Online Marketing Campaigns: Have a Target

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.

Social Media Automation: Pro or Con?

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.

Quality Web Help

I had a question come up recently with a prospective client that interestingly comes up a lot.  The question was, “How do I know you’ll stick around to do these campaigns?”  I’ve had some clients go so far as to ask for a contract for a dedicated length of time to work on their project.  These questions and requests are all based on the same problem.  It’s hard to find good web help.

The internet is only expanding which helps explain why hiring web help is difficult as demand stretches qualified professionals and introduces unqualified “professionals” attempting to tap into the market.

It took me a while to get used to these types of questions.  The defining moment for me was when a business owner asked me for a quote on redesigning his website.  The site was already professionally done, so I asked why the person who created it didn’t do the redesign.  The business owner responded, “Because I can’t locate him.  He got most of the site done and right after that we had a few extra projects for him.  I guess we paid him what he needed because he disappeared.”

So here’s an insider’s view on what to look for if you’re going to hire someone to do any web, internet, social media, or email marketing work for you.

  • How long have they been doing the work?
    Don’t go with just a date established. Seek out testimonials or referrals that validate the individual or firm have been consistently providing a service.  A lot of between job web professionals become freelancers for a few months but then vanish as soon as their next employment opportunity materializes.
  • Who do they work with and what do they specialize in?
    Anyone claiming to be everything to everyone should raise suspicion especially for freelancers or small firms.  The web has grown too big to be an expert in all industries and media.  A lack of specialization might be a sign of casting a wide net but not being well equipped to service clients.  Make sure you clearly define what is needed and what the freelancer or firm will be responsible for.
  • Do they practice what they preach?
    A web design firm should have a website.  A social media expert should have a sophisticated social media profile.  To some extent it’s true that our own sites are the last to get attention but a lack of a professional presence is a sure sign that the individual or firm might not be as qualified as they need to be.

The good news is there are a lot of web professionals available that will do a quality job.  Just make sure to do some homework before hiring them so you’re not left with a poor quality or unfinished project.

Reasonable Next Steps in Online Marketing

Successful online marketing is part art, part science, and a big part common sense. However, when we work on our online marketing campaigns everything makes sense to us. We clearly see the value proposition and truly believe in the product, service, or offer being made. That zeal can blind us to common sense. The most common unreasonable expectation that crops up is how an audience will react to our call to action. Make sure that the call to action is suitable for what’s been communicated to the audience.

I recently had a conversation with a client who was frustrated by a lack of interest in a two day business event they run. We revued the email marketing metrics and my client stated, “See, we had 25 people click to the registration page and not one signed up. What’s going on? Our other offers consistently generate leads but marketing is not getting interest in this event.” So questions arose but 3 key questions told the tale.

How many people were ideal for the event?
About 20 was a good balance to make it a profitable event but small enough for personal interaction.

How many did they typically have register?
The events had averaged 10 people so they were operating at half the desired number.

If marketing was not filling seats how were people being registered?
On average 5 of the attendees came from personal invitations from the sales staff. The other half called in and after getting some more information about the event they would register.

So where did the call-ins come from? The assumption was that it was word of mouth or referrals but upon analyzing the dates it appeared that the call-ins were most prevalent when email communications were sent. The issue wasn’t that the emails weren’t working. It was that the audience was taking an unexpected next step by calling in.

Now correcting this situation can go down a lot of avenues. Was the landing page lacking enough information to convert interested parties? Was the sign up process unclear or cumbersome? Was the sign up process working technically? These are all valid questions but as is often the case the common sense questions are usually the most valuable.

The 2-day event this trainer was running was a $1500/person event. The email communications were largely being sent to prospects that were new to the list or only asked for basic information. The chances of converting an unengaged contact for a $1500 purchase on any online communication are slim to nil. However, the event might be of interest to them and they might want to call and ask questions. Some of the people that call to get information about the event will then decide they do want to attend, but they need that personal interaction. A promotional email just isn’t going to do it because it doesn’t intrinsically carry the necessary credibility for a purchase that size.

Any commitment over about $50 will meet with resistance unless the audience is already familiar with you or your company. My client’s future emails were sure to highlight their phone number so that interested prospects had a viable next step without having to commit to spending $1500. If you find that your conversions are performing well below expectations, it’s a good idea to review the call to action and make sure it’s a reasonable next step.

Email and Online Marketing: Create Genuine Urgency

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.

Content For Social Media

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.

Content for Email Marketing

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.

Email Marketing Service Or In-House?

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.

Online Marketing: Don’t Forget Your Clients

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.

Will Internet Marketing Sell My High Ticket Items?

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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