Marketing Professional Services

By the time you’ve been marketing, selling, and delivering your professional services for a year or two – it has become abundantly clear that there is no straight road from rookie to financial and professional success.

There is no four lane blacktop where you just plug in this magic strategy, that simple process, or someone’s “turnkey” system – and bingo, the next thing you know all your challenges are behind you.

The fact is that  most of the time we have to go it alone, because the brilliant ideas of the “experts” – how we can quickly and easily transform our careers, don’t seem right to us. And we can’t see over the next hill or around the next turn because we are traveling this road for the first time. We are simply making it up as we go along.

Maybe that’s why so many of us fail to achieve our true potential – we don’t have the time (before we go broke and have to get a regular job) or the energy or the help from people with no axe to grind and nothing to sell – and we sort of run out of gas before we make to our destination.

What we are putting together here, based on our collective experiences of about 100 years working with business owners – are strategies that are working for us now and have been for decades.

Take a look at the “About Effectiveness Strategies” page so see how the project started, how the process developed, and our plans for the future. Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: preparation for success

Naturally, if you are trying to make a living selling your services, there are numerous roadblocks to your success. That has always been true and it always will be. Having a Twitter account and a zillion followers won’t keep you from failing. And being there on the cutting edge marketing yourself via facebook.com won’t either.

If you have your message aligned with your target market, versus your competitors. If your value proposition is really a value and written in simple terms for your target audience. And if you actually deliver a valuable service, so that those who do buy it tell their friends. Well then, having a few followers is excellent and a zillion followers will have you stacking up the cash.

There are however these two rocks in the middle of your road to success. You can not ignore them, you can go around them or you can blast them out of the way, but they are facts you have to face.

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Technorati Tags: dominate your niche market, marketing professional services

Let me be clear – what should be referred to as selling, now is called marketing by many. This is problematic because it causes them to expect too much from what are actually very indirect efforts.

Many people think that marketing – the single most important thing any of us can do to increase our business – is supposed to result in new clients.

In fact marketing’s role is to put us in a position where we can sell more effectively. A well considered marketing strategy will illustrate our uniqueness, our suitability as a service provider, and it will attract people – the right people to us, but unless we are willing to ask them to buy something, it was all just a waste of time and money.

Marketing professional services effectively is an art as much as anything else. If you do it the right way, you will find a lot of takers in the market for your services. If you do it wrong you will be considered just another hype merchant whose so-called value proposition sounds remarkably like all the others.

In the good old days marketing professional services was a lot more straightforward. Your goal was to have a very strong network of friends, relatives, fellow service providers, and existing clients. Then, thanks to your wide network, you were able to get new clients through word of mouth alone.

So, you never felt the need for marketing professional services aggressively. When your inventory was low you’d attend a Rotary Club meeting, play a round of golf, attend a convention in your target industry, or take another professional advisor to lunch and get a few referrals.

However, that was before the advent of the Internet. Now, everything has changed – or has it?

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Technorati Tags: internet marketing, marketing business coaching, marketing is not selling

I’ve heard dozens and dozens of life insurance agents, coaches, and other professional solution providers complain that they have not been able to find their ideal niche. Is that a problem for you too? Have you been able to find that certain market where you are well accepted and where your results, profits, are the best and most reliable? Or are you still looking for just the right audience?

If you are still reading this, because you have not found the best possible place for you and your services – maybe it’s because you are looking in the wrong places or looking at the problem from the wrong point of view, making it harder than it should ever be.

Finding your niche could not be more straightforward. You just choose who you want to serve and then do it. The actual reason, from my experience, that people can’t seem to find their niche – is their inability to describe what makes them and their offerings unique, desirable, and beneficial to their target audience.

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Technorati Tags: dominate your niche market, find your target market, niche

As a professional solution provider do you try to "specialize" in everything? Or do you specialize with every person in your niche, providing the services each of them require? Let me explain.

Years ago a friend of mine, a multiple lines insurance agent, had what he thought was the opportunity of a lifetime. There was a gas station in his community, on the busiest street in the neighborhood – that had gone out of business. The owner of the property could not find another oil company to lease it so he cleaned up the site and began trying to lease the building as a bakery, pizza shop, or small retailer, anyone really.

It occurred to my friend that this would be an ideal location for his insurance agency. It was on the main drag, there was parking in front, and it was on a corner for easy in and out maneuvering. The building was remodeled, the parking lot was re-paved and the original 15 foot high gas station sign was painted with his logo.

It read, "Suburban Insurance, We Specialize in ALL Kinds of Insurance" in a very professional look. And of course his catchy phone number everyone around there would remember easily. How could he lose? With all those people driving back and forth every day? They would see the sign on their way to work, call for an appointment on the way home.

What did the people driving by think? Who knows, no one stopped. He was trying to be all things to all people and it did not work. For three months he didn’t make a sale that could in any way have come from one of those passing motorists.

He was faced with the prospect of giving up this really neat space or cutting back elsewhere because he had signed on to a lease based on his untested assumption that people would drive in every day of the week.

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Technorati Tags: Add new tag, all things to all people, asking the right questions, find your target market, getting more publicity

SHELTON, Conn.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Pitney Bowes Inc. (NYSE:PBI) executives today officially opened the Pitney Bowes Customer Innovation Center in Shelton, Connecticut providing a test environment for customers running the latest applications in print and mail. More than 44 customers from 25 companies arrived from around the globe to see the first center of its kind in the industry. Shortly, customers will run their own multimedia and Transpromo applications and report metrics on test runs to demonstrate return on investment in new technologies. Marketing and operations teams are coming together around these new technologies and solutions to create retention, acquisition and cross-selling programs that grow revenue.

Permalink: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20091203005185/en

Duration : 0:5:48

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Technorati Tags: communications, hardware, Human, professional, Publishing, Resources, Services, Technology

Frontdesk SEO software makes anyone an expert. Our simple step by step search engine marketing work flow and processes let anyone run your entire internet marketing campaign and build your website’s visibility in just 5 minutes a day. Or outsource your SEM it to our experts.

Duration : 0:6:13

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Technorati Tags: DIY SEO, Free SEO Report, How to do SEO, Local Search, Local SEO, Outsource SEO, search engine marketing, SEM, SEO, SEO SEM, SEO Software, Website SEO

Liberty Mutual’s new advertising campaign tells the story of the Marlowes, a fictional family experiencing situations that challenge their definition of personal responsibility and what it means to “do the right thing.”

Duration : 0:1:4

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Technorati Tags: advertising, communications, ENTERTAINMENT, Insurance, Marketing, professional services, Social Media, TV and Radio

More Women Turn To Direct Selling in a Recession, Should You? (Business Wire)

Duration : 0:1:11

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Technorati Tags: Consumer, Cosmetics, Human, Other, professional, Resources, retail, Services

This past weekend, Network Solutions Senior Vice President Stephanie Leffler paid a visit to MSNBC’s “Consultants Corner”, where she talked about how companies can ensure that their Web sites come out at the top of the search engines.

Because being found via search engines such as Yahoo! or Google can be the difference between success and failure for small businesses, Stephanie gave three tips for “leading the listings”. Credit: Check out www.MonsterCommerce.com & www.NetworkSolutions.com for services related to this & more.

Duration : 0:4:18

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Technorati Tags: engine, google, network, optimization, search, solutions, Yahoo

Cathy Baron Tamraz, President and Chief Executive Officer of Business Wire, interviews Warren Buffett, Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (Video: Business Wire) Business Wire Press Release: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20091029005884/en

Duration : 0:9:52

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Technorati Tags: Banking, communications, engine, FINANCE, Internet, Investor, Marketing, optimization, professional, relations, search, Services

Ian Brodie shares tips on how to get more referrals for your business.

Duration : 0:3:25

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Technorati Tags: clients, get, Marketing, professional, selling, Services