Tag: Social Media Marketing

Social Media: Quality Over Quantity

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Are you abusing your social profiles? A lot of trainers, consultants, and professional coaches don’t think they are but on analysis their profiles contain very little quality information.  Rather it’s a long series of hastily crafted messages or reused content with little or no value add. Social media marketing isn’t about finding and posting anything with relevance to your profession.  The value of viewing or subscribing to your social profile is in getting expert viewpoints on industry or professional topics.   Social media marketing is much more effective when the focus is on quality rather than quantity.

Regurgitating other profiles
Reposting is the most prevalent abuse of social profiles.  There is never a situation where your profile should automatically repost everything from an industry or professional resource.  People can link to that resource’s profile if they want to see everything they post.  Your social profiles should reflect you or your firm’s view on a topic. It’s OK to selectively repost from an industry or professional resource but, at minimum, any repost should have a short note on why you are linking to it.  A follow on commentary can be a nice touch if what you want to say won’t fit the space restrictions in the first post.

Posting low value blurbs
Space restrictions are a fact of social media life.  That isn’t an excuse to post gibberish that no one cares about to fill a lull in posts.  Take some time to write a message that means something to your audience. Here’s a real-life low value message from a sales training firm: “Do your behaviors today!”  That has no meaning to people unfamiliar with their content and little value to those that do know the content.  With a little tweaking it could be more impactful, something like, “Sales success comes from doing assigned behaviors designed to meet goals. What are your non-negotiable behaviors for this week?”

Pawning off other’s Content as their own
Some people ensure that they are “scooped” on everything they post to their profiles.  This happens when they largely plagiarize from other industry sources.  The internet is a big place and many people get away with taking content but it’s never really an original thought.  It’s impossible to steal an authentic consistent voice.  Worst case scenario is that your content is exposed as copies of other’s information which damages credibility.  Best case is that you have an inconsistent set of postings that provide no overarching principles.

Too much one way communicating
The beauty of social media that many trainers, consultants, and professional coaches ignore is the potential for interaction.  Ask questions of your audience.  The above revised post is an example of writing a question that can be rhetorical but invites interaction from dedicated clients or interested prospects.  There’s a fair chance that interaction will be low but the post is designed to add value even if no one responds.  However, if someone does respond then it makes for a quality interaction and encourages others to participate in the future.

Frequent reposting of the same content
It’s ok to repeat an important point.  Reuse can be spawned from calendar recurrences or current events.  Using the example above, the same post might be used at the beginning of the year for a sales training firm, something like, “The new year is here.  Are your sales goals set and behaviors written down?  If not attend our goal setting workshop on ____”.  But it’s important that some time has passed between posts and that reposts have a logical reason for reuse other than a scramble to put something new on the social profile.  For instance, if you have an event or a tactic, don’t use it back-to-back.  If you have to post something similar within a few weeks of one another, at least change the message up to generate interest.  There should never be a time where the same thing is posted more than once in a week.

There are two techniques to avoid quantity over quality.

  1. Set a social media editorial calendar.  A monthly schedule is a manageable amount of time.  At the end of a month, take a few hours and write out all your posts for the upcoming month.  This ensures a balanced calendar and gives some time to write well thought out, quality posts.
  2.  Links are your friend.  Sometimes space restrictions prevent a quality communication going right on the social profile.  Use links to your advantage by creating content on your website and then linking to it.  In that way, the social post just needs to function as a subject line teasing people to view your more robust content.

Quantity is often the focus to “fill up” a social profile.  However no one ever complains if they get higher quality content but it come less frequently.  Better to post once a week with something impactful to your audience, than to post several times a day with content that holds little value.

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Article Schedule with Social/Email Integration

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Many times with online marketing simply completing the tasks is the most difficult aspect of doing it.  So why not kill a few birds with one stone?  A blog’s posting schedule can be synced with email marketing and social media marketing programs to cover all the channels at once.

The simplest way of doing this is by making your blog your central content hub.  Once you have an article ready for posting you can create an email marketing message that features that article.  Provide a teaser for the content and then link back to the blog.  In this way, the content is not just a blog post but also an email marketing communication.

Same principle applies to social media.  Once a blog posting is live it can be featured on all your social media profiles.  Feature the title or a short teaser and a link back to the blog.  Again the content serves as a blog post but also as a social profile feeder.

Most online marketing campaigns for trainers, consultants, and professional coaches is based around valuable content and the blog serves as the central place for that content.

Once you have your schedule in place and are using the content for multiple marketing channels, you can focus on streamlining the process further.  There are a lot of automated tools to automatically feed your blog to social media channels.  Some are integrated right into the blogging platform, others can pull new blog posts from the blog.  Many email marketing platforms have social media  integration so your email subject line can be used as a social media post and eliminate the need to feed the information separately.

When you duplicate where the blog content is being used, it exponentially adds to the value of the blog because the content for the blog has several channels to engage prospects.

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B-to-B Online Marketing Around the Holidays

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As the holiday season grows closer, many of us associate it with the busiest shopping season of the year.  But for B-to-B the inverse is often true.   While consumer shopping spikes business to business transactions often lag.  Consultants, trainers, and professional coaches need to modify some of their online marketing plans to account for the decreased activity without abandoning the time period as a lost cause.

There are two bad plans for your B-to-B marketing over the holiday period (late November through the early part of January in the US).

The first is pretending the time of year does not matter.  While you’ll want to schedule any informative content that you regularly provide, sales or offer emails are unlikely to convert well.  For example, if you run a monthly event to find new opportunities, it’s likely that registrations will suffer.  Instead of forcing your regular events an alternative “gift” incentive might be more appropriate.  For example, offer a free whitepaper download or training webinar as a thank you to people that subscribe to your email newsletter.  Make the offer simple to redeem.  Prospects don’t even need to leave their office to take advantage of either example.  The holiday period is a challenging time to get people to take advantage of more elaborate or expensive offerings, so find ways of providing simple value add incentives.

The second bad plan is giving up the holidays as a lost cause.  This plan abandons regular communications because “no one’s paying attention now.”  Your regular informative emails or newsletters are a given.  If you publish monthly or bi-weekly, then you need to meet that expectation.  True, rates will likely be somewhat lower but being consistent with your offer assures your audiences that you will deliver on your commitment.  Furthermore, this time frame is not a total lost cause for B-to-B.  Some businesses might have put off a decision until the end of the year.  If their budgeting cycle will reset, they might be primed to close a deal with a consultant, trainer, or professional coach.  Keeping your online marketing churning through this time period provides an opportunity to stay top of mind with prospects and clients.

Take the holidays into account for your online and email marketing.  It’s not the boom time that consumer businesses experience but it can be fruitful none the less.

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When Scheduling Goes Bad

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Having automated processes in place that allow you to pre-schedule email or social media messages are a great tool.  However, the people behind the tools always need to be aware of those sends and make judgment calls in extenuating circumstances.

As an example, Hurricane Sandy is hitting the east coast hard this morning.  Many businesses are closed as people rightly look after their welfare and the welfare of their loved ones.  Sending out an advertisement or an invitation to an event today is likely to be ignored or ill-received.  However, there are plenty of automated messages that will go out today because they were pre-scheduled or out-of-town marketers won’t be aware of local circumstances.

After working on a communication and crafting the message, scheduling is a good way to ensure it is sent at an ideal time.  However, marketers need to remember that extenuating circumstances will come up and send schedules should be modified in these cases.

It’s not always practical as emergencies can rise without warning.  But in situations where there is a looming threat (like a hurricane) then delaying sends until after the threat has passed is advisable. 

Best wishes to the East coast cities hit by Sandy and stay safe.

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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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Quality Web Help

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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.

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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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