How To Market A Consulting Business: Getting Started

Sunday, August 14, 2022

Insights/Marketing/How To Market A Consulting Business: Getting Started

A foolproof marketing plan for the early to mid-stage consultant or firm.

If you're a consultant, you need clients. That's as obvious as the sun rising on the horizon. But what's less obvious is just how you get those clients:

  • ​Should you repeatedly post on social channels with hopes that someone will like your post and hire you?
  • ​ Should you go to networking events and hand out your card to anyone that makes eye contact?
  • ​Should you make cold contact with every person you can find an email address or phone number for?

While there is nothing exactly wrong with these activities, they might not be the best for most consultants. Why? Because every consultant under the sun uses them. They are overused tactics in a saturated market and tend to require a lot of effort and only give a limited return.

That's not to say that these tactics don't work, because they do... but there is a better way.

Take a look at the strategy below and give it a try for your specific niche.

Become The "Go-To" Person For Associations & Groups

The first component to your strategy for growing your consulting business should be to become the "go-to" person within your local associations and groups.

The reason for this is because nearly every person who hires consultants is a part of an industry trade group in their local area. From HR professionals who join their local HR chapter, to entrepreneurs who join their local BNI group or Chamber of Commerce, people who hire consultants have a tendency to "group up".

Given this fact, you as a consultant have a very unique opportunity - you can easily leverage these groups to get started as a consultant and keep yourself more than busy with work. That's because these groups offer you the ability to reach many of the key players in your niche and locale without much effort.

Associations and groups in nearly every industry and profession all have one thing in common - they are desperate for good presenters and content. This is where your opportunity lies.

By positioning yourself as "the person" in your niche and locale that your associations turn to for good presentation and content, you can turn on a nearly endless supply of inbound inquiries and new business.

How you might ask? Well it's simple really, and has been outlined for you in the next section below.

Demonstrate In-Depth Knowledge Of The Most Pressing Issues

As a consultant, you are a person with deep technical knowledge in your given field. You know the ins and outs of the trade, and keep yourself up to date on the leading issues of the day. If you are not doing this, you're likely not a real consultant and will struggle to get clients (sorry for the harsh reality).

Assuming that the harsh reality above doesn't apply to you, the foundational component of your marketing as a consultant will be to share your expertise... freely.

Now, before you go and get yourself in a huff about sharing your expertise freely, let's take a moment to understand who hires consultants - busy people who don't want to fuss with figuring things out themselves.

Read that again, because it is important. People hire consultants because they are too busy to figure things out by themselves. They would rather pay you a premium for your expertise than waste their time trying to do it alone. If they wanted to do it themselves, they would... but they don't. They want to hire someone.

With that said, they don't want to just hire anyone. They themselves are often well-versed enough in the field to be able to keenly identify who knows what they are talking about and who doesn't. They can weed out the good from the bad fairly quickly.

And that brings us back to the part about sharing your expertise freely. And here's why:

When a person who is too busy to do a job themselves wants to hire a consultant, they want to be able to find one FAST. The first person who comes to mind is often the one hired for the job.

This is important because when you share your expertise freely, your name becomes well known in the "groups" that your customers congregate in. You become the known expert - the person who can be called or held on retainer for work.

The person hiring doesn't really want to shuffle through resumes, call a bunch of firms, or spend too much time trying to find the right consultant for the job. They want the person who is already known as the expert in the niche and locale.

That's where the groundwork of your expertise sharing will come into play. Over time, your customer will have come to recognize you as the go-to resource that can help them. OR, they will ask other leaders in the industry groups they are a part of who they recommend... and your name will come up to the top of the list.

It is for that reason that you need to be sharing your expertise: presenting at chapter meetings, holding open Q&A sessions during events, and proactively sending guides out to your network on the issues of the day (for free).

This little bit of legwork will be most all of the marketing you need to do as a consultant. There are still some small things that you can do if you really want to boost your opportunities and grow your business, but everything in your marketing will hinge on you sharing your expertise freely.

Use Lead-Capture Software

One foundational component of ALL good marketing is lead-capture (capturing the contact information of prospects so that you can market to them for free). This allows you to take control of how often your prospective customers see your name.

When you have a list of people who are open to hearing from you, you are in control of your marketing. You can remain in contact with them independently of a group's or association's meeting schedule (and rules), and can set a schedule for how often you keep your name and content in front of them. This is the golden ticket in marketing.

So, in order to set this up for your consulting business, you'll need two things:

  • ​A lead-magnet
  • ​Lead capture software (like Clickfunnels).

Now, if you're not familiar with what a "lead-magnet" is, let's review. A lead-magnet is something that you give away or sell at a very low price to a prospective customer in exchange for their contact information. This is often a guide for how to overcome a specific issue, a webinar where you sell a low ticket item, a free level of service (like a gap analysis or consultation call), or a book that you wrote that is relevant to the niche.

When you give away your lead-magnet, your prospective customer is required to provide you with their contact information. When they do, that's when your relationship with them really begins.

Send Emails AND A Print Newsletter

For anyone that takes you up on your lead-magnet, it's time to start building up your relationship with them at scale.

If you were to try and build 1:1 relationships with all of the people who provide you with their contact information then you'd be busy talking all day and not doing paid work. That's never a good thing.

So, to save your time and keep you billable you'll need to employ some basic marketing strategies that will keep your prospects "on the line" over the long term. Two of the best strategies for this are automated emails and monthly print newsletters.

These two mediums allow you to build your relationship with your prospects en-masse without having to invest any more time than is required. To do this, you'll need to:

  • ​Set up an email autoresponder with an indoctrination sequence and weekly "state of the industry" broadcast.
  • ​Create and send a monthly print newsletter to your contacts that educates, entertains, and inspires them on topics in your field.

But don't worry if you haven't done these things before, a SIMPL Sales & Marketing Consultant can help. Connect with us through one of our Programs and we can tell you all about our email writing and newsletter creation services to make this part of your marketing plan easier than you could have ever imagined.

Recap & Takeaways

Once you've mastered the above marketing plan for your consulting business, you should have more than enough inbound inquiries to keep you busy for a lifetime.

Just to make sure we conclude this article with some succinct steps for you, here's the bulleted list of takeaways:

  • ​Become the "go-to" person within the associations and groups in your niche and locale.
  • ​Share your expertise freely.
  • ​Use lead capture software (like Clickfunnels).
  • ​Send emails AND a print newsletter to keep your leads "on the line" over time.

That's it. Follow these 4 simple steps and you'll be on your way to consulting success in no time.

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