10 (Alternative) Benefits to Publishing Great Content for your Consultancy
As a data consultancy owner or practice lead, you know that publishing content is critical for grabbing the attention of your ideal customer.
Sharing data-related insights that are valuable to your target client profile helps you deepen connections with prospects and past clients.
If you follow a content and sales system (such as myDataBrand), your connections will transition into conversations around opportunities for your data consultancy.
Creating new clients is a vital goal when publishing great content, but what if producing content delivered other benefits?
It turns out there is a growing list of advantages to putting out consistent content that you may have overlooked.
Here is a quick list but feel free to share your own experiences.
Benefit #1: Creating Content Helps You Strengthen and Articulate Your Services and Propositions with Greater Clarity
There's a weird shift that happens when you start to write about your approach - you get smarter, much smarter in fact, about your particular data specialism.
Back when I launched Data Quality Pro I thought I was qualified to talk about data quality management.
When the telephone would ring, and companies started asking for help (as a result of reading my blog), I would get into a dialogue about their problems and how I could help.
But I remember times when I would stumble through the sales process and think:
"Hang on, I know all this stuff - why am I making such a dogs-breakfast talking about stuff like data quality impact assessments and data quality dimensions?".
In short, I would struggle to get my message across succinctly because my experience stemmed from my technical, software engineering roots. It took time to learn how to 'sell' data stories that resonated.
When you're talking to the CxO, brevity and clarity are critical, particularly when talking about data, a topic that many on the business-side find sleep-inducing at the best of times.
But after I started to publish content about what I knew, in the form of articles, podcasts, guides, webinars and keynotes, each sales call became easier and far more successful.
When you start to share your ideas in content, it gives you so much more clarity about your proposition and the problems you solve for clients.
If you're a visual thinker, creating diagrams and outlines of your frameworks and processes helps them become burned into that deeper cortex of your brain.
Relying on this deep visual and written content, helps you answer questions lightning fast, and with more depth.
In short, creating content brings your approach to life, making it real and tangible.
Yes, going public with your content means you will have to defend your approach or logic at times, and that takes courage, but getting your ideas 'out there' makes you a smarter practitioner, marketer and salesperson.
Benefit #2: Publishing Content Enriches Your Approach Through Crowdsourcing
Publishing your best ideas helps you leverage the expertise of your audience so you can enrich and extend your approach and thinking.
When I published my 50+ point Data Migration Checklist a lot of people said I was crazy to give that much information away. But I can't even begin to tell you how many opportunities that list has created for me.
Even today, a decade since releasing, it's still generating 15+ registrations each day because it sits at the top of Google for the keyword 'data migration checklist'.
But aside from generating leads, one benefit was that people started giving me suggestions as to what I should add for different scenarios.
A real data expert and thought-leader will accept they don't have all the answers. Gathering external perspectives is not only a good idea, it's critical to advancing your ability to learn and extend your specialism.
Benefit #3: Documenting Your Approach Builds a Platform for Internal and External Training
If you are marketing your data firm effectively, you'll start to observe demand outstripping supply. At this point, you'll need to start looking at extending your consulting resource to include associates or employees.
The sooner you start 'productising' your expertise in the form of a standard framework or set of 'Operating Procedures', the sooner you can bring in other data practitioners who will deliver services that align to your specific framework.
I've found that creating content is an excellent platform for extending into a training roadmap that you can offer to new hires.
If you wish, you can also publish your expertise commercially in the form of a public training program.
Whatever option you take, documenting your approach provides a perfect platform for building out a training strategy.
Benefit #4: Sharing insights helps attract specialist associates and new hires
When you start to share your content, you'll attract not just ideal clients but other data professionals and consultants.
At this point, many data consultancy founders get frustrated:
"Screw that! I'm not giving up my free time to create content for other competitors!".
Don't despair.
Client engagement will come, but don't forget that specialist associates and new hires may soon become an essential aspect in the growth of your data consultancy.
Particularly for the smaller firm, it's vital to build a strong network of associates to help you punch above your weight.
For example, imagine that you offer data analytics services but come up against data quality issues on a client project. If you have data quality experts in your network, you can extend your services to help move the project forward.
One of the comments I used to receive from large corporates was my resourcefulness at being able to find the right expert to help remove the data obstacles we would encounter on projects.
Publishing content helps you discover other experts and add an 'extra string to your bow' by offering complimentary data consulting skills and services.
Benefit #5: Publishing content on your website improves your Domain Authority and SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a long-term goal, so don't bank on it creating a flood of clients in the first few months of putting out content.
However, with consistent content publication for targeted keywords, you will start to observe the benefits of SEO; particularly for the industry terms and jargon your prospects are likely to be searching.
For example, take a look at some of the top-performing pieces of content on Data Quality Pro recently. You can see that my Beginners Guide to MDM grabs about 25% of the traffic.
That's the power of keyword SEO.
Now, you might say, 'Yes, but that was a detailed guide, who has the time for that?' but that’s a shortsighted viewpoint, you’ve got to look at the bigger picture.
For example, when the ISO 8000 Data Quality standard was first released, I was the first to deliver a range of insights on the topic with interviews of the early ISO standard creators and discussions about its future direction.
A decade later, Data Quality Pro still ranks on the first page of Google for many keywords, without any continued updates or marketing effort at all.
In fact, some of my ISO 8000 content ranks higher than other firms who are actively consulting and training in ISO 8000!
Do you see the value of keyword publication within your data niche?
If you're taking the time to convert this inbound traffic into registrations, that's how you begin to deliver a content strategy that scales.
And none of this required ad spend or a marketing team - the content was published by myself (and kudos to the ISO 8000 team of course) 😉
Benefit #6: Producing content helps you boost authority and create additional revenue streams
There are a lot of data experts bursting onto the scene by leveraging LinkedIn lately. They seem to come out of nowhere and then a few months later they're keynoting and presenting at major data events.
The reality is that being a 'visible expert' is what sponsors, vendors and event organisers look for in a data professional. They don't want shrinking violets - vendors wish to be associated with a respected (and widely recognised) authority!
When I first launched Data Quality Pro, I began to attract revenue in the form of guest speaking, writing and event appearances for sponsors. As the opportunities increased, working with sponsors became a stream of income that I otherwise wouldn't have earned if I hadn't been consistently putting out content.
Don't discount the revenue opportunity that comes from creating content for other brands, particularly if those organisations align with your views on data.
But remember that you won't attract these opportunities unless you have a recognisable 'data brand' with a consistent content publishing strategy.
Benefit #7: Prospects can 'binge' longer on your content and help them more easily transition to a 'buy decision'
Think back to the last car purchase you made. Chances are you took it for a spin before you haggled over the price.
Whether you're buying a $70,000 Tesla or a robotic toy for your kids, we de-risk our investments by testing and researching the solution we're about to purchase.
Your prospects are doing precisely the same with your services!
With referrals, they'll be asking the referral provider a bunch of questions about you.
How does your firm cope with the pressure of a deadline?
How are they with supplier conflicts?
Have they worked with our particular data landscape?
Your clients crave that warm, fuzzy feeling they get when they've narrowed down the options and are confident they've found the right provider.
But what if they've stumbled on your website with no background or context?
If your 'online presence' consists of a bunch of embellished case studies and a stock message of 'we do data analytics for everyone', how will they know you're a good fit before they decide to reach out?
First impressions count. Put your name, or the name of your firm into Google, what comes up?
Engaging insights about your specialist niche and how you tackle those problems your clients are desperate to solve?
Or a couple of LinkedIn entries, and not much else.
Creating content that addresses your clients problems will strongly bias future prospects to look at your firm against all other competitors. (If your content is good enough).
Benefit #8: Content helps to validate if there is an audience for your niche
Great content acts as a barometer, helping you to gauge the level of interest you're likely to receive for your consulting services.
The reason for this is that your content should be 'problem-centric', focused on the most pressing challenges that your Ideal Client Profiles are facing.
Suppose your content creates engagement from your target audience, in the form of newsletter subscribers, webinar attendees or the many forms of social media engagement. In that case, it's a good bet you'll convert a percentage of this audience into clients.
The danger comes when you're producing content but getting zero engagement.
In some cases, poor engagement may be because your network is too small (e.g. on LinkedIn). However, if you have a decent-sized network (e.g. 3,000+) but your articles and posts are generating crickets, your proposition or niche selection may need some work.
Benefit #9: (Case study) content Helps you deepen relationships with existing clients
Many of your clients will have taken a risk to tackle that large-scale data initiative you helped them with. Assuming you've had a successful outcome, why not create an article, webinar, podcast or series of posts sharing the journey you went on together?
You'll need clearance from your client and their PR/comms department, but sharing stories of success (particularly if you have a big enough audience) can help shine a light on your customer and their innovative approach to data.
Importantly with this approach, make the client the hero of the story, don't make out that you carried them over the line.
Your clients will have their own career aspirations and goals so explore how sharing some 'content love' may help them get that promotion or job-switch they're hunting for.
Benefit #10: Creating content helps you validate and discover your passion
One of my clients spent several weeks in the myDataBrand program that I teach until they confessed:
"You know what, running a consultancy just isn't for me".
Each week we had been discussing content topics and working through edits of their finished articles when it became clear their heart wasn't in it.
With another client, one of the principal consultants tasked with creating content started to struggle with hitting deadlines and producing 'great' content. They confided that the topic they had been assigned was outside their comfort zone.
It just wasn't their passion.
After working with many data consulting firms, I've learned you can't fake this passion for your craft. If a consultant doesn't enjoy a topic or niche, they'll produce low-quality content, infrequently, to a standard that would never attract serious buyers.
Creating content helps you figure out whether a data niche is right for you.
When you discover a data topic or discipline that you enjoy, you bring a natural curiosity and eagerness to develop your skills both as a consultant and as a writer. You'll start to enjoy the content creation process far more, and the leads you generate from your content will further validate your interest in the niche.
Summary
There you have it.
10 (side) benefits that I’ve personally discovered from creating content.
Hopefully, you'll now recognise there are significant advantages to be gained from publishing content consistently, aside from obviously attracting plenty of new clients.
What are some of the side-benefits you've experienced from creating content?
Please share in the comments below.
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