If you have made the excellent decision to start your consulting business, the next part is often the more challenging for consultants: Growing Your Consulting Business. How do you do this the easy way and the sustainable way to ensure that your consulting business grows consistently?
This article will explain how I have grown my consulting business by getting my ideal clients to ask me to help them at the precise moment in time that they are ready to engage my consultancy services.
Whilst some so called ‘marketing experts’ sell you that there is only one way to do this, and that way is to buy their training on ‘Facebook marketing’, I will tell you what works and why it works from a marketing perspective.
Before I can do that, I need to briefly explain the two different types of marketing and also ensure that you understand which Marketing DNA type consultancy businesses fit into. Until you understand both of these things you cannot be expected to consistently grow your consulting business.
The Two Different Forms Of Marketing
There are two main forms of marketing; attraction marketing or interruption marketing. Attraction marketing is cheaper and more effective. I call it ‘easy life’ marketing and it is the only type of marketing that you want to undertake as a consultant.
Interruption marketing is the form of marketing that most of the so called ‘marketing gurus’ try to sell you so that you have to buy their training to make it produce prospects for you. What they don’t tell you as they sell you their $497 or $997 course (always dollars, even when they are in England) is that it isn’t a very effective form of marketing.
What is interruption marketing? It is presenting your marketing message to someone when they haven’t asked for it and their primary purpose is not to buy your consultancy services.
Let me provide you with an example to ensure that you know the difference. Imagine that you are on facebook looking at pictures from a friend’s party the previous day. You are laughing as you remember all of the funny things that happened, when, amongst the pictures of Hugh spitting out the caviar just like Tom Hanks in Big, you see an advertisement by Bob Guru telling you to stop what you are doing and see how you too can make $1,000 a minute by watching his short two minute video, which pitches his webinar which sells you his $497 training.
Let’s remember why you went onto facebook – to browse photographs from a friend’s party. You had absolutely no intention of buying any advice when you went online, yet hear you are, vaguely interested to see how you can make $1,000 a minute without any skills or expertise (you can’t, by the way). You sign up for the webinar.
The key points are:
- You didn’t go looking to buy advice. You are not a motivated buyer. Motivation is crucial.
- You were interrupted from your primary task of browsing photographs by Bob Guru’s advertisement.
Flip this position to attraction marketing. Attraction marketing is the complete opposite of Bob’s spammy interruption based marketing.
With attraction marketing you appear in front of your perfect prospects at the precise moment in time that they are looking for your services.
Let’s imagine that you are a management consultant in Oxford. A perfect prospect heads to Google and enters “management consultant oxford” into the search bar, hits return and then sees your website at the top of the search results.
They click onto your website and you offer them a free brochure download about your range of services. They enter their email address and receive your free brochure instantly. Inside the brochure you explain to them precisely what they need to do to get in touch with you.
You have captured a perfect prospect. You used attraction marketing.
I will go onto explain the different types of attraction marketing that you must use if you are serious about growing your consulting business further on in this article, but before I do that, I must now ensure that you know which category of Marketing DNA your business falls into, Marketing DNA Now or Marketing DNA Nurture.
Marketing DNA Now or Marketing DNA Nurture?
If you do not fully understand which of the Marketing DNA camps you fall into, you can spend a lot of time and money doing the wrong form of marketing.
I have had Marketing DNA Now business owners come to me having spent thousands of pounds following Bob Guru’s advice which is all about generating clients for a Marketing DNA Nurture business which he failed to explain was not suitable for them when they signed up. Why would he, or they would not have bought his training?
Some people have it easy when it comes to marketing. They can put an advertisement live today and make the phone ring on the same day. These are the Marketing DNA Now service providers. I envy them. These people sell services that people need immediately.
They would include a solicitor selling house moving/conveyancing services, a removal company doing the same, a PR company selling Crisis Management services, which are needed when a company hits the news headlines for all of the wrong reasons and they need the PR company to stop them sounding as bad as they are.
The requirement is that there is an instant need for these services. People aren’t researching around the topic in question, they are searching for a service provider that can help them RIGHT NOW!
For the rest of us, my own marketing consultancy business included, we fit into the Marketing DNA Nurture category.
Someone doesn’t wake up in the morning, jump out of bed and scream “Get me a marketing consultant right now or else”. Instead, they realise that they are seriously lacking on the new client front, head to Google and start looking for information and advice on how to grow their business.
They are firmly in the research mode, and it is your job to ensure that they find your business at this moment and that when they do, they do not leave your website without giving you their name and email address so that you can keep in touch with them until they are ready to buy your services.
If you fail to achieve this, you will never grow your consulting business to the size that you would like it to be. Never.
The sad thing is that nobody takes the time to explain this to you. I see Bob Guru selling interruption marketing training to Marketing DNA Now business owners all of the time, meaning that the training will simply not work for them, even if they implement all of it perfectly.
Nearly every type of consultant offers a Marketing DNA Nurture service.
People selling a Marketing DNA Nurture service have one priority:
To grow their email list by offering Item(s) of Value (IOV) from their website or at seminars/live events.
The marketing plan for a DNA Nurture Consulting business is this:
- Start an email list (I show you how to do this in my comprehensive guide below)
- Write your Item of Value (IOV) showing your perfect prospects how to do something which helps their business and is related to your services – like my free guide below – download it so that you can see in detail how to do this)
- Write an informative blog post once every week and add this to your website to attract more visitors to your website who are your perfect prospects. This blog should be at least 500 words but up to 2-3,000 words if possible. The longer it is, the more chance you have of Google putting you at the top of the search engine results. The blog should answer a question that your perfect prospects are asking. At the bottom of each blog post, put a button to download your IOV (again, as I have done below).
- Send a weekly email to your growing email list using the content from your weekly blog as the content for that email. In this email tell your clients precisely what they must do to take the next step to working with you.
- Share links to your article on your website on all of your social media platforms to increase the chance of people finding your article and adding themselves to your email marketing list.
- Watch your diary get filled with perfect prospects who are ready to buy your services having been receiving your emails for some weeks or months and being convinced of your expertise. Not only are they now convinced of your expertise but they are also not price sensitive. They want to work with you and you only.
- If you have spare funds, you can use Google Ads, another very effective form of attraction marketing to grow your email list more quickly. Just remember that you are building your Marketing Nurture email list, so it will take some time to generate fees from these prospects – you need to be able to bank roll the Google Ads until that money starts coming back to you in the form of fees.
- Rinse and repeat ad infinitum (forever) and keep growing your consulting business.
This is the precise method that I use to marketing my DNA Marketing Nurture marketing consulting business and that I have used since 2003 when I set up my business.
You should follow this process too and what your consultancy business grow.
To discover in detail how to do this, simply click the button below and let me show you step by step how to grow your own six figure and beyond consulting business:
