As a professional, it can be challenging to balance servicing clients with consistently marketing for new clients. It seems to be a challenge that all professionals face. When you have time to market, you often don’t know where to focus your efforts. In my experience, the most successful professionals seem to focus on balancing their time and energy in each of the following six marketing channels:
Networking
As a professional, over 85% of your new business will come from your network. Because of this, it’s always essential to maintain these strong connections. Remember, when it comes to networking, it’s quality over quantity that matters. To boost efficiency, you may identify your top contacts and concentrate your focus on them.
Your Website
Assume that each referral you receive will eventually end up vetting you through your website. In turn, make sure that your site adequately reflects your brand through excellent and engaging design and messaging. First and foremost is to ensure that your bio is in tip-top shape. Then continue to keep your site as updated and fresh as possible.
Association Involvement
An excellent business development and marketing strategy is joining and becoming actively involved in an association where your prospects and referral sources are active. The key to your success in an association is consistently attend the meetings and lending your skills to a committee. Over time, if you continue to provide value and be of service in your association you will reap the benefits of your hard work.
Social Media
Many of our buying decisions in today’s digitally savvy world are begun and thoroughly researched via social media. Professional services are no different. Because your referral sources, prospects, and clients use social media, you need to as well. At a minimum, make sure your LinkedIn profile is completed and that you have a well-done professional profile picture. You may also want to consider expanding your company’s reach through Facebook, Twitter, or even Instagram. But again, as with networking, remember to favor quality over quantity. So if you are going to be on a social media network, make sure you are committed to active engagement.
Communications
Your network needs to hear from you! While begin active on social media is a great strategy, it’s also really important to share your through-leadership with those that aren’t active on social media. That’s why we encourage our clients to develop a branded, personalized newsletter. This will take some time and focus, as it’s important to share content that you have written yourself with your contacts. The age of canned newsletter is gone. People want authentic, personalized content. The more personal and unique you can make your newsletter, the more people will open your newsletter and actually read it. Over time, your subscriber list will grow and so will your business!
Thought Leadership
To separate yourself from your competitors, you need to share your expertise. To do this, you need to develop a strategy for your thought-leadership. A good way to begin sharing your thought-leadership is by creating and consistency adding to a blog on your website. Ideally if you have taken the time to blog on a topic that you are an expert around, then it’s worth finding ways to repurpose that content into other areas of marketing such as a presentation, submitting it to your association’s newsletter, or pushing it out via your personal newsletter. By consistently maintaining your activity and focus in the above six marketing channels, you can keep the marketing momentum going in your business. As we often say, consistently doing the right things in your business will pay off over time — and your business will grow!