Whether your consulting business is new or established, your marketing campaign centers around your expertise and your credibility. Name recognition doesn’t hurt, either.
Let’s look at a powerful way to achieve all three: blogging for consulting services.
Blogging as an inbound educational tool can drive potential clients to your website again and again. More than achieving mere name recognition, you wind up lending credibility to your claim of expertise. How? By blogging about the lessons learned from the latest innovations, which shouts to the world that:
- you stay on top of what’s current, and
- you are capable of translating business lessons from one company and applying those lessons to a different company—even one with a different mission.
Here’s a sample inbound educational blog post that will encourage potential clients to return to your website repeatedly.
We’ve all read about innovative products that are costly to develop. Invariably, those costs are passed on to customers in the form of high-priced products.
It turns out, however, that product innovations need not always be expensive either to develop or to purchase. In fact, for some specific product ecosystems, the only way to succeed is to develop and launch inexpensively.
The mission of Manu Prakash’s lab at Stanford University is democratizing science. That mission led them to develop their Foldscope, a $1 paper microscope whose power is “equal to the power of a desktop instrument costing $1,000,” according to Bloomberg’s Businessweek. It’s a stellar example of an inexpensive and exciting product.
Getting To The Launch Date
Ideas for inexpensive innovations often rely on the same basic innovation processes as their more expensive counterparts:
- ask the right questions,
- consider the ecosystem,
- test and retest, and
- get customer feedback
Prakash, a biophysicist, does fieldwork in places such as Thailand. “‘We ship research equipment and hope it’ll survive,’” he says in Businessweek. Field scientists like him lug the heavy, fragile, and costly equipment from field site to field site.
Prakash asked himself whether a light-weight and low-cost alternative could be possible.
The result? A “pocket-sized paper microscope made from a single sheet of folded paper, a pair of lenses, and an LED” with modular, interchangeable parts—the perfect instrument for the ecosystem in which field scientists work.
But that’s not all.
The Foldscope’s other significant benefit? The role it is poised to play in disease prevention: “‘Try explaining to a kid who has never seen anything microscopic why he should wash his hands,’” says Prakash in the Businessweek article. “‘A microscope completely changes the dialogue of sanitation.’”
With its ease, convenience, and unbeatable cost of about $1 per Foldscope, the product is likely to have a healthy impact on the fields of disease prevention and health education.
Once Prakash and his team had designed and developed a workable product, as Businessweek reports, they raised grant funds for beta-testing: they sent out 10,000 Foldscopes to field scientists chosen on the basis of pre-submitted scientific research questions.
The Foldscope Team reports that the beta-testing phase is now over. They now will turn to crowdsourcing for customer feedback: “We will be choosing 10,000 people who would like to test the microscopes in a variety of settings and help us generate an open source biology/microscopy field manual written by people from all walks of life.”
Foldscope is a textbook model for an inexpensive yet innovative product concept and design that takes into account the new idea’s ecosystem, and incorporates product testing followed by real user feedback. The opportunity to offer a product that has a positive impact on the quality of many people’s lives helps, too.
Inbound educational blogs have the ability to inspire a large readership. Who wouldn’t want to hire a consultant like that?
At BlogMutt, talented writers can help showcase your talent for executive coaching, business consulting, and much more, through strategically crafted blogs that help you achieve your own business mission.
Submit the form below to see some similar samples to consulting services or hear more about how to attract new clients with inbound educational blogging.
