Digital Marketing Strategy for Consulting Firms
Heading into 2024, digital marketing strategy for consulting firms is essential to attract and retain clients. But how? What’s the best approach to bring your expertise-based business to market? With the right strategy, consulting firms can reach and engage with potential clients, establish their expertise, and generate leads.
But first, we must address the elephant in the room…
Traditional Business Development for Consulting Firms is Broken
So many consulting firms think of growth through traditional “business development,” where people are responsible for generating leads, developing relationships, winning new business, and in some cases delivering on projects. It’s an “eat what you kill” mentality. But in today’s digital-first business environment, consulting firms need to take a different approach to marketing and sales.
My colleague Mark Wainwright and I co-host a podcast called Breaking BizDev. Twice a month, we beat up, break down, and redefine business development for modern professional services firms. When you’re ready to break free from the traditional BD mindset, subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform.
Digital marketing for consulting firms begins with research.
Research is the foundation of digital marketing strategy for consulting firms. Before diving into a digital marketing plan, consulting firms must conduct market research to understand their target audience. This includes identifying the demographics and behaviors of potential clients and gathering insights on competitors and industry trends. Make sure you select the right B2B market research method, because this kind of research can take many forms.
However, research doesn’t have to be a structured, statistically significant project. You can incorporate research into your existing marketing programs. Here are a few examples:
If you host regular webinars, use live Q&As to surface questions from your target audience. Then, use these questions to create sales enablement content and thought leadership that answers the question in depth.
Interview your ideal clients on your podcast. Explore their challenges and business problems, and how they plan to go about solving it. A podcast interview can be useful qualitative research, but it also deepens your relationship and gives you a means of nurturing that prospect into a client down the road.
Look at search trends and long-tail keyword data to focus your content on topics likely to generate organic traffic. SERP analysis shows you a target word count, whether a page can rank for snippets, and whether you need elements like video.
Survey your audience. You can use simple survey tools to send to your email contacts, or you can create a LinkedIn poll. If you have enough people respond, you can use the results of your survey to create original content.
Build a lead-generating website.
A high-performing, lead-generating website is the center of a robust digital marketing strategy for consulting firms. The firm website should effectively showcase its services and expertise. It should be visually appealing, easy to navigate and provide valuable information to visitors. Consulting firms should include clear calls-to-action and contact information on their website to encourage visitors to reach out for more information or to schedule a consultation.
The content on your consulting firm's website should be organized based on user intent. One common way to rank website content is by categorizing pages by marketing “funnel” stage. A funnel is a content marketing framework used to visualize the flow of users interacting with web content. See the illustration below.
Optimize your website for search engines.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is when you optimize a website to improve its ranking on search engines like Google. This can be a massive part of digital marketing for consulting firms. A business can effectively increase its online visibility and credibility by making specific changes to a website, such as improving its design and user experience, increasing its traffic, and boosting its search engine rankings. This is particularly relevant for management consulting businesses, which rely on the internet to attract and retain clients.
Local SEO, which involves optimizing a website for specific locations, can also benefit management consulting businesses that serve clients in particular areas. By optimizing your website and Google Business Profile for relevant keywords and phrases related to the business' location, a company can attract more local traffic and make it more likely that potential clients in the area will find and visit its website.
Scale your expertise with a podcast
Podcasts present a true blue ocean opportunity for consulting firms. According to a survey of over 2,700 users by LinkedIn, 44% of department heads, VPs, owners, and C-suites listen to podcasts. But it gets even better. According to Podcast Industry Insights in Q3, 2023 less than 18% (459,000) of podcasts were active, having released a new episode within the most recent 90 days. Just by showing up and producing new episodes consistently, you have an opportunity to stand out in your niche.
On top of that, podcasts can be an effective pillar, or source of content. As the podcast flywheel shows, one podcast episode can be repurposed into many different formats. If you’re thinking about using podcasts in your digital marketing strategy, contact us to learn more about our podcast marketing services.
Stand out on social media platforms like LinkedIn.
Social media can be a powerful part of a digital marketing strategy for consulting firms. As a professional platform with over 740 million users, LinkedIn is an essential tool for individual consultants looking to build their personal brand and connect with potential clients. By creating a strong LinkedIn profile and actively engaging on the platform, individual consultants can showcase their skills, experience, and expertise and establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry. This can be particularly beneficial for consultants starting and looking to build their reputation and network.
In addition to helping individual consultants build their personal brand, LinkedIn can also benefit the company brand. By encouraging all employees, including individual consultants, to create strong LinkedIn profiles and actively engage on the platform, a company can establish itself as an industry leader and attract top talent. This can help the company stand out in a crowded market and attract more clients and opportunities.
Engage prospects, leads, and clients with email.
Email marketing is another effective tactic for consulting firms looking to nurture leads and stay top-of-mind with potential clients. Consulting firms can effectively communicate with their audience and drive leads by creating a targeted email list of potential clients and industry professionals and developing an email marketing plan. Measuring and analyzing email marketing efforts' effectiveness is essential to optimize and continually improve results. Another way to engage prospects with email is with a weekly email newsletter.
Create evergreen content and focus on distribution.
Consulting firms usually help other businesses solve a challenge or problem. And chances are, that problem will still be around in 3-5 years. You can get the most out of a digital marketing strategy for consulting firms by focusing content creation on “evergreen” topics. These topics intersect with buyer pain points and your consulting firm's services. See the illustration below.
Evergreen content distribution case study
Same Page HR is a consulting firm based in Atlanta who offers fractional HR support to small, people-oriented businesses like agencies, professional services firms, and tech companies. In early 2023, they hosted an event in Atlanta where they invited local business owners to come and share their working theories — hard earned business lessons and stories. They recorded the event, turned it into a standalone podcast episode, and use audiogram video clips from the event as part of their LinkedIn strategy.
In this video clip from my show, Podcasting in Professional Services, Same Page co-founder Callie Murray talks about the connection between the event, the podcast, and her co-founder’s email newsletter, “Working Theories.”
Ruthlessly distribute your content so target buyers see it.
However, content creation is only half the battle. Over time, your content will get stale. For instance, a blog post you wrote in 2022 could seem stale simply because the publish date is a year old. Merely updating the publish date could signal the content is fresh to buyers (and search algorithms). That's why you should include some form of content recycling in your strategy. See the image below.
At its core, content recycling relies on an emerging trend in user behavior. Buyers aren’t always going to click on a link to your blog post. Often, they would prefer to consume your content on whichever platform they’re using. For example, instead of posting a link to your article on LinkedIn, your buyers would like you to take the key points from the article and create a post about it. The more buyers are exposed to your brand, the more familiar they are with your message.
But formatting an article into one LinkedIn post is just the tip of the iceberg. Take that article and turn it into a:
Twitter thread
series of LinkedIn posts
Medium Article
series of emails
podcast episode
webinar presentation
video blog
Accelerate your digital marketing strategy with paid ads.
Another way to accelerate content distribution is to run paid ads. This can be an effective way for consulting firms to guarantee their content and marketing messages reach a wider audience. Platforms like Google Ads and LinkedIn can also be used to drive leads. As with any digital marketing tactic, measuring and analyzing the effectiveness of paid advertising efforts to optimize and improve results is essential.
When I hosted the Digital Marketing Troop podcast, I interviewed Ahmad Munawar, Founder of Boutique Growth, where we talked about how he used paid media on Facebook and LinkedIn to grow his personal brand. Listen to that podcast episode here:
Create a measurement plan that connects strategy to business outcomes.
Including a measurement plan as part of a digital marketing strategy for consulting firms is essential. An effective measurement plan is used to track the effectiveness of digital marketing efforts, allocate resources effectively, and continually optimize and improve tactics. This can be done by setting clear goals and objectives, tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic and conversions, and analyzing data to adjust tactics based on performance. This helps firms understand which tactics drive the most value and efficiently achieve their business goals.
Work with Red Cedar Marketing
A comprehensive digital marketing strategy for consulting firms can be used to attract and retain clients. Contact us to learn how Red Cedar can help your firm develop and execute a digital marketing strategy that generates the right kind of leads for your business.
