Consultants understand the power of quality content and intellectual capital. It’s often the foundation for their entire practice, and can generate leads, support a brand, train employees, facilitate service delivery and educate clients. 

But if you’re using content to sell a product on the web, how much content is too much? 

It’s a question I think about every day.  We sell content integrated with web-based software to consultants. There’s a tremendous volume of content in the private area of our site, and we decided to put a healthy dose of it in the public area also, to 

• Give consultants samples of our offering;
• Generate leads; and
• Build our brand. 

Since we’re a web product, or prospects are scattered all over the world, and we’re not able to take advantage of a face-to-face selling environment for our fairly complex product. Instead, we use our content to facilitate our selling process, via the web and email, so our prospects can 

• Understand how our product approaches business growth strategies;
• Review the tools that we offer; and
• Determine whether our product can help them achieve their goals.

We publically display less than 5% of our available content. Sometimes it works as planned, sometimes not: Some prospects have been overwhelmed with the volume of content. Even though our consultant clients are intellectuals, they face the same time constraints as everyone else.

Our strategy is to strike a balance between showing “not enough” and throwing the “whole kitchen sink” at them.  The end goal is to entice interested visitors to contact us to start the process.

Yesterday I was talking with a consultant about her event planning business and how, for example, she could design email campaigns to better promote her clients’ events.

I pulled up the email subject in our web-app and quickly read off the list of email marketing tools: 

Email Brainstorming - helps you generate ideas for campaigns to meet various business goals
Email Campaign Strategy - develop an over-arching strategy: goals, audience, message, offer, and timing
Email Campaign Plan - define the timing, format, content, fulfillment, tracking requirements and launch plan
Email Technology Requirements - checklist of typical features you’d want from an email service provider or software
Email Creative Guidelines - a template for writing and editing the copy; includes notes for the graphics
Email Testing Plan - helps you set up a test to measure & improve your email campaign
Email Newsletter Program - general tips for content, generating subscriptions and handling signups
Email Response Rate Estimates - tips for estimating response rates
Email Budget - tips for creating your budget
Email Pre-Launch Checklist - a to-do list to tackle before your campaign goes out
Improve Your Email Campaigns - tips for improving your response rate
Email Campaign Results - a template for sharing your results and documenting your learning for the next campaign
Email Marketing.xls - calculate numeric goals, compare lists and evaluate testing

What was her response? “WOW!  That is so detailed! And that’s just one subject!”

So I realized that we could still use MORE content to better display our offering. The challenge is to serve it to prospects in the right sequence, without overwhelming them.

Do you use content to generate leads and sell yourself on the web? If so, have you been able to find the perfect balance yet? 

If you’re a time-strapped consultant that needs a “quick-and-dirty” review to see if our offering might fit your practice, try this:

 1.  Review this page for our program overview. 

2.   Download and scan our Strategic Marketing Process eBook. Our tools will walk you through the “Key Concepts and Steps” section of each subject. 

3.  Spend 5 minutes reviewing sample tools.  Click on the document icons to open each. 

4. Email me and I’ll send you links to private screen cast demos that show the client area and explain how most consultants are using the tools.

Last Friday, Jim Stengel, the former Proctor & Gamble global marketing chief, left P&G and setup his own shop.

What is Mr. Stengel offering? Purpose-based marketing services.

Purpose-based marketing is a concept that shifts the focus from a product’s features to how it improves customers’ lives. P&G has successfully demonstrated the concept with its Pampers and Safeguard brands:

• Pampers focused on helping moms raise happy and healthy babies; and
• Commander Safeguard, a diarrhea-fighting mascot, dramatically improved soap sales in Pakistan.

While this approach might be difficult for B2C brands during an economic downturn, the trend, according to J. Walker Smith, president of market-research firm Yankelovich, is clear: Consumers want brands that have a purpose beyond materialism; they want brands that are more fulfilling.

For marketing consultants with B2C clients, you can apply this concept to your clients’ campaigns: Focus your messages on the ultimate goals of the consumer using the product, and attach your product to the story and content.

For B2B clients, this is more challenging. Many B2C trends apply to B2B markets, but since B2B brands have far more market touch-points, it’s tough to make an impact with a single campaign. If your client has an eight-figure advertising budget, go ahead and address it at the campaign level.

Since the majority of your clients don’t have these resources, try revamping your client’s brand strategy to establish them as a thought-leader in their field. Shape the brand to be more fulfilling to customer decision-makers, and to solve a greater problem. It could be as simple as shifting the brand focus to emphasize the overt benefits instead of features and functional benefits.

Content is a great way to reshape a B2B brand. Internet distribution makes this relatively simple and cost effective. Better yet, the content not only becomes a brand builder, but a lead-generator, and a catalyst for almost any integrated marketing campaign (which delivers buy-in from the sales manager).

If you’d like a step-by-step guide, check out The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott.

Every cloud has a silver lining. The current economic slowdown may be the impetus many executives need to start their own consulting practice. 

The U.S. Labor Department predicts that the employment rate for consultants will grow more than twice as fast as the average for all other disciplines. 

Some start a practice out of necessity. Others are chasing their dream career. But almost all find that creating a consulting practice involves more than just practicing an area of expertise. 

Sarah Needleman of the Wall Street Journal highlights 5 valuable steps to make the transition easier. Her first recommendation - know what you’re getting into - highlights an important point for all new consultants to understand: Most consultants spend 50% or more of their time marketing and selling. 

If you’re a new consultant, make sure to keep marketing after you land your first few projects. It can be challenging to develop and manage marketing campaigns continuously while delivering client work. One way to handle it is to understand and use a marketing process. You can also partner with other consultants to share leads, co-market and provide support services. 

Ms. Needleman’s final point is also something to keep at the top of your priority list: Create a succinct, 30 second elevator pitch. Most consultants rely on networking events and face-to-face meetings to gain new clients. The elevator pitch introduces your brand, your competitive positioning, and can start (or end) your selling process. Create it, test it, and refine it. It can make or break your launch.