When marketing their business and services, consulting firms cannot simply rely on their expertise or consulting skills. Unlike industries that have products to feature, consulting firms need to rely on selling the people within their firm and need to be heavily focused on the client experience. The growing number of new consultancies starting up also means that you need to be able to truly distinguish yourself from the competition. Below are the main strategies you need to consider in order to effectively grow your consulting firm.
Positioning for the right niche
First, you need to start positioning yourself. Positioning is the first step to even more successful differentiation from your competitors, and is a great way to find undecided customers. Think of it as a costless process of self-assessment.
Ask yourself: who are your clients, what are their needs, and why do they need you. Then look at your service: what specialisations you have for your clients and what they pay you to do. Go through the work you’ve done that serves as evidence of your skills. Illustrate how you are the choice to go with for the service you provide. And finally, what is your personality, what kind of work culture you have, what is your brand, and most importantly, how are you different from your competitors. When you have answered all of these questions, you will have all the ingredients to differentiate yourself from the competition.
To solidify your position, you should create and market a Unique Value Proposition, and you can refer to our guide on how you can do so.
Curating an image as thought leaders
Content creation for social media channels is another great way to differentiate your company from the competition. Once you have positioned yourself, you’ll have a
great starting point for the kind of content you should be creating to market yourself to your target niche.
Your content should build trust and authority in you, demonstrating that your firm is indeed the one they should come to for your service. If your content gives clients everything they could have thought of and more, they won’t even need to look at any other websites before deciding to work with you!
Leverage your experience and qualifications in the field to develop and disseminate pieces that help to curate the image of being top of your specialisation. Try out different styles such as longform blog articles or infographics to determine which type of content your audience engages with the most.
Done right, thought leadership can solidify your credibility and give you a presence on social media, becoming one of a firm’s most effective and valuable tools for attracting potential new clients.
Paid Advertising on Social Channels
Paid advertising is useful in building visibility on search engines when potential clients search for consulting services, or terms that are related to your niche.
Based on the niche that you have carved out, you can optimise your ads for the people who are more likely to convert. For example, instead of targeting an ad for a general keyword like “consultants near me”, tailor your keywords down to what your firm actually does. This could look like: “B2C consultants in Singapore”. This way, you know that the people that come across your ads are looking for a service that is your niche, and are also located in an area where you can service.
Local Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the most effective strategies professional service firms can use to rank higher in Google and generate more organic traffic. This is because potential clients would use Google to search for consultants in their local area (recall the time when you searched for “(service/products) near me” on Google). It’s just a matter of getting your firm to show up in the search results.
On platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, you can also target people who work in a specific industry or have a certain job title, ensuring that your ads get your business in front of the right people.
Host Events and Webinars
Now that you have positioned yourself as a thought leader on social media and have generated awareness of your firm to the right audience, another way to reach out to them is through events and webinars. These can help you share more on your expertise on various topics and can also double up as networking opportunities. Connect with the people that attend these events, convert them into leads, and then build on this relationship.
In this socially distant age, hosting events and webinars has become a lot simpler in terms of logistics and costs. You no longer have to rent venues, and time can also be saved since these webinars are hosted online. Similarly, it would also be more convenient for potential clients to attend since they can effectively attend from anywhere in the world.
Marketing Automation
In the digital era, marketing automation is still an underrated approach to online marketing. The automation of marketing tasks and usage of data analytics to optimize marketing is a viable strategy for any firm looking to stay competitive. With behavioral segmentation, automation can tell you what topics within your thought leadership are of most interest to your desired potential clients. Automation helps you see the trends more clearly and market to people based on
their interests.
Through lead scoring, automation can help you figure out which potential clients you should prioritize in appealing to. Marketing automation is also useful in the more mundane ways, email campaigns and marketing are more efficient when done through automation, and the right softwares can even track and report back to you what aspects of your campaigns are and are not working. To put it simply, marketing automation is a great way to help you improve the efficiency of your operations, so that you can better spend your time and resources on more important client-related work.
Summary
In summary, marketing for the consulting industry is a matter of positioning yourself strategically, and differentiating yourself successfully. Content creation and client focused marketing are key to growth in brand awareness, and the client experience should always be considered.
We know that this is no easy task, and that is where we come in! At cmoCre8, we
have an experienced team who can help businesses navigate through this journey
so that you can focus on growing your business and leave all things marketing with
us. Contact us now!