Marketing Consultants

To be a successful advisor, you need to be comfortable with hard truths.

You need to be able to share hard truths with your clients about their business—even if it’s hard to say.

You need to be prepared to hear hard truths about your own shortcomings—even if you deep down already know.

You need to acknowledge hard truths about a lack of results in your engagements—even if it’s not entirely your fault.

The hard truths are a reality of all businesses. They may be humbling at times, but they make you better when you embrace them.

Jim Collins refers to this general idea as “confronting the brutal facts” in his book, Good to Great. 

Hard truths are a gift if you embrace them.

Don’t be scared to have a little fun with your daily blog posts.

Mix it up, try new things, share some good finds. Remember, it’s your blog, you can do whatever you want.

Plus, if you’re enjoying it, your audience will, too. And frankly, you won’t sustain it if you don’t enjoy it.

Go have some fun with it.

There’s a good chance you’ll be in business a long time.

Decades, if you’re lucky.

And if you’re feeling burnt out now, there’s a good chance you’ll always be unless you make a change.

Which means you need to work smarter. You have to be intentional about the way you design your business.

You’ve heard that before, but what does that mean as a consultant?

To me, it means things like this:

• Work with fewer clients at higher average rates.
• Create leveraged services like training and group coaching.
• Sell your knowledge as products instead of services.
• Hire people to do the non-strategic work in your business.
• Keep margin so you can think, recharge, and stay focused.
• Take vacations to avoid burnout and stay productive.
• Cut people and things that give you stress and suck up your mental energy.
• Partner with people on projects and promotions to create leverage.

I used to think working harder would get you better results. But to me, better results means a more balanced, stress-free, and leveraged approach to business.

You still have to work hard, but you also have to be intentional about working smart, too.

If you need help with that, consider my coaching services or join Mindshare.

When I first started in business, I didn’t realize just how much things would actually cost. I thought a $1,500 website would be more than enough money for my time.

How little I knew.

Even if you run an efficient business, expenses add up quickly. Insurance, legal, software, accounting, and many more little things you don’t originally think about contribute to your overhead.

And then there’s the time you spend doing marketing and working on your business. Sales conversations take time, taking away time from doing other valuable things. Doing admin work takes time—and it’s not billable. Marketing takes considerable time with no guarantee of a payoff.

It all adds up.

When you’re creating a price for your work, you should feel a little nervous the first time around. Chances are, you have a higher overhead than you think.

And even if you don’t, no business is great without considerable reinvestment into learning, marketing, and innovation.

Charge more than you think you need and you might just end up with enough.

If you want to get more clients, you need to get yourself and your offers in front of more people in your target market.

But it takes time to build an audience and gain traction when you’re building awareness one person at a time.

That’s why you want to tap into others’ audiences whenever possible. I call this “cross-pollination” and it works really well.

This approach usually requires a little give and take. You won’t be able to get access to other people’s audiences for nothing.

Chances are, you’re likely going to have to contribute your expertise and share access to your audience in order to get access to theirs.

Here are a few examples of ways to do that:

1. Guest on podcasts in your niche. You’ll share your best ideas in exchange for access to their audience. The podcast host knows you’ll also promote the episode to your audience, giving them access to your network, too.
2. Invite others in your niche to guest on your podcast. Your guests will share the episode with their network, gaining exposure for both parties.
3. Do webinars for the audience of other non-competitive companies in your niche. I have done a ton of these for software companies that do webinars as part of their regular content marketing calendar. I’ve gotten many clients this way.
4. Speak at an industry conference (or sponsor if practical), thereby exchanging your expertise (or money) for access to their audience. The former is much stronger.
5. You can also host your own industry conference or event, inviting others in your industry to participate. They’ll get access to your audience, you’ll get access to theirs, and everyone benefits from the joint collaboration.
6. You can also do several other things like cross-promote each other out of goodwill, or share posts by others in your niche, creating reciprocity.

The two currencies you have are educational content and an audience.

If you have both, and you operate in a niche, you have tremendous leverage to do things like the above and much more.

Don’t try to build your audience one person at a time. Look for ways to cross-pollinate and you’ll grow much quicker.

You can’t make your clients do anything.

You can’t make them take your advice. Or execute a promise they said they would make. Or deliver things to you on time.

All you can do is show them the benefits of doing so and the downsides if they don’t. After that, their success or failure is on them.

Don’t try to convince or manage your clients too hard. It won’t work.

Raise your prices instead. It usually forces action one way or another.

In behavioural economics, the theory of loss aversion is a concept that says the pain of loss is psychologically about twice as powerful as the pleasure of gain.

As a marketing consultant, you’re hired to help your clients grow and achieve higher revenues. Obvious, right?

But if you look closely, it’s usually a second-place desire to not losing what they already have. In many cases, your clients need to make big changes in order to grow, but they’re also worried about things falling apart in the process.

Your job is to help clients accomplish their transformation to a better future but also ensure they don’t fall off the tracks in the process. The latter part is critical.

Sell the upside potential and the downside protection.

One thing I learned from a book called Breakthrough Advertising is that you can’t really create demand. All you can do is harness existing demand.

And at first glance, you might feel like that doesn’t make sense. We create demand for our client’s business and our own every day, right?

True. But if you dig a bit deeper, what we’re actually doing is connecting our offers with the buyer’s existing demand for something specific.

In other words, buyers see our products and services as the path to a thing they already want. Maybe it’s more free time, or status, or wealth, or any number of things, big and small.

Whatever it is, your job is to know what people already want and connect the dots about how your products and services will help them get there. 

You can create demand for your offers instead of someone else’s. That’s why differentiation is so important.

But the reason they’re buying in the first place already exists. So, don’t try to create demand. It won’t work.

The sooner you realize this, the easier your job will be as a marketer.

I saw an Instagram ad today for a site called Scrapbook. It’s essentially a collection of marketing tactics for ecommerce and SaaS startups.

It’s almost a hybrid between the Swipe File and Playbook concepts I teach in Mindshare.

A Swipe File is an organized reference file of the best examples you can find of various marketing tactics and creative executions—ideally within your niche to make it relevant.

Your Playbook is an organized list of ideas, tactics, and resources you want to implement during client engagements. It’s your core process.

The Swipe File, in particular, is useful in a lot of ways. Here are some of the main ways it can be used:

1. A free opt-in incentive to grow your email list
2. A perk offered with paid and free memberships
3. A reference to show clients for creative examples when starting new projects
4. A stand-alone paid product, like this one

The Swipe File is one of the easiest and best resources you can create if you’re trying to document your Methodology.

As Scrapbook demonstrates, it can be valuable in and of itself. An asset that can be sold independently of a consulting engagement.

By the way, I don’t endorse Scrapbook. It was a random ad I saw and I have no affiliation with them. Buy it at your own risk if it looks interesting to you.

But here’s the link in case you’re curious: https://www.getscrapbook.com/

And here’s the ad that drew me in.

There is no one-size-fits all formula. Nobody is going to do the work for you.

The best you can do is meet the world halfway. To get started. To try things, see what works, and ignore the rest.

Nobody has the answers, not even those who have walked the path before you. But there are clues everywhere. 

It’s your job to look for them and create a puzzle of your own.

If you need help seeing the clues, hit reply and let’s talk.