Many consultants, trainers, and professional coaches seem to be stumped on where to get quality content for their online marketing campaigns. In reality, the content isn’t the real problem. Given the nature of training and consulting literally everything being offered is valuable content. The real problem is organizing the material to make a cohesive online campaign. Training and consulting businesses have a wealth of valuable data to leverage for online marketing but it needs to be efficiently managed to make an effective online marketing campaign.

The first step in gathering content is to choose an area of focus. Is there a particular problem, tactic, or product/service that the campaign will focus on? Is the series of email designed for a particular segment of your audience? Identify the goal of a campaign and then group all the similar content together.

The second step is to take the similar content and organize that into a logical series. If the email will include narratives, maybe it’s chronological. If it deals with multiple products/services, maybe individual communications can be grouped for each service offering. If it’s a tactic, it could start out with small easy tips and proceed to ones that build on the initial ideas. The point is that a series of emails guide your audience step by step and reinforce your primary message.

Remember each topic in the series should be it’s own email communication.  Email marketing messages need to be laser focused and to the point.  Don’t muddy the communication by splitting the focus.  There should be only one primary offer or article.  Some small side bar offers or links can be OK but the main message should never be in question.

When content is ordered well it can steadily build credibility, reinforce reasons to take action on an offer, or both. Trainers, consultants, and coaches have content available. The challenge is putting in the effort to repurpose that content for an online campaign by organizing it into usable categories.

Every so often I encounter a trainer, consultant, or professional coach that is not comfortable using an email marketing service platform like Constant Contact, Exact Target, Swiftpage, iContact. Vertical Response etc.  The most common reasons for this aversion is that the client doesn’t feel the price is warranted as they can do the same thing in-house with their database or they are uncomfortable with the security of their data on the email service servers.  While doing an email marketing campaign in-house is possible, there are requirements that can be burdensome to the unprepared.

The first requirement is meeting CAN-SPAM regulation.  Specifically the email needs to be clear who it’s coming from, include a physical address, and have an obvious way to unsubscribe.  These are not optional.  If you are building an in-house email marketing platform these things must be included or your emails will violate the CAN-SPAM law.

The second requirement is the email platform setup.  This is typically done through a database program.  Make sure that the email address that will send the email marketing communications is a valid account.  Few things are as alarming as replying to an email marketing message and getting a bounced reply.  The account should also be checked.  Even if your email states “do not respond to this email” someone on your list will and it’s a good idea to be responsive.

The final requirement is the one that is most overlooked.  A few years ago I met with a company that had been doing an in-house email marketing campaign.  I had a lot of trouble sending and receiving emails from them from a popular email service I was using.  Upon investigation it was a problem throughout their company because some ISPs had them blocked under a SPAM listing.  Their marketing emails weren’t SPAM, it was just an organic accumulation of complaints over the years that started getting their domain blocked.

Your in-house email campaign will be coming from your internal servers rather than an email service provider.  That means spam complaints count against your web domain.  If your in-house campaign gets bad feedback your domain can get blacklisted by ISPs.  In my eyes the single biggest benefit to a reputable email marketing service is that they have teams of people that do nothing except keep a good relationship with ISPs. An in-house email marketing campaign needs a strategy to contact large ISPs to ensure messages are not being blocked.  This can be a time consuming activity and one that many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches simply don’t have the resources to take on.

Carefully weigh whether you want to use an email marketing service provider.  If you decide there is something about the service that is unacceptable and go the in-house route, be prepared to do the extra leg work that email marketing services do for you.

When trainers, consultants, and professional coaches set up or maintain an online marketing campaign, prospects are typically the focus.  This makes sense as marketing to prospects is the most direct way of generating new business.  Unfortunately this focus often blinds trainers, consultants, and professional coaches to another, likely more valuable, group; their clients.  Including communications and exclusive offers to clients within an online marketing campaign is a good way to increase client loyalty and generate referral business.

Usually if clients are factored in to online communications it’s in the form of a client newsletter.  While a newsletter can be valuable, it’s just one channel of potential bonuses that can be offered to clients.  Some added options might be:

• Client Portal on the Web – Do you have a client only section?  This could be a portal on the website or an exclusive group within your social media.
• Client Offers – These offers could be free access to paid events, early access to whitepapers or reports, or discounts on materials.  Making the communication exclusive goes a long way toward making the offer credible.  For instance, sending a special email offer works, putting the offer on a public site or social media page doesn’t.
• Online Supported Referrals – Referrals are a key factor for trainers, consultants, and professional coaches to generate new business.  Having an online referral form process in a client portal or sending a list of hot prospects you’d like to be introduced to can be a good prompt to getting clients in the mindset of providing introductions.

This is a small sampling but are pieces often overlooked by trainers, consultants, and professional coaches.  A client marketing plan can have two major benefits if done well.  It will produce warm prospects while strengthening the bond to your client base.

After an email marketing campaign is running consistently and generating results a natural evolution is to segment the email list into groups and cater communications to the segments.  This is easier said than done.  Deciding which segments should exist and what individuals belong in which category is not an undertaking to be taken lightly.  Identifying and performing the administration of breaking up the list requires a plan.  If the task is undertaken haphazardly there usually ends up being a catch all category that eventually morphs back into a singe list.

The “other” category is the bane of email list segmentation.  And it’s unnecessary because there should no be a catch all category.  The whole point in segmenting lists is to deliver content to set groups that directly apply to defined criteria.  There’s no clearly defined category for “other”.

Resist using a catch all segment.  It’s often created out of frustration with the segmenting process.  Rather allot sufficient time to define what segments are appropriate to meet the specialized communications you envision.  If you find that you are drifting toward a general group then stop and redefine.

Also resist using a specialized group as a place for individuals that are challenging to define.  Every person that falls into a segment must share the same defining characteristic.  The worst thing a segmented email campaign can do is send specialized content to individuals it does not apply to.

Usually if a catch all group exists then all the other groupings begin to morph into the single general category.  That is often because it’s easier for the email list administrator to assign “other” rather than do some digging to see what an individual is hoping to receive or a subscriber isn’t sure which category best fits them so they default to a general list.

If you’re setting a general category in a list segmentation process, stop.  If it comes to it, it’s better to scrap the whole process and save the time rather than break the list up into arbitrary lists and eventually have them converge back into a single list down the line.

A question that trainers, consultants, and professional coaches ask is, “How will an online marketing campaign sell my services?  The typical price is x thousands of dollars.”  The simple answer is, “It won’t”.  At least not directly.  However, it is possible to break down the campaign into sections and make small sales/relationship builders that result in easier sales for the high ticket services.

When directly marketing a product or service, price plays a factor.  How often do you get an email asking you to buy a car?  Hopefully the answer is never because no one is going to spontaneously buy something that costs tens of thousands of dollars.  Even online car listings require interaction with a sales person on site to ensure a vehicle meets a buyers wants/needs.  Ads for particular events or vehicle models are prevalent.  That’s because the ads are designed to get a person interested in visiting a dealer so the sales force can take over the sales process.

Trainers, consultants, and professional coaches are no different.  Most of the services offered run into the tens of thousands of dollars and there is no layout/copy that’s going to convert prospects directly to clients.  This is due to price as well as complexity of the service being purchased.  Prospects usually need individualized information about the training, consulting, or coaching which is very difficult if not impossible to duplicate in a static communication.

So the strategy for engaging prospects changes to some smaller offer.  This is typically done through small items like books, materials, or events.  Prices range from free to thousands of dollars for these items.  Typically the more it costs/the more complex it is, the more resistance there will be from prospects.

The effectiveness of these offers typically mirrors how engaged an audience is.  Someone that’ already engaged in an informative email, social media, blog, etc. campaign will pre-assign credibility to your offers and is more likely to take advantage if it meets a need.  Prospects that are new or blindly communicated to, will put little credence to an offer and will be strongly resistant to even minimal pricing/complexity.

Don’t take this formula as a suggestion to compete on price. That is usually a losing battle online as someone is almost always willing to go cheaper.  What it does mean is that expectations should be set based on the offer being made.

Here are two examples of offers that should have different expectations/processes for engaging a prospect:

• Purchase our $20 book – This is a small investment proposition. It’s reasonable to expect that prospects will purchase the book with no personal interaction from an individual with your firm.  The engagement funnel allows for people to make direct purchases of the book from an online marketing campaign.  This pool of prospects can then be followed up with by the sales team to gauge whether they are a valid candidate for higher ticket services.
• Attend a 2-Day event for $1500 – This is a higher investment proposition.  It’s unreasonable to expect any but the most engaged prospects to purchase based off of a single promotional communication.  It’s more likely that the online marketing will introduce the idea and the sales team can use that as leverage for getting people to sign up for the event.  Metrics and data from the online campaign can be used to form a contact list based on people that have some interaction with the initial communication.

The exception to this is the amount of time/effort/money invested in promoting an offer.  National speaking events rely on pure marketing (online and otherwise) to fill massive venues but they also invest significant time (typically 4-6 months lead time) and a large budget to promote the event.  In many cases, large speaking events are an inverse model for offers made by smaller training, consulting, and professional coaching firms in that they spend a lot up front for an event in hopes of selling large amounts of materials to attendees.

This strategy is an unreasonable investment in time and money for many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches.  In these cases, setting reasonable expectations allows for an effective action plan to be put in place.  Rather than relying on a marketing juggernaut, offers can be tailored to fit the amount of personal interaction outside of marketing that needs to take place to sell prospects.

There seems to be a perceived conflict between email marketing and social media.  The conflict is usually summed up as social media taking the place of email.  The truth is that the two are intertwined and not at odds with one another.  Well done online marketing integrates the two to communicate to diverse audiences in the way they want to receive the message.

This post was spawned from a recent site review with a client.  Upon seeing that their site was netting record hits and realizing that social media networks were ranked 3, 5, and 6 for traffic sources my client thought he wanted to scale back on email marketing frequency.

So my client and I weighed the probable effect of that.  The first issue is that half the content fed to social media was featured in the email campaign so content management would be a wrinkle to scaling back.  The second major issue was how it could affect the success of the site.  Guess what the primary source of traffic was?  You guessed it, email marketing clicks.  In fact the clicks from that email campaign were 9 times as much as all the social networks combined.

Social media, email, and your website should be intertwined.  The goal is not for one to replace another, they all serve a unique role.  Maybe years down the a unified system that integrates all our web presences will exist.  For now it’s our responsibility to ensure each online marketing channel support the other.

Email marketing communications should include links to social network profiles.  Social networks should provide a sign up process to join the email marketing lists.  Both should point to your website and your website should have corresponding referring links.  In other words each channel supports the other.

Full disclaimer, I believe that social media is currently being over-hyped as a marketing medium primarily because significant metrics are hard to gather and business communication is often a subsidiary focus.  That said, almost every company should have some strategy for using it.  The reason I say this is not from a belief that it will revolutionize your marketing.  The fact is that for many it won’t.  However social media is becoming a preferred platform of communication for many people and therefore needs to be adopted in some fashion by businesses.

This is especially true for trainers, consultants, and business coaches.  Your clients and prospects look to you as a content expert.  They expect to find you making commentary on your expertise and many rely on social media.  If you won’t communicate to them in their preferred fashion, a competitor will.  Furthermore, social media is becoming more important in search engine optimization and will be important to keeping websites ranking well.

So how do I rectify a belief that social media needs to be adopted but also that it won’t have a significant impact on your marketing (at least not immediately)?  By adopting an, “I can say I’m doing it” strategy.  Most trainers, consultants, and business coaches already have communication channels online and through email.  It’s a fairly straight forward approach to integrate these messages into social media.

This strategy can be implemented by any business because it’s leveraging something that is already being done.  This keeps the time/money/effort commitment to a minimum but still communicates to the social media audience in a way that resonates with them.

The other advantage of doing this is it positions you for a more in depth approach down the line.  I have no doubt that social media applications and tracking will continue to improve, making it a vital mix in online marketing campaigns.

Starting out with a basic model allows businesses to build a social media audience where experiments can be done on the best way to leverage your social media channel.  The power of social media isn’t really just marketing.  When fully adopted social media serves sales, customer service, and personal one-to-one communication roles.

The “I can say I’m doing it” approach let’s businesses walk before they run.  When businesses dive in with a full campaign they often get overwhelmed because they don’t have resources in place to consistently use their social media channel.  Since they are stretched thin the effort is usually lacking and results are often negligible.

If you’re already using social media regularly and find that it serves more than a marketing role by being a communication channel for multiple parts of the business, you’ve likely hit a point where there is true ROI and more time/money/effort is warranted.  If you’re not using social media then taking the “I can say I’m doing it” approach is a good way to get your feet wet.

Staying on the sideline of social media is a bad option.  After all, how silly would it be nowadays to tell someone you don’t have a website/email but that you can fax information?  Social media is becoming a more critical piece to the website/email matrix because it’s how many people communicate and is likely to be a business necessity sooner rather than later.

A social media post or a webpage can be immediately updated or removed if a mistake is present. Email, however, presents a unique challenge when an error is sent out.  If an email platform has a retract feature, the results are typically spotty at best.  This means that once an email is sent, there’s really no going back.  When a mistake happens it’s usually a scramble to rectify the situation.  A quick analysis and assigning an action plan is critical for an appropriate timely response.

The first step to dealing with an email marketing error is to stay calm.  Analysis of the error is needed to assign an appropriate response.  When boiled down there are essentially three options when an error occurs:

1. Ignore It – This is a viable option.  Just don’t make it a default option.  If the error is minor like a misspelled word or grammar error it’s probably best to let it go.  Yes, a few sticklers on your email list might respond but by and large it’s not going to have an impact on your ongoing campaigns. If it’s a small mistake that’s likely to go unnoticed then it’s not worth hitting your lists inbox again.
2. Targeted resend – If an error affects a subset of your list then a correction needs to be sent only to the affected recipients.  This is often the case if a link is broken or referencing the wrong page.  It can also be the case if you have lists broken into versions (like html layout and text layout).  If you can isolate a group or list then do so.  No sense sending an update to everyone about a broken link.  Rather send the update to the recipients that clicked the link.
3. Resend – This is the final and most drastic action.  If there is a major problem or the wrong content goes to the wrong audience then a resend is necessary.  Basically if the body of the email contains a significant problem, then everyone who received it will need a replacement.  The resend should be done quickly and include a note in the body or the subject line explaining that this is a corrected version of the flawed email.

Mistakes happen.  Of course reviewing for errors beforehand is the best course of action but every person running an email marketing campaign will have an error go out sooner or later.  The difference between it having a lasting effect and being a barely noticeable issue depends on what the error is and how efficiently the mistake is corrected.

Companies often agonize over how to use social media.  The process can get fairly drawn out but at the end of the day there are only three options available to companies.

Strategy 1: Company Communications

Doing a company approach to social media is really about setting up social media channels that get fed company communications.  Any information that the company sends publically should find its way onto every social media channel.  This is an easier strategy to put in place because all social media platforms can get linked through an email platform or social media management tool like hoot suite.  Simply put, it takes less time to manage this process.  It also comes with less risk as central employees or contractors can be used to distribute and manage the information.  So the pros are that it takes less time and closely manages the company message. The down side is that very little one-to-one interaction is available which limits powerful brand or marketing capabilities.

Strategy 2: Employee/Individual Communications

Every company is made of individual(s).  This strategy leverages that group of people with the ability to personally interact as representatives of the company.  The benefit here is that, as a group, interactions will be more frequent and personalized which can create a strong bond to the social media audience.  True one-to-one interaction is feasible.  The down side is that those interactions happen in real time and there is a risk of problems being presented on a public forum.  There is also a risk of wasted time as individuals can get drawn into social interactions that provide little value to the company.  Centralized control becomes almost impossible and presenting a unified message is often a challenge.

Strategy 3: Hybrid Style

It’s possible to create a hybrid strategy where company communications are distributed across social media channels but individuals also have access to interact with the social media audience.  This provides the pros of a centralized message mixed with personal interaction but also all the risks of less control and more time dedicated to the social media channel.  The added problem is that sometimes company communications can disrupt the personal interactions as the company communications are sent on a schedule rather than real time.

There is no right answer to social media strategy.  It’s more of deciding what fits for your company.  Some important things to consider is manpower to dedicate to social media, risks involved with personal interactions, and time invested in managing the channels.  The answers to these questions will help you narrow in on the strategy that works for your company.  Once you choose a strategy, it’s important that all parties involved with the social media channels understand the goal.  Once the goal is clear then it’s easier to dedicate the resources necessary but not waste time on low return activities.

Happy new year.  Like most business goals, now is the time to review your metrics and set goals.  And it can’t be a resolution that’s forgotten after January.  eMarketing is not a “set it and forget it” activity.  It’s an ongoing process of trial, error, and improvement.

Look over your email, social media, and website metrics and set target goals for the end of 2012.  Then break those target goals into quarters.  Finally break the first quarter into a monthly set.  In this way you can make a monthly plan that covers the year.  Each month should be assigned one enhancement that you believe will improve results.

After you set this plan you only need to track results.  Then at the end of the year you’ll have numbers that support or inform your plan of action.  So next year’s plan can be a bit more precise.  Over a few years time your eMarketing plan will be pinpoint accurate with reliable projections on what to expect.

But it all starts by setting goals now . . .