David A. Fields Consulting Group Your consulting firm’s great work generates repeat clients and, ideally, word-of-mouth referrals to new clients.
However, if you want more inbound inquiries from prospects, it’s time to power up your consulting firm’s marketing efforts.
Most consulting firms’ marketing is of the 120-volt variety: enough power to keep the lights on (except in Europe), but not blazing energy that makes prospective clients shout, “Wow!”
Your firm needs sizzling, fierce, 300 million-volt marketing. Lightning bolt marketing.
To accomplish that at your firm, let’s play science nerd for a minute and investigate actual lightning.
Lightning strikes in a blinding flash of energy. The electric current jolts from angry clouds to an unlucky point below with such force that it can incinerate its target. Kablooey!
The actual path lightning carves through the skies is the result of a remarkable, natural process called “stepped leaders.”
Watch the extraordinary, 20-second super-slow motion video below to see step leaders in action. It’s instructional for your consulting firm. (Plus, it’s cool.)
Amazing, right?
The lightning bolt process reveals seven lessons that will electrify your consulting firm’s marketing efforts.
Seven Ways to Supercharge Your Marketing
Micro-Test
Did you notice in the video that the lightning bolt scattered stepped leaders in many directions, briefly testing the viability of different, sometimes surprising paths?
Each stepped leader is a small jump into the unknown, and any that don’t prove useful evaporate.
Follow that same pattern in your consulting firm’s marketing: test, test, test, test test!
Conduct a multitude of experiments and be bold in their variety.
Take Pride in Failing Fast
Every stepped leader has enormous potential. And every branch that doesn’t move enough electricity dissipates almost immediately.
When you micro-test, fail fast!
Quickly discard ideas and approaches if other paths move your consulting firm forward better.
You may have to abandon your favorite ideas. In fact, it’s almost guaranteed that ideas you love won’t work. Drop those duds like a dead battery, and re-energize yourself with new tests.
Find A Path, Not The Path
Nature doesn’t wait until it finds the absolute, very best, flawless route from the sky to the ground before unleashing its electrical fury. The first viable route from cloud to ground gets flooded with energy.
When developing your consulting firm’s marketing plan and content, don’t hold out for the perfect approach or award-winning execution. Find a way that works and go for it!
Be Prepared to Give it Everything
In the video, did you see what happened once the stepped leader found a connection to the ground? Kablam!
The stepped leaders were tentative investments of energy, but as soon as a circuit to the ground was in place, a bazillion volts flooded through the circuit.
Once your micro-testing reveals a path, don’t hold back. Commit to the tactics that work and daringly pour your consulting firm’s resources into your marketing.
Advance Relentlessly
Lightning doesn’t give up.
It backtracks, tries different routes and occasionally goes in more than one direction at once in a relentless (albeit quick) effort to find a path that works.
Supercharge your consulting firm’s marketing through sheer, unrelenting persistence.
Collaborate!
Even watching in slow-motion, you missed a natural wonder in the lightning strike: at the last instant, streamers reached up from points on the ground to connect with the surge of electricity from the sky.
You’ll experience a similarly marvelous phenomenon when your consulting firm pours energy wholeheartedly into a focused marketing effort: the world will meet you part way.
Potential partners and collaborators will show up when they see you’re close to success. Grab their hands and let them pull you across the finish line.
What marketing practices have you employed to charge up your consulting firm’s marketing?
Text and images are © 2024 David A. Fields, all rights reserved.
David, I’d love some examples from your experience of some experiments. For example, we have tried a few things at my firm, like perspective pieces on LinkedIn – and sub experiments with hooks, CTAs etc. – as well as long form blog posts, different case study formats, client interviews as text/audio etc. But I’m keen to hear more creative suggestions.
Those are all great experiments, Tim. Remember, stepped leaders aren’t all different paths from ground to sky; they’re micro-experiments and variations along each possible path. What you’ve termed “sub experiments” is moving in the right direction, and you can drill down even more on your experimentation.
For instance, one of our clients micro-tested their LinkedIn articles, changing each illustration, certain words, paragraph structures, frameworks, titles, etc. all in very controlled, measurable experiments. As a result they were able to fine tune their LinkedIn approach and generate hundreds of thousands of impressions (vs. a typical firm’s hundreds or thousands) for their posts, with very high engagement.
Part of what you’re doing with micro experiments is ensuring you’re abandoning a marketing path or channel for your firm once you’ve established it’s the channel that doesn’t work, not your execution of the channel.
Thanks for opening up this conversation for more discussion, Tim!
This is great! However for us since we are 95% B2G the marketing (outreach) looks different. Cap statements and complete profiles with high level reviews have worked great for us. Also knowledge based events. So in essence we did have different strikes!
Exactly, Shantana. You have experimented with your marketing to figure out what works best for your target–in this case governments. Many target markets look different and respond differently to different channels, messages, etc. Plus, every consulting firm leader is different and can communicate more powerfully using different channels and approaches. Good on you for figuring out what works for you and your audience!
Your case study example will be very helpful for others, Shantana–than you for contributing it!
David – thanks for writing
My firm works in an area that very few purchasers understand and, as a result, find frustrating.
One byproduct of this frustration is that they rarely engage or want to talk about it.
We’ve been testing every day on LinkedIn for almost six years, and the only people who engage are competitors and adjacent vendors.
In 2018, I started one of the first fee-based employee benefits consulting, procurement, and management companies in the U.S.
Given the challenges and opportunities for employers, how can we get more executives to engage when many of them feel a bit embarrassed that they don’t understand more about this area?
Thanks again, Donovan
You get points for persistence, Donovan. (Though some readers may wonder whether you could embrace “fail fast” a bit more.) If your target market doesn’t respond or engage with your LinkedIn activity, then test other vehicles. Keep in mind that, for the reasons your noted in your comment, your LinkedIn posts may be effective; however, the clients may come to you indirectly.
In terms of prospects feeling embarrassed, normalize the problem. If pharma companies have made it possible for patients to ask for erectile dysfunction meds, I think overcoming whatever embarrassment executives feel about employee benefits is doable!
I appreciate your joining the conversation and sharing your challenge, Donovan!
Great comparison, David. The video also teaches us that it’s the early bird (first stepped leader to reach ground) that gets the worm (gets to release its electric fury). Search for clients that may work for you and run for them!
Well said, Steen! As you correctly point out, rapid action is absolutely critical in consulting. That’s why failing fast is so important, and also why rapid response will build your win rate.
I very much appreciate your adding more insights to the conversation, Steen!
Nice one, David!
The issue with the micro-testing or stepped leader is that the number of tests grows with the power of 2, and it’s fast.
As we can’t afford real slow-motion in real life, we try with “baby steps”. These are steps small enough that we can afford. We know in advance (also learned from the slo-mo lightning video) that most of the mico (baby) steps will be a fail (wrong direction). The question is how many of the baby steps we do eventually to achive the “touch down”. This can be used as an interesting business metric.
Another important feature of the baby steps (micro testing). We found the most efficient ones which focus on testing only one single assumption. It’s easier for customers to understand and reply quickly.
For FF – fast forward, we need to FF – fail fast. 🙂
Excellent points, Tomaž. Yes, the number of possible micro-tests can grow quickly. Of course, market researchers and smart math-types know there are ways around that. Plus, as you saw with lightning, not every stepped leader continues to create branches. They quickly are dismissed and bazillions of possible routes aren’t tried at all. It’s totally fair to hypothesize a route and quickly test it.
I love where you ended up: to fast forward we must fail fast. That is outstanding thinking and articulation of the idea, Tomaž!