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Talk to Your Marketing Department about a Better, Stronger, Faster Digital Niche Marketing Program
Every day, every partner in charge of a niche practice wears many hats.
Researcher, educator, trainer, mentor, salesperson, marketer, interviewer, billing, strategic planner, client relations ... well, the list goes on and on.
When it comes to business development, the hat you’ve worn and the key to your success has come as a result of the referral network you’ve built and your reputation. It’s likely that you’ve ventured into some very traditional marketing arenas – trade shows, associations, direct mail, print advertising, etc. – with varying degrees of expectations and success.
Today, you’ve got to put on one more hat – digital marketer. You see, it’s not enough to rest on your laurels and your referral network when your prospects are searching online for solutions. If you don’t “get found” and if you don’t have the tools, strategies and tactics to convert people who come to your website into leads, you may have trouble meeting your niche growth objectives.
For many niche practice leaders, the world of online marketing is uncharted territory. So, here are a few ideas that with the proper tools, technologies and execution will put a smile on your face.
Come Into my Office, Shut the Door, and Let’s Talk About...
If you haven’t had a 1:1 discussion with your firm’s marketing department about digital marketing, then there’s no time like the present. Here’s 10 “conversation starters” you can use:
1. “I want to identify and quantify measureable goals for my niche in terms of web visits, leads and new customers.”
To create a digital marketing program for your niche, you’ll want to set up a number of quantifiable goals and then measure everything from website visitors to specific page visits to lead generation and lot a more. The very first meeting you have with your marketer about digital marketing should be about your goals for the overall niche and what your expectations are for the contributions of the digital marketing efforts toward those goals.
Check out this eBook on unlocking the ROI of your marketing with analytics.
2. “Can you build and optimize a series of web pages for my niche so that each page covers a single topic?”
In days of yore, the rule of thumb for a web page was to load it up and make it long, long, long. So, the section of a firm’s website on tax services could run on for hundreds or even thousands of words ... all on one, long, boring web page.
Today, the best practice is single idea or single service means single page. We optimize each of those pages with a relevant search term that in effect, tells search engines that this web page is relevant for any person looking for information about a specific topic.
If you offer 10 different types of tax services, you need 10 different optimized web pages
3. “What can we do to create offers to acquire top of the funnel leads?”
This question will get you into the area of lead generation.
Top of the funnel lead generation involves offering some type of educational material packaged into a whitepaper or eBook, tucking it behind a form, and capturing the contact information of prospect who requests the offer.
This is the beginning of a process that involves continuously “touching” qualified leads until the point that they are sales ready.
4. “What kind of infrastructure and technologies do we need (or have) for capturing leads?
You shouldn’t be capturing leads on an Excel spreadsheet.
Today, there are quite a few digital marketing technology providers that have a suite of products that serve as the backbone of contemporary inbound marketing programs. You do need to do your due diligence in order to buy exactly what you need, but when it comes to lead capture, you’ll want to have software that can create call to action buttons, landing pages, fulfillment capabilities and the means to collect data on visitor to landing page to customer conversions.
Our recommendation: check out HubSpot.
5. “Would you please work with the partners and staff to help organize and publish a regular schedule of blog posts?”
When you ask this question, you’re showing your understanding of the importance of content in the inbound marketing world. You’re also demonstrating that you know that one of the critical pieces to a strong content marketing program for your niche is to regularly publish and promote blogs.
Your marketing department should play a key role in helping you get a blogging program organized and executed in a consistent manner. Some niche practices write their own blog pieces, others look to ghost writers in order to get a consistent publication schedule.
Today, blogging is fundamental to getting found.
6. “Do we have the capabilities and technologies to create and automate drip campaigns to nurture leads that are not sales ready?
Marketing automation is a key marketing tactic that every niche practice leader should know about. Essentially automation is built on technology that can schedule and deliver targeted email messages to the right prospects at the right time with the right message.
It’s not unusual to have 10 or more “touches” in an automated campaign structure.
You marketing team should be using automation to help move your prospects though the sales funnel. A word of caution here: marketing automation IS NOT Marketing 101 – it’s a more sophisticated marketing activity that you’ll want to thoroughly understand before making a commitment to purchasing the technology and realigning department resources to accommodate its multi-faceted moving pieces.
7. “I would like you to create LinkedIn profiles and strategies, and train all of our team members.”
You might be skeptical – and with good reason – about the value of social media for building your niche. While that may be true for Facebook and perhaps Twitter, it may be time for you to rethink the value of LinkedIn for helping build the personal brand of your niche’s subject matter experts, for promoting your thought leadership, for participating in a community where your prospects can be found, and for generating leads.
Your marketing team should be crafting a LinkedIn plan for the niche and for each individual within the niche. We have consistently found that LinkedIn drives prospects to websites and is a huge source of leads from people who see an offer in a LinkedIn group and then go to a landing page to redeem that offer.
8. “What do we need to do to build the marketing database for the niche?”
This is one of the most important, and one of the hardest tasks you’ll ask of your marketing department. A strong marketing database is the foundation of a strong email marketing capability.
Unless you want to be in violation of Federal regulation, the days of being able to purchase a list of email names and use them indiscriminately are long gone. Now, your prospects have to self-identify their willingness to revive your emails and without their permission, your email program can be a ticking time bomb.
Look to your marketers for state of the art ways and best practices for building a list. Today’s rule of thumb is that building a list requires patience, accuracy and permission.
9. “Would you please convert our sales collateral, case studies and testimonials into digital versions and make them available for download on our pages on the website?”
This is a pretty simple, low hanging type of request you can make to your marketers, but surprisingly, it’s not being done by a lot of firms.
Consider this: if you’ve driven a visitor to your niche web pages, why not take the opportunity (in addition to serving up an offer to try to generate a lead) to provide them with the opportunity to download information about your services and successes?
By making these downloads available, you’ll not only free up space on the web page, you’ll move your prospect one step closer to becoming a client by virtue of the fact that they took the initiative to learn more about you ... that’s the heart of inbound marketing!
10. “I want you to help me sell better by giving me lead intelligence. What can we do
There are now ways to track where, when and what a visitor to your website has accessed, as well as a history of their digital interactions with your niche in terms of email open and click through rates, conversions to offers and even whether or not they have opened a direct email message.
One piece of technology that is fairly new that has impressed us is Sidekick from HubSpot. Sidekick shows you powerful information about your contacts right in your inbox. You can see a contact’s professional history, where they live, mutual contacts, email history and a lot more.
How Marketers Get Niche Practice Leaders to Smile
These questions aren’t easy to answer and it’s going to take time, energy and resources to implement their solutions. But across the country, niche practice leaders are coming to the conclusion that digital marketing is not a “wanna have”, but a “must have”.
They need to turn their marketing departments for help, and marketers need to be ready to talk about what the niche practice needs in order to be a strong and viable competitor in this new age of digital and inbound marketing.
At the end of the day, dear Partner, it’s not the processes or the technologies that will put a smile on your face. The secret to getting you smiling as a result of a digital or inbound marketing program is to show you how the effort has complemented your traditional marketing effort to deliver leads and new customers.
For example, here’s live data from a CPA firm that shows through the first 10 months of the year, the digital program created some 350 leads and 11 new clients.
Doing some back of the napkin calculations, say that each client was worth $10k/year and retained for a period of 7 years. That’s $770,000 in new, lifetime business.
That should be enough to make any niche practice team leader smile!
So here’s the last question you should ask your marketing team:
“When can we get started?”
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