The concept of brand positioning for the professional services industry is just as important as the business itself, because today’s professional services marketplace is more crowded than ever. Buyers have a bewildering array of firms to choose from, and with the rise of the Internet, local firms are contending with companies across the nation, if not the world.

Certain questions that arise are: What can a firm do? How can they compete when there is barely any room to breathe? That is where brand positioning comes into play. Aaron Branding’s professional services brand consultancy can help your firm carve out a place in the minds of potential customers through effective brand positioning and strategy.

5 Types of Brand Positioning Strategy

Our brand consulting firm in London utilises positioning strategies that take many forms, but not all are appropriate for professional services firms. Below are five strategies that are most relevant to positioning a professional services firm like yours:

1. Cost-driven positioning. The message is, “We offer everything those other firms do, but we cost less.” This is a very challenging strategy unless you have an inherent cost advantage. Technology can be your tool if you are using it more effectively than your competitors or your worst enemy if you are behind others in a cost-driven strategy.
2. Niche service specialisation. In this approach, you focus on offering a service that is not widely offered by your competitors. You offer specialised expertise that, presumably, the average practitioner would not have. This approach can work well unless the service begins to generate strong demand and new competitors emerge to dilute your “uniqueness”
3. Industry specialisation. This is a popular and often effective way to position a professional services firm. It is another form of specialised expertise, and it allows you to tightly focus your marketing and evolve your services as your market changes. The implication of industry specialisation is that your firm has deep experience working with similar businesses. This approach comes with risks, however. If your industry experiences an economic decline, your fortunes may follow.
4. Role-focused specialisation. A message like, “We help CEOs succeed” is an example of role-focussed positioning — targeting a particular function in the organisation. Instead of specialising in a particular industry or service, you target a niche group of people. These buyers will perceive you as more tuned in to their needs and expectations that you offer specific knowledge or expertise that will make their job easier.
5. Quality of service positioning. This is one of the most utilised strategies implemented by professional services firms, and more often than not, it is one of the least effective. Messages like, “Nobody’s more committed to quality,” “we deliver the best service” and similar messages are so ubiquitous in the marketplace that they consistently fail to impress buyers.

Conclusion

Our brand consulting from in London has encountered a plethora of  professional services firms that are poorly positioned in the marketplace. They typically believe that they can get more clients by opening their arms wide to everyone — the broader their reach, the more business will float into their embrace. But that is rarely ever the case. Spanning all the way to our extension branding agency in Dubai, we have consistently observed that  when buyers look around and see awkwardly splayed arms everywhere, they have nowhere to gravitate.

That’s why we stress the importance of having a great brand positioning strategy. It gives your prospects something to get interested in — and will ultimately convince them to buy from you. If your firm isn’t positioned to consistently attract premium clients, just remember. You’re not alone. Any firm can sharpen its positioning and build an enviable competitive advantage. All it takes is a little courage to take the first step.

If every organisation is claiming that they are innovative, what does that really say? These days innovation is pervasive, it is hard to get beyond the word and stay ahead of its definition. If you are the leader of an organisation, you are at length responsible for setting the stage and tone for creative thinking. There are a multitude of ways to nurture creativity within your organisation, but certain strategies have proven more effective than others.

Innovation Requires Time

The big question is, how much time does it require? Our branding agency in Dubai has seen different companies do it in different ways. One way is the 15% culture, where employees dedicate 15% of their time to innovative thinking. From this strategy, the company 3M came up with the Post-It note.

Taking it further, Google allocates 20% of an employee’s time to be dedicated to innovation, and as a result, their employees have successfully established Gmail and Google Earth.

Innovation Requires Space

Our brand and design consultancy in London has observed that a culture of innovation often stems from people being comfortable in their own workspaces. Providing such spaces for thinking outside of the box effectively encourages innovation amongst your workforce. Companies like Zappos have optimised its campus for innovation by giving employees various workspace options like a rooftop patio, a miniature golf course, and perhaps most importantly, a nap room.

Innovation Required Recognition

Leadership is vital to innovation because if they want innovation to play a key role in their organisations, elevating it has to be among their top priorities. This means that they have to go beyond talking about it, and openly reward those that are doing it. Our financial services brand consultancy has witnessed some companies offer compensation and gifts for those who demonstrate progressive ideas, and doing so acknowledges the importance of innovation throughout their organisations.

Innovation Requires Interaction

In order to innovate at an organisational level, leaders must make a conscious effort to inspire it at a personal level too. As a professional services brand consultancy, we have acknowledged that dialogue is important because innovation can be inspired by conversation. Rather than challenging ideas, leaders should allow people to openly share them and leaders should actively listen without judgment.

In Conclusion.

Finally, remember that innovation doesn’t happen; it must be led. The right leadership teams can ensure that innovation thrives by giving it the time, space, recognition, and interaction it deserves to permeate throughout the organisation and truly drive change.

If your company has been around for more than a couple of years, chances are your website is hosting heaps of published content. Chances are much of that content no longer helps your audience and your brand due to it being outdated or irrelevant. In the event that your company is based in the Middle East and you are working in tandem with a brand design agency in Abu Dhabi, you will definitely want to confer with them and take action after reading this blog.

The question really is, does it hurt anything? According to the SEO experts in our brand design agency in London, the answer to this is YES! Old content can definitely have a negative impact on your content’s search rankings and visitors’ experience. One example of this might be that your published content may link to articles, research reports, or other useful web pages that may now be offline. Clicking on any of those links may lead to non functioning pages, which will in turn hurt your search performance, because Google frowns on it and real readers won’t appreciate them either.

Another thing to consider when it comes to old content is that the topics may no longer fit your current content or business strategy and you would be better off not having any of those turn up in a search.

Still, many brands out there are hesitant when it comes to deleting old content, but the results are often surprisingly positive. For instance, HubSpot deleted over 3000 outdated content pieces and in a matter of months, the company saw an improvement in its SEO results.

Here are a few direct steps put together by Aeron’s branding design agency in Riyadh that will help you fix outdated content and boost your search scores:

1. Start with a content audit.
2. Update and republish good but old content.
3. Delete references to outdated stats in the content you’re keeping.
4. Weave in new SEO keywords and links.

Wrap Up

Cleaning up old content and making it relevant to your target audience once again takes a bit of work and time, but it is well worth the effort. Getting rid of content that no longer works and updating what does can do wonders for your content marketing strategy.

It is a chance for you to improve organic traffic to your site without investing in fresh content, and you’ll better serve your audience’s needs. Try these strategies for yourself and see the results or contact our Branding Agency Dubai and we will be happy to assist you in boosting your search scores!