There is a question I hear regularly from managing partners of mid-sized IP firms, usually somewhere between a strategy conversation and a frank admission:

“We know what we stand for. We just don’t know how to show up that way in the market and be effectively visible in terms of business development.”

That gap is not a positioning problem. Many of these firms have done the positioning work, at least intuitively. They know their strongest mandate areas, their client value, their philosophy about how IP advice should be given. The gap is operational. Their marketing infrastructure has not caught up with the maturity of their business.

The invisible cost of having no system

In many expert-led IP firms, marketing has no structural home. It distributes itself across partner initiative, occasional LinkedIn posts, conference appearances, and website updates that happen when someone finds the time.

There may be good intentions. Sometimes genuinely good ideas. But there is no system. And without a system, whatever happens in the market depends entirely on available energy and moments of low urgency, which, in a well-run firm, are rare.

This is not a motivation problem. It is a structural one. And it rarely resolves itself, because the partners who would need to build the system are the same people who are already too busy running the firm.

The activity trap

Many IP firms make a very understandable mistake: they treat marketing as something that has to be added on top of client work.

A post here. An article there. A speaking slot. A ranking submission. A conference follow-up that gets deprioritised. Each activity may make sense on its own. Together, they create the feeling of another demanding workstream, without producing the cumulative market impact that would make the effort worthwhile.

For partners who carry both client work and firm leadership, this model is simply not sustainable. And because it feels unsustainable, it gets deprioritised. The cycle repeats.

The question that breaks the cycle is not: “What else should we do?”

It is: “Which activities create the strongest reputational and business-development effect for this specific firm, and how can we make them manageable over time?”

That shift, from adding to selecting, is where marketing becomes useful rather than exhausting.

What a market presence system actually requires

Once positioning is clear, the next task is to build a structure around it. Not a content calendar. Not a vague commitment to being more active.

That structure needs to answer a small number of consequential questions: which audiences matter most, which topics the firm wants to own over time, which formats are realistic given how the firm actually works, and what rhythm can be sustained without quality loss. Everything else follows from those decisions, including what can be delegated and what needs a partner’s direct input.

For IP firms, this matters more than in many other professional service contexts. Expertise is often complex, confidential and relationship-driven. The marketing system has to respect the business model, not work around it.

Where the right decisions actually form

Many firms jump to channel decisions before answering the more important question: where do the clients, referrers and decision-makers who matter to this firm actually form trust, before they pick up the phone?

For some IP firms, LinkedIn genuinely matters because individual experts can demonstrate thinking and stay present in professional networks between conversations. For others, carefully curated client briefings or sector-specific insight pieces do more. For others still, conference panels and expert peer circles remain the primary reputation engine.

The mistake is copying the activity mix of other firms without understanding where one’s own business actually comes from. Presence in the wrong place, however consistent, does not compound.

Frequency is not the point. Recognisability is.

Many experts ask: “How often should we post?” It is an understandable question, but it comes too early.

The better sequence is: what do we want to be known for, by whom, and in which situations does that matter?

A firm that publishes three sharp, strategically grounded perspectives per month will build more authority than a firm that posts three times a week without a clear thematic direction. In expert-led businesses, overproduction, especially when it reads as generic or reactive, quietly damages the very credibility the firm is trying to build. Readers notice.

The partner’s role is not content production

In many IP firms, marketing fails because the implicit expectation is that partners should become content producers. That is usually both unrealistic and the wrong use of their time.

What partners actually have, and what the market needs from them, is the thinking that comes up in every client meeting: what clients are currently misunderstanding, which risks are consistently underestimated, which decisions keep being delayed and why. That thinking exists. It is precisely the expertise that builds reputation when made visible.

What is missing is the translation layer. Someone who understands both expert communication and market strategy and can turn partner thinking into output without requiring partners to write it themselves. The expert provides the judgement. The system produces the result. That distinction determines whether the marketing function actually runs.

Small, disciplined, modular

For firms without an internal marketing department, the solution should not be a large and complex marketing machine. It should be a lean one: a quarterly topic agenda, a defined set of priority formats, a repurposing logic that makes one strong piece of content work across several touchpoints. The goal is not to create more work. It is to reduce the friction that currently makes marketing feel like it belongs to someone else’s schedule.

Marketing and business development run on the same logic

In IP firms, marketing only creates lasting value when it connects to business development. The firms that get this right tend to operate with a simple principle: the thinking that impresses in a client meeting should be visible in the market before the meeting happens.

This matters particularly for firms of forty to sixty people. At that size, founder reputation alone no longer carries the full weight, but the firm may not yet have the infrastructure of larger practices. Institutional market presence starts to matter, and it does not build itself.

The accumulation problem

The risk for many successful IP firms is not that they do too little. Often, they do many things, just not coherently enough. One partner posts occasionally. Another gives talks. The website reflects a slightly different emphasis. The best client insights stay inside mandate work. The younger experts are never systematically brought into the firm’s visibility.

The result is activity without accumulation. And accumulation is what reputation is actually made of. When coherence is missing, even a high volume of activity will not produce the market presence the firm deserves.

Governance, not goodwill

For IP firms at this level of maturity, the most valuable support is often not content creation alone. It is governance, a structure that does not depend on individual enthusiasm or available time, but runs reliably because it has been designed to.

Without that structure, marketing stays reactive, driven by urgency and whoever happened to have a window in their calendar. With it, marketing becomes a leadership function that managing partners can actually steer rather than one that simply happens around them.

That reframe matters. It changes what kind of support is useful, what kind of investment makes sense, and what kind of results become realistic. The question is not how to market more. It is how to make what the firm already knows, its expertise, its track record, its way of thinking, show up in the market consistently enough to be remembered when it counts.

Until then, a question to reflect on:

If your firm’s marketing stopped tomorrow, no posts, no conference appearances, no updates, how long would it take for the right people in your market to notice the absence? And what does that answer tell you about the system you currently have?

About the columnist

Giulia Donato
Branding & Communication Advisor | Executive Coach | Lecturer
people & brand strategies
www.donatostrategies.com