Best Consulting Practices

Are You Hiding Behind Online Marketing?

Got a web site? Using Twitter? Facebook? LinkedIn? Blogging?

Having an "online presence" gets a lot of attention these days. You've probably read dozens of (online) articles about why it is essential to building your consulting business. Maybe you entered the online marketing world reluctantly at first, maybe you jumped in right away.

But there's a good chance you are either channeling a lot of energy into online approaches to marketing your consulting services these days ... or, you're feeling guilty precisely because you are not channeling all your energy into online marketing.

And maybe all that effort is about results, maybe not!

They Can See You, But ...

We had a dog who knew when she had done something wrong, and when she was about to get scolded. Her solution was to keep her head turned away from us. She sort of figured that if she couldn't see us, we couldn't see her, and we certainly could not be yelling at her.

If you have a web site, you may take a lot of interest in "hits," in how many visitors you get, and in how those numbers grow. You take great pleasure in knowing that all those visitors, represented by site statistics, "see" you in some way.

But you only see them as numbers, rather than as individual prospects, and the same applies to followers in other social media. If your number of visitors or followers grows from 10 a day to 100 a day to 500 a day, is that proof that you are being effective?

Hardly. The ultimate proof is a contract from a specific individual. Helpful evidence would be contacts, whether through social media, or by e-mail or phone, from interested parties.

Online tools are like that special mirror in the interrogation room: they can see what you are saying, but you can't see what they are doing, unless they step out of the hidden room and make themselves known..

And it is just possible that you like it that way. Like our dog, you feel like you are being good because you have managed to avoid interacting with the individuals who could give you (by their actions) the most meaningful feedback.

All the Hiding Without the Guilt

Frequently updating your web site content, or putting out Tweets more frequently, can make you feel fairly virtuous. You're marketing, aren't you? You're staying visible, right!

And you're dealing with a largely anonymous audience, aren't you?

The truth is, online tools may or may not make marketing easier for your type of business, but they are likely to make it feel easier for you, personally. E-mailing a prospect with a name and a clear inquiry about their specific needs or interest is scary. Calling someone whose name has been given to you as a referral takes guts.

Tweeting or posting something online barely registers on the "scary meter," compared to more personal contacts.

One big difference is that feedback is immediate. You find out very quickly, in a personal meeting or phone call, whether or not the prospect is interested in you, in what you offer. That's a lot different than flinging your message out into the online void and waiting to "achieve critical mass," waiting for your hordes of visitors to turn into clients.

Don't mistake my point for a second! I use this blog, as well as Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on, and I think they can be valuable tools.

But they are also opportunities to "be busy with marketing" with very little accountability. If you are just counting "hits" and "connections" and "followers" without tracking the actual new business you are getting, you're just fooling yourself.

Is Your Web Designer On Your Side?

You may have a variety of "helpers" to whom you delegate key tasks in your consulting business, not only to save time, but to supplement skills you may lack. Having someone build and maintain your web site is among the most common of these, but writers and administrative help can also be valuable.

And I strongly encourage you to look for ways to delegate tasks that others could perform more efficiently, so you can concentrate on the parts of your business to which you bring, and from which you extract, the most value.

But delegating tasks is not the same as abdicating responsibility for core decisions about your business and how it interacts with your prospects and clients.

The Question: "Why?"

How Your Web Site Can Work Without Great Search Results

Using a web site mystifies many training consultants.

Google recently reported that a majority (63%) of small businesses do not have a web site, and that number would probably be higher among training consultants. Then you can add in the web sites that are "underemployed," that are clearly just place holders, or that have dated material on them from when they were first set up -- probably in a desperate flurry of marketing activity when business was down -- a couple of years ago.

Start reading advice about a business web site you are likely to be seduced by the notion that the purpose of your web site is to help people find you, that is it all about "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO) bringing perfect strangers to your site, which is so beautiful and sexy that they book you on the spot.

Dream on. One notion I have little tolerance for is one-size-fits-all approaches to marketing, or to running your consulting business in general. There are many kinds of businesses where being discovered in a search is a major component of marketing, a key to success.

But I do not believe that most training consultants fit this model. For this industry, the small or one-person training consultancy, the best use of a web site is often:

To make it convenient for people who have already heard of you to learn more about you.

Evidence-Based Internet Marketing

You may have heard news stories about "evidence-based medicine," and may even have thought that the phrase seemed redundant in some way. Are not the various medical treatments made available only because they have been proven to work?

Not so. A surprising number of complex (and even risky) treatments are based on logical reasoning, to be sure, but not much more. They are applied because it seems they should work, but not because it has been proven that they do work.

And even when they do work, they rarely work equally well for everyone, Sometimes treatments that are good in well-defined situations draw attention and then are over-extended to a much wider range of cases, many of which do not benefit much from the treatment.

Your training business is probably offered many "prescriptions" to "treat" your "marketing condition." Just be prepared to perform your own reality checks, because many of these recommendations are based on reasonable guesses, or what has worked for others, but that does not mean they will work for you.

Do You Make Your Web Visitors Hurry Up and Wait?

Let us suppose you finally to decide to create, or significantly enhance, your web site for your training business. You go to two web designers for help in creating a lovely and effective layout, and you get this advice from your two candidates:

• Designer #1: "Keep your content short, with lots of links, because people are very impatient when they come to your site, they want to be able to get to what they are looking for as quickly as possible."
• Designer #2: "We need to force your visitors to engage with your site when they come there. We'll have a little movie that shows the key benefits you offer, with some photos of you mixed in, and we'll pop up a sign-up form for your e-newsletter. We'll make sure they click on the pop-up before they can continue, just to make sure they have seen it."

Which designer do you listen to?

Okay, It Was a Trick Question

Your Most Valuable Tool for Building an Effective Web Site

If you are looking at putting a major effort into your web site -- starting one or overhauling what you have -- you will spend a lot of time reading and hearing about "web design." You may have the skills to handle your own web site, or -- more wisely for most of us -- you may hire some help to do the actual building.

Whatever the approach, creating an effective web site, one that your prospects will return to regularly as they grow their trust in you, requires some specialized software. The problem is that you, as the business owner and training consultant, are very likely to be focused on the wrong software. It's a critical mistake that can really hold you back.

The Software You Really Need to Focus On Is ...

Word processing. Any old word processor will do. If you hate to type up content, you can even use dictation software and a microphone to generate the information that is goes into your web site.

But the heart of your web site is what you say. Rich content, especially if it is regularly expanded and updated with new information, is what draws your prospects back to your site.

Of Carts and Horses

Aim Your Web Site at Acquaintances, Not Strangers

There's a lot of hype and mythology around the purpose of a web site. Many training consultants have a vision of future clients searching the web like crazy for just the talents the consultant offers.

This vision -- egged on by many a "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO) consultant or web designer -- suggests that if the consultant gets the web site just right, with the perfect bells and whistles, legions of strangers will appear at the doorstep, checkbooks in hand.

Not likely, for most of us.

Businesses Vary, Web Sites Should, Too

There's a tendency for a lot of the chatter about web site design, about what should be on your web site, to point to "the one true answer" that fits everyone.

What nonsense!