How to attract a bigger audience to your consultancy (without creating more content)
A lot of consultants fail with content marketing on LinkedIn even though they're putting out great content.
Perhaps you’ve experienced this too.
You’re producing valuable posts and articles, but you’re not getting anything like the stampede of engagement and leads you were hoping for.
One of the reasons for this is that you're not applying one of the fundamental laws of marketing, that if ignored will stifle your success on LinkedIn, your website - basically anywhere you're putting out content will suffer if you ignore this key ingredient in the marketing mix.
Let me explain with a personal story.
Years ago, I was running a consultancy that leveraged Data Quality Pro to attract clients to my own business.
As content marketing was core to attracting my consulting clients, I hired the first (of many) expensive content marketing coaches to help me perfect my approach.
He praised my content - I was hitting all the right notes to attract my ideal client profile.
But then he dropped a bombshell:
"The problem is, you're ignoring 80% of the missing effort you should be applying".
I was confused, so he filled in the gaps:
20% Content Creation + 80% Content Promotion = Optimal Success
My coach pointed out that without content promotion, I was failing to exploit and optimise my entire client acquisition system.
So I went away and remedied the problem and quickly gained a marked increase in traffic. Client enquiries and sales soon increased in line with every leap in traffic.
How can you get started with Content Promotion?
It's not enough to put out some posts and hope for the best - you need to promote.
But how?
There are lots of different tactics and strategies I teach my clients in the myDataBrand program, but here is a simple one you can start with today: Leverage your '4C Inner Circle'.
Your Inner Circle consists of the following 4C's:
Colleagues
Collaborators
Community
Customers
Let’s look at how each ‘bucket’ can be leveraged to boost the reach and engagement of your content…
Colleagues:
These are people you've worked with in the past or work with today.
For example, if you operate a small boutique firm, how often are you pinging a message to each team member, asking them to help promote your content on LinkedIn and give it an early boost.
If you expand the 'Colleagues' bucket further, then you've got all your past colleagues from previous projects and employers. Make a note of all that you have good terms with and every time you write a post or article, see who would make sense to share it with.
Collaborators:
These are typically partners, associates, and anyone connected with your data firm.
For example, if you partner with software vendors, ping the relevant people who you have a good relationship with. Back when I ran my data quality consultancy, I would have an army of vendor partners who were only too happy to share my content as it resonated with their audience too.
Community:
This is perhaps your most reliable and valuable asset for content promotion.
In my community are a core of followers, many of which have kindly supported my content for over a decade.
Treat this community with respect by actively sharing and engaging their content . Leave testimonials on their profile. Provide support and offers of assistance. Nurture the wider community that engages with your content and build a list of everyone who can help spread the word.
When you have a post that's worthy of promotion, ask a few select people from your community for their opinion, chances are they'll like, share and comment.
Customers:
Don't ignore past and current customers as a source of content promotion.
If you're sharing stories of past successes (anonymously of course) that involves clients, ping them a link to the post or article and say:
"Hi, shared the great experience we had of working together, hope that's ok?".
They'll often engage and write their account of the problems or goals you helped them with.
Putting it all together
If you put all these names into a spreadsheet, you can quickly build a list of several hundred close contacts who, when contacted sparingly, will help you put that fuel on the fire LinkedIn is looking for when you need an initial engagement boost to get the algorithm working in your favour.
For example, check out the post below where I quickly got up 26,000 views:
The engagement in that post was possible by initially ‘seeding’ the engagement with a small group of:
Current and former clients who had experience of building a data office
Past colleagues who I’d worked with
Several ex-partners and collaborators
Other experts from the data community
That initial traction in terms of views, likes and comments, quickly helped the post to increase its ‘virality’ and reach a much bigger audience.
How can you adopt this tactic to your own content strategy?
Creating content is 20% of the battle.
Instead of stressing out about content creation, learn to maximise the promotion of the content you’ve already created.
Without a solid promotional strategy in place, you won’t attract anything like the attention you deserve.
Try the 4C Content Promotion strategy on your next content and let me know in the comments how it goes.
Want to get more clients?
If you're struggling to piece together a system that works for creating consistent clients to your data consulting or software business, why not book a breakthrough call.
It's free, exclusive to the data sector, and focuses on helping you map out the gaps in your approach, and what you need to course correct for a successful 2020.
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