TL;DNR: Please stop calling yourself a consultant.
A lawyer would never show up to court without doing his due diligence.
A surgeon would never walk into surgery without studying your x-rays.
So why do business coaches and marketing strategists spend half the call “discovering” their client’s business?
This bugs me.
It also reminds me of something I’ve been hearing a lot recently from clients.
Yes, it’s juicy. And yes, it’s gossip. So obviously I cannot name any names here. (But try again after you buy me a drink, maybe?)
Yesterday, we started looking at the strategy work I did for one of my consulting clients, Brainard Carey of the Praxis Institute.
Something he wrote to me after our session stuck with me.
I asked him what made this consultation different from other, similar material he tried in the past and he said:
“You took a deep dive into my work, did your research, thus your advice was specific and we didn’t waste time understanding my business.”
Frankly, this surprised me.
Doesn’t everyone do that? #consulting101
Apparently they don’t, because I keep getting the same comment from clients - especially those who’ve been in business for more than a decade.
So if you’re an aspiring consultant…
For Frodo’s sake, please do your homework?
Because clients notice when you don’t.
Every strategist has his own process. Here is mine:
Step 1: Diagnosis
Do a comprehensive audit on their marketing. Explore their marketing assets and compare their ROI against benchmark numbers for their industry.
What are you doing WELL? (Leverage these.)
What are all the PROBLEMS I see as a marketing strategist looking at your business from the outside in?
Step 2: Prioritisation
Out of all these issues, what do we focus on now? What’s the ONE thing that’s going to bring in the biggest win?
Step 3: Come up with a game plan
Devise a marketing strategy to solve that issue. Ideally, remove any tactics the client doesn’t enjoy doing or isn’t good at, so they can market from their zone of genius.
“Revenue jumped by 55% and the love from readers by 100% after our consultation” isn’t a fairytale.
If I can get it for my clients, you can get it for your clients too.
But you do have to understand their business inside out, and you do need to know how well different marketing strategies work in different industries.
That said, if you own an online business but you aren’t getting the results you want from your marketing, then run what you’re doing through those three steps.
Of course, if you want me to do all the heavy-thinking for you, we could do that too.
Book your session and breathe a big sigh of relief that you have a marketing strategist in your corner.
I’ll conduct an audit of your online business, fix your strategy, and write up all my recommendations in an optimisation report. Then we’ll go over it face to face.
I’m only going to do 5 of these optimisation reports in February.
After that, it will be too late to get in.
To get your hands on it in time, go here:
https://trial-eureka.teachable.com/p/marketing-strategy-session/