Posted on by Create Sales

What’s working in your marketing and what needs to change?

 

We are halfway through the year and for most professional services firms, that means six months of activity, campaigns, content, client conversations and new client instructions are now on record. You have real data about what is resonating and what is falling flat, a clearer picture of what your clients and contacts respond to, and a good sense of which partners are leaning into business development and which are holding back. That makes this the ideal moment for a marketing review.

The question is whether you are using any of that information to make better decisions about your marketing.

Some firms might go through the year without a proper mid-year review. They keep posting, keep running campaigns, keep saying yes to new ideas, hoping things will improve. Carrying on can look like momentum, yet without stepping back to assess what the first half of the year is telling you, it is easy to confuse activity with progress.

Here is what that mid year marketing review should ideally cover.

Start with what marketing is working

Most firms approach a mid-year review by focusing on what is underperforming. The result is a long list of problems and half-formed ideas, which rarely leads anywhere useful.

A better starting point is to ask where you are already getting traction.

Which topics are generating genuine interest? Which sectors are engaging? Which channels are producing conversations? If a particular piece of content is resonating, lean into it. If a referral source is consistently delivering good-fit clients, pay closer attention to that relationship. If one campaign is outperforming the rest, find out why before launching something new.

The temptation in professional services is to assume that improvement means expansion. In practice, doing more of what is already working is almost always more valuable than introducing something new, and considerably less disruptive to deliver.

 

Check your focus

When marketing feels ineffective, the problem usually sits in focus rather than effort or capability.

Are you targeting too many sectors? Talking about too many services? Trying to appeal to too many different audiences at once, and putting out content with no clear thread connecting it?

This is one of the most common patterns in professional services marketing. Firms spread themselves thin because they want to be relevant to everyone, and end up resonating with no one. When everything is a priority, nothing is.

According to LOCALiQ’s UK State of Digital Marketing Report 2026, only 23% of UK marketing professionals rate themselves as satisfied with their overall marketing performance, with 51% describing themselves as neutral. That is a significant proportion of firms doing activity without confidence that it is working.

Lack of focus is often the reason. When effort is scattered across too many objectives, even strong activity starts to lose impact. A tighter remit, consistently executed, will outperform a broad one that is poorly resourced.

 

Look at marketing activity versus outcomes

This is where the review needs to become genuinely commercial.

You may be doing all the right-looking things: regular content, events, email campaigns, social media updates, thought leadership. The relevant question is which of those activities is actually contributing to your pipeline, generating conversations with the right people, surfacing opportunities, and moving relationships forward.

Activity is evidence that marketing is happening. Outcomes are evidence that marketing is working. The two are often confused, and the confusion tends to become more costly the longer it goes unaddressed.

Marketing Week’s 2025 Language of Effectiveness survey, conducted in partnership with Kantar and Google, found that nearly half of UK marketers are unhappy with the analytics available to them, with dissatisfaction rising to more than half among CMOs. More than a third admitted they do not always understand the connection between the data they receive and the marketing decisions being taken.

For professional services firms, this is a particularly important gap to close. Your sales cycle is long, your relationships are central to growth, and your pipeline depends on trust built over time. Measuring marketing against pipeline and client conversations, rather than website visits or social engagement in isolation, is the only way to see what is actually moving the needle.

By mid-year, you should be able to identify patterns. Where is interest coming from? What is moving people closer to a conversation? What is consuming time and resource without giving much back?

 

Pressure test your messaging

Once you have reviewed focus and outcomes, step back and look at your messaging.

This is the part most firms overlook, because it feels less tangible than campaign planning or content calendars. Weak messaging, though, quietly undermines everything built on top of it.

Ask yourself whether it is immediately clear what you do and who you help. Whether you are communicating genuine value or simply describing your services. Whether your positioning is distinctive, or whether your copy could appear on a competitor’s website without anyone noticing.

Good messaging needs to be clear above all else. When clarity is missing, everything else becomes harder to land, regardless of how consistently you show up.

One useful test: ask a client who has recently instructed your firm to describe what you do and why they chose you. If their language is sharper and more compelling than your own marketing, that tells you something important.

 

Where professional services firms tend to get stuck

A handful of patterns show up repeatedly in professional services marketing reviews.

The first is over-reliance on one channel. LinkedIn remains the dominant B2B platform in the UK, used organically by 46% of UK businesses and by a further 21% through paid activity. Firms that treat LinkedIn as their entire marketing strategy often find reach plateaus quickly. A mix of channels, including thought leadership, referrals, events and email, tends to produce more consistent results over time.

Email, in particular, continues to deliver. DMA UK data shows email ROI has remained stable at between £35 and £46 per £1 spent since 2018, making it one of the most consistently effective channels available to B2B firms. For professional services firms with an established contact base, a well-maintained email programme is often the most underused asset they have.

The second pattern is inconsistent partner engagement. Business development in professional services depends on fee-earners playing an active role. When partners are disengaged from marketing, the firm’s external presence becomes thinner and less credible, regardless of how much resource is going in behind the scenes. A mid-year review is a good moment to assess how well-supported partners feel and where the gaps are.

The third is a lack of commercial measurement. Website traffic is the most valued performance metric for 30% of UK businesses, according to recent data. For a professional services firm, conversations started, referrals received, proposals submitted and clients retained are the figures that matter most, and they tell a very different story from traffic alone.

 

Focus on the changes that matter most

The most important part of any mid-year review is resisting the urge to fix everything at once.

The goal is to identify the one to three marketing changes that will make the biggest difference in the next three to six months. That might mean narrowing your sector focus, improving partner involvement in business development, strengthening your positioning, or stopping low-value activity that is absorbing time and attention without delivering results.

Most firms need sharper decisions rather than a full marketing reset halfway through the year. Trying to address everything at once creates more confusion, more pressure and more unfinished work. A smaller number of clear priorities, executed consistently, will take you considerably further.

 

What does good look like? 

Good marketing looks more practical than perfect. It means having clear priorities, consistent messaging, activity linked to outcomes and a realistic plan your team can actually deliver. It means a better understanding of what is working and the confidence to stop doing things that are adding little value.

That is what a useful mid-year review should give you: clearer decisions about where to focus next, rather than a complete overhaul for the sake of it.

 

Asking better questions

The middle of the year is a good time to step back. You know more than you did in January. You have more marketing evidence, more context and more feedback about what is gaining traction and what is falling flat.

The firms that benefit from that knowledge are the ones willing to pause and ask better questions. Try moving away from asking what else you should be doing, and towards asking what you should fix first.

If you would like a fresh perspective on your marketing, get in touch.

Create Sales works with professional services firms across the UK, including accountancy practices, management consultancies and HR businesses, to improve focus, sharpen messaging and connect marketing activity to commercial outcomes.

 

_____________________________________________________________

Further reading, updated June 2026