Pat Iyer’s Guest Post: Why use social media for marketing a legal nurse consulting practice?
A guest blog from guru Pat Iyer.
Four Things to Change About Your Website in 2012.
4 Key Things You Can Do To Help Your Website in 2012.
Above the fold, below the fold, in the middle? This topic is one that confuses a lot of Legal Nurse Consultants when they first begin to use email campaigns to market their practices. Writing copy for hundreds of potential clients to see can seem like a daunting task, but in a post at The Point, J. Sewell outlines his 10 Commandments of email copywriting—including a few interesting ones like these:
Don’t bury the “lead.” In journalistic lingo, burying the lead means obscuring an article’s most important information in the fifth or eighth paragraph when it belongs in the first paragraph. The same rule applies to your email message: Within the first few sentences, subscribers should understand your services, why they want to use them, and how to get in touch with you.
Skip information a subscriber already knows. “It’s OK to ‘set up’ the offer by describing the problem or issue that your solution solves,” Sewell notes. But there’s no need to reiterate the unnecessary information that follows an introduction like: “ So now that you realize the difficulty in medical-legal case reviews….”
Keep your focus. Don’t let anything distract you from the purpose of an email, which should have a single offer, a single message, and a single call to action. When you go off on multiple services provided by most Legal Nurse Consultants (the magic 17 as I call them) you give potential clients multiple opportunities to become distracted or questioning your ability and expertise in all of those areas.
Avoid weak calls to action. According to Sewell, there’s nothing less motivational than the vague phrase learn more. “It means absolutely nothing,” he notes. ” Be specific, be tangible.
What is it that you’re offering exactly?” If you want your clients to call you then give them that in your call to action. Don’t just say, “For more information, give us a call.”
The question simply becomes, if your email came to your inbox would it make you want to buy Legal Nurse Consulting services from you? If yes, then keep up the good work! If maybe or probably not, then there is always room for improvement.
For more on building a remarkable Legal Nurse Consulting or Life Care Planning practice, subscribe to the RSS Feed for the Blog and my Email Newsletter. Follow us on Twitter, join our LNC/LCP Group on LinkedIn, or friend us on Facebook. We also offer one on one practice coaching as well as amazing LNC/LCP marketing materials, website design and social media page designs. Email us or call (317) 426-1170.
While we have all come to love Twitter or at least in my case, accept the inevitable, Legal Nurse Consultants are making egregious errors while using their accounts.
Writing at MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog, Megan Leap discusses several “gruesome Twitter pet peeves that could irk your profile visitors—and cost you followers.” Here are few major no-nos:
The automated direct message (DM). Twitter allows people who follow each other to exchange private messages that don’t appear in public timelines. Some people use this function to send automated DMs to all new followers that say “Thanks for the follow. Let’s figure out how to work together!” or “Nice to meet you. I offer social media consulting services. Hit me up if you have any questions.” “If you have these set up,” says Leap, “please turn them off. They are rude, irrelevant, and oh-so-obviously automated.”
The typo in your bio. We have less stringent proofreading standards in online venues—no one will crucify you for tweets with an occasional typo. But it looks bad when your profile contains poor grammar or spelling. “Please, if you only proofread one thing, proofread your Twitter bio,” she pleads. “Copy and paste it into Microsoft Word. Have your coworker review it. Whatever you need to do, don’t let typos happen in your bio. It’s a pretty permanent piece of your online presence.”
The absence of a profile image. When you first sign up for Twitter, you’re given a generic “egg” avatar as a temporary placeholder—if you don’t immediately upload your headshot or your practice’s logo, expect users to regard your tweets with suspicion.
I think it’s a difficult thing to use Twitter effectively in your practice. What I generally see are more and more Legal Nurse Consultants using Twitter as a streamlined version of Facebook for their friends and colleagues. Dropping a quote or an article headline may fit into the 140 character format but it doesn’t always register as effective content usage from a marketing perspective. As a matter of fact, that colleague I spoke of last week who sent me way to many Twitter texts? Still at it. Haven’t even opened one of them. It’s just irrelevant ranting and random thoughts with nothing designed to help my business; won’t be long before I stop following them all together. Don’t let your Twitter presence do that to someone else.
Try this for one week. Make every Tweet that is going out to colleagues, clients or potential clients content heavy. I mean, give them something solid to use in their practice, a free tip or guide, or an access code to a free ebook on your website. Let me know how much clientele you build from this compared to quotes, song lyrics and check in status Tweets.
For more on building a remarkable Legal Nurse Consulting or Life Care Planning practice, subscribe to the RSS Feed for the Blog and my Email Newsletter. Follow us on Twitter, join our LNC/LCP Group on LinkedIn, or friend us on Facebook. We also offer one on one practice coaching as well as amazing LNC/LCP marketing materials, website design and social media page designs. Email us or call (317) 426-1170
“But There Are No Clients Out There”
Believing that there are no clients out there is short-term thinking. You aren’t going to win your dream clients with the same type of marketing that you have always done. The point of a yearly marketing plan is to build a remarkable practice. That means you have to BUILD.
The goal for 2012 should be to open the relationships that open opportunities and start this next year strong. You can build a remarkable practice if you have a plan. Most of your competitors will not so that will get you one step ahead to finding clients.
The following questions will help you focus on areas you want to build on in 2012.
Questions
What did you do to close last year strong and get a running (sprinting) start on this year?
What number of dream clients will you target next year?
What percentage of your current clients can you get more business from realistically?
What specific changes do you need to make in your current practice branding to refresh your image?
How many times did you update your website last year?
How many times do you intend to blog this year? Do you have your blog feed set up so clients can access it easily?
For more on building a remarkable Legal Nurse Consulting or Life Care Planning practice, subscribe to the RSS Feed for the Blog and my Email Newsletter. Follow us on Twitter, join our LNC/LCP Group on LinkedIn, or friend us on Facebook. We also offer one on one practice coaching as well as amazing LNC/LCP marketing materials, website design and social media page designs. Email us or call (317) 426-1170.
Take five minutes and learn a new way to make your practice remarkable!