That question might sound obvious. But you’d be surprised how many firms skip this step entirely.
Behind every rebrand should be a clear business reason. While every situation is different, and there are many possible reasons a firm might desire a change, we see the same four drivers come up again and again.

1. Your brand has grown stale. The marketplace is always evolving. A brand that felt fresh and relevant five years ago can quietly become a liability—dated, generic and out of step with the marketplace or the current state of your firm. Sometimes firms don’t even notice they have a problem until a prospect mentions it.
2. A merger or acquisition demands a change. When two (or multiple) firms become one, they produce a patchwork of identities that have little in common. In this situation, a rebrand provides an opportunity to create a fresh, unified brand.It signals to clients and prospects that something meaningful has changed.
3. You’re managing a reputational challenge. Sometimes a firm needs a fresh start. A new name or identity can shift market perceptions and give leadership a chance to build something inspiring. Branding is not a silver bullet, but it can be a powerful part of a beleaguered firm’s recovery strategy.
4. You’ve never really differentiated yourself. This is the most common reason we encounter, and one some firms are reluctant to admit. Many professional services firms look like, sound like and say more or less the same things as their competitors. A rebrand is an opportunity to uncover what genuinely sets you apart and build a brand around it.

That last one is more common than most leaders would like to admit, which is why we’ve dedicated several recent articles to this very topic, including this one.

A 7-Step Branding Process

At Hinge, we’ve rebranded scores of professional services firms over the past two decades. And while no two engagements look exactly the same, each has followed the same seven step process. Here’s the short version:

1. Define the business case for rebranding. Why now? What outcome are you trying to achieve? If you can’t answer these questions clearly, stop and figure them out first.
2. Research your firm and your clients. You think you know how clients perceive you. But chances are, you don’t—at least not fully. Independent research is the only way to know for sure. (And as I’ve noted before, what clients tell impartial researchers they won’t always say to your face.)
3. Develop your positioning and messaging. Before you design a single visual element, you need to know where you fit in the market and what story you are going to tell. This is the framework upon which everything else is built.
4. Build your brand identity. This is the part most people think of as “the rebrand”: the name, logo, colors, tagline. Brand identity is important. But it’s only one piece of your brand, and it should flow directly from Step 3.
5. Redesign your website. In a way, your website is the full expression of your brand strategy. It is the single most important communication and business development tool you have. Every buyer who considers you will visit it. A rebrand without a new website is like moving into a freshly renovated building but leaving up the old sign.
6. Update your marketing collateral. Pitch decks, proposal templates, brochures, one-pagers—all of these tools need to reflect your new brand.
7. Launch your brand. How will you launch the new brand internally? How will you announce it to the outside world? In professional services, your people are your product. If they don’t believe in the brand, your clients won’t either, so don’t miss a crucial opportunity to get your team excited about the change. Your external brand launch can be as simple or extravagant as you like. But start with a plan, and make the most of this rare chance to reintroduce your firm to a broad audience.

What This Looks Like in Practice

When Thiel & Team, a Texas-based hospitality and residential design firm, came to us, they had an excellent reputation and a loyal client base But they were struggling to gain traction in a crowded market. The problem was their work was far more elegant than their brand, and they needed to elevate the way prospective clients perceived them.

Our research confirmed that clients loved the firm’s personable style. But the brand wasn’t communicating the sophistication their high-net-worth clientele expected. Their logo lacked elegance, and their website didn’t reflect the quality of the work their talented team was delivering.

We started with the logo, a lighter, all-caps typeface and a subtle refinement to their signature ampersand mark. Small changes, but they signaled exactly the right things: attention to detail, polish and personality. Next, we reworked their messaging to highlight a true differentiator: their procurement expertise, a service most competitors don’t offer and almost none were talking about.

The new website followed—clean, sophisticated, rich with professional photography and video. We added an Insights section, launched a content marketing and email program, and built out a paid LinkedIn campaign to extend their reach beyond their local area.

Within three months of launch, website traffic was up 50%. Google impressions and clicks had surged 300%. And the firm was generating a steady flow of inbound leads that had already paid for the rebranding investment.

ML&R tells a different story, but with similar lessons and results.

One of the largest accounting and advisory firms in Texas, ML&R aspired to build a national reputation. They had the expertise. They had the client relationships. What they needed was a brand and digital presence that could compete with the biggest players in the industry. At the same time, they didn’t want to sacrifice the warm, people-centric style that their clients appreciated so much.

Using our research as a foundation to inform our many choice, we modernized their visual identity and built a new, high-performance website designed from the ground up to turn ML&R’s expert-led business model into a lead-generating engine. Because their clients work directly with seasoned professionals, not junior staff, we engineered the site to make their specialists and thought leadership highly visible throughout. Custom photography of their actual team brought the brand’s personality to life in a way stock imagery never could.

Today, ML&R is the largest independent CPA firm in Texas, with a steady flow of high-quality inbound digital leads.

Two different firms. Two different challenges. Same principle: When your brand is both differentiated and reflects who you really are, the right clients (and talent!) take notice.

If your firm is considering a rebrand—or if you suspect it’s overdue—I’d love to hear what’s driving the conversation. You know where to find me.

The post How to Rebrand Without Wasting Time and Money appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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I work with a lot of clients who come to us for new positioning, a modern logo, color palette and website. The world is changing, and the way a business presents itself needs to evolve with it.

Sometimes at the beginning of the engagement, however, the CEO will shift uneasily in her chair and say something like, “Whatever you do, as you work with us just please don’t use the word “branding.”

Okay, I think to myself, we’ll try to avoid using that word , but that is in fact what you hired us for. It’s even in our firm’s descriptor: “Branding and marketing for professional services firms.”

This behavior got me wondering what lies behind these leaders’ concerns. I think there are two reasons.

First, branding has become such a ubiquitous, overused word that some people are tired of hearing it. I certainly understand that objection. (For example, I think the word “authentic” has been so abused in marketing that it may now kindle suspicion rather than trust.) On the other hand, branding is a word that most people readily understand, at least at a basic level. Can you think of any other word that conveys the same concept? There are certainly words like “identity” and “reputation”—but I would argue that these are actually components of a brand and don’t capture the full scope of the term. More on this in a moment.

Second, I believe many leaders equate brands with flashy consumer products and services they see repeatedly in ads and on store shelves. They can’t imagine that their accounting or consulting firm has anything in common with breakfast cereal or cell phones.

But they would be mistaken.

What Exactly Is a Brand?

Frustratingly, branding experts define “brand” in different ways. When you look closely, however, most converge on the same basic idea. Let me give you three examples.

Legendary branding pioneer, Al Ries—who, with Jack Trout, invented positioning in 1969—defines a brand as “nothing more than a word in the mind.” What he means is that branding creates a connection between something a person wants or needs and a business’ or product’s name. When a client thinks of a service or product, they associate it in their mind with a specific firm that they are aware of and trust.

In his dictionary Brand A to Z, branding legend Marty Neumeier defines a brand as “A person’s perception of a product, service, experience or organization; a commercial reputation.”

Both Ries and Neumeier understand a brand as something that is perceived. It can’t be imposed on an audience—those perceptions have to be built and earned.

At Hinge, we take a similar approach, but with an added dimension. We describe a brand as a firm’s reputation multiplied by its visibility, and we even developed a methodology to quantify a brand’s strength by measuring these two factors.

Visibility is critical. A firm can have a superior reputation, but if only a handful of businesses are aware that it exists, its potential to grow and thrive is low. Its reputation is strong, but its brand is weak. If a firm’s visibility and reputation are high, however, it is positioned to be a leader in its category.

Whether a kid reaches for a Coke or a global enterprise hires McKinsey, they are influenced by perceptions. In both cases, perceptions were intentionally designed by their respective companies and marketed to their target audience (in the case of Coke, with their multibillion-dollar advertising budget, this is pretty much everyone).

Companies, of course, aren’t in total control of perceptions. Things can go awry despite their best efforts. Or in the cases of Theranos or Enron, because of fraud or mismanagement. But if firms had no brand strategy in place, most would be unremarkable and unknown.

Why You Should Care

Let’s return now to my original question: “Is a professional services firm a brand?” The answer is “it depends.”

Does your firm have a reliable strategy to build visibility and become known as a leader in a specific area of expertise? Then arguably, yes, it has a brand. I say “arguably” because a brand exists only in the minds of your audience.

The way to know for certain is to talk to buyers in the marketplace. Have they heard of your firm? If so, what are you known for? And how strong is your reputation?

If your firm does not have a plan to stand out and hook your audience, I would contend that you likely do not have a brand—nor do you have a viable growth strategy.

You won’t be able to attract a loyal following who admire and refer you. You won’t be positioned to weather market downturns, pesky new market entrants and other unexpected challenges. Nor will you attract the best and brightest talent.

In the end, your brand may only be about perceptions. But those perceptions have significant bottom-line implications.

So ask yourself (or your leadership team), is your firm a brand?

The post Is Your Firm a Brand? appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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But I recognize that AI can be a powerful tool when used to enhance rather than replace your thinking.

When the world is suddenly filled with AI-generated content, it is difficult to catch anyone’s attention. People stop trusting. And ultimately, they stop reading.

Blair Enns, founder of sales consultancy Win Without Pitching, has developed a system that he hopes will help counter this problem.

He calls it the AI Contribution Scale. It is a 6-point scale he uses to disclose if and how he used AI to develop a piece of content. It runs from completely human-written (AI-0) to AI-generated (AI-5). In between are various levels of AI input, from research assistance to deep collaboration to drafting (albeit with significant subsequent human editing).

At the bottom of each blog post he indicates the level of AI he used to produce it. As of this writing, the only post that wasn’t AI-0 (100% human-written) was the one that introduced the scale.

This got me wondering how transparent professional services experts should be about how they use AI in their own writing. Is this type of disclosure over the top? Or is it a public service that readers actually want? Will it feel like a gimmick or will it build trust?

To be honest, I’m still wrestling with these questions. If your content is always, or almost always, written without the help of AI, a system like Blair’s might indeed build trust. You are instilling confidence—your readers know they are receiving your ideas in your own words.

But what if you routinely use AI for research or drafting your content? Even if you spend time editing the final product and ensuring the voice is your own, would disclosing that you used AI at all introduce a seed of doubt in the reader’s mind? Or do people no longer care and accept AI input as routine or even beneficial?

I’m not sure. We are all navigating this new world together, my friends. One feature I admire about Blair’s approach is the way in which it conveys his honesty and integrity. It also provides insight into how a blog post or newsletter article was produced.

So I ask you, reader, do people want to know how the pieces they read were created? And might this be a way to differentiate yourself from other experts?

The post If You Use AI, Should You Admit It? appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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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.

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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.

The post Why AI Isn’t a Magic Marketing Machine appeared first on Hinge Marketing.

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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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