Marketing Consultants

Not every day needs to be short-term profitable.

Often, it’s just as important to build longterm assets: audience and relationships.

How many people can you speak with today to form a deeper connection?

How many new folks can you get on your mailing list this week?

What new audiences can you get in front of this month to share your unique value?

Sometimes, the move isn’t to go for the money. It’s to build your audience and relationships.

Keep a database full of the relationships you create. Stay in touch with people. These are assets that compound over time.

As we see the global markets shift from a long bull run to a recessionary period, you’ll probably notice a few of your clients struggling to get the traction they were once used to.

They may look directly at you and put you in charge of “more leads” and ultimately, to grow the business via new client acquisition.

And while that is certainly the main part of our job as marketers, it’s important to be aware of the various forces at play so you can work on the right things to make the necessary impact.

Here’s how I break down the problem to help our clients get the best possible results.

1. Macroeconomic Forces

Right now, the capital markets are down and it’s getting more expensive to borrow.

There’s concern about a looming recession in the coming months or years, and that means generally people are spending less money than they were during the long and prosperous bull run that led us here.

A lot of companies are seeing plateaus and in some cases, declines in sales. This means they pre-emptively conserve cash in case things get worse.

Consumers also spend less. And that makes our job harder.

We are directly impacted by the macro, whether we’re aware of it or not. It’s good to be aware of the broad picture in times like these.

Metric to look for: GDP growth/decline, major market indexes like the S&P and DOW, federal interest rates, geopolitical activity.

2. Market Forces

The market consists of buyers and sellers in any given region or addressable area.

If the macro picture is negative, there are usually fewer people looking to buy right now. You can only sell to the people who want to buy, after all.

Furthermore, if there is a lot of competition, that smaller pool of buyers will have plenty of options to choose from, making it even more challenging.

The most customer-centric companies win in these environments.

All of this means everything companies do needs to be buttoned up. Complacent companies will be the first to get cut or replaced.

We’ll get into the particulars below.

Metric to look for: Who is the category leader and why are they most successful?

3. Category Demand

Demand for your clients’ category (i.e. CRMs, legal services, whatever else) is a major driver of a company’s success. It was almost impossible to lose money selling pickaxes during the gold rush in California.

I might love chocolate-covered pickles. I might open a chocolate pickles store. But if most people don’t like them and that’s what you sell, you’re in a tough place.

Sometimes, demand is static. People buy shampoo and dog food at pretty consistent rates.

But demand can also fluctuate due to a variety of circumstances.

Ice cream doesn’t sell too well in a Canadian winter. People don’t go on as many vacations to the Bahamas during hurricane season.

And when the macro conditions get tight, people scale down to the essentials. Demand is a real force at play, whether you and your clients recognize it or not.

Metric to look for: Total market size for the industry (local and global).

4. Brand and Product Awareness

As a marketer, making people in your target market aware of your product or service is your main job.

If people search on Google for a solution, your job is to make sure your client is plastered all over the search results.

If people buy your clients’ products impulsively from a Facebook ad, that’s where you need to show up.

If your clients’ target market spends a lot of time and money going to conferences, it’s a good sign you should help your clients show up in the best possible way.

People most closely associate a marketer’s job with driving awareness. As we’ll learn here, that’s just one of many influencing factors at play.

Metric to look for: Traffic/impressions/conversations.

5. Product Quality

When push comes to shove, how good are your clients’ products and services? When given two similar options, do people choose them or the competition? Why?

A good product alone won’t help a business grow. There are plenty of great products that died because of insufficient marketing—and plenty of mediocre products that sold due to good marketing.

But a bad product is almost impossible to sell when times get tighter—no matter how much awareness you build around it.

You could take over the entire Superbowl ad lineup and not sell a thing if the product doesn’t meet the specs of what people want.

Be as honest and objective as possible about the quality of the product in the eyes of the target market relative to the other options.

If it needs work, help the client improve it with market research. If the product is good, continue to market the heck out of it.

Metric to look for: Net Promoter Score surveys and/or customer interviews.

5. Messaging and Positioning

Your clients may have the best products. The market may love what they sell once they try it.

But if the way you position and describe the product isn’t right, people won’t see the benefit of making the purchase.

The product needs to speak to a particular audience in ways they care about. It needs to be sufficiently differentiated from the competition. We buy based on differences, after all.

If you’re getting attention on your offers, the product is competitive, and yet still people aren’t turning into leads and customers, it might be a messaging and positioning problem.

Metric to look for: Traffic to lead or purchase conversion rate.

6. Sales Process

Maybe the market forces are good. Your product is good. You’ve described it well enough to get people to raise their hands and show interest.

But for some reason, leads aren’t turning into customers.

Some questions to ask:

1. What is the conversion rate on all qualified opportunities?
2. Are your salespeople responding to leads quickly?
3. Are they following up consistently to quiet leads?
4. Do they reach out to past (dead/inactive/lost) leads?
5. Do they ask the right questions when someone reaches out?
6. Are they sharing the right information during the sales conversation?
7. Do they know why deals were won or lost?

Marketing relies on a good sales process in order to succeed, and these are just a few questions to consider when evaluating the sales process.

In closing…

It’s a lot easier to sell to a hungry market when you have a great product during exceptional macroeconomic conditions than it is to sell an undifferentiated, sub-standard product with a sales team who isn’t performing.

But we don’t always have the luxury of the perfect scenario.

As marketers, our job is to understand the landscape—both the macro and local factors—to sufficiently guide our clients toward the best possible outcomes.

Marketing is more than just broad awareness. If it were that easy, we’d all be rich.

The best consultants get out of the siloed view of marketing channels alone and get involved in—or at least contribute to—discussions related to the product, price, and sales activities.

It’s not enough to be a master technician at one channel or another. Everything is marketing.

We have to be critically aware that our role as marketers means taking a cold hard look at the desirability of the product, the macro trends shifting winds for or against us, and how we can help the sales team to close more opportunities.

At the end of the day, it’s about results. Financial business results. Don’t be scared to evaluate your clients’ businesses more holistically than through a typical marketing lens.

Sometimes, the answers are self-evident. But you won’t see it unless you look at the whole picture.

As an outsider, you’re best positioned to see things as they are.

—k

 

If you’re reading this, you’re probably an expert.

And because you’re an expert, it’s reasonable to assume you talk about your craft like one.

I know I do. I often make arguments and take stances around my areas of expertise. It’s how we share ideas so they can be considered and scrutinized by others.

More recently, though, I’ve noticed I’ve been relating more to the explorers out there. The ones who share what they discover instead of having all the answers.

They’re also experts, but they’re still actively exploring their craft. There’s a subtle difference in the way they communicate.

Maybe you can be an expert while still taking an explorer’s mindset. Maybe that’s the better way to communicate.

I’m not sure.

The most successful businesses have a high degree of customer-centricity. Think Amazon or Google—they’re absolutely relentless about the customer experience.

And in the consulting world, the most successful advisors are the ones who have a high customer-centricity and low self-orientation.

Not sure what this all means? In this episode, I break down how to put your client at the epicentre of your business, how to reduce your self-orientation, and the trade-offs needed to do all of this well.

Give this a listen here or subscribe via your podcast player.

Early this year, at the height of the Canadian winter, my wife booked a trip for our family to visit a nearby farm to let our son see the animals and explore the area.

It turns out, the day we booked ended up being so cold that they had to close for the day. You can almost picture the animals’ hooves being frozen to the turf, it was that cold.

But we didn’t know they were closed. And we didn’t check the weather to see if it was exceptionally cold that day. So, we bundled up well and headed over to the farm, as good Canadians do.

When we arrived, the person working said they were closed that day. We didn’t get any phone calls or emails about it. And their website didn’t mention anything.

“Didn’t you check our Instagram account?”, he asked.

No, we didn’t even think to check their Instagram account. And even if we logged into Instagram that morning, would we see their message amidst the posts of our actual friends and family?

But I definitely noticed all emails that came in that morning. I get notified of every single one.

Which gets me thinking…

Would you rather make email or social media your primary communication channel?

Of course, they have different purposes. You might say that social media is for distributing your ideas and building relationships with people online.

And to a large extent, I’d agree with that. But I wouldn’t rely on social media to communicate important things to my clients or prospects. And I wouldn’t build it at the expense of email.

Email is the one thing every single person with access to the internet has. Most people check it daily, if not many times a day.

My reminder here is to make building and nurturing your email list your top priority. It’s a lot easier to get important messages across—algorithm-free—and to actually sell things later on.

Yes, it takes time to build. But you won’t build a list by thinking about it. You do it one subscriber at a time.

—k

The odds of you succeeding with new ventures or ideas out of the gate is low. It’s not fun but it’s true.

Even if your idea is good, it might be adjacent to the one the market actually wants. A small set of tweaks and iterations to the format, offer, or audience might just be what it needs to take off.

And that’s empowering! It means you’re not alone. Nobody figures everything out right away.

It’s easy to get frustrated when things aren’t clicking for you—especially when you’re trying something new that you feel really passionate about.

It can feel like two steps forward and one step back. We look around for answers but get frustrated when nobody offers the magic pill.

There is no magic pill, only iteration and innovation.

We have to hold our vision strong while simultaneously being loose about our best ideas. It’s a fine line between a steadfast vision and being oblivious to what the market wants.

If you are willing to iterate and innovate continually, it’s only a matter of time before your vision and what your audience wants are in complete alignment.

Listen in for more on this topic if you’re in this mode or subscribe via your podcast player.

Last week, I talked about making offers.

My advice was to create value slowly by codifying and documenting your intellectual property, but change how you capture that value often.

And I’ve been taking my own advice. Here’s what’s new and different to show you behind the scenes.

1. My 1:1 mentorship now has one option, not two.

I’ve made it a no-brainer option for people seeking to transition into or succeed at selling advisory work.

For $997/month, mentorship clients get one deep-dive call with me each month and unlimited access to me for short calls and asynchronous Slack conversations, among other resources.

Clean, simple, and super reasonable.

2. The group coaching membership now has one option, not two.

I briefly introduced a second option for the Mindtrust membership but it didn’t feel right to have two.

The value distinctions became too blurry.

So, I decided to keep things super simple and go all-in on over-delivering for members at $97/month.

I’m excited about what’s coming here.

Hint: it’s a good time to become a member if you’re not already.

3. I stopped promoting the free Mindshare community for now.

I’m not sure if keep running the free community. Maybe it’s the platform, maybe it’s my energy levels, or maybe it’s my ability to add value in this context. I’m not sure.

Members have historically gotten a lot of value from the coffee meetups, connections, content, and peer advice. But is it becoming “yet another place to log into”? I’m not sure.

I might change it up soon and possibly move it to a premium (paid plan) Slack community. Possibly.

That said, I’ll keep it running for now and invite people who want to join. You’re welcome to invite folks, too.

More on that soon.

4. I’ve also added some new things.

AdvisorOS

I’ve officially released AdvisorOS (formerly MindshareOS). And it’s been selling! It’s fun to see digital products take on a life of their own.

My mind now is thinking about how to help make sure those methods and templates help the people who bought it run a more effective advisory practice.

Things are only valuable when they make people better at what they do…

Member Perks

Members and current clients get free access to workshops and webinars and special pricing on 1:1 strategy sessions if they need it.

Podcast Interviews

I’m beginning to line up guests to interview for Mindshare Radio. Less monologue (still some of that) and more interviews coming your way.

And that’s it!

It’s a constant evolution around here. IMO, that’s how you find the right model for your business.

My guiding principle is simple: to help people achieve meaningful improvements to their consulting practice through leveraged offerings and advisory work.

I plan to keep adding, trimming, consolidating, and unbundling my work to make them valuable to different people at different stages.

Kill your darlings, as they say. Double down on what works and do what your gut tells you.

What are you doing in your business to expand, cut, consolidate, or deconstruct your offerings?

Let me know if this inspired any thoughts or if you have any feedback for me. 😬

—k

A lot of people ask me what audio, camera, and lighting setup I use.

I’ve written about my audio setup a couple years ago. But a lot has changed since then—particularly in terms of the video equipment I use.

If you want to check out the full technology setup I use—from camera to lights, microphones, wires, software and more—you can check it out here.

I’ll consider this an evergreen resource and will update it when something new gets added.

—k

Turning your expertise into a codified methodology is a lifelong process. It happens slowly.

But the way you package, sell, and even deliver your expertise can change constantly.

That’s because people prefer different modes of transportation at different times—regardless of context.

Some people are visual learners, some like to read, some process via audio, and others through application.

Some people prefer coaching, or a course, or a membership depending on their budget and goals.

We’re all different and our needs change over time.

What matters most is your ability to get people to a destination successfully. And that means packaging up your expertise in a variety of ways to make it suitable for your different kinds of buyers and their preferences.

One of the best ways to discover what your market wants and sell more of your expertise is to create new offers constantly.

Offers could be anything. They could be products, services, experiences, or as a bundled combination of multiple things.

They may vary in scope, length, price, and/or terms. They might be high-touch, low-touch, or a bit of both. You might offer them once, for a limited time, or as a standard offer.

The options are endless.

You will spend years codifying your core value. But you can change up how you deliver that value whenever you want.

So don’t be scared to create offers. Try things. Put things out there. Switch up what you do on a regular basis to see if one thing works better than the other.

The worst thing that happens is nobody buys it. But if never experiment, you’ll never know what works best.

—k

LAST CALL:
If you haven’t registered for the Google Analytics 4 workshop on Monday, do that now so you have the training you need to keep your clients analytics in order before the current version gets phased out. Register: https://lu.ma/ga4

Does researching your “competition” in a new niche make you feel intimidated?

If you compare yourself to the established players in the niche you’re entering, you can easily talk yourself out of entering it at all.

On the one hand, if there’s no competition, it might be a sign there’s not a valid business. But even that might be misleading.

On the other, if there’s plenty of competition, it could actually be like seeing trees in a desert—an oasis of opportunity.

Regardless of the situation, researching the players in a market might make you feel like you’re not good enough. Or the road will be too steep to climb.

What you’re forgetting, however, is the X-factor you bring to the table. Your unique experience, expertise, personality, and style are all original to you. Your way of selling and delivering your expertise will be uniquely yours, too.

People buy from people they like and relate to. And we’re all different, which means you have just as much a shot at success as anyone who came before you.

Sure, it may take time to gain the traction you want. But don’t let the presence or “competition” dissuade you from pursuing your ideal clients.

Lean into your original worldview and amplify your quirky self. Give it time. Ignore everyone else for a while.

The right people will come to you. There’s room for everyone.