10 Reasons why you shouldn’t be afraid of sharing your expertise as a consultant
People often ask me: ‘Why the heck are you openly sharing all your expertise and learnings? Aren’t you afraid that, by sharing your ‘secrets’, your clients won’t need you anymore’?
My easy and relaxed answer to this is that clients have to know, like, and trust us before they buy. It’s the essence of good content marketing. Consulting is a credence business and sharing your expertise is the only thing that can build this trust (and visibility).
1. Expertise tops content.
Clients are looking for the bigger picture: your qualifications and years of experience that you bring to the table. Content can never replace that! Our clients pay us to help them to apply our expertise to their specific situation.
2. Content doesn’t replace implementation.
Even with profound reading about experiences and learnings from other projects, most non-experts will always struggle with executing a complex implementation, even with a step-by-step instruction ‘the IKEA-way’.
If prospects are in dare need of support, your content will never be THE solution for them. But YOU are!
3. Content builds trust.
Sharing content is the best possible way to build a strong and credible reputation as a consultant. Without trust in your expertise, you won’t get that call to meet. And if they don’t call you, you will never know, unfortunately. I learned this from Seth Godin: ‘ Give people an abundance of confidence in your expertise by creating an abundance of value and share it again and again.’
Show your prospects who you are, what you do, how you solve client problems, what clients can learn from your experience, your struggles and failures.
4. Content builds visibility.
If you are reluctant to embrace content-driven marketing, nobody will ever find you on the internet. In a world where professional services buyers act like consumers and can find anything in seconds, how on earth will you be found?
Did you know that 90% of professional service buyers check out a consultant’s expertise online before making a decision whether or not to get in touch with them?
And did you know that a striking 80% of potential consultants put themselves out of the picture straight away because of their poor online profile and/or the lack of visible expertise? (Data from Hinge Research Institute)
5. Content builds a mental connection.
The more you write about how YOU have solved the problems of your clients, the more clients will relate to you and build a mental connection with you over time. Important though: your writing should be ‘pain-resolution content’. Clients should immediately recognize their pains in your stories (that’s what I did: storytelling from the problem-solving project trenches).
The more you open up, the more people will relate to you! @timdenning
6. Writing & sharing content deepens your expertise.
There’s no better way to deepen your expertise than writing about it and sharing it. In the spirit of one of my great ‘masters’, Nobel Price winner Feynman (known for his ability to clearly explain difficult topics such as quantum physics for virtually everybody): ‘ The ultimate test of your knowledge is your capacity to transfer it to another’.
7. Sharing content provides you with data.
I am obsessed with studying and researching what my prospects and existing clients are reading from me, how much time they invest in reading my stuff, what exactly they focus on when reading, how often they come back to read, how long they stay on my blog, what their click-thru behaviors are, etc.
It’s the most important research database to understand the interests & behaviors of your prospects and clients. I couldn’t have been successful in the past without these data, you bet.
8. Content sharing is a pre-qualification tool.
In the early years of my consulting work, I received quite a big volume of inquiry calls from ‘non-ideal’ clients. However, the more I wrote about the work I was doing, the more ‘ideal clients’ calls I got. Step by step, my writing (and speaking) became my most important client pre-qualification tool.
The prospects who contacted me knew exactly what I was doing, which problems I was solving, what kind of projects I was involved in. In fact, once my content-driven visibility got established, I almost never got non-ideal inquiries anymore.
9. Content sharing propels conversion.
Like it or not but your content is the key driver of the TLC process: from Traffic to Leads to Clients. About 80% of the traffic to my website originates from the content that I am sharing.
My content has always been like ‘my assets’: the more I wrote, the more traffic and ultimately the more clients I got. Your content should be organized in such a way it drives leads to your consulting business. Sounds like a no-brainer, or?
10. Content is your alternative hiring tool.
For about a decade, I received an almost infinite number of spontaneous applications of top experts who wanted to work with me/us. They had been reading my content and became keen to join what we were doing.
Just like with prospects, your content is building trust with candidates. If they can’t find anything ‘trust-building’ about you, you will struggle much more to attract top talent (or contractors to support your growth).
Conclusion
Marketing in consulting isn’t about pushing a product or service on a customer who doesn’t need it.
Instead, marketing is about sharing your knowledge and providing something of authentic value to your followers, prospects, or clients.
Your consulting expertise is probably not truly exceptional but YOU certainly are. If you are struggling to start developing your content, start with telling the authentic story of your project struggles, your suffering in the trenches, your dealing with bottlenecks, the way you’ve solved critical client problems, and what others can learn from it.
Even if all of this could be profoundly personal, potential clients will quickly recognize their own problems in your story and can truly connect with you.
Content marketing is not a sales tool. It’s designed to build visibility, trust & authority. It has enabled me to create consulting opportunities that I would not have had otherwise.
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Originally published at https://www.thevisibleauthority.com.
