Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants

The Trouble with Marketing

If you've ever thought your marketing and sales processes weren't working well together, you're not alone. According to a survey by The Bloom Group, professional services firms' sales and marketing efforts are often out of synch.

Bloom surveyed marketing and sales executives from 224 professional services firms in North America and Europe. The survey found that few firms effectively coordinate marketing campaigns, measure results of those campaigns, or even work from a common client data base.

It's no wonder that only 29 percent of firms are highly successful in creating awareness of their expertise and services with target buyers.

Of course, it's no secret that many firms throw good money after bad in the hopes of making a market impression. But it's equally true that by landing a few engagements, most firms can cover years of marketing costs. And, unfortunately, that seems to be okay with some firm executives.

Have a look at the survey results by visiting The Bloom Group.

Who Reads Your Press Release?

If you've just mailed out carefully prepared, printed press releases about your business, think about this: According to a study by Speaker Magazine, only 2 percent of the recipients will take the time to read it.

Send that same press release by e-mail, and the open rate could get as high as 50 percent. And if you use press release wire services, like Business Wire and PR Newswire, expect journalists to be watching. More than 75 percent of journalists surveyed scan these news sources for ideas.

Loyalty

My subscription to the Wall Street Journal expired recently.

I knew well in advance that the renewal date was looming because I was barraged with mailers from Dow Jones offering me a "special renewal rate" for current subscribers. For $249.00, my service would be uninterrupted, at a substantial savings, for the next year.

With time running out, I finally went to the Dow Jones web site, special renewal offer in hand, to extend my subscription. As I navigated through the site, I learned that new subscribers could get a very different deal. For just $99.00 a year, a new subscriber would receive the same benefits, at a 60 percent lower cost.

I understand that customer acquisition programs sustain a newspaper operation, but that seemed like a slap in the face for my years of loyalty. The company is risking the same reaction from every renewal customer by displaying its rock-bottom, new subscriber offer so prominently on the site.

In our business, client retention is often more important than client acquisition, as most would agree. But it's easy to lose sight of that priority in our zeal to find the next client.

Are your marketing programs targeted toward new clients at the expense of your existing ones? Are you proactively marketing to your best audience--existing clients?

Make sure your marketing tactics emphasize the importance of your current clients. Don't short-change them as you search for your next opportunity because you might just lose them along the way.

The Trouble with Testimonials

I once read a story about a professional speaker who relied solely on testimonials to market his business. The story may be a myth, but it goes like this.

Whenever this professional speaker had a qualified client lead, he would place a large stack of his testimonials in a box and mail them to his prospective client. The selling power of those testimonials was so strong that the speaker didn't do anything else to bring in new clients, or so the story goes.

I admit that I read testimonials in marketing communications, but it's a rare occasion that a testimonial moves me to buy. And in some cases, a testimonial makes me run in the other direction. Mostly everyone agrees, though, that testimonials are an important part of a marketing program, and consultants use them a lot.

The trouble with testimonials is that they all sound pretty much the same. And most of them are too short to say anything of substance, so writers often resort to platitudes. With a little effort, it's easy to put more punch in your testimonials.

To begin with, make sure the author of your testimonial is fully identified. It always seems a little flaky to me when the author of a testimonial is someone like Sandra J., CFO of a leading financial services organization. If you can't disclose the identity of your endorser, the testimonial probably won't help you much. If you want to add more weight to an endorser's opinion, be sure that person is willing to be contacted by your prospective clients, with advance notice, of course.

And please resist the urge to publish testimonials from your own employees. Few things are less client-focused than having your consultants wax on about their state of bliss at the opportunity to serve the firm's clients.

You'll rarely--if ever--read a bad testimonial, so  look for ways to make yours stand out.

Interesting...but Useless

The direct mail piece sitting in my mailbox offered me a free "Lawn Analysis." All I had to do was call the toll-free number for this well-known garden supply company, and request the service.

Too bad I don't have a lawn anymore.

That marketer wasted money trying to educate me on a problem I don't have. And according to a recent study of 1,000 managers in the US and the UK, there's lots of other useless information jamming the circuits in our clients' businesses. In fact, more than 50 percent of managers say most of the business information they receive has no value.

That trend hasn't prevented consultants from continuing to crank out articles, books, presentations, special reports, and white papers. The logic is that market visibility follows when you provide valuable information.

But many clients might say that one consultant's perception of value is like someone else's free lawn analysis. So, before you print that report or send that article, ask yourself--what is the relevance, currency, and value of this content for the client? What will the client actually do with the information? Don't publish or send anything until you can answer those questions.

What's Compelling?

In the on-going quest to make a splash in the market, the giant consulting firms are still forking over their hard-earned money to ad agencies.

In a full-page ad in BusinessWeek, for example, one firm proclaims:

"Experience has shown us that if we define measurable objectives and set realistic schedules together, build joint teams, and above all, anticipate and mitigate risks together, we can improve our chances."

Contrast that with this ad copy created by Accenture's agency, which appeared recently in Fortune:

"Accenture and Dell conceived and implemented an approach that allows Dell to operate on no more than two hours of inventory at a time. Now in place at Dell's plants around the world, the program paid for itself five times over during the first 12 months of operation."

Setting aside how you may feel about either company, Accenture has made a claim, backed it with data, and named the client to add an extra shot of credibility.

What are readers, or prospective clients, more likely to remember--Documented results, or a consulting approach that will improve their "chances?" Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Aim at Foot…Shoot Repeatedly

AOL, the beleaguered online service, is probably glad that the month of June is over.

Besides aggravating many long-time customers by inserting ads into their emails, AOL execs found themselves in the spotlight for shooting themselves in the foot—again. In the now famous “I want to cancel my account” episode, AOL subscriber, Vincent Ferrari, battled mightily with a service rep to shut down his account.

Ferrari recorded his tussle, which circulated widely, and it landed him an interview with Matt Lauer on Today. AOL execs apologized to Ferrari, discussed the story with the media, and fired the customer service rep.

AOL’s self-inflicted wound reveals the perils of unleashing an aggressive sales strategy using customer service staff. Granted, most customers expect to hear some sales pitch when they talk to a service rep. But tenacious efforts to sell something to a customer seeking service violate a simple rule of marketing: customer service is a better marketing opportunity than a sales tool.

Customer support, of course, is an enormous expense for most businesses, and it’s tough to ignore the sales opportunity that presents itself in any interaction with a customer. But why not take advantage of the power of customer goodwill and word-of-mouth marketing by offering error-free service, rather than an unwanted sales spiel?

By focusing on service, and its marketing benefits, a business may not wind up on YouTube, Digg, or Today. But that could be the ideal outcome.

Theodore Levitt (1925-2006)

Theodore Levitt, who transformed the world of modern marketing, passed away last month at the age of 81.

Levitt’s groundbreaking manifesto Marketing Myopia, originally published in 1960, disputed the idea that slow growth in some industries was a result of market saturation. Instead, Levitt cited a “failure of management” as the culprit. He suggested that businesses endangered their futures by defining themselves too narrowly.

He noted that the railroad companies, for example, "let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business instead of the transportation business."

Levitt wrote and lectured on marketing “intangibles,” differentiation, and he coined the term “globalization of markets” in the 1980s.

In addition to writing eight books on marketing, Levitt authored twenty-five articles for The Harvard Business Review, which puts him next to the late Peter Drucker as the most prolific contributor to the magazine.

Levitt published a collection of his most influential essays in The Marketing Imagination, which should have a spot in every marketer’s library.

Though he is gone, Levitt's legacy lives on.

The P-Word

Plagiarism. Last month my local paper, The Boston Globe, had articles, editorials, and letters to the editor about plagiarism nearly every single day.

They’ve had plenty of fodder. First, there was the ongoing saga of Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, author of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life who admitted to borrowing passages from another book. Then there was Raytheon’s chief William Swanson who cribbed from a textbook when he wrote his “Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management.” We also heard about DaVinci Code author Dan Brown’s copyright infringement suit and how the Internet is uncovering rampant plagiarism in China’s academic circles.

So what does this have to do with Guerrilla Consulting? Fans of the book know that publishing your bylined articles is one of the ways a guerrilla consultant stands out from the crowd. But those very same articles that showcase your expertise are susceptible to being copied by competitors.

The flip side of the Web’s ability to disseminate your content to potential clients is that it makes it ridiculously easy to steal. Articles, blog posts, even entire Web sites – I’ve seen examples of all types of content that was stolen.

I had a couple of experiences with this lately. First, while doing a Google search, I discovered a link for an article title that sounded similar to one I wrote and had published in Management Consulting News a few years ago. I clicked on the link, and started reading an article that borrowed quite heavily from mine. The concept, many subheads, and even the content of the sidebar were the same. Although the author expanded the article with her own content, it was obvious that she used mine for her base and didn’t change it enough.

Ironically, the writer has excellent credentials and an impressive client list. To give her the benefit of the doubt, perhaps she read my article, internalized it, and didn’t realize she was plagiarizing. For what it’s worth, that’s the same excuse Kaavya Viswanathan gave. Regardless, I asked her to remove the article, and it’s now gone from her Web site.

The second recent experience came with a client’s article. Actually, this article also appeared in Management Consulting News. In this case I didn’t find a competitor copying her article, but I found it listed on two sites that supply students with essays to plagiarize. For only $9.99 I could have searched their entire database and copied the full text of her article and about a zillion others.

Although not technically plagiarized, another one of my client’s published articles regularly show up word-for-word on a foreign IT blog. They provide his name, but no links to his site, no bio, and no mention of where the material originally appeared.

Curious if some of your content is being used elsewhere? Put a phrase in quotes and Google it. You might be surprised.

-Andrea Harris-

A Compelling Offer?

One consultant offers to:

“…help clients identify, design, implement, and evaluate the business structure and  processes needed to optimize internal efficiencies and leverage external opportunities.”

Most clients would read this phrase and think, "huh?"

Sadly, too many of us fail to create compelling and understandable descriptions of what we actually do for clients.To keep options open for serving a wide range of clients--across industries and business processes--consultants risk a loss of clarity in their marketing. The result: no one knows what they do.

Almost any service offering can be strengthened once it's viewed from a client's perspective. And most clients will respond favorably to services that score high on a list of eight service attributes:

1. Differentiated service
2. Strong value-to-fee ratio
3. Flawless delivery
4. Mitigates risk
5. Creates client capability
6. Demonstrable
7. Results, not process-based
8. Specific

It's not impossible to appeal to many clients, but it's also simple to confuse them all.