Have you decided to launch your own consulting firm to make good use of your expertise and skills but are wondering how to get more clients for your consulting business?
Don’t worry, here we’ll show you some effective strategies you can use to promote your consulting business and get new consulting clients.
How to Get Clients for Your Consulting Business
Starting a consulting business is only the first step in making income from your expertise. The entrepreneur needs to engage potential clients through a well-thought-out communication strategy. One of the crucial moments when launching your consulting business is getting the first clients.
However, if one wishes to rely on more traditional techniques, one must seize every opportunity to strengthen one’s reputation. Interested parties can, therefore, participate in trade shows and organize various events.
Soliciting a business provider is also a solution to consider. Some professionals have a large address book that a consulting firm can take advantage of.
There are several strategies you can use to identify your ideal client and get more. Learn about your unique value proposition, attend meetups and events related to your ideal client’s industry and share informative content related to your niche. Nonetheless, many leaders are focusing more on an effective presence on the web. The web has effectively become a full-fledged sales channel.
Read here: How to Become a Consultant: 10 Key Consulting Skills
The 8 Best Ways to Promote Your Consulting Business and Get New Clients
If you want to sell consulting services, you have to find ideal consulting clients. Once you are clear about who your ideal client is, it will be easy for you to contact them and offer them your consulting services and sell your services.
Here are 8 effective marketing strategies you can use to promote your consulting business and get new ideal consulting clients.
1. Assess Your Expertise and Choose Your Niche
When you think of starting a consulting project, you probably already have some decent places in your mind. A specific industry you’ll work in, which includes the types of services you’ll offer and the clients will receive.
Usually, it’s best to start with the services you have the knowledge and experience in, so that you can start working as soon as possible. The more experience you will immediately have in the industry of your choice, the faster you can get started.
Usually, in order to choose a suitable position for clients, try to create a buyer persona that describes the characteristics of the decision-makers you plan to sell your services to.
If you need some additional ideas, here are some consulting areas you can go into:
- Project management consultant (PMC)
- Public relations and marketing
- Sales consultant
- Information technology, and computer programmer
- Finance and accounting
- Insurance consulting
- Human resources
- Business intelligence and data analytics
Starting with a niche means starting with a specific area that you have control over, rather than being everywhere at once. By doing so, you will have several advantages including a significant reduction in competition and better visibility at the same time. Your goal should therefore be to offer a new service or product that sets you apart from the crowd.
2. Start a Professional Blog to Invite New Clients
Having a blog is one of the best ways to gain visibility. The primary goal is to drive more organic traffic to your website. You can bet on content marketing which is now the number 1 channel to get traffic.
If you create a blog and feed it regularly, you will reap many benefits both in terms of increasing your visibility on search engines and getting new clients.
A successful blog will allow you to:
- Drive qualified traffic to your site:
If you are able to create relevant, original, and optimized content for your audience, your pages will be more visible and you will have a natural increase in traffic. To increase your blog site traffic, You have to write relevant, high-quality content with irresistible headlines, target long-tail keywords, and post to social media sites regularly. Choose your keywords and themes carefully, in order to be able to convert your visitors into clients.
- Convert traffic to leads:
An increase in traffic does not necessarily lead to an increasing number of leads. Having a blog will allow you to produce content that is optimized for conversion on your website. This obviously requires effective “Call To Action” as well as links placed in the right place and leading to the right page. Also, set up processes to easily retrieve emails or registrations that will turn into your clients later. However, find a good balance between entertaining, informative content and commercial incentives.
- Know your audience better:
Produce quality content for your blog and have insights about your potential clients and your audience. Google Analytics reveals socio-demographic information and you will know the subjects that interest your target the most. Also, you will be able to know their opinion through the comments on your web pages and on social networks and therefore understand their needs. Then, you can offer suitable services to help your audience.
- Retain your internet users:
One of the important keys is the regularity in the publication of your contents. By doing so, you will create a kind of meeting with Internet users which will be a very important lever in improving your reputation. Subsequently, they will be more likely to buy your products or use your services.
- Boost your brand awareness:
Regularly feeding your blog with authentic content allows you to gain interest in your offers or your brand.
Your notoriety and your e-reputation will be improved and you will be able to reinforce your uniqueness which acts as an element of differentiation compared to the competitors. In addition, by helping Internet users and providing answers to certain questions, you will appear as a reliable and expert company.
Your audience will therefore have much more confidence in you and will be inclined to use your services.
3. Create Relevant Informative Videos to Attract New Clients
A picture is worth a thousand words, so what about a video? If you want to get more consulting clients, creating a good explainer video is the best option for you. This will give you a good chance to communicate clearly and simply without interference. And for Internet users, it will be an opportunity to more easily retain information.
Indeed, a study shows that visuals allow 65% of people to remember more easily than other forms of communication. Plus, quality video inspires trust and purchase. If you create most suitable and high quality informative videos, you can almost double your chances of converting your viewers into clients.
In addition to increasing the reach of your communications, this type of content increases the interest of your email marketing. Indeed, email marketing with videos have a click-through rate of 96%. You should therefore consider including quality videos in your content marketing strategy.
YouTube is the second search engine in the world and with informative YouTube videos, you are 53 times more likely to appear at the top of Google results with a video than with a text. To improve your visibility on the Internet, you must therefore include usefull high quality videos in your marketing strategy.
4. Expand Your Social Circles and Professional Network
If you want to promote your consulting business and get more ideal clients, expand your social circles and professional network, be proactive, quickly get back in touch and offer your services.
Today, your brand must be present on social networks. There are many people who know and trust you. But do they know the services you provide? And do you know people in your friend’s network you would like to interact with? These two questions punctuate your network strategy.
So, you have to know how to use social networks well. You can create a Facebook page, Linkedin, or other popular social media pages, and share useful posts regularly with information that may interest your followers for example.
If you are looking for new consulting clients, it is time to step out of your lair as a business owner and meet new people who could introduce you to future clients.
5. Use the Freelance Platform to Get Clients
To find your new consulting clients, starting with freelance platforms might be the best idea. There are many freelance platforms that allow you to showcase your skills. However, there is a hitch: the competition is very stiff and there is an incredible number of consultants, developers, graphic designers, etc. The real question, therefore, remains to know how to increase your chances.
In order to increase your chances on freelance platforms, you must observe a few rules, including:
- An extremely professional profile: simple words, no mistakes and a clear structure;
- A profile photo that highlights you;
- A clear and personal presentation;
- A unique and personalized response to each project;
- A fair price (neither too low nor too high) and focused on providing value;
- If possible, recommendations from your former clients and examples of achievements
6. Target Companies That Have Recently Raised Funds
Target companies that have “cash”. In other words, target those who have recently raised funds. Indeed, if they are small structures such as startups, it will be much easier for you to get in touch with them.
This facility is not found at the level of large groups which generally have a fairly complex process and you will have great difficulty in approaching them. Therefore, it is best to reach out to small businesses with a good reputation when you have just launched your business or when you are freelance. You are likely to get faster returns from small companies.
If you want to ensure the success of the first contact, it is recommended to create unique content for the companies you are targeting; the goal is to show them what you are capable of.
Indeed, the first customers are the most difficult to have, therefore take the time to do well. For example, you can contact them by email, explaining how you can help them and what added value you can bring them.
Use multiple media, emails, PDFs, visuals, and videos. Make the effort to personalize your communications in order to seduce your first customers by letting them understand how their business will improve if they choose your services.
You can contact a lot of companies, in order to make yourself known and to try to reach as many people as possible in each company. Also include investors who aim to grow the business since they have put money into it. If you convince them, they can be the real means for you to get new clients.
7. Launch a Successful Podcast to Attract Clients
Starting a podcast is an effective way to reach a brand new audience and influence potential customers.
People like to hear news and make audio recordings. The podcast is a good tool to publicize your expertise and it can be a great medium that you can use to reach your potential clients and get one.
Podcasting is a relatively easy way to get your name out there. Technically, you don’t need much material to start a podcast, you just need to open up a microphone, share your thoughts on a recorder, distribute your message and you’re done. Then make your edits and think about feeding your social networks with this content.
8. Organize Webinars to Promote Your Business
You have scrupulously followed the previous advice, well done! But all the work remains to be done! Because it is not enough to give your business card to win a new client. If you want to promote your business and attract new clients, you should host an effective webinar that will generate leads for your business.
Webinar (web conference) is attracting more and more marketing experts. And for good reason, webinars are very affordable and their organization is very simple. So you can add a webinar to your content creation strategy for five reasons.
- Webinar Saves Your Time and Money:
A webinar is a productive way to reach many existing and potential clients while saving a significant amount of time and money for your company.
A webinar is a very effective tool to bridge the gap between you and your clients. It is one of the cheapest formats to contact potential clients. you just need to register on platforms such as Demio, Livestorm, Zoom, EverWebinar, WebinarJam, WebEx, GetResponse, Livestream, etc. Then invite your audience to register and at the time of the appointment, click on “Play”. The webinar is very economical. In addition, the recording of the webinar remains accessible in a replay.
- Webinar is an Interactive Format:
The webinar is a more engaging and interactive format. There is a live chat or commentary option offered by major webinar platforms. You will therefore be able to read participants’ comments live and respond to them if you deem it necessary. Surveys can also be organized and you will have a real interaction with your audience. You should have a moderator here who will collect or respond to comments on the chat.
- Webinar Content can Be Reused:
At the end of your webinar, you have the option to access the recording that you can share on your various channels, you can publish webinar content on your blog, your YouTube channel, create a white paper, infographic, or ebook, and include it in loyalty or canvassing emails.
- Relevant KPIs to Measure Your Marketing Activities:
With a webinar, you will be able to measure the effectiveness of your strategies since you will have many statistics. These include, for example, engagement rates, list of participants, most engaged leads, etc.
- Webinar is an Effective Lead Generation Channel:
A webinar can be a very effective lead generation channel, but only if you know how to take advantage of it. You can use this opportunity to identify the best leads, generate awareness and build trust.
Make segmentations to offer content adapted to your audience and do not hesitate to encourage them to consult other complementary resources belonging to you. I’m talking about your blog posts, white papers, industry studies, etc. You can also take advantage of a free or paid service.
Read Also: How Business Consultants Can Help Your Company Grow?
