Offline Marketing, CRAZY???

When I’m not spending time writing about Side Hustles, starting up a new side business, or hanging out with family and friends I actually have a daytime job 🫢

I’m a co-founder of a consultant agency and have for many years done consulting for 20+ clients in roles as developer, architect, and various management roles, everything from team manager to CIO. However, In the last few years, I have spent most of my time coaching our consultants, recruiting, and finding new clients and assignments for our consultants.

2023 and early 2024 have been tough years, there is general price pressure and fierce competition about all assignments, especially those assignments that are announced to multiple agencies. So far we still have managed to find assignments for all our consultants, even deploying almost 20 subcontractors and defending our price.

How is that possible?

In short, I think it comes down to relationships, meeting in person, and offline marketing.

Relationships and trustworthiness

All co-founders at our company come from a development background. We have many years of experience working out in the field and built a big network of relevant connections. Our background makes us stand out when we meet customers. A lot of salespersons may know the acronyms of the business but don’t really understand the needs of the customer. With the help of our background, we most of the time understand exactly what the customer needs and can match them with a really suitable consultant.

This makes it much easier for us to close the deal and get the right price.

Meeting in person

Being active online is great, by publishing content on for example LinkedIn, and sending sporadic catch-up messages you will be on top of their mind when a need arises, and hopefully, you will be the first person they contact, before going public.

Actually meeting over a cup of coffee, or lunch is unbeatable. It takes more time than just sending a message, but you will bound much more than just by meeting online.
And even better, when sitting down you can get more information about what’s going on at the client. Very often they start talking about some project where they have a problem or mention some different department at the company that is doing XYZ. By listening in and asking the right questions there is a pretty high chance that you will discover a few opportunities that your client hasn’t even thought about and then can connect you with the right person.

Offline marketing

At the time of the writing, we are getting close to Easter. Big holidays can be a perfect time to prepare some nice gifts to your current customers. And with gift, I don’t mean a personal gift to the buyer, more like a big basket of candy, really nicely decorated and with some promotional material and greeting from you. Instead of just sending over the gift with some delivery company, take the time to deliver it yourself and make sure that the appropriate person you would like to meet has time to meet you and take that coffee so you can find out what’s going on and then bring in some more business to your company.

Conclusion

With online marketing, you easily reach lots of potential customers, but most likely have a low hit rate. Offline marketing is the other way around, here you meet fewer customers, but your hit rate is much higher. And I think the hit rate ratio is much better for offline marketing when the times are tougher and competition is fierce.

Good luck closing that next deal for your side hustle or day job!