Business consultants have always been in high demand, and now the Coronavirus has increased this demand with more and more businesses seeking help to survive the pandemic.
From too much work to handle to nothing in the pipeline, business consultants are at the ready to lend a helping hand to SMEs in need. However, with countless business consultants out there, how can you ensure your business consultancy firm stands out from the crowd? How do you effectively communicate your unique value as a business consultant to attract the right clients? There are a few solutions, which I’ve outlined in this article to help make sure your consultancy business continues to attract the right kind of clients now and well into the future.
1. Get Clear on Who You’re Targeting
As a business consultant, a buyer persona is the first step to standing out from the crowd and attracting the right customers. You need to attract the right industry that aligns with your expertise. Consider what industries you’ve had experience with and make sure you’re targeting people within those industries. You can make this process easier by creating a buyer persona. They are based on market research and real data about your existing customers. When it comes to buyer personas, the more detailed you are, the more useful they will be. Buyer personas are integral to marketing success as they provide valuable insight that will ensure your marketing efforts are aligned with what your buyers are looking for. How? A detailed buyer persona will help you decide where to focus your marketing efforts, budget and sales process. The benefit of this? You will attract more website visitors, generate quality leads and close more customers.
2. Consider the Buyer’s Journey
Understanding the buyer’s journey is crucial to helping your business consultancy stand out from the crowd. In fact, the buyer’s journey needs to underpin every aspect of your marketing strategy if you want to attract the right customers and make your mark. Buyers’ behaviour is constantly changing as the world and the way we live changes, which is why as a business consultant, you need to be prepared to pivot and move with the times. When your marketing evolves with how your customers buy, your marketing will be more effective because you are providing the information they are looking for. Ultimately, this will help your business to really stand out from other business consultants.
3. Map Your Content
Once you have your buyer personas and the buyer’s journey, you can start creating content that aligns with their needs (aka content mapping).To stand out as a business consultant, you need an effective content strategy, content that meets the wants and needs of your buyers at each stage of the buying process. Your content should address the questions your buyers have at each stage, and provide them with valuable information that will help them make the right buying decision.
4. Customer Experience is Everything
Now that you know who your ideal customer is and how to grab their attention, you need to ensure the experience you’re providing is out of this world. Customer experience (CX) is vital for the current and future success of your business. A happy customer is a loyal customer, and a customer who will want to promote your business. Furthermore, CX stats show 86% of shoppers are willing to pay more for better CX, and 73% of consumers consider CX an important factor that affects their purchasing decisions. If you can create an amazing customer experience, you will cement yourself as the go-to business consultant and truly stand out from your competitors.
5. Communicate & Ask for Feedback
Bad experiences are easy to remember, and unfortunately, if a customer has just one bad experience that has been left unresolved with your business, they may write your business off. For this reason, it is important you always communicate with clients and ask for their feedback throughout the entire customer experience. In fact, customers share good experiences with an average of 9 people and poor experiences with about 16 people. That’s why you need to know about your customers’ issues and do your best to solve them (before they go viral on social media). Simple feedback forms emailed to customers are a great way to do this.
To create your own strategic marketing plan with buyer persona, buyer journey and content strategy, attend this on-demand workshop today. Click here to register.
About the author:
Stacie Chalmers is the managing director of The Inbound Marketing Company (TIMCo), a global Inbound Marketing and Sales Agency based in Australia, with clients in North America and Australia.