For boutique consultancies, top-of-the-funnel success is less about volume and more about precision. Clear positioning, client-led insights, and consistent thought leadership help attract prospects who recognize both their problem and your relevance.
Key Takeaways
- Top of funnel content must be driven by a niche UVP and speak to well-researched ideal client concerns.
- Think about long-term brand building as well as short-term campaigns.
- Ensure you have a mechanism, such as a mailing list, to keep your clients warm.
- Map out your content re-use and outsourcing processes and automate this as well as you can.
- Automation and AI for outreach can work if it is done intelligently and is not spammy.
Filling the top of your consultancy’s funnel is crucial, but it’s equally important to attract the right leads. I’ve often seen consultancies where sales generate useful leads. However, these leads are either unsuitable or have expectations that don’t align with what the delivery teams can provide.
In this document, I reflect on what works for filling the top of the funnel. I also share insights from my Marketing Leaders Club. These come from people who have been there and done that.
Funnel Basics
To be honest with you I think the idea of a funnel is limited for two reasons. Firstly because it doesn’t include a keeping warm process. It assumes that people go through the funnel consuming different content and then eventually buying.
In reality, most consultancy buyers don’t purchase immediately. Instead, they consume content from consultancies for one or two years before making a decision.
It is also important to stress that this content will be in different forms for several types of customers. Some customers like reading, some like watching videos, some like infographics, and some listen to podcasts.
Your small consultancy doesn’t need to do everything. You can win quickly by automating or outsourcing the reuse of content in different formats.
The other important caveat for funnel-thinking is that consultancy is still very much a relationship-based business. Marketing in consultancies should support relationship-building efforts of senior staff. It should listen closely to their insights on client needs and pain points.
The funnel is a process that guides prospects from ignorance to awareness. It takes them from not knowing about you or their problem to understanding both.
At this stage they have become leads. Your thought leadership and interactions with your content can educate leads, helping them understand not only their problems but also the potential solutions your firm offers to fix them.
As I suggested above, it is important to have a “keeping warm” Process. This might be a newsletter podcast webinar series, or a subscription to your blog. Regardless of what your offering is here you will likely need to capture their email to do this.
Two-track Marketing
Generally speaking, most of your prospects and leads will not be ready to buy now, even if you are selling the best solution on the market. For this reason, you should usually apportion around 50% of your marketing budget to longer term, brand building campaigns, as well as shorter term ‘buy now’ campaigns.
In reality there is a lot of overlap between these two approaches, end that speaks to your niche ideal clients’ problems.
Starting With the Ideal Target Client
In my experience there is no one right way to succeed with the top of the funnel. It requires a cycle of experimentation: planning, executing, and improving. As we can see in Figure 2, the top of the funnel is often more focused on attention-grabbing, shorter types of content.
However, as we can see from Figure 3, you must drive even short-form content with your unique value proposition. The internet is full of generic content, and you must avoid competing with that.
Instead you really need to Start with a deep, considered understanding of your target clients’ challenges. Ideally, you will achieve this by interviewing your clients, target clients, and speaking with your partners.
This often means that you will start with the longer, rich content in the middle of the funnel, as depicted in Figure 3, and use this to drive the shorter form content that you can distribute to the mass market.
Ads as Top-of Funnel
If you have an extremely specific, niche, target audience then paid ads can be an effective way to keep front of mind with your prospects. If you have a cookie, or pixel, on your website then you can use this to ensure that people who have visited your website get to see your ads more frequently wherever they are.
However, since this is a relatively quick way to burn through marketing budgets, you should pay particular attention to the effectiveness of these ads. These types of ads should generate a click, typically to download a valuable piece of content in exchange for an email.
This takes some time to work, and some consultancies complain that it is hard to track prospect activity through to becoming a lead through to becoming a paid client.
In the words of John Wanamaker, over 100 years ago:
‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.’
What Type of Content?
People often ask me what type of content is most effective for filling a funnel. Unfortunately, you should treat any definitive answers to this with some skepticism.
Different clients, solutions, companies, and people are attracted to diverse types of content. Unfortunately, this means you need to experiment and be patient to find out which type of content works best.
Patience is a crucial word here. I have seen a lot of owners of small firms try one type of content for a couple of months, assume it is not working and then move on to a different type, and so on and so on. In my experience, it can take up to a year for content to actually build a persistent audience.
It will also depend on who is doing the content creation. If you have a bright, charismatic, and engaging partner, they might work brilliantly with a webinar, video marketing, or a podcast. However if you do not have this unicorn, you may well be better focusing on blogs and ebooks.
SEO
SEO is also another way to quickly use up budget. In most consultancies I am not a fan of anything other than the most basic SEO, because often these consultancies are going to end up competing against the marketing spend of the big 4 or a firm like Accenture.
However if your consultancy is truly niche, and your keyword research shows that there isn’t a lot of competition, then it may well be worth it.
However, please do be aware of cheap, outsourced SEO experts who will often generate cheap bat links that will actually damage your traffic rather than improve it.
You should insist on payment by results if at all possible, and by results I do not mean the number of headings and backlinks, but instead increase traffic of the right type.
Technology and Automation
There are hundreds of types of automation and technology that can help with the top of funnel. The most important is a CRM system.
I won’t expand on this in any detail because there is much better advice out there, but a key aspect of success for this system is getting people to actually use it. More recently there are some useful AI systems that make the updating of a CRM system much easier.
There are also tools like meat Alfred which are linked in outreach automation tools that these need to be used carefully, to avoid beans spammy. One can also buy email lists but in my experience these are often pretty terrible.
It’s generally more effective to hire someone to build targeted email lists based on a client persona.
From my experience, Sales Navigator has proven to be quite useful, though its effectiveness depends on how well it’s used.
Additionally, one of the biggest opportunities lies in content reuse. With AI and outsourcing (UpWork is great for this) it is relatively easy to outsource transcription, translation, editing, expansion, or the annotation of one piece of content into many other formats of content.
For example, the basis for this article was a conversation with my boutique marketing leaders club which was transcribed and condensed by ChatGPT4. The images in this piece come from an online training course that I have developed for consulting partners.
And when I have finished writing this it is likely that I will ask GPT 4 to produce short summaries for LinkedIn and that I will get my outsourced media guy to post it as a blog on my website and an article on LinkedIn. If I had the app, I could also get an avatar of me to read this out in my voice!
Whatever content you use as your primary focus, it is well worth Mapping out your reuse processes as these can be a very cost-effective way of creating content for your top of funnel marketing. I have given you an example of my own process map in Figure 5.
