Marketing Consultants

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Are you hesitating to hit publish?

It might be time to re-think your approach. Chances are, you’re talking yourself out of publishing your good ideas because you think they’re not unique, or interesting, or that nobody would pay attention anyway.

In this episode, I talk about how to think about your content publishing habit and ways to talk yourself into just hitting publish.

Hint: just try to be useful to one person.

I promise that once you do, you’ll feel a lot better.

Listen in.

—k

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Got a great idea? 

Load it into your Methodology‘s organizational system. Otherwise, you might not remember it the next time you need it.

Most of my notes are pretty simple. Sometimes, it’s just an idea stored as an empty Trello card with a title I’ll remember.

Do a “raise the dead” email campaign.

Over time, though, they get a little more polished and a little more complete. I add links, screenshots, even supplementary training and documentation.

My notes are far from perfect, but I always have a list of ideas that eventually become detailed pieces of training for my consulting work.

The hardest part is having the discipline to actually put your learnings and ideas into your organizational system in the first place.

Keep it open at all times and it’s a lot easier to actually do it.

I’ll be sharing a version of my Methodology soon to members of a new tier of Mindshare.

Stay tuned for that.

One of the temptations we face as consultants is to book ourselves solid and stay there for as long as possible.

But the problem with that is your business will suffer if you’re redlining the entire time.

At least 25% of your time should be spent on marketing and business development.

Ideally more when you’re not fully booked. You must always be marketing. It might look like writing, newsletters, podcasting, research, outreach, or a variety of other activities.

No more than 50% of your time should be spent on client work.

And it’s not enough to simply deliver the work you promise, either. You need to find ways to exceed expectations if you want to build long-term clients and referrals. Factor that into your equation when planning your workload.

The remaining 25% of your time should be spent working on your business.

This might include admin work (which you should outsource as soon as you can), planning your future, working with a coach, learning new skills, creating assets like info products, training, and reusable templates, and a variety of other things.

Oh, and don’t forget to keep margin in your business so you have energy to sustain it all and can account for the unforeseens.

Something will always come up.

Positioning is the soil in your garden.

The more fertile it is, the more likely you are to grow plants. The better your positioning is, the more compelling you will be to your ideal audience.

But good soil alone won’t produce vegetables, just like good positioning won’t get you clients automatically.

Once you have the soil in place, you need to find seeds. You then need to nurture them with adequate water and light.

If they germinate, you are onto something. If they don’t, it means either the soil, seeds, or the care aren’t in harmony.

Keep refining your approach until something grows, then rinse and repeat until your garden is overflowing.

Just don’t expect it to happen overnight.

Yesterday, I wrote about how fractional CMOs and marketing advisors are generalists by nature. We have to be.

We need to be able to combine business acumen with marketing skills across a wide range of channels and disciplines.

And that’s precisely why it’s so important to build your business for a specific niche as soon as you can.

When you intersect your generalist abilities with a specific target market’s challenges, you have a chance at becoming a deep specialist in that area—allowing you to create a competitive moat.

The more general your horizontal skillset, the more niche you want to be with your target market. Otherwise, you’re back to doing everything for everyone.

And maybe you can help anyone with anything. But it won’t help you grow a profitable marketing advisory practice.

Without focus, you’ll be interchangeable with literally anyone else. You’ll lose deals to people more specialized. You’ll have a hard time standing out or becoming ubiquitous to any single group. You won’t be able to build repeatable assets and one-to-many offerings.

In short, you’ll own a job. And not a very good one.

Be specific about what you do or who you do it for.

Ideally both. But not neither.

Some number of years after going to university, I studied ‘Small Business Entrepreneurship’ in a post-graduate college program.

In the one-year program, I learned the fundamentals of most core areas of business, including finance, tax, law, management, marketing, accounting, HR, and a variety of other disciplines.

And while I learned plenty about the various aspects of running a business, I didn’t master any of them.

However, I learned enough about each to effectively manage those areas in my own business. I knew how they worked, how to speak the language, and how to measure their effectiveness.

That’s really all you need to be an entrepreneur. And it’s the same thing with being a fractional CMO or marketing advisor.

As a marketing advisor, you’re lucky to be very strong in one or two areas. You need to be able to leverage those core skills and be reasonably capable with the rest to create business results.

You don’t need to be the most technical, most creative, or best strategist. But you do need to know how business works and be able to demonstrate the value you create.

You need to be able to speak the language of each marketing channel, hire the right people, measure their effectiveness, and bring it all together to get actual business results.

No two advisors are skilled in the same ways, which makes what you do unique. Lean into that. Own your strengths and your weaknesses.

As long as you know enough to get results, how you do that is up to you.

James Clear has a great quote in his book, Atomic Habits:

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

Your goal is your desired outcome. Your system is the collection of daily habits that will get you there.

This year, spend less time focusing on outcomes and more time focusing on the habits that precede the results.”

It’s the same in your business.

Instead of goals, create systems that lead to habits that lead to results.

Write that daily email. Do that quarterly webinar. Reach out to those 10 people each month. Publish that podcast.

Create a system for you and your clients that make your goals not only achievable, but realistic.

Here’s a little secret every fractional CMO or marketing strategist should know: nobody knows everything.

Nobody is an expert at all the channels. Nobody is perfectly creative AND technical. Nobody is a one-stop-shop— although many can do a little bit of everything.

To be successful in this role, you need to at minimum have these four traits:

1. You need to be very strong in at least one or two core areas
2. You need to know how to hire for your weaknesses
3. You need to understand how business works
4. You need to know how to manage all the pieces

Just like entrepreneurs can’t do everything needed to run their business effectively, you can’t and shouldn’t be expected to know how to do everything yourself.

In-house CMO’s can’t do everything, either, by the way.

That said, you should know how to do this one thing really well: get results for a specific kind of client. 

As long as you get real results, compensate for your weaknesses with good hires, and have a system for managing the entire process, you’re well-equipped to lead your clients’ marketing strategy.

Easier said than done, yes. But you have permission to not know everything.

Nobody knows everything.

If you are wondering whether your consulting practice is niched down enough, it probably isn’t. 🙂

But seriously, here are six signs to look for:

1. Your content feels like it was tailor-written for your ideal clients.

Ever land on a website where it feels like every headline, blog post, and resource was written for you?

That’s how your content should feel to your prospects

2. Your services feel custom-made for your ideal prospect’s situation.

The world is looking for personalization and perfect-fit solutions.

They’ll settle for less, but only if a better option isn’t available.

Be the obvious option.

3. Your ideas are uniquely specific and nearly impossible to find elsewhere.

There are no original ideas left.

But there are *contextualized* ideas that are specific to an audience, making them feel uniquely relevant.

Be the translator.

4. Your “competition” feels like a more generalized, watered-down version of you.

You want to find a way to position yourself as the “only” one doing precisely what you do.

Find your unique angle such that everyone else is the generalist relative to you.

5. People think of you as the “XYZ person” and refer others to you regularly.

You should hear people saying, “You need to speak to this person” or “I saw this and thought of you” when it comes to your area of focus.

That’s how you know you’re positioned well in people’s minds.

6. You close most of your deals because frankly, you’re by far the most practical choice.

If people are comparing you to others or choosing other alternatives more than they choose you, it might be a sign you’re too broadly positioned.

Have little to no competition.

You don’t need to have all of these signals to be a successful consultant.

But if you’re not seeing any of them, it could be time to niche smaller.