- Analyze our clients. Understand what leads them to buy and what functional/emotional outcomes they try to achieve.
- Segment them based on their goals. Find the most profitable segments that get the most value from our services, which also have reasonable sales cycles. Look for patterns that define those businesses.
- Dig into our firm’s expertise and strengths. What positively surprises the clients the most? What’s the edge our firm has that others don’t?
- Consider the major trends in our space. What do clients demand more compared to three years ago? What will they continue to demand in three years?
- Research direct competitors. Find what they are good at, where they are weak, and what segments they ignore.
- Understand our prospects’ internal alternatives to our services, including hiring, using AI, or doing nothing. What makes our services an easy choice over them?
- Make a positioning decision based on all this. Get clear on who exactly we’ll serve, what problems we’ll solve, and how we’ll be different. Align all executives and employees around this direction.
- Define the firm’s point of view. Not generic things like “collaboration” or being “result-oriented.” Opinionated ideas about how clients should operate in our area of expertise. A clear articulation of what we stand for, to attract clients who believe in what we believe.
- Create a brand narrative to fit our firm into our clients’ lives. What’s the villain causing their problems? What’s the change we’ll help them make to beat it?
- Define our firm’s tone of voice. Most consulting firms sound similar and boring. How do we sound to become distinct? What words do we use and avoid?
- Turn all this into a messaging framework that both marketing and consultants/sales can follow. Create a compass for everything we create.
- Get clear on our offers. Don’t let prospects figure out how to work with us. Structure our capabilities under clear options based on their journey.
- Focus our marketing on the core offer that generates the most profit and the entry offer that leads to it. Deprioritize offers we sell only to existing clients after we build a relationship.
- Map out the marketing funnel. How will prospects discover us? How do we capture their attention? How do we deepen the relationship before they ever talk to us?
- Revamp the home page and other main pages based on the new messaging. Explain everything from the clients’ perspective, using their language.
- Create a new content strategy that ties every new article, post, and resource back to our core messages.
- Review our existing content. What can be repurposed? What needs to be retired?
- Make the email newsletter the main channel that everything else connects to. Treat it as a product on its own. Make it truly valuable.
- Create automated email sequences to send the best editions to the new subscribers. Help them understand our expertise, point of view, and services without aggressive selling.
- Get clear on marketing metrics directly tied to business results. What’s our lifetime gross profit per client? What’s our client acquisition cost? If our marketing is already profitable, why are we not spending more?
- Fix the leaks in the existing funnel. Weak copy, weak creatives, ads that lead to the home page… Create a process to track and improve conversions at each funnel step.
- Add our ideal client profile (in a way they’d describe themselves) everywhere: from ads to landing pages, from content pieces to emails. Make it easy for prospects, AI engines, and algorithms to find and refer us.
- Increase cross-channel conversions. Turn newsletter subscribers into LinkedIn followers, turn podcast listeners into email subscribers, etc.
- Turn our firm’s experts into true thought leaders that prospects would follow. Make the marketing team regularly interview them to extract insights and support their personal social accounts. Make all their personal accounts ambassadors to deliver the firm’s core messages.
- Review the tool stack. How do we track attribution, intent, and other signals? Where are the gaps? How does everything tie back to our CRM?
- Set up a process for our thought leaders/sales to do warm outreach to good-fit prospects who have high intent (certain link clicks, website visits, engagement).
- Use ads to increase the reach of our thought leaders’ best ideas. Use LinkedIn for highly targeted ads, and Meta for retargeting the website visitors in a cost-effective way.
- Create a process to connect all our in-person connections and networking activities to our digital channels. Stay top of mind with as many prospects as possible.
- Reconnect with all the previous clients/contacts to ask what’s going on in their businesses. Inform them about our latest activities and resources.
- Set quarterly input (actions) and output (results) goals. Be strict with actions, while using results as a measure to understand what’s working and what needs to change.
- Wonder why our firm has not done all these before.
- Keep going.
P.S. If your firm has outgrown referrals but doesn’t have a marketing engine yet (or has an ineffective one), fill out this form. Let’s talk.
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Ozan
Founder - Frontera
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