Marketing Consultants

Consulting is an intimate game.

Your job is to make change in other businesses—often difficult ones.

But in order to do that, you need to work with people.

Most companies have a wide range of stakeholders. Each with varying beliefs, goals, needs, experiences, and motivations.

Your job, first and foremost, is to be a positive collaborator. To act with respect, empathy, and integrity.

In some cases, mistakes have been made before you got there. It’s nobody’s fault, but you need to help correct them tactfully.

Sometimes, new ones get made along the way. Obstacles arise. Stress waxes and wanes. It’s all normal.

And of course, money on the line. There are real stakes. The work means something.

Your job is to perform your responsibilities, yes. But in order for things to work, you need to have trust.

You need to trust your clients and they need to trust you.

Don’t start working with people you don’t trust.

And when you do start working with someone, do everything you can to maintain that trust over time.

Without it, nothing works.

Today, I stumbled upon a wisdom-packed old blog post by Sam Altman.

The following quote brought me to the article and I thought you might like, too:

Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it. Get rid of distractions in your life. Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap you don’t like doing pile up and take your mental cycles, especially in your work life.

Cognitive load is a knowledge worker’s enemy. It’s what makes you feel scatter-brained and anxious if you don’t keep it under control.

You simply can’t grow your business if you’re mired down by too many small gigs, odd jobs, distracting work, or other low-impact activities.

At best, these things create cognitive load that stresses you out and distracts you from the bigger picture.

At worst, they hold back from achieving your potential.

When a new prospect crosses your desk for the first time, you only have one first look at their marketing.

In that first look, you’ll notice things. You’ll see various details that make the company compelling or not.

Conscious or not, these are your first impressions. And first impressions are critical.

If you pay attention, you’ll notice what stands out as good or bad. What makes them credible or not. How unique and interesting their positioning is.

Jot them down. You’ll never have another first impression.

Like it or not, we tend to become blind to things over time. The more we see things, the more we learn to accept them as part of the scenery. Little design flaws, messaging flops, or other nits that add up to the whole.

And yet, those first impressions make a big difference to the effectiveness of a company’s marketing. Those little details add up.

Let’s remember, a high percentage of people will make judgements about whether to buy based on first impressions. You don’t always have a second chance to win people over.

As a marketing consultant, the best thing you could do for your clients is honour your own first impression and write it down.

It will serve you and your clients down the road.

As marketing practitioners, we often lean towards selling our process. It’s the way we approach our client work, so it feels important for us to talk about it.

But if you’ve bought anything lately and encountered someone selling their approach to the way they work, you’ll quickly realize how little you care about it.

What you care about most is the outcome.

Now that doesn’t mean systems don’t have a place. They do. You should have a system or methodology and clients should know you have one.

But what they really care about is the system you’ll create for them. 

If I go to buy a Tesla, I don’t care how they make it. I mean, I do, but not really.

I care more about how the car I’m going to drive works. All the things it will do and how I will be able to use it.

Systems have a place. But instead of selling your methodology, focus more on the marketing system you’ll make for your clients.

Everybody loves a good marketing engine that creates results for their business.

Sell that, not how you make the system.

At my last corporate job, we undertook a several hundred thousand dollar website redesign project with an outside agency.

The agency had a “strategist” on their team who helped wireframe the website based on our business goals.

The strategist’s main job was to match our company’s business goals with user experience best practices and industry standards.

For any decision we had to make, he was able to show us examples of what other companies in the same/similar industries were doing. He’d explain the pros and cons of doing things each way, educating us about how best to make decisions.

It struck me as interesting just how much research and examples he had ready to show us.

It seemed like a lot of his work was borrowing good examples from similar industries to inform the design of our website.

There’s obviously a lot more to strategy than copying and iterating off a bunch of examples. But if you want to create a marketing plan or strategy, it’s not the worst idea to have examples at the ready.

Good strategists and planners are researchers.

They gather knowledge and examples and have it ready to show clients. Not to convince them that their ideas are good, but to educate them about why their ideas are right for certain situations.

If you want to sell strategic marketing services, be someone who does a lot of research.

Find examples. Keep them in a file and have them ready to present next time you want to educate your clients on a decision.

Not to convince your clients, but to educate them.

An educated client is a satisfied one. Your work will be better, too.