Marketing Consultant

What works best when it comes to marketing for consultants? If you are already a consultant or thinking of becoming one, your first major challenge is to determine exactly how you will find your first clients, or even just your first client.

So where do you start when it comes to marketing your consultancy business? What is the best method of marketing for consultants, and by best I also mean one that does not cost you a fortune but will produce new clients for you – and quickly?

The good news is that the best method, or methods, are not expensive. They can take time, but it is time you absolutely must spend if you plan to run a thriving consultancy business, and I assure you that will be much more fun than running a failing one (and I speak from experience of both sides of the fence).

The main point is always to start from the position of your clients, and my own very short and to the point marketing definition will help you to do this: Clients First!

So whatever type of consultancy business you are running, or intend to run, think about what your clients will want or need to see from you before deciding to engage your services.

At this point please let me save you a lot of time and stress. You may well have read before now that there are two types of marketing for consultants or for businesses generally, the type of marketing where you try to win an instant instruction for your services, and the type where you generate leads, helpfully called lead generation.

Lead generation or instant contact marketing for consultants?

What you may not be sure of is which type of marketing you need to undertake for your consultancy business. In my experience, and I have tested this substantially and at great expense, most consultants should generally target ‘lead generation’.

Why?

There is a very logical reason for this, in that if someone is considering choosing a consultant to help them with any aspect of their service, by the very nature of the service it is unlikely to be an urgent or instant requirement but one for which your client is likely to do a fair amount of research.

Contrast the position of looking for a consultant with someone who is looking for a heart surgeon, or even a solicitor to move house, when this would definitely call for instant instruction marketing (e.g. call us now on xxx or complete our online enquiry form), but for a consultant it is definitely a case that a prospect is going to take their time to ask you to help them. The reason for this is that they want you to prove that you know your onions before they part with their hard earned profits.

Therefore, you absolutely must be able to offer any prospects landing on your website something of value in exchange for their email address. This will allow you to follow up using an auto responder (email marketing software) until they are at the point where they are ready to buy your consultancy services.

So when I mentioned above the one best method of marketing for consultants, and hinted that it is slightly more than one, this is why. The reality is that you need three key tools in place as soon as possible for your consultancy business;

• An informative content rich website which proves your expertise as a consultant;
• A free gift of value for your prospects in exchange for their email address; and
• An email autoresponder (I use AWeber and love it)

Once you have a free gift of value you can add a download form to a landing page on your website (these are automatically created by most email marketing auto responders so are very easy to set up) and then send some traffic to that page to grow your email marketing database.

I remember setting an initial target of 500 people on my email marketing list and thinking it would probably take forever and that I would probably never get past 1,000, but I hit 500 within 12 months and past 1,000 within the next six months, so if I can do it, I assure you that you can too.

Most importantly, the results of having such an email marketing list are that you can create a steady and consistent stream of new consultancy client instructions.

Email marketing for consultants

Therefore, the first method of marketing for consultants is an email marketing list. I put this first for a very specific reason. It will take you five minutes to get it up and running and as soon as you have it you can start adding the people who you speak with to it.

Websites are vital too for a consultancy business (later), but they take time to create (usually weeks, sometimes months). However, your email marketing list takes minutes to set up but allows you to start talking every week to a growing list of prospects for your consultancy business. You can even start this building this whilst you are still working by adding contacts who could become clients to it.

Start your email list, then start emailing it ideally once a week, but at least once a month.

If you sell a slow burn consultancy service, the sooner you start communicating with your prospects on a regular basis, the sooner you will start getting enquiries for your services.

Fast client acquisition marketing for consultants

If you need clients quickly, either because your consultancy business has not been doing so well, or you are just starting, what can you do to quickly generate new clients?

Well, this depends on whether you already have your email marketing list.

If you do, a simple email asking if your prospects are still interested in “the solution you provide” will make your telephone ring. For me, as a marketing consultant, that email could be as simple as “Are you sill looking to attract new clients to your business?”.

If you do not have an email list, then the good old fashioned telephone is a great place to start. It might not be fun or glamorous, but if you are in need of new clients, you sometimes have to do what you have got to do.

Who will you ring?

• People that you have worked for in the past;
• People who have referred clients to you;
• People who fill into one or both of the two categories above;
• The old radio favourite – “anyone else who knows me”.

Your conversation should be simple and not pushy in any way. If you haven’t spoken with them for a while, just call to say hello and show genuine interest in them. During the course of the conversation you will ask them what they are doing and how it is all going and you will have the chance to say the same about your business.

Strictly no selling, just saying hello.

I have many consultant business friends who do this every three or four months when they want a quick surge of new business. It always works; if you handle the call properly and don’t sell or be pushy.

Website marketing for consultants

Once you have an email list and you have had a ring around to make your telephone ring, clearly the next step is to ensure that your website is up to scratch. It has a crucial role to play in proving your expertise; because that is what you have to do.

Your future consultant clients don’t want an average consultant; they want the best consultant for their needs.

Therefore, your website’s job is to prove your expertise.

It has to have sufficient pages explaining each of your different services, lots of feedback from satisfied clients (if you are a new consultant this will have to be from people who have worked with you in previous roles and sang your praises and any press or media coverage you have had.

It also needs the auto-responder form prominently displayed on every page to grow your email list, and contact details easily accessible when needed.

Google Ads Marketing For Consultants

Now that you have a good website for your consultancy business, you need to send more people to it. The fastest way to do this is to use Google Ads. This way, as soon as someone types in a search related to your services, e.g. ‘business continuity consultant’ or ‘sales consultant’ plus your Town or City name, you can appear in front of them.

It is for this reason that Google Ads is such a powerful form of marketing for consultants.

Grow your website

Once you have a good website, you have to keep growing it.

What is so good about this is that the informative content that you write will serve several purposes:

• It proves your expertise to visitors;
• It tells Google that your website is updated and provides many more opportunities to send more visitors to it; and
• It forms the basis of your email marketing newsletters.

Summary

These are pretty much the only methods of marketing for consultants that you will need.

Do each of them well and consistently and they will deliver you the steady flow of new clients that you need to create a successful consultancy business.

How To Grow Your Consultancy Email List

I managed to grow my email marketing list simply by writing articles for my target audience and letting Google do the rest. I didn’t have the budget when I started to try Google Ads and so I had to be patient, but if you have even one or two hundred pounds a month you should be able to grow your list much more quickly than I was able to.

So do you have a website, a free guide and an email marketing autoresponder in place? If not, you should put this right as quickly as possible. It will be the best investment in yours consultancy business that you could make.

Click the button below to download my six figure consultancy guide:

CLICK HERE to Download My 6 Figure Consultancy Guide :>>

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• Marketing Coaching Services
• Marketing Consultancy Services

I recently met with a very good business coach for a catch up coffee. I have known him for a number of years and he is a really nice chap with excellent qualities for being a business coach/consultant (the main one being that he has run very many successful businesses).

We caught up on each other’s businesses and how we were doing, and then naturally I asked him how he was attracting new clients (what would you expect a marketing consultant to do)?

He explained that mainly new clients came to him from networking and existing client referrals. Both of these methods are totally reliant upon him taking some action, so if he takes time off or is unable to work for a few days or weeks, his flow of new clients will stop because his one marketing method has stopped.

I asked him why he was making life so hard on himself. He looked at me quizzically, before asking what I meant. I simply explained that with a little effort in choosing some good suppliers he could add another marketing system to his coaching business to generate some new client instructions. The obvious gap would be to make better use of his website and engage an Ads agency to set up a Google Ads account to instantly attract more people to his website who are looking for his coaching services right now.

Within one month he could have a completely automated new marketing tactic in place which produced leads for him every month without him taking any action at all. By engaging a professional Pay Per Click agency (who charge a fraction of his hourly rate) he could instantly generate more new client instructions.

It doesn’t have to be Pay Per Click, he could engage a search engine marketing company (slower returns but good in the long term), or a Direct Mail agency to send out postcards promoting his free guide every month. The point is, it absolutely must be automated to ensure that it takes place with or without his input.

If you are the main decision maker and marketer in your business, you cannot ever be the one solely in charge of your day to day marketing, as if you are, everything will take 10 times longer to happen, and worse still, when you are busy, you will simply stop marketing completelyall. This will inevitably lead to a downturn in business in time as you ride the marketing roller coaster of being quite, doing lots of marketing until you get busy, then stopping and so allowing the roller coaster to go down until you are quiet again.

Make life easier on yourself. Engage external help to automate some new marketing tactics and watch your coaching or consulting business flourish!

Click the button below to download my six figure consultancy guide:

CLICK HERE to Download My 6 Figure Consultancy Guide :>>

The start of this article makes it sound as though you have a choice, doesn’t it. ‘How to use email marketing to grow your consulting business‘. Mmm, I might just try that Nick, it sounds interesting. Maybe I will use email marketing, or maybe I won’t. When it comes to selling your consulting services, you have the final say after all, don’t you?

No. Well, yes, but really, no.

You see the simple truth is that when it comes to selling your consulting business services, if you are not using email marketing you will be at a huge disadvantage to consultants who are using email marketing. A huge disadvantage.

The main reason for this is that unless you are a crisis management consultant, stepping in when the proverbial hits the fan to avert a major crisis for a company, most consultancy services are not a ‘distress purchase’.

Take my services as a marketing consultant. Nobody rushes out to the streets shouting ‘Find me a marketing consultant right now, immediately, I need a new client right this minute or it’s curtains for me”.

Or a business continuity consultant. Who wakes up enthused about this very day, right now, setting up a plan to deal with a crisis many months into the future, dashing to their keyboard and frantically typing in ‘business continuity consultant’ into Google, whilst simultaneously picking up the telephone to get the consultant in right now.

I hope I make my point, and sorry to be so brutal in breaking this to you, but I do pride myself on providing ‘no fluff advice to consulting businesses’, so I am being true to myself, and hopefully making a crucial point clear to you. The point is this: your future consultancy clients will take time to decide to make contact with you about your services, often a very long time.

So if you are not using email marketing for your consulting business you are almost certainly missing 80% of your opportunities to win more consulting contracts. Do you really want to throw away that many chances to win new business?

So How Do You Use Email Marketing In Your Consulting Business?

You may be pleased to hear that this is the easy part of the process. Once you are convinced that you must use email marketing to ensure that you sell as much of your consultancy services as you need to to be profitable, using email marketing is relatively straightforward.

Use one of the major providers (I use Aweber), prepare your first free guide which will appeal to your target audience, publicise it on every page of your website in exchange for your prospects email address, and hey presto, you are up and running.

Notice the key part above; you must publicise your free guide on every page of your website. Don’t make the mistake that most consultants make of just putting it on one page and having a link to that page only on the home page or in the navigation. This is a huge mistake when you realise that most people who visit your website to find out more about your consulting services will only ever look at two or three pages.

People are busy; they do not have time to search around your website. They might find your website through a good article you have written and be tempted to find out more, but time is money, so they don’t have time to dig around to find out more about your consulting services. So they leave, unless that is that at the bottom of the article they have just been reading you offer them the chance to receive a free guide, or to find out more about your services, just like you will see at the foot of all of my articles.

If you do this, more likely than not they will add their details, and then you have them. You can now send them an email at least every month, but preferably every week, so that at that point in the future which may be six weeks or six months away, your name is in the front of their mind because you have kept in contact.

Suddenly you are not one of three or four consultants being considered for their business, you are in the race of one of one consultants. That is a far better race to be in than the former.

Now if you are thinking that it will be hard to create the content, it won’t be. Your website needs new content added regularly to provide you with the chance of attracting more clients to your consulting business, so this content can also be used as the content for your email marketing newsletter. Two birds, one stone.

Summary

Email newsletters absolutely haver to be a part of the marketing of your consulting business. Without them you will struggle to create the consultancy business of your dreams.

Download my free guide below to find out the other crucial elements to a six figure consulting business (see what I did there)?

Free Guide: 8 Key Strategies For A 6 Figure Consultancy

Download this free guide to discover:

• • How to generate leads for your consultancy, week after week.
  • The secret to winning repeat client business
  • How to price your services to guarantee success
  • How to leverage your time to ensure that you are paid over and over again for work you do only once
  • Easy ways to keep in touch with your clients
  • Automating your business so that you can enjoy more time with your family or to enjoy your hobbies, ensuring you always stay fresh and focused for your clients
  • The one mistake that could derail your consultancy (if you do not know about it)

Click the button below to download my six figure consultancy guide:

CLICK HERE to Download My 6 Figure Consultancy Guide :>>

More?

• Best consulting websites
• How to get consulting clients fast
• Marketing Coaching Services
• Marketing Consultancy Services

If you are thinking of setting up a consultancy business in the UK, you will have a million and one thoughts and questions running through your mind.

When I set up my consultancy business, I know that I did.

I established my business marketing consultancy for solicitors in 2003.

Since then, it has gone from strength to strength, but perhaps one of the biggest surprises in setting up my consultancy business (and something that gives me a lot of pleasure) has been that I now get to help other people leave employment to set up their own consultancy business.

I share my experiences of what has worked and what hasn’t in establishing my consultancy business to save new consultants from the time, trouble and stress of making all of the same mistakes.

If you want to know exactly what you need to do to set up your consultancy business the easiest way (and the fastest way to the profit/fun part) then I strongly advise you to download my guide by clicking the button below:

Click Here to Download My 6 Figure Consultancy Guide :>>

If you would like a more extensive article detailing all of the requirements of setting up a consultancy business in the UK – please select the link below to view the article on my sister website, Small Business Salt:

How To Set Up And Grow A Consultancy Business – Consulting Success Series:>>

Below is a very shortened summary of my experience of setting up a consultancy business in the UK so you can perhaps do it a lot easier than I did!

Here is my five part guide to setting up a consultancy business.

1. Should You Start A Consultancy Business?

I left a well-paid job as a solicitor to set up a consultancy business because it is what I had always wanted to do. What’s more, I decided to do this at a time when I had a young family to support.

In hindsight you might say it was bad timing, I know my wife has said that!

However, I knew it was now or never for me before I got sucked further into the life as a solicitor to the point that I couldn’t leave it due to the salary levels. That would have killed me as I knew that being a solicitor was not what I was meant to do and it was eating away at me the longer I stayed in the legal profession.

So I jumped, and I jumped hard and far. I left the well paid job as a solicitor and went to earning nothing literally overnight. I did not keep a part time job, or start working on my consultancy business in the evenings; I just went for it straight off the bat.

I wouldn’t have it any other way!

For you now, if you can start your consultancy business whilst also keeping your full time job, or even a part time job, then do it. Or if you think that jumping straight into it is better for you, then do that too.

The point here is that only you can decide. But if you are reading this and something inside of you is jumping up and down saying ‘do it, do it’, you know that whichever way you choose, you owe it to yourself to set up your consultancy business.

2. Why Set Up A Consultancy Business?

Now I have covered the potentially ugly part, let’s have a bit more fun with this.

Here are some of my favourite reasons for setting up a consultancy business:

• You are master of your own destiny. If you earn good money, you can keep good money, it doesn’t go to the boss upstairs.
• You can set your own working times. Now I am not going to lie to you and say that it doesn’t involve a lot of hard work, especially at the beginning, but there are huge benefits to running your own business. I was able to go to all of my children’s plays and events when they were very young because I could set my own working hours and plan my day around them. Many of my ‘employed’ friends missed most of the events because they simply were not allowed the time off.
• You can set your own income limits. There is no limit to your income; it is completely within your own hands. At first you may well take lower paid consultancy roles, but as you grow in confidence and experience, you will soon realise your true value to your clients.
• There are many hidden benefits and opportunities. When you start your consultancy business you will soon find all manner of opportunities to create new income streams alongside your consultancy or completely separate from it. This is exciting, although I would say that at first the key point is not to get carried away with all of these ‘future’ income opportunities. The key point initially is to concentrate on your bread today rather than your jam tomorrow (which sadly never pays the mortgage or the other bills).

3. Where To Set Up A Consultancy Business?

This is a simple question to answer, based on my experience of running a consultancy business from home and now from a suite of offices.

You can run your consultancy business from absolutely anywhere. Generally, the only person that this matters to is yourself. If you think a client won’t pay you thousands of pounds a week or month if you work from home, I can assure you that that is your own mental block and not your clients.

I have found that I am far more focused and get more done working in an office, but that is very much just my personal preference.

At first, to keep costs down, it may well be sensible to run your consultancy business from your home.

4. When To Set Up Your Consultancy Business.

Nike it! Just do it.

The longer you spend thinking about it, the more excuses you will come up with not to do it, so don’t miss this opportunity.

If it is something you need to do, get started on it right now.

5. How To Market Your Consultancy Business And Win New Clients

1. Get a website (a WordPress one would be my advice, costing around £1,000 – £1,500 is more than enough to get all you need to be up and running). Email me if you would like details of service providers.
2. Promote your consultancy services using Google Ads
3. Set up your profile on LinkedIn and connect with all of your old colleagues and contacts who may need your services now or in the future.
4. Attend networking events for two reasons. Firstly, to meet other business owners and see how they find new clients, and secondly, if your clients attend these events, to find new clients for your business.

That really should be enough to get you up and running, so what are you waiting for?

Click the button below to download my six figure consultancy guide:

CLICK HERE to Download My 6 Figure Consultancy Guide :>>