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demand generation consulting

Demand Generation Consulting: How Consultants Create Demand Generation Machines

By Andrei Zinkevich
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Are you looking to create a “demand-generation machine” for your consulting business so that you can fill your pipeline full of high-quality buyers?

Demand generation is a specific marketing strategy that looks to create awareness and interest in your firm’s services.

Consider this: we started Fullfunnel.io as an unknown brand back in Sep 2020.

Since then, we’ve built a full-funnel demand generation program that’s generated:

  • 200+ sales-qualified, 5-figure opportunities
  • LinkedIn following 60K followers
  • 14K newsletter subscribers
  • 10K+ subscribers for our online events
  • Speaking gigs at 20+ events & podcasts
  • Publications in CXL, Marketing Profs, Terminus

demand generation consulting calendar

These results have established us as go-to-experts in full-funnel account-based marketing.

In this article, I’ll share how a team of 2 produces more content than most B2B companies with 15+ person marketing teams — and how you can do the same in your consulting business.

1. Do Evergreen Customer Research

The key to creating content that resonates is ensuring it’s based upon a deep understanding of your ideal consulting clients.

The best approach to doing this customer research is to incorporate it into your revenue operations.

Here are 3 processes that will help you do consistent and effective research on your ideal clients:

  1. After a successful sale, ask about the buying triggers, challenges and goals, the buying committee, purchase criteria, and why they chose you.
  2. After the successful implementation, ask about the value, benefits, and experience.
  3. During events and social engagement, chat with target buyers about top-of-mind topics, goals, and challenges.

The key to creating content that resonates is ensuring it’s based upon a deep understanding of your ideal consulting clients.

2. Excel At One Channel

At FullFunnel, our main channel is LinkedIn. It drives most of our inbound pipeline.

Why?

LinkedIn makes it easy to get immediate feedback and create two-way conversations with B2B buyers. Using LinkedIn, we get tremendous insight into the minds of our buyers. Thus, it’s an excellent platform for developing new businesses.

According to a recent study by Hinge Marketing, LinkedIn is by far the best marketing channel in the professional services space. As a consultant, chances are it’s where you should focus your marketing efforts.

By focusing on LinkedIn, we know what topics to dive into during our in-depth articles and monthly webinars.

3. Build A Demand Generation Calendar

We’re fully committed to a calendar of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual marketing activities.

To do this, we focus on operationalization:

  • Invest 80% of our effort into proven channels and content formats and 20% in experimenting with new ones.
  • Prioritize delivery (and gradual improvement), instead of wasting time obsessing over and perfecting individual actions.

Creating an editorial calendar for your marketing activities will help you build a “marketing habit” and be consistent in your marketing efforts.

4. Create Multichannel Distribution

When we speak with potential clients, we want them to say “I see you guys everywhere.”

Here is what our content repurposing and distribution process looks like:

LinkedIn?Newsletter ->Webinars?Articles?LinkedIn?Trenches – B2B marketing community?Newsletter -> Live podcasts?LinkedIn?The Trenches -> Online summit ? LinkedIn?The Trenches?Newsletter.

We call it a content flywheel. And it’s the driving force of our demand generation engine.

In the next section, I’ll break down the 9 elements of the content flywheel.

LinkedIn is by far the best marketing channel in the professional services space. As a consultant, chances are it’s where you should focus your marketing efforts.

9 Elements Of The Content Flywheel

consulting content flywheel

1. Map Of Informational Needs (MOIN)

The MOIN is a fundamental document we use to collect questions our customers have at different stages of their buyer journey.

We collect and add these questions to three core content clusters: GTM strategy, ABM, and demand generation.

Here are the sources of said questions:

  • Discovery calls and inquiries
  • Questions in the communities
  • Questions in comments to our content and thought leaders
  • Questions we get on our podcast and webinars

By collecting this information, you’ll understand your buyers and their needs as much as they understand themselves, giving you a massive advantage in your communications.

2. Tactical Social Posts

We share detailed answers in a how-to or step-by-step format on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Every post is supplied with a visual infographic of a framework.

Example:

Tactical social posts are key to getting your thought leadership in front of your ideal clients and providing them with valuable insight.

3. Detailed Overview Of A Specific Topic On The Podcast

When a post gets significant engagement (questions and feedback in comments and DMs), we plan a weekly new Full-Funnel live episode.

On the podcast, we share more details and examples. And we enable our community to ask any additional questions.

Everybody from our community can join and ask questions live.

These podcasts are a fantastic way to engage with the community and provide them with more value on the topic.

4. Newsletter Repurposing

We treat our Full-Funnel Insider newsletter as a microblog.

We combine the best posts about a specific topic and send them as a mini blog post in our newsletter.

It’s easy to create and helps us maintain top-of-mind awareness with our audience.

5. Cluster Comprehensive Webinars

The next step is webinars where we share comprehensive frameworks.

Example: ABM strategy 2.0

Through these webinars, our more engaged potential buyers get a taste of our service. By this point, they’re becoming warmer leads.

6. In-Depth Blog Posts

We use our webinars, podcast episodes, newsletters, and social posts to create comprehensive in-depth articles published on our blog.

These posts not only contain our insights and expertise but also examples and stories from guests of our podcast.

With these posts, we aim to give away everything we know on a particular topic.

7. Content Distribution

We add every newly published guide to the content distribution calendar that includes a cadence of promotional activities:

  • Social
  • Communities
  • Newsletter
  • Manual distribution to target accounts.

This creates a spike in website traffic, backlinks, and brand mentions.

We don’t overwhelm our audience by posting about the same piece of content every single day. Instead, we proactively distribute it in the first 2 weeks after publishing it.

Later on, we promote it selectively among strategic accounts.

8. Frameworks As A Part Of The Buyer Enablement Program

We add key frameworks to the content hubs we share with prospects. These frameworks help them a sense of how to build an account-based marketing motion step by step.

Our buyers see a practical solution instead of high-level advice they don’t get.

Through these frameworks, our buyers see a practical solution instead of high-level advice they don’t yet understand.

9. Manual Distribution To Target Accounts

Whenever we have a non-sales conversation with a company that fits our ideal client profile, we try to identify where they are in their account-based marketing journey.

Following that, we share practical frameworks and suggest a call in case they have questions about implementation.

If you consider replicating our process, here are 8 best practices to keep in mind:

  1. Have a long-term mindset and support from executives.
  2. Create alignment between marketing and sales.
  3. Enlist someone to own the project.
  4. Be consistent.
  5. Start small and add demand activities one by one.
  6. Define content creators and in-house experts.
  7. Build a diversified content strategy.
  8. Use demand capturing and activation playbooks.

Demand Gen Engine For Consultants: Summary

If you want to build a demand generation engine in your consulting business, follow these 4 high-level steps:

  1. Understand your buyers’ journey and the questions they have at different stages. Especially the questions when they are not buying.
  2. Provide comprehensive answers on social media.
  3. Repurpose the best pieces of content and leverage them in other demand generation activities: blog, podcast, newsletter, and webinars.
  4. Create a content distribution process.

Your pipeline will thank you later!


andrei zinkevichAndrei Zinkevich is co-founder of Fullfunnel.io, ABM, and full-funnel marketing for B2B tech companies with high ACV and long sales cycles. Andrei also hosts a weekly Full-Funnel Marketing Live Podcast and Full-Funnel Insider newsletter.

 

 

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