The number of consulting companies has grown dramatically in recent years and their turnover in France exceeded 4 billion euros in 2016. The consulting sector includes a wide variety of areas of expertise, from St. Pierre and Miquelon Email List to strategy, including legal but also IT services. Despite this obvious growth, the consulting sector remains fragile and development is often stimulated by the financial sector, risk management and IT security. Consulting market situation. Consulting is currently dominated by the Big Four (Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC), these large global groups. However, today we are seeing an increasingly obvious trend: SMEs, VSEs and startups prefer to entrust their missions to smaller, more specialized and more accessible consulting companies.
This proliferation of consulting firms and IT services companies means that the competition is getting tougher and the various players must find innovative ways to stand out in their sector, by promoting the specificity of their expertise . You can also call on an agency to frame your development strategy and start on a healthy and solid foundation from the start . It is a long-term investment that will allow you to sustain your growth.
What are the challenges of consulting companies?
To survive in the vast jungle of consulting services available today, companies must be able to keep pace with the news and constantly renew themselves. Their main objectives are to recruit new customers and employees , but also to retain and develop them . The inbound marketing is the perfect answer to the needs of consulting company. Why ? Because for most French business council, the digital transformation remains a goal and not a reality . This means that they are still based on traditional actions in terms of recruiting customers, in particular the network, cold-calling and mass emailing prospecting and events. The same goes for talent recruitment, which relies on expensive and time-consuming processes such as hunting and partnerships with schools.
When you call on support, you will have as many different contacts as you have tools. It is therefore difficult to create a relationship and to exchange views on the basis of a history of the problems encountered, for example. If the problem involves two tools, the situation becomes even more complicated. Be patient and prepare to have to deal with your problem on your own. The marketing automation platforms overall are primarily tools to facilitate the implementation of Inbound Marketing strategy performance. It is quite possible that your need is very specific and not global. In this case, choose a more suitable solution.
1. Facilitated promotion of complex services
No need to explain it to you, selling a consultation is much more difficult than selling a product or service in B2C mode. The services offered by consulting companies are generally expensive products that have a big impact on the success of their clients, businesses of all sizes looking to improve some aspect of their organization.
The clients of consulting companies must therefore have 100% confidence in the know-how of the service provider. For a lead to turn into a customer and proceed with the purchase of a service, he must be sure that it is the most suited to his needs and that the company offering it is truly an expert in the field.
The heart of the inbound strategy is represented by content and personalization. By adopting an inbound marketing strategy, companies are led to define in detail the profiles of the customers they wish to target, the famous “buyer personas” , and to create content adapted to each of them.
Content focused on themes of interest to buyer personas (such as ebooks, analysis reports, editorial content) will attract quality leads to the company’s site . These can then be fed with content even more specific to their needs (webinars, comparative white papers, expert advice or case studies), educated and then transformed into loyal customers .
