A Marketing Agency for Consultants
What We Can Achieve Together
Acquire More Clients
We use methods such as thought leadership content, campaign portfolio management, lead automation and brand promotion to help you acquire more clients.
Increase Client Share
We apply marketing best practices such as nurture campaigns to stay top of mind with your clients, increase customer share and improve customer lifetime value.
Improve Client Retention
We use engagement methods such as social media marketing and content marketing to maintain top of mind awareness and keep customer retention high.
Marketing for Consultants
Marketing for consultants is different than other industries. It must support relationship-based selling. It must focus on the brand, people and services in ways that convey confidence and results. And it must demonstrate differentiation and competitive advantage.
Consultants position themselves as trusted advisors. They are essentially selling skills, expertise and experience. And many times, it’s less about selling and more about solutioning.
But to do this in a way that achieves consistent results requires systemic and repeatable methods.
To do it well and at low cost requires marketing best practices.
Marketing recommendations without supporting data are just opinions. The Pandesix Growth Framework is built on evidence-based best practices and backed by industry specific benchmark data.
Rather than generic marketing programs, we deploy programs optimized for buyers of consulting services.
An Optimized Program Portfolio
With so many options, marketing can feel overwhelming. It can be difficult to know where to start.
We start by measuring and ranking programs based on their revenue and profit contributions. Below are some of the programs we assess, forecast and implement with our clients.
- An Inspiring Website
Your company website is your most important marketing asset. When working with clients we find some websites that will benefit from minor improvements, others that need simple redesign and a few that need makeovers.
The first best practice for achieving a website that increases visitor engagement and conversions is to focus on the client first, the brand second and services third.
The website should reflect your company’s brand identity and showcase your creative solutions.
It must be intuitive, responsive, mobile-friendly, and optimized for search engines.
Building an impressive website need not be a daunting task. If you know what it should do, an experienced website professional can usually create it in a relatively short period.
And here’s the upside. Most consulting company websites achieve less than a one percent website visitor to lead conversion rate. Websites that include the above best practices often achieve a 3 percent or higher conversion rate. When you consider the volume of website visitors, that 3-fold increase results in a steady pipeline of new sale opportunities
- Brand Development
If clients suggest your company or services are pretty much the same as your competitors, it may be time for an improved brand identity.
We help clients create or reinforce brands with distinction and differentiation. That’s essential to stand out in a crowded marketplace. When done pursuant to a brand strategy, it also positions the firm’s staff as thought leaders and crafts messaging that inspires your target audiences.
This is another asset that can be performed quickly if you apply a proven process and best practices.
The upside here is that if done well, over time, your brand becomes your most valuable company asset.
- Search Engine Optimization
SEO is the process of organizing your website so that clients find you online when searching for services that you deliver. It improves the position of your website in Google and other search engine result pages.
SEO is an organic strategy, meaning that once set up and nurtured, you don’t need to procure search ads or other paid media to attract visitors to your website.
There are many SEO best practices. But for consulting websites, it’s important to design website content that integrates search engine keywords with your services pages and including local SEO or geo-focus content for buyers in your proximity.
When done well, the company will be discovered by significantly more potential buyers.
- Content Marketing
This method uses content, such as web pages and blog posts, to educate, engage and inform prospects and customers. It’s also a top method to position the company’s employees or executives as thought leaders.
Best practices include creating content that addresses the pain points and challenges of your target audiences. That may include innovative solutions, modern technologies, repeatable processes, case studies or professional advice.
Regardless of content type, it should be developed in a way that positions the firm’s executives as experts and problem solvers.
These programs work best when content is aligned with the buyer’s purchase journey. But the buyer’s goals change as they make progress toward selecting a firm. That’s why content must be designed for each stage of the purchase cycle.
When creating content for clients, we include additional best practices such as applying story telling techniques and embedding multimedia elements, such as images, videos or infographics. We also emphasize evergreen content, which is information that remains relevant for long periods of time.
Finally, you want to apply SEO to your content so its discovered by more potential buyers.
- Marketing Campaigns
There are many types of campaigns. Inbound, outbound, email, pay per click and digital ads to name a few. Each has strengths and weaknesses. Each delivers different results. To make sense of it, we apply our industry benchmarks to prioritize those that drive the biggest financial uplift.
But campaigns should be measured both individually and collectively. For example, in the consulting industry, account-based marketing programs are often the most effective as measured by conversions and ROI. However, when integrated with other complimentary types of campaigns, the conversion and ROI surge even higher.
Best practices include precision campaigns targeted to your ideal customer profile (ICP). The messaging must integrate the client’s challenges with the firm’s solutions. The offers must be highly specific and demonstrate compelling benefits. When correctly done, the firm will acquire more qualified leads at a reduced cost per lead.
- Nurture Campaigns
This marketing technique is used to maintain top of mind awareness with prospects and customers. Many times, its managed as an email campaign.
It should sequence email distributions that build upon each other and ultimately reach a crescendo effect. When done well, it will increase conversions and customer share. Even better, it will help grow customer relationships. That’s essential because customer affinity is one of only four sustainable competitive advantages.
- Social Media Marketing
Social media is a growing information source for many professional services buyers. Social networks are also ideal channels to promote your content and engage with your target audience.
Some best practices include creating posts of behind-the-scenes back stories, putting the spotlight on key staff, providing analysis of industry trends, or sharing interesting ways you firm has solved client problems.
Well done well, your consulting firm will expand its brand, boost engagement with your target audience, stay top of mind with your existing clients, and acquire new leads and new projects.
Any program selected for our clients uses our marketing best practices to achieve top quartile performance results.
Our programs are validated by field research, implemented with a prescriptive framework, measured with purpose-built reporting, and leverage technology automation. And because these programs are data-driven, they can be modeled to show investment, cash flow impact, time to value, and ROI.
Here’s How our Process Works
Every client and project are unique. But as an experienced marketing agency for consultants, we’ve found that most benefit from a structured framework that delivers predictable results. Below is a summary of our framework that we adapt for each client engagement.
01. Rapid Diagnostic
A strategic project should start with an assessment to measure baseline performance and learn what's holding the company back. That's important because a full and accurate diagnosis gets past symptoms, identifies root causes and specifies an accurate prescription.
If you don’t accurately and fully identify the biggest obstacles, you are unlikely to pursue the most efficient path to achieve your goals. You wouldn’t want your doctor to prescribe medicine before a diagnosis. The same applies to your business.
02. A Marketing Strategy
We identify and prioritize your goals in clear and measurable terms. This allows us to craft a marketing strategy that meets your goals in the least time, cost and risk.
A strategy creates focus and prioritization. It's a precursor to everything that comes after. Great execution doesn’t get you very far if your strategy is wrong.
03. A Go-to-Market Plan
This is the operating plan that identifies the best programs to meet your goals.
Most companies will benefit from an optimized mix of programs. We create an operating Blueprint to clearly show the highest impact programs and how they will collectively deliver the company’s goal.
04. Agile Execution
We apply agile Scrum sprint-based execution for speed and results.
Agile execution accelerates time to value, applies systemic execution, delivers predictable results, and reduces risk.
It’s also business outcomes focused. For example, the first agile principle is to “begin with clarity of outcome and let it guide every step of the journey.”
05. Technology Automation
We apply purpose-built software applications to bring information, automation and scale to operations. The right MarTech facilitates consistent delivery, replaces manual labor, applies process automation for faster results, and realizes cost savings.
06. Performance Analytics
Clear goals set the vision and create the roadmap, but rigorous execution directs the path to success and the realization of results. And that execution should be measured in real-time with the right key performance indicators (KPIs).
That’s why we instrument our programs with dashboards and KPIs. This allows us to know what’s working, what’s not and intervene with swift course corrections to remedy deviations.
A Unique Digital Marketing Agency for Consultants
Three things make us a different type of digital marketing agency for consultants.
- We are industry experts. Our staff are seasoned management consultants, systems consultants, marketing consultants, and experts in other professional services disciplines. We don’t incur up front time to learn about the industry. We don’t need to perform experimentation to see what works and what doesn’t.
- We are a revenue-focused marketing agency for consultants. Our efforts target measurable business outcomes. That includes things like increasing client acquisitions, customer lifetime value and customer retention. We don’t dilute our focus by getting sidetracked with activity and vanity metrics. The results we deliver are shown in top line revenue and bottom-line profit figures.
- We take a data-driven approach to all our services. We use industry data, performance benchmarks and best practices that collectively forecast reliable results. It's a science-based process that transforms measurable objectives into actual results. Marketing is cool but business outcomes rule.
Lets Get Growing
If you want to step up the growth of your consulting company, we have some options.
Consider our one-day Professional Services Marketing Workshop. This course delivers data-driven insights, evidence-based best practices, a proven framework and templates to accelerate your journey.
Or for professional help from a digital marketing agency for consultants, contact us to schedule an introductory call with one of our experts.