Make Social Sharing Easy

Most people engage in social media to interact with a target market and gain a following. Often times, generating that interest is easier said than done. Valuable commentary and content is a prerequisite to gaining a valuable following but beyond that, sharing should be made easy on your audience to broaden your reach.

The unique power of social media is the ability to share. That one feature makes social media a vastly scalable channel. So if the goal is for others to share your content, then why do many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches make it so hard to share?

When asking that question many people will say, “They can just like it, or retweet it, or share it, or pin it, etc.” The problem with that thinking is that it presupposes your audience interacts with content in the exact same manner you do. That’s a dangerous assumption and one that can limit your overall reach.

Look for ways of making sharing easy across social media platforms. A simple way is to include your content on multiple platforms. Trainers, consultants, and professional coaches often target LinkedIn due to its business focus and neglect other platforms. While LinkedIn does tend to perform the best for trainers, consultants, and professional coaches that doesn’t mean that other platforms can’t contribute value.

Make sure to include social shareability off of your social channels. Share buttons for websites and email have become prevalent and easier than ever to implement. This allows people to share your content with a single click. We suggest using Addthis as it includes tons of social media platforms, customization, and makes integration simple. Widgets, I frames, and plugins are all available for different integration applications. If Addthis does not offer a necessary component, find a social sharing utility that suits your needs, there are many quality ones available.

As a general rule, check each channel for a two-click share process. If it takes more than two clicks for users to share your content then the process is likely a barrier that prevents some sharing.

Making Your Digital Marketing Relatable

ID-100293556It’s not uncommon for us to run into a trainer, consultant, or professional coach that says, “I’m putting a lot of effort into marketing and I’m just not seeing results.” Sometimes the effort is questionable but many times there is a legitimate marketing campaign being rolled out with little to show for it. If you have a well-constructed campaign but no results from it, the problem is likely that your messages are not relatable to your target audience.

A digital marketing campaign will only be relatable to your target market if you understand your target market. It’s impossible to make compelling communications if you don’t understand your prospects and clients and the concerns they face on a day-to-day basis.

If you are certain that your communications are pertinent to your audience then the problem might be in the authenticity of your messages. Are they honest and transparent? Many marketing communications are watered down clichés or confusing corporate speak rather than a truly interesting or insightful message. If marketing messages aren’t saying something that resonates with the individual, then it will be ignored.

Marketing provides a stage for you to communicate why you are relevant to your target audience. Companies, even small firms, often have a brand but no voice for that stage. The voice of a company is the people that make up an organization. When it comes to trainers, consultants, or coaches, people don’t relate to companies. Rather they relate to the person they are interacting with.

Use that connection in your communications by communicating and reinforcing the same enthusiastic, compelling, and insightful messages that the trainers, consultants, or coaches provide when dealing with prospects or clients directly. If the digital marketing campaign can’t provide that same level of engagement, then it will be a shadow of what the company can truly provide and will remain largely irrelevant and ignored.

Image courtesy of  sheelamohan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Simplify Digital Marketing Systems

There are countless tools that can be used for digital marketing. Just finding and selecting the right mix can be arduous, but to further complicate all of these options, many of the systems offer overlapping features which may or may not be useful. In planning a system for digital marketing, make a list of criteria and try to simplify the process to as few systems as possible that meet all those needs.

As was noted in the last blog post, there are a ton of third party apps that will specialize in any number of marketing verticals. These tend to be the bedrock of marketing systems for most trainers, consultants, and professional coaches.

In marketing these apps tend to fall in one of three categories:

  • Data
  • Communication
  • Reporting

Set a map for how your marketing system flows. Start the process by making a checklist of all the critical needs. Then make a secondary list of features that aren’t absolutely necessary but would make managing the digital marketing campaigns much easier. Finally make notes of any add-ons or experimental features that appear to have value but have not been tested to date.

This checklist can be used to evaluate your current systems or to analyze new potential vendors. Be sure to do your own analysis and take advantage of trial offers. Many vendors will list features of things their app can technically accomplish but might do so in such a cumbersome factor as to make it unusable. Even the most robust solutions like salesforce.com’s marketing platform have tons of plugins that do a particular function much better than the out of the box platform will.

Once you’ve completed your checklist you should have a thorough evaluation of what functions are being met, which are not, and some options to fill in the gaps. Filling in the gaps is a more subjective exercise typically driven by budget and true need. For instance, a user tracker on a website can be very valuable but many trainers, consultants, or professional coaches, don’t see a good ROI on the cost because the traffic levels are not sufficient.

In the evaluation, keep the number of systems as low as you can. Double check to see that there is not too much overlap in a one of the three categories above. Often sacrificing some non-critical functionality in communication or reporting can be advantageous if it makes data manipulation easier. This is especially true if a system does not integrate with your other platforms.

As with any tool, a system is only as good as the user behind it. Before investing in any marketing system make sure that it is technically appropriate to the person that plans to use it. Many times a tradeoff for user friendliness over functionality in an app is necessary if the primary user is not up to a more technically skewed application.

As with many things, keeping it simple will eliminate headaches. With digital marketing platforms it’s worth analyzing your systems every other year or so to see if it’s organically grown into something more cumbersome than necessary.