By Paul Tobey

Are you too busy working with your patients to take care of marketing your business? Many professional people have this problem. But how can you deal with it? By learning to leverage a small amount of time to get a significant marketing result.

A social media gold rush is going on right now. However, if you are like most people you have probably downgraded social media marketing to “not urgent." As a result, your business could be suffering the crippling cost of inaction.

If you are deeply committed to growing your business, you have likely tried many different marketing strategies, such as traditional print advertising, referral marketing, search engine optimization, radio, TV, pay-per-click campaigns, and even direct mail. And while you have been diligently tracking and measuring your results, social media comes along and turns things upside down. Suddenly your website isn’t enough. You need to blog, have Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, be on Facebook and 30 other social media whatchamacallits.

Where are you supposed to find the time? Actually, it's not about finding the time, it's about avoiding the painful consequences of trial and error – which will eventually cost you huge amounts of time.

While it usually takes an entire day of training to help people learn how to choose the right tools, automate the tasks and implement advanced conversion strategies, here are some insights into how the social media world works.

The secret ingredient is NOT about selling. It’s about offering high value information to earn trust, credibility and respect.

Social media is your outreach and education plan. It works by providing others with high-value, helpful information and has the effect of earning you their trust as the sole source for this information and service.

Here is my own four-part marketing system and how social media fits into it.

1. Prospecting. Social media is a great way to find a targeted audience. By using software like TweetDeck and automated connections to popular social media networks you essentially monitor conversations through keyword phrases that represent your target market. Then you mine that audience by interacting, posting comments on their blogs and ultimately building valuable back links to your website.

This system can have an extraordinary effect on traffic and it takes only 15 minutes a day to literally double your leads.

2. Communication. On average it takes four to seven visits or communications for anyone to make a buying decision in your favour. You must earn it by interacting not only in the social media realm but by building a targeted mailing list of prospects that have been delivered to you through social media.
The interaction between social media and your website landing zone is extremely important. Each page on your website must have six key elements of a profitable landing zone, one of which is an opt-in subscription form. The more people you have on your list, the more profit you will make.

3. Presentation Marketing. There are many ways to present your products and services to targeted audiences. When the initial contact has been made through your social media automation and the system of communication continues to inform that prospect, they will reach a point where they've received enough information and you must present your final case.

This point should not be underestimated. It's not what you present to people, but it's how you present it that matters.

Presentation marketing is about choosing the right medium to convey what's in it for them. This could come in the form of an information video, a seminar or webinar. Ultimately, you use every presentation medium you can find to interact and inform. The underlying context and the order in which you convey your value means the difference between growing your business and losing ground.

4. Follow-up. Even when prospects are willing to sit through any of the presentation strategies mentioned above, only a percentage of them are ready to buy. What do you do with the others? You literally put them back into the same automated communication system and drip market to them until they are ready.

In my own business I have had people on a mailing list for four years before they bought anything – because they just weren't ready yet.

Many additional social media strategies can enhance the connection with your audiences by

referring clients
converting an online visitor into a patient
providing advice and a caring voice
developing relationships with people in your local community
providing medical updates
providing informational advertisements and videos
providing after-care support

Back in the days of simple selling when you didn't have a boatload of competition and your audience didn't have immediate access through the Internet to thousands of competitors, social media wasn't even an option. Now, social media is mandatory. You need to know this before things really heat up. For example, when marketing goes mobile. Staying on top of what's relevant in the 21st century is a business owner's and professional person's greatest challenge but the most rewarding in terms of business growth.

Social media has become an urgent business tool and your marketing muscles must be flexed every day to keep pace so you can become the sole trusted source for what you do in your area of expertise.

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Paul Tobey is the CEO of Training Business Pros and is well known to thousands of business professionals as Canada's top internet marketing and social media trainer. He has trained more than 22,000 business owners across Canada and the USA and many have endorsed Paul as a contributing factor in their ongoing business, personal and financial success.