Issue 8: Learning from Internet Marketers

In the professions we often like to think that we’re unique – that insights from how other sectors do marketing and sales don’t apply to us. There’s some truth in that view. In many ways professional services really are different to other businesses. But there’s also a lot we can learn if we’re prepared to think and adapt ideas to our own circumstances.

One area that I believe we can learn from is Internet Marketing. And it’s an area that’s of great interest to me.

When I first set up my own practice a couple of years ago I decided to put a lot of research and effort into my web presence. Consulting has always been a "people to people" business when it comes to marketing and business development. But over the years I’ve seen time after time, more and more "people to people" businesses moving online and the web becoming the dominant channel for them. I decided I wanted to be ahead of the curve for consulting.

So I did a lot of research, and a lot of experimentation (you may have seen some of the many different variants of my websites over the years). And I got results.

What I discovered is that the web can be a great leveller. You don’t need to be a large company any more to get noticed. You don’t need to publish in Harvard Business Review or the major industry journals to get found: people search and find your content if it’s good and you’ve optimised your site.

If you look at some of the internet traffic monitoring services like Alexa and Compete, it turns out that my little website gets more visitors than the sites of some of the top 30 consulting firms globally – firms in some cases with thousands of employees and revenues in the hundreds of millions.

I now get over two thirds of my new clients from the web. Of course, we almost always have to talk on the phone and meet before I get hired. But they initially find me, and find out more about me and decide they’d be interested in working with me just from my website. It makes marketing so much easier.
 
I’m relating this, not to show off (well, OK, maybe a little bit), but to highlight that if I can do it, anyone can do it. My business is not so different from yours.

In the last 6 months, the people I’ve learnt the most from have been full-time Internet Marketers. People who earn their entire income (in some cases very large incomes) from products and services sold purely over the web.

Unlike traditional businesses who can dabble with the web, or get it half right and still survive; Internet Marketers’ livelihood depends on knowing how to get lots of high quality traffic to their sites, and how to convert that traffic into paying customers.

They’re not very visible. Unless you circulate in their world, you probably won’t have heard of any of even the most successful of them. But they really know their stuff. And their markets are much, much more competitive on the web than ours in the professions, so there’s a lot we can learn from them. Over the last few months I’ve been busily learning their secrets and looking at how I can apply them to my own business, and to professional services generally.

In the near future I’m going to be doing more detailed articles on marketing and selling via the web for professional services. I’m already informally advising clients on how they can do it better and it’s a service I’m going to formalise and introduce for a small number of clients in the upcoming months.

But right now I want to share a different set of learnings i have from Internet Marketers. Because what i found was that you can apply some of the things they do and the ways they operate to real-world marketing too.

Internet Marketing Lessons for Real World Marketers

In many ways, Internet Marketing is a real "new kid on the block". Many of the people who do it are from technical rather than business or marketing backgrounds – so sometimes what they do seems incredibly blunt or simply wrong. And to be frank, the ethics of some Internet Marketers are rather shady.

But they have one huge advantage over us real-world marketers. They have data.

Almost everything they do can be measured and tested. And pretty much instantly.

Not sure which headline on a promotion will work best? Put up two different versions delivered randomly to different visitors and see which one generates the most clicks or sales.

Not sure what the best price point for a new product is? Do the same,

Will video work to get more interest than text? Should I offer just a single product at once, or a range of options? Which page should I send visitors to who click on my online ad?

Test, test, test.

So they learn fast. Very fast.

What now follows are 3 key lessons I’ve learned from Internet Marketers that I believe can be applied back into real world marketing.

Lesson 1: Find a "Hungry Crowd"

One of the fundamental rules for all internet marketers is to find a "hungry crowd".  Rather than starting with a product or service or idea they want to sell, they first look to find something people want to buy.

How do they find hungry crowds? Thanks to google.

Rather than relying on inspiration, their knowledge of a market, or even market research, they look for what people are searching for online.

Although you can subscribe to paid services for this, for the last year or so, google has made the data on which keywords are being searched with which frequency available for free via its Adwords keyword tool. It will even suggest other related keywords that people are searching for too.

The end result is that even if they initially know very little about a market, a "persistent geek" can use online research tools to get a reasonably accurate picture of what people are looking for in that market. And they can also research how competitive the market is by looking at other sites targeting that keyword. So they just keep trying different ideas and combinations until they find a hungry crowd with limited competition.

How can we apply the hungry crowd principle to real world marketing for professional services?

At first glance it looks difficult. Professional services are delivered based on years of training and accumulated experience – professionals can’t just switch overnight into new fields and hope to be credible. A divorce lawyer who spots that there’s higher demand in PI work can’t just hop from one to the other, for example.

But within our fields we can do a lot more to see what our crowd is hungry for.

What sort of pricing models are our clients most likely to buy: Fixed fee projects, hourly billing, retainers, etc? What about service delivery models: can we do more of our work without them having to come to our offices or vice versa? Can we turn our services into discrete packages that can be bought more off the shelf for simpler cases? Rather than just advising our clients, can we do things for them, take tasks off their hands?

Rather than relying on google, we’ll have to do a bit more research to find out what our clients want. But it often staggers me how little many professional firms listen to their key clients. I often see war-and-peace sized strategies written without ever asking a client what they think or what they’d be willing to buy.

And to some degree we can look at google too. What people are searching for online can guide us to tweak our services or position them differently. For example, there are around 90,500 searches per month on google globally for "business coaching", but 246,000 searches for business consulting.  Now those figures could be interpreted in many ways and need further investigation – but perhaps they indicate that it may be better to position yourself as a consultant than a coach.

How might this apply to your niche? Is it better to position yourself as a divorce lawyer or a family lawyer? Google can tell you which is being searched for most. Trying to figure out which sector to focus your consulting work on? Google can tell you which is getting the most searches.

Lesson 2: The Power of a Product Funnel

The funnel to most professionals is the flow of potential clients in to the firm. But to an internet marketer, the funnel is also the range of products used to entice a prospect to do business with you.

The classic internet marketing model is to develop a series of products of increasing value and price which can be offered to clients. Often the initial product is free – a so-called "lead magnet" used to get the details of the prospect so that they can be communicated with further over time.

Even without a free initial product, almost all internet marketers stage their range so that it’s easy to start to buy from them. They may have an introductory $29 ebook. Then you could get a bigger $99 video training course. Then a full $1,299 home study course. Then there’s the $4,997 mastermind club where you get some one-on-one coaching, access to all their materials and a 1 day offsite together.

Each product requires just a little bit more commitment than the previous one, so it’s not such a huge step if you got good value and results. And it’s a lot easier to sell a $4,997 membership to someone who bought and loved your $1,299 home study course than it would be to sell it from cold. Having this range gives them more options and increases the lifetime value of their customers. They can afford to use loss leaders to initially attract customers if they know that many will buy high value back-end products.

We can definitely learn from this in the professions. Often a client’s initial engagement with us is a very big step for them – both emotionally and financially. We can do a lot to lower the barriers to working with us by constructing tester or "wedge" products which get a client working with us, experiencing how good we are, and then motivating themselves to by more.

This can be particularly useful for "full service" professional firms. It’s a huge deal for clients to switch all their accounting or law or advertising from one firm/agency to another. But a smart firm will create a small, low-risk offer that their competitor doesn’t provide – perhaps in a new area like digital marketing or an audit in a new area of legislation. it’s much easier to buy this small service that the incumbent doesn’t provide. And if you do a great job, you’re much more likely to win a bigger piece of work later.

It’s also very often worth thinking about what new "back end" services you can create for your existing clients. They already know, like and trust you and know you deliver value. This is more than just cross selling your existing services – it’s creatively thinking about new products and services that would be valuable for them – or even asking them what they might be.

Lesson 3: "The Money’s in the List"

Recommended Resource: Surveymonkey

The resource I’m using for my own survey is one I recommend to many clients: Surveymonkey. I’ve been using a simple, free account for many years. It’s really easy to set up, collect and analyse surveys. It took me about 5 minutes to set up the feedback survey I’m using right now.

With a pro account you can brand the surveys, ask more questions, and load up and automate invitations. If you’ve never tried surveymonkey out, it’s a must.

Blog Roundup

I’ve put up a number of posts on the blog in the last month which have attracted a lot of interest: