For management consultancies looking to add oomph and impact into their thought leadership

PR advisors Kelso Consulting are hosting a series of seminars and webinars for management consultancies on a range of business development, public relations, social media and thought leadership issues in the first half of 2018. 

We'd like to invite you do join us at them!

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 

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

In a few weeks time I'll be on a panel at a marketing summit where I will be discussing how to measure the return of investment for Thought Leadership activities.

It sounds an esoteric subject and immediately begs some specific questions like:"What is Thought Leadership?"; "What resources are being invested and how do I cost such inputs as non-billable time?"; and "What actually is the return I am looking for and how will I know when I achieve it?". 

Measuring the impact and the ROI is really fundamental, but too often businesses leave considering this until after the campaign, rather than early on as it is developed.

It's easy to start over-complicating things, so the key question management consultants and their marketing teams involved in Thought Leadership projects should be asking are:

"Successful marketing is all about storytelling" is an idea who's time has come... or a bit of a fad, depending on your perspective. Certainly the amount of articles about it seems to have risen exponentially in recent months.

It wasn't always thus. I remember an occasion some 12 years

At our recent webinar I shared a straight forward 6 step process for getting your management consultancy to the top of Google, which is a hugely valuable place for any business to be, including those professional practices selling high value services.

I have found there are two sorts of attitudes amongst management