Most marketers think social proof sells. But it doesn’t. It reassures. And this difference changes how to do messaging right. Imagine going to a consulting firm’s website. You’d like to figure out what they do. But you struggle. Because first, you read an aspirational mission statement that means nothing. Then they bombard you with social…
Category: Messaging
Points of Parity: Why Saying What Buyers Expect Never Makes Your Consulting Firm Stand Out
You can’t differentiate your brand by using what’s expected. Let me explain with an example. Go to 20 management consulting firm websites. You’ll see that they claim to be different by providing high-quality work. Or by bragging about years of experience. But here’s the problem. These are expected by buyers. All management consultancy firms are…
7 Rules to Build Messaging That Actually Influences Your Buyers
Why do many consulting firms struggle to get their message across? Why is their value lost in translation? Here’s one reason. Many executives confuse messaging with copywriting. But messaging isn’t just about beautiful words. It’s about making decisions. It’s about clarity. Most consulting firms skip straight to copy and content, without building the structure beneath…
Why Big Words Mean So Little In Consulting Firms’ Messaging
Oscar Wilde has a quote I like: “Don’t use big words. They mean so little.” But most consulting firms don’t follow Wilde’s advice. They love big words. They want to revolutionize stuff. They want to supercharge growth. But guess what these big words and phrases mean for buyers? Nothing. They are vague. They are disconnected…
Three Marketing Bottlenecks That Keep Consulting Firms Stuck (And Their Symptoms)
Three marketing bottlenecks keep consulting firms stuck at a certain revenue level: These problems keep the business from growing to its next stage. Some businesses just have one. Some others might have all three to a certain degree. They have different symptoms: 1. Wrong Positioning You create the wrong value and/or for the wrong clients.…
Pull Marketing: Why Most Consulting Content Fails To Drive Sales (And How To Do It Right)
We’ve talked about why most push marketing tactics fail and how to do it right. Today, let’s focus on pull. Here’s why most organic content doesn’t deliver results and how to fix it to attract clients: The Soviet Union had a shortage of nails during Lenin’s government. To increase production, Soviet officials started setting quotas…
14 Questions to Audit Your Homepage Messaging (Before It Silently Kills Sales)
You know this as a buyer. When you plan to buy a B2B service, you go to that brand’s website. You read the homepage. You try to understand what they do, how they do it, and how they are different. And based on what you see, you form an opinion and make a decision: to…
Brand Ideology: Why Your Consulting Firm Needs An Ideology To Stand Out (And How To Develop One)
Think about it. How come some brands have passionate believers like political parties? People even do irrational stuff for some brands. Like getting into a line at 5 a.m. to buy products or defending it against negative comments online as if somebody cursed their mother. It’s almost like some brands become part of customers’ identities.…
How Goal Dilution Kills Your Brand’s Believability (And How To Avoid It)
In 1996, two Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin realized the largest internet search engines were doing it wrong. Yahoo and MSN manually curated sites like a directory. So you could only search for certain things. AltaVista had a slightly more advanced algorithm. It ranked sites depending on how many times your search…
How The Curse Of Knowledge Ruins Brands’ Value (And How To Avoid It)
In 2007, two MIT students —Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi— created a solution to a modern problem. Laptops and smartphones were becoming more common. And they realized people needed a simple way to access their files from different devices. So they developed an app that allowed users to store their files in the “cloud.” They…
