How To Market Consulting Services
I am Nick Jervis and I have been a marketing consultant since 2003. In this article, I share with you the most effective methods for marketing consulting services. For more information ensure that you download my free six figure consultancy guide.
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The First Thing To Understand When Marketing Consulting Services
I have spent around six figures online marketing my consulting services. I make that point to explain that what I am sharing with you is based on spending my own, hard-earned income, on marketing my consulting services and getting results.
The first thing to understand when marketing consulting services, which most consultants fail to realise, is that you must understand your Marketing DNA.
There are two types of Marketing DNA, Marketing DNA Now and Marketing DNA Nurture. You must understand which category your consulting business falls into otherwise you can spend a lot of money on marketing that will never deliver new clients to you.
Your Marketing DNA determines which methods of marketing will be most effective and, perhaps more importantly, how to generate enquiries for your services.
For example, a Marketing DNA Now business owner is able to generate more enquiries for their services instantly, because clients looking for their services have an immediate itch that needs scratching.
This would include a lawyer offering help for people who have suffered personal injury. If someone has been involved in an accident and suffered an injury, they require immediate help from a specialist lawyer, so they head to Google, type in personal injury lawyer and head to the lawyer at the top of Google, using Google Ads/ Pay Per Click (and paying around $20/£20 per click (I know from experience)) and land on their website. So long as the lawyer proves that they are a specialist, all they need to do at the end of the page that their visitor finds is to offer the visitor several methods for instantly contacting them. These would be telephone, email, online enquiry and live chat.
The Marketing DNA now business owner can go straight for the sale/contact, because their client has an instant need for their services.
In addition to personal injury lawyers, Marketing DNA Now businesses also include many tradesmen (if you have a leaking toilet, you need it fixing instantly), estate agents (I want to sell my house now) and any other type of service business where there is an instant and often urgent need for their services.
So what is the difference with a Marketing DNA Nurture business?
Well, if you have a marketing DNA Nurture service business, you market your services in a slightly different way, and this should interest you because it is the way that you should market consulting services 99% of the time.
When a potential client of a Marketing DNA Nurture business goes looking for help, they do not immediately reach out to a service provider for help, but instead, they start looking for answers to the problem they have to try and fix it for themselves.
Applying this to a marketing consulting firm, the client is very unlikely to type into Google “Find me a small business marketing consultant to work with today”, but instead will type in something like “How do I find new clients” or “How do I marketing my estate agency/law firm/financial advice services?”.
They are looking for ideas to win them new clients, not for a telephone number to call just yet.
Therefore, when you have a Marketing DNA Nurture business, it is 100% about offering what I call ‘an item of value‘ which your website visitors can download in exchange for their name and email address.
The ‘item of value’ can be anything from a checklist that your visitor can download, to a list of marketing ideas, to a full ebook or a 7 day video training course.
The key point is that you have to offer something that your website visitors feel compelled to download because it will solve their current problem and therefore are happy to exchange their email address for it.
If you fail to do this, as I have seen hundreds of marketing consultants do, you will never find it easy to attract new clients.
The reason is simple: your visitor arrives at your website looking for an answer to their problem, they read your helpful information, then reach the bottom of the page where all they are offered is to call or email you. They are not yet ready to do this, so they hit the back button and head off to find some more ideas to solve their problem.
You have lost your warm prospect.
However, your nearest competitor offered an ‘Item of value’ so when your visitor next goes onto this website, he downloaded the item and not only received the item requested but then heard from the consultant every single week until the prospect felt ready to reach out to him and ask for some help.
If you do not yet offer several ‘Items of value’ across your website, that solves the most common challenges your ideal prospects have when doing their research around the problems that you solve, you are missing huge opportunities to create a steady and consistent flow of enquiries for your services.
With marketing consulting services, you fall firmly into the Marketing DNA Nurture camp, so it is all about growing your email list by offering ‘items of value’ from your website.
If you look back to the top of this article, you will see that one of the first things that I did was to offer you something of value to download in exchange for your email address.
As I said, the information I share with you is based on successfully marketing my consultancy services since 2003. I teach my consulting clients the same methods that I use to promote my own services.
What Do You Do Next?
Once you have started growing your email marketing list, what do you do next?
You have all of these people eager to discover how to solve their problem (of finding new clients largely) so what do you do?
You send a weekly email that explains what they should do, without giving away the how to do it, then you invite them to contact you to find out more.
When you do this well, and consistently, you will never worry about marketing your consulting services again, because you, as I do, will have a steady flow of new enquiries for your consulting services.
What I have given you here is the precise system that I have been using since 2003 to create a successful consulting business.
To see the marketing of my consulting services in action, you should download my guide below, then you can see precisely how it works.
