To all the newly fledged consultants and coaches out there.
Welcome to the best thing you ever did.
You may not have chosen the time or the manner of your leap into being a solopreneur. Sometimes things happen to us that are beyond our control. But it’s what you do afterwards that matters.
I started my own copywriting and content marketing consultancy this year, just in time for lockdown. It was a little bit hairy. Not gonna lie.
But it turned out great because I got a few things right. (Got a few things wrong too … but we’ll come to that).
Figured that it might be handy to share a few of the things I’ve learned with you.
If you’re new to the hustle this might help.
It may also help if you’re an old hand, but you’re finding things rough. Sometimes when you get stuck, the best thing to do is go back to basics and look at where you can strengthen your foundation.
Way I see it, there are 10 key elements in establishing your brand as a consultant or a coach.
Know what you want to be famous for fixing.
Find your niche and understand the people you’ll serve.
Understand why people choose to work with you.
Develop a few focused services that establish you as an expert in your field.
Know your expert topics.
Develop a suite of brand language, so that you’re comfortable talking about what you do.
Invest in a visual brand and some great photos of you.
Know how you’ll market smarter than your key competitors.
Simplify your marketing (and focus on content).
Create a simple marketing calendar that you know you can stick to.
Let’s unpack each step in a bit more detail.
1. Know what you’ll be famous for fixing
Who do you want to be when you grow up?
I’m not even being facetious here.
Up until the beginning of this year, I had no idea who I wanted to be.
I’ve been bumbling along through life playing to my strengths. Sure, I accumulated some hella handy skills on the way. But there hasn’t been a lot of direction, bar the time I decided I wanted to learn to sell and the time I decided I wanted to be a copywriter. Those were both solid decisions. Well played past me.
But being woolly won’t wash when it comes to starting your own consultancy or coaching practise.
You can’t do all the things for all the people.
Even although many consultants start out thinking ‘I will do literally anything for anyone if there’s money on offer,’ that isn’t a particularly compelling marketing message. Sounds a teeny bit desperate even.
Your marketing is far more powerful when you’re clear about your focus.
Identifying your superpower
So how do you find out what you want to be famous for?
Well, I’m sure no expert in this field. I only just worked this stuff out myself.
But there are a few handy indicators that might help you identify your superpower.
You’re good at this thing.
You enjoy doing it.
You’ve used this skill to solve problems for yourself and / or other people.
When you think about building a business around this skill, you get excited.
There are other people out there making a living doing this thing.
You know some people who need help with this thing and who are willing to pay.
Helping people find their career purpose is not my core area of expertise, so I’m way out in deep blue water here. But a few things that helped me focus were:
Talking to friends, colleagues and clients about my strengths.
Thinking about what matters to me in my life.
Writing a detailed list of all the achievements in my career (going way back to my first jobs in hospo). This helped me see themes that I hadn’t been aware of.
Digging a little deeper. I looked at those times I done good and asked myself a few more questions.
o What challenge did I solve?
o How did I approach it?
o What skills did I use?
o How did I feel about the situation?
o What did people say about the results?
I also had over a year of counselling to help me acknowledge my strengths.
I’m not suggesting that you attend counselling before starting a consultancy (unless you want to of course). The point I’m making is that a successful business requires self-belief. You’re putting yourself out there and saying that you have what it takes to fix other people’s problems. That takes confidence. Confidence can take work.
You don’t have to be the best to help other people
One thing that I’ve seen trip people up is their conviction that they’re not expert enough in anything to be a valuable consultant or a coach.
And I’m here to tell you that’s not true.
You don’t have to be the best at something to help people out.
You just have to be more skilled than them.
I’m not a consultant marketing expert. But I did business development for creative agencies for almost 20 years, and I’m successfully growing my own business. So, I’m expert enough to help people who have less experience than me.
So, find your focus. Your calling. Your purpose. The one thing you want to be famous for. That thing you love enough to invest your time and energy in 40+ hours a week for years on end.
2. Understand who you’ll serve
Knowing your audience is the flip side of knowing your purpose.
You need both to build a viable consultancy or coaching practice.
Unless you’re a vast multi-national producing a product that everybody consumes, it’s important to identify your ideal clients … otherwise known as your market niche.
A niche is a clearly defined set of people with problems you know how to solve.
Or to put it another way, your ideal customers are people who need what you do, love what you offer, and pay you well. Love those people.
Niche marketing experts believe that the more focused your niche becomes, the more likely you are to succeed in business.
This is because people want information, services, and products tailored to them and their needs. You increase your chances of making a sale by being highly relevant to your potential client.
You want to be able to say: “I fix this problem for this group of people. They felt like this (describe their feelings of pain and frustration) before I worked with them. Now they feel much better because they’ve got these results.”
Messaging like this is powerful because your target market can see themselves reflected in it.
Speak directly to your ideal customer
Here are some examples of messaging that made me buy recently.
“I teach women in business how to drop the self-sabotage and take consistent, imperfect action to grow their biz AND their revenue with confidence.” Business coach Natalie Tolhopf
“I help professionals whose time is maxed out discover the step-by-step system to leverage your skills and experience without trading time for money. Generate predictable inbound leads and stand out in competitive markets.” Business coach James Kemp
“Are you … A coach, speaker, business owner or expert in your field and know you need to create more content and IP but can’t seem to find the time? Wishing you could just go offline and hide for a couple of days to get focussed but just can’t seem to get around to organising it? Struggling to create content quickly because you fear it’s not good enough and find yourself procrastinating over it?” Strategic communications expert Jane Anderson
“Let’s talk about how to level up your business. I want you to make more money. I want you to work less to earn it. I want you to be your own boss for real and not just a freelance outsourced replaceable gig worker competing with suck-ass hacks who can undercut you for pennies on the dollar. Quit that shit! It ends today!” Copywriter Colin Theriot
In every single instance, I handed over my hard-earned dollars because these people were speaking directly to me. It was like they already knew me. They knew my pain points and they had a solution for me.
The more targeted your niche is, the clearer and more powerful your marketing messaging becomes. Want to know more about how to identify your market niche? I wrote you a guide.
Uncover your customer’s pain and dreams
Once you’ve discovered your niche, your next task is to get to know your customers’ pain points, frustrations, fears, and dreams.
Understand the problems you can fix for them. Know how they feel when they’re experiencing this issue. Uncover the journey they go on to try to resolve this challenge. Find out what solution they finally select, and why they choose it.
There are two ways to uncover this information.
Interview your customers about the process that led them to work with you.
Interview potential customers in your market niche.
If you’d like to know more about how to conduct customer interviews, there’s advice over here.
Once you understand your ideal customers like you know your friends, find the places where they hang out, both online and offline.
There you can connect with them and build a relationship by sharing valuable content that helps them solve their problems. Once you’ve built trust by showing that you understand their needs, then you can start making business offers.
3. Understand why people choose you
Why do people like working with you?
What’s the most valuable thing you deliver?
What is it about the way you work that keeps people coming back?
Why do people choose to work with you, and not your competitors?
The answer to these questions is what marketing wankers like me call your unique value proposition.
You find out why people choose to work with you, by asking your clients.
Interview at least five clients and ask them these questions:
What problem did they hire you to fix?
When did they find out that they had this challenge?
How did they feel about this?
How did they find out that you might be able to help?
What process did they go through before deciding to work with you? Did they check out your website? Your social media? Talk to current clients? Ask for a proposal? Get competitive quotes?
How did they feel as they learned more about you?
What made them decide to work with you?
How do they feel about that decision now?
Once you’ve interviewed a few clients, look for common themes in their answers. These are your secret sauce. Then use these insights and your client’s language to craft a compelling unique value proposition using the tips over here.
What do you do if you’re just starting out and you don’t have any clients yet?
Interview the closest thing you have to clients. Have you fixed the problem you now solve professionally for past employers, friends and family in the past? Have you fixed it for yourself? If so, ask yourself the same questions and write your own story.
If you’re setting up as a consultant or a coach in an area that is entirely new to you, then you may wish to consider taking on a couple of case study clients so that you can hone your service, understand the value that you offer, and gather some starter testimonials.
4. Deliver a few focused services that support your area of expertise
It’s common for new consultants to offer a wide range of services. We’re afraid of leaving money on the table, so we say we’ll do it all.
However, the more bespoke services you offer, the more complexity you create.
Reducing custom projects and custom quotes gives you more predictability and consistency in your new business pipeline and in your workflow.
So, when you start out, keep your services simple. Focus on being great at fixing one problem for your clients. And only offer between one to five services. These will be higher priced consultancy or coaching services.
Over time, expand your portfolio to offer products and services at a range of price points. This is for two reasons:
Some people will want to work with you but won’t have much money to spend. Entry level products like books, resources, or affordable courses are perfect for this market. These products may not cost much, but you might sell lots of them. One of my LinkedIn buddies sells a $97 guide to copywriting. He’s sold more than 800 copies. You do the maths.
Some potential clients might want to get a taster of your approach before they hire you for a more substantial gig. Reading your $25 book can help sell them on your services, so by the time they contact you to hand over the big bucks, the deal is all but closed.
And as you think about your services, have an eye on the future.
Because while you might start out trading your time for money, you don’t want to be stuck in that trap for ever. Time for money is an exhausting merry-go-round, and your income will be limited by the fact that you only have so much time you can sell.
So, look to a future where you will productise your knowledge with coaching and mentoring and public speaking. Where you will grow your impact by working with groups of people, rather than one-on-one, and where you will package your IP so people can pay you to learn how to fix their problem or attain their goals themselves.
5. Know your expert topics
Your expert topics are linked to the services you offer.
They position you as knowledgeable on the thing you want to be famous for.
Most importantly, they’re topics where you know you can add significant value to your clients by sharing your expertise.
When you pick your expert topics, be guided by your sincere desire to serve your audience. As marketing strategist Jason Vana says, “Teach people to do for themselves what they could pay you to do for them.”
Give away everything you know to build trust.
If this feels risky, remember that your IP is only valuable when it meets a specific need.
People pay you to solve their problems, not for your knowledge alone.
The power of repetition
Your job is to write and talk and post about your expert topics over and over again.
Repetition makes your message stick.
Repetition associates you with these topics in your target market’s mind, so that when they need an expert in your area, you’re top of mind.
Research indicates that people need to hear a message between 7 and 20 times before it sticks.
That’s why some of the biggest brands in the world have used the same tagline for decades.
Wheaties have used the line ‘Breakfast of Champions’ since 1927.
M&Ms have been using ‘Melts in your mouth, not in your hands’ since 1954.
Nike have been exhorting people to ‘Just do it’ since 1988.
Repetition is effective because of the mere exposure effect. We prefer things we’re more familiar with, and this applies to people, brands and messages.
Mere exposure effect research shows that the more messages are repeated to people, the more favourably they respond to them. So, don’t be afraid to talk about the same topics all the time. It takes years for messages to connect.
When you’re bored to tears with what you have to say, your customers are just starting to notice what you can do for them.
6. Develop a suite of brand language
It’s important that you’re comfortable and confident talking about what you do.
Invest time getting your key messages straight.
Practice using this language, not just in your written communications, but aloud, so that when someone says: “And what do you do?” you have a polished answer ready to trip off your tongue.
Here are the essential ingredients of your brand copy tool kit.
You’ll use all these all the time.
A tagline that explains what you do and who you do it for. Essential for your home page, but also handy for social media and print marketing material.
Your unique value proposition. Why people choose to work with you. You’ll use this everywhere, so create something punchy.
A positioning statement / elevator pitch. These are similar, with the critical difference that your positioning statement is designed to be read, and your elevator pitch is delivered as a short answer to the question; “What do you do?”
Both cover off:
What you do.
Who you do it for.
Your UVP (why people choose you).
The most valuable benefits you deliver.
Your purpose. Why you do what you do.
Your values. How you behave. Values are the stars you navigate by. They guide all aspects of what you do, mark out your boundaries and highlight no-go areas.
Your story. This is usually used on your About page.
What you do.
Your mission.
Proof you deliver.
Stories that show how you gained the skills you use to serve your clients.
Descriptions of your services. These are for your website, but you’ll also use them in proposals and conversations with potential clients.
Who your service is for.
Problems you solve with this service.
Why this problem is a big deal.
Results and benefits.
Your process.
Proof from happy clients (testimonials, case studies).
Call to action.
Your bio. This is a concise version of your story used for speaking engagements and author credits.
A word bank of client language. Verbatim quotes from your clients about pain points, desires, objections and questions. You gather this gold by conducting customer interviews and you use it whenever you write sales copy for your brand.
7. Invest in a visual brand and some great photos of you
People are emotional decision makers.
We decide to buy because a product or service makes us feel something. It promises to make us feel good. Or it promises to take the pain away. Or both.
Not only are we all about the feels. We’re also visual decision makers.
Images affect our behaviour faster than words. The hypothesis is that images are processed more directly than words, using “an older more immediately reactive brain system, while words, which can be nuanced and ambiguous, might require more thought before they are able to affect us.”
The importance of authentic visual marketing
Copy is crucial because it clinches the deal and helps people post-rationalise their preferences.
But the real reason most people pick their coaches and consultants is because they like the look of you. You ‘feel right’.
So, it’s important to present your game face to the world.
And at the same time, you want that face to feel authentically you. Your visual brand and your imagery should reflect your personality. You need your business to be sustainable, and if you force yourself into a box that doesn’t feel like you, you’re going to chafe and crack.
For example, you may be a management consultant, but it’s not compulsory to have a conservative logo, a formal serif font, and photographs of you wearing your best suit.
By infusing your brand with your personality, you’ll attract a clientele who appreciate a warmer, more personable take on business. You’ll also stand out from all the other suited booted management consultants out there.
Your brand has two jobs:
To attract
To repel
Just as you want to attract the right people, you also want to repel the wrong people. Brands and language with personality are polarising, and that’s just how it should be.
I know people who don’t like sweary, opinionated Scottish copywriters.
Hard to believe, but true my friend.
So best they know that’s how I roll before they start working with me.
Save us both a disappointing experience.
Your visual marketing tool kit essentials
When it comes to your visual brand, at a minimum you need a logo, a suite of fonts, and some templates to make your proposals, reports, emails, and presentations professional and consistent.
Investing in great photography is vital. I know lots of us hate getting our photos taken, but find a photographer you love, who makes people feel relaxed, and suck it up. As a consultant or a coach, you are your brand, and people want to see you.
Finally, a word on stock photography.
Don’t.
Especially not on the main pages of your website. Use real pictures of you, your clients and your friends. People can smell a stock shot a mile away and it makes your business feel less credible.
It’s OK to use stock for details or blog posts, but even there steer away from images that look too posed. You know the ones I mean, the happy smiley United Nations of hot twenty somethings pointing at meaningless graphs in shiny white offices.
Shudder.
8. Know how you’ll market smarter than your competiton.
Audit your competitors’ digital presence and their marketing activity and identify opportunities to add more value than they do.
To out-perform your competitors you can:
Niche harder.
Offer a fresh angle.
Provide higher quality services and products.
Provide more specialised services and products.
Offer more valuable content marketing.
Be better at marketing. Use channels they don’t use. Be more omnipresent. Market harder and smarter.
There will always be ways to outsmart your competitors and claim your turf, so make this audit part of your content strategy process.
But don’t become obsessive about this. Businesses who continually watch their competitors risk becoming generic shadows, imitating not innovating. First and foremost, focus on adding value to your customers with great content.
9. Simplify your marketing
There’s no such thing as free marketing. Let’s knock that myth on the head. Every marketing activity carries a cost, whether that’s time or money.
Nor can you do all the marketing things.
If you’re a consultant or a coach you’re probably time poor and cash poor. Your biggest marketing question is how do you invest your time most wisely?
The best answer I know is to invest your time in building a body of valuable content that empowers, educates, and entertains your potential customers. Build an attraction engine for your business that will become more powerful over time.
Start with three core marketing channels
Your website. This is where you’ll build your content marketing hub.
E-mail marketing. Start building a list as soon as you start your busines).
A social channel where your customers are. For most consultants, this will be LinkedIn, as it’s where your customers are already talking about their businesses.
When you’re confident with your three key channels, add more activities that attract strangers into your bubble.
This could be writing articles for third-party websites and blogs (guest posting), PR, speaking engagements, a new social media channel. or increasing paid marketing spend.
Add one new channel at a time and master it (or discard it if it doesn’t work for you) before moving on to the next.
One caveat. Putting all your marketing efforts into one social media channel isn’t a smart long-term strategy. Social media platforms change the playing field all the time. You can be merrily growing your crowd, posting great content and attracting new business enquires one day. Nec minute the algorithm changes, your organic reach tanks, and you’re left scratching your head.
So, plan to expand your range of attraction channels over time.
But be deliberate, be strategic, and be consistent.
10. Create a simple marketing calendar
Consistency is key to making your mark. Remember our old mate the mere exposure effect? If you want people to like you (or your brand), showing up regularly in your prospective customer’s social feeds and email inboxes is half the battle.
Be realistic
Consistency takes commitment. And in my experience commitment requires realism.
There is no point (and I speak from bitter personal experience) saying that you will blog weekly, when the reality is that you are incapable of writing a blog post shorter than 4,000 words.
If you’re a verbose long-form copy obsessive, then posting once a month is more realistic.
My professional recommendation to myself is that there’s a sweet spot where quality meets quantity and maybe (just maybe) I could write 2,000-word pieces every two weeks.
Crazy talk I know.
Guess where I’m going with this is be real.
Don’t set yourself up to fail by getting over excited and creating a marketing calendar based on blogging three times a week if you haven’t got the time or the material to deliver.
Repurpose your content
The second rule of thumb for any smart marketer is get smart about repurposing your content.
I’ll slice this article up into at least 10 posts for LinkedIn. Maybe more. I post three-four times a week, so that’s three weeks’ worth of content from one blog post. I see other business marketers repurposing video interviews and podcasts for social content.
A sensible content production plan might look like this.
Write a resource for your website. This is a chunky how to guide, usually over 2,000 words long. It includes examples, advice and actionable takeaways.
Then break that article up into 4-5 social posts for the week ahead.
Put a call to action in every social post. This can be as simple as comment, or follow for more good gear like this, or it can be a link to your e-newsletter sign up or a lead magnet.
Post 3-5 times a week on LinkedIn and engage with people’s content every day.
Write a potted version for your e-newsletter.
Et voila. One week of marketing content from one blog post.
Wrapping this beast up now
If you work your way through this list, you’ll build a solid base for your brand as a consultant or a coach. The one thing we haven’t considered is the importance of your own mindset.
The stories you tell yourself.
Ever since I learned to read, stories have been my drug of choice. But like all the best drugs, the comedown can be as brutal, as the high is sublime.
A few months back I watched a Seeds podcast interview where Steven Moe talks with speaking coach Michael Philpott. Something Michael said stuck with me: “The most important stories are the ones we tell ourselves. But you can rewrite your script.”
Story as loving nourishment. Story as cruel shackles. Two sides of the same coin.
I’m a storyteller by trade. Here’s what I know.
If you want people to follow you, tell them a story about where you’re taking them.
If you want people to give you their money, share a story about the heaven that awaits when they do.
If you want to steel yourself to climb a steep hill, fuel yourself with a story about the place you’re going.
If you want to exorcise your demons, find out what story your wounded child is whispering in your ear, and tell her a new one about a world where she’s safe and loved.
If you want to be happy, weave a story of gratitude from everyday moments.
Story is the lens through which we see our lives.
So, make the story you tell yourself a good one.
Here’s to happy endings.