This post is all about strategy and focuses on the critical components to beginning a strategy with your consulting business.
Here are the 3 steps to begin your consulting marketing strategy!
1. Know Your Audience
Your success relies on understanding and connecting with your audience. It is important to know everything about your ideal customer. The more you narrow the focus, the better you can market to their specific needs. I recommend that you create an Avatar of your ideal customer. What do wI mean by this? Encapsulate everything you know about your audience in to a single fictitious person… this is called your audience avatar. If your audience was one person, define everything there is to know about them. Are they a man or a woman, married, kids, hobbies, etc. Give this Avatar a name so that all of your marketing strategies are personified into your one ideal customer. Believe me, this is a very effective way to get and maintain a clear understanding of your audience.
2. Identify Your Key Marketing Channels
After you clearly define exactly who your ideal customer is, it is then time to identify the most effective channel to reach them. Many businesses waste a ton of money on marketing because they had no clear strategy of how their audience would be best reached. Where is your audience most likely to be influenced by your marketing? Are they one Facebook? Twitter? Shopping in specific areas? Reading the Newspaper? Knowing the most effective way to connect with your audience will save you a lot of headaches and it will be easier and much more cost-effective to reach them. Because you know how to best reach your audience, you can pour all of your marketing efforts into those specific areas to saturate your audience with your message and connect with them on a personal level.
3. Shape Your Message
The last step to begin your marketing strategy is to shape a very powerful message that will absolutely resonate with them. Spend a lot of time on this… don’t just rush through it! Now that you know who your ideal customer is and how you can best reach them, it is imperative that the message you are conveying will accurately address their needs, wants and desires as well as convey your value in helping them. Marketing is about perception, so be sure to carefully select each word in a way that your ideal customer will perceive you in a positive way.
After you have carefully followed these three steps, you can develop your on-going marketing strategy from there. Always remember, it’s NOT about you, it’s about your AUDIENCE!
