Building your consulting business takes ongoing planning — and action. If you aren’t constantly working at finetuning and implementing your marketing plan, you may one day find yourself out of clients.
5 must-have marketing tips
- Know your market. You can’t build a marketing plan if you don’t know your market. Figure out who your potential customers are — and what makes them tick.
- Research your market. Spend some time identifying and analyzing your market. Is the market big enough to support your business? Is there a particular way in which you need to connect with it? Get the details.
- Build a plan. Whether you spend three hours or three months on building your marketing plan, do take the time to plan. If you take a haphazard approach to planning, you’re going to end up with haphazard results.
- Make a holistic plan. Be sure to build a plan that looks at price, promotion, product/service and place (distribution). If you only ever think about promotion, you may end up filling your pipeline with people who are paying too little for your services — you could end up with an unprofitable business.
- Review and refine. Once your marketing plan is set, check in with the results from time to time. It’s okay to make changes as you go along — and it’s a necessity to make changes before you reuse the plan.
Marketing isn’t easy for most people. It takes planning and dedication. But it can be one of the most powerful strategies in building your consulting business.