Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator

Kevin C. Whelan

Marketing Consultants

Build in the love

Are you selling what you want to sell or what the market is asking for?

Ideally, you get to do both.

But to stay in business, you need to do the latter.

If you sell just want you want to sell, there’s no guarantee people will buy it. Artists have this challenge.

Instead, if you aim to sell what people are already looking for, the chances of you succeeding goes dramatically higher.

But how do you find out what that is?

Research. (You do do research, right?)

What do people ask you for help with already? Who do you like to work with? What do those people already buy?

Can you point to real cases where your target audience is buying something you plan to sell? If so, that’s a signal.

If you sell what the market is asking for, you’ll have a sustainable business.

If you can convert that into work you also love, you’re ahead of most.

First make a sustainable business, then build in the love.

Prove your expertise with samples

It’s risky to hire a consultant.

Sure, you have skills. But prospects wonder if those skills will move the needle in their business.

That’s why removing risk from your engagements is so important. And you can do it in several ways.

Your credibility signals reduce some degree of risk. Your guarantees reduce risk even more.

But there’s a third important way to reduce risk: samples.

Your content marketing and thought leadership are like samples at the grocery store. People can get a taste of your expertise before they buy it.

And samples sell products.

Without a strong content strategy, people have to rely on your promise of expertise and whatever risk-reducing signals you can put out there.

Conversely, your content proves you have expertise in the areas your prospects care about. Either the content is useful or it’s not.

That’s why good marketing without expertise isn’t really possible for consultants.

If you want to sell more, prove your expertise with content.

How to be hired faster and paid more to do better work

I see a lot of shoddy marketing work out there.

People are offering too many services, not doing what they promised, not actually getting results, and then obfuscating the entire situation.

I’m not saying it’s intentional or malicious, but it happens a lot. Here’s a recent example, and I’ve seen far worse.

Marketing, like many industries, is unregulated. Which means anybody can do it. Which means finding quality work out there is not easy.

So when I say it’s good to specialize, I mean finding an industry and/or a small set of core services to offer that you can do excellent work at.

Sure, you can branch out to other industries. You can offer tangential services. I understand the need to do that and it can be done well sometimes.

In fact, I did that for a long time with my agency before I specialized. But looking back, my agency work wasn’t always great, either.

At least, not the stuff outside of my core competency that I should have never offered.

As an advisor, I sit on the client side of a lot of work product. I can tell you first-hand that those who specialize tend to be hired faster, paid more, and do better work.

If you’re reading this, you’re already delivering great work for your clients. This isn’t about you.

It’s about the industry. It’s about striving for excellence.

It’s your reminder that success comes from doing less, not more.

Be sub-specific

In a sea of content, sometimes the best way to stand out is with sub-specific content.

To give you some examples, here are some ways that I do that:

  • Instead of writing for consultants, I write for marketing consultants.
  • Instead of writing about marketing, I write about daily emails, or recurring systems, or leading indicators.
  • Instead of writing about general strategy, I write about making trade-offs and placing bets.
  • Instead of writing about client management, I write about calling out the emotions in the room.

The more specific your topic and/or audience, the easier it is to go deep and stand out.

General content gets lost in a sea of noise. To stand out, be specific. Be sub-specific.

It works with content and positioning, by the way.

My not-so-secret to attracting clients

I’ve never had a problem attracting clients. For that, I’m grateful.

Is it because I’m smarter than the average marketing consultant?

Nope. It’s largely because I publish a lot of content. 

Here are some of the things I publish:

  • Daily blog posts
  • Daily emails
  • Private podcast episodes (Mindshare Radio)
  • Guesting on other shows
  • Host webinars for my audience and others’
  • Post content on LinkedIn and Twitter for different audiences
  • Engage with people on social media
  • Speak at conferences when I can

In other words, I publish as much content as I can muster.

Content not only helps me attract clients directly (which it does), it also reminds people I’m in the game.

And those people refer opportunities to me.

At this point, you have two choices: you either publish content to attract new clients, or you’re largely invisible.

If you want to build a profitable consulting business, it starts with publishing like your life depends on it.

Or, at least publishing as much as you can.

Don’t talk yourself out of it.

What audience growth and client acquisition have in common

How do you build an audience?

You do it the same way you build your client roster: one person at a time.

In the beginning, audience (and client) growth takes time. It feels like an uphill battle. Results are slow and sparse.

But if you focus on building one relationship at a time, the rest will naturally take care of itself.

Think individual relationships, not masses.

Niching helps with both, too.

Asking for referrals

It’s possible that you’re good at what you do, but still don’t get many referrals.

After all, your clients and colleagues are busy—your business growth isn’t top-of-mind for them.

So what’s one way to get more referrals? It sounds simple, but you ask.

A good time to ask is when you begin to see great results with your clients. Don’t wait until the end of your relationship when some of your prime goodwill has worn off.

Maybe you offer to do a free initial assessment of someone’s marketing if they know anyone in your target market who would benefit from it.

Or, maybe you notice an ideal potential client is connected with them on LinkedIn, so you see if they’d be willing to make a warm intro.

Or, maybe they know the head of their industry association or some other supplier to the industry.

It doesn’t have to be a direct potential client. There are lots of valuable relationships to be had.

This approach won’t work every time, but it definitely won’t work if you don’t ask.

Loyalty, acquisition, programs, and campaigns

I stumbled upon an interesting Twitter thread yesterday that brought up a couple concepts worth sharing.

I highly recommend you read the entire thread, but I’ll share my main takeaways below as well.

Here are the highlights of my takeaways:

  • There are two primary kinds of marketing: loyalty and acquisition
  • Loyalty marketing is all about focusing your efforts on repeat purchases (i.e. frequency, transaction value, etc.)
  • Acquisition marketing is all about acquiring new customers to survive.
  • He argues companies who have 40% or less of their customers repurchase in the next year should focus their strategy on acquisition, not loyalty. Makes sense.
  • He argues in a subsequent thread that you usually cant fix those repurchase rates without a shift in what you sell (think a gift shop). So that’s not really a viable solution in most cases.
  • The second big ideas were his view that there are two core ways to approach marketing: campaigns and programs.
  • “A program is a comprehensive strategy to find new customers across all aspects of the business.”
  • “When I worked at Eddie Bauer, we flushed $15,000,000 of television advertising during a few months to generate $15,000,000 in sales (hint – that’s a profit loss of about $9,000,000 … oh my goodness). That was a campaign. But it wasn’t a program.”
  • “Well, “commerce television” is a customer acquisition program … a TV program, sure, but a program. That’s what a program is. All day. Every day. Relentless.”
  • “So I’m beggin’ y’all to give customer acquisition efforts another look. Please. Build a program. Dedicate real resources to the effort. You’re smart enough, talented enough, resourceful enough to be successful!”

Not sure why these ideas clicked with me, but thinking in terms of whether you should be helping your clients with loyalty, acquisition (or both)—and when to do each—was a lightbulb for me. Especially the 40% or less idea.

And then thinking in terms of a program, being an ongoing, ever-present, relentless system that is always working for you—it’s a foundation of what I do with my clients but I never thought of it as distinct from campaigns per se.

But distinguishing that from a campaign, which is more like an event or finite series of events, really shaped how I mentally organize the initiatives we marketers undertake.

Go back and read the full thread. This is the stuff strategy is made of. How you organize and name ideas also matters.

Hope this clicks for you, too.

Actual expertise vs. marketing yourself well

There are two important skills you need to master as an advisor:

  1. Getting business results for your clients
  2. Being able to market yourself well

So which is more important to your long-term success as a consultant?

The truth is, you won’t succeed on the merits of your expertise alone.

People are not lining up to give their business to the smartest consultants on their merits alone. They need to discover them first.

And that means, you need to invest considerable time into marketing yourself if you want to see the fruits of success.

Marketing yourself should be a little hard—at least until you have momentum. It takes work, there’s no ways around that.

But here’s the thing: you won’t be able to market yourself well if you don’t also have deep expertise at what you do.

The same way having expertise alone won’t solve your client attraction problems, neither will good marketing.

You can’t do good marketing as a consultant without some level of true expertise at your craft.

That’s because much of marketing as a consultant is sharing what you know with the world for free. If what you know isn’t valuable enough, it won’t attract many buyers.

So the answer to succeeding as a marketing isn’t one or the other. It takes true expertise and a lot of marketing to be successful.

There is no fast-tracking true expertise nor the good marketing that stems from it.

Keep putting in the work and good things will happen.

Is it fear or a desire to do things right?

Sometimes, the right approach is to wait until your ideas are perfect before you share them with the world.

But more often, the better approach is to run with your best ideas, see how they perform, then iterate until you find the traction you need.

Ideas need oxygen to thrive. Maybe not at first, but they need it sooner than later.

The oxygen gives your ideas life. It gives you feedback. Your ideas need feedback to be successful in the same way plants need sunlight.

The key is knowing whether your need for perfection is based on fear or wanting to do things right the first time.

There’s a difference. Only you can know for sure what is driving you.

Either way, don’t suffocate your ideas.