Digital marketing is becoming an increasingly popular topic in M&A circles, but how do you know if you really need digital marketing help?
To find out if your M&A firm needs marketing help, ask yourself if your firm has any of the below characteristics:
#1 Your M&A firm is not growing
Yes, M&A is cyclical and no two years are identical. However, in the hot markets of recent years, your firm should be growing. If not, you are simply not capturing opportunity effectively. Your firm may be able to survive on referrals but in the long term, as competition increases, you must diversify how you acquire new clients, plain and simple.
#2 Your website has not been updated in 5 years
More people than ever before are searching for keywords directly related to engaging with M&A firms online. Your website is often the first opportunity you have to exhibit your professionalism and expertise to a potential client. If your website does not appear as professional and successful as you do in person you are doing yourself a great disservice. Not only should your website look good, it should be consistent with best practices and be built with your competitors in mind. If you want to be a successful M&A firm for years to come, you need to invest in your website at minimum every 5 years.
#3 It takes too long for you to make marketing decisions
Unlike many other small and mid-sized businesses, most M&A firms do not have Chief Executives or Marketing VP’s. Because of this most marketing decisions are made by busy principals who are required to spend most of their time running deals and managing clients. This leads to treating marketing decisions as afterthoughts and often means that taking decisive action simply takes too long. If you are taking many months to make simple marketing decisions you will have trouble scaling long term.
#4 You are not measuring marketing results
Analytics and quality data are the keys to understanding the efficacy of your marketing efforts. If you are not looking at these metrics, do not know how to decipher them or do not have a resource to handle this for you, you will lack the insight needed to help you improve your marketing efforts and better spend your M&A firm’s marketing budgets.
If your M&a firm is experiencing a lack of growth, or simply are flying blind when it comes to digital marketing, we can help! As the only team who exclusively focuses on serving middle market M&A firms, we have a suite of solutions for these problems and more.
