Marketing is essential for businesses of all shapes and sizes, but many small companies often can’t afford it. Or, they will try for a little while, not see immediate results, and then give up. To alleviate the problems that come from marketing, small businesses can turn to consulting firms like yours.
Fortunately, running a marketing consulting firm has never been easier. Thanks to a suite of tools that help with everything from content management to website development, you can manage multiple clients without getting overloaded. How do these tools work? Let’s break them down.
How Does Marketing Consulting for Small Businesses Work?
As a marketing consultant, your job is to help your clients (small businesses) reach their marketing and sales goals. These goals could be increased sales, market expansion, a larger online presence, or any number of other options.
Part of the process is to assess where the business is right now and what it will take to reach those goals. For example, perhaps a company currently does about $1,000 per day in online sales, but it wants to increase its revenue to $5,000 a day. As the consultant, you need to know which marketing strategies can help with that objective.
When you get into the nuts and bolts of marketing consulting, it consists of a few key elements, including:
Brand Tone and Voice
Each brand should have its own “voice” to differentiate itself from its competitors. One way to determine the voice is to develop a brand persona. Examples of personas can be authoritative, whimsical, innovative, or educational.
Brand Materials
While you may work with a small business for a while, your contract may be limited to a single campaign or set of campaigns. So, you need to help the company develop core brand materials, including logos, color schemes, image galleries, and more. These materials will set the foundation for all marketing strategies moving forward.
Marketing Channels
Some businesses may thrive on sites like Pinterest and Instagram, while others do better with SEO and video content. As a consultant, you need to know which channels to focus on, even if the business hasn’t done any marketing up to this point. It’s also up to you to create profiles for each channel, so the brand can post regularly.
Marketing Campaigns
A marketing campaign focuses on a specific goal and outlines how it will achieve that goal. One campaign may be focused on getting more site traffic, while another one may be designed to capture more email leads. The length of the campaign can vary, although most of them will require ongoing work.
Analytics
Part of the value you bring as a consultant is the ability to analyze data and adjust your campaigns accordingly. Since it’s hard to know how customers will respond, you have to see what works and what doesn’t. After you’ve run some materials, you can cut out anything that doesn’t generate traction.
5 Marketing Tools for Consulting Firms
With so much on your plate to deliver to clients, the whole process can seem overwhelming. While you can leverage assistance by hiring other consultants and workers, the tools you use also matter. If you use high-quality tools, you can see better results in less time. It’ll also be easier to juggle multiple clients, both big and small.
Here are five unique marketing tools that can help your consulting firm shine.
For project management: Studio
While collaboration can lighten one person’s load, it can also lead to a lot of secondary problems. For each project to run smoothly, everyone has to know what they’re doing and when they need to finish different tasks.
Studio is built for collaboration and can be scaled to accommodate any type of project with any number of participants. Project managers can get a bird’s-eye-view of the situation, and individuals can share ideas and cross off tasks with ease.
Where Studio really shines is in its customization. You can create unique workflows based on how you do business and the type of project you’re doing. Then, you can save those workflows as templates and come back to them when you have similar projects in the pipeline. That said, Studio also supports Gantt- and Kanban-style projects if that’s how your team works best.
When it comes to content management and publishing, managers can handle everything from the same dashboard. It’s easy to schedule posts on different platforms and make adjustments as needed.
Overall, Studio allows you to take complex projects with tons of moving parts and arrange them in a single, user-friendly dashboard. Workers can see what they need to see, and managers can make adjustments on the fly to keep everything moving forward. If you’re struggling to keep up with an increased workload, Studio can help streamline the entire process.
For website hosting: Stage
Websites are essential for all businesses, especially those with a limited following. Most customers will check a company’s website before buying anything or setting foot inside a storefront. However, website management is a challenge for most small business owners, so they usually opt out of doing anything. Or, they’ll slap together a basic website with limited information.
Thankfully, Stage allows you to come in and build or transfer a site to WordPress. WordPress is the largest website host in the world, with millions of active users. Plus, since it’s open-source software, there is an endless supply of templates, plugins, and tools available to make the site as useful as possible.
Best of all, Stage is managed hosting, so you’re essentially outsourcing all the hard technical work to us. You can just focus on making the site look the way it should for the client, and we’ll handle everything “under the hood.” That includes elements like cybersecurity, search engine optimization (based on your provided keywords), and page speed.
Overall, the technical elements of a site often outweigh any of the flashier pieces. It doesn’t matter if a website looks incredible if it seems cramped on a mobile phone or takes forever to load on a desktop computer. Stage allows you to focus on what you do best (content creation and marketing) without worrying about missing some critical detail behind the scenes.
Finally, although Stage is managed hosting, you can pick and choose what we manage. If you want to hand us the keys and let us build everything for you and your clients, we can do that. Alternatively, if you want to handle most of the visual elements yourself and just have us take care of technical stuff, that works too. We’re here to make your clients happy and help you look like a rock star.
For content creation: WriterAccess
Regardless of the type of marketing campaign you’re running, you need a lot of content to make it work. Content can take many forms, including:
- Blog posts
- Podcasts
- Video clips
- Infographics
- Webinars
- Whitepapers
- E-books
- Digital products
- Social media posts
With so much to get done for varying clients, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and fall behind. When that happens, you risk losing clients and struggling to pay the bills.
Fortunately, WriterAccess can help. This content creation solution connects you to writers from around the world. These writers can generate content about a wide array of topics, and many of them are subject matter experts within their respective fields.
Also, WriterAccess provides high-quality work that doesn’t rely on AI. It’s all humans writing this content, not computers. So, you can be sure that your client’s pieces have all the insight and personality necessary to wow their customers.
Best of all, WriterAccess is offering a free two-week trial. This way, you can see the diversity of the content you receive, the quality of that content, and the speed of delivery. With each of these elements locked down, it’s easy to scale up content production, especially if you’re working with multiple clients and tight deadlines.
For interactive experiences: Ion
Traditional content is still king on the internet, but it can also be hard to get noticed. Since everyone does blog posts and social media blurbs, audiences can tune them out pretty quickly.
One way to combat this issue is to deliver interactive content. This type of content requires engagement from the user to work properly, so it’s far more entertaining than a straight text or image-based piece.
In addition to increased engagement, interactive content can also provide valuable data. For example, your clients can send quizzes or surveys to their customers to get feedback and adjust their business model accordingly. This data can be invaluable, and it’s virtually impossible to receive without interactive content.
Here are some examples of the types of pieces you can create with Ion.
Quizzes
A quiz can be a fun way to pass the time, or it can be a useful way to capture answers from your target demographic. For example, a prospective customer may fill out a quiz to determine which product they should buy. Similarly, the quiz may provide insight into the customer’s problems and where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Surveys
A survey is designed to solicit feedback from a customer, usually about a purchase or an interaction. Most people tend to avoid surveys, but if you incentivize customers to fill them out, you can see a much higher capture rate. Also, the easier you make it to fill out and submit, the more likely someone will follow through.
Calculators
Calculators are helpful tools that enable customers to make informed decisions. For example, a savings calculator can show an individual how much money they could save by buying a specific product or service. Or, a calculator can be used as a comparison tool to show customers how your client’s prices stack up against the competition.
Games
Interactive games are a fantastic way to increase engagement and build brand loyalty. The best option is to incorporate a game into a reward or incentive program. So, the more that guests play the game, the more they earn, and the more likely they’ll make another purchase (or two, or three, etc.). Gamification is a powerful tool that Ion lets you use to your client’s advantage.
Overall, interactive content can yield some incredible returns when done correctly. Best of all, Ion makes it easy to develop, package, and deliver content pieces to clients and customers. Even prospects who may be on the fence could change their minds after experiencing some examples of interactive content.
For an all-in-one solution: Content Cloud
Each of the tools we’ve shown you so far is useful on its own, but they work best together. Fortunately, since they’re all part of the same Content Cloud, it’s super easy to integrate and synchronize each tool for maximum productivity.
For example, you could generate content with WriterAccess, upload that content into Stage, and then publish it onto your client’s website. Similarly, you can sync Ion and Studio so that the content generation team can collaborate on interactive experiences in real-time. Once the content is complete, you can pitch it to the client and then import it into Stage.
Content Cloud from Rock Content is hugely valuable for consultants who don’t already have a lot of infrastructure or employees. Since it can be expensive to rent office space and hire people in-house, the Content Cloud enables you to do more as a sole operator or proprietor. Best of all, you can scale almost immediately, allowing you to market your services and take on new clients whenever you like.
There are no limits to the Content Cloud, and you can take full advantage of it today.
The Bottom Line: Upgrade Your Consulting Firm With Rock Content and Content Cloud
How many times have you had to turn away clients because you couldn’t afford to take on more work? Have you ever had to turn away a higher-paying client because you were already contracted with someone? With Content Cloud from Rock Content, those losses can turn into immediate wins.
Content Cloud is designed with consultants and marketers in mind. Each component was developed to be as user-friendly as possible, and you can customize everything to suit your needs and preferences. If necessary, you can even set content creation on autopilot if you need to take a break for a while.
Overall, there’s no reason not to invest in Content Cloud if you’re ready to scale your business and start landing bigger clients. Set up your account today and see what possibilities await.
