Marekting Strategy
A complete marketing strategy should include a number of essential elements which are built on top of all the other strategies just covered. The additional elements include:
- Your target audience
- Your subject matter (defined by your product strategy)
- Your position in the market (relative to your competition)
- Campaign strategies (including specific tactics)
You should have a good idea about the first three elements based on your own knowledge and experience of the industry segments in which you work as a subject matter expert. Fine tuning your market position can dramatically improve your success so always be thinking about how you can better position yourself in the market, either by expanding the breadth and width of your own expertise or by narrowing it down. Whenever you narrow your position down you have to make up for the loss in potential audience by developing a deeper and richer understanding of the more limited topics you will address. This is a balancing act but an increasingly important one as the number of experts continues to grow, forcing you to be more competitive in thinking about your own expertise and how it fits in the marketplace of ideas.
The fourth item, campaign strategies, will vary over time. Your basic marketing strategy is made up of all the items discussed up to this point and a general knowledge of specific technologies and tactics needed for specific campaigns. Any campaign you do can have its own unique goals. Some of the more important goals that should be considered when designing a campaign include:
- Personal brand building
- Increased traffic
- Conversions (to audience/fans)
- Event promotion
- Sales
In the old world, like everything else, marketing and advertising options were limited and fairly straight forward. In today’s digital world, nothing has evolved faster and developed farther than online marketing and advertising. While this has been a very difficult area to work in over the last decade, solutions and services are beginning to emerge that actually make these tasks easier and more powerful even when embraced on an individual level by a single producer. Here is a brief overview of the techniques and tactics that you should include in your marketing strategies.
Email Marketing & CRM Tactics
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are readily available on a single license basis. This is the result of the revolution in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) that has put powerful tools, once only available to enterprise businesses, in the hands of virtually everyone. Sometimes Email marketing solutions are licensed separately but these capabilities are often included in CRM solutions. You need to review current law on email marketing so that you can avoid being accused of sending SPAM but a good email marketing solution gives you the tools to properly (and legally) handle opt in and opt out rules according to industry best practices.
Your overriding goal should be to build an audience in the same way businesses build a customer base. You have an overwhelming advantage as a subject matter expert compared to most businesses in that your own expertise provides you with the means to create perceived value in virtually every communication you engage in with your prospective audience. Take full advantage of that fact when you think about creating content specifically designed to market or promote your content. Every marketing communication you send out should include some useful knowledge or information with perceived value from the point of view of your audience. That immediately redefines this content as “advertorial” in nature. This vaulted status is often desired and rarely achieved by most marketers but as a subject matter expert it is yours to claim in every communication.
As an overall objective of virtually any campaign, regardless of its specific goal, you should seek to increase your audience and drive traffic either directly or indirectly to your central marketing hub; your web site. This is the best place to connect your fans to links for registering for events or making purchases. This is also where you can provide special offers which should be prominently featured either on your home page or in a special area designated for that purpose. Always think about how you can provide free content for your audience as a way to remain engaged with them even when they are not buying from you. All the tools available to you, including the marketing tools described here, provide you with the means to maintain a continuous dialogue with your audience and that is how you build and maintain lasting, valuable relationships that build up your bank of potential sales.
Email marketing campaigns are best driven through a newsletter or similar format rather than through individual offers for specific products but separate emails for these kinds of offers are acceptable. The key to doing those well is to keep them limited in scope and number and making sure that you always deliver quality and value with your paid for content. It’s always preferable to talk price on your web site or at the point of purchase rather than in your emails. Discounts and other promotions are perfectly good to include in an email or newsletter but avoid talking price in these communications.
Audience Building Tactics
Specific tactics for building audience are limited only by your own imagination and creativity. The key, as a subject matter expert, is to always focus on the knowledge and information you can provide and the specific value it has for your audience. In your communications with your audience or new prospects, focus on the value of this knowledge and information and talk about what it can do for them. This is just a bit of classic salesmanship which you are probably familiar with but it simply comes down to talking about benefits rather than features. It’s not what you know as a subject matter expert that matters. It’s what that knowledge can do for your audience. How does it make their life better? How does it make their job easier? How does it make them money; save them money; or make them look good?
Social Networking Tactics
The revolution in social media has taken the world by storm, literally. Marketing professionals have been living in the eye of this storm for several years. Yet, for all the promise that social media holds for marketing, it has proven very difficult to translate the phenomena into real marketing ROI. There are plenty of anecdotal success stories but the challenge of social media is that while it offers the most powerful form of advertising in the world, word of mouth, it places barriers between marketers and the people they want to reach. Facebook offers ad spots for sale but these are usually not involved in the success stories you hear about, where campaigns go viral, as when a commercial is pushed out through YouTube and viewed millions of times. That is free advertising for the lucky winners but for every video that goes viral this way, most don’t ever get seen.
So how do you leverage social media to your advantage? As a subject matter expert you once again have an advantage that most businesses don’t. You are the star of your own show. As you build audience, you are the product they want to see and you can give yourself away for free over and over again. This basic strategy goes back to the 80/20 rule discussed before. You can give yourself away as much as you like as long as you save at least 20% of your content by placing it behind a pay wall. Of course, when you do give yourself away for free, it has to be in the form of valued content. Giving away a list of common sense “Do’s and Don’ts” won’t do anything to build your personal brand. Its’ never a question of how much content you give away. It’s a question of how much valued content you give away… and it should all be valued.
A robust social networking strategy is just an extension of the set of strategies discussed elsewhere in our blog, including a knowledge process strategy, a content strategy, and product strategy. In implementing those strategies you will automatically be implementing an effective social networking strategy. You just need to be sure to include Linked-in groups in your social networking efforts. You should also set up your own Facebook site. To do this, simply go to the Facebook login page and follow the instructions for creating page for a celebrity (create an Official Page, not a Community Page).
Whether you should set up a Twitter account depends in part on your own feeling about what it takes to use Twitter effectively as a tool. We recommend that you do use Twitter but it requires that you develop the habit and use it on a regular basis. Setting up a Twitter account and not using it correctly is worse than not using it at all. There are no set rules on how to use a Twitter account so it is a good idea to follow other subject matter experts you like and see how they do it. Emulate the style that you like the best. Some experts only use Twitter to direct their audience to content. That is a good, simple strategy that works well but you must remember to use it consistently. Other experts like to twitter about themselves. Whether that makes sense for you depends a lot on your personality and how your audience views you. You can take a minimal approach to using Twitter and if you are not sure how to use it, it may be a good idea to limit yourself to only a few communications per month and then, only when it is directly related to other content. However you feel about Twitter, we recommend you get your feet wet, first by following others and then learning from those who you like best.
[Watch our free webinar to learn the best trick for using Twitter to manage your content and control your audience experience].
Depending on your market, you may find other social networks that could be useful for expanding your social network efforts. Keep an eye on other subject matter experts in your industry to see what they do. It is easy to overextend yourself to no real purpose so be careful about engaging in social networking that is not directly related to other campaign efforts.
Of course we highly recommend that you use The Expert Knowledge Network as a second hub, in addition to your web site, as a means to better connect all your online activities. Using EKN this way is like putting a second wheel on your bike (maybe you can ride a unicycle but it sure is a lot easier to ride a bicycle). The Expert Knowledge Network is not just a hub; it is a content network with blogs that can be redistributed through multiple channels. If you are already blogging in other media, you can redistribute your blogs inside the EKN network. Extending the flow of information (and the flow of traffic) in both directions works either way. Because The Expert Knowledge Network is designed as a destination site for those seeking expert knowledge and advice, is a natural center of influence for any subject matter expert. Using our tools effectively can be the key to building your audience and scaling our own brand to a national or even an international effort.
Online Advertising Tactics
Online marketing comes in two forms, display advertising and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). There is another important form of online marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which addresses where your web site shows up in search listings (see below). Display advertising and SEM are where you actually make media buys, purchasing either ad space or keywords.
Display advertising is very effective for big businesses but as a scalable solution, it is more difficult to implement on a small scale. That is in large part because access to display space in major online ad networks requires large media buys that remain outside most budgets for subject matter experts. You can overcome this barrier by identifying individual online journals and key industry portals in our own industry segment where individual display space is available at an affordable scale. Experiment with small media buys, testing out web portals individually and tracking the results. You should know when these tactics actually work for you, either building audience or selling product.
Most people are familiar with key words and how keywords trigger keyword ads that appear on a page inside a search engine. Of course, Google invented keyword ads but they are available in many social networks and even in some media portals so look for sites in your own industry segment that offers this as a product. If you have never purchased key words, the easiest way to learn how is to jump in and make a small buy. Google has a whole library of information available to explain how their system works and most other systems operate in similar ways. You can spend very small amounts so it is easy to experiment. You will want to try out different combinations of key words depending on your content and your own expertise. Once again, as a subject matter expert, you have a big advantage over businesses because you can readily generate key words that directly relate to your own expertise and further distinguish you in the marketplace.
The thing to always think about with both display advertising and keyword buys is what you do with the traffic when you get it. Celebrating over page views is meaningless if your audience does not engage in meaningful activity when it gets there. The key to making that work, as a subject matter expert, is in keeping them engaged with valued content and directing them, whenever possible, into pay for gateways where you can monetize your content. Your goal is to build your audience and keep them coming back for more. That requires that you exercise your talent to create valued content as an ongoing process. The production strategies already covered show you how to do that in the most painless way possible.
SEO Tactics
When you do set up your website you will want to optimize the site so that search engines can find you. As with all other aspects of marketing and advertising, your position as a subject matter expert gives you the advantage of being able to generate highly specific key words logically connected to your area of expertise. You may prefer to work with a good web developer to ensure that your site is properly optimized. Your responsibility is to create ten to twenty key words per web page to go along with the content on the page. You should create a separate set of keywords for each web page, along with a short page description which should include some of those same keywords. Search engines will compare your keywords to your page content so you want to be sure your keywords are included in your page content.
Updating content also helps raise your rating in most search engines so it best to build a dynamic site. This requires that a Content Management System (CMS) that allows you to updated content on a regular basis. A good CMS will allow you to post articles to your site the same way you post blogs. Ideally, all the content on your site should be searchable, especially articles and other content which can be downloaded. You can also use an e-commerce system to sell content on your site but in many cases, distribution channels can provide you with pay-for options that allow you to monetize your content. Your product and distribution strategy should leverage third party service providers that give you ways to distribute and monetize content outside your own site.
[NOTE: The Expert Knowledge Network is partners with Lulu which provides you with on-demand print solutions for books, e-books, CDs &: DVDs, and print portfolios.]
Event Marketing
Finally, you will need to develop event marketing plans for webinars, in person events, and seminars or workshops. You will want to have an event schedule either on your site or available through third party distribution channels, depending on whether you are organizing these events yourself or participating in events created through other channels. Your event marketing strategy should simply be an extension of your product strategy. You can flowchart the process that shows how your audience can move through the various communications and products you create for them. A typical scenario will make an initial introduction through an advertising campaign or a referral that leads to a newsletter, content on your own web site, blog postings, then onto free webinars, books, seminars and workshops. This flow will be supplemented with cyclic communications that include messaging and interactions that build and help sustain your relationship with your audience.
Free webinars are easy to do and you should consider making them a normal part of your marketing process. As long as you are dealing with small numbers (less than 100) the costs are very affordable. If you begin to deal with larger audiences, you may consider using teleconference solutions. While you lose the ability to share your desktop, your cost per listener is significantly less. If you do use teleconferences to deal with larger audiences, you should consider adding a webinar into your marketing process as a way to increase engagement and draw your audience into a more intimate and interactive relationship.
[NOTE: The Expert Knowledge Network is partners with Yugma and we make their live webinar solution available on our home page so your audience can easily find you.]
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We hope that this overview showing you how to market your expertise and your content using the tools and techniques now available in the digital age has been helpful. Look for our one day workshops for in depth training in these tools and techniques coming soon to an area near you.
