Digital marketing has become an essential growth driver for small consultancies, helping them reach targeted audiences, build credibility, and generate leads.By focusing on the right platforms, creating valuable content, and guiding prospects from awareness to engagement, firms gradually build trust and authority. Successful consultancies invest in digital marketing, reuse content strategically, and use clear calls to action to strengthen client relationships.
Many founders are wary of social media, especially around advertising. It is a major psychological shift from traditional consultancy marketing and a quick way to burn cash, as early blogging, YouTube, or LinkedIn efforts often failed.
However, research shows an incredibly strong correlation by firms that use digital marketing and growth success finding that high growth professional service firms:
- Invested 25% more effort in digital and content marketing than their no growth counterparts.
- Spent 15%+ of their budget on marketing
- Were twice as likely as low-growth firms to use paid digital ads, videos and automated marketing
- Used gated digital content
- Which generated 40% or more leads online grew at double the speed of firms that didn’t
Although consulting sales rely on strong relationships (testimonials, referrals, follow-on work), social media adds value by warming potential clients.
The wonderful thing about social media is its ability to target specific audiences and track which campaigns are more successful.
For most clients, I have four rules with social media:
- Do one thing (generally LinkedIn) very well before you think of moving on to anything else.
- Create a content re-use process. This might mean that the system automatically reposts LinkedIn content on Twitter. (or blog content on LinkedIn) but might also mean that ‘evergreen content’ (i.e. content that is relatively timeless) is reused on LinkedIn several times[2], or that a video posted on your website is edited down into different segments for reuse elsewhere.
- Never take a lead to a dead-end. Once they have viewed the post, video or whatever, there should be an option to subscribe, book a call, or access another piece of content.
- Occasionally use ‘gated’ content—host content on your website and require leads to submit their email before accessing it. This approach captures potential leads’ contact details and also enables you to identify others who may be interested.
The key to digital marketing is to remember you build a relationship slowly. No-one is going to buy from you or even talk to you after seeing one LinkedIn post or blog. Your job is to demonstrate expertise by giving potential clients insights addressing the challenges they face and that you can help with.
Over time, you move potential clients from ‘cold’ (knowing nothing about you) to ‘warm’ (aware of what you do) to ‘hot’ (ready to talk about buying).
There is no ‘right’ route from cold to hot, but a good route should:
- Progress a prospect towards a sale through education about their challenge/opportunity
- Build trust through a progression of ‘touches’ with the firm
- Take opportunities to demonstrate your expertise and experience
- Chose methods which show-off your strong points
- Never have a dead-end. i.e. there is always an obvious next step (what marketeers term a ‘call to action’ – which might be submitting an email or booking a call)
In this video, I provide an overview to those founders who are new to digital marketing.
[1] Frederiksen, L. McVey, S. Montgomery, S. and Taylor, A. (2012) Online Marketing for Professional Services. Hinge: Virginia.
[2] Many clients are worried that the same people will see the same content repeatedly. This is not usually the case. A typical LinkedIn post will be seen by 5% of your contacts, and the algorithm is pretty good at ensuring similar content is viewed by different people. The exception is if one of your posts is massively viral, in which case, your network might WANT to see it again!
