Laser Focused Consulting Services Win More Digital Marketing Business

Consulting Services businesses with experience in digital marketing can specialise and set their business on a stronger growth path.

As a business description, consulting services is very broad…too broad. Like any business, you as a ‘consultant’ need to differentiate or be seen as just another ‘me to’ operator to be successful.

If you don’t have something focused and interesting to offer, you will struggle to sell your services. Everything will be that bit harder, take longer and cost more to get there.

A better strategy is to create a specialist consulting services business that sets you apart from everyone else in your space. Of course it must be something that is in demand and that has a hungry crowd looking to buy.

One of the problems I observe with many consultants (and I mean mainly marketing and business consultants) is that they have a lot of generalist knowledge. Marketing and business strategy are both large fields and it is because of this that many have difficulty becoming laser focused on a single specialist area. They don’t want to limit their opportunities and emotionally, that is understandable.

However, designing your business for success is not best driven on emotion issues.

By having a well chosen specialist offering, you will open many more doors and in my experience, once you start working, build trust and demonstrate your expertise, many customers will ask if you can also assist with other components of the process. Which allows you to demonstrate your broader expertise and build a solid long term relationship.

So how do you do this?

Start by breaking down a big picture process into elements to identify the possible areas businesses actually need help.

For example, you might want to help businesses generate new customer leads through online marketing. So do you promote yourself as a Lead generator?

I just Googled ‘lead generation services’ and up came 54.6 million results. The competition in this space is high with many well established businesses making it quite difficult to reach a page 1 presence on Google, and it will be hard to get heard in such a noisy space.

So, try breaking down the process and identify the elements that create the most pain and therefore opportunities to specialise.

Steps in the process of online lead generation;

1. Website – is the website suitable for purpose? Is it modern, or mobile friendly?
2. Landing Pages – lead generation requires an offer and a way to sell it. This means a carefully designed landing page to capture the leads.
3. Landing page optimisation – split testing to find what works the best in landing page design. Leads can be increased without finding new traffic by getting more of the current visitors to put their hands up and express interest, creating a big boost in ROI which is something business will pay for.
4. Email promotion – using email to generate interest and sending prospects to the landing page(s) is another specialised area. This can include one off campaigns, automated series of emails, split testing to find the best performing emails.
5. SEO traffic – creating organic search traffic through a content marketing and promotion strategy to build backlinks and position in search engine results.
6. Paid traffic – this could be targeted Google Adwords management or Facebook and other social media paid advertising.
7. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) processes – what happens when a lead is received? How is it managed and distributed to a sales team or online sales process? How do you measure success?
   Sales transactions – setting up and managing ecommerce software and payment gateways or working out the most suitable way to transact online or offline.
8. Automation – all of the above steps will need integrating to really achieve a robust process with achievable results. Left in its parts, the system can easily break as it requires too much human intervention.

As you can see, what the simple ‘lead generation’ statement turned out to be was a very complex process that involves all sorts of different skill sets, software and knowledge.

And here is another possibility;

Software and App sourcing – there are many solutions possible to deliver each of the elements of the above 8 Step process. It is a big job by itself to identify, test and recommend then implement these solutions. Its time consuming and so easy to make a bad choice…a specialisation in this space provides another key opportunity to differentiate.

So why not position yourself as a specialist consultant?

There is reduced competition for your services and not only that but you increase your potential market size. PLUS, as with the medical profession, specialists can often charge much higher rates.

Think about it. If you were a Lead Generation Consultant, you would go head to head with everyone trying to do the full job. However, if you were the specialist landing page optimiser or email promotion expert or system automation integrator, you would be able to promote your service to the lead generation consultants and other agencies and marketing services in addition to direct to customers. You wouldn’t be seen as a direct competitor to these other consultants but potentially as an expert member of their team for a project. To continue the medical example, General Practitioners refer patients (customers) to Specialists…it happens everywhere. What a great way to develop new business leads for your business!

Back to the Google search…let’s try ‘landing page optimisation’. My search displayed 464,000 results i.e. less that 1% of the search results for ‘lead generation services’. The point is only to illustrate the differences between broad definition and laser focused.

Find your niche, develop a key specialisation and promote it. Avoid using generic descriptions like consulting services and differentiate yourself from everyone else and prosper.

And Vee Digital can support your ‘specialist’ consulting services business by partnering with you on delivery of services and products. From website renovation, maintenance and new builds to landing page development, seo, ppc and email marketing services. We even spend a lot of time researching the best tools to use on digital marketing.

You don’t need to have in-house capacity for all of the deliverables. Outsourced services and reselling products allows you to leverage and grow much more quickly.

Check out our Partner with Vee Digital opportunity here.