For all of you work-at-home (WAH) pros that make a living selling your expertise, you already know there’s no lack of information on how to market your services. The problem is, there’s a lot of confusing and conflicting messages out there. Not to mention a staggering amount of marketing tools that are meant to help, yet often lead to more confusion.
When you have a consulting business to run, you don’t have a lot of time and/or resources to figure out which tools to use when and the best way to attract qualified leads and turn them into paying customers. Based on an in-depth analysis of how customers find and decide to hire an expert like you, below are five proven shortcuts for effectively selling your consulting expertise online.
The Essential WAH Marketing Toolkit
Before we get to the shortcuts, let’s take a look at the basic marketing toolkit that you’ll need. Your marketing toolkit should include a combination of inbound and outbound marketing tools that deliver the highest ROI, are easy to learn and won’t break the bank.
Given these priorities, here are the tools you’ll need: email, webinars, social media, landing pages, and e-commerce capabilities already built-in so customers don’t have to leave your site for you to close the deal. While that might sound like a lot of tools, don’t worry. You won’t be using them all at once and you don’t have to buy them piecemeal because it’s not that hard to find a turnkey solution that bundles them together.
The Five Proven Shortcuts
Armed with the right marketing toolkit, here are the five shortcuts for effectively selling your consulting expertise online.
Shortcut #1: Set a single goal for your campaign. It could be to drive sales or generate leads but it can’t be both. While one leads to the other, don’t splinter your efforts trying to simultaneously achieve both goals. Instead, focus on the primary goal of the campaign.
Shortcut #2: Create great content and use it to entice customers. Your expertise is your business so why not show it off via an e-book or webinar. While many WAH consultants already do this, consider adding a new twist to the content to make it fresh and freely available. Focus on sharing some, not all, of your expertise for free to achieve your primary campaign goal. Remember, you want to nurture the conversation by demonstrating your expertise, not overwhelm your audience with over the top promos.
As you continue to engage customers, some of them will opt out. This is actually a good thing because it allows you to focus on the customers that are most likely to hire you.
Shortcut #3: Once you’ve narrowed down who is most likely to hire you based on your latest campaign, further segment your audience and present each subsegment with a compelling offer that speaks to their particular interests and needs. This takes a little more work up front but it pays off in the end because it makes it easier to achieve your campaign goal.
Shortcut #4: When you present a compelling offer, or a series of offers that are targeted to your customer’s needs, be sure to show your gratitude when you close the deal. This can be a simple thank you or a special offer for new clients. Along with starting your formal consulting relationship on the right foot, it helps drive word-of-mouth and creates an opportunity to continue to engage them.
Shortcut #5: Build on your success. For your next campaign, build on what you learned and achieved from your last campaign. This includes asking satisfied customers to provide a quote you can use in promotional content and inspiring them to spread the word online and offline. Also, don’t dismiss prospects that didn’t take you up on your offer. Instead, add them to a separate contact list and reengage them in a few months.
Being a WAH consultant is one of the most rewarding career paths. To continue to thrive in your home business, these tips will help you navigate new business development and shorten the marketing and sales process.
