Marketing Consultants

I get a fair amount of business via referrals.

Occasionally, a client will refer me. But more often than not, it’s someone in my network.

Upon reflection, it usually coincides with activity on LinkedIn. For whatever reason, whenever I get active on LinkedIn, almost inevitably someone comes out of the woodwork to refer me to someone they know.

Referrals are great to have, but they don’t come without you keeping up your end of the bargain.

Keep marketing yourself and watch those referrals come in.

I hear LinkedIn is good, too.

Here’s a tweet from a reporter today on Facebook’s platform outage:

Source at Facebook: “it’s mayhem over here, all internal systems are down too.” Tells me employees are communicating amongst each other by text and by Outlook email.

— Philip Crowther (@PhilipinDC) October 4, 2021

Notice how staff are resorting to email and text messages? It’s no coincidence that these are two of the five ingredients of an independent communications platform.

Social media platforms will come and go. You’re always subject to their rules. You can lose your account without notice nor recourse.

And that means your distribution on those channels can be taken away at any time.

Social media is a valuable tool. But if you completely depend on it to attract new clients, you’re putting yourself at risk.

Build your email list.

There’s a lot of demand for marketing services. That won’t be going away any time soon.

But with that demand comes the temptation to take on more clients and do more things than you can handle effectively.

Like yesterday’s story implies, it’s better to work with fewer clients doing fewer things well in order to maintain standards you can be proud of.

You should feel comfortable showing any other marketing consultant your work. It should be able to stand up to a reasonable degree of scrutiny.

Your work doesn’t need to be absolutely perfect (nobody’s marketing is perfect), but you should be able to stand by your decisions and the work you deliver.

Do work in such a way that you would be comfortable sharing it publicly. You’ll feel better about what you do and your business will benefit enormously.

It’s tempting to say yes to everything, but it always comes at a cost.

Don’t risk your reputation.

The other day, I took a look at a new client’s Google Ads account.

They had someone manage it for the past few years, paying them a small management fee each month and receiving reports.

As part of my process, I had a look to see what was under the hood.

It turns out, the agency hasn’t made a single update to their account in almost a year.

For that long, the account laid dormant while my client paid their bills, expecting ongoing management and optimizations.

All they received was an auto-generated report on the results. And the results were ambiguous.

It’s stories like this that remind me why I consider myself an advocate first and an advisor second.

Your clients depend on you to do good work. To know what you’re doing. To be transparent about what’s happening.

If you’re a marketing advisor, this is a reminder of your duty of care.

Be your clients’ biggest advocate.

You might be a smart consultant. Maybe you’re the smartest person in the room on your topic​ wherever you go.

But if you can’t be humble, people won’t be able to stand you let alone continue working with you.

Be confident, but don’t be arrogant. There’s a difference. 

You’re in the service business, after all.

Yesterday, I alluded briefly to the idea that you can be a generalist and niched down at the same time.

In fact, that’s exactly what I did and it worked great.

First, I kept my B2B marketing agency running to accept any business that came along while I built out a new horizontal specialization as a fractional CMO/advisor under my own name.

I didn’t market the agency anymore, but it was always there for when a good opportunity came along.

Eventually, I phased out of agency work and focused solely on doing advisory work once I was making about $100k/year at it (with two clients).

But I knew that in order to stand out and build a real business, I needed to niche down. So I kept that running kevin.me while I built my niche consultancy, Everspaces.

I focused 90% of my time and energy building Everspaces while still accepting clients that came along in other industries by directing them to kevin.me.

That allowed me to look good on paper to any vertical (though leads were few and far between) while building a reputation in the coworking niche.

Jumping into a niche doesn’t mean you have to go all-in from the beginning. You can keep rather broad and there’s a good chance you’ll drum up business.

It might not be the best business, though it will pay the bills while you build inroads into a vertical/niche.

But once you get traction in a niche, there’s no comparison.

Your work gets better, your lead flow increases, you become less interchangeable and can charge premium rates, you can more easily build an audience, you can package your knowledge as education products, and the flywheel continues.

Niching takes time, which is why I suggest phasing into it so you don’t burn out of cash before you get traction.

But once you do get traction, you’ll wonder why you didn’t niche down sooner.

You gotta see it to believe it sometimes.

The other day, I said you don’t have to choose a niche, but you’ll make more money if you do.

And while niching is, in my view, the better longterm strategy, it’s probably better to stay broad in terms of who you’re targeting if you’re still getting traction in your business

It’s usually faster and easier to get “survival income” as a generalist than it is as a specialist. A little networking and self-promotion can usually drum up some basic revenue.

You also don’t know exactly who you’ll end up serving best or who you’ll enjoy working with the most. It takes time to figure that out.

But if you don’t pick a niche eventually, you’ll likely find you’re always staying just above survival income.

As marketers, we know the dangers of being undifferentiated. It’s a race to the bottom and we have to take what we can get. That’s the problem.

Niching (or even specializing horizontally) has many benefits, but getting traction in a new niche takes time.

People need to recognize you as credible long before they decide to buy from you. And it’s not easy to fast-track that.

For many, starting more broadly positioned can help you pay the bills until you branch off and niche down on your best clients.

That’s why I recommend starting broadly, then either tightening as you go, or being a generalist while specializing at the same time.

Pay the bills, then build the niche business.