How To Get The Best Results From Your Website and Social Media Activity: Follow The Best Online Presence Management Practices

If there is one thing to be learned from the COVID pandemic, it the necessity for every business, including service businesses, to have an online presence.

Now, more than ever before, when individuals want or need professional services, they start their search online.

Typically, social media accounts and profiles are among the first sources listed.

As a result, your LinkedIn profile, Facebook pages, Instagram and Twitter references usually represent the starting point for potentially ideal clients to find you.

If you want to find clients online, you have to make it easy for clients to find you.

Easy and fast Internet access has opened the floodgates to online marketing.

Many people jump on the Internet marketing bandwagon because they think they should be online. Others do it simply because they can.

As a result, marketing has come to mean online marketing.

And its primary application seems to be using all electronic media in order to pitch goods and pre-packaged services to the entire cyber-world.

The More Thing Change, The More They Stay The Same

Although you would never know it from surfing the net, marketing is more than pitching.

Realistically, it includes everything we do to generate more business for our businesses.

The marketing process is based largely on establishing and maintaining relationships with potential clients.

As well as helping potential clients get to know and like us as people, these relationships also help prospects learn how our professional services can satisfy them.

Whether offline, as I did when starting my law practice, or online as many of us do today, these relationships start with a connection.

In the technological dark age, personal contact was our best and only choice for connecting with others. Now, thanks to technological developments, a full range of electronic options has been added to basic personal contact as ways of connecting with others.

Internet-based options for connecting include websites, email, blogging and oodles of social media applications.

Enhanced Marketing...Not Replacement Marketing

Contrary to appearances, online marketing is not about pitching.

Nor has Internet marketing replaced the fundamental principles of marketing professional services.

What the technological revolution has provided us is a new set of tools for connecting, and maintaining relationships, with potential clients and referral sources.

By effectively using these tools, you can dramatically expand your marketing capability.

Available around the clock and around the world, Internet-based marketing tools will help you develop and maintain your online presence when you are doing other things.

In its various formats and applications, online marketing is a critical component of your overall marketing program. Incorporated into your marketing program, online marketing can and will help you attract more clients.

Innovative Online Marketing

As an online office, your website also serves as a multi-functional marketing platform, helping you connect with your community.

And instead of depending upon others to distribute your writing, you can use your website to get you marketing message out.

Once we start to recognize the marketing potential of the Internet tools and applications, there is virtually no limit to the ways in which we can use the net to connect and interact with our communities.

Solve Specific Problems

As service professionals, we are in the transformation business.

In practice, this means we help clients make the transformation from where they are to where they want to be.

In addition to our professional training and experience, we draw upon our problem-solving skills to help clients ...and in return, have clients pay us for our help.

Part of marketing professional service involves demonstrating our ability to help clients.?Frequently this process involves suggesting solutions to common client problems.

The best problem-solving content is mid-way between your best fee-for-service help for clients and your marketing content. Ideal vehicles for this content include FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) and case studies.

Community-Oriented

As service professionals we are also facilitators and consolidators.

We help clients identify issues and develop solutions to these problems. Then we add this experience to our collected know-how, consolidating it with the rest of our experience.

Ideally, your website and other online touch points will be a vehicle for you and your audience to discuss issues and share solutions to common problems.

Continuous Changes

Instead of ranting about rapid and constant change, re-frame it as an opportunity to enhance your profile.

Monitor new developments and changes in your profession and then be the first to post and explain them...in your members-only area.

The most member-friendly content is fresh news and current up-to-date information. The least member-friendly content is the same-old stuff, endlessly repeated and regurgitated.

Starting & Maintaining The Conversation

The marketing that attracts the most new business includes conversations with potentially ideal clients.

Although these conversations might include small talk about some of our favorite things, they are more focused and strategic in nature.

People who need your help go online look for information. They want two kinds of information:

1.???What kinds of services are available that might help them with specific issues?

2.???Who is the best person to help them.

The best way to provide information is to engage in a conversation with the information-seekers. Being interactive, conversations are more effective than self-serving promotional monologues (also known as sales pitches) and information dumps.

Social media applications are excellent vehicles for starting and maintaining conversations.

Our favorite social media help us engage in conversations about personal and social activities. These conversations may be with specifically identified friends.

Or they could just be remarks that we post for the benefit of any of our friends and contacts.

Savvy businesses use social media applications to engage their prospects and clients in conversation. Unlike purely social conversations, these conversations are about specific services and the benefits they offer.

It doesn't really matter what services you provide. Similarly, neither the size nor the physical location of your business matters.

What does matter is that the same social media features that make it possible for individuals to interact with their friends also make it possible for service professionals to interact with their market.

Regardless of your service or physical location, social media can help you interact with your market. It is a truly versatile and valuable addition to your marketing.

User-Friendly Marketing

Even though there are some generally accepted principles for starting and maintaining offline conversations with others, there are no standard requirements that everyone must follow.

The principles of good conversation, together with the rules of grammar and pronunciation form the framework for our interactions.

Guided by these principles and rules, we enter into conversation with others, exchanging information and ideas, but doing it in our own personal style.

These are the kinds of user-friendly marketing conversations that take place in personal networking situations.

Not surprisingly, we follow much the same process when using social media to interact effectively online.

The most obvious difference is that instead of interacting in person or by telephone, we are communicating through the Internet.

Sure there are technical considerations to manage. But these technical issues are more likely to be obstacles in our minds than they are in actual fact.

Whatever problems we may encounter with social media, there is no virtually no limit to free and easily accessible online help.

Realistically, if you can carry on a worthwhile conversation by e-mail, you can do the same thing using social media.

Of course, with more experience and resources to devote to social media marketing, you can expect better results. But it all starts with online conversations, just like those conversations you have with friends and family using e-mail.

A marketing tool that can be used by novice and expert alike, social media once again demonstrates its versatility.

Your Success In Social Media

"Using social media for business is something that you should do on a daily basis, if possible. Posting randomly on your social media profiles once a week or whenever you make the time will not produce the best results for you. Personally, I have used a large number of services and have worked with many different service providers who have all tried to automate my social media initiatives, and for me the efforts never paid off for my business...

"If you are too busy to implement the social media activity you want to initiate yourself, then use an administrative assistant of member of your staff...

"The key to your success in social media is being authentic and reasonable. People do not respond well to information they feel is basted onto the platforms they share with you, and because of this a slow and steady strategy will work best for your business."?

J.B. Giles is the author Social Media "How To's" that work! A guide to social media strategies and techniques.

He is also a professional business consultant, business plan writer and social media strategy developer.

Sharing Your Brand Message

Given the importance of developing and maintaining an effective online presence, it’s essential to ensure that your whatever you do online is aligned with your overall brand strategy.

To learn more, see The Ultimate Guide To Your Professional Services Brand Strategy

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