Marketing Consultants

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If you’re like me, case studies can be a neglected part of your own marketing.  And yet, case studies done well are one of the most persuasive forms of proof you can create.

Honestly, I can’t believe I can sign up so many clients without having more than a couple case studies. Luckily, I am good at what I do!

Anyway, I used to say “kill them with proof”, implying you can’t produce too much proof around the work you do and results you get.

The best consultants and course creators use endless proof to demonstrate the wins people get. It’s far more persuasive than simply staying what you can do.

Now I say, “win them with proof” because it’s a probably a better way to say it. But regardless, the truth is: you can’t over-prove yourself.

Clients don’t always know what you actually do in your engagements, let alone what kind of results you can get.

Case studies are a great way to show the kinds of clients you work with, what you do, and how it impacts the business.

Remember: people like to work with people who have helped others like them before, and will only hire you if they understand what you do and what kind of results you can get from your work. 

Case studies demonstrate all of this.

Listen to this episode to learn my approach to creating case studies that convert with minimal time and effort involved to create them.

There’s a paradox when it comes to our expertise that the broader we focus, the harder it is to come up with our big ideas.

If you feel like you have nothing meaningful to say, or you don’t have strong points of view on your area of expertise, it’s likely you’re just not focused enough with your positioning.

It’s counter-intuitive, but constraints create creativity. Keep your expertise focused around what you do best and for whom.

The big ideas will follow. 

Running a successful expertise-based business requires having space in your calendar.

Here are some reasons why:

1. You can’t learn if you don’t have time to explore, read, and get educated.
2. You can’t produce good ideas if you don’t have time to learn, think, and apply yourself.
3. You can’t get organized if you don’t have downtime to clean up your desk and improve your processes.
4. You can’t innovate if you don’t have time to tinker and explore your ideas.
5. You can’t over-deliver without reserving time to adjust for unforeseen challenges that inevitably arise.
6. You can’t earn top dollar without the aforementioned pieces built into your routine.

If you want to run a business around your expertise, you need time to breathe, think, and innovate.

I try to keep about 40 to 50% of my days open to do these things and market myself.

I’ve designed my business well enough to reserve that time and earn a healthy living in the process. It’s possible, you just need to prioritize it.

Otherwise, you’ll burn out and your clients will never be as happy as they could be.

As an independent marketing professional, there are a few ways you can operate:

1. You can personally execute the work
2. You can hire a team to execute the work and mark up their time
3. You can sell strategy, planning, and oversight
4. You can teach others how the work gets done

There are no right or wrong ways to operate.

If you are doing #1, you package your expertise into your execution work.

If you are doing #2, you infuse your expertise into your team’s execution work.

If you are doing #3, you refer the execution work and clients pay you for your thinking.

If you’re doing #4, you package your expertise into scalable education products and subscriptions.

There’s no right or wrong way to do things. It’s a sliding scale.

I prefer to live in #3 and #4 and stay small. But that’s just me.

What does selling your expertise mean to you?

Starting off as an advisor when you’ve always sold execution work is a big step.

It requires both you and the market to recognize your expertise as having value in and of itself—independent of you being the one to actually implement.

The fastest way to do this, in my view, is to phase into it. To do managed advisory services, where you coordinate the marketing efforts of a company but hire out the actual execution work.

In this case, you produce the effect of an outsourced, highly nimble marketing team. Your client doesn’t have to worry too much, and you’re still cheaper and more agile than hiring their first marketing manager.

The best clients to do this for are those who have never had a marketing manager before. Or, if they did, they no longer have one.

There’s a gap in a lot of businesses around the $3-$10million mark where they can no longer depend on a single agency to do everything, but they can’t justify a full-time marketing hire either.

You can position yourself as a fractional CMO in this role, but truth be told, you’re more like a part-time marketing manager.

You can do this as a step towards selling advisory services, but this should never be your final destination.

It’s taxing and stressful and eventually, your client will wonder why you’re not working even faster, regardless of how much you actually accomplish.

If you don’t time-box the execution work, you’ll eventually be treated the same as an employee. But you’re not an employee, you’re a part-time producer and strategist. Big difference.

So, if you’re having trouble selling pure advisory work, this might be your first approach.

The other way is to focus on a niche/vertical, such that your expertise is even more rare and valuable—and therefore worth paying for independent of your execution work. More on that soon.

The choice is yours, but these are the best two ways I know to get into advisory work.

 

If you think of content marketing in baseball terms, think of it this way.

Sometimes, you will hit a home run. You’ll create something people love, they will share it, and you’ll accrue backlinks, signups, and traffic for years to come.

But more often than not, your content will be a base hit, double, or—if you’re lucky—a triple.

In baseball, you don’t try to hit a home run at every bat, nor do you need one to succeed.

With content marketing, it’s a completely fair strategy to stay top-of-mind through consistently publishing valuable content over time—even if it means each piece of content is not a home run.

It’s consistency that builds trust and familiarity with your audience.

That’s the goal, isn’t it?

Sometimes, you’ll hit it out of the park. That’s great when it happens. You should aim for that, at least sometimes.

But the main thing is you keep getting up to bat.

Consistency over time is hard to beat.

I recently heard on a podcast an idea that was simple, yet stuck with me for some reason.

I think it was Lenny Rachitsky on a Creator Lab podcast episode. I highly recommend you give this one a listen—he breaks down his approach to marketing in an interesting and unique way.

Anyway, the idea that stuck with me is that for his Substack subscription, he focuses on creating content people could actually use the next day. 

In other words, he aimed for his content to be practical and down to earth so that people would genuinely get value from and use it.

This idea might seem obvious to you. And in a way, it is obvious.

But it reminded me to bring home ideas in my own content so they could be used by you, my reader, in some practical manner the next day.

So let’s make this post useful for you. When you go to write your content next, ask yourself: could someone use this tomorrow or do I need to make this more practical and useful in some way?

There’s your idea for the day. I hope you put it to use.

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As a consultant, your job is to deliver results.

But we need to remember that people don’t just buy results, because frankly, we don’t buy on logic. We buy on emotion.

What this means is you’re also responsible for delivering a certain feeling in your engagements.

Sound hippy dippy? Stick with me, it’s not.

As much as your clients are looking for results, what they’re really buying is confidence.

Your clients’ confidence looks different before, during, and after you work with them.

It comes from a belief you can help, the verification that you’re an expert, from downside protection and avoidance, and also from legitimate gains as a result of your work.

It’s a tall order. And I go into detail on why you need to be confident as a consultant, too, as well as how to create confidence in both you and your clients.

At the end of the day, you can’t succeed without instilling confidence—both in you and your clients. It’s that simple.

It’s more than just a mindset, but I do talk about that too.

Give this a listen and let me know if you agree! I promise this won’t be a kumbaya episode—it will be very practical.

How important to you is gut instinct when making your marketing decisions?

So much can be measured in marketing. And yet, at the same time, so much can’t be.

Data is a powerful input when making decisions. It should inform your decisions whenever possible.

But things should also feel right. At least most of the time.

Why? Because a lot of decisions will be made without adequate data. If you constantly make decisions against your better instinct, you’ll be unable to make good decisions later on.

You can be nervous, unsure, or even flat out guessing at times. There are really no guarantees.

But if you can’t rely on your gut instinct to tell you when something is worth exploring or avoiding, you will run into a lot of issues down the road.

Find the balance between gut instinct and data-driven decisions and you’ll be a well-rounded marketer who is prepared for the realities of marketing leadership.

Trust your gut and inform it with data where possible.

You can’t create a strategy without a clearly defined goal.

If your goal is to reach a million subscribers next year, you can create a strategy and plan to map to that outcome.

If your goal is to get more subscribers, you can throw a number of tactics at the wall to see what sticks.

But the two approaches will be completely different. And so will the outcomes.

The next time you’re not sure about what to do next, make sure you’re clear about the goal you’re trying to accomplish.

Vague goals lead to vague strategies, which always leads to vague outcomes.