Most service professionals know that they need to market their business consistently to get great results. But knowing and doing are two very different things. It can seem challenging to market consistently when you’re so busy serving your clients, actually running your company, and trying to take care of and enjoy the other aspects of your life.
Without a doubt, effective marketing does require your time, energy, and consistent effort, but not to the point that it should be draining for you. It actually should be really easy. And in fact, once you build momentum and get the right systems in place, you’ll find that your marketing runs like a well-oiled machine, and support you in filling your practice with ideal clients and creating more visibility for the solutions you offer, and generating the income you need to enjoy the lifestyle of your choice.
Then you might be thinking, "that all sounds great, Sydni, how do I do that?” Let me answer that question for you.
First you want to build a strong foundation for your marketing. This includes:
• Getting really clear and focused on what exactly you want to accomplish in your business.
• Setting S.M.A.R.T. goals – goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-sensitive.
• Making over your mindset. Many times, what hinders us from taking consistent action with our marketing is that we let our limiting beliefs get in the way. It’s really important to embrace a mindset for marketing success.
• Identifying who is your exact market, who your ideal client is, and what specialized niche of services you’re going to offer that individual.
• Learning how to talk confidently about what you do in a way that is compelling to the person that you’re speaking with.
• Looking at how you’re packaging your services so that you’re creating options and solutions that are really appealing to your ideal client.
• Finally, you want to create a simple marketing plan that’s going to, week after week, create visibility and awareness for the work you do.
Once you have your foundation in place, it’s time to focus on creating visibility! And there’s a number of ways that you can do that:
• Educating those in your network who already, those people who already know you and like you and trust you. This includes family members, friends, ex-colleagues, other individuals in your professional services industry that may serve a complimentary service. Everyone who knows about what you do needs to be educated about how they can refer business to you.
• You also want to look at ways to create referral relationships.
• You want to network strategically.
• Look at ways online that you can create a lot of visibility for your work such as through social media. Of course, there’s the BIG three, Twitter, and Facebook, and LinkedIn. However, depending on your profession, there are also may be social networks that are specific to just what you do.
Now that you have built a strong foundation, you built up some momentum, and created some visibility; you want to maintain that momentum. This includes:
• Having regular interactions with your audience, such as via webinars or teleseminars or of an email newsletter.
• Consistently publishing great content on your blog.
• Leveraging the power of social media so that you can consistently create visibility for what it is that you do
The fact is that consistent, effective marketing creates awareness. It creates awareness of the problems that you solve, and who exactly you solve them for. So when people who are looking for those solutions discover what you have to offer, you become the natural choice and hiring you is almost automatic. They don’t over think it or hem and haw. They whip out their credit card or form of payment because they need exactly what it is that you have to offer. And it’s maintaining a full practice of client that creates a consistent and reliable income for you month after month.