Why do some coaches and consultants have a constant stream of potential clients calling them for advice and appointments, while most service providers struggle year after year to attract enough clients?
No matter how impressive your credentials and skills, or how much advertising and selling you do, many potential customers ignore promotional ads made by small businesses without recognizable brand names.
Marketing experts have found that the most effective way for small service-oriented businesses to market themselves is by producing and distributing educational content (content marketing) that positions them as thought leaders.
Becoming an authority in your field attracts clients who believe you can solve their problems. You won’t have to chase after clients like traditional marketers.
Famous gurus are mostly average professionals who know how to market themselves
If you look into the background of most famous “gurus”, you will learn that most of them are just average professionals who know how to position themselves as experts.
These authorities indirectly market themselves by writing books, giving speeches, doing interviews, and promoting their content on the internet. They don’t advertise their businesses directly.
The good news for those of us who aren’t as brash or extroverted as those celebrity gurus is that the internet provides a variety of affordable, accessible channels you can use to build your reputation and standing within your niche.
The variety of tools ranges from writing articles to appearing on local TV shows.
The content marketing channels and information products discussed below are available to all businesses, regardless of marketing budget
This strategy of indirectly promoting yourself to attract more potential clients usually follows this sequence:
- Create free content and submit it to your website
- Create one or two information products and sell on your site or other sites
- Create a valuable e-book or report to be used as a bonus for prospects who give you their contact information
- Promote your free content, bonus reports, and info products to encourage more people to sign up for your free e-mail newsletter or articles
- Create and send an e-mail marketing series consisting of educational and promotional content to e-mail subscribers
- Persuade your subscribers to try your products and services
There are many different types of information products and free content you can create to help you become known as an authority in your niche:
Articles
Writing articles about topics that are important to your potential clients.
These articles can be copied to your website and social media pages. You can also submit articles to directories and blogs or journals related to your field.
You can subscribe to services such as HARO (Help a Reporter Out), where you submit articles in response to inquiries from journalists who need stories to publish.
Blog Posts
Blog posts are similar to articles, but allow you to use a more personal style, where your readers can respond by posting comments.
Presentations
Delivering presentations on topics that are relevant to your industry allows you to introduce yourself to leaders within your niche. It also creates free publicity for your business.
Press Release
Press releases are used to publicize new products, events, or changes that take place in organizations.
You can create a press release to let people know about a new book you’ve published, or a new service you’re offering.
You can use services such as www.businesswire.com to distribute your press release to search engines and directories where people search for stories and news.
Free Downloadable Reports
Creating and distributing free special reports (lead bait) on your website is an effective way to prove your credentials while building your mailing list of potential customers.
You can make your downloadable files available to people who enter their contact information, such as email address, into an online form on your site.
Having a list of names and email addresses allows you to distribute educational and marketing content to people who have an interest in what you offer. Some of these prospects will turn into paying customers.
Email Marketing Content
The content you distribute through an email marketing campaign includes how-to articles, promotional emails, and other forms of educational content.
Your email content will be sent to people who’ve given you their contact information. This content will be part of a sequence of email messages (autoresponder series) meant to convert consumers of your content into customers.
E-books
Writing and publishing e-books offers a lot of advantages for small business owners, aside from boosting credibility and recognition:
- Promoting your e-books provides you with free publicity
- Selling e-books can create an extra source of income for you
- Publishing e-books will boost your prestige
- E-books can be used as a premium / reward that you can give to new customers
- The content of your e-books can be recycled into separate articles, blog posts, presentations, and courses
It is relatively inexpensive to create and publish a small e-book related to your professional field. Sites such as Amazon provide you with free resources that make publishing e-books easy.
Information Products
Selling information products has become a secondary source of income for many service professionals such as coaches.
There is a variety of information products you can create:
- Audiobooks
- CDs
- Home-study courses
- Handbooks
- Workbooks
- Online courses
The content for most of these products can be taken from your existing e-books, special reports, website content, and articles.
Similar to e-books, information products have a variety of uses, aside from helping to establish your credibility and authority within your field.
The great thing about information products is that they can generate income for you. Even if your profits aren’t huge, any sales made can help you to cover your marketing expenses.
Electronic Newsletter
E-newsletters are useful as a CRM (customer relationship management) technique for staying in touch with current and past customers. Newsletters also help to generate referrals, as your existing customers share your content with colleagues and friends.
Newsletters can be used to share news about your business. You can also include business and professional tips, or lists of books and resources that will help your customers.
You can create ads within your newsletter to help promote e-books and other information products that you sell.
All you need to create a newsletter is an account with one of the larger email marketing platforms such as Zoho Campaigns.
E-mail marketing software provides templates to help you design newsletters quickly, as well as features such as autoresponders, that allow you to automatically send newsletter issues to your mailing list according to a fixed schedule.
Videos
Producing short videos is another way to boost your credentials and become known to your target market.
The content for your videos may be recycled articles, courses, presentations, tutorials, and other types of content that can be adapted into video scripts.
For those who feel uncomfortable being in front of a camera, it’s possible to create presentations showing only images or animations, along with speech created with text-to-speech software.
Website Content
Your website is equivalent to your virtual store or office, and all of your marketing efforts are aimed at sending potential customers to your site, where you hope to eventually convert them into long-term customers.
Your site needs to have useful content and resources in order to encourage visitors to read both your educational and promotional webpages.
Your main goal is to have people fill out your web form with their contact information and download your free booklets or reports. Having a list of email addresses and names makes it much easier to create targeted marketing campaigns.
The content you provide in your website can originate from many sources:
- Previous articles, presentations, and blog posts you’ve created
- Recycled pages from your e-books and reports
- Old email marketing campaigns
- Your existing marketing materials
- Links to other useful websites
- Lists of helpful books and resources
- Your blog
How to create and manage your educational content
A freelance copywriter can help you to repurpose old content and materials into interesting webpages by adding keywords (search terms used on Google), and making the text more scannable by adding subheadings and more white space.
It’s also a good idea to have your freelancer create blog posts and other educational content on a regular basis in order to alert Google and other search engines that your website is active and provides relevant and updated information.
Promoting Your Content
When you’re first getting started, you’ll have to promote every piece of content you create over and over to get the attention of readers.
As you create more information products and content, potential clients see your name show up in different places, reinforcing your status and authority. You will still need to routinely promote your website and e-books.
Eventually, you’ll reach a point where the information you sell or give away generates enough attention, comments, reviews, and word-of-mouth that they help to promote your business even without any active promotion.
At this point, it becomes much easier to attract potential clients who are willing to give their contact information and subscribe to your content. They will also be more receptive to your promotions and ads.
A few months of publishing and promoting your educational content and materials should lead to a steady volume of incoming inquiries and email subscriptions.
Mark Bellini – Freelance Copywriter
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