👀B2B Marketing Consulting: Four Lessons Learned
Making Your Marketing Communications Even Better: Context Collapse #301
I’ve been working as a full-time consultant since 2018, and this month marks the sixth anniversary of my freelance life. Yikes!
My longest past professional life was as a journalist. I wrote for Fast Company magazine, op-eds for the Los Angeles Times, and racked up freelance bylines at places like Wired, Bon Appetit, and Esquire.
By any standards, I had an excellent journalism career.
I also worked in advertising at R/GA, where I was a copywriter and strategist on the Western Digital and SanDisk accounts. Not too shabby either.
As a consultant, I work primarily with B2B clients.
I’ve done everything from storytelling for interactive game experiences at corporate headquarters to writing Cannes Lions applications for advertising agencies to putting together newsletters for the C-suite at a Fortune 10 company.
This is one of the best things about consulting: You learn how to do a lot of different things with a lot of different clients.
So let’s talk about four of the most important things you learn in this process:
Understanding how your clients actually make their money is crucial.
Your clients want to feel understood.
You get what you pay for.
Email and direct mail matter.
But First… A Message From Neal
I have limited client availability this August and autumn 2024 + would love to work with your agency or in-house team. Per-project, day, or hourly rates available.
Lesson 1: Understand How Your Clients Make Money
This lesson sounds simple. I mean… understanding how your clients make money. C’mon.
But it’s more complicated than you think.
Ask yourself:
Who is my client who is writing me a paycheck and sending the ACH payments? (Ex: Is it the in-house marketing department I am doing work for or the digital agency who I’m helping with their account as part of a larger team?)
How does that client make money exactly?
These answers can be counterintuitive.
The digital agency may rely on long-term retainer models where they’re counting on you not to rock the boat, or they make revenue from limited-duration projects where they’re tasked with knocking the ball out of the ballpark for their clients.
If you’re working for an in-house client, their company might generate revenue from locked-in SaaS subscriptions for corporate customers or from expensive one-off project sales.
You will want to adjust your trajectory depending on your client’s business model.
So do what consultants do best: Ask lots of questions and do some research.
The way companies generate revenue isn’t always what you expect, after all. Printer companies make money from selling ink cartridges and not from selling printers. Your SaaS client may make more money from custom installations and tiered technical support than from actual SaaS subscriptions.
Understand how your client actually makes their money, and your marketing consulting will be at least 10x more effective.
Lesson 2: Help Your Clients Feel Understood
Once you progress beyond entry-level work, something weird happens.
People love talking about their jobs, but they don’t have enough people to talk about it with.
Someone may have a job that takes up much of their time and their physical, intellectual, and emotional resources, but they may not necessarily be able to discuss work with friends, partners, or family.
Understanding that is one of your secret weapons as a consultant.
Make sure that your clients feel understood. This means:
Active listening in meetings.
Using client language and terminology in your emails and conversations.
Asking lots of questions about their products/services and industry - especially the parts you may not understand.
Lesson 3: You Get What You Pay For (Including
Using Generative AI)
There’s always a question when consulting of cost vs. quality in subcontracting marketing services. The internet has been an amazing resource for a race to the bottom pricewise, which can include everything from generative AI services like Claude and Midjourney to budget-priced freelancers in foreign countries hired through online marketplaces.
But like the saying goes, “Good, fast, or cheap - you can choose only two.”
Don’t be surprised when the freelancer with prices that are too good to be true suddenly stops answering emails or turns in work that has absolutely nothing to do with the brief you sent them.
Spend the extra money on the graphic designer or web developer or voiceover artist with a solid portfolio, good references, and related work experience. It may be a more expensive line item, but you’re vastly increasing the odds of a happy client and a successful project.
Then there is generative AI. Generative AI is great for some things.
ChatGPT can create a decent 500-word SEO keyword-driven blog post while it will sputter out and fail on a 2000-word technical white paper.
DALL-E is brilliant at creating social media post thumbnail art or storyboard guidance for a short commercial but will lead to disappointing sales results if used for hero images for a large-scale D2C campaign.
Use generative AI as a project enhancing tool, not as a substitute for contractors or freelancers.
Helping a client develop marketing content? Don’t use ChatGPT to write the content for you; use ChatGPT to suggest topics and keywords and explain concepts to you. Use ChatGPT to suggest article ideas and give you initial outlines and then hire a human writer who can write copy that converts.
Use AI tools to provide guidance art and initial readthroughs instead of using it to make the art or voiceover and dooming your client’s project to uncanny valley hell.
Lesson 4: Email and Direct Mail Matter
Marketers have traditionally had bad cases of shiny object syndrome.
TikToks. Ten-minute videos. Custom GPTs.
But sometimes you just need a plain text email or sending postcards by snail mail.
If my client is holding a local TEDx event, you bet I’m going to recommend they send postcards to the physical addresses on their organization mailing list in the metro area. People like physical invitations to events and receiving them feels flattering.
Conversely, if my client is hosting an influencer or customer dinner at a big conference like CES or NRF Big Show… they will have much better turnout if they send personalized all-text emails to guests than if they send their segment a fancy image-and-PDF email invite. The personal touch matters for events like those.
Again: Make people feel special. Direct mail and email are great for that.
And From Here…
Understanding how clients make money, making sure they feel understood, using good freelancers and not neglecting the easiest solutions will go a long way in making sure your projects succeed.
These have all helped me deliver clients wins after wins. I hope they help you too.