Here goes: Artificial intelligence is transforming professional services website strategy.

Only it’s not happening in the way you think. I’m not talking about sophisticated chatbots or other on-site AI tech. I’m not talking about how firms use ChatGPT or Claude to write the copy. In fact, I’m not talking about the way sites use AI at all.

Instead, I’m referring to the way people find websites. It wasn’t that long ago that the most common entry point to any given firm’s website was not their homepage or services pages. It was their blog. And while that often is still true today, the story is changing rapidly.

How AI Search Has Turned Web Strategy on its Head

The amount of this type of traffic is in sharp decline. Traditional search engine optimization allowed firms to build visibility around their expert content. While that still works (for now), it is steadily becoming less potent.

Most people still head to Google, Bing and other search engines to find answers. In fact, they use search engines 20 times more often than AI chatbots to do research and answer questions. But that delta is getting smaller each year.

You only need to look at your own web traffic reports to see that organic web traffic has been eroding year after year. Innovations such as AI overviews and answer engines are supplying the information most people are searching for without requiring an additional click to read an article.

Some buyers are even asking these fast, convenient new tools to recommend service providers—not understanding (or caring?) how opaque the behind-the-scenes evaluation criteria and process are.

If the number of people who actually scroll past Google’s AI Overview and ads to click on a website link is shrinking, that means fewer people are actually reaching your firm through your expert content. In fact, fewer people are visiting your website, period.

Most AI Traffic Is Invisible—and Chaotic

We know that AI-driven traffic is growing. But in our analytics tools, we can only see a very small slice of that traffic. AI responses provide only a few sources, if any, and many users never click any of them. And even when somebody clicks one of those links there is no guarantee it will be correctly attributed to the AI source in analytics.

Add on top of that the fact that people don’t make decisions in a linear fashion. Research by SparkToro and Similarweb has shown that the buyer journey is not this:

prompt AI > visit a website > buy product or service

Instead, it involves many disconnected steps that we cannot see or track, often including separate Google searches to validate the results and expand the search. Also, the time between initial query and final outreach can be many weeks or months.

Traditional Web Strategy Isn’t Working Like It Used To

A traditional web strategy goes something like this: You use SEO to attract a lot of visitors to your blog posts and other educational content. In your posts, you promote more in-depth free gated content to capture their email address. Then you use email marketing to feed your visitors more high-quality, relevant content. Over time, a certain percentage will become true fans, trust your expertise, and prefer your firm over others. When it’s time to buy, the decision is easy.

This approach worked beautifully for years. Then AI diverted the water and the roaring river of web visitors began to subside and run dry. The strategy, while still fundamentally sound in some ways, needs a rethink because the old SEO audience is evaporating. (Though it is unlikely to go away entirely, at least for the time being.) Now, people are taking other routes to reach firms’ websites.

The Return of Old-Style Marketing

In a way, AI has turned back the clock. Marketing in this new age is as much about gaining old-fashioned exposure—what some might call brand awareness or public relations—as it is about optimizing your marketing stack. A recent survey of marketers and owners showed that the top factor influencing a company’s visibility in AI is brand mentions.

How do you get brand mentions? Through PR, personal connections and brand visibility.

In a digital marketing world where you can no longer see how a significant portion of your traffic arrives at your website, visibility is crucial. The more familiar your audience is with you, the more likely they are to remember and think of you when it matters most.

In this environment, your website doesn’t need to change dramatically, but its role is different.

The Website’s New Place in Marketing

It is time to think of your website less as the central driver of your marketing machine and more as a primary character in a larger marketing play. Content Marketing and SEO are still critical. But they now have to cater not only to a traditional search engine audience but also to a new, more shadowy AI search audience.

As before, you should continue to configure your website with relevant offers and gated content to convert visitors into contacts. Email marketing remains very effective so long as recipients know you, consent to receive your emails and are sent educational material they find useful.

You may also want to begin optimizing your content and some of your services pages for AI search. Keep in mind that marketing experts are still teasing out the rules of this game and there is plenty of disagreement about what works and what doesn’t.

If, however, sustained growth is your objective, you need to look beyond SEO, AI search and traditional marketing techniques like networking to build visibility. This may mean expanding your repertoire to include actively networking on social media, producing videos and webinars, soliciting media and influencer coverage, asking clients to write online reviews—and, importantly, determining where your audiences go to get information about their business problems. Once you know where your clients and prospects seek out business information, you can tailor your marketing program to be visible and helpful in those channels.

The term “multichannel marketing” has been around for decades. But never has it been more relevant or urgent to firms of all sizes. That means marketing is more complex than ever, and the website is just one piece—albeit a crucial one—of an integrated strategy.

Just a few years ago, a firm’s website combined with a strong content marketing initiative could carry much of the weight of its marketing program. AI and Google have changed the rules. The result is less visibility, which you must make up for in other ways.

Don’t misunderstand. Content marketing and SEO—and now AI search optimization—are as important as ever. Your expert content lays the foundation for your reputation. At the same time, it continues to draw in a flow of new visitors from online search. Even if this flow is diminished, these visitors tend to be of high quality and convert at a higher rate than before the SEO collapse.

But you need additional sources of visibility, like those I mention above, to address the habits of the modern buyer. Ultimately, your website is where your wider marketing program should send people. At that point, its role hasn’t changed: to inform, validate and persuade.

The post Why AI Is Changing Website Strategy appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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But a question arises: How do they talk about AI in their marketing? And should they position themselves as an AI-centric firm?

I’m going to give away my answer up front. Then I’ll explain my thinking and propose a path forward.

In most cases, my advice is no, you should not make AI the centerpiece of your positioning or marketing messaging.

While there are exceptions—for instance, you sell an innovative AI product or have an all-new process that could only be delivered with artificial intelligence—the vast majority of firms should think carefully about how they talk about AI.

Why? For one thing, and this is probably my biggest reason, AI is everywhere in business already. And it’s only going to spread more widely as the technology matures and easy-to-use solutions emerge. In other words, what seems special today is likely to look ordinary tomorrow. Even the true leaders in AI adoption may find the noise drowns out their differentiators. Frankly, it’s expected that today’s firms use AI—so staking a claim around it as a differentiator can create the impression of being late to the game.

Second is AI fatigue. I don’t know about you, but I can’t absorb the national or business news without being inundated with scores of articles about AI. I often skip right over stories that once might have piqued my curiosity. Overexposure makes people jaded. And that’s a problem for the AI-focused firm.

Third, with so many firms touting their AI prowess, some buyers may eye these claims with suspicion. Are these guys the real deal, or are they just pretenders?

Finally, there’s what the French might call l’éléphant dans le salon. A lot of people simply don’t trust AI. They have experienced AI hallucinations first-hand. And they have read about AI agents behaving badly and grim doomsday scenarios. Everywhere you look, there is a great deal of skepticism about this technology.

If you want to position your firm directly around AI, you’ll need a plan to address these challenges. Hopefully, you will be speaking to a sophisticated audience that understands the difference between the specialized AI you use and the LLMs that have captured the attention of the world. But you never know for certain. If you keep these four perspectives in mind as you craft your messages, you can write them with real-world concern in mind.

Most firms, however, would do better to avoid branding their business as AI-forward. This is not to say you should avoid AI. Nor am I suggesting you avoid talking about it altogether. Rather, I’m recommending that you avoid saying you use AI everywhere.

Instead, use a light hand when you refer to AI in your firm and service descriptions. For example, you might describe how the technology is enhancing your professionals’ expertise. How it helps you do your work faster and with greater accuracy. How it allows you to work with more data and extract greater insights from it. How you can automate previously expensive, laborious tasks. How you can produce more robust deliverables. You get the point.

Note how these messages are both specific and address people’s natural skepticism. They speak directly to questions such as accuracy, precision and cost—and present them as benefits.

Remember, AI probably isn’t the thing that makes you different. It’s the thing that makes you even better at what you are known for.

The post Should You Position Your Firm as “AI-Forward”? appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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Key decision makers in your leadership team treat marketing as an afterthought. Business is humming along on referrals and networking, after all. So what’s the urgency? Oh, and finding qualified professionals to handle an influx of new business is really tough in this marketplace, anyway.

You, however, know better. Times are a-changing. Marketing is how you combat difficult times ahead. Even the leaders in your industry don’t rest on their laurels. In fact, they are among the most aggressive marketers. But nobody wants to listen.

I’ve run into variations on this theme throughout my career. Whether you are a marketing director frustrated with a leadership team that’s set in its ways, or part of an executive team that largely doesn’t believe marketing delivers results, you are left with the same question:

“How do I make them see the light?”

The first thing you need to do is try to understand their objections. Are they concerned primarily about cost? Do they think marketing is unnecessary? Or do they think it won’t work for your firm? Are they more focused on retirement and protecting capital than building the business? Maybe they aren’t interested in growth and just want to maintain the status quo.

As you can see, some objections may have straightforward answers while others may never be said aloud. Ask questions (but maybe not the imprudent ones). Observe. Then draw your own conclusions.

Once you have an idea of what the problem is, you can develop a strategy to counter it.

First, speak their language. The leadership team is going to be a lot less impressed by talk of LinkedIn followers and content marketing than by the results a well-conceived, modern marketing program can deliver.

Talk instead in terms of metrics. At Hinge, we think of metrics as falling into one of three categories:

1. Visibility—These metrics quantify how likely your firm is to be seen and considered. They include indices such as website traffic quality, SEO rankings, AI search findability and brand mentions in the media and online.
2. Expertise—How accessible and authoritative is your firm’s expertise? These metrics track to what degree people seek out your firm’s thought leadership, including blog traffic, podcast interviews, speaking engagements, email list growth, social media followers and gated content downloads.
3. Impact—These metrics present direct business outcomes, such as shortened sales cycles, higher average contract values, increased proposal volume and improvements in win rate, profitability and overall firm growth. While these metrics often can’t be directly attributed to specific marketing activities, they can be generally correlated with changes you make to your program.

Explain how metrics are the foundation of a modern marketing strategy. More than a dashboard, they will tell you what levers to pull on harder and which ones to abandon. Marketing is designed to deliver certain outcomes, and metrics let you know if you are achieving them.

Next, you need to address the related issues of change and risk. You can cite Hinge’s 2026 High Growth Study: two of the top three challenges faced by professional services firms today are marketplace unpredictability and increased competition.

If you aren’t planning for change, you are taking on risk like an open boat takes on water in a storm. One minute you are safely afloat, the next you aren’t.

If your firm relies heavily on referrals, you should make the point that referrals have been in decline for at least two decades. Buyers of services routinely look online for experts who can solve their problems. Many are turning to AI to recommend service providers. If you aren’t where these new buyers are looking, you are invisible.

Now, you need to connect the issue of risk to metrics. Marketing metrics can show you how much risk you are assuming. And marketing strategy is the way you lower that risk and steer your firm toward more favorable waters. By investing in marketing, you aren’t throwing money away. You are guiding the firm’s future.

Even if your goal isn’t growth, marketing gives you more tools to weather a changing marketplace and economic downturns. It can also elevate the perceived value of your services. For example, when you have what we call Visible Experts^® on your team, they can often command premium fees. Even better, your firm’s value usually rises with them (this is called the halo effect).

What about the objection around hiring? Marketing is the answer! In fact, it’s probably the only answer. A whole discipline called employer branding has grown up to address this need. But regular marketing can do wonders, too. When your firm becomes more visible and reputable, prospective employees are more likely to find you and express interest in working for you.

Using the framework above, you can help key stakeholders understand what marketing is and why it is an essential tool to mitigate risk and achieve your business goals with consistency. By making reporting on your marketing activities a regular feature of your executive meetings, you can show how they affect real business outcomes. This discipline will build expertise—and confidence in the system.

Marketing costs a great deal of time and money. The most successful firms know this, and they invest twice as much as their no-growth counterparts. Clearly they know something that many firm leaders do not.

Fortunately, it’s never too late to learn.

The post How to Sell Marketing … To Your Executive Team appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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Today, I’m going to give you a little back story on this ongoing project and explain why we invest so much in it. I also want you to think about whether it could be a model for your own marketing.

Way back in 2008, Hinge partner and former academic researcher, Lee Frederiksen, published our first marketing research study, Defying Gravity. It surveyed 100 firm CEOs and covered topics such as marketplace challenges, competitive strategies and factors driving success.

But what made it special was its focus on high-growth firms.

These firms grew 9 times faster than their competitors and were 50% more profitable—and at the time they spent far less on marketing. How did they do it? That’s what we set out to discover.

We soon followed up with our first book, Spiraling Up, which expanded on the lessons we learned—and helped build Hinge’s reputation as an innovative, research-forward marketing firm.

Each year, we published more research on topics of interest to our audience (such as buyer behavior, firm valuations and employer branding), but we kept returning to the theme of high-growth firms and what drives their success. The concept resonated with clients and prospects.

And frankly, we wanted to know what made these firms so successful, too.

Then in 2015, we decided to systematize our study of the professional services marketing environment and the elite firms that outperform their peers. Every year since, we have published a new High Growth Study edition, including breakout reports for key industries.

The study has been a boon for our reputation and business. As I (and others) have long pointed out, research that is broadly relevant to your audience—so-called “research as content”—can be a very powerful marketing and business development tool.

Leaders in virtually every industry have known this for years. They are often known for their research—and sought out for the deeper understanding research brings to their work.

But research is not just for the industry giants. Hinge is living proof of that. Many smaller firms produce important studies that benefit their audiences and themselves. Is it a significant investment? Yes. Is it hard work? Yes. But the payoff can be significant.

In the case of my firm, research has become part of Hinge’s DNA—and a key factor that differentiates us from competitors. If you are struggling with differentiation, or if you simply want to raise your thought leadership game, an ongoing program of public-facing research can become an asset of immeasurable value.

Your Part in Our Story

At Hinge, we give away much of our research for free. We make our all-industry report freely available on our website. And while we charge a fee for our in-depth industry reports, we publish key highlights of each on our blog. I use many of these insights to inform what I write here.

But we couldn’t offer this public service without the generous assistance of people like you.

So I am asking: Do you mind spending 15-20 minutes to take this year’s survey? All results are kept completely confidential.

As a thank you for completing your survey, you will receive a complimentary copy of the industry report of your choice as soon as it is released in early 2027. (After release, each report will sell for $799.)

You will also be entered into a drawing for a gift of your choice worth up to $500. Complete your survey by October 15th and you will receive five drawing entries!

I hope you will consider helping us help marketers like you deepen our understanding of what drives professional services marketing success.

The post Join the High Growth Study (And Why You Need a Study, Too) appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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For well over a decade, this study has uncovered the specific strategies and techniques the fastest-growing firms use to outperform their peers. But it takes the generous help of people like you to make it possible.

What You Get

As thanks for completing the survey, you will receive:

• A complimentary copy of the detailed industry report of your choice as soon as it is released early in 2027. These reports will sell for $799 each.
• A chance to win a gift of your choice worth up to $500.*
• EARLY-BIRD BONUS: Complete your survey by October 15 and receive four additional entries!

By donating a small amount of your time, you contribute to the most accurate and trusted marketing benchmark project in the industry—and help us understand what drives extraordinary growth and financial performance.

The survey takes just 15–20 minutes to complete. All your responses will be kept completely confidential. And we never share your data with third parties.

Thank you for helping us provide this essential resource to the professional services community!

*You are not required to take the survey to enter. See the official rules here. To enter the drawing without participating in the survey, click here.

The post Help Us Help You Grow — Join the 2027 High Growth Study appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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“Why are we spending so much on marketing,” they say, “when Claude (or ChatGPT or Gemini) can do it faster and with greater precision?”

Of course, nobody is asking a chatbot to run their entire marketing program (yet!). But many of the people who are inclined to keep the purse strings pulled taut have begun to get excited about AI. After all, AI can do things that would have seemed miraculous just five years ago—write persuasive emails, generate photos that are indistinguishable from the real thing, analyze data and write reports, automate repetitive tasks, even code websites and apps.

With such sophisticated tech at hand, why would we continue to invest so heavily in a traditional marketing team and tools? Why not scale down the team to the bare essentials and let the robots do all the heavy lifting?

It’s a reasonable question. And maybe someday I will be more sympathetic to this point of view. But not yet.

Today, handing most tasks over to AI without a lot of expert oversight means dancing with disaster. Why? Because many use cases for AI in marketing just aren’t ready for the real world. And I think key pieces, such as producing thought leadership content, won’t be for a very long time. At the same time, the LLM technology behind the revolution still has serious unsolved problems.

Let’s start with AI’s most publicized bugaboo: its proclivity to make stuff up. If nobody is fact-checking your emails, blogs and social media posts, you risk embarrassing your firm or even exposing it to brand harm. While the AI platforms have made some incremental progress on this front, it remains a serious challenge and worry.

Then you have to wrestle with implications of all that AI-generated content. I’ve argued why experts should avoid using AI to write their content: Thought leaders, by definition, need to develop their own voice and point of view, neither of which a chatbot is any good at. And detecting AI text is becoming easier than ever. Pangram, a leading AI detection company, has released extensions for Chrome and Firefox browsers. Now, readers can just highlight some text in their web browser and right-click to find out if it was generated by AI. Easy peasy.

While I believe expert educational content should be human-written, I don’t think that standard has to apply to every page, email and post a firm produces, as long as a person reviews and edits them before they are released into the wild. That said, even this situation poses a theoretical risk of reputational damage.

As a person who thinks deeply about branding, I worry about perceptions. Will the availability and convenience of tools like Pangram’s browser extension make everything online fair game? Will people troll the internet looking for firms to shame publicly because they used AI (to write their homepage copy? (Or they think they did. In some cases human-written content is mistakenly identified as being in part or in whole AI-produced.) We are already seeing signs of this happening—and some companies are fighting back by making a point of not using AI.

I’m not naive. I understand that AI has too many legitimate marketing applications to be ignored. It gives marketers superpowers they never had before—such as the ability to comb through and make sense of large amounts of data. It can take the drudgery out of internet research (but verify your sources!). It can dramatically reduce the time it takes to respond to RFPs. It can also speed up the production of marketing emails, landing pages, charts, infographics and more.

Major marketing platforms routinely build AI into their products, as well, making it easy to extract insights from the data without needing a computer science degree.

So here’s what any firm leader needs to know today. AI is a useful tool that makes skilled marketers more productive. It is not replacing many, if any of them, at this point. And the converse is true too: if you ask an unskilled person to use AI to do a marketing task, the results are likely to be poor.

You can’t invest in AI alone and expect results. The results come not from the tool itself, but from the experience, knowledge and good judgement of the person who wields the tool. Nor can you expect a single marketer, no matter how skilled and competent, to run a sophisticated modern marketing program alone, no matter how many AI agents they deploy. Each task requires human attention and decision-making.

An AI-centric marketing program—one with minimal human oversight—would also likely push your marketing toward the middle. That means doing more of the things ordinary firms do, delivered with similar messaging. Undifferentiated marketing is unremarkable marketing.

Each year, Hinge conducts a study of hundreds of professional services firms to determine what the top-performers do differently. They do not shy away from AI. In fact, it is a top marketing priority. But they also invest heavily in marketing. They spend 140% more on marketing than their no-growth peers. Here’s the data:

Far from running away from marketing, the most successful firms are embracing it. They are building skilled internal marketing teams, outsourcing certain tasks to specialists and going to great lengths to master the AI tools and marketing platforms at their disposal.

And they are enjoying the fruits of their harvest.

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• The marketplace is mired in uncertainty, so figuring out what to do next can feel like a guessing game.
• Competition is fierce, and it’s flying at you from all sides—resource-rich market leaders, ambitious mid-majors and startups with pesky new ideas.

Then there’s the pace of change. As marketing becomes increasingly tied to technology, the field is becoming more and more technical. You need a veritable army of experts to handle the dozens of disciplines required to carry out a modern marketing program.

Take the new field of AI search optimization, for example. Because the mechanics of search are hidden from us (or we are even fed misleading information), and because those mechanics are always evolving, AI search experts have to determine what is going on by looking at empirical evidence (see this 6-minute video for a summary of some recent research). Clearly, it takes an AI search specialist to keep abreast of the latest findings or conduct their own tests—and determine whether or not those findings should change the way their services are delivered.

Wrangling a large team of internal and external specialists isn’t easy. Communicating regularly with each is important. That means lots of meetings, schedules and analytics to review.

Pile on top of this the ongoing tasks of keeping the website up to date, prodding subject matter experts to write blog posts and articles, reporting to the management team and, oh, retaining your sanity.

Nobody said marketing was easy. And despite the promise of amazing technology, it’s not likely to get easier any time soon.

Marketers are so focused on implementing their sophisticated multichannel marketing strategy that they often overlook one critical question:

What makes us different or better than anybody else?

In theory, at least, you can optimize your marketing machine to perfection so that it reaches precisely the right people at exactly the right time. But if they don’t perceive you as any different from all the other options, all that effort will be wasted. Your conversion rates will be low. And failing to recognize where the problem really lies, you will try to fix the part of the machine that isn’t broken.

In short, your brilliant technical marketing will be torpedoed by your uninspired positioning.

How do you determine if your positioning is working?

An engineer would say, “Let’s A/B test it.” But that’s actually very hard. You can certainly test specific messages—say, headlines in an online ad. And that can provide some useful surface-level insight into positioning.

But it doesn’t really provide the context you need to truly position your firm. Positioning is more than what you say about yourself. It’s what you are, the services you offer, who you serve and who you don’t serve, how people perceive you and, importantly, how this whole cast of characteristics stacks up against your competitors.

For that, you need to conduct research on your target audience. When you talk to your clients you learn some pretty interesting things. Like why they chose you over other firms, why they stick with you and what they think of your competitors. If you do your research right, they will also reveal your strengths and weaknesses. Your best clients are more than happy to share this information because they believe in you and want you to succeed.

All of that intel should inform your positioning, including the messages you use to communicate it.

There are several signs that your positioning is working:

• People immediately grasp what you do
• Prospects already understand your value proposition when they reach out to you
• Buyers are less price sensitive because you offer more perceived value
• Referral sources can easily describe and differentiate your firm
• It is easy for anyone in your firm to explain what you do

So ask yourself: Is your firm so focused on the mechanics of modern marketing that you are missing the big, compelling story that will inspire your buyers?

The post What’s Broken? Your Marketing or Your Positioning? appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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Since Hinge has named or renamed dozens of professional services firms, practices and products, I have first-hand insight into this dark alchemy.

Whether your organization needs a new name and wants to know how to go about it, or if you are just curious about the mechanics of the process, this article is for you.

Step 1. Select Your Decision Makers

How smoothly the entire process will go often hangs on this first crucial step. I can’t emphasize this enough: Empower a small group to make the decisions—including the final name choice.

Three to five people is ideal. These chosen few will be in all the meetings, collaborate in the process and make all of the decisions.

Skip this step at your own peril. The more people you involve in the decision making process, the more opinions you will have to wrestle with and the longer everything will take. Diverse perspectives, of course, can be very valuable. But only when the number of viewpoints is manageable.

A particular problem arises when decision makers join late in the process. A common example is the leaders who is “too busy” to participate in the presentations and meetings yet wants to make the final call. Another example is a flat organization with dozens of partners, all of whom want a say in the final choice.

In both cases, people who pop in and out aren’t exposed to the explanations, discussions and challenges of the process, so they lack the context to make informed decisions. All they offer is their reaction in the moment. Because most people are inherently uncomfortable with change, those reactions are often negative.

If you don’t set the process up for success from the beginning, you risk making a final decision impossible.

Step 2. Ask and Answer Key Questions

The naming team is likely to ask you a series of questions so they can use the answers to guide them down the right conceptual pathways as they explore different options. Apart from background information about the firm and its services, here are a few typical questions the team might ask:

• What do you dislike about your current name?
• What should the new name convey or make people feel or think of?
• Are there any ideas or themes the name should steer clear of?
• Who are your competitors?
• Do you need the clean dot-com domain (name.com), or is a compound dot-com (such as name-inc.com) okay? Be aware that a clean dot-com requirement will significantly restrict the range of name options.
• Are you willing to potentially pay premium prices for a clean dot-com domain?
• Will the name be used extensively overseas? If so, which countries?
• Do you have any other preconceptions or criteria regarding the name (such as types of names to consider)?

Let me take this opportunity to take you on an excursion and briefly explain what we mean by “types of names.”

Different branding firms may use different terminology, but there are essentially four ways to build names:

1. Dictionary word names: These are English (or foreign) words like Slalom or Populous that can be found in a dictionary. Unless they are obscure (such as Petrichor, which means ”the pleasant, earthy smell that fills the air when rain falls on dry soil or rock” and is the name of a venture capital firm), people know them already, so they are easy to remember, say and spell.
2. Compound names: These names are two common words welded together to form a new one. Examples include Guidehouse and ClearView [Healthcare Partners]. They have the advantage of allowing the namer to combine two different ideas, but they tend to be limited to short, simple component words.
3. Coined names: These names exist in no dictionary. They can be completely made up (Xerox), built from Greek or Latin roots (Cognizant) or misspelled English words (Kinetix). Coined names are often easier to trademark and sometimes their clean dot-com URLs are available. A disadvantage is that they are unfamiliar and can sometimes be confusing to say or spell.
4. Abbreviations: Initialisms and acronyms are ubiquitous in professional services. While they might be worth considering in certain situations (especially if they create interesting acronyms that can be spoken like a word), we usually recommend that clients avoid them.

Names can also take two different approaches:

1. Descriptive: These names describe to some extent the firm they represent. Highly descriptive, multi-word names, such as Construction Support Services, are so generic that they have little brand value and are almost impossible to trademark. However, many one-word names hint at what the firm does or what benefit they provide (BearingPoint is a management consulting firm that points the way forward; Method is a digital product design firm with, well, a methodology).
2. Abstract: Abstract names provide no information about the firm other than, perhaps, some suggestion of its personality. Abstract names are often easier to protect and are more unique and differentiating. However, they may require extra explanation and may take a while for people to get used to them. Most coined names are abstract, but many dictionary words can be, too, if they have no obvious connection to the business (think Apple).

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Step 3. Develop a List of Potential Names

This is where experience really shines. Using the answers to the questions in Step 2 as a guide, a seasoned namer, or team of namers, has the tools, taste and techniques to develop a long list of strong name options. Usually, a final list includes hundreds of possible names—and for some clients, thousands. Many of the options will be variations on a theme as the namer explores different permutations and combinations. Some are designed to feel safe while others are chosen to push the limits in an attempt to produce something unexpected and memorable.

The goal at this stage is to produce as many different ideas as possible. Namers will comb through dictionaries, thesauruses, lists of Greek and Roman cognates and proprietary name databases for ideas. They use various techniques to look at the firm from interesting new angles and uncover new naming possibilities.

Step 4. Cull the List

The naming firm will schedule one or more internal meetings to go through the list and select a handful of semifinalists. How many will vary depending on the specific engagement and how the naming firm operates. At Hinge, our goal is to present six to eight options to the client. Why so few? More options make selecting a name more difficult. So we pick 15 to 25 of the best names from the long list, knowing that many of these will likely not survive the vetting process (see below).

Step 5. Screen the Names

In this step, the naming firm typically takes the winnowed-down names through a multi-part evaluation process.

1. First, the namer checks the candidates for linguistic problems. Are they pronounced the way they look? Do they have any unforeseen negative connotations (the Urban Dictionary is a good place to start)? If the name is going to be used internationally, do the names have negative meanings or associations?
2. Next, they check the names in the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) database. Only the largest naming firms have IP attorneys on staff and access to more powerful search tools, so usually this is a preliminary search to knock out any obvious conflicts and to identify potential problems. Most professional services firms fall into more than one Nice Classification (NCL), so this can be a tedious process for names that include common words.
3. They may then run Google searches on the names to see what other companies turn up. Suppose you find a business in your industry with the name you want but it hasn’t registered it with the USPTO. That doesn’t mean you can automatically ignore it. The business might have common law rights to the name in certain markets, which could mean you can’t operate under that name in their jurisdiction.
4. They might also run a search in an AI chatbot. AI can be helpful in tracking down potential conflicts and often provides a more nuanced view on the marketplace than a traditional Google search.

Our team will meet, review the screening results, discuss any edge cases and decide which names to eliminate until we have six to eight finalists.

Step 6. Check for Domain Availability

At this point, the team can hop onto any online registrar to check for a name’s domain availability. At Hinge, we look only for the configuration “name.com”. While there are hundreds of alternatives to the dot-com extension (such as .biz), we don’t believe they are familiar or credible enough yet to recommend to our professional services clients (with the possible exception of .net for some firms).

Some domains may be available for a low standard fee. Unfortunately, this is increasingly rare. Some may be available for a “premium” fee, which can range from reasonable to ridiculous. Others are owned but advertised as available for sale. In this case, you contact the owner or a third-party intermediary to negotiate a price. Others may not be available, but are not in active use. In some cases, these domains may be available for purchase from the owner. And of course, many will be actively used on the internet. Unless you have a pot of gold to spend, good luck buying those. Remember, just because a domain isn’t available, doesn’t mean you can’t come up with a simple, easy-to-remember variation.

By the way, if a client prioritized finding a name with a free-and-clear dot-com domain back in Step 2, this activity has to take place earlier in the process—in either Step 3 or 4.

Step 7. Present Names

And now for the big moment. The client is anxious to see what’s in store. The purpose of the presentation, however, is not to decide on a final name. Rather, it is to select a few candidates to move forward with. In fact, because only preliminary trademark searches have been done at this point, choosing one name would be very risky.

The naming team presents the options one at a time, saying each aloud and explaining what makes it a perfect name for the organization. Often, they will display each name on one or more realistic mockups, such as a business card or lobby sign, to help the client visualize how it might look and feel in the real world.

They may also talk about any potential trademark registration issues they found, domain name availability and linguistic checks.

Then they will pull up all the names on one slide and open the floor for discussion. As I said earlier, change is difficult for most people. To avoid negative feedback dominating the commentary from the start, some presenters ask the audience at first to identify only which names they like and why. This allows the conversation to build upon a positive foundation. Only after everyone has voiced their positive opinions do they open the floor for criticism.

By the end of the meeting, the team may have its list of three finalists. Or the naming team may be asked to go back and develop a few more options.

Step 8. Conduct a Full Legal Search

At this point, the client firm likely has a favorite name. But that doesn’t mean it will pass legal scrutiny. That’s why we recommended that they send three (or more) name options to an IP attorney. It’s wise to have backups.

By the way, don’t expect a clear go/no-go recommendation. IP attorneys score each trademark candidate on various criteria. They can help you understand the risk factors the USPTO may consider for each name candidate and the confidence level they have in each one. But since they aren’t making the final judgment, that’s as far as they can go.

Step 9. Apply for the Trademark

While a firm doesn’t have to register its name, we strongly recommend that it take the extra step to protect its brand. Most IP attorneys routinely handle the necessary paperwork. The USPTO can take many months to review a trademark application. In the meantime, a firm can use the name. They can apply an SM (for services) or ™ (for products) after the name to indicate that it is under review.

Step 10. Secure the Domain Name and Social Media Handles

At this point, the firm likely has enough legal confidence in its name to purchase its domain name. If the free-and-clear dot-com domain isn’t available, this is the time to explore various extensions it might add to the name.

This is also a good time to secure any social media handles the firm will need on platforms like LinkedIn, X, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. If possible, the firm should try to use the same handle across all its platforms.

Step 11. Register the Name with the State

If the firm is changing its legal name, it will need to register it with the state or local government. If the firm is retaining its legal name but will be known in commerce under the new name, it will need to register a separate Doing Business As (DBA) name.

Step 12. Launch Your New Name

Woo hoo! The firm is ready to introduce its new name to the world.

Whether it announces the name before it designs the new logo, rebrands its website and creates new marketing materials or waits for a grand reveal, the firm needs to prepare a compelling story to tell about its new moniker. The naming firm is usually happy to draft a concise explanation of the name and why the firm is making the change.

Launching a new name, of course, involves a lot more than writing a press release. Ideally, it is a carefully orchestrated rollout—first to staff, then clients and the public. A branding firm is often the best option to plan and help execute this launch, though it certainly can be handled in-house if the resources are available.

The point is to make the most of this seminal moment. A name change is a huge opportunity to tell your larger story to an audience that might not have noticed or known about you before. Make the most of it.

The post The Firm Naming Process Demystified appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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You have to retrain your clients and prospects to recognize you, for one thing. Then there’s the cost of producing updated stationery, collateral, and signage.

But there are good reasons that firms rename themselves—despite the drawbacks. Below I describe seven of the most common.

1. Your Name Infringes on Another Copyright

Here’s a fun one! You receive a cease and desist letter from another firm in your industry with a similar name. Your lawyer says you can fight it in court, but it will be very expensive. Oh, and there is at least a 50/50 chance you will lose. It happens to organizations small and large. Even the global titans aren’t immune. Remember Andersen Consulting? After losing in arbitration, they became Accenture.

2. Reputational Damage

This one also falls into the “fun” category. For whatever reason—a transgression real or imagined—your firm is transformed overnight from market dynamite to public kryptonite. No amount of PR or crisis management seems able to revive your reputation. But sometimes a new name can change the dynamic. After Cambridge Analytica and its parent company SCL Group were embroiled in a Facebook data harvesting scandal, they dissolved the original companies and reconstituted them under the new name Emerdata. Which brings us to…

3. Mergers and Acquisitions

When two or more firms come together, they sometimes need a new identity that is distinct from any one of the component businesses. Sometimes it is a merger of equals and no party wants to appear to have been subsumed by the others. Other times they simply want to move away from stale old names and take on a fresh moniker. In 1990, for instance, five AEC firms came together to form the new firm AECOM, an acronym that stands for the services they provide: Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Operations, and Management.

4. Too Long

Older professional services firms are notorious for growing partner names like yeards. Even after those partners are long dead, the firms live on with their complex, multisyllabic surname extravaganzas. Once, there was a Los Angeles law firm with ten partner names: Ziffren, Brittenham, Branca, Fischer, Gilbert-Lurie, Stiffelman, Cook, Johnson, Lande & Wolf. Imagine answering their phones! Today, many firms embrace simplicity. In 2023, for example, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld rebranded as Akin. That’s what I call progress!

5. Too Generic

The professional services marketplace is crowded. Many firms are eager to stand out from a sea of look-alike competitors. As a result, some firms with undistinguished names change them as part of a differentiation strategy. What types of names are ripe for a refresh? Those that simply describe the service they provide (for example, CEO Support Services LLC). Perhaps those known only by their initials. Or a firm known by a founder’s name that has no distinctive characteristics (Smith & Associates). For firms like these, a unique and memorable name can help set them apart from their less interesting competitors. In 2017, accounting firm HA&W rebranded themselves as Aprio. With 40+ offices across the nation, they are one of today’s fastest-growing accounting firms.

6. Change of Strategy

When a firm decides to move away from its core business or audience, perceptions can be difficult to change. A new name can be a fresh start and create permission in buyers’ minds to put the firm in a different category. For years, Forensic Technologies International provided computer graphics, trial animations, and technical expert witness testimony for courtroom litigation. Then they shifted strategy to offer corporate restructuring, crisis management, economic consulting, and strategic communications services. They reformulated their name to FTI Consulting.

7. Spun-Off Business Line

Occasionally a mature business realizes it has developed significant expertise in an area that no longer supports its core mission. So it decides to spin it off as a separate company. Usually, there is no reason to retain the original firm’s name. In fact, that might create confusion. In most cases, the best answer is to devise an entirely new name. Dun & Bradstreet did exactly that in the 1990s when it spun off its internal IT support unit as a stand-alone business targeting Fortune 500 companies. Its new name was Cognizant Technology Solutions (but goes by “Cognizant”).

There are, of course, a host of other reasons firms update their names—a desire to be perceived as more modern, to overcome linguistic problems with their old name and to unify fragmented brands, to name just three more examples. But a new name can bring new audiences and new opportunities.

When a firm finds itself in a period of fundamental transition—or in need of change—a fresh name can help it reset its brand and thrive in its new environment.

The post 7 Reasons Firms Change Their Names appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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Now, before you pack your teeth with spinach or ask if I like “see-food” (I have 3 boys), I have to tell you that I’m talking about digital immaturity. My apologies to the young at heart.

I’ve commented briefly on this chart before, but today I think it deserves a deeper look:

This chart compares high-growth firms (green bars)—those that experience at least 20% compound annual growth over a three-year period—against no-growth firms (beige bars)—those that experience zero or negative growth over the same period. It also divides each growth category into five digital maturity levels. If you are interested, you can read what each signifies in the 2026 High Growth Executive Summary. But for our purposes, you just need to know that the numbered levels represent an increasing scale of sophistication, from rudimentary (1) to highly advanced (5).

What can we take away from this data?

Almost one in three of all firms rated themselves in the lowest level of maturity. Over half of firms, including those in the high-growth category, fall into the two lowest levels. And when you move up another rung, three-quarters of high-growth firms and 89% of no-growth firms sit in the first three levels of digital maturity.

That’s a shockingly bottom-heavy distribution.

Slightly less than a quarter of high-growth firms and about one in ten no-growth firms have reached the top two levels. In a business world that talks incessantly about technology, especially AI, this seems like a dismal state of affairs.

When I looked at the results for each of the individual industries we covered in the study, one set of data looked different. Its chart was a classic bell curve, with most firms clustered around the center. This was, unsurprisingly, the technology & software industry.

No technology or software high-growth firm gave themselves a Level 1 rating, while 14.8% placed themselves in Level 5—that’s a 50% improvement over the aggregate, all-professional services number.

This means that if you are in any other industry, the results in the chart above are skewed slightly higher because of the technology and software firms in the sample. Meaning your industry is likely worse off than the data shown.

In a marketplace pushing a highly connected, automated, AI-superpowered tech stack, most firms are falling woefully short. Many firms remain stubbornly stuck in the paper-and-spreadsheet age.

There is a paradox in these numbers, of course. While the high-growth cohort grows four times faster and is much more profitable than their no-growth peers, they follow roughly the same digital maturity pattern as the rest of professional services. Yes, their maturity numbers are better (especially at the high end), but they tell more or less the same story as everyone else, with about one in three bottomed out at Level 1.

If 75% of the best-performing firms are absent from the top two levels, then how much of a role does technology really play in their success?

It’s a tricky question. The easy—and very likely wrong—conclusion is that there is little correlation between digital maturity and high growth, so technology is not an important factor in firm growth.

We believe the answer is more subtle. And it has as much to do with human psychology and the pace of technological change as it does with what tech platforms a firm employs.

My colleagues at Hinge have noticed that a “reset” has taken place in these numbers over the past couple of years. Digital maturity used to be generally higher across the board, then around 2023–2024 they abruptly fell. Based on the timing of this decline, we believe the emergence of AI was the major culprit.

All of a sudden, the bar of technological sophistication rose to a towering new height, and everybody was standing at ground level looking up, trying to figure out how in the world they would clear it. Even today, most firms are still trying to understand how and when to use AI.

When asked to assess their digital maturity, firm leaders and marketers seem to believe they are now playing a different game, one whose rules they are still trying to understand. This seems like the most plausible explanation for today’s lower high-growth digital maturity numbers.

That said, we continue to believe that high-growth firms are better at deploying, integrating and using technology than this chart indicates.

Why do we think this? Because their numbers were higher before the Big AI Bang, which occurred in November of 2022 when OpenAI released ChatGPT 3.5. These organizations were better at connecting disparate platforms, training their teams on the software and using its advanced features.

Even if all the fastest growing firms haven’t yet mastered AI, many of them still have a strong lead over their slower-growing peers when it comes to using technology to improve efficiency and provide real-time insights. But when we ask them to rate their digital maturity, they give themselves only partial credit because of their AI deficit.

So by one measure, the difficult-to-attain ideal of multiple connected AI-driven technology platforms, most professional services providers are immature. Even if they aren’t telling Uranus jokes.

By a different measure, one that includes powerful process automation and tech that today seems so 2022, high-growth firms have a decided advantage. And if you look again at the chart above, you’ll see that the fast-growing group also significantly outperform their no-growth counterparts in the top two levels.

There are many factors that contribute to high performers’ success. Technology is one of them. But it sometimes takes a careful reading of the data—and some historical context—to see the story.

How does your digital maturity stack up against the fastest-growing firms?

The post Oh, You’re SO Digitally Mature appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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