Seven Criteria for Choosing Marketing Techniques for a Business Consultant

Having the required skills, contacts and experience is only a small part of succeeding as an independent business consultant. There would be many others with the same or better level of skills and professional experience, but only those who can successfully market their skills would succeed. When a business consultant needs to choose the marketing techniques to promote his or her services – each technique used must be evaluated on the basis of the following seven criteria: 1. Cost – Determine your initial budget and how much you can afford to invest on marketing. Direct mail has its own impact, but has high costs, while e-mail has the chances of going into the spam folder, unless professionally sent, but has low associated costs. 2. Time – You need to set a time budget for marketing and ascertain how much time each day or over short periods like a week, that you can actually afford to invest in marketing. Keep in mind that all marketing functions involve efforts to turn people you can reach into a world divided into clients, potential clients and people who can lead to clients. Writing a book is a good technique for building authority and marketing yourself as a business consultant – but do you have the time, or would you rather attend professional meetings with regularity? You can delegate someone to write a book, but you cannot delegate attending professional meetings to someone else. You have to budget your time and choose techniques that fit in with your objectives and work hours. 3. Term-based goals and time horizon – You have to decide upon conflicting needs of having immediate business and developing business on the long term. While writing two chapters in a book may not bring you immediate business, then again it might – depending upon how you conduct the marketing exercise. However a book does not require constant and repeated time investment from a business consultant. But professional meetings require you to invest your time repeatedly. 4. Which marketing technique can be easily delegated? Delegation saves time at the expense of money. Keeping quality and other objectives in mind, it can be easily said that it is difficult for a business consultant to delegate cold calling, but quite easy to delegate E-mailing work where formats have already been developed. Finding how easily a marketing technique can be delegated helps to prioritize a technique and either select or discard it. 5. Which marketing techniques require greater writing skills? The preparation of most marketing material like articles, books, brochures, newsletters, will require high writing skills, while there are other approaches which require almost no writing skills at all. Knowing which functions require higher level of thought and logic helps to prioritize them. 6. Presentation skills – The amount of presentation skills required by a marketing technique has to be determined before choosing it and employing it on a regular basis. It must be aligned with your available resources. 7. Interpersonal skills – As a business consultant, you need to develop your interpersonal communication skills, but not all marketing functions require such skills. For example, sending an electronic newsletter – though being an important marketing technique, does not require interpersonal skills, and can also be delegated. However, conducting professional meetings requires high interpersonal skills – some part of which can be delegated and some can be done only by you.