The Fundamental Guide to Successful and Scaleable Marketing
For Technology Consulting
Establish Marketing As a System and Growth Catalyst
Tech Consulting Firms Need Successful Marketing
— to acquire new clients and achieve growth goals.
Successful marketing begins with the understanding that marketing is a business system that should be monitored, measured, and managed. Successful marketing delivers predictable and consistent results, has measurable costs and returns, and scales as the business grows.
Unsuccessful marketing is the opposite; one-off, inconsistent, and wasteful.
Successful marketing delivers what you want when you say “marketing”: a well-defined and recognizable brand, predictable lead generation, assets and efforts that support sales and partner programs, and the ability to scale as the firm grows.
How This Guide Will Help You
This guide provides an overview of what is needed for “successful marketing” and will help tech consulting firm leaders understand what is necessary to craft a comprehensive marketing message, erect a solid scalable marketing foundation, construct targeted strategies across key channels, and execute lead generation. Whether you’re looking to develop your authority, strengthen your brand position, or scale your firm to the next level, this guide provides insight into the marketing elements and components needed to thrive in today’s enterprise IT market.
This guide for Successful Marketing is divided into these sections:
- Create A Strong Message That Resonates With Your Audience
- A Marketing Strategy (What You’ll Do and What You Won’t)
- Marketing Goals, Actions, and Campaigns
- A Solid Marketing Foundation That Scales
- Content — Fuel of the Marketing System
- Lead Generation That Engages the Right Prospects
- Lead Nurturing Techniques That Keep You Top of Mind
- Marketing and Sales Alignment To Enable Customer Growth
- Measuring What’s Important, not Just What’s Interesting
Throughout this guide, we aim to present the basics of each of these topics. Every effort has been taken to KISS — Keep It Sensibly Simple — by covering the essential thinking for building your firm’s marketing capability.
If your goal is to attract and convert the right prospects, convert those prospects into opportunities, and establish your firm as an industry leader clients want to work with, this guide is for you. Read on.
Sections
01 – A Strong Message
02 – A Marketing Strategy
03 – A Marketing Plan
04 – A Solid Marketing Foundation
05 – Content — Marketing System Fuel
06 – Lead Generation
07 – Lead Nurturing
08 – Alignment With Sales
09 – Measures
01 A Strong Message
Your Firm has a brand. Is yours defined, and is it doing it’s job?
Successful marketing is anchored with the brand and brand identity. Your brand communicates to the market your expertise and experience, creates awareness, and builds credibility.
A well-defined and recognizable brand is a platform for
consulting firm growth
Successful marketing uses a clear message to position the tech consulting firm and define the brand. The marketing message has multiple components:
Successful marketing uses a clear message to position the tech consulting firm and define the brand. The marketing message has multiple components:
Who You Serve & The Problem You Solve
- Identify the target marketing for your services (size, attributes)
- Identify the persona(s) involved in buying your services
- Define the problem you solve
- The benefits they receive when you solve the problem
A Compelling Brand Story
- Who you are and why you concentrate on solving this problem
Offers, Unique Selling Proposition (USP), competitive advantage, and differentiators
- Define the service you offer to solve the problem
- Why customers should buy from your firm
- What sets you apart from the competition (differentiators)
An effective messaging framework attracts ideal prospects who relate to the problem you address and are compelled by your brand story and unique value. It persuades them to engage with your content, entices them to buy into your thought leadership, and ultimately motivates them to choose your services. Refine your message with customer insight and feedback. Feature it prominently across channels.
Add creative consistency and repetition, and your message will resonate deeply with your audience.
02 A Marketing Strategy
What You’ll Do and What You Won’t
The reason most firms fail to get positive marketing results is that their marketing efforts are isolated and one-offs. They are not guided by a unified marketing strategy. Without a proper marketing strategy, a consulting firm will not reach its target audience or maximize customer growth potential.
Marketing strategy is the process of defining key marketing goals and developing plans and activities to achieve them.
A marketing strategy helps to identify the ideal customer, determine the most effective way to reach them and create a plan for engaging them. It is informed by research and analysis, and customer experience.
In other words, marketing strategy is the “who, what, when, where, and how” of marketing.
Marketing strategy is the process of defining key
marketing goals
What’s in the Marketing Strategy?
In addition to the other elements discussed in this guide (message, brand, capabilities, sales alignment, and content), your marketing strategy should also include these elements:
Awareness of Competitors
What are others offering, what are their focus areas, and what message are they using to connect with their target audience? A common mistake for tech consulting firms is to market themselves the same as their competitors.
The Marketing Channels and the Tactics
There are several “de facto standard” channels that will be used in your marketing efforts. The fundamental channels include website, email, social, and SEO. Additional channels and tactics should be added based on your target audience and their buying journey.
Identify the Resources You’ll Need
Various types of resources, including human, financial, and technical, should be codified and planned. There isn’t a business without constraints, and resource planning allows you to acknowledge and manage these areas.
Measurable Marketing Goals and How They Will be Measured.
You need to identify realistic marketing goals that reflect your current and future growth plans. You can use KPIs, OKRs, or whichever method you currently utilize within your firm.
Establish a Marketing Calendar
A marketing calendar allows you to anticipate and plan for upcoming marketing opportunities and activities.
Establish a Marketing Budget and How You Will Manage the Budget
The marketing budget should be tied to customer acquisition. There are some elements that are more fixed in nature, for example, your marketing technology stack and staff, and others that are impacted by scale. Content, events, sponsorships, and special campaign budgets can be planned and managed.
With a defined marketing strategy, firms can create an effective marketing plan that focuses on increasing their visibility (brand awareness), expanding their customer base (getting leads), and ultimately, achieving their business goals.
03 A Marketing Plan
Marketing Goals, Actions, and Campaigns
Planning marketing actions, campaigns, and goals is like project planning. You define the outcomes you want to achieve (goals) and the activities, resources, and schedule for accomplishing them. This concept should be very familiar to your firm.
Defining
Goals & Actions
Any discussion of the firm’s marketing goals should begin with this statement: The business and marketing goals should be aligned and directly connected. Marketing should be focused on achieving business goals, not merely marketing goals.
Elevating your marketing efforts to propel growth requires goals that balance building the firm’s marketing capabilities and the never-ending drive to engage leads and prospects. Capability goals are “work on your business” goals, whereas lead and prospect goals are more likely to be recognized as traditional “marketing” goals. The point here is to manage both types to achieve progress.
Examples of Lead Goals
- Increase Contact Captures and Marketing Qualified Leads
- Increase Sales Accepted Leads, and Marketing Attributed Opportunities
- Increase marketing KPIs like subscribers, engagement (opens and clicks), LinkedIn, and website visitors
- Sales collateral/asset pieces created
- Case studies published
Examples of Capability Building Goals
- Defining content production processes and techniques
- Developing methods for capturing and producing thought leadership content
- Strengthening online visibility and search results through improved website design and SEO emphasis
- Designing contact management and segregation
- Establishing email schedules and routines (notifications, newsletters, etc.)
- Assessing and reviewing Brand Identity Elements
These goals are designed to drive immediate results for the sales team. In addition, they build the capabilities and assets necessary for sustained marketing success in the tech consulting industry.
Executing Campaigns
Marketing campaigns are organized marketing efforts to achieve a defined goal. Campaign plans will include the target audience, message, offer, channels, goals, and expectations. Executing well-planned and impactful campaigns delivers results (added customers) and tests your marketing capabilities. Monitoring and measuring campaign effectiveness will improve marketing performance and boost confidence in execution and results.
A successful marketing plan brings together the firms’ messaging and strategy, and the near-term goals, activities, and campaigns.
04 A Solid Foundation
Your Marketing Foundation is What You Will Scale — Make it a Solid One
The marketing foundation comprises tools and processes that can be launched, perfected, and scaled as your firm grows. These foundation elements replace the tools and processes that may have been used for one-off marketing efforts or cheap or free tools that get you started and then lock you into expansions and expensive implementations.
This is What You Will Scale
Make It SOLID
The marketing foundation comprises tools and processes that can be launched, perfected, and scaled as your firm grows. These foundation elements replace the tools and processes that may have been used for one-off marketing efforts or cheap or free tools that get you started and then lock you into expansions and expensive implementations.
The secret to a no-regrets marketing foundation is to select tools and build processes that allow you to improve and optimize into the future. The tools and techniques should integrate with your CRM, support, and other vital internal and customer-facing systems.
Your marketing foundation includes the following:
Email Marketing
A system that helps you manage contacts, connect with new connections, and nurture existing and known relationships.
Social Media Management
Tools and processes that allow you to craft social content, schedule posts, and amplify your content to improve visibility and engagement.
Content Production
The processes you will use to produce the content that fuels the marketing system.
Website Optimization
Processes and tools to update and improve your website. That includes enhancing user experiences, optimizing landing pages, and adding relevant content and pages.
As part of the day-to-day work of the marketing department, Marketing Operations will use the foundation elements to handle email communications, social media management, and website maintenance.
The proper marketing foundation will help you achieve your initial marketing action plans and goals and scale up when you are ready to expand.
05 Content Marketing
Fuel For Your Marketing System
Content is the fuel for tech consulting marketing. Marketing systems that use the right content can strengthen the brand, capture prospects’ attention, convert leads into customers, and accelerate growth.
The marketing system content aligns with your persona(s) and their buying journey. It will help prospects find your firm, and understand your capability to solve their problem. It will help them determine if your firm is the right choice, support them through the engagement process, and strengthen the bond they establish with the company. By mapping content to personas and their purchase stages, we can systematically educate, inform, and convert high-value leads.
The fuel for scaling is
Good Content
Types of Content
There are various types of content needed for the marketing system, including:
Thought Leadership Articles & Assets
Publishing perspectives on industry issues raises the firm’s profile as subject matter experts and trusted advisors. This provides prospects with knowledge of the issue and our understanding, which establishes trust and builds confidence, essential for elevating the firm’s reputation (brand).
Case Studies
Case studies highlight real-world challenges addressed for clients and showcase the successful solutions the firm has provided. Case studies and success stories demonstrate the capabilities and tangible benefits of your services.
Sales Assets & Collateral
Material that helps remove the friction of converting prospects to customers is an essential collection of content necessary to achieve growth. Assets like business case templates, planning tools, comparison sheets, and scorecards are valuable for leads in the consideration phase of their buyer journey. Supplying the right asset at the right time will guide the prospect to the right choice.
Blog Posts & Articles
This is the basic content element firms use to educate and inform their audience. Establishing a practice of frequently publishing relevant and insightful information keeps your contacts engaged and nurtures the relationship. This type of content also enhances SEO which increases search engine visibility. Content helps drive organic (inbound) traffic to your website, fostering trust and credibility and growing your contact list.
eBooks & White Papers
In-depth long-form content lets your firm establish and demonstrate deep technical and business knowledge. Prospects and leads utilize this content to further educate themselves on problems and solutions and rely on your firm’s expertise to guide their decisions.
Content Fuels the Marketing System
and is necessary for email automation campaigns, website updates, social media, advertisement, and sales enablement.
The above examples are a partial list of the many content types and uses. These written content types are the inputs to producing other content, including videos, webinars, visual elements, charts, and infographics.
06 Lead Generation
Engage With the Right Prospects
When tech consulting leaders think of marketing, they go directly to LEADS. It’s easy to understand why. Leads are the result they want to achieve.
In the leader’s mind, Marketing = Leads.
Generating leads is one of the highest goals of tech consulting marketing, but quantity needs to be balanced with quality. Defining your marketing message helps you narrow your marketing focus. It also helps you identify the persona(s) that will benefit from your services, and be receptive to your message and value proposition. This allows you to prioritize your marketing activities and channels to get the right prospects into your marketing system.
The fuel for scaling is
Good Content
Lead Generation Is a Journey
Lead generation begins with capturing or collecting the contact information of the person interested in your services. That person has seen your brand, investigated your firm, and is interested in learning more. They are at the beginning of their buying journey, not likely ready to buy, but ready to become a contact. They give you permission to market to them.
Contacts become prospects and progress to lead status using a defined lead nurturing process. In essence, lead generation is an aspirational way of saying “contact generation,” — but to be consistent with known labels, we’ll use “lead generation” in this section.
Multiple Ways Forward
Lead generation for tech consulting firms is primarily centered
around these five areas:
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing produces leads through website traffic and inquiries. Inbound traffic relies on quality content, successful SEO efforts, social media activity, and gaining potential contacts’ attention. Once on your firm’s website, the person engages with a call to action (a download, subscription, trial, or similar indicator of interest) and exchanges their contact information for something of value.
Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing produces leads through activities like cold calling, cold emailing or messaging, email and social campaigns to known (warm) contacts, and account-based marketing (ABM) in certain situations.
Advertisement
Digital advertisements on platforms like Google or LinkedIn can also produce leads and are very effective with offers for in-depth content related to solutions to niche business and technical problems (i.e., integration, product upgrades, etc.).
Technology & Partnership Referrals
Relationships with partners and technology providers should lead to referrals and introductions to prospects. This type of referral can be effective if your firm provides services that range from initial implementation to customization and optimization of a software system or platform.
Events
Events, both in-person and virtual, can promote thought leadership and generate leads. Business and technology-oriented conferences and shows help prospective customers see your brand aligned with their interests. Content such as eBooks, whitepapers, case studies, and product-oriented details (upgrades, hacks, and tips) are excellent webinar topics and help nurture relationships with known contacts and attract new ones.
The combination of brand, message, strategy, a solid marketing foundation, and quality content enables multiple options for lead generation. Testing, monitoring, and doubling down on what’s working will help your firm accelerate results.
07 Lead Nurturing
Lead Nurturing is the Process That Moves Contacts to Leads
To accomplish this, contacts are educated and informed with relevant content and urged to follow calls to action that demonstrate their intentions through buying signals and heightened interest.
techniques That Keep You
Top of Mind
To accomplish this, contacts are educated and informed with relevant content and urged to follow calls to action that demonstrate their intentions through buying signals and heightened interest.
The marketing techniques involved with lead nurturing are primarily email marketing, well-designed landing pages, direct conversations, and thoughtful offers.
The most effective practice for lead nurturing is to allow the contact to demonstrate, through their behavior, the movement from one buyer journey stage to the next. This is Interest to Decision, Decision to Action.
One of Marketing’s primary roles is to engineer opportunities and offers that allow the contact or prospect to reveal their readiness to move from one stage to another. This could be accomplished by presenting varying content, for example, business case development tools, ROI calculators, project planning tools, or other content that signals apparent maturation past the awareness and interest phase of the journey.
Initial offers that are low cost but provide meaningful commitment are also effective means to nurture contacts into leads. For example, a single-day, fee-based workshop to plan a product implementation or upgrade project strongly signals that the prospect is moving from contact to lead status. Marketing can execute dedicated campaigns for these offers to known (warm) contacts.
Additionally, lead nurturing can be used to build relations with the multiple stakeholders involved in the typically lengthy and complex enterprise IT buying processes. ABM may play a role here, especially if the sales team utilizes the Land-and-Expand method of growing business at an existing account.
Lead nurturing is essential to reap the rewards and benefits of lead generation activities and investments. Without planned lead nurturing activities and effort, you’ll waste marketing time, budget, and momentum of the prior marketing activity.
08 Sales Alignment
Align Marketing & Sales to Accelerate Customer Growth
Sales and marketing organizations often have some friction between them. Sometimes the friction is positive. As the saying goes, “Iron sharpens iron.” But sometimes it’s not. Negative friction is usually caused by expectations that were poorly (or not) set and met. This can result in finger-pointing and other negative behaviors that divert attention from achieving the firms’ growth goals.
To accelerate customer growth, marketing, and sales must share common goals, establish universal definitions, and measure success in the same way.
When Sales & Marketing Are Aligned You
Grow Faster
Areas to Get Aligned
Here are four areas of alignment for tech consulting firms’
marketing and sales:
Strategy
Marketing and sales can collaborate to strengthen the definition of persona(s) and the details of the buyer’s journey. This will improve messaging and help get the right message to the right person, at the right time.
Lead Definition, Scoring, and Qualification
Marketing and sales teams should have clear definitions and rules for scoring and qualifying leads. This will increase confidence and conversion and provide a basis for improvements.
Collateral & Assets
Marketing should provide the sales team with the relevant offer and solution collateral (data sheets, solution overviews, etc.) and applicable case studies.
This ensures that all material is uniform and consistent with branding and style guidelines. In addition, starter kits for presentations and proposals can be developed based on the sales team’s needs.
Measurement & Reporting
Marketing and sales should have a reporting cadence that provides performance metrics for lead conversion, campaign results, and other measures. The goal is to identify and implement actions that improve results.
The firm can eliminate siloed goals, missed opportunities, and frustration by proactively aligning marketing and sales.
09 Measures
Measure What’s Important, Not Just What’s Interesting
The measures captured and reported by the marketing team should be a decision the leadership/executive team makes. Taking responsibility for determining what will be measured and reported eliminates reporting on marketing-centric (vanity) metrics that may look good on paper but do little to propel firm growth.
Aviod
Vanity Metrics
The key to successful measurement and reporting is to concentrate on what’s important and not what is interesting. What is important are indicators that prove marketing contributes to company goals.
Most growing tech consulting firms will concentrate on these five areas of measurement and reporting.
Leads
This is the leading indicator measure, and it drives all other critical elements. Leads can be reported as MQLs, SALs, SQLs, and Opportunities. These terms should be clearly defined and agreed to. Otherwise, there could be time and effort wasted discussing “what is an MQL?” instead of analyzing what’s working and the potential impact leads have on other measures of success.
Conversion Rates
Measuring and reporting leads allows the marketing team to measure lead conversion and stages as they progress along their buyer’s journey. Typical measures would include MQL to SAL rate, MQL to QSL rate, and MQL to Sales Opportunity.
Costs
The marketing team should measure and report the cost of leads (MQLs) and the Customer Acquisition Cost. There are numerous benchmarks and baselines that can provide guidance and comparison.
Pipeline
Pipeline growth and attribution to the appropriate lead source offers insight into where growth and success originate. It also offers insight into the impact marketing activity, and campaigns have on the pipeline.
Revenue
Revenue implies closed deals and paying customers, and you’ll want to see the connection between marketing activity and leads and conversion to customers.
Agreeing to what, when, and how marketing measures will be reported will give you increased control of your marketing activity and growth trajectory.
In Closing
Transform Your Marketing
This guide emphasizes transforming marketing into a well-structured business system that drives growth and delivers consistent, measurable results. It provides a blueprint for building a scaleable marketing capability that can be refined and improved as the firm grows.
While leads and customers are stressed as the desired marketing outcome, the guide explains how the system’s elements work together to create “marketing.”
A defined message, strategy, and plan are necessary to narrow the marketing focus. This ensures your tech consulting marketing system has reasonable goals and attracts the leads you want.
Establishing the foundational capability of email, social, content, and website optimization creates the primary channels most tech consulting firms use for lead generation.
The Pay-Off?
Capturing contacts, nurturing them into prospects and leads, and then converting them into opportunities for your consulting firm is the payoff for the thoughtful and deliberate effort to stand up marketing as a business system, not just a one-off tactic that can never be repeated or scaled.
Take Action
This self-assessment will help you evaluate your marketing capacity and effectiveness. You’ll
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We help early-stage tech companies accelerate growth by building brand credibility, establishing repeatable lead generation, and supporting sales and partner teams. The result — effective marketing up and running in a fraction of the time it would take to recruit, hire, and train an internal marketing team.
