Most consultants and professional services providers face the same career-halting, business-diminishing truth: Would-be clients can’t differentiate between you and the competition.
They try to overcome this through:
- More and more networking
- Begging friends, colleagues and relatives for introductions
- Working Centers of Influence for more referrals
This can work! But only for a while. Because none of these activities scales, and at some point, you reach the end of your network. When this happens, and you feel growth stagnating, it’s time to embrace digital marketing and create one-to-many conversations. The key is to optimize your budget by being laser-focused on the right audience.
Thought leadership is the only professional services marketing that matters
When a business leader is looking for an expert to help them solve a problem, they may turn to friends and colleagues for referrals, but they will also look online, and increasingly in AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini—it’s simply how we do our research now.
Even if they hear about you at a networking event, they’re going to do their homework. Every buyer is skeptical. No buyer wants to make a mistake.
Thought leadership—doing your thinking in public—is how you make them feel comfortable that you know your stuff. The thought leadership you create and publish helps future clients navigate their uncertainty by demonstrating how you and your firm think and solve problems.
The “product” a professional services firm sells is its thinking. Which means your marketing should showcase that product in public. It’s better than sponsoring lunch at every penny-ante chamber of commerce.
What makes an expert unignorable
Unignorable Experts are frequent publishers on their firm’s blog and on LinkedIn. They speak at industry events. They do it with both volume and depth and consequently are well known, admired, sometimes envied by their peers and frequently copied. And when it’s time for someone to buy the services your firm offers, that Unignorable Expert is likely to be on the short list.
Before we dive into this, an important note: “unignorable” does not mean “obnoxious.” The most effective thought leadership treats the audience with respect. Remember, your goal is to make people want to work with you—not too many people like working with assholes.
Unignorable Experts tend to have these specific attributes—these are learned behaviors, so if you or the subject matter experts you’re looking to promote don’t check all of these boxes, that’s okay.
- Intellectual curiosity
- Deep focus
- Lateral thinking
- The courage to be different
Intellectual curiosity means you consume a lot of ideas, not just about work but about news, culture, sports—whatever. You’re constantly up for learning new things. You read voraciously, ask a lot of questions and your brain stays switched on.
Deep focus typically requires years of experience. There comes a point when you realize you’ve spent a ton of time in a very specific domain for a considerable amount of time, and there’s virtually nothing you haven’t seen. You can quickly identify situations, instinctively know the downstream impacts of different solutions and can guide your clients accordingly. Anyone can have a hot take. Unignorable Experts go three levels deeper than everyone else and come back with insights that are actually useful.
Lateral thinking is marrying your intellectual curiosity to your deep focus. It’s the ability to borrow ideas from adjacent fields and apply them to your own. The consultant who reads history, psychology and military strategy alongside the trade press is going to have more interesting things to say than the one who only reads the trade press.
The courage to be different is what makes you stand out. You have to be willing to stand up for an idea, even if you know it’s going to spark disagreement. “Safe thought leadership” isn’t thought leadership at all; it’s more like thought followership. And it’s likely to be ignored. Unignorable Experts say true things that other people are afraid to say. They take positions. They’re occasionally wrong in public—and that’s okay, because it proves they’re actually thinking and willing to take action.
How to get started
The first thing you need to do is find your niche. Think about what lies in the center of the Venn diagram of where your expertise lies and what your clients care about. Identify two to three topics, your particular points of view on them, and stay disciplined around these ideas. Your goal is to become known for this.
Develop a simple plan to create and distribute thought leadership content. Find a balance between a level of activity that is sustainable and will also get noticed by your future clients.
And launch.
Make it as good as you can, but don’t try to make it perfect. The perfect plan that never gets executed does you no good. Yes, you might make mistakes. Yes, your thoughts could turn out to be wrong 5 years from now. But being a leader of any kind demands courage, and thought leadership is no different.
Over time, you will develop a reputation for expertise, and when your ideal client needs what you sell, your name is already in their head—and your thinking is already in their feed.
That’s what makes an expert unignorable.