Regardless if it’s a small consulting firm or a large consulting organization, Consulting companies are having a hard time because they’re marketing services to people without knowing if they need their services or not. Selling a product is easier because you are offering solutions to a customer’s need or want. However, selling a service means selling the value of your relationship with your clients and it’s harder to measure the quality of service especially if you’re new in the industry.
Consulting firms must focus their marketing efforts and resources on what’s important and refrain from spending their time, effort and money on things that aren’t even working for them.
In order to maximize the marketing team’s efforts and resources, consulting firms must spend on the following when selling their services.
Marketing planning
Marketing planning is important in every business. For marketing teams in a consulting firm, thorough planning is needed to achieve your marketing goals. Planning can help you determine what marketing strategy works for your organization.
Here’s how you should plan A Marketing Planning Process for a Professional Services Firm from Rattleback.
Direct Mailing
One way to reach out to prospects is through email blast. It is the easiest and the cheapest way of providing information and letting your target market aware of your company. With the right targeted list, you can deliver the right message to the right people easily.
How to create attention-getting email?
- Personalize your message. Address the email directly to them by using their name in the email. Create a message that emphasizes the current need or issues of your audience.
- Stress the benefits of your service.
Here’s a sample template that we use to send out emails to our prospects.
Michelle Tan
Leng Kee Road, SiS Building, Singapore 159088
Hi Michelle,
We know that many companies in Singapore are spending big money in tracking all of their company’s expenses.
We’ve recently develop a payment tracking software and we just finished testing it out. The results blew us away.
Call +65 1234 5678 for a free demo of our services that will allow you to:
- Pay and Receive payments online
- Keep track of all of your customer’s payments, real time
- Improve your cash flow
Sincerely,
John Lee
Related source: Email Marketing Statistics in 2017
Here are some pointer on email marketing you could check into:
- What’s the Next Step in Sending Event Emails?
- 5 Things Every Prospecting Email Must Have Before Hitting ‘Send’
Cold Calls
Another way of reaching out to prospective customers is through cold calling. This is the fasting way of knowing whether your prospect is interested or not. Cold calling is necessary to grow your consulting business. Contacting prospects to know if they’re qualified for your business is important because it lets you identify which prospect to nurture and follow up and which ones are not worth your time, money and efforts.
Related: Marketing Starter Kit for your Consulting Business in Singapore
Online Content
One way of letting your audience become aware of your company is by providing helpful content with relevant information. However, you must not overload your audience with information. Instead, create high quality contents stressing the only benefits that they can get when they consider your service depending on their needs and want.
Rattleback created a Content Marketing Wheel to think about what type of content and topics to have.
Here’s an example of how they apply their Content Marketing Wheel to their content marketing campaign.
As of April 2014, this is how this collection of content has performed for us:
- Site Visits: 2,780 page views (~40% to the flagship content + ~60% to our ancillary content designed to attract potential clients)
- Conversions: 293
- Email Subscribers: 152
- Opportunities: 3
Consulting firms create different marketing campaigns on almost everything just to generate income for their business. Their marketing teams should focus on spending their marketing efforts and resources on the things that matter. Planning, direct mailing, cold calling and online content are where they’re supposed to put their efforts on to help them increase their customers and generate more income to grow their business.
