Consultant Marketing Simplified—Step One: The Plan

Sep 15

It’s not necessary for me to tell you how much of a slog marketing is when you’re running your own consultancy. The challenge is when you’re so busy delivering value and servicing your consultant clients, marketing often takes a back seat. I see this time and time again with consultants I work with, and if consultants had an easier pathway to market via content, they would be more apt to produce the content that gets them the awareness and the leads they need to grow the business and stay busy.

A special note for referral-based consultants: Most consultants are in a referral-based business. It may be easier to rely 100% on referrals, however, they are unpredictable and most consultants don’t have a referral program for their clients to keep a steady supply of referrals they can work with.

Content marketing is critical to staying visible, relevant and on top of your industry’s trends to your referrers and makes them feel great about referring you. Referrals can dry up really fast when you’re not staying relevant, as they’re passive and irregular. Plus, your content can go a long way to help them make their buying decision or at minimum how to work with you, even though they are coming in through referral pathways.

I had a high-end consultant in a very niche industry (consulting healthcare systems on performance and applying for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award) who learned through my qualitative research that the number one way she acquired clients was through referral, but only if she stayed relevant and top-of-mind with her referrers. When I started working with her, we increased her visibility and relevancy tenfold. As a result, she started winning proposals and in a single year, consulted two major healthcare systems who were recognized by Baldrige for their quality and performance, which had never been done before.

So this is the first step of a three-step process I will teach you (over two additional posts) how you can not only create a plan for content that fuels your consultancy’s relevance and leads, but potentially inspire information products you can also offer to prospective clients who are not familiar with you.

The plan: reverse engineer it

I will use a mock content marketing strategy based on my own offerings to demonstrate this three-step process to simplify your marketing by creating real efficiencies in not only the content creation, but how you repurpose and leverage content.

When you reverse engineer something you always start with the end goal.

Using my own consultancy as a straw man, here is how I started so I could reverse-engineer the tactical rollout:

The goal is to generate revenue via my passion-centric offerings: my courses, my environment-enhancing original art for the remote worker, creative guidance sessions as well as the creative services through Better3.
Given that’s a lot of offerings to present people, I designed a way to connect everything together so one activity would sponsor another as well as cross-pollinate. (I go into detail in Consultant Marketing Simplified: Step 2)
So what can I focus on as my primary goal? Promote my mini online courses that drill down into specific content found in the larger Passion Course, so if someone wanted to really focus on an area versus end-to-end business startup training, it’s available.

As an option, instead of mini courses, you could choose books which can also cross-pollinate to your other products in the same manner. Your book could even offer free access to your course that complements the material. Books are low cost and can help propagate to other products and services in your business. Many consultants believe they have to have something published to be perceived as a thought leader and legitimate. That’s up for debate these days, in my opinion. Although online courses can be priced higher than books, you don’t have the benefit of the audience and search capability that Amazon offers if Amazon is your distribution platform.

Doing both allows you to leverage the value of Amazon’s search capabilities as well as full control over content in a mini-course such as downloads, video and audio in addition to text. So linking your ebook and online course is a win-win. (Assuming you’re publishing your book on Amazon as a Kindle ebook not as a lead magnet ebook on your website, unless you do an abbreviated version that’s a tease to promote your Amazon book and online course.)

See how you can tie it all together? More on that in the next step. Meanwhile…

So the first step is figuring out your main goal. Start with the end in mind: what is it you want to sell? Remember this can be a low-cost item, it doesn’t have to be your whale (the biggest, costliest consultant engagement). You need to treat it as a paid lead generator, so people get to experience working with you while getting immense value.

This is not a new marketing concept. It’s been done for decades, and is still done today. I do it with my KISS Marketing Map™ and it has worked fantastic at generating creative services engagements. Many non-fiction authors use the book path to create speaking and consulting engagements or to sell other products and services.

The trick is deciding where and what you want your target goal to be so you can reverse-engineer the steps to getting it sold so it propagates your other products and services.

Do some practice rounds. Brainstorm any existing or potential product you have that may work and then reverse engineer how it can lead to other offerings in your arsenal. There is no right answer, you just need to feel around and trust your gut which one will be the most interesting and fun to develop, because you’re going to spend a lot of time creating content about it. And that’s the third step!

See you soon for Step 2!