Professional / Consulting
Consulting marketing where the credential is a person.
Consulting is the purest version of the professional services problem. There is no product, no premises and frequently no team the client will meet. They are buying a person's judgement, on the evidence of how that person thinks in public.
How do consultants and consultancies get clients?
Consulting work arrives through referral and reputation far more than through advertising, because a buyer cannot evaluate judgement before they purchase it and falls back on who else has trusted the consultant.
The marketing that builds that reputation is published thinking: specific, opinionated, demonstrably useful work about a narrow problem. Generic thought leadership does the opposite, because it demonstrates nothing and is indistinguishable from every competitor.
The structural problem most consultancies hit is that the reputation belongs to a founder rather than to the firm, which caps growth and makes the business difficult to sell. Transferring it deliberately is a marketing project as much as an organisational one.
A consultancy that helps organisations improve has described nothing.
The default consulting positioning is abstract, because abstraction feels like it preserves optionality. In practice it removes the only thing that makes a consultancy findable, memorable and referable.
Specificity works along three axes and one is sufficient. A sector, where you know the constraints, the economics and the vocabulary without being briefed. A problem, where you are the obvious answer to a particular situation. Or a method, where you have a distinctive and repeatable way of doing something.
Read the full breakdown: A consultancy that helps organisations improve has described nothing.Hide the full breakdown: A consultancy that helps organisations improve has described nothing.
The fear is turning work away. What actually happens is that enquiries increase, because a narrow consultancy is easy to describe, easy to recommend and easy to find. A prospect with that specific problem chooses the specialist every time, and a prospect with a different problem was never going to choose you over somebody focused.
It also changes the fee conversation. A generalist is compared on day rate. A specialist is compared on whether they can solve the problem, which is a different question with a different price attached.
The practical test is whether a former client could describe what you do in one sentence to somebody else. If they cannot, the positioning is producing no referrals regardless of how good the work was. Results vary by market, budget, competition and other factors. Nothing here is a guarantee of a ranking, a lead volume or a revenue outcome.
Depth in one area beats breadth across many.
Consulting content fails in a predictable way and succeeds in a narrow one.
It fails when it is broad, safe and indistinguishable. A post summarising an industry trend, an explainer available in fifty places, or a list of five things leaders should consider demonstrates nothing about judgement and is read as filler by exactly the people you want.
It succeeds when it is specific enough to be wrong. A clear position on how a particular problem should be approached, an honest account of a trade off, an analysis nobody else has done, or a description of what actually happens when an organisation tries something. Those demonstrate thinking rather than asserting it.
Read the full breakdown: Depth in one area beats breadth across many.Hide the full breakdown: Depth in one area beats breadth across many.
Volume is not the variable. One piece of genuinely original work about a narrow problem does more for a consultancy than a year of weekly posts, and it continues doing it for years afterwards.
The test is uncomfortable and useful: would a knowledgeable person in your field read this and learn something. Material that would not pass that is not building a reputation, whatever the traffic report says.
This is also the material that gets cited when somebody asks an assistant about the problem, which matters increasingly as more of this research happens conversationally.
What companies spend, and what they are adopting.
The CMO Survey, run by Duke Fuqua with Deloitte and the American Marketing Association, polled 308 US marketing leaders in January 2026.
SourceThe CMO Survey, Duke Fuqua with Deloitte and the AMA, 2026, 308 marketing leaders
For a consultancy the generative engine figure is the interesting one, because it indicates how quickly buyers themselves are changing how they research, which changes where a reputation has to be visible.
Three consulting models with different marketing problems.
They are frequently discussed together and they face quite different constraints.
| Item | Solo or boutique | Mid sized firm | Productised consulting |
|---|---|---|---|
| What is being bought | A specific person | A capability | A defined outcome |
| Main channel | Personal reputation and referral | Firm reputation and relationships | Search and direct response |
| Growth ceiling | The founder's time | Hiring and delegation | Demand for the specific offer |
| Marketing risk | Reputation is not transferable | Positioning becomes generic | Commoditisation |
| Pricing | Day rate or project | Project or retainer | Fixed, published |
| Hardest problem | Scaling past yourself | Staying specific while growing | Differentiating a defined offer |
Productised consulting is the most marketable of the three and the least defensible, because a clearly defined offer at a published price is straightforward for a competitor to copy. The defence is usually the method and the evidence rather than the offer itself.
Transferring a reputation from a person to a firm.
Almost every consultancy hits this, and most address it too late.
Publish under other names
If every article, talk and case study carries one person's byline, the reputation stays with that person. Building visibility for other people in the firm is slow and it is the only way the transfer happens.
Make the method the asset
A distinctive, documented way of working is transferable in a way personal judgement is not. It is also what allows somebody else to deliver work the client recognises.
Introduce the team early
A client who meets only the founder in the sale and somebody else in delivery experiences a substitution. A client who met both experiences a team.
See the remaining steps: Transferring a reputation from a person to a firm.Hide the remaining steps: Transferring a reputation from a person to a firm.
Let other people own relationships
Referral relationships held exclusively by a founder are a single point of failure. Introducing colleagues into them is uncomfortable and necessary.
Measure the transfer
What proportion of enquiries arrive asking for the founder by name, and is it falling. That single number tells you whether the firm is becoming a firm.
This work is slow, it feels like a dilution of the thing that is working, and it is the difference between a practice and a business.
Case studies are the ammunition, and confidentiality is the constraint.
A buyer wants evidence that you have solved a problem like theirs for an organisation like theirs. Nothing else does that job, which makes case studies the most valuable asset a consultancy can produce and the hardest to obtain.
The obstacle is usually confidentiality. Many consulting engagements are covered by provisions that restrict naming the client, the work, or the results, sometimes all three. A consultancy that publishes without checking has a contractual problem rather than a marketing win.
Read the full breakdown: Case studies are the ammunition, and confidentiality is the constraint.Hide the full breakdown: Case studies are the ammunition, and confidentiality is the constraint.
The workable approaches are anonymised studies that describe the situation and the approach without identifying the client, permission sought explicitly at the end of a successful engagement while goodwill is high, and referenceability rather than publication, where a client agrees to speak to a prospect privately.
That last one is undervalued. A prospect who speaks to a comparable client is more convinced than by any published study, and many clients who would never agree to a public case study are happy to take a call.
Where results are published, they are performance claims. Describing what a specific engagement achieved is defensible; presenting it as what a new client should expect is not.
What applies to consulting marketing.
- Client names, logos and results need permission, and many engagement terms restrict them. Check the contract before publishing rather than after.
- Results claims are performance claims. A described outcome is defensible; the same figure presented as typical is not.
- Any material connection between you and someone endorsing you has to be disclosed clearly and close to the endorsement. Paying, gifting, discounting or employing someone all count as material connections.
- The FTC's rule on fake reviews and testimonials took effect on 21 October 2024. It covers buying reviews, writing your own, and suppressing negative ones. Every review we help collect is first party, requested from a real customer, and never gated on the rating they intend to leave.
- Email and phone follow up carry their own rules. CAN-SPAM requires accurate headers, a physical postal address and a working opt out honoured promptly, and calls and texts to consumers sit under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Follow up sequences get built to those rules rather than retrofitted to them.
Consultancies working in regulated sectors inherit constraints from their clients as well. Work with healthcare, financial services or legal clients frequently carries confidentiality and communication requirements that reach the consultant's own marketing.
What an engagement is worth, and how to tell the marketing is not working.
A consulting engagement is worth its fee plus the probability of follow on work, which for a well delivered project is frequently substantial. That makes lifetime value the right frame and a single project fee an understatement.
Define qualified around fit rather than interest. The problem, the sector, the budget range, and whether the person you are speaking to can convene the people who decide. Consulting pipelines stall on that last point more than on any other.
Read the full breakdown: What an engagement is worth, and how to tell the marketing is not working.Hide the full breakdown: What an engagement is worth, and how to tell the marketing is not working.
Measure qualified conversations, proposals issued, win rate and average engagement value. Win rate is the most diagnostic: a falling win rate with rising enquiry volume means the positioning has broadened and the firm is being compared on price.
How you tell it is being done badly: content that would not teach a knowledgeable reader anything, positioning that could describe any consultancy, every asset carrying one person's byline, and reporting that counts website traffic.
The vanity metric is impressions or followers on a professional network. Both rise with posting frequency and neither indicates whether anybody credible is reading.
Two further figures belong in an annual review rather than a monthly one. The proportion of revenue from repeat clients, which describes whether the work is good enough to be bought again, and the proportion of engagements that originated from published work rather than from existing relationships. The second is the only honest measure of whether the marketing is building anything new.
What we would build.
SEO Content Strategy
Depth in one area rather than breadth, built around a specific problem.
Generative Engine Optimization
Being a cited source when a buyer researches the problem conversationally.
LinkedIn Marketing
Visibility for the whole firm rather than one person's byline.
Web Design and Development
A site built around evidence and method rather than adjectives.
CRM Implementation
Pipeline, win rate and engagement value across a cycle of months.
Your website works alongside the CRM you already run.
We do not replace your CRM, we do not migrate it, and we do not ask you to change it. The site links to it from the places a prospective client is ready to act, and embeds the vendor's own widget where the vendor publishes one. Being plain about the mechanism: that is all it is. Nothing is synced, nothing we build reads or writes your records, and the names below are systems our clients run, not partners of ours. A consulting enquiry that lands in a calendar without a qualifying question is a meeting somebody is going to regret. The handoff should filter, not just book.
CRM and pipeline
Where an enquiry ends up is your decision and your system. The site's job is to get it there intact, with the source attached, so that six months later you can tell which conversations actually started with a search.
- HubSpot
- Salesforce Sales Cloud
- Pipedrive
- monday CRM
- Keap
- Insightly CRM
- Copper
Proposals and signatures
Engagement letters and proposals stay in the tool that already holds your templates. The site never holds a document and never needs to. It ends at the point somebody has agreed to talk.
- Docusign
- Dropbox Sign
- Adobe Acrobat Sign
Scheduling
These are the most embeddable tools in this list and the most commonly misused. A calendar that books anybody who clicks is not a qualification step, so we usually put two or three questions in front of it rather than behind it.
- Calendly
- Acuity Scheduling
- HubSpot's Meeting Scheduler
What we actually change
Not the system: the path to it. Where the button sits on the page, whether it says what happens when you press it, how many taps it takes from a phone, whether it appears again at the point a prospective client has finished reading and decided, and whether somebody who is not ready yet has a second way to reach you. That path is ours, it is measurable, and in most firm audits it is the part doing the damage.
Where the handoff is only a link
Some vendors publish an embeddable widget and some publish nothing at all. Where there is nothing to embed and no deep link worth pointing at, the site sends the visitor to your booking page or your login and stops there. That is a perfectly good outcome and we would rather say so than describe a seam we cannot remove. What we can do is make the destination unsurprising, so nobody arrives wondering whether they are still dealing with you.
Get a consulting practice review.
We look at whether your positioning is specific enough to be referred, whether your published work demonstrates judgement, and how much of it depends on one person.
One caveat on all of that. These are descriptions of rules as they are published today, not legal advice about your situation. They differ by state and they change, sometimes quietly, so check the current wording with your own counsel or compliance officer before you rely on any of it. Where a rule touches your marketing we write to the stricter reading and send it to you for sign off before anything publishes.
Straight answers.
Will narrowing our positioning cost us work?
Almost always the opposite. A narrow consultancy is easier to describe, easier to recommend and easier to find, and a prospect with that problem chooses the specialist.
The test is whether a former client could describe what you do in one sentence to somebody else. If they cannot, the positioning is producing no referrals.
What content actually builds a consulting reputation?
Work specific enough to be wrong. A clear position on how a problem should be approached, an honest account of a trade off, or analysis nobody else has done.
Broad, safe thought leadership demonstrates nothing and is read as filler by exactly the people you are trying to reach.
How do we publish case studies when clients are confidential?
Anonymised studies describing the situation and approach, permission sought at the end of a successful engagement, or referenceability rather than publication.
That last option is undervalued. Many clients who would never agree to a public case study will happily take a call from a prospect, and that conversation convinces more than any published study.
How do we grow beyond the founder?
By publishing under other names, documenting the method so it is transferable, introducing the team during the sale rather than at delivery, and bringing colleagues into referral relationships.
Measure the proportion of enquiries that ask for the founder by name. If it is not falling, the transfer is not happening.
Should we publish our rates?
Productised offers benefit from it, because predictability is the appeal. Bespoke consulting usually does better with an indicative range and a clear explanation of what drives it.
Either way, saying something about cost lets a prospect advance the conversation internally. Saying nothing asks somebody to sell an unquantified proposal to their own budget holder.
Is a professional network the right place to build visibility?
For reaching named buyers and referrers, yes. As a broadcast channel measured on impressions and followers, it is a distraction.
Both metrics rise with posting frequency and neither indicates whether anybody credible is reading, let alone considering an engagement.
What should we measure?
Qualified conversations, proposals issued, win rate and average engagement value, alongside where each relationship originated.
Win rate is the most diagnostic. Rising enquiries with a falling win rate means the positioning has broadened and the firm is being compared on price.
Track average engagement value alongside it. A consultancy winning fewer, larger engagements is in a considerably stronger position than one winning more small ones, and a proposal count does not distinguish between the two.
Size is the other thing worth thinking about honestly. A large firm is optimising across many sectors and problems, which means it cannot afford to be the obvious answer to a narrow one, and that is the opening. Speed is the second lever: a prospect who receives a considered response in a day from a principal, rather than a week from a coordinator, notices immediately and frequently decides on the strength of it.
Should we productise our consulting?
A defined offer at a published price is far easier to market, shortens the sales cycle and is straightforward for a competitor to copy. The defence is the method and the evidence rather than the offer itself.
Many firms run both: a productised entry point that is easy to buy, and bespoke work for clients who arrive through it.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- The CMO Survey, Duke Fuqua with Deloitte and the AMA (opens in a new tab)
- Google Search Central: creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (opens in a new tab)
- FTC: endorsement guides, what people are asking (opens in a new tab)
- FTC: final rule banning fake reviews and testimonials (opens in a new tab)
- FTC: CAN-SPAM Act compliance guide for business (opens in a new tab)
- Schema.org: the structured data vocabulary (opens in a new tab)
- Aggarwal and others: GEO, Generative Engine Optimization (opens in a new tab)
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.