Professional Service Firm Marketing Tips & Strategies

Miami County Small Business Development Workshops

Do you have a business in Miami County, KS?

The Miami County Economic Development Department has teamed up with Fort Scott Community College (Paola campus) to provide 5 Small Business Development Workshops this summer.

Most businesses are eligible for a scholarship that will cover 75% of the costs of these workshops. The scholarship is part of the $35,000 USDA grant recently received by Miami County. To determine if you are eligible, you should contact Janet McRae, Economic Development Director of Miami County, Kansas. You can contact Janet at (913) 294-4045.

I will be helping out by teaching the Social Media Pro class. Here is a list of the workshops:

1. Become a Social Media Pro
2. Market Your Small Business on a Budget
3. Create a Tri-Fold Brochure
4. Write Your Own Press Release
5. The Quick-and-Easy Web Site for Small Business

You can download the program brochures here.

Drip Marketing with Swiftpage Connect

Our friends at Swiftpage recently announced their latest offering – Swiftpage Connect.

If you are familiar with Swiftpage, you know that it is a service that integrates with ACT! and other CRM programs. Swiftpage Connect is a free standing, web based automated marketing solution.

Here is a quick summary of the features included with Swiftpage Connect:

List Manager

Build and manage your list of contacts by importing one or many lists to Swiftpage Connect. Access E-marketing History, Call List Actions and keep notes specific to each contact. Then export qualified contacts, lookups, and groups to another database easily.

Email Marketing

Swiftpage Connect gives you the tools to create beautiful email templates from scratch or import a HTML template. Send your email now, schedule to send at a later date.

Email Tracking

Track who opened, clicked, bounced, suppressed and more. You can also view graphical and detailed data about your send.

Surveys and Web Forms

With Swiftpage Connect’s Surveys and Web Forms, you can build your list and become more informed on your contacts. The Drip Marketing Autoloader allows you to automatically load contacts into a Drip Marketing campaign to receive a series of marketing messages.

Call List

Swiftpage creates a ranked list of the most interested contacts based on their interaction with your email blast.

Drip Marketing

Swiftpage Drip Marketing gives you the ability to create a sequence of messages that are automatically delivered to your contacts at the right time. 

For more information, including screen shots of the product and demos, visit the Swiftpage Connect web page. Of course, you can always drop me a note or give me a call and I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have.

Social Media Siren Song

[Note – if this is you first time here (welcome!), please don’t think I’m anti-social media – browse around and you’ll see I’ve been a long time proponent of social media.]

Continuing on the theme of listening to the conversations going around me, today I want to talk about the silliness of social media marketing as the magic elixir for instant small business success.

I’m not surprised to be hearing this sort of talk from marketing consultants and the like. After all, we are selling this stuff. What does concern me is when I start to hear some of, what I will kindly call sales nonsense, being echoed back by business owners. They have been hearing so much of this crap that they are starting to be assimilated.

If you are going to try social media marketing because you have been “disappointed with your results from traditional marketing”, and social media marketing is the answer you have been waiting for because it is “free” and “easy”, and you have plan to “go viral”, then I urge you to step back from the Kool-Aid for a second and give it a second thought.

Social media marketing is still marketing. You still need to have a crystal clear idea of who your ideal customers are. You have to know what is important to them and how to communicate that in their language. You still need to have a system in place to nurture leads and follow up. You still need to have marketing materials (content) that educates rather than trying to sell. You still have to make sure your business follows through on the expectations that are set by marketing. And all of this still takes time.

Yes, social medial provides a lot of advantages and tools that let us do more and connect with more people than ever before. But “free” or “easy” or “automatic”?

Story telling is a big part of marketing. I’d encourage you to take a step back and listen to the stories you are hearing. Are they realistic? Fantasy?

What do you think? Am I just being grumpy or are you hearing the fairy tales too?

Referral Partner Groups or Networking Events - Which do you prefer?

In yesterday's post, I mentioned that I was spending more time listening to the conversations around me. Another theme that seems to be repeating itself is the idea of shifting from attending general networking events to referral groups.

In these conversations, networking events are comprised of chamber of commerce and association events, various luncheon get-togethers, and after hours events. In the Kansas City area, we seem to have an embarassment of wealth when it comes to these type of networking opportunities. It would be very easy to consume a 40 hour work week just attending the various networking opportunities in our city.

Referral meetings tend to be much smaller and are typically comprised of business owners who serve similar target markets but don't compete with one another. 

Some other ways referral groups tend to differ from networking meetings include:

1. Expectations - there is more of an expectation that people who attend referral groups are looking for introductions. This expectations goes both ways, if you want me to provide you with an introduction, you must be clear about who (or what company) you would like to meet.
2. Introductions vs. Referrals - even though I refer to them as referral groups, I find that people in these groups are looking for introductions. They realize they may not be able to connect directly to the ultimate decision maker in one step. Rather, they are looking for a path to lead them to the decision maker.
3. Speaking of decision makers, many of these groups seem to form out of a shared frustration over the inability to connect with decision makers at the typical networking event. If you are not having any luck meeting the decision makers of your target customers at these events, you may want to explore forming your own referral group.
4. Because expectations are more clearly defined, these groups often feel more productive. They feel more like a business meeting rather than a social. This feeling of being productive often makes the experience more valuable to the participants, so attendance and participation tends to be stronger.

Those are some of the things I have been noticing. How about you? Do you have a preference between networking and referral partner groups?

Interested in starting a referral partner group but not sure how? Drop me a line or leave a comment, I'll be happy to help.

Marketing Tactic Building Blocks – Follow Up

The final building block in our marketing tactic model is the Follow Up block. As accountants, lawyers, and other service professionals, we tend to, as my fellow Duct Tape Marketing coach Bill Doerr is fond of saying “meet people by introduction rather than by crisis”.

In other words, for most professionals, we don’t meet people at the specific time that they have a need for our services. However, chances are they will need our services in the future. Hopefully, they will have a need for our services several times over the course of our relationship. Chances are, they will also have friends and acquaintances who will periodically have a need to know about us and what we do. We spend a lot of marketing effort to help us achieve “Top of Mind” status. It is of paramount importance that we have a follow up system in place so that once we achieve Top-of-Mind we are able to stay Top-of-Mind, so when a need to know about what we do does arise, they will contact us or refer us to those with the need.

Of course, we also need to have follow up systems in place so that when someone responds to one of our Calls to Action, that we respond appropriately, whether that mean starting a sales conversation or continuing to educate via our marketing materials.

In the building block diagram, there is a dotted line (you may click on the image to see the larger version) right below the Follow Up block. This signifies that, while every tactic needs to be attached to a follow up system, you certainly don’t need to have a separate follow up system for each tactic. As a practical matter, the fewer systems that you have, the more likely your are to use them consistently and effectively. As I mentioned in the Tools block, these systems should only be as sophisticated as needed to get the job done. For some firms, ACT! may do the job. Others may use something like Salesforce.com. For others, a simple index card based tickler system may do the trick. The “best” system isn’t the one that has the most bells and whistles, it’s the one that produces results.

That’s the end of this series of blog posts. Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback, both here and in person. I’d love to hear your opinions about this model – did you find it helpful, what do you think is missing, etc. Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Is Your Business Invisible?

Many businesses still don’t have a web site, rendering them virtually invisible to potential customers.

For a couple of years now, I (and other Duct Tape Marketing coaches) have been referencing research from the Kelsey Group that showed 70% of US adults use the internet as an information source when shopping for local goods and services. Now, updated research indicates that number is as high as 90%.

Last year, 1 & 1 Internet conducted a survey of of 1,800 small and medium sized business. That survey revealed that 2 out of 5 of those businesses did not have a website. By the way, of those SMBs that did have a website, 83 percent report that their website was essential to their company’s success.

Let’s summarize, and generalize a bit. Almost all of your potential customers search the internet for local goods and services before they buy. Only a little more than half of local businesses have a chance of showing up in that search. I say a chance because it is important to do the work to make sure your site is showing up in the search results for the way your customers search. It seems to me that those businesses who have a website optimized for local search enjoy a distinct competitive advantage.

Which side of the playground does your business have to line up on – the visible or the invisible?

Have an invisible website?

If you have a website but your not showing up in local search results, check out the Local Search Engine Profile

Defining your marketing problem

(This article originally appeared in Feb. 2010 Business Builder newsletter. I’m posting it here because I seem to be having related conversations with business owners with greater frequency.)

Sometimes the biggest challenge in correcting your marketing problems is defining exactly what kind of problem you have. There are many kinds of marketing problems. Here are a few broad categories that may help you to better define, and therefore solve, marketing related problems you may face.

Problems related to marketing strategy, such as target market selection, development of your core message, and how you package services and products. One of the biggest problems related to strategy is not having one or just glossing over one. Other problems include thinking “everyone” is our target market, or trying to have one generic marketing message that fits all of the segments we serve.

Problems related to tactic selection. When we don’t give the proper attention to our marketing strategy, we will often encounter problems related to selecting inappropriate marketing tactics. As business people, we tend to want to “get things done”. This makes it easy to select the wrong tactic in an effort to “do marketing”.

Problems related to tactic execution. Sometimes we may know what to do but either 1) don’t get around to doing it or 2) don’t do it effectively. For instance, we may know that we should network, we may go to networking events, but we may not yet have the skills to have a conversation that helps us qualify who we should build a relationship with.

Problems related to follow up. More often than not, these problems are related the the lack of a follow up system. Your system can be anything from a 3x5 index card system to a full blown CRM system.

Problems implementing technical tools. We have more technology available to help us with marketing than ever before. Sometime this technology can provide a hurdle to getting started. Questions in this category include “How do I set up a blog?”, “How do I pick the right CRM system?”, “How do I collect email addresses and send out newsletters?” and “How do I get started with social media?”.

It is not uncommon for an initially perceived problem to be one or more problems in these different categories. By taking the time to define your marketing problem, you will have a better chance of identifying the skills, knowledge, and resources you need to solve that problem. Quite often, once we clearly define the problem, the answer almost presents itself.

3 Metrics for Referral Marketing

I'm a big fan of regularly reviewing you marketing plan. I believe that regularly reviewing your plan is just as, if not more, important as creating the plan in the first place. Marketing plan review discussions generally include metrics. Here are three of my favorite metrics related to referral marketing:

Referrals Given - I always like to start with this one. I'm sure we have all heard sayings like "give to get" and "givers gain", but do you set goals and measure results related to the referrals you give others?

Stay in touch conversations - More often than not, referrals don't come from partners right away. It takes some time to nurture those relationships. Having a system in place to regularly reach out to maintain your "top of mind" status is a key to a successful referral strategy.

Referrals Asked For - more often than not, the biggest obstacle to receiving referrals is that we don't ask for them. You don't have control over how many referrals you receive, but you certainly have control over making requests.

Do you have a favorite metric for tracking your referral marketing process? Leave a comment and share it with us.

Looking for more referral marketing tips?

John Jantsch's lastest book, The Referral Engine, is now available for pre-order.

Tom Peters on Thoughtfulness

Over the weekend, I found this short video from Tom Peters where he shares his views regarding thoughtfulness as a key to success. (If you can't see the video, click here)

So what do you think about the role that thoughtfulness plays in your business?

Should law and accounting firms outsource their social media marketing activities?

As more professional service firms use social media as a platform for their marketing activities, the question of whether to outsource those activities will come up with greater frequency. Today  I want to talk a little about how to go about making those outsourcing decisions.

For the sake of this post, let’s divide social media marketing activities into 2 broad categories, creating valuable content and distributing that content so it can be found by those who need it when they need it, with the hopes of leading them back to us so they can hire us to help solve their problems.

The activities in the distributing category can also be broken up into 2 broad categories – getting ready and ongoing. Getting ready activities are things like setting up blog software, creating profiles (Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Biznik, etc.), and creating accounts on social bookmarking sites. It can also include creating listening stations and dashboards.

Activities in the ongoing distribution category are those activities that need to be done whenever a new piece of content is created. Things like:

• tagging and categorizing
• submitting to community sites
• “pinging” your social communities
• repurposing content

In my opinion, the activities best suited for outsourcing are those in the distribution category. These activities do not require the specific expertise of the firm and can be handled more efficiently by a company that has a “factory” set up to handle them.

Creating content that is valuable to your current and future customers is not as suitable for outsourcing. Neither is finding content that others  have created and explaining how it impacts your customers business. Content creation, should favor effectiveness over efficiency.

Of course, some types of content (i.e. eBooks or research studies) that are helpful for your customers may be a prime candidates for outsourcing. However, I believe that blog content, online articles, etc. should be created by the firm.

Many firms struggle through the "getting ready” activities on their own before they ever get to a decision point about whether or not to outsource. If this is you, then you don’t have to worry about this step, although, you may want to outsource these as other professionals in your firm begin to participate in social media.

I often like to compare social media conversations with in person conversations. If you are going to have a conversation with a prospect, it would make sense to outsource things like appointment setting, calling to confirm, making reservations, and even transportation, but you wouldn’t send someone else from outside your company to have the actual conversation with them, would you?