Category: Social Media

Web Marketing: Stay Up To Date

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Liking an idea and executing it are two very different things.  Many consultant, trainers, and professional coaches want to leverage their knowledge into an online marketing campaign but struggle to put it together.  This is especially true if they see or hear an idea they like but don’t think through steps for executing and maintaining the campaign.  Online marketing campaigns are timely and if there’s no sustainability plan then the effort can cause more harm than good.

The most common example of this is an online blog.  Many consultants, trainers, and professional coaches will see a blog they like and then haphazardly set up a blog of their own.  This frequently is thrown up on a blog service website.  Those a little more dedicated might find suitable templates, customize a layout, and/or have the blog set up on their site.  This shotgun approach typically creates subpar results.  The blog can come off as disjointed or may never be properly promoted at all.

Creating content consistently takes time and if there isn’t an agreed upon system for creating the content then the blog will stagnate.  This is the most common fate of hastily done blogs and reflects poorly on the individual or company who created it.  It’s a clear sign that projects go unfinished if a blog is found stagnant.  Our blog is an example that it takes commitment to maintain.  Though we’d like to post more regularly we are committed to a new post at least once every other week and maintain that schedule regardless of other demands on our time.  At minimum, if you have a blog and find that it’s not being updated; remove it from your site.

A blog is just an example of how web marketing needs maintained.  Other common offenders are social media pages or news/press release sections of the site.  If you identify an idea or channel you’d like to use, then a sustainability plan should be top priority.  An even higher priority than design or technical details because if the content isn’t current, then it won’t generate results.  Keep up to date with your online campaigns so they are relevant and add new touch points with clients and potential clients.

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Online Marketing Campaigns: Have a Target

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A common mistake in online marketing is not having a clear client target for individual campaigns.  The thinking behind it is usually,  “cast a wider net to have more opportunities to catch something.”  The problem is there are a lot of nets in the water, so the people that know how to catch a particular fish stand a much better chance of landing them.  Every online campaign should be built around attracting a particular target.

The first step in making a target is the overview.  Consultants, trainers, and professional coaches usually focus on executives or business professionals of a certain job role.  Let’s use sales training as an example.  The overall target could be sales professionals, sales managers, customer service professionals, business owners, and service professionals.  This is the businesses target focus but not specific enough for a single online campaign.

The second step is picking out a subsection of your target market that is suitable for your call to action.  Let’s use sales managers from the example above.  If a manager event is coming up then the campaign should be built around problems that a manager faces.  Topics of making prospecting calls or dealing with budgets will have less impact than building a sales team and sales debriefing because these are topics that sales managers directly deal with. 

The third step is identifying group subsets.  The event might be centered on managing a sales team in a particular industry.  If this is the case then targets should be related to that industry with a certain size sales force.

The point is that every online campaign should have a very clear target.  Ideally communications via email will be segmented to that group.  For web and social media communications, (or in cases where email segmentation isn’t possible) communications should clearly define who the offer is for.  This casts a smaller net by eliminating poorly suited people but adds credibility to the message for the target group.  A side benefit is that people outside the target group can quickly see it’s not suited to them and are more likely to take notice when they fall into a target segment for a future campaign.

There’s nothing complicated about defining a target.  It’s simply a matter of taking some extra time to focus the campaign and having the guts to let people know who is and is not a good fit for the offer.

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Social Media Automation: Pro or Con?

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At its best social media is an interactive tool for businesses to engage their clients and prospects in meaningful interaction.  At its worst is regurgitated content filling a stream of SPAM.  It would seem that automating social media would lean toward the latter rather than the former, right?  It doesn’t have to be that way.  Setting automation for business social media is often the only practical way to ensure that social media channels are providing valuable content.

Automation is vital for many businesses because it’s often a time suck.  Trainers, professional coaches, and consultants especially don’t have blocks of time to dedicate to social media.  Many anti-automation proponents for social media claim to have the 10-minute a day solution.  The fact is without automation, 10 minutes becomes 30 which becomes 60 and so on.  Furthermore some small businesses don’t even have the 10 minutes to dedicate.

That’s why a dedicated social media automation program is vital.  It let’s businesses use singular content across several channels.  When done well, it’s better for the user as well. The information is available across the board so they can access it in a manner they like.

So where’s the down side?  The down side is that many people abuse automation.  They regurgitate information or seed their profile with anything, whether it has to do with their stated topic or not.  This is a waste of time as it requires audiences to sift through loads of information to find what they want.  People simply will not put that much work into a social media presence.

I recently had a person claim that they ignore all automated social media posts.  He only read what was targeted to him.  I don’t buy that for a minute.  Imagine screening the internet for what was only targeted to you.  Your email, a few personal social media posts, and websites of interest would be all that’s left.  People simply don’t do that.  When a question or problem arises, people venture out to learn solutions.  If they find your social media content and it offers valuable insights, they won’t care whether it’s automated or not.

The goal is to ensure that your social media automation isn’t robotic.  Automate recurring messages but be sure to intermix personal notes.  Also respond to comments or feedback.  If people want to interact on your social media channels you should be able to oblige.

Automating original content geared toward your target audience is vital to keeping business social media campaigns consistently providing value to drive business because doing it manually just isn’t practical.

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Post Overload in Social Media

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A good question was recently presented to me, “Can we overpost to our social media accounts and wear people out?”  Unlike email, social media communications aren’t falling directly in an inbox where the audience needs to do something with it (at minimum delete it) but rather the audience has to proactively seek out the content.  The answer is, it’s very rare to overload your social media audience because content is rapid, short lived, and not intrusive . . . but that doesn’t mean post overload can’t happen.

Social media post overload is the polar opposite problem many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches have where they are trying to squeeze social media into a busy schedule.  However, once a campaign is in place, especially if it involves many individuals’ social media accounts then the number of posts from a single company can start to grow exponentially.

For a business there are a few important questions to ask to see if the quantity of social media posts is burdensome to your audience:

  • What accounts are company profiles and which belong to individuals?
  • Do individual accounts sync to company accounts and vice versa?
  • How many shared contacts exist between accounts that would get redundant posts?
  • Is the content being posted trivial, always copied from elsewhere, or off topic?

Overloading on social media posts is usually the result of one or two problems.

The first is that the same information gets regularly posted multiple times.  This can be frustrating to the dedicated followers on social media because they can’t be sure if content is new or a rehash of what they already saw.  This most commonly happens when accounts are improperly linked or individuals don’t use discretion on what gets posted.  For example, an individual forwarding a post about the dog show they attended to a company account adds unfocused clutter that’s inappropriate for the business.  It’s also a potential problem if multiple people share the same thing and have shared contacts.  While the source is different the shared contacts are seeing duplicate messages.

The second problem is a lack of original content.  Providing reposts or links to relevant information can be a valuable piece of a social media campaign but it can’t be the whole campaign.  When an audience gets the sense that posts are just a series of copied or reposted notes then they’ll tune out because nothing unique is being provided.

Post overload has varied risk factors for separate social media platforms.  The risk of post overload is almost non-existent on Twitter.  Tweets are rapid and fleeting.  Facebook and LinkedIn can be problematic in that it’s virtually impossible to rapidly produce quality content consistently for these pages.  So if content is too frequent it’s usually a sign of copied or poor quality information.  Think about your Facebook contact that posts everything they do.  How much attention do you pay to their “at the store post.”  None, and after a while you expect that person to post trivial information and you begin training yourself to ignore everything they post.

Social media post overload isn’t a common problem.  But if you find that content is being listed in a rapid fire way, it’s worth reviewing your campaign to ensure that it’s providing value to your audience.

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Email and Online Marketing: Create Genuine Urgency

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Creating a sense of urgency is often noted as a best practice in marketing.  We want prospects to take action on an offer now rather than filing it away for “later” and then forgetting about it.  But urgency, like anything, can be abused.  Many online marketers create arbitrary deadlines or dates to force urgency.  Overusing the strategy causes problems in the long run because audiences become skeptical.  Rather than making up false urgency review your offers to find the genuine urgency that can drive your prospects to take action.

Here are a few sample offers common for consultant, trainer, and professional coach’s events.   It’s an outline on how subtle changes in an offer can be perceived as genuine rather than a hollow marketing ploy.  The same strategies can be adapted for products or item promotions.

Many event communications for business seminars try to encourage registrations immediately.  Below are some common incentives.  But remember only use these urgency building tactics if it truly fits your event.

  • Give Away – A certain number of people that sign up first get a free item.  If you use this promotion then you need a rock solid way of knowing who the first registrations were up to a certain point.  The attendees will notice if every person in the room has the give-away.  Be realistic about the audience size an event will draw.  If you are expecting 30 people, don’t do the first 30 to sign up because the offer will look disingenuous.
  • Reduced Pricing – Early registration leads to a discounted price.  This can be a powerful incentive but needs to be honest.  If dates are rescheduled or everyone is given a reduced price the audience will learn that any advertised reduction is just a hollow attempt to portray a good deal.
  • Limited Number of Seats – Unless your registration method has a counter on available seats it’s difficult to use this incentive early. An email stating that seats are filling up well in advance is often hard to take seriously unless it’s a well known event.  This tactic is most effective as events get closer. It’s often a good “last chance” communication letting potential attendees know there are a certain number of spaces left but it needs to be sincere.  Telling people that there are a limited number of spots and having them come to a sparsely attended event is a quick way to lose credibility.
  • Upcoming Date – The most overlooked urgency builder for events is the most obvious, the date.  The beauty of this urgency builder is it’s self-apparently genuine.  The event happens on x date.  If you don’t sign up by y date then registration will be closed and you won’t be able to attend.  This again is best served as the event gets closer. The only way this can be undermined is if dates are commonly cancelled or rearranged.  If dates move a lot the audiences will assume that it’s not an actual deadline.

These are 4 examples.  The key to using any of them is to do so genuinely.  Urgency is created when the audience clearly understands why a timely response is necessary.  If urgency builders are overused or abused then the marketing audience tunes them out.  When that happens conversion suffers because communications have less credibility and offers with urgency are disregarded.

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Content For Social Media

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Once you have content for your email you’re at a jumping off point for your social media content.  Many consultants, trainers, and professional coaches will copy their email content to their social media pages.  That is a good strategy to save time and ensure that content is available to all your channels.  However it’s not the most effective strategy.  The best social media campaigns will break out their email content into a series of social media posts.

Really good social media provides information in bite-size chunks.  Social media audiences typically have an extremely limited attention span so the message needs to be short and to the point to get further attention.  While emails should always have a single focus, it’s common for them to have secondary offers, promotions, or content.  Rather than posting all those things to social media at once by duplicating an email, highly effective social media campaigns will break it out.

Here’s an example.  Suppose an email is sent featuring a business tactic article.  The article itself is the focus of the email but the side bar has a link to an upcoming event as well as a recently released whitepaper.

Rather than posting a link to the email, each element can be a social media post.  So the first posting would be the title of the article and a link to the full article on the website.  The following day a post about the event can be placed on social media pages.  The day after that, a note about the whitepaper can be supplied with a link to a page to download it. In this way very specific offers are being made to social media audiences that they can digest at a glance.

The beauty of social media is that send schedules are almost infinite.  Since people can choose what to look at and when, there’s not the same fear of audience exhaustion that email marketing has to take into account.

Breaking out an email adds quantity to your social media pages without sacrificing quality.  Social media marketing hinges on staying in front of your audience with timely content.  Breaking email messages into small chunks is a good way to make frequent updates and be sure your marketing communications are available across all your channels.

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Online Marketing: Don’t Forget Your Clients

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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.

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Will Internet Marketing Sell My High Ticket Items?

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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.

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Email Marketing and Social Media Aren’t in Conflict

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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.

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Social Media is Becoming a Necessity (Not Optional)

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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.

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