Last week I said that pretty much any marketing technique that's “been around the block” a while can work. It's a matter of finding a technique that fits with you, your clients, your skills, and the kind of things you want to do.

Here's a simple question that will help narrow down your options.

Do you tend to work with a small number of very high-value clients? For example, a consultant working with 2 or 3 clients a year, some perhaps paying a six-figure sum or more per engagement. 

Or do you work with a larger number of clients each paying a smaller amount? For example, a coach working with a few dozen or so clients on an ongoing basis. Or like me, you might run a membership program with potentially hundreds of members.

If you're in the former situation it means two things:

1. Because each engagement is big, you'll have to build a really strong relationship with your prospective client to win it. Potentially talking to many people in the client organisation many times and maybe going through a formal procurement process.

2. Because each engagement is big, you can afford to spend more time winning each one because of the high ROI you get if you win.

So putting those together implies you need to really focus and target a small number of potential clients and put a lot of personal effort into winning each engagement. Spread yourself too thin and you won't win any of them.

That means that the sort of marketing that will work best for you will be very targeted. Things like referrals, working your personal network. Contacting high-value potential clients and offering to do a presentation for them on trends in their industry.

And your follow-up will often be quite manually-driven and personalised.

By contrast, if you work with a large number of clients every year, it means you need your marketing to reach much broader. And you can't afford to invest so much of your time per potential client on each opportunity.

That means we're talking much more automated or leveraged marketing – at least initially until an opportunity becomes likely to close.

That might mean doing presentations at industry conferences. Using online advertising leading people to a lead magnet and nurture emails. Or using content marketing or SEO to get people to that lead magnet.

And your follow-up is much more likely to be automated – email marketing being the usual suspect.

Quite a different strategy.

And all based on whether you work with a large number of clients each year (one-to-many) or a small number (one-to-few).

Worth thinking about. Because if you get it wrong you'll either spend way too much time and money personally nurturing a small number of potential clients when really you need a much bigger number.

Or you'll use mass-market techniques to try to win clients that need a personal touch and you won't get anywhere near enough to winning them.