You have mastered your field and gathered enough experience to share it with those seeking insights in the world of business. How do consultants build an online presence or strengthen their digital marketing strategies?
Though there may be a handful of referrals, this hasn’t been enough to keep your business afloat. This is a common concern for business consultants everywhere. According to research, finding and developing new business is the most challenging aspect of being a consultant.
One reason behind this is that you may have limited reach.
As a business consultant, getting your name out there as a thought leader in your chosen industry is extremely important. You’ll also want your previous and current clients to talk about you and how you positively impacted their business. The best way to prompt this is to make your presence felt online.
Though there are many people on the online scene, there is a unique space you can fill out, given your credentials and experience.
You can start by following these five steps:
1. Know Your Customers
Before you start marketing yourself as a consultant, you need to understand who your target audience is. This includes knowing their goals, challenges, and pain points to provide value and solutions for their business needs.
Create a buyer persona—a semi-fictional representation of your intended customers.
Basing these personas on real people, you plan to reach out to and transact with (or already have in the past) can help you internalize your entire process when dealing with prospects.
The buyer persona can help you create valuable, tailor-fit content and products and services that align with the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups.
This 11-minute read blog from HubSpot will show how easy it is to create a buyer persona.
2. Understand the Market and Your Competition
Beyond getting to know your customers, you must familiarize yourself with market trends and your competition. Keeping up-to-date with the developments in your industry and how these shape the business landscape will help you determine your unique selling point.
By doing an in-depth analysis of your competitors, you will know the different options available for your potential clients, thus helping you identify what sets you apart from everyone else.
When identifying your unique selling point, it’s essential to know how you can help solve your client’s problems and how these differentiate you from other consultants.
This will allow you to build a strategy that targets specific issues clientele experience that only you can answer.
Performing a competitor analysis also gives you helpful insights into how well other companies run their service.
Acknowledging that your competitors are better at certain aspects than you will help you identify personal improvement points.
3. Capture Your Customer’s Attention
Now that you’ve successfully created your buyer persona and studied the latest trends in the market, it’s time to increase brand awareness with strategic content and offers.
Set clear goals and objectives for your strategy.
If you’re hoping for broader reach and more authority, your prospects need a better idea of who you are and your capabilities as a business consultant. This involves choosing a suitable medium to introduce yourself and connect with people.
Outside of traditional networking and referrals, take advantage of online connections through social media.
96% of marketing efforts are now on social media platforms to increase customer awareness and meaningful exchanges.
There are different platforms to choose from:
- YouTube
Knowing where your customers spend most of their time is one way to determine which channel—or channels—you should use.
- Posting a photo of a conference or event you recently participated in or sharing the latest news from your industry helps start conversations.
- It would also help to include a compelling copy to accompany your post or image.
These are critical factors in building an online presence and bringing us to our next step.
source: Tim Bennett, via Unsplash
4. Write Creative, Informative, and Meaningful Content
Beyond social media, publishing regular blogs on your website will not only help increase website traffic, but blogs also offer you a space to share your specific brand of expertise.
Given your tenure as a business consultant, you have enough unique experiences to use as inspiration for content.
For example, opt to share thoughts and insights on the latest financial strategies, or even create educational and informative content covering the different trends in your industry.
Blogs help establish your credibility and authority as a consultant.
More than just writing blogs, your content strategy would also benefit significantly from an editorial calendar so you can plot the flow of your blogging schedule.
- Determine the best publishing dates for your articles and categorize them by theme or target audience.
- An editorial calendar will allow you to not only establish consistency with your content, but it’s also a handy tool to support developing your overall content strategy to increase your authority.
Another popular way of delivering informative content is through videos and infographics, especially since customers today spend a third of their online activity viewing videos.
- Infographics are handy when sharing visually pleasing and engaging statistics.
- Be creative and strategic with your social media page and website content.
That said, remember that a content strategy goes beyond just writing. Impactful content takes practical strategies to execute, which is why many consultants consider outsourcing their content marketing needs to specialists in this field.
Hiring a creative process outsourcing company with content experts can help improve your overall content and communications strategy and add value to your existing workflow.
With a team to take on your creative executions, you’ll find yourself free to focus more on what matters most—growing your business.
If you consider outsourcing your creative processes, remember to look for a company that can support your business's specific needs.
5. Ask Your Clients to Provide Reviews
According to BrightLocal’s survey, 88% of customers trust online reviews as much as a referral from their close friend.
- Encouraging happy clients to leave commendations or honest insights on the quality of your performance. It gives your target audience an idea of how you work from people in the same position.
- Featuring reviews on your website also generates unique content about your services, giving you a better chance at ranking on search engines. These reviews are meaningful content that makes your website more visible and credible to people who might need your expertise.
And in the long run, honest reviews also provide a unique perspective of your service and allow you to improve as a consultant further.
Takeaway
Establishing your authority online takes time and research—but this is a worthwhile investment that benefits you in the long term.
So get to know your customers and what they want, build up your authority through publishing informative content, and encourage client reviews.
Keep these in mind, and you’re well on increasing your reach and presence online.
Are you ready to strengthen your online presence?
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