Stop Trusting Other’s “One Way to Grow A Marketing Consulting Business” and Find Your One Way

Transcript

I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but there is no one thing to do to successfully grow a marketing consultant business. It’s not possible. Here’s the idea. There are many people out there, many online businesses that tell you, I have the process for you to get 10, 20, 30, 40 new clients a month, a week, a day, whatever it is that they claim. And we’ve all seen these crazy claims out there, and we’re all very familiar with them. And I can promise you at the end of this video, there is not a claim of, well, I can tell you how to get your next one or two. It is just a way to clarify, what do you really have to look at? How do you really determine why those claims are typically untrue and overblown? There is no one thing that marketing consultants can do to, to successfully achieve having a successful business.

That would be true of just about any profession. If it’s a profession where you’re operating on a solo basis, if it’s an entrepreneurial pursuit where you’re starting out, just hitting the ground, running, bootstrapping the operation, when it’s just you, or pretty much just you, if you’re running a marketing agency and having a small team, it is still not the case where you can find that one thing that’ll work for everyone. Now, the issue there is that assumes a couple of things. Assuming that there is this one thing that will work for everyone assumes that it’s something that will work for all despite different industries, different niches, different service offerings, different pricing, different sales skills different markets, an endless list of the variables in a business. It assumes that everyone has the talent to execute effectively and any marketing strategy that has dumbed down so much that anyone can do.

It probably isn’t that good of a marketing strategy. And to say that anyone can implement this also assumes that there’s no talent that really goes into marketing on his core, as you know is about how you communicate. It’s about the product, the price, the promotion, the placement, how you get it up there. Marketing is too big, big of a subject to say that all you have to do is follow X, Y, and Z. And you’ll be fine. You’ll be okay. We’ll be generating a hundred new clients overnight as well. It assumes that everyone can mindlessly follow the step by step process. And as much as that should be true, it isn’t realistically, we have our own interests and desires and paths that we want to go down. So to say that we’re going to follow everything perfectly. It’s going to work regardless of our skill level, it’s going to work regardless of our market and what we do.

That’s a tough sell for me. And I think on top of all of that, typically those promises that are made of those unbelievable claims, they’re shortsighted, the tactics that they employ are shortsighted. And you know, we’re in a game where, as a consultant, you need to show your credibility, your expertise. And that is what brings clients in. Isn’t the magic ad that you put out there. It isn’t the SEO trick that you implement. It is sharing your expertise, contributing to the market. And that brings people to you. Nobody responds to those spam emails about SEO services that are offered, right? There’s a couple of people that are tricked into it, but no one respects the consultant that sends those spam messages out. So to think that it’s going to be any different, that someone’s going to hire a consultant from one of these crazy, you know, Ninja tactics that are out there, it’s a hard sell.

So what I share is something that I refer to as personality based marketing and personality based marketing is based on the idea that everyone needs to market in a way that is aligned to their own personality. And there’s a science to that. There’s a way to determine what that marketing method is. But the basis of it is that we need to do marketing that is consistent. You should be teaching your clients that effective marketing is also consistent marketing. It isn’t something that we set up for a week and we haven’t run. And that’s it. It’s something that we keep long term. We keep improving upon it. We keep executing it, but it builds up over time. The same is true when you’re a business, it’s more true in your business than an ending because you need to have that consistency to see the results and continue building a pipeline long term, if you’re able to be consistent.

That’s great. And one of the aspects of consistency is making sure that you personally execute over time and executing over time is a lot easier when you are engaged by what you’re doing. And if you can find the activity that you’re engaged in, you’re excited that you want to continue learning and improving upon. Then that makes the whole process of marketing your business that much easier. Now the consistency issues usually fall in one of two buckets when you can’t stay consistent with what you’re doing, it’s because you experienced something called cognitive dissonance, or because you have a lack of vision of where this all takes you going forward. So cognitive dissonance, this is an organizational behavioral type of term.

It goes back to a book called

A theory of cognitive dissonance. I believe it’s by Leon fast injuring Preston juror or something along those lines. And this is way back to, I think, 1956. And he explains pretty clearly what cognitive dissonance is. But in short it’s when your actions don’t align to your beliefs, when you’re doing something that inside, you know, you just don’t feel right about. And oftentimes there that one tactic that needs to employ is something that leads you towards feeling that cognitive dissonance, when you are out there, spamming people and sending out those automated messages in mass and thousands a day, go out there. You might get some responses in my experience. And I’ve tried those kinds of tactics before years ago, when it was also not as common, the issue is you realize, well, you are basically spamming people and you have an issue with that.

You shouldn’t have an issue with that because no one likes spam. It is inherently annoying. No one wants to deal with that. Now you can justify and say, well, the right people are going to see it and respond. So I feel good about it, net positive. I’m not bothering anyone too much, but ultimately people aren’t really hiring consultants that span them. That’s not the way people go out and find consultants, not the way that people go out and engage with anyone that they really respect. And ultimately, it’s not something that’s going to show your credibility, your expertise. It’s not going to hold you in the right light so that you can demand the top dollar so that you can show why you are a value. So there’s that issue of cognitive dissonance. And when you feel that way, when you feel that dissonance, it’s going to make it difficult for you to get up every day and execute as you need to.

The other aspect I mentioned was vision and the lack of vision that comes with executing the activity. So that one is a little bit different, but what we’re essentially looking at is the questions of, alright, well, if I implement this, what if it works? What if it really works? And that’s a reason people stop being consistent because they’re worried about the success of it. If you don’t know how your business operates, if you don’t know how you’re actually going to service clients, that’s going to be a big issue. There’s also the element of what ancillary benefits come out of this. So if I’m executing marketing that is also providing some ancillary benefits, some extra added benefits, typically to me specifically from developing a skill in that process, not the skill of spamming, but a real skill, a talent, then that makes it easier to say, or I’m getting something out of this immediately, essentially.

And it’s something that I can continue to work upon. And I improve myself. I improved the product of what I’m doing, the activity and I’m generating business. The final piece I’m alluding to in the beginning, but it’s a question of how does this activity contribute to the market, to my audience? How am I coming from a place of contribution rather than just taking? And when you can be a contributor, when you can give something to the market and the activities that you execute, you’re coming from a place of value. Okay. Okay. So value is a place of power and this type of business, it’s the place that you need to come from. So there is no one thing that you can do. There is a marketing activity out there, or a couple of activities out there that fit your personality. And when they are personality based, they’re easier for you to execute on consistently to improve upon, to become an expert in executing.

The consistency is probably because you feel like cognitive dissonance with executing the activity or the lack of vision, or both with a vision of what happens when this works. If it does bring in clients, what else do I get out of it by executing? How does it actually contribute to the market? And if you can solve that equation, if you can understand that concept, that is how you execute marketing as a consultant that you can be consistent with. That’s how you execute marketing as a consultant that you can continue on, enjoy being engaged in, be energized by, and that’s what you need to figure out. That’s what you need to understand.