Want to stop relying on referrals and take control of how you get new clients?
How to start proactively marketing your consultancy
Part 1: Choosing your target market. And “SMEs in my local area with XYZ number of employees shouldn’t be it!”
Getting results from your marketing requires knowing what results you want first
Which is why when I first start working with a HR consultant, I ask three questions:
1. What type of work do you want
2. What do you want to achieve in life and from the business
3. Who do you want to work with
Quite often, the answers to these 3 questions contradict one-another.
So, before I create a marketing plan for my clients, I align their life vision with goals for the business and then I am able to align the marketing plan with their business goals.
When I ask "Who do you want to work with" I mostly get this answer:
“I want to work with SMEs, locally to me, with XYZ number of employees. Thinking that this is a good target market to use when proactively marketing their consultancy.
This is where I believe most HR consultants are going wrong straight away.
Let me give you some background…
There are 3 main ways to grow your HR consultancy:
Organic growth
This is completely out of your control and is based on a business’s need. They typically search for you, either on Google or socials to find you.
Referrals
Again, this is completely out of your control and is based again on a business’s need, but instead of making an independent search they speak to someone who then refers you.
Proactive marketing
This combines both inbound and outbound marketing techniques and is completely within your own control.
Deciding who your target market is…
You’re reading this because you’ve probably grown your consultancy to date via organic and referrals. And you probably have a varied client base stretching different industries because of this.
You must realise that this varied client base is the outcome of organic and referral marketing.
So, when it comes to proactively marketing your HR consultancy, you cannot expect the same outcome with the same success.
This is why most HR consultants struggle to get new clients, at the speed that they would like, by wanting to work with any type of business in their area.
You might think that this opens up your window of opportunity. But on the contrary, when it comes to proactively marketing your consultancy it actually makes it way more difficult.
Let me come back to this in just a second. But first, we need to quickly talk about the easiest way to proactively start marketing your consultancy…
Two easy steps to start proactively marketing your consultancy
There are two key actions here…
Action 1: Get a list of businesses you want to target, with all of their contact details.
The hardest part of marketing is finding people. There’s a really easy way around this and that’s to create a list of people you want to target first.
Action 2: Start contacting those people
There’s only 4 ways to contact someone. Email, phone, post and social media.
When creating your list, as long as you have these 4 data points, marketing your HR consultancy becomes really easy.
What problems do you come up against trying to create a list of “SMEs in your area with XYZ number of employees”?
Problem 1: There are way too many industries to think about
On Google, there are over 3900 different business categories to choose from.
I’m a marketing expert and I literally have no idea where to get started. My brain hurts even to think about it.
Problem 2: It’s hard to know how many employees each business has
When it comes to building a prospect list, each company may list its employees on their website. Or, you may be able to get employee numbers from their company page on LinkedIn.
But this requires a manual search each time, which isn’t scalable.
What problems do you come up against when contacting a list of “SMEs in your area with XYZ number of employees”?
Each industry is completely different. And each industry will have its HR challenges.
So, when you try to contact these companies, you end up completely diluting your message (to try and please everyone) and your messaging becomes completely ineffective as a result.
You are spreading yourself way too thin. Here’s what to do instead…
Firstly, forget about how you’ve grown your business to date because that’s not a reflection of how you can grow your business by being proactive.
What you need is focus.
Narrow down your target market to focus on one or two industries.
For example: I want to work with manufacturing companies in Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire.
This gives you a wide geographical base - there are probably hundreds of manufacturing companies within those three counties. But it also gives you a tight focus on who you are trying to attract. You only want people who manufacture products of one type or another.
Businesses in the same industry are likely to have similar HR challenges. They’ll want the same kinds of help from you, and you can target your outreach to ensure you are addressing their likely concerns.
You will need to obtain data for each industry type, which is way more easier.
And once you have your data, you can contact people via LinkedIn, cold email, telephone call or post.
You can then use your original criteria of “I want to work with local SMEs with X number of employee’s as more of an internal qualification instead, and use it to sift through people once you’ve got a few conversations going.
