How to Build a Compelling Content Strategy for Your Consulting Firm

Quality content has solidified itself as a key ingredient in today’s marketing mix. In fact, marketers rank developing and refining their content strategy as their top priority of any content initiative.

An effective content strategy will help your brand to establish trust, drive users to convert, and deliver valuable information to the right users at the right time.

However, content marketing in the consulting industry has its challenges. Before being able to generate leads, consulting firms must gain the trust of a prospect. In order to build this trust, your content must tap into the needs of your audience and demonstrate your firm’s expertise. Once your audience grows accustomed to the valuable content you share, they will start to engage with your brand and lean on your consulting expertise.

To tap into these opportunities, apply the following best practices to your consulting firm’s content strategy.

Setting It Up

Cater to Personas

The content you produce won’t matter if it doesn’t strike a chord with your target audience. Therefore, craft content that caters to your unique set of current and prospective clients and their needs. Categorize your audience into personas and build a template to cover every persona type and their common behaviors. For instance, you can group your personas based on their daily routines or the pain points they have when looking for a consulting service. By focusing on your personas throughout your content strategy, your content will mirror the needs of your ideal leads.

Follow the Client Journey

Once you have defined personas, you can structure your content around your client journey. Start this process by creating a journey map, which visually represents the path an individual takes toward conversion – from stranger to client. Once this process is mapped out, you can start to generate content for each journey stage. For instance, during the awareness stage, the client is usually doing research to better understand or define their problem. By providing content such as blog posts, articles and educational videos, you’ll cater to their needs during that stage.

Use Third-Party Research

Thorough research will enable you to decode your audiences’ pressing concerns that are leading them to seek out consulting. It can also determine valuable insights, including traffic sources, common search terms, and a competitive analysis. Your firm can utilize discussion groups, social media, and Google Analytics to dive into this data. By gaining this insight, you can use historical data to guide your future content strategy.

You can also use LinkedIn to mine information for your content initiatives. LinkedIn groups are a goldmine for identifying content gaps in your industry, as well as trending topics. By joining groups that are highly relevant to your industry, you will be able to generate topical ideas, understand industry trends, and put your brand at the forefront of prospects’ minds (and feeds). The information found in your third-party research can work to guide the content you produce, ultimately optimizing your content strategy.