As a consultant or coach, your strengths lie in helping people uncover insights to transform their day-to-day lives. You know the value you provide to your clients, but, the rest of the world may not. That’s where marketing comes in. Many are quick to say that blogs and social media are marketing and that they are doing it well. That may be true, but there’s layers to that—what’s the journey like AFTER a blog or social post is interacted with?
Here are your 3 keys to unlocking success in your marketing strategy for your consulting business.
Use Lead Magnets
What exactly is a lead magnet? It’s a specialized piece of content designed to engage a potential lead. It extends the journey of someone entering your site to read your blog or clicking on your social media post. The goal is to create content that is compelling enough to motivate the reader to trade their contact information for your content piece.
Using them is very simple too. After designing a customer journey, think about what you’d like the potential customer (a lead) to walk away knowing, and what questions this content could spark in them. Ensure you gate the content (click here to learn about gating) and think of a clever way to continue engaging them. Sometimes just a helpful email that references another piece of your content will do the trick. If you see that they are doing a lot of engaging you know you have their attention. Here’s a free tool to help you with email marketing if you’re just getting started.
Curious how to get started creating your content? Get inspired! We at TTI SI create lead magnets all the time for our VAAs and for the public, like this one. Use this landing page, which gates the content through an embedded form to get your wheels turning about how to formulate your sales content, and then use the actual lead magnet to think of how to create your own. Lead magnets can be everything from an ebook, to a worksheet, to an infographic—if it’s engaging and sparking questions, it’s working.
Engage Your Audience
Engaging your audience is everything. This is the way your potential customers can find you, decide if they like your brand, and think your product or service solves their challenge.
Imagine you want to buy a car. These days buyers already know what they want and what they are getting before they even speak to a sales representative at the dealer. That’s because they’ve consumed all the specialized content available to them to make an informed decision.
What are some ways to do this? Social media and blogging are two of the most effective ways to generate interest—but once you’ve got their contact information it’s time to take it up a notch. That’s where things like nurture campaigns come into play. These are thought-out strategies that continue giving your new lead content that is relevant to their initial engagement with you.
This is most commonly done through email and providing a blog that relates back to their original download. This will open their mind to something popular right now, and then you can even add in a link for them to request a meeting with you. If your gated content form asks for a phone number, and you see that they’ve engaged with a few emails, it may be a good opportunity to call them as well. If you’re looking for clever ways to develop your content, you can reference this article by our Creative and Marketing Director, Bobby Tyning.
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Develop Your CRM
According to Hubspot, a CRM is “[A platform that] allows businesses to manage relationships with contacts and customers by centralizing information.” This can range from the super basic as a small business with a well-documented and organized google sheet, to larger platforms like Hubspot or Salesforce to name a few.
This kind of resource is critical to your organization if you have intent to scale and grow. It’s imperative to have a centralized and searchable database to store your contacts. It’s also equally important to keep it clean and do routine maintenance and data purging for old contacts that aren’t doing you any good. At TTI SI, we use Hubspot for our entire marketing and customer relationship management operations—but if you’re on a budget like many proud entrepreneurs, their free option is a perfect solution to keeping track of your contacts/leads and managing your growth.
We’re passionate about CRMs because of all the opportunities for scale, organization, and tracking. For example, if you’ve got a team of people you can easily track their activity by browsing through your CRM, even one as simple as a google sheet.
You can also track the activity of your leads through a CRM to determine if they are revisiting your material, opening emails, and overall staying interested in what you have to offer. This kind of information will inform you about what stage in your journey a particular contact is in and how you should nurture them. You can dig a little deeper into the benefits of a CRM by checking out this article too.
Putting It All Together
Your strength is providing amazing experiences for your clients, but expanding your customer journey through marketing is where you can really make a difference. We know as an entrepreneur you don’t always have the time to implement these keys—that’s where TTI SI Global comes in. TTI SI Global’s main goal is to help clients build saleable and scalable businesses.
Whether you’re getting some help to level up in these areas or are getting scrappy and using the tools we suggested we can’t wait to see what you create.
