Let’s see. Hurricane Sandy. The end of the world. The fiscal cliff. 2012 was certainly a year and a half, wasn’t it?! Whether or not 13 turns out to be a lucky number or not remains to be seen. But I, for one, think there’s reason for optimism. We’re seeing many of our clients make significant progress in their businesses and we see hope on the horizon for the advisory business sector.
Corporate gift giving is a long-standing tradition and gift options run the gamut from greeting cards to custom imprinted laptop bags. But it can be challenging to decide what to give and to whom. Most businesses give the same gift to everyone on the list, while others give individually chosen items. So, as an advisory services firm, what should you do? Here are a few things to consider:
One of the most effective marketing strategies helping advisory businesses (those that sell advisory services to consumers or other businesses) grow these days is content marketing — writing effective blog posts that resonate with your target audience and that get noticed by search engines.
One of the keys to a successful landing page is making it easy for site visitors to share and pass on to others, which means making sharing options a focus on your page. That’s why it’s so important to omit your site’s navigation, footers and other common elements from the page. To reduce distraction to other pages and control focus on just what is being offered in the landing page and promoting it to others.
A landing page is a special, stripped-down page in your website that’s dedicated to capturing information about your site visitor. In order to entice your visitor to give you that information, landing pages usually contain special offers — like a free e-book, or other information product, or a special offer related to a product or service.
I recently read something that truly shocked me. And I am not easily shocked. Four words nearly guaranteed to get your email opened are “You Are Not Alone.” It’s known to bring an average open rate of 90%, often stretching to even 100%, and for a wide range of audience groups and subject areas.
I recently treated myself to an ipad. But what I find myself thinking a lot about is just how nice my buying experience was with it. Add to that, the fact that half the businesses we work with have, at one point or another, asked us to make them the Apple of their industry. A daunting request. But we know what they are asking for when they say it. They want to be a leader, to be different, to be about more than just exchange of services for renumeration, but mostly I think they want to be liked and successful.
Sounds like cartoon commentary, doesn’t it? Picture a guy at a desk with a marketing sign above him, feet up talking on the phone. But branding and marketing is not fluffy, “designy” stuff. Branding and marketing is what makes the difference between a full pipeline of leads and an empty one.
There are certain common questions that those who buy advisory services tend to ask themselves. Many are questions they will be too hesitant to ask directly. If you are not addressing these questions in your website, you might want to consider doing so. If you have an editable site built in a CMS like WordPress or Drupal, the fix is easy. Add content that addresses these concerns. One of the first things we do, when evaluating the effectiveness of a potential client’s website, is to ask these questions to determine a list of new content that might need to be developed.
We recently met with a potential client and had an interesting conversation about how marketing and branding work and differ from one another. He was a very smart guy who had a good handle on what he was trying to do with his website and overall brand, but as is nearly always the case, he was too close to it to be able to articulate it clearly, and uniquely, and needed a little help with how to make it look and sound the best it could.
As communicators, we like to think we don’t use jargon to describe what we do. We often counsel clients to avoid using industry jargon, referring to these terms unaffectionately as “weasel words” — words designed to make something sound like more than it really is. But the truth is, although we try not to, we, too, use jargon terms for some things. And I think the term “brand strategy” is one of those. So, let’s simplify things and define what a brand strategy is in practical terms.
There’s so much buzz and competition these days to try to make content go viral, that it has, by nature, become more difficult to do. But it is still possible. Going “viral” only means that a piece of content has enough appeal, either broadly or narrowly, that people take the time and effort to spread it to their friends and colleagues with their endorsements or commentary.
