Dec 4, 2022
If you Google the term marketing consultant, you will get 748,000 results pop up.
Each describing themselves as a marketing consultant and each attempting to describe themselves slightly better in one way or another than the other 747,999 of them.
What a tough gig – what a failing proposition.
So if you are a marketing consultant you have no choice but to put some energy into differentiation.
You do not want to be what all the others are.
So my first problem if I was touting for business through Google is I would have to confront how I describe myself.
Same goes for a client of mine who is an accountant (385,000 search results in Perth WA alone), sure his practice is Xero certified but so are 70% of the other 385k.
Here too a point of difference is desperately required.
In fact, describing yourself as Xero certified is the wrong way to present yourself for two reasons.
One, nobody really wants that. They want outcomes. They want benefits, they want assets. They want things that work. They want information. They want the ability to manage their business effectively. Those are the things they want.
In my world, everybody says, I can do your marketing, I can do your this, I can do your that as well. But that, simply tells us what not to say.
What I do for clients is i make a list of the 10 things everybody in the category is saying, and then I know what to rule out in the messaging.
You have to position yourself as something other than what everybody else is saying.
Being just a marketing consultant or being a Xero certified accountant, or whatever it is, is simply a tool in the toolbox rather than what you are.
In my case I am there to help my clients exploit an opportunity, or to drive growth, expansion, revenue improvements, or profit improvements.
Nobody really wants just marketing.
And if they do, they're buying it as a commodity from the cheapest provider that they can get it from.
So I'm never starting from the position of, well – “I do marketing for food”.
One of my biggest clients – started as wanting a brochure.
5 solid years later and they have expanded into international markets and diversified from B2B and now into wholesale direct I have become an integral part of their business. And guess what – that didn’t happen with just a brochure.
Back to my Accounting client.
The second thing is it only matters that there's 385,000 other accountants of which 70% are Xero certified in Perth WA, if you are being seen, if you are showing yourself to, or presenting yourself to the same people as they are, at the same time as they are.
If you play that game it is somewhat like a Tinder profile.
That puts all the power on the other side. 50 guys all in a line. Where there's eight women looking, not a good scenario, unless of course you are Brad Pitt.
So it's not the situation you want to put yourself in, and that's why you need what I call a client generation system, a means of extracting a prospect out of the market so that they aren't paying any attention to the other 385,000 and are only paying attention to you.
In this fashion, it doesn't matter if there's 385 or 3,850, and it doesn't matter if they're all saying the same things. It doesn't even matter if you are saying the same things as long as you're the only one saying it to them at the particular moment.
So this is about, picking target markets, getting people in them to raise their hands, step forward and, step into your web.
Typically I like to do this by having them request information to solve a vexing problem or to exploit an opportunity, and then I will slam the door behind their back and I am the only one communicating with them, again and again and again over some period of time until they take action.
When you have that type of system in place, it greatly diminishes the importance of needing a differentiated message.
So in my feeder system that brings me a client, there's actually what I like to call nine points of entry or doors into it.
Prospects come into my world knowing about me or at the very least heard of me and how I do things.
Preferably it is via a referral or maybe it was through my newsletter, maybe through one of my books, maybe by hearing me at a seminar, or perhaps even by listening to this podcast.
Generally they have met me, encountered me, or at least read my stuff or heard my stuff or better yet heard from people who are my clients,
Thus!
I don't really need a big, differentiated message about me.
I really don’t need to spend too much energy in explaining my background, my education, my credentials, or why I'm better than any other marketer. The importance of all that diminishes enormously because by the time they are talking to me about marketing for them.
I'm the only one they are talking to and they are not even thinking about shopping me and my price around.
So there's two pieces to this puzzle. There's the message piece of what you say about yourself. How you position yourself in terms of beneficial outcomes, not tools in your toolkit.
And the second piece of this puzzle is how do you feed potential clients into a closed room where you are the only one talking to them in your category.
And when you combine those two things, you really have a lot of power in the marketplace.