Email Marketing Best Practices

Email Marketing Best Practices

Note: This is a transcript of an episode about Email Marketing from PSM – Professional Services Marketing Show podcast. Hosts David Lecours and Josh Miles share email marketing best practices. Click here to listen to the episode.

PSM: Professional Services Marketing

Episode 104 on Email Marketing

Josh: Hello and welcome to PSM show. If it’s about professional services marketing, we’ll be covering it here. I’m Josh Miles and this is episode 104 on Email Marketing for Friday, November 17, 2017. You know, tomorrow is my birthday and welcome to the show David.

David: Hey, happy birthday.

Josh: Thank you.

David: In that honor, I’m cracking open a beer. Oh, can you hear that?

Josh: That sounds like birthday goodness. I’m actually enjoying a little bit of Bourbon here myself, celebrating a little early.

David: Nice. This is a Stone Ripper, a San Diego Pale Ale.

Josh: Excellent.

David: Cheers.

Josh: Sampling the Woodford Reserve here today. Also quite tasty. Today’s episode is actually not about beverages but it is about one of my favorite topics, which is email marketing.

David: Yeah. Josh, you know, I’ve heard you say that this is the most under-appreciated marketing channel and that begs the question, why?

Josh: I think there’s a lot of reasons, not the least of which, depending on the tool that you use, email marketing can actually be the least expensive, especially if your firm is doing email in-house and pulling together email newsletters. There’s certainly the time that goes into it. One of the reasons we like it is because it can be so targeted. You’re obviously building your list and sending it exactly to the people that you want to receive it. It’s more likely to be seen and you can actually know who has looked at it.

You can get a little bit big brother with it of course, and get into the details and know exactly who clicked on it and who forwarded it and who clicked on what. In effect, your audience if giving you that permission. They’re signing up for your list, presumably you’re not spamming them. Hopefully nobody’s doing that. If you are, we’ll get into that a little bit later. That combination of low cost and targeted and the ability to know who’s looking at it and sending it to only people who want it, it’s kind of one of the closest things we have to silver bullet in marketing today.

David: Yeah. I think that’s so true. The idea that it is so targeted is so key. Many marketing channels, whether it’s traditional advertising or direct mail, you just don’t know if somebody has seen it because if it’s just an ad, you’re hoping that they pick up the publication that you’ve placed that ad-buy in. Whereas, with email marketing, you can’t guarantee that somebody’s going to open and click on your email but there’s a pretty good chance that they’re going to at least see it. You’re going to have a better opportunity for somebody seeing your message than so many other media.

That intimacy of knowing exactly who you’re targeting and sending something to them is pretty unrivaled.

Josh: There’s also the, as you mentioned, the visibility piece. Even if people aren’t opening the email, even if they’re triaging it and seeing it in the inbox and they aren’t opening everyone, they’re just deleting it as it comes in, they’re still getting that brand expose. I think about some of the retail brands that I interact with. I don’t want to buy something from J Crew or Bed, Bath and Beyond or whoever else I’m getting these occasional emails from but I see them in my inbox all the time so that brand exposure is there pretty frequently.

David: Yeah. I think we know that, in our business, the professional service marketers, the sales cycle is long. Being front of mind with somebody is so key. Having a targeted campaign where you put that prospective buyer on a drip of useful content, will help you rise to the front of mind or the top of requests for proposal list when your customer moves in the buying cycle to actually have a project and ready to purchase. I think that is so key.

Josh: We talked a little bit about, obviously, you’re going to get a little bit of visibility in the inbox even if somebody does interact with the email. Maybe we could talk about some of the ways to help optimize getting people to read that email and I think one of the ones I’d love to hear your thoughts on is what role the subject line plays in getting someone to open that email.

David: It’s critical. You can’t overstate this. If somebody doesn’t open your email, they don’t really absorb your message and the only way they’re going to open the email is if the subject line is compelling. I’m imagining opening my email service provider, I happen to use Mac Mail but it could be Gmail or whatever. Doesn’t matter. You’ve got a sea of new emails. They’re all bold, indicating that they haven’t been read. You get this little dreadful feeling in your stomach about having to go through all of these different emails.

Josh: That was literally me this morning. Why are there so many emails in my inbox?

David: Right. Yeah. You’ve got to deal with most of them. Knowing that, you’re competing with projects and critical emails from people on your staff so you’ve got to have an email subject line, because that’s the only thing people see, that is in fact, compelling and it needs to be well written, it needs to peak somebody’s interest. There’s a lot of techniques to do this whether it’s asking a compelling question, having a thought-provoking or provocative message. I always suggest to clients that, if they’re looking for inspiration for writing great email headlines, go to the supermarket and look at the tabloids. Look at the headlines that you’re seeing popping off the list.

I’m not recommending that you write an article about Brad Pitt’s dating habits or something like that but, look at the way they craft those messages because they’re guaranteed to stand out on a newsstand. The techniques they use, things like seven tips for X, Y, and Z or, have you ever thought of A, B, and C? Those are great techniques.

Josh: The third one will blow your mind.

David: There you go.

Josh: The subject lines, I think, are definitely powerful ways to get your attention and then, you know, most email programs also will have that preview text, is what I typically call it, but that next line of text that’s the un-bolded copy which is sometimes, a totally squandered opportunity when you open up the email and you see that that first line says, “Email not rendering. View it in a browser.” That kind of default text is the first thing you see but we’ll get into some of the different email programs here in a second but things like Mail Chimp will allow you to enter that preview text in purposefully so it’s not just pulling the default message.

David: Yes. Right. Right. Typically, the default is the first lines in your actual email but you have the ability to create, some people call it an excerpt or a synopsis and that’s another great way that your email is compelling. First read subject line, second read is whatever that summary easy. Just some real practical tips; somewhere between 35 and 55 characters, which ends up being about six to ten words for the subject line so it fits within the window of view within the email.

Josh: Yeah because you’re not probably, technically limited by the number of words or characters but nobody’s ever going to see those beyond the six to ten words, you’re not going to be able to read it anymore.

David: Yeah. Don’t put your whole entire email message, in the subject line. It’s not a way to game the system.

Josh: I feel like there are some people who use the subject line almost like text messaging. They just send you the subject line email with an empty content.

David: Yeah. Nothing else. I’ve used that technique so I’m guilty. Josh, there’s something I noticed recently. The rise in popularity of emojis. It may be because people are sending emails from their phone and the emoji culture is a little bit more prominent within mobile. How do you feel sticking an emoji in the subject line? You’ve got this sea of email text for subject lines and an emoji pops out? Is it professional? I don’t know. I have mixed feelings. What do you think?

Josh: I feel like the underlying theme with email is, is with great power comes great responsibility. Most people just don’t behave very responsibly on the web when it comes to email marketing. It’s the thing that I feel that people have abused more than anything. The reason we have spam laws is that people spam you. I think emojis are maybe not up there with spam but certainly, every email doesn’t warrant using emoji and the professional services space.

David: No.

Josh: Sure, there are things like open houses or parties or golf outings or networking opportunities and maybe those are good places to maybe work in a little emoji here and there but certainly not every message. What’s your take on that?

David: I like that. I think using it sparingly. There are some cute emojis that you can utilize in a witty way. Whether it relations to the literally or metaphorically, to the subject line, that can be kind of fun. Yeah. I think if it becomes the norm, then it’s not unique, it’s not special and people will tire of it.

Josh: Who knew that we would have so much to say about emails and we are literally, just through the subject line at this point? This is one of those that may seem like, “How do you even change this?” Actually, the sender itself could be a factor to whether you open this email or not. Tell us about why that is.

David: Yeah. I’m glad you brought that up. When you’re scanning, the first thing you’ll look at is … Well, actually, I’m not even sure. I sort of go back and forth between looking at the subject line and looking at who sent it. Both are going to give me a clue, you mentioned triage, in terms of the priority that I need to respond to that email. My eyeball probably goes back and forth. I put one eye on subject line and maybe I use the other eye to look at sender and I’m instantly judging whether or not I’m going to open that email.

The point here is that I strongly believe that the sender needs to be an actual person that you have this relationship with. Now, you may not have met that person but I think it needs to come from you, an actual person or somebody in the company that is perhaps a figurehead that people know. What I discourage people from doing is just putting, the X, Y, Z first or B&C consulting because that just feels instantly like it’s going to be some sort of generic corporate, not very compelling, personal email.

It seems small but again, you’ve got milliseconds to let the viewer know; are you trustworthy? Are you offering something worthy? Most likely, that comes from a person, not a company. Your thoughts?

Josh: Let me see if I’ve got this straight. We can say it’s from XYZ Corp and the subject line is November email.

David: Yeah. Right. That tells me-

Josh: There’s nothing less interesting than the big corporate giants sending me their November newsletter.

David: Yes. Absolutely. Right. I don’t want to read that. It’s going directly into trash. The other option is to get an email from Josh Miles and saying, “Guess who we just hired at Miles Herndon?” I know it’s coming from you. I have a relationship with you. The headline is compelling. I’m much more apt to click on that.

Josh: I love the very conversational nature of your very theoretic subject line of, “Guess who we just hired?” That’s so much more human than, “A press release E sounding. Miles is proud to announce the new developer of business development.” I’d rather read the email that says, “Guess who we just hired?”

David: Yeah.

Josh: I don’t know. Let me guess.

David: I love you said that. That’s a great technique. If your subject line doesn’t sound conversational and literally, test it by posing the question or staying the statement to somebody else and if they say, “Oh no, that’s corporate speak,” speak human. Be a human being and have empathy and be compelling. Don’t sound like a corporate automaton, if that’s even a word.

Josh: It is if we use it a few more times.

David: That’s right.

Josh: I think the other thing to keep in mind for sender is, for most programs, you’re going to have the option of including both, the sender name and the sender email so you’ve got the opportunity to, depending on how your email preferences are set, you either see those listed as names, so you see that it’s from David Lecours, or you see that it’s from david@lecoursdesign.com but those are both things to think about because, when you’re sending through an email service provider and piece of software, you’re not relegated to just sending from, “your email address” it can be from anybody as long as that email address is validated through the system.

David: There might be a reason to break this rule. Let’s say your email address is showing but let’s say you’re sending out some sort of fun, timely thing. In the last episode, we talked about holiday messages and generally, we’re not a fan of generic holiday messages but let’s just say for example, you were sending a holiday message and to break things up a little you could say, “Elf from the North Pole,” or, “Elf from XYZ Corp,” just to provide a little bit of variety or maybe there’s a relationship between the sender, name and the subject matter.

I think as a general rule, don’t try to be overly creative and witty. Save that for the content and the body of the email, which I think we might want to talk about next.

Josh: Yeah. Let’s get to that then.

David: That was my segway, did you notice that?

Josh: It was pretty subtle. I appreciated that.

David: All right. You’ve determined your subject line. You’ve determined your sender, now you’ve got to write the content. Josh, any good rules for developing content of an email, without getting too much into content marketing, which is a totally separate subject? In terms of length or topic, what do you do in terms of creating this content of the email?

Josh: This may be sort of cheating but I’ve always enjoyed writing the email inside the context of the template that I’m going to be using so that I can really see. It’s so easy if you just start writing in Word or a text editor, to write something lengthy, even if you don’t feel like it’s getting that way and I think email is one of those things, it’s much easier to visually scan the important parts. Email writing and blog writing are similar in that regard. Having lots of small, bite-sized pieces, allows your eyes to just kind of glance over it and see the important parts that pop out, whether you’ve got one big image at the top or a couple little thumbnails throughout but you know.

Even if it’s not literally bullet points, just writing in little chunks I think is a little bit easier to digest than opening up your inbox and being greeted with a wall of text. I think very few people are looking for that in an email. What would you add to that?

David: Yeah. That’s so true. I like digestible chunks of content. Think of it sort of, as web copy where it’s not long-form narration but it’s these smaller chunks that somebody can scan and see a headline and then a little bit of copy, a couple sentences. Another headline, another couple sentences so it doesn’t feel like work. It feels joyful to be able to read and learn the great insight that you’re providing. That reminds me of the next thing.

Within the content, you want to make sure that you’re offering valuable information that will make your clients’ work better. I think people a lot of times, fall into the trap and the mistake that I see commonly made by professional services forums is they, pardon my potty humor but, they “we” all over themselves. Do you know what I’m talking about there Josh?

Josh: I think that’s when they say, we this and we that and we, we, we.

David: Yes. Exactly. You can share that joke with your five-year-old son. Yeah. You don’t want to we all over yourself.

Josh: Everybody likes dad jokes.

David: Yeah. It doesn’t. It’s not very interesting. It’s like a relationship with somebody who talks only about themselves and doesn’t offer anything of value. I kind of like to think of it like this 6:1 ratio. I’ve heard as much as 10:1 where you’re offering content that’s valuable to your client, useful tips for making them smarter, faster better and then that affords you that latitude, so six of those, to one we content.

We content would be the equivalent of a project we just won, we just hired this key new hire, we just won this award. I get so much email from firms in our space and they just are constantly … it feels like you’re just bragging the whole time.

Josh: Right.

David: What am I supposed to do with that? Okay. Great. I’m proud but it just doesn’t have the resonance and lasting power of offering something of value.

Josh: I think even, the softer side of we is when you’re sharing culture or sharing people and when it feels conversational or story-like. I know story’s an important word for you too David. When I feel like somebody is telling me something that I’m excited to hear about, it’s a lot different, even if it is all about … if it’s a fun, a light, or interesting or human sided story, that makes me a lot more interested to dig into it than it does when it’s just announcing that next project or that new hire.

David: Right. Doesn’t everybody really think their own content is interesting? How do you get to that sort of human part? I think you do it well. I’m just curious if we can offer some tips.

Josh: Yeah. I think when it really sounds conversational. One of the tips that I’ve heard for blogging that I’ve tried to apply to email whenever possible is thinking about, what if you were just writing to one person? I think sometimes it’s helpful to think exactly, literally one person. It can be an imaginary person. Okay, I’m going to write to this marketing manager and she has X years of experience in the business and she deals with these kinds of problems and she wants to learn one, two, and three, and her life would just be easier if she could just figure out these things.

If I just think about, I’m always writing to her, what would my next message be to her if I was trying to encourage her along or trying to help her out or teach her something? I think that really changes the tone of the email and makes it kind of naturally conversational and friendlier. It’s kind of speaking to an audience. When you pick somebody out in the audience and you make eye contact with them, I think it’s that same thing with the email.

When you have written that feeling like you’ve written to one person, everybody who reads that says, “Oh, they were writing to me. This is a great email.”

David: Yeah. Is that amazing? Yeah. Absolutely. For sure.

Josh: It’s much more engaging email to read that kind of message I think.

David: Totally. One idea that our studio audience can think about is, just keep listening, listening to your clients and what are the problems that they’re consistently facing? Those can be great topics. By the same token, what are the answers that you consistently give? That’s great fodder for email copy. Of course, you want that copy to live on your blog so that it has a life well beyond just the email. Maybe we could transition a little bit into that relationship between email and a blog. I know there’s a couple different schools of thought.

One is, have the entire message in the body of the email. Another one is, send just a teaser within the body of the email to encourage the user to click from the email, onto your turf, which is now the website, own-able media. Do you have any preference there Josh?

Josh: Well, interestingly enough, I have fully subscribed to both schools of thought at one point or another in hopes of keeping my emails short back when, this was kind of the early days of email for my firm, 2005, 2006. We were just experimenting with this thing called email marketing. We would do these very we focused and it was always like, “Here’s the latest project. Here’s the thing that we just won. Here’s an award. Here’s a client that did something that was in the news.” We would have a one liner about that project and, “Click here to read more.” The next client, “Click here to read more.” The next client, and shocking, very few people clicked through unless it was a face or a really cool image, then they would click on the images or the faces but they wouldn’t click on the “read more” as much.

David: Right.

Josh: Fast forward to 2013 or ’14, we started sending out these emails that were very conversational and we started treating it the opposite. We started really building up our email list and subscriber list from our blog. We were pulling in email from the website as opposed to previously, we were trying to send our email subscribers back to the web. In this case, when we flipped it around, we really tried to keep all of the conversation, literally, in the inbox.

We would end a lot of our messages with a question or a challenge or something to provoke thought. We’d say things like, “Tell us about a time when you had something like this. What has your biggest challenge been in this area? Share an idea with us. Do you love this idea or hate it?” Then we’d always end it with, “Hit reply and let us know.” When you have that personal email address as the sending email and they hit reply, it literally just comes back to our inbox.

It was a really cool way. Obviously, it was a smaller number of subscribers who would actually do that but the ones who did would realize, “Oh, he’s actually sending and responding to these emails.” It really extends that personal relationship piece of it.

David: Right. It felt like you were there for somebody if they had a question or wanted to respond right within the email.

Josh: Yeah. Obviously, it feels really accessible when you get an email from somebody and you hit reply and then they write back to you. It’s kind of mind blowing. Peter Shankman’s another marketing guy out there. I’ve had a very similar experience with him recently. He was a speaker at a regional conference earlier this year and I subscribed to his list and hit reply to the auto-thanks for signing up and told him what I liked about his talk.

He wrote back and had very specific things to that talk in response so I knew it was him or someone who was very well trained in what was going on in his show. That was pretty cool.

David: It wasn’t a bot.

Josh: That’s right. Probably not a bot. Would have been a really good bot if it were.

David: Right.

Josh: What do you think about including calls to action inside of an email or buttons or that idea of read more? How often are you seeing that successful or how would you advise firms to handle those?

David: Right. My example is my own in that I’ve been tracking my firm as a professional services firm. Our list is 1,539 people and we’ve done some A/B testing. I was designing an email and wanted to test whether a fully designed email that utilizes some of the bells and whistles that these email services provide versus just plain text email with a link. I did it two different times.

In both cases, the plain text emails had … I’ll just give you the numbers. 17.2% opened for designed versus 23.5% for the plain text. For the second time, it was 25.2% opened for the design and 30.3% opened for the plain text. In both cases, the plain text email had a higher open rate and a higher click through rate.

Josh: Isn’t that interesting.

David: That may just be the audience. I think that there’s also some concerns that when you include a lot of graphics and pictures, that it could get flagged as potentially spam and that might not reach your intended user, in which case, your open rates would be lower. Yeah. Lately, my approach has been simple plain text with a link because I do want to get them over to the site where hopefully, they can stumble upon other articles and if they’re interested in services, they can learn about that. My goal is to get them to the site.

Yeah. I think the key is just knowing what your plan is and knowing how you’re going to do it. There isn’t one right way to do it but probably the right answer is just to know what you’re doing and be intentional about it so that you can execute on that.

Josh: Dude, I feel like we’ve gone through a lot of really cool stuff on emails so far but we’ve got so much left to go here. Maybe we should actually split this up into a second episode and release this as a little bonus for everybody. What do you think about that?

David: Yeah. I think that’s great. We have been publishing our episodes every other week and this is such a hot topic and I’m into it, I want to keep going. Let’s wrap up for now. Let’s call each other in a week and do part two of this and then we’ll release them in subsequent weeks so people will just only have to wait one week. Today is November 17th, we’ll release the next one on the 24th. Does that sound good?

Josh: Yeah. That sounds good.

Episode 105 on Email Marketing

Josh Miles: Yeah. Sometimes I just love nerding out on nerdy stuff, and e-mail marketing is definitely one of those kind of nerdy topics. But as we talked about in episode 104, when it comes to e-mail marketing with great power comes great responsibility. I’m excited. If you haven’t listened to episode 104 yet, please go back and do that because David and I covered the nitty gritty of why e-mail is a great tool in professional services, better ways to look at subject lines and the importance of those, and the sender. We really just started digging into the actual content of the e-mail itself. Today, I’m think we’re just going to pick up in the area of building your list. David, what are some of the good ways to build your list when it comes to e-mail marketing?

David Lecours: I think you have two choices. One is build it organically, which means adding people in an opt-in kind of manner. You meet somebody, you ask them either in-person or via e-mail, “Hey, can I add you to my mailing list?” Or another way of organic building is that they go to your site, they fill out a call-to-action form and they give you permission to send them information. They’ve opted-in to your list. That would be organic.

The other method is purchasing a list. There are sellers of lists out there and you can buy e-mail addresses and build your list that way. Both have pros and cons, but this is a bit of a numbers game. You want to have as big a targeted list as you can. You don’t want numbers for the sake of ego. You really want people that are prospective clients, now or in the future, so it’s not just about getting your cousin in to your list, or your whole family. It’s having targeted members.

Those are the two approaches. I have explored purchasing a list, but it didn’t make sense. I wasn’t convinced that the list was quality. I knew they were going to give me a bunch of names and e-mail addresses, I just wasn’t convinced that they were going to be targeted enough. I’m a super targeted marketer and my firm is exclusively focused on the architecture, engineering, construction industry. A lot of these list sellers are building their lists based on advertising buys, and architecture, engineering, construction doesn’t do a lot of ad buys, so like I said, I wasn’t convinced that the list was going to be valuable.

I may have not done enough research, but how about you, Josh? Where do you sit on this organic versus purchasing list?

Josh Miles: Yeah, we talked a little bit about this on the last episode. Again, if you haven’t listened to 104, go back and do that, but kind of in the early days of marketing for us, we were doing the business card thing. Any time we had an intern, one of their weekly tasks would be to enter all of my business cards into our e-mail marketing program and making sure that that database was up to date, and then we would just blast away to that group. Today, it’s even more permission based where most of our e-mail subscribers are coming from our website and blog traffic. I think we’re averaging something like 50 or 60 new sign ups a week, which is kind of ridiculous, but we’ve got a couple of blog pieces out there that are working hard for us, and really helping build that list. The main things that we’re looking for are also what the real e-mail nerds will call List Hygiene, which is just making sure that when we’re sending an e-mail out to thousands of people, that those thousands are still receiving that e-mail and they’re opening it.

If we have someone who goes multiple sends without even an open, we’ll just go ahead and take them off the list because it’s not doing anything for our sending scores to have people who are not even opening the e-mail. If we know they’re going to delete a couple in a row, then we’ll just go ahead and take them off the list.

David Lecours: Just to clarify, when Josh says it’s “ridiculous” that they get 50 or 60 a week, I think he means it’s ridiculously great. Right?

Josh Miles: Yes. Ridiculously great.

David Lecours: Sometimes we’re not sure with Josh’s Indianapolis vernacular. Just want to clarify for our listeners.

Josh Miles: When I say ridiculous, I mean good. It’s been, I think, successful beyond what I expected it to be. David and I were talking a little bit before we hit record here, about we’ve got a couple of blog posts that are now outperforming our homepage. The homepage is actually the 4th or 5th most popular page on our site, which means we’re getting a lot of organic traffic. That organic traffic, we could talk about that content strategy later, but that organic traffic is really what’s driving new subscribers to our e-mail list. Ultimately, people who want to hear from us, which is a pretty cool thing.

David Lecours: In short, build your list, we don’t proselytize, whether it’s organic, organic does seem to lend itself a little better to people signing up, raising their hand saying, “Yes, you can send me things.” In either case, you might want to include at the bottom of one of your e-mails, a request to be white listed, white listed meaning that you have gone into your e-mail service’s spam filter to tell it, “Yes, this person who is sending me things is a viable source. It’s not spam.” It’s basically just making sure that the e-mail doesn’t go directly to spam. Adding somebody to your address book is another way to whitelist. You want to make sure that your e-mail gets to your audience.

Josh Miles: What about when you send out an e-mail to your audience, David, or as you’re coaching your clients on this, do you do the standard batch and blast where you’ve got, just everybody gets everything, or do you do more customized groupings, or do you do any customization within the message itself so that at least mine says, “Hey, Josh,” or it has my company’s name somewhere in the body? What level of customization and segmentation are you looking at typically?

David Lecours: Right. What I do, and what I advise my clients to do are actually different. I’ll explain why. Because my firm is so specialized, architecture, engineering and construction, I do actually have those lists segmented just in case I want to send something specific, but I don’t know, 99 times out of 100, the message has been relevant to all three of those audiences. I send all my e-mails to all my list. For my clients, because a lot of them work in so many different vertical markets, they may be an architecture firm that works in the commercial space, they may be working in education, they may be working in universities, they may be working in transportation, all these different sectors, their messaging and their e-mails are probably going to be specific to that particular market. They want to actually segment their list, and only send the e-mail that’s relevant to that specific audience.

The more relevant, the better. I did a little A/B testing with this where I sent out, and one of my subject lines included the term, “A/E/C Firm,” and one of the subject lines included “Engineering Firm.” It was ever more specific. The results of the “Engineering Firm” were several percentage points higher than just the more generic “A/E/C Firm.” Point is, be specific and send your list to a specific audience.

Josh Miles: Yeah, and I think we’re probably similar to that. Really, the only segmentation that we use regularly within our agency and what we send out to our prospects is that my business partner and I each have our own lists that come through. If it’s something he’s written, it’ll by default sign you up for his list, and then we give folks the opportunity to also sign up for mine. Because we do a very personal touch on our e-mails. As we talked a little bit last time, we try to make them sound like they’re really written for one person, and just coming personally from me or from Daniel. The flavor that you’re going to get between the two, as you’d expect when you’re getting e-mails from two totally different people, they sound different, they read differently. That’s kind of the chief segmentation, but then we also break it down for, we’ve got one group that’s called our Highly Engaged Group. This is like if we send it, they are going to open it, and they’re probably going to click on it. That always pads our stats a bit if we send out to that group.

Then, there are kind of the larger lists or the combined lists, which are more of the announcement kind of e-mails. Those are things that are not just me musing about something, but something that’s more appropriate to send to the whole group. Certainly, I agree with the idea of more segmentation is probably better, especially if you serve multiple verticals and have maybe different flavor you might want to present your brand to each of those segments.

David Lecours: Yeah, you said something interesting when you mentioned this highly engaged group. How do you know that they’re highly engaged, and then what do you do about that in order to repurpose that highly engaged group?

Josh Miles: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think our full list is somewhere around 10,000 people. Our engaged list, the folks who would typically open an e-mail is about 4,000 combined, and then I think between Daniel and I, we each have somewhere between 750 to 1,000 a piece who we would consider are highly engaged, which is those are the ones that are most likely to open and likely to click as well. We’re looking at the stats that our e-mail service provider provides on a per e-mail basis, and we just try to go in there and update as we can and make sure that we’re keeping things really tidy, and that we’re not sending two e-mail addresses where somebody maybe switched jobs. This might be what’s called a hardbound, so the e-mail doesn’t go through anymore, or a softbound, so something where maybe they just got a delay or something.

Just trying to keep really tidy records and making sure that we know who’s getting what. If it’s something that we feel like just the choir is going to be interested in, we make sure we’re not sending that to the whole community.

David Lecours: Yeah, and I think any good e-mail service provider will give you metrics and let you know who opened your e-mail. Then, you can create a new list from the last campaign. Let’s say 300 out of 1,000 opened your e-mail, you can create this new list, and I would call those, “Engaged Viewers.” One of the benefits of working with, or using an e-mail service provider rather than trying to run your e-mail campaign straight from your e-mail, which would be a nightmare.

Josh Miles: Yeah. I think it’s good, too, to have a general idea of what your typical open stats look like. From an e-mail marketing response standpoint, you’re obviously looking for higher percentage. You’re seldom ever going to have an e-mail where 100% of people are opening the e-mail, but as David and I talked a little bit earlier, sometimes those stats may be kind of worst-case scenario. If the tracking pixel doesn’t fire or something, you may actually be getting more opens that what you’re showing, but we know that our lists are going to get anywhere between high teens to low 40’s in percent of open rates, so a 40% open rate is really fantastic, and the high teens is still pretty strong. I think you can see really lousy e-mails, might be below 10%.

Each time you send one, if you get different numbers, that’s actually a helpful thing. You start to get some feedback from your own audience. Not just industry list, not just trends, not just what somebody else is doing, but only your list is your list. Your list may behave a little bit differently than others. It’s good to try things like playful headlines in the subject versus something that’s really straightforward, and see which things start to perform better.

David Lecours: Absolutely. Yeah, I think our egos can get caught up in wanting to have everybody open our e-mail and read it, and it’s just not realistic. Like you said, your list is your list. I think the key is with this open rates, and any measurement, it’s looking for differences between one campaign to the next, and what can you learn from that, rather than playing the comparison game versus industry average. Seeing what type of content is resonating most, and obviously serving up some more of that, or thinking about is it a poor really written headline or subject line that is hampering that particular post, that isn’t … Just to throw out some numbers for you guys, MarketingSherpa, a digital marketing resource says anything about 20% is a good open rate. MailChimp says 15.5% is the industry average for the audience that my firm is trying to hit. The Architecture, Engineering, Construction. Those are just some basics that give me a sense of where we are.

That’s one thing, is open rates. You want to talk a little bit about click-thru rates?

Josh Miles: Yeah, we could talk about that too. I think when we talk about click-thrus, it sort of implies that you have something within the e-mail that you want something to click on.

David Lecours: Yeah, that’s a great point.

Josh Miles: I mean, there are so many e-mails that I look at that are … Sometimes this is the case, that it’s really just you want to share a message and there’s not really anything that you need to do. It’s just our internet service provider at the office will send us a message that says, “We just want you to know that we’ve got this regular maintenance thing going on, and it’s going to happen at 4AM tonight, and there are no expected outages for your area. If you have questions, give us a call.” There’s nothing to click on ever in those e-mails, so I bet their click-thru rate is pretty horrible. The goal was not to have a click-thru, it’s just to share that message, but it’s something to think about if you want someone to click on something, we always encourage giving them a couple different opportunities whether it’s hyperlink within the paragraph, or you mention the words of the thing that you want them to do, or even following up that paragraph with a button where it’s a really obvious, big, shiny button that has words on it that say, kind of complete the sentence of what it is you want somebody to do like download the white paper or get the goods, or something like that, or the button name is something more than just submit.

David Lecours: Right.

Josh Miles: I always like having something visual to help people want to click thru. As I shared in the last episode, we’ve always seen not only buttons, but also like faces and interesting images get lots of clicks as well. How about you?

David Lecours: Picture of people seem to really do well. I sent out an e-mail recently announcing this podcast, and it had our pictures on it. It was one of the highest open rates and click-thrus that I’ve had in a long time. I guess people like looking at us. I don’t know if they like hearing us, but they liked our picture. That’s something.

Josh Miles: Little did we know, it was like an aggressive click in the face. It’s like, “Get that guy out of here.”

David Lecours: Yeah, but I think this click-thru thing can be depressing. You see like an average click-thru of 6%, and you go like, “Oh man, that’s all?” They may open the thing and they don’t click on it, but like you mentioned, it may be because they got as much as they needed from your e-mail and opening it was enough. I wouldn’t get too hung up on those numbers. I think you should keep track of them and see what’s trending just for your own learning curb. The other thing I wouldn’t get too hung up on is unsubscribes. I would say we send out about 1500 per message, we get of like 10 to 12 on average unsubscribes each time. I have to admit, I look at those and see who’s unsubscribing and I track them down and call them. No I don’t. I don’t call them.

Josh Miles: Grab them by the lapels.

David Lecours: We all unsubscribe from lists. Sometimes they give you a reason why and sometimes they don’t.

Josh Miles: I think the reason in my mind, more often than not, is just they get too much e-mail. I think that’s also kind of code for “I’m not getting enough value out of all the e-mail that I have to deal with during the day. It’s just another reminder of how important it is to send out valuable messages that are not so “we” or “us” focused.

David Lecours: Yeah, and I think that goes back to what we talked about in the last episode, was that with great power comes great responsibility. That this medium is free and it’s easy, and as a result, we get lumped in with all the other e-mails. There’s this afterglow or aftertaste of somebody getting an e-mail from you, it already has, “Okay, now what? Another e-mail.” Your e-mails have got to be really compelling and interesting to cut through that haze, or that sort of maybe bad taste that somebody has about e-mail in general. Let your e-mail be this shining beacon of hope and inspiration, and whim, and whimsy, so that it does stand out against all the other stuff that people are getting.

Josh Miles: Speaking of that a little bit, do you think it matters when you send the e-mail out?

David Lecours: Yeah. This is the golden question. If I’m ever speaking at a conference people ask, “what day of the week and what time do I need to send my e-mail?” In most cases, I can’t answer that for you, but your data probably can. Look at and track these things, and see what is working best for you, which is why you need to look at the metrics. I typically don’t send things on Mondays because I feel like people are inundated, they’re just getting their week started. By the same token, I don’t send things on Fridays because I feel like people have checked out. I found Tuesdays and Wednesdays, mid day works, the numbers support it. It has been working well, but also maybe somebody catches something right before their lunch break and I’m hoping that they’re going to read it. This assumes of course they’re on my own timezone. Yeah, that’s been worked well for me.

By the same token, if everybody has the same sort of thinking and everybody’s sending their e-mails at the same time, your e-mail is going to fall into a whole batch of stuff. It’s a little bit of cat and mouse. Trying to figure out when you’ll stand out, and then also when you’re audience is more treceptive to receiving emails. Any tips you have for that, Josh?

Josh Miles: Yeah, I feel like that first thing Tuesday or right before lunch on Tuesdays is a stat that I’ve heard quite a lot. We’ve experimented with that. I think it’s cool that, and maybe more than just MailChimp offers this, but I just saw it in MailChip recently that they offer this, I figured they call it Time Machine or something, but basically you can set it for 9AM and then you can tell it to also send to 9AM east coast, central, pacific, so you can have it send within your given timezone at the same time. That’s kind of nice too, but I often feel like, “Well, I don’t want to send it to the west coast at 2 in the morning. The last thing I want is for somebody to be awoken by an e-mail from MilesHerndon. It’s cool that you can balance that out with that kind of sender.

I think you’re totally right, we all hear as marketers that first thing on Tuesday or 11AM on Wednesday is the best time to send, then you notice … I literally do notice how many e-mails on Tuesday and Wednesday I get at 11AM. It’s like right before I start to go to lunch, and I just hear the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and they all show up at once. I’m like, “What is going on?” I think, again, test it out with your audience. I even heard that occasionally a weekend send can get a really great open rate, because in the right industry, people are kind of relaxed and they’re in that hang out and just playing on their phone, and maybe they’re more likely to open that e-mail when they’re in a different mindset. Something else to experiment with.

David Lecours: Yeah, I think the key here is this experiment and track, and measure, and then that’ll give you the answer. Josh, what about frequency? We talked about time a day, but how many e-mails should you be sending to somebody?

Josh Miles: When we were doing these very conversational e-mails from our firm, we were aiming for one per week, but I would send my list every other week, and Daniel would send his list every other week. Admittedly, there was only about 15% of overlap. It felt like we were doing a weekly e-mail, but in effect, it was really probably in every other week. That was still a lot to keep up with, just to write that many trying to be thoughtful and keeping the frequency and quality up. I think even moving to a monthly e-mails is not a bad idea either. It’s all about what kind of content calendar your firm can keep up with and how often you can commit to publishing and shipping. What do you guys shoot for?

David Lecours: Yeah, I think safe to say go for quality, not quantity. I think it’s good to commit to it, an editorial calendar where you’re going to publish just to keep yourself on target with some rigor and some discipline, but not sacrifice quality. If you just don’t have anything great, don’t put it out. I’ve been doing about once a month, and that feels right to me. Then just into it, if I don’t have specific metrics to back that up, I just feel like if I’m getting stuff from other people and it starts to get more frequent, and I start to tune out a little, this way, yeah I’d be willing to break that rule, of course, if there was something really interesting to send mid-month. Do you recommend doing any sort of testing before you send out an e-mail?

Josh Miles: Yeah, I feel like when we do e-mail, I end up sending myself a dozen or more tests before it finally goes live, because at first I’m like, “All right, nailed it, first try.” I look at that draft and I’m like, “Oh thank goodness, I’m proofing this again.” I always like to proof it both from that desktop view what it looks like in the browser and then also obviously looking at it on my phone, because so many people do that e-mail triage on their phone, and figure out if they want to delete or keep something at that point. Do you have any tips on testing as well?

David Lecours: Well, a good e-mail service provider will give you that view of what it would look like in a web browser on a desktop, what it would look like on a tablet, what it would look like on a phone, I think that is important. I think it’s key to send it to yourself and also somebody else. We’re terrible at proofreading our own stuff, so send it to a trusted employee or colleague or somebody just to make sure it reads right, the grammar is right, the spelling is right, and then, by all means, test all the links. Make sure that they’re not old and residual links from the last e-mail you sent. Make sure they’re the right link to the right place. If you’re including links. It’s just embarrassing. You don’t want to send that retroactive e-mail. “Sorry, I screwed up the first time.” In fact, I wouldn’t even do that. If you do that, just …

Josh Miles: Just let it die.

David Lecours: Yeah, let it go. Depending on your level of interest in testing, you can really get serious. The testing examples Josh and I just gave are the free ones that come with your e-mail service provider. There are services out there, the one that is coming to mind is Sauce Labs, where you can really get deep on what an e-mail is going to look like in all the different e-mail clients, all the different ways it might show up. It can run some tests about how effective deliverability can be. It just depends on whether you want to pay for that next level. Personally, I haven’t felt the need to, but it’s nice to know that that kind of service is out there.

Josh Miles: Yeah. We’ve used another one called Litmus, too, which is one of the industry leaders in testing for deliverability and all that good stuff.

David Lecours: Absolutely. That’s a good one. In fact, maybe Sauce Labs creates Litmus. We’ll get back to you on that. Note: Josh is correct, it is Litmus, not Sauce Labs.

Josh Miles: We’ll put those notes in the show notes. David, that seems like maybe a good point to wrap it up. Anything you want to add on the e-mail front?

David Lecours: Yeah, just know that there’s a lot of e-mail service providers out there. You probably have your favorite. I’m used to MailChimp. I can’t say that one is better. Try a couple, figure out what’s the best plan for you. Yeah, we covered when to send, we talked about segmenting your list, building your list, and then of course measuring. Making sure you know what’s working for you and what’s not. Yeah, just in general, I want to put it out to the audience, we really want to hear from you guys. We’ve done a couple episodes just Josh and I, specifically on this topic. What are the best practices that are working with you for e-mail marketing? We’d love to … If there’s a really great comment, we’ll pass it on to our readers. The way you get in touch with us is to go to www.psm.show, and scroll down to “contact us.”

Josh Miles: I love that even in the first few episodes here, we’ve already had several listeners filling out that form and sending this questions, and sending us ideas, and even pitching us as to if we’d be interested in interviewing or interviewing other people that they’ve thought of. That’s exactly how we want you to use that form. Please, as David said, head over to psm.show and check out episodes and show notes there, as well as tell us what you think.

David Lecours: Yeah, so that brings us to the end of episode 105 of PSM show. If you’re listening via the PSM Show website, going over to iTunes, Stitcher, or any favorite podcast player and subscribe. It’s a pain to try to seek this out and remember how great it is. Just put yourself on a regular drip so that it comes right in through your player and you can listen to it. Even better, if you like this show, the best thing you can do is go to iTunes and give us a rating. That’s going to help boost us in the rankings, and get this out to your colleagues who can benefit from. Absolutely, as we mentioned, if you have questions or comments, write to us via psm.show. That’s it from this episode of www.psm.show. From Josh Miles and myself, David Lecours, cheers for now.

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David Lecours to Co-Host PSM Podcast

David Lecours to Co-Host PSM Podcast

PSM: Professional Services Marketing

David Lecours and Josh Miles begin co-hosting PSM: Professional Services Marketing podcast with episode 102. Episode 101 covers how and why David and Josh accepted the offer from Brad and Scully to adopt the show.

PSM: Professional Services Marketing was one of two podcasts that Andrew Sculthorpe (Scully) and Brad Entwistle founded. Brad and Scully, Principals of ImageSeven, an Australia-based marketing communications firm continue producing SMC: School Marketing Communications podcast.

“We’re excited to serve the PSM audience with juicy marketing ideas to help firms attract great clients and talent,” said David Lecours. “Josh is a seasoned podcaster, and highly persuasive. So when he asked me to join him in co-hosting PSM, it was an easy yes!”

In Episode 102, Josh and David discuss their plans for the show. Mentioned in the episode:

  • What have we done Brad and Scully?
  • Who is new host David Lecours?
  • Who is new host Josh Miles?
  • Who is our intended audience?
  • Upcoming topics and features of the show
  • Our new website: www.psm.show
  • The many options for website domain extensions
Infographics for AEC Marketers

Infographics for AEC Marketers

Resources and links from David Lecours’ SMPS Build Business 2017 Program, Visual Content That Wins Business: The Untapped Power of Infographics.

Program Description
A/E/C firms are marketing in the era of big data, but small attention spans. It’s challenging to differentiate your firm from the competition when your prospective client doesn’t have time to listen.

This program unleashes the untapped power of infographics to help your firm stand out. Sure, writing and speaking are the typical ways to demonstrate thought leadership via content marketing. But who wants to be typical? With data visualization in the form of infographics, you can effectively demonstrate your expertise to win new business.

 


Slide Deck

To download slides, click on LinkedIn (in) icon


Examples & Sources Shown in Program
Populous.com
Eypae.com
big.dk/#projects
bnim.com/results
theweidtgroup.com
lmnarchitects.com
randalllamb.com/careers/
archsmarter.com
lsa.net/about/
murraysmith.us/great-company/
bergelectric.com/locations/
psomas.com/about/overview/
smps-oc.org/about/
www.good.is/infographics
infographicslab203.com
neomam.com/interactive/13reasons/

 


Watch the Program


Tools for Creating Infographics
adobe.com/illustrator
visual.ly
canva.com
piktochart.com
charted.co
wordart.com
mapbox.com
geckoboard.com
powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/
thenounproject.com
visme.co


Typography Resources Mentioned
Fount – browser plug-in to identify fonts within a browser
What The Font – upload photos of fonts for identification

 


Books & Classes For Going Further
Good Charts by Scott Berinato
All books by Edward Tufte
Resonate by Nancy Duarte
Slideology by Nancy Duarte

 


Black Tie Optional
Reward for scrolling all the way to the bottom!
The Process of Creating Great Video

The Process of Creating Great Video

Video Process

Are you considering video as part of your marketing mix? With cameras and editing software being relatively inexpensive, it is tempting to Do-It-Yourself (DIY). But, owning a paint brush and paint does not make you a painter. I recommend leaving video production to professionals.

To get the most value from your relationship with a video professional, it’s essential that you understand the process of creating great video. So I interviewed a creative partner of ours, Chris Giles, who recently directed this video for the San Diego Green Building Council.

Creative Development
Begin the process by asking yourself the following questions:

  • Why are you creating this video?
  • How can we measure success?
  • Who is the audience? What do they think of you now? What should they think or do after watching the video?
  • Will the video be viewed online? on an HD screen in your office? projected in a theater?
  • What is the budget?
  • What is the availability of talent (people featured in the video)?
  • What is the personality of your brand and what should the tone be of the video?
  • How long should the video be?

Story Development
Just like for movies seen in theaters, it all begins with a script. The script should include:

  • dialogue direction for those interviewed on camera or those providing voice-over.
  • what graphics (logos, illustrations, captions) will appear on-screen
  • list of possible shooting locations and duration

Storyboarding brings the written script into visual form:

  • a sketch of the planned shot in column one, run time & audio notes in column two
  • get executive sign-off to help decision makers visualize the final product.

frame from storyboard

Pre-Production
This phase is mostly about planning and scheduling the shots. Location scouting should be done with one of your designers who knows which building angles are most desirable. In addition to the visual scouting, audio scouting needs to be done. Is it a noisy location? This can be good or bad depending on your intent.

Planning of your crew: a typical shoot requires 4 people: Director, Director of Photography, Lighting, and Sound. Having a stylist for hair, make-up and wardrobe is also helpful. Designate 1 person from your firm to give feedback to the Director.

Just like when creating still photographs, you’ll need owner’s permission to photograph buildings and individual permission to photograph people. Your Director of Photography should provide the necessary forms and releases.

Production
This phase will combine shooting projects and people. You’ll probably include existing still photos combined with video shot on location.

When filming people, semi-scripted interviews are more interesting than having someone memorize a script. Semi-scripted means you tell the person ahead of time what type of questions you’ll ask, but not the exact question. The spontaneity feels more authentic, and interesting. Start with easy questions and ramp up as the person becomes more comfortable being on-camera.

Don’t only interview firm leaders. Interviewing all levels of staff, clients, and end-users is more interesting. For example, a student talking about how her new classroom inspires her to learn is incredibly compelling.

When filming people, find a place that is both quiet to capture great sounds, and visually interesting in the background.

If there is a script that needs to communicated verbatim, it’s best to read it off camera as straight audio. Consider hiring a voice-over actor through a service like voice123.com to give your video a professional sound. The voice-over can be combined with b-roll or a montage of still photos. B-roll is imagery like video, still photos, maps, graphs, or motion graphics.

Post-Production
This phase is where all the elements are assembled into the final product. The editor will prepare a rough cut to show you the general direction. If you’ve signed off on story boards, then there shouldn’t be any big surprises.

Music, when played softly “underneath” an interview, or narration adds emotion. You’ll need to license, or attain rights to any music used in your video.

If you are supplying the editor with existing logos or still photos or motion graphics, you’ll want to make sure they are high resolution. This means 1920px x 1080px or greater for High Definition. To maintain brand consistency, give your editor your brand style guide so they get the colors, patterns and logo usage correct.

The last phase is output which should have been decided in the beginning. You’ll want a digital master of the video that you should archive. You may also want the video to be uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo or your website.

Conclusion
With an investment of $5k”“$35k+ for professional quality video, you’ll need to justify this expense. By understanding the process described in this post, you’ll get the most return on your investment.

AEC Content Marketing: How To Get Started

AEC Content Marketing: How To Get Started

Chicken vs. Egg, Plan First or Get Approval First

Note: This is part 2 in a series. Part 1 is Why AEC Firms Must Use Content Marketing

I see a lot of firms dabbling with content marketing “when they have time for it.” With sporadic content sharing, firms see sporadic results, if any, and then abandon this valuable marketing channel. Content marketing can’t be a luxury for when you have free time. Nobody has free time. Content marketing requires a plan and commitment. This post will help you get started.

Buy-In From the Top
In order for a marketing initiative like content marketing to work, you must have support from the C-Suite.You need this buy-in because content creation will only occur when the C-Suite makes content creation part of technical staff job descriptions. There is a chicken-and-egg conundrum of needing a content marketing plan to persuade the C-Suite, while needing support of the C-Suite to spend your time creating a plan. This post is a short-cut to help you create your content marketing plan before, or after, you have C-Suite buy-in.

Creating content (start with writing for your blog) is alien to technical staff and thus outside their comfort zone. Knowledge is the antidote to fear, so I recommend getting C-Suite approval for training technical staff to become better writers and speakers (see Resources at the end of this post).

Those in the C-suite often ask, “what firms are using content marketing successfully?” Peer pressure can be persuasive, so here are a few examples:
Array Architects
HOK
Gensler
Populous
Brown & Caldwell
DPR
American Express


“Content is an important piece in all of our marketing efforts…extending our messaging through content is a great way for us to continue to convert our customers from simply seeing a message to considering our brand.”

““ Walter Frye, Director of Entertainment Marketing & Sponsorships at American Express


Venn Diagram: Intersection of client pain and your expertise = your next blog post

Start With Strategy
Like any marketing channel under consideration, start with strategy. Determine who you are trying to reach, and what is the intersection of their pain points and your expertise. This intersection will answer the question of what to write/speak about. For example, I wrote this post in response to several Marketing Directors expressing interest in content marketing, but needing to develop a plan to get buy-in from their C-Suite.

Commit to at least a year. Part of what makes content marketing work is putting your audience on a regular drip of valuable content. You never know when buyers, in the sales process, cross the threshold from the research stage to the intent to hire stage. So it’s key to keep your firm front of mind with consistent publishing of content.


No single piece of content, no matter how excellent, will be as successful as a steady, long term flow of quality content.

““Chris Butler, author of The Strategic Web Designer


Define Personas
It’s always more effective to write with a single reader in mind rather than an amorphous group. Therefore, I recommend that you clarify your target audience by creating 3 personas for ideal clients. Personas are short fictitious biographies for those you wish to influence. At minimum, include the following in your personas:
• name
• age
• sex
• job title and responsibilities
• dreams and goals at work
Find a photo and post a cut-out of this “person” to keep your target audience front of mind when creating content. Consider creating one persona for each stage of the buying process (research, evaluation, decision) for your 3 personas.

Start Small and Then Scale
I see a lot of firms get excited about all the channels at the content marketing buffet: podcasts, blogs, newsletters, speaking, white papers, etc. Firms fail because they bite off more than they can chew. I recommend starting with a blog, and committing to one post per month for an entire year. Posts about new hires, project wins, and awards do not count. True content marketing must be original content that your audience can use to be better at their jobs. Aim for 500″“1000 words per month. Once you’ve mastered a year of blog posts, and have resources to scale, then take on new content marketing channels, while increasing to 2k”“3k words of new content on your blog per month.

Considering Outsourcing Writing
Since your technical staff are under pressure to maintain billable efficiency, consider hiring professional writers to write compelling content. Technical staff should brief the writer on the article, provide key terminology, and fact check. The Bloom Group conducted research last year with 50 consulting firms and found that those whose website thought leadership content generated the greatest number of client leads on average used ghostwriters for more than 50% of their articles. Consulting firms with the fewest number of leads from their website content on average had 22% of their online articles ghostwritten.

Your Website Is The Hub or Home Base
All your brilliant content needs to have a home. That home should be your website and the content must be indexable by search engines. Within your website, the content must live under a button listed in your main navigation. This button could be titled Blog, News, Thinking, Thought Leadership, Thoughts, etc. Avoid creating a separate blog with a separate URL because you then dilute your SEO.

All your outbound channels (Twitter, Email Marketing, Pinterest, Linked-In, Direct Mail) for promoting your content should pull your audience back to your website to read the entire story. Hence the term “inbound marketing.”

Remember: Your Content Must Be Searchable
Whatever form your content takes, be sure that at least part of it is posted on your website in searchable form. In other words, don’t just post PDFs or videos. If you do, search engines won’t pick them up, and you lose the opportunity the unaware finding you through a google search. Be sure to include a summary of the PDF, video, or podcast in your blog.

Conclusion
Content Marketing is difficult, so few firms do it well. This is why it’s an opportunity for your firm to stand out. By following the steps outlined above, you’ll create a “scalable plan for regularly adding high quality, educational content to your website that will attract prospects, inform them of your expertise, and engage them in a helpful and conversion focused process that transitions visitors to qualified and viable leads.” ““Mark O’Brien, author of A Website That Works

When your firm’s content and expertise becomes archived, and accessible to everyone in your firm, you begin to build a Core Brilliance Culture. This is also known as knowledge management. This adds significant value to your firm as a marketing, recruiting, and ownership transition asset. Maybe this is how you get your C-Suite to approve your content marketing plan?

For Discussion
How did you get your content marketing initiative started?
How do you motivate technical staff to write and speak?

Resources
Writing Training – Copyblogger
Speaking Training – Toastmasters
Firms Doing Conttent Marketing Well: Array Architects, Populous, DPR
More on Personas: The User is Always Right by Steve Mulder
Bloom Group Research – State of Online Publishing in Consulting

Why AEC Firms Must Use Content Marketing

Why AEC Firms Must Use Content Marketing

Reverse Megaphone

I recently received a call from a client that we hadn’t worked with in 10 years. The client said, “I received one of your advice emails and it was really good. I get a lot of these from vendors and I rarely read them. But I consistently read yours because they are thoughtful, helpful, and I like your voice. Our firm is going through some strategic changes and I’d like to discuss having you help us communicate our new voice.”

I loved getting this call because:

  1. It validated that the content I share is useful
  2. By being myself, my voice connected with a prospect
  3. By sharing advice on a consistent basis, it arrived when the prospect had a need for our services

The call led to a brand strategy assignment that led to two new brand identity projects, websites, and more. This reinforced my belief that Content Marketing is essential for AEC firms (and consultants like me who serve them).

What is Content Marketing?
The sharing of expertise in exchange for your audience’s attention. Also called Inbound Marketing because it pulls prospects toward you in an inbound direction. As opposed to outbound marketing channels like advertising or direct mail where your message is being pushed out towards prospects.

“Unlike traditional advertising which interrupts customers to get noticed, content marketing provides content that customers want in exchange for permission to market a product or service.” ““Kiss Metrics

Content Marketing Takes Many Forms
Content Marketing isn’t new. People have been speaking at conferences and writing newsletters for the last century. What’s new is the distribution ease via the internet. I’ve listed the major forms of content marketing here (from moderate to very difficult):

  • Shared Images (Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, etc.)
  • Social Media Posts
  • Case Studies
  • Blog Posts – shorter form ~500 words
  • Newsletter – long form articles. 1k words +
  • White Papers
  • Writing For External Publications
  • Webinars
  • Speaking
  • Podcasts
  • Videocasts
  • Info graphics

Why Content Marketing Works
As you know, AEC firms have the challenge of selling expensive services on the promise of future delivery. This requires trust on the part of the buyer. Traditionally, that trust was only gained after delivering the promise of a project. Content marketing works as a shortcut to gaining a buyers trust before hiring you. The prospect has the opportunity to experience your expertise in a low risk, non-sales environment. Nobody likes to be sold; content marketing gives the buyer the opportunity to learn how you think before taking any risk of hiring you.

Content marketing works on the principle of reciprocity as highlighted in the marketing classic, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. Human are driven to resolve the inherent tension of being indebted to another. When we give away something of value (our expertise), prospects feel a psychological urge to “even the score.” Try before you buy lets prospects experience your thinking, but it also puts them slightly in debt to you.

More Benefits of Content Marketing

  • Pre-positions your firm – sharing content demonstrates your expertise before the RFP comes out
  • Having time to develop content communicates that you have a well run business
  • Communicates helpful confidence, not desperation
  • You have to do less “selling”
  • Boosts SEO – Google likes original content being added to your website
  • Educate prospects to the point where they are ready to hire you
  • Great content gets shared (residual exposure within your niche)
  • Content can, and should, be highly targeted
  • It makes you smarter – you gain clarity when you share your expertise with others

“The antidote to fear is knowledge. Knowledge is not complete until it is articulated and publicized.” ““David Baker

Conclusion
In the race towards gaining the trust of a potential client, content marketing can provide a shortcut. It can allow a prospect to get to know you, like you, and eventually trust you enough to hire you.

* A / E / C = Architecture, Engineering, & Construction (but you already knew that)
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