SBA Consultation Insight
The Tagline She Loved Was Selling the Wrong Service
A freelance consultant loved her clever tagline so much she almost missed that it spoke to the wrong audience entirely. The business that would actually scale required a different message.
By Doug Mansfield | President, Mansfield Marketing
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The Tagline She Loved
I sat with a business owner recently who had built a clean, professional freelance consulting website. The design was intentional. The logo worked. The content demonstrated real skill.
Her tagline: "Coaching and editing for writers on a mission."
It was clever. It had personality. She was proud of it.
The problem: it described only one of two services she offered, and not the one most likely to grow her business.
Two Services That Do Not Match
As she described her work, I noticed she provided two fundamentally different services under the same umbrella.
The first: coaching and consulting. Working with individuals to improve their writing skills. Helping people become more confident writers. The benefit was education and personal development. Clients got better at something through the relationship.
The second: outsourced content. Organizations paying her to write things they did not have time or capacity to produce themselves. White papers. Case studies. Blog posts. The benefit was getting work done without hiring staff. Clients got deliverables, not education.
These two services target different buyers with different needs and different willingness to pay.
The Scalability Problem
Individual coaching relationships are hard to scale. Each new client requires building rapport, understanding their specific situation, adapting to their learning style. The time spent developing each relationship is significant compared to the billable work that follows.
A one-off resume rewrite takes substantial client communication for a relatively small project. Multiply that across dozens of individual clients and the overhead becomes exhausting.
Contrast that with an organization that needs ongoing content. One relationship, one set of preferences, one communication style. But the work continues month after month. The same time invested in relationship building generates vastly more revenue over time.
If the goal is stable, recurring income that scales, the outsourced content path offers better economics than coaching individuals one at a time.
The Hot Water Heater Principle
Nobody wakes up wanting to spend money on plumbing. What they want is their hot water heater fixed. The plumber is just the solution to that problem.
Similarly, nobody wants to pay for copywriting. What they want is whatever problem copywriting solves for them.
For organizations outsourcing content, the benefits might include:
- Thought leadership content without pulling staff from billable work
- Consistent blog updates without the overhead of hiring a writer
- White papers that generate sales leads
- Case studies that close deals
For individuals seeking coaching, the benefits look completely different:
- Confidence in their writing abilities
- Skills they carry forward beyond this one engagement
- A thesis or dissertation that actually gets approved
Same consultant. Same underlying skills. Completely different reasons anyone would write a check.
Split the Homepage
The solution is not to choose one service over the other. Not yet, anyway. At this early stage, turning away paying work would be premature.
The solution is to give each audience their own path. Right at the top of the homepage, two clear options. Coaching and consulting. Click here. Outsourced content solution. Click here.
Each path leads to messaging tailored to that specific buyer. The benefits they care about. The problems they are trying to solve. Examples relevant to their situation.
No more forcing every visitor to sort through information meant for someone else.
The 75/25 Blog Rule
She had written several high-quality blog posts. Hand-drawn illustrations made them memorable. The writing demonstrated exactly the skills she was selling.
But she had published them close together, and the content focused entirely on her services.
I suggested a different approach.
Three out of four blog posts should not sell services at all. Be a good neighbor. Curate useful content. Support local businesses. Promote causes you believe in. Share resources your target audience would find genuinely helpful.
One out of four posts can be the quality sales content. Give it room to breathe. Announce it in advance. Let it stand alone as an event rather than one item in a stack.
The mix matters because readers perceive content from service providers as biased. They know you are selling something. They filter accordingly. But when most of your content provides genuine value without asking for anything in return, the occasional sales message lands differently.
Blog Feeds Social Media
Every blog post becomes a social media post. The blog is the primary asset. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn simply distribute what the blog already contains.
This eliminates the burden of creating separate content for each platform. Write once, share everywhere. The blog builds search engine visibility while social channels extend reach.
When the homepage automatically displays the latest blog post, the website looks alive. Someone is home. The business is active. First-time visitors do not have to wonder if this is an abandoned project.
LinkedIn as the Path to Recurring Revenue
For service providers seeking organizational relationships, LinkedIn matters more than any other platform.
The people who authorize ongoing content contracts work at organizations. They have titles. They belong to industries. They show up on LinkedIn.
Sales Navigator allows filtering by geography, industry, company size, job function, and seniority level. Instead of manually searching for prospects, the platform delivers lists of people who match the criteria.
Then the work begins. Genuine connection requests. Not sales pitches. Not automated messages. Real conversations that treat digital networking with the same courtesy as meeting someone at a conference.
Publish content to the company page. Share from the personal profile. As the network grows, content reaches more people. The snowball builds slowly but compounds over time.
The Pricing Conversation
She had not asked about pricing, but I raised it anyway. New consultants almost universally undervalue their services.
The counterintuitive pattern: businesses often increase when prices go up. Higher prices signal higher value. Clients perceive quality differently based on what they pay.
White papers specifically command premium rates because they sit closer to revenue. Organizations use them as lead generation tools. Download this white paper, enter your contact information. The white paper feeds the sales pipeline directly.
That proximity to money changes what the work is worth. A blog post fills space. A white paper generates leads that close deals. The second justifies significantly higher investment.
The Delicate Balance
She mentioned one complication. Her current employer operated in the same professional network where she would find clients. Moving too aggressively could create awkwardness while she still held the day job.
Fair enough. The strategy does not require burning bridges. Build the foundation now. Optimize the website. Develop the blog. Grow the LinkedIn network. When the time comes to transition, the infrastructure exists.
The consulting approach works well for people uncomfortable with aggressive sales. Be genuinely helpful. Point people in the right direction even when that direction is not hiring you. Build relationships based on actually caring whether the other person succeeds.
Most cold outreach fails because recipients recognize the pitch immediately. Ignore. Delete. Next.
Connection requests that lead with genuine interest in the other person feel different. They get responses. They start conversations. Some of those conversations eventually become business.
