What are some common PR challenges for professional services organisations?

Senior executive buy-in is very important – without it, achieving the right outcomes becomes far more difficult. Regulation can be a major factor too. A good understanding is necessary, particularly if the work covers several different jurisdictions. International organisations need to be culturally sensitive. Missteps here can be calamitous for the business and for reputation. Your PR agency needs to prevent such problems arising in the first place, but must be ready to find solutions at speed if a situation arises.

Professional Services PR & Digital Marketing

Sapience is a leading professional services PR and digital marketing agency. This means understanding the complexities of their business, articulating their value proposition and developing the appropriate professional services PR and digital marketing strategies to meet their objectives.

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Professional Services PR

Professional services encompass a broad range of business areas, forming an essential part of the machinery that makes a thriving commercial centre function. It’s no surprise that cities like London, New York and Hong Kong are home to some of the largest professional service sectors. Yet their work often goes unnoticed despite its impact.

Why Sapience

We consider ourselves a provider of professional services, so we recognise that knowledge, expertise and experience can be difficult to quantify. Our professional services PR and digital marketing consultants come from many different industry sectors, bringing direct experience of overcoming this challenge.

We offer a full range of professional services PR and digital marketing capabilities, helping convert research into insightful, readable content that will interest media, potential clients, and other stakeholders alike.

We emphasise the need to be nimble, responsive and completely focused on delivering the right outcomes for our clients. Our achievements and long-standing relationships with companies in the professional services space is a testament to our success, making us one the UK’s leading professional services PR agency.

We have carefully selected a team whose skills and insight reflect the challenges our clients face. Our professional services PR and digital marketing team brings deep experience of strategic planning, crisis management, messaging, media counsel and the full suite of content creation.

Professional Services Landscape

Professional services covers a multitude of industry sectors. Under its umbrella come lawyers, accountants, architects, surveyors, actuaries, management consultants, tax specialists, market researchers, HR specialists, investment advisory and even PR and digital marketing consultants. The list goes on.

A glance at all those specialist areas shows how professional services impact lives and enable millions of businesses to function.

In the UK, the professional services sector is in a state of flux amid increased digitalisation and greater usage of data analytics and artificial intelligence, which are impacting the nature of work and components of jobs. What’s clear is that the sector as a whole has plenty of scope for growth, along with innovation in both the tools and thought processes used.

Ultimately, professional services companies need to stay on top of what’s going on around them in order to stay relevant to their clients and audiences – via both traditional and non-traditional channels. Sapience, as a top professional services PR agency, can enable you to do that.

Professional Services PR Services

Our experts are highly skilled in providing a range of professional services PR and digital marketing services for firms.

Some of our most typical services include:

Branding and strategy activities
Media relations and media training
Content marketing and writing including white papers and case studies
Producing and distributing press releases
Issues and crisis management, including crisis prevention and preparation
Reputation management PR
Investor relations PR
Internal communications with staff and service users
Social media PR

Our Approach

We work with clients on both short-term projects and long-term retainer work. Our approach is always to start with the overarching professional services PR strategy. We frame the work within that strategy to ensure consistency of message and focus, and to achieve the desired strategic objectives.

While much of our work for professional services firms centres on thought leadership, content development and media relations, we also provide bespoke messaging, advocacy and media training. We also help our clients have the right protocols and contingency plans in place, which is important for managing and mitigating risk. Significant areas of risk may include ethics and governance, data privacy and regulation, and intellectual property, to name just a few.

We seek to build awareness among target audiences to create familiarity that leads to acceptance, then adoption. In other words, positioning our clients, through professional services PR, in such a way that results in them becoming the go-to source for comment for media before a story has even broken.

Contact us

We’d love to hear from you. You can get in touch with us to discuss your corporate PR needs using this form and we’ll get back to you as soon as feasible.

FAQ – Professional Services

Sapience has deep professional services experience across multiple categories in the sector. The longevity of our client relationships says a lot about our ability to deliver high quality work on a consistent basis.

We sit down with our clients to understand their exact needs and price transparently, based on the amount of time and the number of Sapience team members required to get the job done.

Professional services PR tends to emphasise more thought leadership and content generation – by-lines, blogs, press releases, case studies and white papers. Thought leadership is often based on proprietary data, research or surveys on specific areas making it particularly valuable and newsworthy. It requires sector knowledge to write meaningful, relevant content which can then be amplified usin social media and SEO strategy.

Senior executive buy-in is very important – without it, achieving the right outcomes becomes far more difficult.
Regulation can be a major factor too. A good understanding is necessary, particularly if the work covers several different jurisdictions.
International organisations need to be culturally sensitive. Missteps here can be calamitous for the business and for reputation. Your PR agency needs to prevent such problems arising in the first place, but must be ready to find solutions at speed if a situation arises.

It’s important to agree ways to measure performance at the outset. Generally, they would include metrics such as the volume of coverage, with a breakdown by relevance, tone and share of voice versus competitors, but also the quality of where coverage appears and who it is seen by. However, it’s worth saying that different campaigns have different goals and can be measured differently. Increasing the organic search visibility in Google Search, for example, is not the same as improving the conversion rate of a landing page or the click-through rate on social channels.

A shorter project would typically be about three months. But a campaign can easily be multi-year. For professional services firms, a retainer programme will typically yield the best results. It comes down to scope, vision, territories covered and, of course, budget.

Press releases remain a very effective way to reach large audiences and get to the top of search engines. Media appetite for press releases varies in different geographies, but they are useful statements for the record, can be a source of blogs, tweets, WeChat posts, and they can also be readily translated.

While online channels are clearly very important, a good PR campaign would take a more holistic approach to include speaking events, media briefings, thought leadership programmes, exhibitions, face-to-face interviews, television etc. Depending on the nature of the campaign, there may be a need for advertising or sponsorship, a media tour or a press conference, or some other activity.

To ensure the client’s message is delivered accurately and in a compelling way to its key audiences. The role is also to protect and enhance the reputation of the client.

An ongoing programme will likely prove both cost effective and more effective in getting results. The need for know-how and continuity with a client’s communications are important to stay on top of the company’s news, thought leadership, personnel changes and other developments. But PR activities typically also extend to media monitoring about the company and about the industry which is important for flagging potential problems that need to be addressed or managed. Awareness of the latest regulation is also very important in the professional services sector. This is another reason a professional services firm would ideally have a long-term retainer agreement with its PR agency.

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If you are looking to enhance your corporate comms and digital marketing efforts with engaging,
relevant content, please get in touch for a free, confidential discussion.

Clients & Case Studies

Discover how we helped our clients become more successful. See more case studies.

OSiT

Serviced Offices

Leading London-based serviced office provider, Office Space in Town (OSiT), wanted to raise its corporate profile, as well as the profile of the burgeoning serviced office sector, with a multi-channel communications strategy.

BizSpace

Flexible Workspace Providers

Sapience helped build BizSpace’s, the UK’s leading provider of regional flexible workspace, profile as the go-to partner for businesses looking to transition to a ‘hub-and-spoke’ model through an effective media relations programme.

HSPG

Social Impact Real Estate

The innovative social-impact real estate company wanted to spread awareness of their life-changing work around affordable housing and raising the profile of their expert leadership as authorities on the social housing sector.

CHEC

Raise the profile of CHEC and its newly launching sites across the UK to optometrists, showcasing its expertise in delivering ophthalmological care. Build local awareness among the public of alternative choices in providers for ophthalmology treatment in order to reduce backlogs and improve patient outcomes.

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