Four Tips to Grow Your Regulatory Consulting Business
Your consulting businesses is built on your experience and expertise. You have honed your skills, studied the complex regulations and have helped clients navigate the path of regulatory submissions. You know how to help clients get their products to market and keep them there because you are an expert in your field.
Regulatory consulting has become a lucrative business. The industry is growing quickly but there is a lot of competition from big businesses and emerging firms. If you want to grow your practice and build your new client pipeline you are going to need to know how to market your business.
There are four essential tips on how to market and grow your consulting business:
Create Awareness
Sales are the result of getting the right message to the right people at the right time. Since it is nearly impossible to know when a prospective client will be ready to contract for consulting services, you need to always be marketing to build business awareness.
For a small or mid-sized consulting business, awareness is almost impossible to measure, but it’s still critically important. The awareness you create is connected to the extent your audience is willing to trust the value you can bring to their business.
How do you create awareness? Awareness = Value x Consistency. Demonstrating your value is achieved by providing Expert Content. Awareness is the result of providing high-value content for free combined with a methodical program of regular postings to targeted social media, email campaigns, blog posts, articles in publications that are already trusted by your audience and participation in live events such as conferences or trade shows. This process is known as Content Marketing.
Show your Expertise
If you are looking to buy a car you can go to the dealer and take a test drive. If you are selling consulting services, it is probably not cost effective to give clients a ‘test drive’ of your services. You want to pre-sell prospects on your expertise before they narrow down their list of potential consultants.
How do you pre-sell your expertise? People tend to gravitate toward consultants who have established a certain level of authority. This is accomplished through Content Marketing. Content marketing focuses on creating, publishing, and distributing content for your targeted audience. 93% of B2B companies say content marketing generates more leads than traditional marketing strategies (Source: Marketo).
You could do this by developing and promoting expert content such as blogs, podcasts or white papers. Promote your content through events, email campaigns and social media. Authorities in their field get more press than consultants that have not been very successful at establishing their credibility.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
Do not assume that because a prospective client was impressed by something you wrote several months ago that you will be on the top of their vendor list at a later time when they are actively looking to hire a consultant.
How much and how often should you be communicating with your target audience? A simple formula is: Reach x Frequency.
Reach: Believe it or not, the world of regulatory compliance is not as small as you might think. To get the best return on your content marketing you will need to get your content out to the greatest number of potential decision makers and influencers as possible.
Frequency: If you want people to remember you, it is imperative for them to see your content on a regular basis. Build a following on social media and post content to social media platforms or through email campaigns one or two times every week.
How?
It has been pointed out that “the abundance of online tools or tactics at your disposal can be a double-edged sword.” The good news? Your brand doesn’t have to invest in high-cost billboards or large ads in trade publications to build awareness. The challenge is making the most of the low-cost, digital options for building brand awareness.
Ultimately the most effective brand awareness activities will focus on building exposure, trust, and thought leadership, while maintaining your progress towards goals of website traffic, leads generated, and revenue. By understanding how your audience researches and learns online, you can increase your presence and authority on the right digital channels.
If your expertise is regulatory compliance – not marketing, building a marketing program for awareness; developing a social media following and maintaining that program might seem overwhelming. Luckily for you, this is exactly the expert support BrandUp Strategy has been providing to businesses in the regulatory compliance world. If you would like to learn how we can help you grow your business call or email us.
BrandUp Strategy
(813) 435-3636
info@brandupstrategy.com
www.BrandUpStrategy.com
