How Real Professionals Market Themselves3 min read
If you’re a management consultant, business coach or corporate trainer, your marketing is different than other service businesses.
It’s different because it needs to be more professional, more personal and more, well, serious.
Your buyer is the owner of a company or a top-level executive in a company. They are looking for proven solutions to their problems, issues and challenges.
And they don’t respond to marketing that’s full of hype and over-the-top promises. They are looking for professionals who are a known quantity, not those with fly-by-night ideas.
So, what works to market to these kinds of clients?
This following is the advice I give to clients who need to make the right connections and the right impression through their marketing.
Network Actively
And I don’t mean going to a lot of cocktail mixers (although they do have their place), but being in touch with and regularly meeting with your business associates who can connect you with new people, resources and opportunities.
If your associates are not seeing you and speaking with you occasionally, they are not thinking about you. Set up coffees or lunches two to three times a month. My marketing research client, Nancy Clift, got back on the vendor list for a major client and landed large new projects with this kind of networking activity.
Be Active on LinkedIn
Check your feed at least daily. Make comments on posts. Point to your blog articles or share a resource. My client, Eileen, just got an appointment with a prospective client by paying attention on LinkedIn and following up with a connection.
LinkedIn is online networking and can keep your name and services in front of those who already know, like and trust you. You don’t have to promote aggressively for LinkedIn to lead you to new clients.
Do Presentations
It may be a talk at a professional group or a webinar to those on your list. You have ideas people want to know about, so get out there and share them. Nothing else builds your credibility faster.
One of my clients, Ross Blake, speaks exclusively at human resource organizations in Upstate New York. He makes a positive impact, collects cards, follows up, gets appointments and makes sales. It’s a proven system.
Write Content
Digital Marketer, Tsavo Neal, advocates writing and posting something related to your business once a week. Send to your list, post it on your blog, LinkedIn and/or Medium. Doing so keep you sharp and spotlights your current thinking.
I write this ezine and blog post in a couple of hours each Monday, but Neal points out that you could spread this out by writing just 20 minutes a day. Break down what seems like an overwhelming marketing chore into small bits of work.
Follow Up
I sometimes think that this is really the master skill of marketing. Although many avoid it, it’s really not that hard to do. And the best way to do it is to send follow-up emails or make calls the very first thing in the day.
My client, Amina, calls this “swallowing the frog.” It may be the hardest activity you do in the day, which makes the rest of the day a whole lot easier. She doubled her coaching practice in three months by simply following up with prospective clients each morning.
These five marketing activities are nothing new. And yet they do take time, focus, and effort to get results. They are not a quick fix where you can expect a flood of new leads overnight. Instead, they result in a nice flow of new clients over time.
And that’s how real professionals market themselves.
Cheers, Robert