The Marketing Task Consultants Can't Outsource

Yesterday I wrote about what you need to capture mindshare and be the first and only consultant inside the head of your potential clients, whatever your niche is. Today we will expand on that.

The required components to do so are:

1. Hyper-specific value proposition
2. Hyper-relevant content
3. Hyper-targeted marketing engine
4. Hyper-insightful consultative conversations

After reading the post, a subscriber wrote me:

"Why did you separate content from your marketing engine? Isn't content creation (or content marketing as a whole) fuel in the engine, in the sense that is just one of the many activities that we need to implement on a regular basis?"

The consultant has a fair point and is right to say content creation is indeed a piece of your marketing engine. But a very special one.

I kept them separated due to a simple reason: content creation is the only activity in your marketing implementation that you cannot outsource or delegate.

You can hire multiple agencies or professionals to promote your expertise through paid advertising, social media, email marketing, conferences and associations. But the unique insights and experience can only be created by you. Be it by putting them into words or video, be it by speaking about them in public or private forums.

Having others write on your behalf usually ends up with a huge volume of shallow and superficial content. Or content that is not aligned with your tone of voice. You will lose the main point of doing it: finding a clear way to communicate all of the expertise you accumulated during your career.

Don't get me wrong: there are high-quality writers or content agencies out there. And they are a great solution for SaaS or direct-to-consumer companies. But for us in consulting, my advice is always against outsourcing your content creation.

This might sound obvious, but has huge consequences for you and your firm.

It takes time and resources for people to recognize you as an authority on a subject matter and earn interest and trust. If you can't create quality content and insights in a consistent way, all of your other marketing initiatives will underperform.

How to increase the likelihood that you will create quality content, and continue to do so when things get busy? I'll share my answer in tomorrow's post.