Marketing Consultants

If you’re selling your expertise, you better have a damn good reason why someone should choose you over anyone else.

The best way to do that is to have rare skills and experiences. A speciality.

And yet, so many people are terrified of picking something small and specific to be excellent at. They want to do all the things for all people because it feels safer.

But when it comes down to it, the more alternative options there are, the harder you’ll have to work to find, win, and keep clients.

Find expertise that makes you rare and you’ll understand what real leverage is.

Think small and specific.

Want to leave a comment?
Click here to respond to this post’s tweet.

Being a marketing consultant is not easy.

There are endless layers—from strategic to tactical, creative to technical, and everything in between.

But the hardest part is not any one of those things. The hard part is the unpredictable nature of it all.

As marketers, we work hard to specialize, create frameworks, apply methodologies, and continually develop our skills.

But even if you find people with the same problem—which happens a lot when you specialize—the solution is never the same.

Reality is just too complex to have one answer for all problems, even if they’re highly similar.

Which means, as consultants, we need to apply everything we know to each problem—in a unique way—in order to get a solution that works for each individual situation.

The best you can do is work hard, run the system, and be ready to iterate.

Either your clients are bought into that idea from the beginning or they are not.

And if they aren’t bought into any of those three things, there’s a very good chance you won’t see results quickly enough to satisfy them.

So this is it: work hard, run the system, and iterate until you succeed.

It takes time and there are no shortcuts. That’s the law of marketing reality.

Part of my approach to successful consulting is to specialize. To be highly compelling to a small group of people.

But here’s the thing: you have to like what you do and who it’s for.

If one of those is out of alignment, you won’t be successful long-term.

Business is too hard to things you don’t like for people you don’t like. It would be like wearing a weighted vest going up an already steep cliff.

Choose your work and clients wisely.

You might think it’s worth saving some of your secret sauce for your paid products or 1:1 consulting.

That if you shared just some of your best tips, people would be keen to buy the rest.

But here’s the thing. It doesn’t work that way.

When people buy consulting from you, they don’t just want to know what to do and how to do it. They want your expertise applied to their situation to move them closer in a straight line.

When people buy your info products or memberships, they want you to organize your methodology and make it simple to consume.

I heard somewhere a quote that resonated with me. It was something like, ‘your expertise is like an encyclopedia. Your marketing should be like pulling out a page at a time and sharing it with the world’.

Don’t hold back and people will be even more likely to buy your expertise as long as it’s aligned with their goals.

They’ll know your ideas are good and will be willing to pay for the complete and organized clarity of your paid products or services.

Be generous with what you know.

Note: This post was the topic for today’s Mindshare Mentorship, a private podcast helping marketing consultants package, sell, and deliver their expert advice—not just their hands. Learn more and consider joining the community at Mindshare.fm.

When you get paid to do implementation work, you’re ultimately being paid to solve a problem.

Maybe it’s anything website or content-related. Or maybe it’s more broad, like anything marketing-related. Anything within that purview becomes your problem.

In other words, you own the entire problem of X for your clients.

The challenge when switching to advisory work is that you end up facilitating the solution instead of actually doing it for your client. That means someone still has to actually do the implementation.

But as an advisor, whatever your scope is, it’s still your problem to solve.

Regardless of the roadblock that comes up, you will move mountains if you have to.

That might mean finding new freelancers or agencies to implement, doing wireframes or proof-of-concepts yourself, training people do to things in-house, teaching people how things work, or anything else that needs to happen to get the problem solved.

After all, what you’re selling is a solution to their problem. Nobody pays for half a solution.

Personally, I charge a fixed price for what I do. I don’t want problems to get more expensive for my clients than anticipated. That just adds a problem to a problem.

If it means I need to put in overtime to get the problem solved, that’s the risk I take. I own it and find solutions.

From the client’s perspective, they get the assurance that for a fixed price, the problem of X is solved (marketing, design, strategy, leads, whatever).

The feeling of buying all-in services is very reassuring.

But if you throw your hands in the air and make any part of the problem your client’s problem, you’re providing an incomplete service.

“That’s not my job” won’t cut it if it’s part of the problem you promised to own.

People pay a lot of money to make their problems someone else’s. The more you do that, and the bigger the “problem” is, the more you’ll get paid.

Good positioning hurts when you first try it on. And it should hurt, at least a little.

Why? Because good positioning is tight and narrow. It’s specific. It solves particular problems for particular kinds of people.

It should feel like you’re leaving a lot of opportunity on the table.

And the reality is, you are. If you’re doing it right, you’re leaving MOST of your potential opportunities on the table by saying no to most things.

And yet, counter-intuitively, by saying no to most things, you say yes to many more.

The challenge most consultants have is they can help a LOT of people do a LOT of different things.

If you’re good at marketing, for example, you can solve marketing challenges for a wide range of clients.

The problem, however, is that your clients and prospects have choice. And the more choice they have, the more interchangeable you are.

Which brings me to the reason you want to have a narrow focus.

By focusing narrowly on one particular target market, and then solving one particular problem for them really well, you immediately remove 99% of the competition.

The choice for your clients becomes either choosing you—the one who only solves their precise needs—or all the other options who claim they can help anyone with anything.

So which will you be, the interchangeable supplier who claims they can help anyone?

Or will you be the consultant who appears out of nowhere with the exact solution your ideal clients are looking for?

The choice is yours to make.

P.S. I recorded a deep dive on this topic today in the Mindshare Community.

If you’re a marketing professional who wants to sell your expert advice—not just your hands—then I highly recommend you check it out and become a member.