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Solutions Marketing for Consulting Services

Marketing for consulting services typically consists of long presentations that feature dense PowerPoint slides illustrating a firm’s philosophy, frameworks, and methodologies. What can be lost on clients are the solutions and benefits that will help move their business forward. The solutions marketing brochure fills the gap.
 
A solutions marketing brochure is not designed to explain all of the things you offer, your entire process, or your complete thinking about an industry. Rather, it is designed to show the client what they get and why you are the best ones to provide it to them. Brochures are sales tools.

Professional Services Brochure
Collin provides an overview of a method developed by chief marketing officer George Ravich, president of Ravco Marketing. George is a master of making professional services into marketable products and solutions. Our work on a series of brochures for technology consultancy Synechron crystallized our method of brochure copywriting.

Why

  • Captures interest and prompts buyer engagement.

Use Cases

  • Follow up to a sales presentation sent by email, posted on websites, or ideally as a printed piece left behind after an in-person meeting.
  • Detail the solutions and benefits that a specific service provides to clients.
  • Show how your firm makes a client’s business work better.

Method

Focus on the audience for the service: who they are, what level in the organization, and what problems you think they have. Write these content elements:

A short problem statement. George always instilled in us that the potential clients understood the problem better than we do. Our brochures did not tell the client what they needed.
 
What we provide. State clearly what you are selling to the client. Focus on a specific service, such as Cloud Capabilities Assessment, Payment Card Program Management, or Anti-Money Laundering Compliance.
 
Why we are different. Provide points of differentiation: the results you can provide to clients that other firms cannot.
 
Benefits to the clients. These are direct statements of what a customer gets, such as reduced costs. Ideally, each statement will be quantified in some meaningful way.
 
Proof. Short case studies and examples are woven into the copy, set off in a sidebar, or used as pull-out quotes.
 
Features and technologies supported. List them at the end or set them off in a sidebar. These details support the sales case. They are not the show and really not what you are selling. If possible, focus on what your firm does well and better than competing firms.

For an overview of a professional services campaign that used this method, see our Synechron Blockchain Now case study.

Contact us if you’re interested in our services at collin@canrightcommunications.com

Communications Conversations: June 13 – June 17

Random Notes on Technology and Marketing

This week we focus on how to deliver information and content to stakeholders in a clear, concise format. The following methods detail how we transform the raw material of interviews and discussions into concise, easy-to-understand documents.

Knowledge Briefs

This week Jess describes how to give stakeholders the information they need in a simple, clear format.

Why

  • Breaking down concepts for the layperson helps business professionals understand the importance of technical work.

Use Cases

  • Pitch decks, explainers, and other internal communications

Method

  • Conduct research to get a clear technical understanding of the subject matter. Using a journalistic framework (who, what, where, when, why, how), break it down into pieces that make concepts simple to understand no matter the expertise of the reader. Aiming for broad readability without talking down, these briefs help boil down technical speak for non-technical audiences.

Creating a Digital Knowledge Base 

Ryan shows how our digital content creation strategy helps stakeholders benefit from a business and organizational standpoint.

Why

  • Give the team content in a digital format that is searchable, filterable, and acts as a knowledge base. Improving productivity and reducing training time.

Use Cases

  • Write new help content and revamp legacy content to fit an organization’s digital transformation. Making information more accessible to the end-user.

Method

  • Determine the audience which can include internal, existing customers, and new customers.
  • Plan for new content to be written into the digital knowledge base.
  • Add resource pages based off of the aspects the audience wants to learn in relation to products and organization. 
  • Create visuals in the content to clarify the message.
  • Make sure the site is easy to navigate.
  • Customize content based on the topic to help the end-user better grasp the concepts.

Communications Conversations is a weekly recap of the solutions and themes we’ve been working on. At Canright Communications, we’ve spent decades helping clients market and sell their ideas, innovations, products, and solutions through clear technical communications and marketing writing.  

Contact us if you’re interested in our services at collin@canrightcommunications.com

API Marketing Strategy and Tactics

APIs can provide a competitive advantage. They enable businesses to provide new solutions by making it easy for developers a way to incorporate your software’s capabilities into theirs.

As the marketplace for API publishers continues to expand, with vast libraries of tools available to would-be developers from all over the world, developing a comprehensive marketing strategy is core to standing out.

While having the best API offering possible and striving for product excellence is important, it isn’t enough to win in the marketplace. Discoverability is key, along with a clear plan to build associations and differentiations with your competition every step of the way. 

List in API Directories

The most straightforward way to make sure that your product is visible to customers is to make sure it’s on store shelves.  Online API directories are a ubiquitous part of the marketplace for developers, and usually include search functionality that helps people narrow down the best API for their needs.

Listing capabilities vary by directory, but all of them include keyword functionality – it’s important that you provide as much information about your API as possible in the space provided to maximize results.

Some of the most popular directories include:

Tailor Content to Client Business Needs

No matter what your product is, your clients are looking for a business with a clear expertise, and clear ideas for just how best to use what you’ve built.

Knowledge articles and blogs offer a natural entry point for customers to discover your product through search engines, providing answers that naturally point the way towards your API as the best solution for their business problems.

You can also tailor your content to the niche audience that best fits your product through participation in Q&A sites like Stack Exchange, Quora, and Stack Overflow.

Whatever your strategy, it’s important to remember that tailored content is marketing, but it’s not an advertising pitch – references to the product should be restrained, only brought up where appropriate, with the general focus centered on providing information. Nothing undermines your credibility as an expert like coming across too much like a commercial.

Above all, engagement is key in this space; making voices available to answer questions that arise is the most solid way to engage the developer community and build trust with your customers.

Focus on the Audience

Business. You’re proud of the work you’ve done, and it’s tempting to fill your product marketing with technical information about how you built your API and how it works – but this kind of data can come across like a foreign language to the business people who make the purchasing decisions around your product.

As a primary strategy, that complexity should be made compelling to a lay audience – broken down into simpler terms with a clear focus on the capabilities and solutions your API can bring to a business, not the jargon.  It’s a simple concept, but easy to lose sight of:  focus on what your API does, not how it works.

Know your API’s unique selling position: what makes it distinct from the competition,  and addressing potential objections before your customers can even mention them.

Developers. Software developers are unlikely to be the audience that makes the purchasing decision for a particular API – but they are the ones who are going to be using it. Focusing some of your marketing content for them, with the kind of technical information they need, is vital to give them reasons to advocate for your solution above others.

Provide Documentation

Your API needs to be as simple for developers to utilize as possible if it’s going to stand out in the marketplace. Comprehensive documentation, traditionally through collaborative spaces like Confluence or various wiki software, is key to driving adoption.

Publishing and promoting new API documentation can even be a great way to push awareness of a new offering in the space.

Standards should be focused on following OpenAPI specifications – documentation that’s both human- and machine-readable. From there, it’s just a matter of covering the relevant territory; from authentication, to error handling, and any other situations that developers using your product are likely to run into.

To see how Canright has helped clients with API marketing materials, see Getting Started with the Envestnet | Yodlee Platform API – for Non-Coders. For a basic introduction to APIs, what they do and how they work, see Bridging the Gap.

New Horizons in Cryptocurrency

What’s on the horizon for cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies? It’s a question on a lot of people’s minds, and there’s a potential for more than a good profit margin for financial professionals who come to the right answers: a potential paradigm shift in payments, investing, and the way we use the internet itself could be on the line.

For its April talk, the Chicago Payments Forum consulted an expert on this subject – Lamont Black, a Ph.D. Associate Professor of Finance in the Driehaus College of Business at DePaul University in Chicago. Black has become something of a regular fixture for a wide range of financial institutions in recent years, with a particular focus and expertise in all things crypto.

Black suggests that a real understanding of what’s next for crypto is built around an understanding of what cryptocurrency is – a more complicated question than it may seem at first blush. He suggests three major subject areas: cryptocurrency as money, as an asset, and as a platform for application development.

“The thing about crypto as it relates to money is that the original idea of Bitcoin was as digital currency, peer-to-peer electronic cash,” Black said. “I’d like to point out we’ve transitioned from physical cash to electronic payments, but it’s still heavily intermediated. What would it look like to have purely digital cash that is peer-to-peer?”

Some institutions have made leaps in this area – payments giants Visa and Mastercard are rolling out a program to support converting crypto into fiat currencies – but Bitcoin’s extreme volatility in particular still makes it a dicey prospect for wider adoption, and one that almost always relies on that intermediary step of conversion to a more common fiat currency like the U.S. Dollar.

But other concerns about crypto, or that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value? Increasingly less of a concern for financial professionals, suggests Black:

“I would argue no money has intrinsic value, so bitcoin being digital has no real bearing on value,” Black said. “The U.S. Dollar and the Fed… I think people are starting to have a few doubts about the dollar as it relates to inflation. You start showing pictures of the CPI index and inflation over the last 40 years, and you start to show, whoa, we are now 7.9% inflation. That’s going back all the way to the 1980s since we’ve seen numbers like that. Where is this headed? Could we wind up in stagflation?

“This is a great opportunity to raise questions about the central bank model. Central banks manage fiat currency, but there are times with monetary stimulus that some of that can start to get out of hand.”

An area of arguably more interest for financial institutions, in particular, is looking at cryptocurrencies as an asset class – and looking beyond bitcoin into Ethereum applications and NFTs.

“Understanding the technology in an Ethereum-based NFT, the asset itself is unique,” Black said. 

“It’s not just about cool pictures or fads, but a digital record of ownership. This whole wave we’re seeing of the creator economy using NFTs, using these digital platforms, to provide proof of ownership, is super interesting, and can be way more than just cryptocurrency.”

The potential for solving the problem of digital scarcity, and creating real ownership, would be a major feather in the cap for the creator economy, though major problems of fraud in the space will have to be addressed before that potential can truly be realized.

But perhaps the most potentially transformational aspects of cryptocurrency aren’t about crypto at all, but about the underlying blockchain technologies powered by currencies like Ethereum, with their programmable capabilities and the platforms they could empower.

“Even things like Metaverse and Web3, I think these are partly buzzwords, but also potentially watershed moments we’re seeing in our generation,” Black said. “As the economy digitizes, what does it look like to build these digitally native economies, like Second Life? This is not Facebook rebranding as Meta, this is Metaverse built on blockchain. Those are different things.”

And as Web3 continues to develop, Black argues that it could have effects far beyond the financial, and perhaps help us as a society reclaim that thing that seems almost entirely forgotten in an age of digital surveillance.

“We talk about how the internet is a system of data collection, data monetization, and the tech giants starting through personalized advertising are collecting information about you,” Black said. “I think the narrative around privacy used to be, ‘if you want privacy you must be a criminal.’ Privacy, in the national dialogue, is starting to emerge as something that we value. A lot of the internet is making money off of observing your behavior. If we can start to use that cryptographic technology to create a different system for browsing, for using decentralized applications using private keys, I think this could be a real paradigm shift where it’s no longer just transferring value through the internet, but how we use the internet.”

It’s a broad topic, but it’s not hard to see why it’s exciting so many professionals. As we continue to accelerate into a digital world – or maybe even a Metaversal world – the potential applications will only continue to balloon out. In many ways, today’s pioneers are still just scratching the surface.