How to create your marketing strategy

I want more marketing...

...said no consulting business leader ever.

It's not more marketing that you want, it's more clients. Or, more specifically, more of the right clients.

In this blog article I'm going to explore:

• How marketing has changed for B2B consulting firms.
• Why most marketers really don't know anything about strategy.
• And how to go about creating your marketing strategy to give you the greatest chance of success, and the best return on your investment. 

The marketing landscape

How things used to be

In the good old days a lot of consulting opportunities were discovered when you were down the pub! Your sales team and practice directors would head out, bump into a bunch of people that they knew, and return with an arm full of opportunities. Some direct, some referrals. Combined with repeat business, this was the playbook for growing your consultancy. 

The trouble is, you can't just nip down the pub and return with leads anymore. And you can't blame Covid and remote working as reasons why your prospects aren't to be found in the pubs. Things have changed. And it happened long before Covid.

The classic model of repeat business, referrals and rainmakers isn't enough anymore. If you want to scale your consulting business, you need to raise its profile much higher than you ever did before. 

The information age changed everything

The chief driver of change is the information age and the transition to becoming knowledge economies. Before the information age businesses essentially sold secrets. Your consultancy knew how to do something.  All you had to do was convince prospects to believe in you, and hey presto, you made a sale. 

But the internet and the information age combined to bring an end to selling secrets. You can now search how to do pretty much anything on Google and YouTube. No longer able to sell through secret methodologies, consultancies have had to change the way that they go about generating leads. This is where marketing comes in. But not how it used to done.  

If you think back, say 10-15 years, your marketing department would churn out white papers. They mostly focused on describing a problem, and perhaps showcasing how your firm had overcome that problem for certain clients. The purpose of those white papers was to convince the reader that your consultancy knew how to solve their problem. What those white papers didn't do, was to educate prospects in how to solve their problem - that was the secret they had to pay to get access to. Delivered, of course, by your consultants.  

For a B2B consultancy, today's marketing is all about educating your prospects. Not simply on the services you offer as used to be the case, but on the problems that they are facing, and how they can overcome them. 

Everyone thinks they’re a marketer

In the olden days your marketing dept. (or more likely the one person who was the Marketing Admin) mostly churned out white papers and case studies demanded by the sales team. But in this new world of marketing you need to turn your attention to educating your prospects long before they're your clients, or even long before they even know they have a problem to solve. Whereas marketing in a B2B consultancy was once a very thin slither of activity (and cost), now its role is pivotal to the success of your firm.

The big problem with marketing, however, is that everyone thinks they're an expert! Most people have studied marketing to some degree. Perhaps as a component of an MBA. And we're all used to experiencing marketing as consumers. This creates the belief that everyone's a marketer. It must be one of the most interfered and fiddled with departments in any organisation. For example, how often do you hear of finance directors telling marketing how much it should be spending? Certainly more than you hear marketing directors telling the finance director how to do their job.

Is it marketing or is it sales?

Not only are marketing departments faced with the challenge of interference, but in many organisations it's not even clear what marketing's role is! It can be anywhere from the basic 'colouring in department', to the more common expectation that marketing is somehow responsible for closing sales. 

This is where there are some nuances in a consulting business. Classic marketing scope covers the 4P's of Product, Place, Price, and Promotion. But in consulting, price is usually determined on per opportunity basis by the people leading the sale - and that isn't the marketing department. 

The marketing industry's perpetual land grab doesn't help. Perhaps driven by a perceived lack of respect, many marketers aim for greater scope and responsibility. But more responsibility doesn't beget more respect - better results do. 

The rise of digital marketing

Marketers are having to change tact to be education-led, dealing with the sudden rise in importance whilst being generally under-valued and perpetually interfered with. In addition, it must also contend with the digital marketing revolution. 

In what is sometimes referred to as 'traditional marketing' the marketer focused on hosting conferences, and exec dinners, getting articles published in magazines, and hitting the phones to cold call prospects. The sales leads still came mostly from the sales execs who were out pounding the pavements. 

With digital marketing came the promise that you can do marketing en-masse, and that it would be both easier and cheaper. No longer did you need to be on stage in front of 200 people. Instead, you could be in front of millions of people whilst sat at your desk staring through the lens of a webcam. This lead to an explosion of digital channels for marketers to deal with, covering websites, blogs, webinars, social media, search ads, digital magazines, podcasting, and so on. 

The biggest casualty of all this noise and busyness was the humble strategy. 

Most marketers don’t know a thing about strategy

Those with responsibility for marketing within consultancies found themselves turning to the outside world for support. A proliferation of digital marketing agencies filled the void, promising 'full-service' marketing firms. The problem is, a true full-service agency is the holy grail. It essentially means being both a specialist and generalist. That's no mean feat. 

This race to cover so many different tactics resulted in some really great tacticians and some truly expert agencies. The trouble is, technicians don't typically make for great strategists. This lack of strategy understanding is obvious when you see marketing agencies throwing in strategy for free! The irony is not lost on me how many consultancies rightly charge their clients handsomely for strategy work, yet hugely undervalue it when it comes to their own business. 

Gaslighting the consultancy leadership team

Consultancy owners have found themselves in a situation where marketing has risen in importance, complexity, and cost. For many this has been an unwanted frustration. Rather than embracing this new world, these same consultancies have focused on minimising the cost and complexity. This has lead to consultancy leaders being easy prey for marketing agencies.

You'll recognise the pitches if you're ever on Linkedin. The promise from a stranger who knows nothing about your business yet is offering you 30 qualified leads a month. All you need to do is to sign up to their guaranteed programme for £25k.

I get it, it's appealing. But even you know deep down that it's not going to work. Many consultancies only need a handful of new clients a year to be doing fantastically well. And it takes months to get their attention, build trust, generate leads and close deals.

Even if these lead generation agencies were successful, what would you even do with 300+ leads a year? How would you field the opportunities? In fact, if you're honest, the chances are that number of opportunities doesn't even ring true in your niche field of expertise. 

Of course, Marketers need to be good at persuasion, right. And I think one of the core skills in many marketing agencies is their ability to gaslight clients into believing that the lack of marketing success is down to the consultancy, not the agency. The solution offered typically is naturally to invest more money with the agency. But that's no different to a gambler doubling down on their losses!

Consultants are from Mars, Marketers are from Venus

As if all the above isn't enough to contend with - the change in the role of marketing; the fact everyone believes they're a marketing expert; the confusion in the role of marketing; the lack of strategy expertise; and agencies that gaslight - the greatest challenge for consultancy leaders is that they don't come from the same planet as marketers.

Let me explain...

In consultancy, we do things that people expect (the client is paying us to do it), that they want and need (the client engaged us in the first place), for which we'll get positive feedback (getting paid to start with!), and for which failure is not an option (we'll usually do anything to ensure the client is happy). 

Now, contrast that with marketing, where a 3% success rate becomes a good thing! Most of the consultants I know would grimace at the idea of a 3% failure rate, yet marketing revels when success is 3%. For example, your post on Linkedin will be seen by 1%-4% of your followers. Send out an email campaign and only 15%-30% of recipients will even open it. Expect them to click on a link in that email? Well, that's a 1%-5% success rate. Think running ads is the solution? A Click-Through-Rate (CTR) of 0.6% and above is seen as stellar! 

Marketing revels in low rates of success.

But it's not just success rates where there's a difference. If I write a consulting report, chances are it's going to read from anywhere between, say, 5 and 30 people. Typically, my report has to gain consensus. I need to get people to agree to a certain direction or action. As much as is possible, I need to get everyone on side. Normally, I have to do this without introducing an ounce of emotion! 

Yet when I'm writing for marketing purposes I'm liberated! I can say whatever I want. I can use emotion - I can talk about how I love things - 'love' being a word that I have never, nor ever will, use in a consulting report! In fact, when I'm writing for marketing purposes, I'll be deliberately provocative. I might purposely choose to piss some people off! (the use of a swear word there a point in case). 

This distinction in being from different planets became clear to me when I had a conversation with the digital marketing agency I'd engaged when I started my consulting practice. (If you don't know, I'm very much a marketer by mistake and my core background is as a management consultant). I recall the conversation vividly:

Agency: We're getting some great results!

Me: But my phone hasn't rang once. 

Agency: The numbers are all going up. Traffic is looking good. Impressions are increasing. Dwell time is good. CTR's are good. 

Me: Huh?

It was at this point that I sacked the digital agency and vowed to myself to never again have a conversation with a service provider where we're talking in completely different languages!

On a road to nowhere - the pointlessness of random acts of marketing

After the dismal situation with the digital marketing agency, I set about marketing my management consultancy by myself and with gusto. I went networking, did exhibitions, did some cold calling (I really hate cold calling!), started blogging, published articles in magazines, hosted webinars. You name a marketing tactic, chances are I tried it!

And I had some success. One particular example being an infographic I created. It was on the 'Rise of the CDO (the CDO being the Chief Digital Officer - a role that no-one hears of today!).

The infographic got the attention of Clickz, an online magazine in the US. This resulted in my being interviewed alongside a senior strategy director at PWC, with my infographic included in the published article - it's still available now, nearly a decade on! There I was in my fledgling one-man consultancy, with my opinion being contrasted against someone from PWC. Amazing. 

And the opportunities I got off the back of it? Nada. Nothing. Zilch!

My sales pipeline remained dry. What I couldn't understand was why, in having a background consulting for large multinationals, I couldn't interest people in buying my services. Surely people still needed IT strategies and complex product and service procurement. What was I getting wrong?

The answer was simple. My marketing was all about face. it was inward focused. It was all me, me, me, when what it should have been was all about the prospective client. Or more specifically, all about the problems that my ideal clients were facing, and how they could solve them. What it shouldn't have been was all about me and the services that I offered.

The 3|9 approach to developing your marketing strategy

In the remainder of this article I'm going to provide a whistle-stop tour in how to create your marketing strategy. As you can imagine, this is a massive subject, and the precise tools and techniques I deploy will differ for each client scenario. However, the diagram below lays out the approach that I have defined and follow for all my clients. It covers 3 main stages, and 9 sub-elements. 

Download your copy: The 3|9 Marketing Strategy Approach

Now, a good marketing strategy will take some deep thinking, and that can't be rushed. With my clients it can take anywhere between 6 to 12 weeks to formulate a full strategy. It's not a weekend job, and it certainly isn't something that should be diminished to a free offering!

So, let's dive in...

Defining your Marketing Strategy

Step 1: Get clear on the exact problems that your consultancy helps clients to overcome

People don’t want quarter-inch drill bits. They want quarter-inch holes.

This is what I was missing with my own marketing. People didn't want my services. Or, at least, they weren't searching for my services. What they wanted was to solve their problems. To steal from the above often quoted saying, they wanted a hole, they weren't searching for drills. 

Or, as I like to put it in the context of a B2B consultancy: 

Services are for selling, problems are for marketing

Up until that point, my approach to marketing was all about me. My services. My company. My background. My expertise. There was nothing on my website that called out the problems that my ideal prospects were facing and that I could help them to overcome. 

So, step 1. of your marketing strategy is to get clear on the exact problems that your consultancy helps people to overcome, and exactly who those people are. You need to consider this from their perspective too. For example, with The B2B Marketer, I help B2B consultancies who are missing out because they're:

• The world's best kept secret i.e. no-one knows who they are.
• Over-reliant on a small number of clients providing repeat business. 
• Hoping for referrals.
• Experiencing feast and famine revenues (typically as a result of the above).
• Want to be recognised as thought leaders. 
• Frustrated by the lack of results from their current marketing efforts. 
• Keen to attract the best talent (and recognise that marketing can help with this). 
• Want to increase their margins (through higher value, higher ticket engagements).  

Thinking about your own business, what are the problems your ideal clients are facing and the outcomes they are seeking to achieve? Make a list. 

Who's your buyer?

In addition to gaining clarity on the problems you help people resolved, you also need to be very clear who exactly it is that has those problems. these are your ideal clients. Marketers call this your ICP - Ideal Client Profile. I don't believe you need to get too carried away with this to start with. Just use some simple parameters, such as:

• Firmographics: Market sector/industry; annual revenue range; headcount range
• Demographics: Job titles; age range; education level

To use my own business as an example again, I target:

• Firmographics: B2B consultancies; £1m-£10m turnover; 10+ staff
• Demographics: Owner/Director level; Age 35+; Highly educated and/or exprienced

If you were to sit down with your team and come up with a similar list, what would it look like? What are the problems that your ideal prospects are facing? What are their desired outcomes?

Step 2: Determining your products and services

Before you start getting the attention of people, you need to have a plan for what you're going to sell them! Granted, a lot of consulting engagements are bespoke crafted to the client exact needs, but this should still fit broadly in line with a defined service.

Side Note: There's much advice being espoused presently about how consultancies should productise their services. I don't believe this is the right thing to do. I think you should have frameworks around which you build your products and services, but I don't think they should ever be off-the-shelf products. Such an approach, in my view, drives commoditisation and thus lower profit margins. 

Let's take the example of Marketing Strategy. It is a service that The B2B Marketer provides. However, there is no one-size-fits-all off-the-shelf service price. I use a number of models and frameworks that I created and curated, but every client's need will be different. And thus the engagement scope, duration and price will be unique.

How many products and service should you have?

There's no right or wrong answer as to how many products and services you should have, however, I favour as few as possible. Most of the clients that come to me turn up with a huge offering of services. A recent client had 72 services on offer, yet they only had 20 staff members. That simply didn't make sense. 

If you're PWC, Accenture or McKinsey, then you can and will have a lot of services to offer. But then you'll have the breadth and scale to make that so. As a boutique consultancy, it simply not possible. Or, as I like to say to clients:

You can sell whatever you want to whoever you want, you just can't market that! 

Effective marketing needs decisions to be taken. You must decide what you want your firm to be known for. This is what I like to call your 'signature service'. Your other services - those on which you'll dedicate much less marketing focus to - are your complimentary and periphery services. Thus, what's more important than the total number of products and services is their structure - how they fit and work together. 

Below is the model of product and service that I have developed to support my clients.

Identifying your competitors and what they're up to

By this stage you should have clarity on the problems that you help people solve; who those people are; and the products and services that you have to offer. The next thing I like to determine is the competitive landscape. Are there other consultancies out there offering the same or similar solutions?

A consulting business doesn't belong in Dragon's Den or the Shark Tank where a bunch of entrepreneurs are looking for a unique product that can be protected by IP law. In consulting, seeing other firms with similar offerings proves there's a market for your services. In consultancy, we typically differentiate ourselves not by what we do, but in how we do it. 

A basic competitor analysis involves finding similar firms on the internet, then analysing them. As we're focusing on marketing here, I want to know:

• What problems are they focusing on?
• What products and services are they offering?
• How are they currently marketing? What types of content are they producing and on what topics? What is my subjective assessment of the content quality?
• How do they appear to be generating leads?
• How successful are they? I'll search for information on revenues, headcount, and growth rates.
• How big is their audience? I want to get a feel for how well-known they are. I'll look at their web traffic, social media presence, follower counts, mentions, and influencers. 

Step 3: Determining your positioning

Now that you know who else is out there you need to determine how you will position your firm. What makes you unique? What is that is hard for others to replicate? What alternatives are available to your prospects that may prevent them from choosing you and your firm, and that you'll need to defend against?

There's a lot more to positioning, but this will suffice for the purposes of this article. 

Creating your Marketing Plan

At this point in the process you will have completed the initial stage of your marketing strategy. This means you'll have clarity on:

1. The problems that you help clients to overcome, and who exactly has those problems.
2. The products and services that you offer to help clients overcome their problems.
3. How you will differentiate your firm and make it distinctive. 

Before we get into the next stage - your Marketing Plan - I need to introduce you to some additional concepts . The first of these is what I call 'buyer readiness'.

Not all buyers are ready

There are 3 big mistakes that consultancies typically make when it comes to marketing. they are:

1. Waiting until it's too late - Marketing is not a quick fix to a sales pipeline problem. It takes time for marketing to work, and there's a lot of ground work to put in first. Waiting until you need leads is never a good idea and results in mistake number two.
2. Focusing on the now buyers - more on that in a moment.
3. Diving into tactics without a strategy - As I mentioned above, too few marketers carry strategy expertise. If you wait until it's too late, and you make the mistake of focusing your marketing on short term sales, then you'll end up diving straight into tactics. And, as you 'prove to yourself' that certain tactics don't work for your firm, you end up bouncing from one tactic to the next with little success to show for your efforts. 

Side Note: Pretty much every marketing channel can and does work. For every person that tells you cold calling is dead, there's another who will tell it's their best source of leads. The same can be said for every channel, be it Linkedin, webinars, conferences, email marketing, and so on. What your marketing needs to do is to first deploy channels correctly, and secondly to determine which channels work best for your unique business. 

Focusing on the 'now' buyers

Let's explore mistake number 2 in more detail. What do I mean when I say the 'now' buyers?

To explain this it's easier to work in reverse, so I'll start at the end - making the sale. In B2B consultancy what we're selling is intangible. We can't show the buyer what the end product looks like because it doesn't exist! Add to this the fact that consulting is a high-cost service, you can appreciate that prospects are taking a lot of risk in engaging us. Especially so if it's a new client.

This means that in order to makes a sale we first need to develop a deep level of trust. Trust, that is, that we can help the client to solve their problem. To build that trust we need to demonstrate our expertise through educating them on their problem, exactly how to solve it, and by bringing it to life by sharing our experiences with other clients. 

We do this through a combination of thought leadership and content marketing. 

You already know that you need to educate your prospects about your ability to overcome their problems. Remember:

Problems are for marketing, services are for selling

And you know that marketing takes time to deliver results. You can't just rock up, do a bit of marketing, and expect a full sales pipeline of opportunities.  

The next thing you need to appreciate is that only a fraction of your prospective clients are even ready to buy. In fact, of your total potential audience, the people who are ready to buy - the 'now' buyers - are only around 5% of your total market. Remember how, in marketing, we love the small numbers! 

So what about the rest of the market? What do we do about them?

I like to divide the market into 3 buckets using terminology that I learnt from a former marketer, Derek Halpern of Social Triggers. (As far as I'm aware, Derek left the marketing industry which is a real shame). Your buyers, then, are in one of the 3 states as detailed in the images below:

What is the split of your audience across these 3 groups? Here's what I've learned over the years from my own experiences and the research of others:

From this there are three key takeaways:

1. Only 5% of your potential audience is ready to buy right now.
2. Your marketing needs to cater for these 3 different audiences.
3. Your marketing must take your prospects on a journey from being Oblivious, to Afflicted, to Informed. 

Bringing it all together - The Pyramid of Trust 

The Pyramid of Trust, shown below, serves as a planning tool, providing the backbone to your marketing plan. Its purpose is to tackle the 3 core elements of your Marketing Plan:

1. Where to go to get in front of your ideal prospects and/or the people who influence them.
2. What to educate your prospects on based on their various levels of problem awareness.
3. Which marketing channels to utilise to take your prospects on a journey from Oblivious, to Afflicted, to Informed. 

On the left-hand side of the Pyramid of Trust you can see the different levels of buyer readiness. And on the right-hand side are the core marketing outcomes we aim to achieve:

1. Get Attention
2. Build Trust
3. Create Leads

In the central pyramid are the many different marketing channels, covering both traditional and digital channels (NB. this list is not exhaustive). The orange writing in the trapezoid shapes provides guidance as to what the respective marketing channels need to do to achieve the target marketing outcomes.

The job of marketing is to determine the collection of marketing channels that will provide a route for prospects to climb from the bottom (Oblivious), through the middle (Afflicted), to the top of the pyramid (Informed) such that they'll either contact your firm (inbound), or they'll happily accept you calling them (outbound). 

Once a prospect reaches the top of the pyramid, they are considered a Marketing-Qualified Lead (MQL). At this point your sale team/process should kick in and take hold of the ball. 

Developing your Tactical Plans

As you move down through the 3|9 Marketing Strategy framework the amount of work that needs to be undertaken increases, involving a growing number of contributors. Whilst your marketing team owns the Marketing Strategy, Marketing Plan, and the Tactical Plans, it is at the tactical level that more of your team needs to get engaged. Your marketers are not your thought leaders. Your consultants are. Marketing is there to direct and facilitate, ensuring prospect engagement.

Tactical Plans are developed in response to your chosen channels and based on the people who will contribute in your business. Thus, it is not practical to go into any greater detail on tactical plans in this article. 

Recap

This article covers a lot of ground. As you've seen, developing a marketing strategy for a B2B consultancy is not a 5-minute job.

Rather than repeat what's already been said here, the quickest and easiest way to recap what you've learnt is to download a copy of the The 3|9 Marketing Strategy Approach.

Once you've answered the 3 strategic questions - Who and Why? [people and problems], What? [products and services], and Why Us? [positioning], you can proceed with developing your marketing plan. To do so, let the Pyramid of Trust be your guide. Download a copy of the Pyramid of Trust. 

Having determined your marketing plan, you attention must then turn to your tactical plans. This is the marketing execution. 

If you found this article interesting, click or tap on the buttons below to bookmark it, and to share it with your friends, colleagues and contacts. 

And if you'd like help to review your current marketing efforts, and/or to develop your marketing strategy, then get in touch.