Marketing high-level consultancy services isn’t always easy…
You already have the knowledge and expertise to provide your clients with an excellent service, but how can you get your business out there to attract clients in the first place?
Luckily, there’s a proven process to successfully market your consultancy services with just a few touchstones. All you need is a commitment to follow it through, and you’ll be able to start engaging with the decision-makers you need to reach in no time.
This article will take you through:
- Your overall strategy
- Sharing educational content
- Developing an engaged audience
- Hosting webinars
- Our recommended process for success
Let’s dive right in.
Defining your overall strategy
When it comes to your strategy for marketing high-level consultancy services, it needs to be built in a way that positions you as an expert in your industry.
This is something that’s essential for getting your audience to see you as credible.
You already have all the knowledge you need to do what you do well in your head, but the senior managers you’re targeting won’t know that without your help.
So, what kind of things do you need to know to get recognition as an industry expert?
Share educational content
One of the key ways to position yourself as an expert in digital marketing is to create educational content.
It can be in the form of articles, videos, ebooks and more, which you can publish on your site and share across social media and email marketing.
This gives you the opportunity to delve into the topics that matter most to your audience and build trust by identifying what solutions can work for them and why.
Educational content like this shows your audience that you understand their problem and know how to solve it.
The trick is to share enough information to inform your audience without giving away so much that they can do it all themselves.
If you’re unsure where to start with writing great content to market your consultancy business, check out our quick guide here.
Developing an engaged audience who know, like and trust you
In business, people need to know, like and trust you before they commit to investing in your product or service. Building these three pillars are fundamental for generating an audience that engages with your brand.
But how does this translate into your marketing?
The answer is that it all comes down to your marketing funnel.
Every one of your customers’ journeys will differ, with various touchstones informing their decision of whether or not to buy your service along the way. However, they all go through the same funnel that starts with awareness and ends with conversion.
It just so happens that the know, like, trust principle corresponds with each stage in the funnel, which summarises what you need to achieve in each part of your customers’ journeys.
If you haven’t seen the marketing funnel before, It looks a little something like this:
Different marketing techniques need to be used to move potential clients from one stage of the funnel to the next.
Generally speaking, it works like this:
However, when you’re marketing high-level consultancy services where you need to convey more complex information and ideas, networking is key, which is why hosting regular webinars can make the biggest difference.
Hosting webinars
Hosting webinars gives you the opportunity to speak directly to your audience about what you’re most passionate about and how you can solve your attendees’ pain points.
And it’s proven to be effective for many businesses. In fact, 53% of marketers say that webinars are the best top-of-funnel method for generating high-quality leads.
Do it well, and you can fulfil the know, like, and trust principle for your audience during the 1-2 hours it takes for you to deliver the webinar.
Overall, it’s a fantastic way to raise awareness around your brand and build an audience that is engaged- it also provides you with fresh content to post across your social media channels during the run-up to the event.
However, it’s not always easy to translate wanting to host a webinar into a webinar with plenty of attendees.
We’ve rounded up a process that you can follow to ensure that you’re in a position to deliver high-quality webinars to a good number of attendees.
The process
Determine what’s in it for the attendee
So you’ve decided to host your first webinar to market your high-level consultancy services. By doing it, you want to raise awareness for your brand, tell your audience about how you can solve their problem with your offering and start building relationships with potential clients.
But what’s in it for them?
Your webinar needs to provide enough value to appeal to the people you want to reach. Otherwise, you simply won’t get the signups you need to run it.
This means you need to start with a topic that you know your target audience will be interested in- and your webinar presentation can’t be all about selling yourself.
You need to provide useful information that your attendees can leverage. The key is to provide enough insight to inform your attendees without giving away so much that they can go away and do it themselves.
If the consultancy market you’re in is a particularly competitive sector, it could also be worth offering something that will entice more people to signup. This could be something as simple as a free troubleshooting consultation for all attendees.
What they’ll gain will then need to be at the forefront of your marketing for the webinar.
Email marketing
One of the best ways of sourcing attendees is by sending out invites via your email marketing system.
However, this only really works if your email database has enough quality contacts in it, which requires a solid lead generation strategy to build it up over time.
However, there’s no guarantee that the people who have signed up to attend will actually turn up, so, as well as sending out initial invites, it’s also a good idea to write reminder emails to send out to your registrants one or two days before your webinar.
Social media presence
If you already post regularly on social media from your business profiles and personal LinkedIn profile, you may have already built up a good level of organic reach. Use it as an opportunity to tell your audience about any upcoming webinars that you’re hosting.
Advertising your webinars on social media is a great way to get the word out there, but you do also need to think about quality and quantity.
Little will get followers or connections to disconnect faster than repetitive posts, and so these will need to be limited to once or twice a week, blended with a range of other content, including industry news, engagement posts and sales posts on different days.
The quality also needs to be up to scratch. Think engaging copy that sums up what your audience can expect when they sign up and use branded videos or graphics to capture their attention as they scroll through their newsfeed.
Eventbrite/Zoom registration
Using Eventbrite makes it easy for you to create, manage and promote your webinar. You can keep track of signups and use the link to send to those you’re inviting to signup.
Having a link for your visitors to register means that you can use the link in social media, email, paid advertising, individual messages etc as the call to action. Once attendees are registered in Eventbrite the Eventbrite system can then be used to send reminder messages of the up and coming event. Without those reminders, the percentage who actually turn up will be low.
Expect around 50% dropout rate of those signed up to those who actually show up.
It also integrates with Zoom, making it easy to host your webinar on Zoom, a platform most of your audience will be well-acquainted with by now.
Headline speakers/ panellists
As I’ve mentioned, if you want your audience to choose you over a competitor, credibility is incredibly important.
In the context of a webinar, having industry experts as headline speakers or panellists to speak on specialist topics helps contribute to building this credibility.
It’s fairly easy to attract suitable speakers for this, especially if you have a pre-existing relationship with them, as they also get the opportunity to raise awareness of their own brand and services.
Interactivity
One of the biggest hurdles to overcome when you’re in the process of delivering your webinar is maintaining your audience’s attention.
After all, there’s nothing worse than speaking for a whole hour when the people watching have tuned out.
One of the best ways to do this is through interactivity. By creating polls and setting up break out rooms to break up the session, you’ll keep your audience more engaged while creating new points of discussion in the process.
Break out rooms are particularly effective for getting more insight into the thoughts, ideas and problems your attendees are facing and can help to build stronger relationships with them in the process.
If you are faced with an audience whose videos are switched off (either because they are simply listening in or they are on a desktop without a camera) then be prepared to ask the audience questions and have them respond back through chat. You have to work a bit harder but you can get this type of audience to become engaged.
Encourage 1-2-1s
Calls to action are important in any form of marketing promoting your high-level consultancy services, and webinars are no different.
So, the final thing to remember when hosting a webinar is that you want discussions and relationship-building to continue once it’s ended.
This is where 1-2-1s come in. At the end of the webinar (and in a follow-up email thanking registrants for attending), encourage your audience to book a free consultation with you where you can help develop their knowledge on the webinar’s topic and troubleshoot aspects of their business that are relevant to your offering.
One of the easiest ways to do this is by setting up a Calendly account and sharing it so that your webinar attendees can book a time that suits them without going through the hassle of email ping pong.
Conclusion
And there you have it. Hopefully, this article has helped you realise the actions you can take to improve your overall approach to digital marketing.
From sharing educational content to building an engaged audience that you can deliver webinars to, the underlying theme is informing people about what they can do to help themselves as opposed to directly selling your solution- this can come later during your 1-2-1 discussion.
If you’d like to find out more about what it takes to market your high-level consultancy business, book a free consultation here.
