August: A dead month for sports consultants?

It's August. The office is quiet. Nothing happens. Everyone you need to make a decision seems to be on holiday. If you're a consultant working in the sports industry, you might as well pack it all in for the month and go on holiday, maybe take in the athletics, the Ashes, some tennis or another of the many sports events that are happening worldwide.

Is that really true? It's certainly true that your customers may be on holiday or at a major sporting event. It may also be true that client work is limited and that you can't get any sales meetings booked in until well into September.

But August may represent the best time to get your house in order and put in some of the groundwork that will see your consulting business thrive in the next year. While getting your house in order might include getting your books up to date, or tidying the office, I'm thinking more of marketing.

Whatever the state of your order book, you can't really ever put too much effort into marketing, and the web continues to provide great opportunities to develop and execute a marketing campaign on a tight budget.

Social media, such as blogs and articles, are a form of marketing that help you to reach new audiences, build credibility and trust, and start building a pipeling of "qualified leads". That is, by the time you get to trying to sell to them, they are already engaged and interested in what you have to offer. The beauty of using the web as a marketing platform is that high-quality content that you put down now can be tweaked and improved, and serve you well for years to come.

So: What are you doing this August that will help your sports consulting business over the next 12 months or longer?

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Rob Robson
Co-founder, iStadia.com