In this session, Danilo discussed:
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Right, so welcome everyone. Today we're going to talk about how consultancy founders can improve their digital presence. I'll quickly explain what exactly a strong digital presence mean, show you why it matters, and just share some unconventional truths, I guess, and some practical advice. Right?
If it's the first time that you're joining, BCC Bites are chats we run every other week on different topics. I share a bit of what I've learned and what I'm learning from working with micro consultancies, startup consultancies, and we close with a Q&A at the end. So if you have any questions, feel free to put them in the chat and I'll try to go through them at the end.
As always, let's make sure that we're speaking the same language first, right? What do I mean by digital presence? What are we talking about here?
This is my personal definition. A digital presence refers to how a business or individual appears online. It's the sum of all the digital footprints, website, social media, content, online interactions that represents you or your consultancy online. So here we're not only going to talk about content, social media, your website. People come to you, they come across you in your consultancy online in a number of ways. So if you want to improve your online presence, you need to zoom out a bit. We need to zoom out a bit before making any major change in any of those things. Right?
What does having a strong digital presence mean? Here there are four elements I think it's helpful to keep in mind when we're kind of assessing our digital presence. When we're looking to improve our digital presence.
The first one is visibility. Visibility is about how easily and frequently you are found online. The goal is to be discoverable, be seen by your audience, get your message in front of them.
Another element is engagement. So engagement is about how your audience or those who come across your content, your brand, they interact with them after they discover it. So do they like and share your articles? Do they attend your online events? Do they open and read your newsletters, for example? Engagement is a measure of quality, really. It's a way that we can attest that our message resonates, that we're talking about something that matters, that's interesting and that can be easily understood also by people. Especially in the context of consulting where we're used to throwing so many jargons and technical language.
The third element is coherence. By coherence here, I mean a uniform brand message and identity across all the digital channels. So here we're making sure that how you describe and present your consultancy, for example, it doesn't change every week. You're not using different words. You're not using different logos, different colors. The topics or the ideas that you are writing or you're speaking about, they are connected somehow. And you're not just creating content or writing about anything and everything that gets you clicks.
When people, for example, see that I have hundreds of blog posts on marketing and business development for micro consultancies, that helps them to remember and understand what I do, right? They connect my name with my positioning. He's a growth advisor for micro consultancies. That's why he writes so much about marketing and business development strategy for micro consultancies. I'm always seeing the same stuff. So this helps with recognition.
And the fourth element here is authority, which is about establishing your brand as... establishing yourself as a credible source in your field, a trusted source of value. And this means publishing in-depth, well researched content instead of sharing memes, for example. Having a distinct point of view in your area, collaborating with other experts, showing or including in your content case studies. Or in your website client testimonials. If you have awards, certifications. It adds up authority to your digital presence.
And here's the thing: you need all of them. You need all of those elements in your digital presence plan or strategy.
Let's say if you produce content or create a website and no one sees it, so you have no visibility, then there's no real impact, right? You can have the most beautiful website in the world. If no one sees it you will see no real impact from building this, from putting this out there.
If you manage to put it in front of your target audience, let's say, but no one reads it, no one listens to your podcasts or your videos, no one's engaging with your website, then there's still no positive impact, right? At its best, you may get known as one of the many consultancies who publish boring or irrelevant content. You're seeing that there's always new stuff but no one sees it, no one's engaging with this, no one is discussing the ideas that you are putting forward. So you need visibility, but you also need engagement.
Now, let's say you can get people to read and engage with your content, but you're not consistent in the way you position yourself or the topics you speak about. It will be very difficult for people to remember you. It directly affects what marketers call your brand recognition. If you go to any social media you will find many examples of this. I remember a few months ago, we looked at LinkedIn profile of a consultancy founder who was very active and he had good reach and decent engagement numbers. But in 30 days... We scanned his content and in 30 days he wrote about more than one dozen different topics. He wrote about business strategy. He wrote about new technologies. Golf. Organizational culture. Football. Netflix. He ran a bunch of unrelated polls. And it's funny to remember, but he was creating content that he knew would get clicks or would get some kind of engagement, some kind of attention. But it was impossible to understand what he did or with whom he worked with through the content. It was a big mess. So of course you need visibility. Some variation is healthy. We are free to pursue different interests, to talk about different topics. But the main goal is really to generate opportunities and to position yourself as an expert in the mind of your audience. Right? And this will not happen if you try to talk about anything and everything. So you need coherence, that's why you need coherence here or some kind of brand messaging strategy.
And authority... Finally, you need to earn trust and credibility. Consulting is bought and sold on the basis of trust. We talked about it. If you're part of the community and you're joining the BCC Bites, or you've been reading some of the content we put out, our email course, you know that consulting is a credence good. So it's all about trust. And this means that you need to prioritize well-researched and relevant content. Partner up with other experts in your field showing that there are others that endorse your brand. Maybe there's an industry journal or popular news outlet that you can get to publish your article on. Or maybe you can run a research in collaboration with a local trade association. Or you simply ask clients to provide testimonials and quotes for a case study. Whatever it is, it's important to add some authority to the content there, to the website and to your social media.
Here I want to share some numbers on why exactly to improve your digital presence, some numbers that I think it's important for you to have in mind.
The team from Hinge ran a research to measure brand strength of professional service firms. And for those of you who never really understood what brand really means because it's marketing jargon, I wrote about it in our newsletter a few months ago. I will share the link with you after the event. The most useful definition we found for boutique consultancies is simple. Your brand is your firm's reputation and visibility within your target market. So brand equals reputation plus visibility. And the team from Hinge ran this research trying to learn more about brand strength. They surveyed consultancy buyers. So they're not asking us, the consultants who are selling our services, they are asking the buyers: What do you think about the reputation and the visibility of the consultancies that you're hired or that you're collaborated with? They found out that consultancies, most consultancies tend to have a good reputation. So 55 or 60% of buyers rated the reputation of consultancies as "very good". But only 23% of those buyers, they rated their visibility as "very good". This is what marketers call the "visibility gap". Most of you, of us micro consultancies, we have a market awareness problem. It's not about your reputation. The easiest way to improve your brand is to simply get in front of your audience more frequently. We don't do that. They forget about us, they don't see us, we lose touch. We're not top of mind. Right?
The second statistic here, when we look at engagement, is that consultancies that prioritize online educational activities or some kind of exchange of ideas, they grow faster. Here, it's another study. When we separate consultancies into two groups, one who's growing faster and the other one who's growing slower or not growing at all, we can see that the most successful ones, they are 2.5 times more likely to use marketing tactics like running educational webinars. It's not just about webinars, by the way, educational marketing initiatives as a whole. It might be a webinar with space to Q&A. It might be some kind of video series, interviews, podcasts. This proves the value, the importance of engagement in your online marketing mix.
And this last one is a statistic that it's difficult to forget because of how shocking it is. 9 out of 10 service buyers, they will actively do their research on a consultant, which is expected. But 8 out of 10 consultants get automatically rejected because their digital footprint does not point to a desired level of expertise. That's saying people will look at your website, they will look at your LinkedIn, they will look at anything that's online on you. And 8 times out of 10, you will be rejected because there's not much or they don't like what they see. They're not impressed by what they see. That's why, content marketing in specific, you can't ignore this anymore. The buyers, they do their own research even before speaking to you. And if nothing comes up when people Google your name, or if your content is just generic, poor, then it will be very difficult to generate new conversations, to generate new opportunities. You will be fighting an uphill battle.
Now, let's move on, because all of those numbers and these statistics here, they show why your prospective buyers... they like, they want, they prefer to engage with consultancies with a stronger digital presence. Right now, I want to show you some numbers that demonstrate how exactly this impacts your consultancy, why it matters to you. And here I'll focus specifically on lead generation.
If we had to split between online market initiatives and in-person or offline market initiatives, you can see here that the vast majority of firms, they get only a fraction, a small fraction of their leads online. And of course this changes when we look at different groups, industry groups. Marketing firms, as we could expect, they have a stronger online presence, stronger online lead generation when compared to more traditional professional service firms. But you can see that the average for consultancies is around 15, 20% here, right? 15% for management consultancies, 20% for IT firms. These numbers are from a few years ago, so they're probably a bit higher today. But still, most of the leads are coming from in-person or offline initiatives. Referrals. Word of mouth. Repeated business. In-person, networking conferences.
It matters because it affects both your growth and how much money you put on your pocket at the end of the month. Your margins, your profitability.
On the left here, you can see impact on growth. So you can see the higher the proportion of leads that you generate online, the higher is the rate of growth, the faster your practice will grow. Up until a point, yes. So there's this relationship, it will hold until 40% or more of the leads come from digital source. Above 40%, the growth levels off.
And when we look at profitability, we also see a similar story, right? So if less than 20% of your leads come from online marketing, you won't see a big effect on margins. But above that, your margins improve the bigger the share of online leads. And of course this makes total sense because online lead generation is typically way cheaper than traditional marketing, in-person marketing initiatives. The difference is just brutal. You can see here, if your consultancy generates 60% or more of its leads online, it's twice as profitable as one generating less than 20%. So it really matters.
One of the questions I got before this chat was:
"How do I know if I'm visible enough? How do I know if I need to invest more on online marketing?"
And the answer, of course, will depend on your specific context. What's your positioning, business model. What's your target compensation, how much money you want to make. How much you want to grow your practice, what kind of consultancy you want to build. With a team, without, as a solo practice.
But the main goal of improving our digital presence, at least for most of the consultancy founders I speak to, is to increase the financial performance and security of their practice, right? So if we want to evaluate whether you're already visible enough or not, we need to look at things like the number and the quality of leads, how many opportunities you have in your pipeline and so on. We had a BCC Bites chat a few months ago where I shared the seven levers of marketing planning. So if you were not here, I recommend you to watch that recording. I can share with you the link after this, but these are typically the things that we look at. We need to look at your pipeline indicators, leads, quantity and quality, opportunities, proposals, etc.
I think that these statistics here, they are great because they also kind of point to a high-level or objective answer that I can give to you without having all of these pipeline indicators. And that is: If you get between zero and 40% of your leads online, then if you invest more you should first increase your growth and then increase your profitability. If you already get at least 40% of your leads online, then shifting time and money to online marketing will improve your margins, but not necessarily make you grow faster. And in this sense, I think that 40% of leads coming from online is an important number you can keep in mind.
Attention: If you don't even measure your leads, or if you're only getting a handful of leads for your consultancy today, then ignore that number. 40%. If you got four leads last month and two of them came from online, that doesn't mean that you're good since it's 50%. You're not getting enough qualified leads in the first place. So the answer is no, you're not visible enough. Right? But if you have a decent lead flow, a decent number of new contacts, new conversations happening every month, then yeah, 40%, it's an interesting number to keep in mind to evaluate if you should invest more or not on online initiatives.
Before I share some kind of practical advice on improving your digital presence, I think it's important to kind of understand how it fits into the bigger picture, meaning how exactly it relates to your capabilities, to the skills, to the systems, to the processes that you want to slowly build in your business, in your consultancy, right? So your digital presence here, it will ultimately be defined by several different activities, several different plans of action, let's say.
So we have content marketing plan, which themes, which topics to write about, how much content you can produce, where and how you distribute that. This is the job of a content market plan.
Lead generation plan. So which pieces of content you should gate or how exactly you will convince people to join your email list, to join your online webinar, to share their information with you. This is the job of a lead generation plan.
A brand messaging guide is... how do you ensure your message and your identity are consistent across all platforms and channels? That's the job of your brand messaging strategy.
Tech stack, online tools. So using tools to manage your content, schedule social media posts, newsletters. Gathering data, seeing what works, what doesn't work.
So all of these things, they are really important parts of your go-to-market strategy. On how you're going to market your consulting services. And ideally, you want to invest some time at looking at each of those things. They are not absolutely required to improve your digital presence. You can start improving your digital presence without those things, but the clearer they are to you, the easier it will be to put your plan into action. If you already have, for example, a content calendar, you don't need to think about what topic you're going to write about or how you're going to distribute it every time that you publish something, right? So every single one of these assets here, they will make your work of increasing visibility, engagement, coherence and authority... They will make this work much more efficient, much more effective.
Now let's get practical. Let's say you don't have any of those things ready, but you still want to improve your digital presence, right? What can you do? And I was talking this week with a consultancy founder. Let me see if he's here... Jim. Yes. Hi, Jim. He asked me:
What does a "minimum digital presence plan" would look like for the typical micro consultancy founder? What are the 20% of the activities that yield 80% of the results? Can you 80/20 this thing?
So I thought about that and here's my answer to your question. So, assuming that you have a strong positioning, meaning that you know who you want to work with, which problems you can help them solve, and how you differentiate from other consultancies. Let's assume you have this ready. I have five critical recommendations here for any consultancy.
So first, the absolute first thing should be to establish a professional website. Keep it simple, clear design, clear messaging about your services, expertise, how people can contact you. Keep it simple. I'm a big believer of gradual, continuous improvement. You can always add more, you don't need to get fancy here. The only thing I would add besides the clear messaging is also... I would implement some basic SEO principles like relevant keywords, meta description, making sure that the website is looking good and it loads fast. Also on mobile devices because more than half of the online traffic now comes from cell phones. So just making sure things work, things don't break and things are looking good. This would be the absolute first task to build or improve your digital presence.
The second one should be create, publish and distribute content. I see a lot of people who get overwhelmed... A lot of consultancy founders get lost, stuck, overwhelmed because they don't know where to start here. And the reason for this is also because you can hear all kinds of content creation advice online. You should write to clarify thoughts. Other marketers say it's actually better to speak or to do videos and podcasts because they are faster and they are better to build rapport, for example. Some say that you have to use a structured content calendar. Others say that if you feel like you have to write about a topic, about a specific topic, then your excitement and level of energy drops. So it's better to avoid picking topics in advance and just write what you feel like writing about. Some say that you should outsource or use AI to help you with some of the content creation. And others say to avoid it. It's better to avoid it because the results sound generic, dull, and using AI makes you dumber.
So you can find all kinds of advice around content creation. And I'm not getting into any of these technical discussions here, frankly, because the truth is that there is no single recipe. You have pros and cons in every choice and the answer to what, when and how will depend on your context. Okay? Again, this is part of your content marketing plan. This is the job of your content marketing plan. So ideally you want to invest some time in preparing one plan that fits your situation and your personality.
What I will say though is that every consultant that wants to improve their digital presence should follow two universal rules. First, your content needs to strengthen the four elements that we saw before. Visibility, engagement, coherence and authority. And second, the time you can personally dedicate to creating content cannot go over 2, 3, 4 hours a week maximum. I don't have time to get into this, but there are a number of reasons why this is our recommendation, my recommendation. Do not invest more than 2, 3, 4 hours at max per week on content creation. Now, if you follow these two rules... so you need to strengthen the four elements. And you cannot spend more than 2, 3 hours a week on content creation. And we look at other consultancies who excel at doing content, who do it right. We end up with two practical recommendations.
First is focus on quality over quantity. When we think about those elements, those four elements, if you want to strengthen engagement, coherence, authority, you need good original content, well-produced content. Good content will strengthen your authority, will create engagement, will be coherent with your brand messaging. Of course, good content also automatically provides you with visibility because people will be interested in consuming that content. It will be shared around. But you can't write one good article in a year. That's the thing. Your audience will forget about you. It's not enough. One of the jobs of your content is also keep you top of mind, slowly build recognition.
And this takes us to the second recommendation. So the first recommendation is focus on quality over quantity. And the second one is repurpose content. So you can turn one high quality article or one long presentation, well-researched presentation, into several smaller and easy-to-consume pieces of content, right? You can do that. You can break a good long piece of content into smaller parts and distribute them. But the opposite is not true. If someone posts every day on LinkedIn but it's all memes or inspirational quotes, you can't put them all together to create a high quality piece of content. It will never build authority, right? That's why for this minimum digital presence plan, I recommend you to produce at least one high quality piece of content per month. And then you can repurpose it into different formats or styles to share on many channels.
The third thing here in my minimal digital presence plan is to be active on social media. And social media is one of those channels that you can use to distribute content. But it's also unique because it makes it very easy to engage with other people. I would recommend you to choose one social media platform where your target clients are most active. And for 99% of you that will be LinkedIn. Polish your personal profile. There are millions of best practices you can follow on how to do that. Just Google it. Or email me, I can share some. And then start networking.
Yes, you will post some of the repurposed content there. I think one or two posts a week is more than enough for you to start. But most importantly, you want to network through comments, connections and conversations, right? So put aside 2 hours a week, schedule a block of time to engage with other people's content, comment, connect with relevant people, and most important, start conversations. Just start conversations. Again, there are a million tips and techniques on how to do it faster and more effectively. There are a lot of LinkedIn gurus, LinkedIn experts. But if you're not an active user, just schedule a block time every week and start using it. That's the recommendation for a minimal digital presence plan. To get the ball rolling.
The fourth out of five items here is to look for partnerships. As the saying goes, I really like that saying, "If you lack resources, you need to become resourceful", right Many of you might be starting this from scratch. Maybe you don't have an excellent digital presence, maybe you're not that active online. And what's very common is that you start to invest more and more into improving your website, creating content, posting, engaging on LinkedIn... but still, not a lot of people see you, right? You have a low digital reach. And you don't have budget for ads, which are expensive. So increasing visibility is difficult and it can be a long process. It usually is. That's why I included here in this minimum plan "partnerships".
If you don't have reach but have quality content, you can partner with those who already have a large audience and are hungry for content. They are looking for interesting, relevant, valuable insights to put in front of their audience. No matter your area, no matter your vertical, your specialization, there are a bunch of people you can collaborate with. You can run joint webinars, I did it already dozens of times. Webinars, online, workshops with others. You can ask those influencers or micro influencers for quotes you can include in an article. You can interview them. You can even suggest them to create a piece of content together. And then when you do that, they will share you and your work with their audience. And they will help you reach a broader audience with a relatively small effort. In a sense, if you're creating content anyway, if your goal is to create one piece of high quality content a month anyway... Well, you might as well do it with someone else. Or ask or invite someone else to collaborate and help you to distribute that, right?
The last thing that I included in my minimum digital presence plan is use email marketing. With email you can get your message in front of all your network. When you want it, how you want it. Everyone uses email. It arguably offers the highest return on investment out of every other marketing initiative. So start building an email list. You can have simple sign up form on your website for an email newsletter. If you have an existing network offline, not online, email them, call them, ask them if you can add their emails to your new list and communicate regularly. Again, how frequent you want to communicate will depend on your context. But for a minimal digital presence plan here, I would say a monthly newsletter is more than enough.
So that's a practical, actionable, minimal digital presence plan. Summarizing: At the very minimum, you would have one clean website that can host content and capture emails, and one professional LinkedIn profile. That's what you would have. In terms of activities, what would you be doing? Producing one high quality piece of content a month. It can be text, it can be audio, it can be video. Repurposing that piece into eight or ten shorter pieces that can go to social media, email, or wherever you want. Schedule a block of time to comment, connect and start conversations on LinkedIn. And contact a couple of potential partners every month. That can help you increase your reach, put you in touch with other people, collaborate, co-create content. It's not much. If you do this religiously, you will be surprised by the improvement you will see in a couple of months.
Thanks for attending. This was the last BCC Bites chat of the year, so I appreciate it, I saw that there are some of you who attended almost every chat. It was really fun. In the upcoming weeks, I will share the calendar for at least the first quarter for the upcoming events. As always, feel free to suggest any topics that would be interesting to be covered. If you're interested in in learning more about how other micro consultancy founders are improving their digital presence in general, feel free to drop a line and connect via email or LinkedIn. See you. Ciao.
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