Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator

Kevin C. Whelan

Marketing Consultants

Buying into your taste

A big part of being a marketing consultant is having a vision about how things should look and function.

Clients hire you not just for your technical and creative abilities, but also your taste.

The way you do things—for yourself and your clients—adds up to a total experience that your clients should be able to see and buy into.

The sites you help your clients design, the content you help create, the brands you help shape—these should all reflect your taste and standards.

It’s another reason why you want to have case studies, testimonials, and share work samples on social media.

It’s also why you should strive to make your own marketing meet your tastes and standards. Your marketing will never be perfect, but it should showcase your general taste, at the very least.

Skills are everywhere. Taste is unique. Showcase it wherever you can.

Copy and paste your best clients

Your best clients are often the people you do your best work for.

After all, you won’t think of them as your “best” for very long if your work isn’t top notch.

Plus, when you are good at what you do, you usually like it a lot more, too…. which makes you even better at your job while also increasing your general satisfaction.

It’s a great cycle to be in if you find it.

That’s why one of the best ways to find a niche is by “copying and pasting” your best clients.

What industry are they in? How big is the business? What personality traits do they have? Why do you work so well together?

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Find replicas of your best clients in all the factors that matter.

Combine a vertical with a personality trait, value system, or company size. Look at all the variables that make them a great fit for you.

That’s your bullseye.

Not only will you do better work, you’ll like it more, too.

You can’t rush a new consulting business

There’s a tendency to think marketing isn’t working if it doesn’t get an immediate result.

Maybe you see that tendency in yourself, or maybe you notice some clients with it. Months go by and it feels like it’s crickets.

The reality is, even if you have the right positioning, messaging, offerings, and manage to get in front of your ideal audience, you still may not sell any of your consulting services for several months.

After all, hiring a consultant is not something people take lightly. It’s a risky bet for most companies, both in terms of time and money.

And that can be discouraging. Especially when you’re starting our or building in a new niche.

It feels like you have to constantly change tactics or try something new, when more often than not, you just need to grind it out a little longer.

To keep showing up. Iterating. Talking to people. Researching.

When you’re new to consulting, your goal is to learn as much as you can and add as much value as possible to the people around you.

You need to prove you can help people—even if it’s for free at first. That’s why I write daily and host a community full of free additional content.

It’s hard, but that’s the price of admission. It takes a long time to build people’s trust.

Referrals help a lot, but don’t expect them right away, either.

Sell what you need to to stay in business, then give yourself a long enough runway to make your ideal consulting busines work.

Desperate consultants don’t win business. You have to prove yourself first.

If it were easy, people wouldn’t need you.

Find a niche you belong to

Sometimes, the best places to look for a niche is within the sub-cultures you belong to.

Specifically, look in the areas in which you are a superconsumer.

What do you buy the most? Where are you price insensitive? What content do you consume the most?

I believe you can be successful in almost any industry. And if true, why not choose one you care a lot about?

Love books? Work with authors or book stores!

Love motorcycles? Work with parts dealers, mechanics, or motorcycle magazines!

Love crypto? Find a way to serve people in that industry!

I’m not saying this is the only way to pick a niche, nor the best way. But it is a way. And a good one.

It’s how I ended up starting this daily newsletter 389 days ago and building a coaching business and community around it.

I constantly listen to business and marketing podcasts, buy courses, hire coaches—you name it.

You could say I’m a superconsumer of business and marketing “stuff”.

I love learning and applying new ideas in this space, particularly as it intersects with selling advisory products and services.

Hence, I got into this business.

The only way you will be great at what you do is if you stick with it long enough to be an expert. To practice, learn, and apply yourself.

And that requires your time and energy. A lot of it.

You can’t be great at what you do if you burn out first. Loving what you do and the people you work with can everything else easier and better.

If you’re lost, look inward. It’s not the only way, but it’s as good a way as any.

—k

P.S. Listen to this section of a Tim Ferris podcast episode. A couple years ago, it helped trigger my thinking and ultimately led me down this path as an advisor to other marketing consultants. I hope it does helps you, too.

Life is too long to dread what you do

The difference between loving what you do and dreading your work is almost unquantifiable.

Clients you love working with give you energy. You can use that energy to invest more of your time learning how to solve their problems.

You’ll want to keep working on your business and you’ll have the drive to keep showing up for them. It’s a virtuous cycle.

On the other hand, working with clients you dread will burn you out. You’ll eventually feel like your work has no meaning. You won’t want to invest your time into learning their industry or how to better solve their problems.

You’ll feel like you’re constantly pushing a rock up the hill. And that impacts your personal life—there’s no compartmentalizing it.

Remember, you’re in business for yourself, which means you choose to do work that serves you and your clients.

Don’t settle for dread. Don’t even tolerate it.

Instead, pay attention to who and what lights you up and find a way to evolve your business until it’s made up of just those things.

You’ll do better work and you’ll live a better life if you do.

Life is too long to dread what you do.

Earn your right to promote

Black Friday is a great reminder about how many email newsletters you’ve been subscribed to over time.

Many of them, you have no interest in receiving. 

Things like old services you signed up for or people who add you to their email list without your express permission.

On days like today, they all come out. They sell hard. They dangle their discounts. They send you last call warnings and remind you it’s all going away at midnight.

And while I have nothing against a good Black Friday discount (as a consumer)—nor will I bash the marketers who create them—it does remind me of a few things:

  1. If you want to earn permission to sell, you need to deliver value first.
  2. Don’t add people to your mailing list without their express permission.

Email is one of the most powerful marketing channels on the planet. It has been for a long time.

But in order for email to work, you need to earn people’s trust. Slowly. Over time. There are no shortcuts.

Earn your right to promote. It doesn’t work if you don’t.

Create your own lane

There are two core ways to dissect your positioning: what you do and who you do it for.

When you blend those two axes in novel ways, you can come up with remarkably unique and compelling positioning.

And that can lead to significant advantages, if you do it right.

If there are a lot of people doing what you do, it’s almost impossible to stand out. When you don’t stand out, you become interchangeable at best and invisible at worst.

Find a way to go narrow in terms of what you do and who you do it for. The wider the what you offer is, the narrower the who it’s for should be.

Remember, good positioning hurts a little, so don’t be afraid to push past your comfort zone.

The niche you think is too small, probably isn’t.

When you create your own lane, driving is a lot smoother.

(Just make sure the people who matter actually care about what you’re offering).

Trust your way of doing things

You’re not in the business of selling tasks, hours, days, months, or deliverables.

As an advisor, you’re in the business of selling outcomes and benefits.

And that means doing things your way, not following instructions and taking orders from your clients.

Gather the information and ideas you need to do your job well. Input is a good thing—accept as much of it as you can.

But solve your client challenges in the way you are uniquely capable.

That’s why you’re hired in the first place. Trust your way of doing things.

Don’t just plan for fair weather, plan for reality

Rarely does achieving client results happen more easily than you think.

It’s better to price contingencies and unforeseen challenges into your engagement than to expect everything to go smoothly.

Not only will this allow you to be more profitable, it will also allow you to do the often-necessary additional work required to get results for your clients.

You’ll be happier and your clients will be happier when you do.

Don’t just plan for fair weather, plan for reality.

Price accordingly.

The three ways to generate more business

There are three general ways you can grow your business: nurturing, prospecting, and mining.

1. Nurturing

You won’t sell anything without first developing and nurturing your audience and relationships.

Nurturing efforts include:

  • Giving value in the form of educational content or freebies
  • Checking in personally to see how people are doing
  • Sending a card or a gift to people you value most
  • Promoting people’s content or work out of good will
  • Or any other number of relationship-enhancing activities

The more you invest in your relationships, the more you’ll get out of them.

Give, give, give before you ask anybody for anything.

2. Mining

Usually, the best place to drum up new business is by tapping into your existing audience and relationships to see if there are any ready buyers.

You can do that by:

  • Asking for referrals and introductions
  • Promoting something you are offering
  • Reaching out to past clients to check in
  • Contacting past leads to re-open a discussion

Of course, “mining” should be done in the most contributory way possible, hence leading with nurturing.

You never want to deplete your relationships—only present valuable offers to the right people at the right time.

Give people an offer they like, but avoid the hard sell.

3. Prospecting

The third approach is seeking to build new relationships by gaining exposure to new audiences in your target market.

You can do that by:

  • Guesting on podcasts
  • Speaking at or attending events
  • Contributing to online communities
  • Advertising and sponsorships
  • Joint venture projects and promotions
  • Cold outreach and range of other lead gen activities

Prospecting is a lot easier if you have pre-nurtured relationships with colleagues and others in your industry.

You also want to be prepared to give something in return for access to other people’s audiences, such as offering them exposure to your audience (i.e. invite them onto a podcast first).

Choosing your tactic

If you find yourself constantly prospecting, it might be time to focus on nurturing for a while.

Or, if you find yourself constantly mining, it’s definitely time to switch up your tactics or you risk depleting people’s good will.

Ask yourself this: for the next three months, do I need to be mining or prospecting most?

You should always be nurturing. So the question becomes where to spend your effort next to grow your business.