Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator

Kevin C. Whelan

marketing

Knowing you exist is half the battle

Typical real estate agents rely on word of mouth and relationships.

They meet people at barbecues, schools, sporting events—wherever they happen to be.

They also do door knocking, cold calls, and marketing, but a lot of business comes via referrals and relationships.

Consulting doesn’t need to be much different.

Yes, you want to do marketing. What better way to prove you have skills than by marketing yourself effectively?

But you also want to simply meet people. As many as you can. And ideally, within the niche you’re focused on.

Some may become clients, some may become partners, and some people just may refer you. Some don’t do any of those things, and that’s okay too.

There’s no special magic to it, either. It comes down to making a connection with people, letting them know what you do, and let the relationship happen naturally after that.

Half the battle is getting people to know you exist. Don’t over-complicate it.

Start conversations, meet people, and yes, keep marketing.

Most people don’t need you right now

One thing I learned about selling consulting services is that people don’t buy when you want them to.

They buy when they’re ready.

The vast majority of people who encounter you won’t need your services in that moment. And even if they do, it takes a long time to build trust.

Eventually, though, something happens in their business. You’ll come to mind first.

You’ve been consistently showing up on their radar. They know what you do. They have built some familiarity with you.

So they reach out. Maybe it’s a month later. Maybe it’s several years.

The point is, your work won’t pay off in some cases for a long time. The best thing you can do is keep showing up, adding value, and let the results compound over time.

Sure, you can do what you need to do to get short-term results. But don’t depend on them.

You’ll reap what you sow if you can wait for the harvest to mature.

Keep sowing and good things will happen.

Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself

Most of us need to hear new ideas a few times before they sink in.

Sometimes we’re ready for new ideas and sometimes we’re not. Timing is everything.

Even your most read books have new ideas every time you read them.

So if your goal is to help your clients create new ways of thinking, don’t be afraid to repeat yourself.

Tell new stories that make the same point. Say things a different way. Come back to your core ideas often.

That’s the best way to make them stick, whether in your content marketing or your advisory work. People do appreciate it, even if they’ve already internalized and implemented your idea.

Repeat yourself as often as it takes. We all need reminders.

Buying credibility with ads

Today, while driving, I heard a radio ad for a longterm disability law firm.

I found myself noticing that if I needed to hire such a firm, a rightly-timed radio ad might just get me to call them.

Effectiveness of radio ads as a strategy aside, it got me thinking: some forms of advertising can create an impression of credibility

I figured if they advertise on radio, they must have reasonably big budgets. It’s not the kind of thing you do once, nor is it cheap to keep running them.

And if they can afford to advertise on the radio for an extended period, I also figured they must be reasonably successful at what they do. At least successful enough to do mass-media advertising (albeit at the local level).

This experience made me realize how advertising can, in some cases, create a level of implied credibility. 

Another example of this might be seeing a company’s ad on an NHL hockey rink’s boards. They’d have to be reasonably credible to do that, right?

Or let’s pretend I was looking for a new coworking space. If I visited five local coworking spaces’ websites and one retargeted me with ads on all platforms but the others did not, I would probably assume they are at least a market leader worth considering.

Funny how you can buy some degree of credibility. Not a lot, but potentially enough to get an inquiry or two.

What other ways do people “buy” credibility?

Prove your expertise with samples

It’s risky to hire a consultant.

Sure, you have skills. But prospects wonder if those skills will move the needle in their business.

That’s why removing risk from your engagements is so important. And you can do it in several ways.

Your credibility signals reduce some degree of risk. Your guarantees reduce risk even more.

But there’s a third important way to reduce risk: samples.

Your content marketing and thought leadership are like samples at the grocery store. People can get a taste of your expertise before they buy it.

And samples sell products.

Without a strong content strategy, people have to rely on your promise of expertise and whatever risk-reducing signals you can put out there.

Conversely, your content proves you have expertise in the areas your prospects care about. Either the content is useful or it’s not.

That’s why good marketing without expertise isn’t really possible for consultants.

If you want to sell more, prove your expertise with content.

Be sub-specific

In a sea of content, sometimes the best way to stand out is with sub-specific content.

To give you some examples, here are some ways that I do that:

  • Instead of writing for consultants, I write for marketing consultants.
  • Instead of writing about marketing, I write about daily emails, or recurring systems, or leading indicators.
  • Instead of writing about general strategy, I write about making trade-offs and placing bets.
  • Instead of writing about client management, I write about calling out the emotions in the room.

The more specific your topic and/or audience, the easier it is to go deep and stand out.

General content gets lost in a sea of noise. To stand out, be specific. Be sub-specific.

It works with content and positioning, by the way.

What audience growth and client acquisition have in common

How do you build an audience?

You do it the same way you build your client roster: one person at a time.

In the beginning, audience (and client) growth takes time. It feels like an uphill battle. Results are slow and sparse.

But if you focus on building one relationship at a time, the rest will naturally take care of itself.

Think individual relationships, not masses.

Niching helps with both, too.

Asking for referrals

It’s possible that you’re good at what you do, but still don’t get many referrals.

After all, your clients and colleagues are busy—your business growth isn’t top-of-mind for them.

So what’s one way to get more referrals? It sounds simple, but you ask.

A good time to ask is when you begin to see great results with your clients. Don’t wait until the end of your relationship when some of your prime goodwill has worn off.

Maybe you offer to do a free initial assessment of someone’s marketing if they know anyone in your target market who would benefit from it.

Or, maybe you notice an ideal potential client is connected with them on LinkedIn, so you see if they’d be willing to make a warm intro.

Or, maybe they know the head of their industry association or some other supplier to the industry.

It doesn’t have to be a direct potential client. There are lots of valuable relationships to be had.

This approach won’t work every time, but it definitely won’t work if you don’t ask.

Loyalty, acquisition, programs, and campaigns

I stumbled upon an interesting Twitter thread yesterday that brought up a couple concepts worth sharing.

I highly recommend you read the entire thread, but I’ll share my main takeaways below as well.

Here are the highlights of my takeaways:

  • There are two primary kinds of marketing: loyalty and acquisition
  • Loyalty marketing is all about focusing your efforts on repeat purchases (i.e. frequency, transaction value, etc.)
  • Acquisition marketing is all about acquiring new customers to survive.
  • He argues companies who have 40% or less of their customers repurchase in the next year should focus their strategy on acquisition, not loyalty. Makes sense.
  • He argues in a subsequent thread that you usually cant fix those repurchase rates without a shift in what you sell (think a gift shop). So that’s not really a viable solution in most cases.
  • The second big ideas were his view that there are two core ways to approach marketing: campaigns and programs.
  • “A program is a comprehensive strategy to find new customers across all aspects of the business.”
  • “When I worked at Eddie Bauer, we flushed $15,000,000 of television advertising during a few months to generate $15,000,000 in sales (hint – that’s a profit loss of about $9,000,000 … oh my goodness). That was a campaign. But it wasn’t a program.”
  • “Well, “commerce television” is a customer acquisition program … a TV program, sure, but a program. That’s what a program is. All day. Every day. Relentless.”
  • “So I’m beggin’ y’all to give customer acquisition efforts another look. Please. Build a program. Dedicate real resources to the effort. You’re smart enough, talented enough, resourceful enough to be successful!”

Not sure why these ideas clicked with me, but thinking in terms of whether you should be helping your clients with loyalty, acquisition (or both)—and when to do each—was a lightbulb for me. Especially the 40% or less idea.

And then thinking in terms of a program, being an ongoing, ever-present, relentless system that is always working for you—it’s a foundation of what I do with my clients but I never thought of it as distinct from campaigns per se.

But distinguishing that from a campaign, which is more like an event or finite series of events, really shaped how I mentally organize the initiatives we marketers undertake.

Go back and read the full thread. This is the stuff strategy is made of. How you organize and name ideas also matters.

Hope this clicks for you, too.

Actual expertise vs. marketing yourself well

There are two important skills you need to master as an advisor:

  1. Getting business results for your clients
  2. Being able to market yourself well

So which is more important to your long-term success as a consultant?

The truth is, you won’t succeed on the merits of your expertise alone.

People are not lining up to give their business to the smartest consultants on their merits alone. They need to discover them first.

And that means, you need to invest considerable time into marketing yourself if you want to see the fruits of success.

Marketing yourself should be a little hard—at least until you have momentum. It takes work, there’s no ways around that.

But here’s the thing: you won’t be able to market yourself well if you don’t also have deep expertise at what you do.

The same way having expertise alone won’t solve your client attraction problems, neither will good marketing.

You can’t do good marketing as a consultant without some level of true expertise at your craft.

That’s because much of marketing as a consultant is sharing what you know with the world for free. If what you know isn’t valuable enough, it won’t attract many buyers.

So the answer to succeeding as a marketing isn’t one or the other. It takes true expertise and a lot of marketing to be successful.

There is no fast-tracking true expertise nor the good marketing that stems from it.

Keep putting in the work and good things will happen.