Digital Marketing 101 for small consultancies

Many founders are wary of social media, especially around advertising. It is not only a big psychological step from traditional marketing in consultancies, but it is also one of the quickest ways to burn cash. Often this fear is compounded by early experiments in blogging, YouTube videos or LinkedIn advertisements which took up a lot of time but did not work.

However, research shows an incredibly strong correlation by firms that use digital marketing and growth success finding that high growth professional service firms:

• invested 25% more effort in digital and content marketing than their no growth counterparts.
• spent 15%+ of their budget on marketing
• were twice as likely as low-growth firms to use paid digital ads, videos and automated marketing
• used gated digital content
• which generated 40% or more leads online grew at double the speed of firms that didn’t

Whilst it is true that consulting sales are still very much based upon rich relationships (i.e. testimonials, referrals and follow-on work), social media offers huge value in both achieving these and shifting potential clients from cold to warm. The wonderful thing about social media is two-fold: it’s ability to provide a laser-like focus on the specific audience you need – age, job, interests, location, employer and so on; and its ability to track which of your campaigns are more successful.

For most clients, I have four rules with social media.

1. Do one thing (generally LinkedIn) very well before you think of moving on to anything else.
2. Create a content re-use process. This might mean that LinkedIn content is automatically reposted on Twitter (or blog content on LinkedIn), but might also mean that ‘evergreen content’ (i.e. content that is relatively timeless) is reused on LinkedIn several times^[2], or that a video posted on your website is edited down into different segments for reuse elsewhere.
3. Never take a lead to a dead-end. Once they have viewed the post, video or whatever, there should be an option to subscribe, book a call, or access another piece of content.
4. Occasionally use ‘gated’ content: i.e. content that is hosted on your website that the lead can access after submitting their email. This not only provides you with potential leads’ contact details, but also lets you build up a picture of who else might be interested.

The key to digital marketing is to remember you build a relationship slowly. No-one is going to buy from you or even talk to you after seeing one LinkedIn post or blog. Your job is to dmonstrate your expertise by providing potential clients with insights that speak to the challenges they face (that you can help with). Over time, you move potential clients from ‘cold’ (knowing nothing about you) to ‘warm’ (aware of what you do) to ‘hot’ (ready to talk about buying).

There is no ‘right’ route from cold to hot, but a good route should:

• progress a prospect towards a sale through education about their challenge/opportunity
• build trust through a progression of ‘touches’ with the firm
• take opportunities to demonstrate your expertise and experience
• chose methods which show-off your strong points
• never have a dead-end. i.e. there is always an obvious next step (what marketeers term a ‘call to action’ – which might be submitting an email or booking a call)

In this video, I provide an overview to those founders who are new to digital marketing.