the client at every stage
• We provide results faster
• We are trusted advisors
• We have a proprietary process (that isn’t very different from everyone else’s)
• We have the expertise of a big firm but the agility or personal service of a small one
• We are different (no proof)

If everyone is saying the same things, these statements don’t really qualify as differentiators, do they? That’s why I wrote a piece about how to differentiate the not-so-different firm. Most large, established firms, in particular, look and sound alike because as they grow they accumulate new services like apps on a cluttered phone. “Full service” is pretty much the same thing as “undifferentiated.”

Sheer inertia makes big firms almost impossible to differentiate in the classic sense. (Later, I’ll point out some notable exceptions.) Instead, they use their size to their advantage, relying on their breadth of services, vast portfolio of past client work and name recognition to win new business. Many prospective clients find the scope of these firms reassuring. Others, burned before by the bureaucracy, inattention or inefficiencies that sometimes come with size, are looking for something new.

How Smaller Firms Can Outmaneuver the Big Guys

Small and mid-size firms are usually poorly differentiated, too. After all, most were founded by people who left larger firms and are trying to emulate the market leaders they left.

But smaller firms have a tremendous opportunity that the industry titans don’t: They aren’t too big to change. I’m not saying change is easy. In fact, it can be very, very hard. But there is no better way to truly separate your firm from competitors than to pivot and bake your differentiation into your business model.

I call this “true differentiation”—when you can point to one or more features of your business that your competitors can’t claim. W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne have another name for this approach: Blue Ocean Strategy. Whatever you decide to call it, those characteristics must be valuable to your clients. Being different for different’s sake doesn’t cut it.

If lack of differentiation maximizes the number of competitors you face, the goal of true differentiation is to reduce your pool of competitors. At the same time, it greatly simplifies your marketing because you don’t have to chase down so many unproductive leads and opportunities. It snaps your business into sharp focus.

In his book The Brand Flip, strategist and best-selling author Marty Neumeier urges businesses to complete this sentence:

“Our brand is the only _______ that _______.”

He goes on to explain: “In the first blank, put the name of your category (robotics company, online university, fast-food chain). In the second blank put your key differentiator (sells voice-mimicking parrots, makes you the teacher, caters to vegans).”

Most professional services firms would have a devilish time writing this simple sentence. For one thing, it forces you to focus on just one differentiator. And “the only” means nobody else can claim it.

This task may be easier for retail startups or certain technology product firms—companies that offer something unique. But what if you are a traditional consulting firm, construction company, accounting firm or Salesforce integrator? What do you do?

You go back to the drawing board and rethink the way you deliver your business.

That might mean narrowing your focus to serve a very specific audience (“We are the only general contractor that exclusively serves indigenous tribes across North America.”). Or it might mean developing a new way of delivering your services (“We are the only national accounting firm that works on a cloud-based, no-surprises subscription model.”). Or it could mean fundamentally changing your business. (“We are the only Salesforce consulting firm that charges according to the results delivered.”).

If these scenarios sound like fantasy, think again. There are many, many examples of firms—many of them legendary—that have changed their business model to avoid the commoditization trap. IBM, once a hardware business, reinvented itself as a major software and services company. Adobe was one of the earliest major companies to transition from selling boxed software to a cloud-based subscription model. JPMorgan Chase evolved from a traditional bank to a global financial services firm. Apple was once synonymous with personal computers. Today, it is the world’s leading personal device and services company.

Do you have the courage to swerve and take your business into brave new waters? If so, tremendous opportunities await you.

The post The Best Differentiator Is Often the Hardest appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

Here’s the data from the 2026 High Growth Study:

When marketing budgets are tight, it’s easy to think of design as a “nice to have.” But in a marketplace filled with look-alike professional services firms, design can play a pivotal role. It can shape perceptions at a variety of touch points, from your website to your business collateral to your pitch decks and proposals. People encounter your visual identity at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Instead of relying on words alone to persuade and express key brand attributes and benefits, a firm can use design—color, images, layout and typography—to set a tone and help tell its story. By enlisting design as part of its brand strategy, a firm can engage its audience at a raw, emotional level, laying a psychological foundation for a uniquely appealing, powerful brand.

Good design is not just about aesthetics. It is also about differentiation, creating an exciting experience and communicating your firm’s sophistication without using words. When a buyer encounters a well-crafted visual identity, it inspires confidence and signals a high level of credibility and attention to detail.

If your identity looks significantly different from your competitors, your firm immediately stands apart from otherwise similar firms. Color and imagery, in particular, can play a big role in achieving this effect.

Design can also convey your firm’s personality. Are you bold and innovative? Calmly efficient? Confident yet friendly? Fun to work with? The design choices you make can communicate a wide range of attributes and support your positioning.

So much of branding and marketing is about building perceptions. Perceptions that your firm is exceptionally—if not uniquely—qualified to solve a prospective client’s problem. Perceptions that your team will be a perfect fit. Perceptions that you are top experts in your field. Although design can’t communicate these abstract ideas directly, it can create a psychological setting that makes those messages and perceptions plausible and convincing.

In a hypercompetitive marketplace, you need every advantage. And high-quality design provides one more way to capture buyers’ attention and cultivate trust. Best of all, it mostly does its work without any intervention from your team. It can make the messages on your website more compelling, your pitch decks more persuasive and your proposals easier to sign.

The professional services are rife with firms that don’t appreciate the power of design. As a result, buyers have to overcome that hurdle before they can take the next step. (“I’m not encouraged by the look of this website. Hopefully, that’s not a bad sign.”) Inattention to the visual side of your brand just adds unnecessary friction in the selection process.

High-quality design is an investment. But the best-performing firms understand that is money well spent. We are visual beings, and we often draw conclusions unconsciously based on visual cues we encounter. So why take a cue from the market leaders and position your visual brand to deliver the best possible impression?

The post Design: The Unsung Hero of Growth appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

At Hinge, we do a lot of competitive analysis for our our clients. So if you’re unsure on the number of competitors your business has, then our buyer-focused research can supply you with an approximate answer that’s probably not too far off from the truth. 

Let me explain. 

We routinely ask our clients to identify what businesses they compete against. Then in our research process, we ask their clients and prospects to name any firms that they considered or knew about when selecting a service provider. When we average these results over thousands of clients and buyers of their services, we find that there is about a 25% overlap.

This means you probably don’t even know about 75% of the firms you compete against!

Now, if your firm is highly specialized with only a handful of true business competitors, this finding may not apply to you. But for the vast majority of companies, this is a pretty consistent result in our ongoing research.

How can this be? I can think of three reasons. 

Why You Don’t Know Your Competitors as Well as You Think

There are quite a few reasons why it’s difficult to capture an accurate picture of the competitive landscape without conducting more formal competitive analysis research.

First, when you compete for a client or project, you often aren’t told who the other competitors are, especially in the early stages when there might be dozens of firms under consideration. 

Second, the professional services marketplace is packed with look-alike competitors who shower your clients with marketing messages that make it seem like they do what you do. While most of these claims go unheeded, they don’t necessarily go unnoticed. 

Third, firms can be dismissive of competitors they consider inferior or unqualified. “XYZ Group can’t hold a candle to what we do!” Or, “They don’t don’t have the experience to take on a project like that.” Yet these firms often get serious consideration, and sometimes they even win the bid. Never underestimate a company you know little about.

When you factor all these things together, it becomes clearer that the competitive landscape is a bit more complicated than we all imagine.

Free Resource

The Differentiation Guide for Professional Services Firms

Download Now

Why You Need to Know Your Competitors

Let’s turn our attention now to the second question: How important is it that you do some competitive analysis? There are two ways to think about this question. One way is what I just described—who are you really competing against, and does it really matter? 

The other way is to consider how much you actually know about the businesses you compete against. Do you know what they offer? How they talk about themselves? Why do clients hire them? As long as you continue to attract new business, should you even care what your opponents are doing and saying?

In fact, there are many good reasons to keep an eye on your competition. That means knowing both whom you are competing against and how they approach the marketplace. This knowledge can equip you to differentiate your firm. After all, you can’t separate yourself from the crowd if you know little about it. Here are three important ways that understanding your marketplace can help:

1. Messaging – When you are aware of how others present and position their services and products, you can zag and describe yours in a fresh way or with a sharper selling proposition.
2. Branding – How your brand looks can put your firm at a psychological advantage or disadvantage. Visual branding can provide powerful signals that convey credibility, confidence and creativity.
3. Service Offerings – If you offer essentially the same services as your market peers, you might consider introducing a new service or changing the way you deliver some of your existing ones.
4. Marketing Strengths – Where does each of your competitors excel in their go-to-market strategy? Are they proficient in content and digital marketing techniques? What events, conferences, associations and partnerships do they engage with on a regular basis?

Another reason to investigate your competitors is to learn about their weaknesses. Armed with this intel, you can seek out the unoccupied high ground and potentially gain an advantage. You may even be able to uncover some of your rivals’ marketing strategies and performance metrics, which you can use to inform your own approach to marketing.

The Fastest Growing Companies Monitor Their Business Competitors

In addition to these two reasons, Hinge’s High Growth Study has measured that the fastest growing professional services firms are regularly conducting research on their business competitors. We refer to these firms as the High Growth Firms—and the data shows that those who conduct competitive analysis research, do so more frequently than their slower growing peers.

Most of the High Growth Firms who conduct competitive research report that they do so at least quarterly. Whether it’s monitoring the activity of the most direct or large competitors or scanning the marketplace for signs of new competitors entering the space, it’s clear that High Growth Firms have the tools and discipline to keep this as a part of their marketing strategy.

How to Learn About Your Competition

So how do you gather all this information? It requires some competitive research. Research is the only dependable way I know of to get an objective perspective on your marketplace. As that Venn diagram above shows, you can’t depend on your own experiences to deliver a complete and accurate picture. 

Most likely, you’ll need to hire an outside firm or consultant—one that knows your industry and is well versed in competitive research and analysis. They will interview your team and your clients. Then they will review your top competitors and explore their positioning, messaging, service offerings, visual identity and certain marketing performance metrics. 

If you opt to do your own competitive analysis for your team, then create a collaborative, centralized spreadsheet that goes into detail on each of your competitors. Utilize tools like SEMrush and Moz to understand the digital reach of your competitors. Explore the competitor websites and document all you can about their brand positioning and digital marketing strategy. Encourage your team to keep this document updated as you learn more about the competitive landscape.

The post How Well Do You Know Your Business Competitors? appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

One important idea we talk about is the value of specialization. Firms that specialize in an industry, or a group of similar industries, have a competitive advantage and can charge higher fees than their unspecialized competitors. Sometimes they take a different tack, going all-in on a particular service or target audience. There are many variations on this theme.

On the other hand, firms that don’t specialize—and that means most firms—find themselves in a bind. They look a lot like everyone else in their industry, so people have trouble telling them apart. That means nobody stands out, which makes their marketing less effective. And because so many firms sell the same services, buyers have all the leverage in the relationship. That means prices tend to go down, and so does profitability.

There are few ways to win in this situation. You can lower overhead and increase your efficiency. But there’s only so much juice in those lemons. 

Why Buyers Prefer Specialists

Specialists are less affected by commoditization, and buyers just trust them more. That’s because buyers believe—for good reason—that specialists understand their area of expertise better than a generalist. After all, specialized firms are likely to have seen every problem before and are better equipped to fix them. Which means their solution is more likely to be done well and more quickly. 

For these benefits, many buyers are willing to pay a premium. They’ve been burned before by the lowest bidder and they are happy to open their wallets a bit wider to avoid the pain of poor client service and incompetent work. 

Free Resource

The Differentiation Guide for Professional Services Firms

Download Now

The Innovator’s Advantage

Another excellent way to differentiate your firm is through innovation. You hear that word a lot in the professional services. But true innovation is a lot rarer than all that chatter would have you believe. I’m talking about the kind of innovation that will make buyers take notice. It might be a new business model people haven’t seen before, a proprietary new technology that produces never-seen-before results, or something that dramatically—and measurably—improves the client experience. That kind of innovation is hard to achieve. And to be a true differentiator, it must be easy to understand and provable. Most innovations don’t meet these standards.

What if You Can’t Specialize or Innovate?

What if your firm is too big or too set in its ways to specialize or innovate? What if true differentiation like that is simply out of your reach?

There is another path forward. It is not as powerful as having a true differentiator. But this alternative approach can set you apart, nevertheless.

Before I tell you about that approach, it helps to understand why most firms are so similar in the first place.

Why Professional Services Firms Are Alike

Most professional services firms are, by and large, undifferentiated. Some industries, such as accounting, IT and law, are chock full of look-alikes that offer the same set of services to the same audience.

How does this happen? I can think of three ways. 

First, most firms are formed when one or more professionals leave a larger firm to start their own business. These individuals are excellent at delivering the work, but they don’t necessarily know much about business strategy. Rather than focus on a narrow market or change up their business model, they set up a scaled down version of the firm they left. 

Second, as organizations grow they add more and more services and target an ever-expanding range of audiences. That’s because they need a broader range of expertise and experience to compete with their larger competitors for complex projects.

Third, firms love to follow the leaders. From “best practices” to messaging to branding, they like to model themselves after the biggest and most successful organizations in their industry. This instinct produces a clutch of firms that look, sound and operate like clones.

Chances are, one or more of these forces channeled your firm like a river into the broad, bland Undifferentiated Sea. Gulp. Fortunately, there is a way out. 

How to Differentiate the Undifferentiated Firm

If narrowing your focus or innovating in a meaningful way are out of the question, there is still a technique you can use to help prospective buyers see you as different. It involves finding a way to talk about yourself that is both unique and relevant to your target audience.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Know Your Foes

To be different, you need to understand how your competitors talk about themselves. You probably aren’t going to be invited to their sales pitches, but you can still get a good idea of their main themes. The easiest way to do that is to get online and visit each of their websites. 

Visit just two pages: the homepage and About page. On the homepage, look first at the major headlines. What are they prioritizing? How do they talk about their firm? Write it down. Then look for any blocks of text that describe their firm. If you find any, try to pick out any key themes they use to define themselves. Follow a similar approach on the About page. Typically, these pages have a lot more text, but you’ll find the relevant messages in the first paragraph or two.

Follow this process for at least five or six of your top competitors. When you are done, read over your notes and highlight the themes they are using. These are the things you want to avoid in your own messaging. 

Step 2: Look for the Opportunities

This step may be easy or it may be tricky, depending on the hand you have been dealt. Think about your own firm and services and ask yourself a series of questions:

• What are you best at? 
• What do your best clients appreciate most about you? 
• Why do they hire you? 
• What is your value proposition? 
• Is there anything that’s different or special about your firm?
• Do you do something that most firms in your industry don’t

Start a list.

If you have done any client research this is a great place to apply it. In fact, we find that this kind of research can uncover perspectives that you just can’t see from inside your organization. If you haven’t conducted research and you can afford it, I strongly recommend that you do that first, before going through this process. Your final product will be validated and considerably stronger.

Once your list is complete, rule out any of the following:

• The quality of your people
• Your proprietary process (unless it is really, truly different)
• Your client service (unless you can prove that it is truly outstanding)

While you may do the same things as your competitors, they aren’t talking about all of them. They have chosen certain themes to emphasize. As I explained earlier, their points of emphasis are usually well-tread territory that buyers have heard before—messages they’ve adapted from other firms. Your mission is to find messages that neither fall into the commonly used language used in your industry nor overlap with any more-distinctive language used by your top competitors.

Step 3: Draft Your Positioning Statement

Now it’s time to distill your ideas into a coherent statement. Keep it to just a single sentence. That way you’ll be more likely to produce an idea that’s simple enough to be memorable. Below are a few strategies you can try to give your statement some momentum. I’ve also included real-world examples you can use as models:

Strategy 1: Combine Attributes

Look for two or more things you can combine that make you unique, or unique sounding? When you combine the elements can you reasonably call yourself the leader?

Example: We help mid market manufacturing and distribution companies improve their operational efficiency and bottom-line results by making the most of their ERP technology” [combines mid market manufacturers/distributors and ERP technology]

Example: “We are the nation’s leading accounting and research firm for nonprofits and associations” [combines accounting, research, nonprofits and associations]

Strategy 2: Make it Inspirational 

Find a way to appeal to your audience’s emotions and position your firm as inspiring and forward-looking.

Example: “We’ve built our business to address the key milestones at yours—and every critical moment in between” 

Example: “Our goal is to make our communities richer, safer and more resilient—one well-conceived project at a time”

Strategy 3: Connect Your Firm to Something Clients Want 

Think about your client’s biggest business challenges or goals, then tie your services to them.

Example: “We specialize in transforming business data into a formidable competitive advantage”

Example: “We help growth-oriented companies like yours become digital leaders”

Strategy 4: Find a Unique Angle

Look for a way of talking about your business that is surprising, catchy or unusual but still relevant to your clients.

Example: “We believe that all projects, from single-family residences to capital-intensive roads and bridges, are local—requiring local connections, know-how and perspectives to run at peak efficiency”

Example: “A national leadership training and strategy consultancy, we believe in the power of practical”

Once you have your statement, apply it—or some variation on it—to your website, elevator pitch, prospect pitches and marketing materials. If you have done a good job, you’ll start hearing your clients use your language when talking about you. And that can lead to more referrals and greater awareness of your firm in the marketplace.

In some organizations this exercise can be a challenge. Strong personalities, unrecognized biases and resistance to change are common obstacles. In this case, consider using an outside firm to facilitate the process and deliver the differentiated messaging you need.

The post How to Differentiate the Not-So-Different Firm appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

Your Brand Defined

A professional services brand is the product of a firm’s reputation and its visibility in the marketplace. As a result, one way to measure the strength of your brand is with the formula, Reputation  X  Visibility.

Any successful marketing program has to address both of these factors. Your firm’s reputation is not enough. Prospective buyers have to be able to find you. Nor is being highly visible enough. People need to value the services and products you have to sell. 

That means there is another important dimension of your brand, as well: how relevant it is to your target client audience. We’ll explore this point more a bit later, but first let’s explain what we mean when we say brand development.

What is Brand Development?

Brand development is the process of creating and strengthening your professional services brand. When Hinge helps firms develop their brands, we divide the process into three phases.

1. First, we make sure we get your brand strategy right and aligned with your business objectives.
2. Second, we develop all the tools you will need to deliver your brand to the marketplace. This includes a range of things, such as your logo, tagline and website.
3. Finally, we strengthen your new or updated brand. Think of this as a marketing program designed to boost both your reputation and your visibility.

Your brand development strategy is how you go about accomplishing these tasks. To make the task a bit easier to digest, we’ve broken the brand development strategy into 10 steps.

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A 10-Step Brand Development Strategy

1. Consider your overall business strategy

A strong, well differentiated brand will make growing your firm much easier. But what type of firm do you want? Are you planning to grow organically? Your overall business strategy is the context for your brand development strategy, so that’s the place to start. If you are clear about where you want to take your firm, your brand will help you get there. When considering your strategy, consider not only what you will be doing but also what you will not be doing (and who you will not be serving).

2. Identify your target clients

Who are your target clients? If you say “everybody” you are making a very big mistake. Our research clearly shows that high growth, high profit firms are focused on having clearly defined target clients. The narrower your focus, the faster you are more likely to grow. The more diverse your target audience, the more diluted your marketing messaging must be. So how do you know if you have chosen the right target client group? That’s where the next step comes in.

When you focus on a particular target audience—whether it’s an industry (or group of related industries), a role (for example, CEOs) or something else—you become a “specialist.” Specialists are not only differentiated from their non-specialist brethren, they can command higher fees.

3. Research your target client group

Firms that do systematic research on their target client group grow faster and are more profitable (see figure below). Further, those that do research more frequently (at least once per quarter) grow faster still.

Research equips you with several advantages. It helps you understand your target client’s perspective and priorities, anticipate their needs and create messaging that will resonate with them. It can also tell you how your clients perceive your firm’s strengths, weaknesses and overall brand. Equipped with this kind of intelligence, you can dramatically lower the marketing risk associated with brand development.

4. Develop your brand positioning

By this point, you have enough information to determine your firm’s brand positioning (also called market positioning) within your marketplace. How is your firm different from others and why should potential clients within your target audience choose to work with you?

A positioning statement is typically four to six sentences in length and captures the essence of your brand positioning. It must be grounded in reality, as you will have to deliver on what you promise. If your current differentiators are shared by some of your competitors, you can add aspirational language that points to the firm you plan to become. Just make sure that these aspirations are real and achievable.

5. Develop your messaging strategy

Your next step is a messaging strategy that translates your brand positioning into messages you can deliver to your various target audiences. Your target audiences typically include potential clients, potential employees, referral sources or other influencers and potential partnering opportunities, to name a few of the usual suspects.

While your core brand positioning must be the same for all audiences, each audience will be interested in different aspects of it. The messages to each audience will emphasize the most relevant points. Each audience will also have specific concerns that must be addressed, and each will need different types of evidence to support your messages. Your messaging strategy should address all of these needs. This is an important step in making your brand relevant to your target audiences.

Your messaging strategy may include sample headlines, a list of your differentiators, your elevator pitch (adjusted to each audience, if needed) and a messaging architecture document that lays out key messages for each audience, common objections, responses to overcome those objections and any proof points to support your arguments.

6. Develop your name, logo and tagline

For many firms, a name change is not required. But if you are a new firm, are undergoing a merger or are burdened with a name that no longer suits your positioning, a name change may be in order. Even if you don’t change your firm’s name, a new logo and tagline may be required to support your new brand positioning.

Remember, your name, logo and tagline are not your brand. They are components of your brand identity—the visual and verbal expression of your brand. Your logo is a proxy for your brand, but the ideas and emotions the people associate with your brand coalesce from many different touch points.

If you do develop a new name, logo or tagline, keep in mind that they are for your marketplace and should be judged on how well they communicate to your audience. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of looking for solutions that you love or that reflect attributes of an unrelated brand you admire.

7. Develop your content marketing strategy.

We could have called this step “develop your marketing strategy.” But we didn’t. Instead we call for a content marketing strategy.

Why? Content marketing is particularly well suited to professional services firms in the Internet age. It does all things traditional marketing does but it does them more efficiently. In a nutshell, it uses valuable educational content to attract, nurture and qualify prospects.

Remember that your brand strength is driven by both your reputation and visibility. Increasing visibility alone, without strengthening your reputation, is rarely successful. That’s why traditional “awareness-building” advertising or sponsorships so often yield disappointing results. On the other hand, content marketing increases both visibility and reputation at the same time. It is also the perfect way to make your brand relevant to your target audiences.

8. Develop your website.

Your website is arguably your single most important brand development tool. It is the place where all your audiences turn to learn what you do, how you do it and who your clients are. Prospective clients are not likely to choose your firm solely based on your website. But they may well rule you out if your site sends the wrong message.

Further, your website will be home to your valuable content. That content will become the focus of your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts so that prospects, potential employees and referral sources can find you and learn about your expertise and your firm. Online content is central to any modern brand development strategy.

Professional services websites come in two types. The first is a branding site, which tells your story and describes who you are, who you serve and what you do. In short, it conveys your brand message. The second type does all of the above and also generates leads, builds engagement and moves prospects toward a sale. We call these High Performance Websites.

9. Build your marketing toolkit. 

The next step in the process is to build out the remainder of your marketing toolkit. This might include one-page sales sheets that describe core services offerings or key markets served. In addition, you may need a pitch deck and/or brochure that provides a concise overview of your firm and your key offerings.  These pieces are rarely printed anymore, but if you attend in-person events and conferences, you may want printed marketing collateral on hand.

Increasingly, this marketing toolkit also includes videos. Popular video topics include firm overviews, case studies and “meet the partner” videos. If prepared appropriately, these tools serve not only a business development function but can also enhance your brand.

10. Implement, track, and adjust.

The final step in the brand development process may be one of the most important. A winning brand development strategy doesn’t do much good if it is never implemented.  You might be surprised how often that happens. A firm develops a solid strategy with all the good intentions it can muster. Then reality intervenes. People get busy with client work and brand development tasks get put off… then forgotten.

That’s why tracking is so important. We strongly recommend tracking both the implementation of the plan and results. Did the strategy get implemented as planned? What happened with the objective measures, such as search traffic and web visitors? How many new leads, employee applications and partnering opportunities were generated? Only by tracking the entire process can you make sure you are drawing the right conclusions and making the right adjustments.

There you have it — a 10 step brand development process to drive the growth and profitability of your firm. As you review this article, ask yourself how strong your firm’s brand is and what you need to do to make it more differentiated, visible and engaging.

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A Brand Development Example

Let’s consider the following real-world example of brand development. Heller Consulting is a technology consulting firm for nonprofits that approached Hinge when their marketing program was not delivering the results they desired. As a brand, they struggled to define themselves in the marketplace. 

We began our engagement with research  to understand how Heller was perceived by their prospects and clients. One discovery from this research was that their brand had unintentionally developed a narrow reputation as fundraising technology experts. They wanted to be known for more. With this brand research in hand, we were ready to proceed to the next phase of the brand development process.

We used what we learned about their firm’s strengths and how they compared to the competitive landscape to develop a set of key differentiators. This exercise led to the development of a compact positioning statement and persuasive messaging they could use in all their marketing materials. 

One of the key areas where this new marketing language needed to be reflected was on the Heller website. Hinge helped Heller redevelop their website for an improved user experience and to incorporate they new positioning and messaging. We also made it easier to find and consume their thought leadership—gating the most valuable content to help turn web visitors into leads. It was now easier than ever for Heller to be identified and known as a thought leader in their space.

The results? Heller experienced a 400% increase in website conversions and a 50% increase in organic search traffic after a two year period. “Hinge gave us the foundation for a powerful, long-term marketing program,” said Heller COO Smita Vadakekalam.

The post Brand Development Strategy: 10 Essential Steps for Your Professional Services Firm appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

The rise of digital marketing has changed the way firms differentiate themselves from an ever-growing list of competitors. And today, more and more companies find themselves competing on cost. 

Yet, brand differentiation remains one of the most poorly understood pillars of professional services marketing.

Finding the right differentiators for your professional services firm is not always an easy task. Many firms promote “differentiators” that don’t differentiate them at all—in fact, these so-called differentiators often make them sound more like their competitors.

In this article, we explain how differentiation works, and we provide examples of strong professional services differentiators that you can use to sharpen your own firm’s brand positioning.

What is a Differentiator?

A differentiator is any characteristic of your firm that separates you from key competitors and gives you a perceived advantage in the eyes of your target audience. To be a valid differentiator, it should pass three tests, which we cover in the next section.

Differentiators are often part of an overall differentiation strategy, which is a deliberate plan to make it stand out from otherwise similar competitors. 

Developing your firm’s differentiation strategy is an important way to avoid the commodity trap and always  compete on price with your competitors. Strong differentiators will shine a light on important ways you deliver value to your clients. But how can you evaluate if a differentiator is strong or not? Let’s explore this topic briefly.

How to Evaluate a Differentiator

To test if a differentiator is effective, a it must meet three important criteria:

1. It must be true. You can’t simply make up a differentiator in order to appeal to prospects. This could damage your reputation. A differentiator may be aspirational, however—as long as you are taking serious measures to make it come true in the near future.
   
2. It must be relevant to potential clients. If your differentiators do not matter to your prospects, they will quickly lose interest and move on to a competitor that speaks to their issues.
   
3. It must be provable. Differentiators can be relevant and true but if you don’t support them with evidence prospects will remain skeptical. It’s important to support your differentiators in ways that your buyers can understand.

The sad reality is that  many differentiators fail on at least two of these criteria. But take heart. There are many successful ways to differentiate your firm. 

In fact, we’ve developed a list of twenty-one examples you can use to brainstorm possible differentiators for your firm.

21 Top Differentiators for Professional Services Firms

Here are twenty-one differentiators that work for many professional services firms. It’s important to note that you can have multiple differentiators at your firm. Moreover, they can be combined to create a powerful competitive advantage.

Review these differentiation examples and speak with your team about how they may be adapted to work at your company.

1. Specialize in an industry.

This is perhaps the easiest and most successful differentiator for most firms. Clients value the specialist in their industry. But be careful. If you try to specialize in too many industries, you will lose credibility.

2. Specialize in serving a specific role within your client’s organization.

This role-based specialization is also quite successful, especially if combined with an industry focus. If you are head of IT at a law firm, it’s comforting to know that your service provider specializes in helping technology officers just like you.

3. Specialize in offering a particular service.

This approach can be quite successful, especially if the service you specialize in is hard to find. But beware, unique service offerings can quickly become mainstream. Witness Sarbanes-Oxley compliance or social media marketing as two recent examples.

4. Offer a truly unique technology or process.

By truly unique, we do not mean your process that starts with assessment and ends with monitoring results and making adjustments. We mean an approach that is a whole different way of approaching the problem and offers a unique benefit to the client.

5. Focus on understanding a particular target audience.

A key differentiator for some firms is their in-depth understanding of a particular audience. Your firm might specialize in marketing to Baby Boomer women. Your clients might be retirement planners, insurance companies, or clothing retailers, for example.

6. Specialize in serving clients of a certain size.

This is a common differentiator, although some folks don’t think of it as such. Perhaps you work exclusively with the largest companies in the world. Contrast that with a firm that focuses on solo practitioners. Either firm could have a competitive advantage over a firm that serves clients of all sizes.

7. All of your staff shares a specific characteristic or credential.

Everyone feels like they have a great team. So it’s tough to make that stick as a differentiator. But what if all of your programmers hold PhDs in computer science? That is both provable and meaningful to a potential client. Or perhaps all your project managers are PMPs. Not as distinctive, but also provable and relevant.

8. Specialize in clients that share a common characteristic.

This differentiator is focused on a characteristic of your clients other than their industry or role. Let’s say you provide accounting and tax services for expatriates. They might be from any country, in any industry or any corporate role, yet you will have a competitive advantage.

9. Focus on solving a specific business challenge.

Here, the spotlight is not on the client as much as on the nature of the business challenge they are facing. To work, it must be a challenge that is easily recognized and tough to solve without specialized skills and experience. Helping firms secure their first government contract is an example.

10. Have one or more individuals who are Visible Experts® in their fields.

This is a time-tested strategy that works very well. Having the country’s top expert in your specialty is a very powerful competitive advantage. Many firms have been built on this differentiator alone. Add multiple high visibility experts and you will have a compelling and very valuable brand.

11. Offer a unique business model.

Everyone in your profession bills by the hour, but you offer a fixed fee. Voilà, a perfect differentiator is born! A unique business model can be both meaningful and easy to prove. But be watchful. If it works well, you are likely to accumulate imitators.

12. Have a specific geographic focus.

This is a very traditional differentiator that is losing some of its punch as technology, remote work and changes in common business practices are making geography less important. But take heart, it can still work in situations where local knowledge or face-to-face interaction is vitally important to clients.

13. Offer access to a unique set of information not available elsewhere.

Sometimes, access to certain information can be very valuable to potential clients. Do you have benchmarking data that no one else possesses? Some firms have built very valuable practices around proprietary data that isn’t easily duplicated.

14. Offer a unique set of contacts or relationships not easily accessible.

While the previous differentiator focused on information, this one is focused on relationships. Public relations firms have long used relationships with reporters and editors as differentiators. What relationships can your firm bring to the table?

15. Do business with a distinctive level of service.

In most cases, offering good client service is simply the price of entry. Everyone does it, or claims to. So to become a differentiator, your level of service has to truly stand out. Can it be done? Indeed, there are still some physicians who make house calls.

16. Distinguish yourself by the clients you have.

Having an impressive client list is a plus for many firms. But what if you take it further? Some firms differentiate themselves based on their client list. For example, if your firm serves the higher education market and your clients include Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, you have a key differentiator.

17. Focus on the size of your firm.

We are the largest… fill in the blank. Size sends a signal that you are doing something right in the minds of many potential clients. This combines nicely with a specialization to show both relevance (the specialty) as well as success (the largest). Find a niche and dominate it.

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18.  Emphasize your relationship with a parent firm or partner.

A close relationship with a parent firm can be a limiter (potential clients may feel like you cannot be objective about other technologies for example). But for other potential clients, it can be a big asset. Who knows the ins and outs of the technology better? This same differentiator might also be applied to situations where your firm is a value-added partner rather than a subsidiary.

19. Focus on a notable signature accomplishment.

Some firms can build a strong brand upon a notable accomplishment. Firms that invented a technology or solved a highly visible problem for a very well-known client are good examples. (One of our clients built the launchpads that sent NASA’s astronauts to the moon.) This type of notoriety can be leveraged throughout the industry and over time.

20. Specialize in producing a unique or very valuable result.

Similar to number 9, where you focus on a notable business challenge, this differentiator focuses on a valuable result. The key difference is that you may need to overcome multiple business challenges to produce a valuable result. For example, you might specialize in turning average growth clients into high-growth firms. This could involve solving a wide range of business challenges, rather than a single one.

21. Look or act differently than all of your competitors.

Most professional services firms tend to look and act a lot like their competitors. Why? Perhaps you have been in the industry for a long time. Or perhaps doing things very differently feels risky. We see this all the time. Well, a very different look and feel can be a powerful differentiator for this exact reason. Combine this with other differentiators and you have the makings of a robust competitive advantage.

There you have it—21 differentiators that can pass the three hurdles that every differentiator must clear. And remember, these can be combined in ways that make your firm unique in a way that no single differentiator can.

The post Top 21 Examples of Key Differentiators for Professional Services Firms appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

Yet most firms get it all wrong.

They don’t understand that being different means being exposed and a little vulnerable. After all, to stand out means you no longer fit in. Instead, most firms look to others in their industry for inspiration and adopt words and ideas and images that feel comfortable. Meet the not-so-differentiated firms.

They are everywhere, so why not learn from their mistakes? In this post, we’re going to focus on the worst offenders: a dozen so-called differentiators that haunt professional services firms like bats—and suck the life out of otherwise promising brands. 

You’ll find the “differentiators” below promoted on the websites and marketing collateral of firms of every stripe. And if you spot some of these in your own messaging, take heart—you’re in good company. At least you will be aware of the problems—and can take steps to address them.

Okay, pinch your nose. We’re jumping in.

12 Not-So-Fresh “Differentiators”

1. Best People

Sure, professional services firms are only as good as their people. But unless you can point to a tangible way your people are better than everyone else’s (for instance, “we hire only PhDs”), you will slip into the featureless sea of firms that make the same, difficult-to-substantiate claim. 

2. Great Client Service

The problem with client service is you can’t evaluate it until you experience it. It’s just too easy for a firm to claim great service (as many do) without putting in the work to deliver it on a consistent basis. And because so many buyers have been burned by poor service in the past, they sure aren’t going to take your word for it. Unless you can prove up front that your service is superior, find a stronger differentiator to promote.

3. Full Service

Offering a broad range of services may seem like a good way to generate more revenue, but it’s a marketing cul-de-sac. In a crowded marketplace, specialists have the advantage—firms that are willing to sacrifice breadth of services for depth of knowledge. Many clients will pay a premium for a firm they believe can solve their problems more quickly and reliably.

4. Best Value

If you are touting your firm as the “best value,” you are in a low-margin commodity business—a tough way to make a living unless you are great at cutting costs and extracting every efficiency. If you want to improve your margins and grow faster, however, there are better ways to position your firm. 

5. Proprietary Process

In my experience, every other firm on the planet claims it has a proprietary process. But when you dig deeper you’ll find that most of these processes are variations on a theme, if not outright identical to processes at other firms. Today’s buyers are not fooled. They no longer swoon at a provider’s “unique methodology.” Describe your process however you like, but don’t call it a differentiator unless it truly breaks new ground.

6. Putting Clients First

Clients expect exceptional treatment and see this as a given. Make a big deal about it and your credibility is likely to suffer rather than grow. 

7. Committed to Excellence

Is any word less alive than “excellence”? By all means, read Tom Peters’ book and build an excellent firm, but don’t bother talking about it. Not even the crickets will listen.

8. Innovation

Innovation is one of the most overused words in business today—and buyers aren’t buying it. If, unlike most firms that use the word, you do truly innovative work, then find different, fresher language to describe it. 

9. Passion

So you’re passionate about your work, your mission or your clients? So what? Prospective clients aren’t impressed by abstract notions like passion. Instead, they swoon at tangible, proveable things like past performance, relevant experience, numerical results and specialized expertise. 

10. Trusted Advisors

Since David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford popularized the term “trusted advisor” in their 2001 book, thousands of management consultancies, CPA firms and other trust-based organizations have embraced these words. As a result of this overexposure, these words have lost their luster among prospective buyers and are shoe-ins to the Hall of Clichés.

11. Quality

Every buyer assumes you do quality work, so you don’t need to harp on it. Quality is no longer job one; it’s the price of admission. If you are talking to prospects about quality, you must not have much of interest to say. Time to revisit your positioning.

12. Your Partner

While some buyers are in fact looking for a long-term business partnership, that’s a level of trust that can only be earned over time. Get past the first date and build a relationship before you propose marriage. Saying that you partner with your clients is as presumptuous as it is premature.

Once upon a time, these messages may have been fresh, but now—like a dried-up well—they have nothing to offer us. Yet these words (and their variants) are everywhere. They’ve become clichés. But there are many principals who’d rather their firms fit in than stand apart. The familiarity of these false differentiators is comforting, and their positive attributes feel safe and affirmative. 

Here’s the problem: there is nothing more risky in business than playing it safe. There is no such thing as safety in numbers—by following the herd you invite a fatal trampling. Your best play is to step away from the crowd and play up your differences (Below are some resources to help you in this regard). You see, when you are different, you become easier to find, notice and remember. And many buyers will be willing to pay more for the specialized expertise you bring to the table. 

Here are a few simple questions to ask yourself when thinking about your differentiators.

The post The 12 Worst Differentiators for Professional Services Firms appeared first on Hinge Marketing.