Kelso Consulting has a busy schedule of webinars for 2019 to help management consultants build the strongest possible reputation.

Topics include sorting out your thought leadership programme, ensuring you are at the top of Google and generating credibility-building national media coverage.

It starts in January with one on sorting out your communications strategy... after all, Sun Tzu

Most consultancy owners implicitly know that being recognised as an expert in a particular area is vital for their professional standing and winning new clients.

This was strongly supported by recent research by professors Tim Morris and Will Harvey (Said Business School, Oxford and University of Exeter Business School respectively) who found thought leadership activity

 FT and MCA deliver twin accolades for Kelso management consultancy client Simon-Kucher

What you need to know for ensuring a successful first encounter for your consultancy with the media in 2018

Many management consultancy firms are regularly in the media, whether the national newspapers or the sector media read by the directors of their target industries.

Many also avoid it, whether through apprehension about how to get started or fear that the media's power will somehow backfire.

If your consultancy is looking to harness the power of the media in 2018 to build a strong brand and generate leads, make sure you read our PR for Newbies guide that recently appeared in Professional Marketing magazine.

It covers all the things that you need to know to ensure a great outcome, but 

Nine signs your thought leadership campaign will go wrong.. and how to sort it out

Your management consultancy is ambitious.  It sees an opportunity and wants to stand out as the go-to firm.  You want clients and prospects to recognise you as experts.

But standing out in a crowded market is difficult, so what could be better than an attention-grabbing "thought leadership" initiative?  After all, market leaders like Accenture, Clifford Chance, McKinsey and PwC do lots of it,

It's time for management consultancies to be measuring the return on investment from their marketing 

Gauging the return on investment of marketing activity is a fundamentally important metric for management consultancies looking to grow, yet many we meet struggle to know whether the  time and money spent on marketing produces an effective return.

Many only measure short term metrics 

New research reveals how to change a management consultancy's reputation

I took part in an interesting discussion last week hosted by the Management Consultancies Association where professors Tim Morris and Will Harvey (Said Business School, Oxford and University of Exeter Business School respectively) presented new research they've been doing into how management consultancies protect and improve their brand.

To jump to their conclusions, the three ways their in-depth research showed as effective in changing (i.e. improving or shifting) a management consultancy's brand are:

1. Focusing on the partners to ensure the experience every client and prospect has are as close as humanly as possible to the new perception

I used to strongly advocate management consultants putting effort into their profile, building up their network and using LinkedIn for communicating. It seemed on the verge of turning into a really handy mini-CRM for social selling.

But no more, all the useful functionality has disappeared without notice or warning.

Some of the important disappearances include:

• Ability to categorise your contacts into groups - gone!
• Ability to send messages