Don't Make It Difficult For People To Connect With You

Earning trust takes time. The journey between people noticing you and believing your services could improve or transform their business can take weeks, months, or even years. People will move at their own pace and take as long as they need to go through it.

If you don't have an open line of communication during this period, you make it difficult for people to complete that journey. That's why a connection plan should be one of the key components of your marketing strategy.

Connecting Is Building Relationships

The goal of your marketing engine is to get in front of your audience and dream clients and show them you exist. If, after that first interaction, people judge you as worthy of their interest, they typically will want to establish some kind of relationship with you.

All of the following are examples of how people can connect with you:

• Following you on LinkedIn.
• Subscribing to your email list or podcast.
• Joining your private community.

What drives this behavior is the feeling of wanting to learn more about you and your work, follow or get involved with your future marketing initiatives, and discover new insights that might be useful to them.

If you've tried to build an email list, a social following, or any type of marketing platform before, you know it takes real work. Most people don't simply stumble upon your blog - you need to actively promote it. "Build it and they will come" is a myth, and the sooner you understand this the better.

But before investing time and money promoting it, why not reduce friction?

If you want to make the best of your resources, you first need to ensure people can quickly and easily establish a connection with you once they find you.

Building Your Marketing Platforms

The two biggest recommendations for you regarding connection are:

1. Keep it simple.
2. Be where your potential clients are.

This part of your marketing strategy should be simple, and the reason for it is obvious: you want it to be easy for people to connect with you. You don't need expensive marketing tech or complex solutions to do it.

Another thing that makes it easy is to be where your audience is. If you've done your homework and have your positioning strategy ready, you should already know the channels they use to communicate, where they find and consume information, and how they spend their time.

The connection between you and your audience happens in a marketing platform.

The most popular marketing platforms for consultants are:

• Website: Your consultancy website, and/or your personal website. They can include a blog, an online forum, or other resources for your audience.
• Email: People should be able to contact you through email. Most consultants also distribute content to an email list, making it easy for the recipients to reply and start a conversation.  
• Social media: Your company and/or personal profile on social media (e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook) allow your audience to engage with you there.
• Niche communities and trade associations: There are several groups, both online and offline, that your audience is involved with. By joining them you make it easy for potential buyers to find and connect with you.

No matter which marketing platform your audience is on, it should be easy for them to establish a connection with you. This means:

• Website: Have a visible contact form or page, and an easy way to join your email list or private community.
• Email: Add a link to your website, blog, social profile, or community to your email signature.
• Social media: Every social media platform allows you to write a description of yourself and add links to external URLs - include a link to your website and your email list.
• Niche communities: Introduce yourself to online communities and make it easy for people to connect with you on social or email. Associations generally keep a directory with updated information on their members - include your contact info.

Apart from potential changes to your website design, all of these initiatives are extremely quick to implement. You can perform a full check and make any necessary change in a couple of hours.

Your business will thank you later.