While running a successful consulting business has its advantages – including but not limited to lucrative financial rewards – the fact is, that it’s not what anyone would call a “passive income stream”. It takes hard work, talent, focus, and plenty of perseverance.
What’s more, and as a growing number of highly successful consulting business owners are discovering, on today’s landscape it also requires smart and strategic inbound marketing.
To illustrate this advice, below we highlight 8 tips for building and sustaining a thriving consultancy practice courtesy of BusinessInsider.com, and highlight how inbound marketing helps each one:
Tip #1: Find the Optimal Billing Rate
How Inbound Marketing Helps: In most cases, the problem isn’t that consulting business owners are billing too high. Rather, it’s that they’re billing too low – not because they want to, but because that’s what their prospects are asking or, in some cases demanding.
Inbound marketing allows consultants to break free of this artificial – and crushing – cost ceiling by establishing their unique value proposition, and convincingly justify why they aren’t the “Wal-Mart” of their industry; and more importantly, why that is VERY good news for their clients who will not fall victim to the truism that “you get what you pay for”.
Tip #2: Target specific clients vs. a general audience
How Inbound Marketing Helps: Consulting business owners can launch inbound marketing campaigns to target specific buyer personas, and engage them with strategically developed messaging that resonates with their needs, pain points and aspirations. This granular-level targeting is categorically superior to conventional (“interrupt”) marketing.
Tip # 3: Develop and nurture a strong network
How Inbound Marketing Helps: Inbound marketing is “word of mouth” for the digital age, because it allows people to easily share assets (e.g. ebooks, reports, white papers, infographics, etc.) with members of their network – which can lead to an exponential increase in clients (but without having to spend an extra cent on marketing or advertising!).
Tip #4: Review key contract clauses for suitability
How Inbound Marketing Helps: At first glance, it may not seem that inbound marketing has much to do with this tip. After all, if a prospective client wants a consulting business owner to sign an NDA or non-compete, where does inbound marketing fit into the picture?
Well, here’s where inbound marketing helps consulting business owners target and attract qualified prospects who, to put it bluntly, know how to do business. As such, requests for NDAs, non-competes, warranties, guarantees and so on are more likely to be in-line with industry/marketplace best practices, and not inappropriate (or ludicrous!) demands.
Tip #5: Be clear with project expectations
How Inbound Marketing Helps: Consulting business owners can create checklists, project plan templates, and other tools that can be delivered to prospects through inbound marketing campaigns. As such, when they reach the end of the customer journey and are ready to enter into an engagement, their expectations are clearer and more realistic – which makes them easier to work with, and frankly, more profitable as well.
Tip #6: Avoid multiple, simultaneous projects
How Inbound Marketing Helps: Some consulting business owners go from not having enough clients, to having too many! And while this is in some ways a nice problem to have, it’s nevertheless an issue that must be addressed. Otherwise, a much worse problem will emerge: unhappy clients who are thinking of taking their business elsewhere.
Inbound marketing helps by streamlining and automating the entire marketing process, to the point that business consulting owners literally don’t have to write a single email (let alone a blog post, ebook, white paper, etc.). Everything can be created and organized by their inbound marketing partner, which frees up capacity to do what matters most: serving clients and exceeding their expectations.
Tip #7: Create a pipeline of opportunity
How Inbound Marketing Helps: Really, it’s almost as if this tip was written with inbound marketing in mind, because this is precisely that inbound marketing does. It puts business consulting owners on their prospects’ radar screen – and keeps them there – so that when it’s time to choose a partner, they’re top-of-mind vs. lost somewhere in a sea of vendors.
Tip #8: Build Equity in Yourself
How Inbound Marketing Helps: Simply put, inbound marketing helps consulting businesses owners elevate their brand, and establish their reputation as results-oriented thought leaders who work with professionalism and integrity. Why? Because inbound marketing isn’t about selling. It’s about advising, educating, and cultivating relationships: which is what successful consulting business owners do best!
Learn More
To learn more about how inbound marketing can help your consulting business thrive and succeed, contact the Leap Clixx team today. Your consultation with us is free.
There are many opportunities for inbound marketing to help consulting businesses become more successful. For more information on inbound marketing best practices, download our FREE eBook:
Topics: Inbound Marketing
