What is one thing every business owner lacks? Time.
Time is one of the most valuable commodities as a business owner, making it imperative to strategically maximize.
A roadblock I see many business owners face is the struggle between providing high-value and having the time to do it. Every business wants to provide its clients with an optimal experience, adding unique value to the services it provides. But that isn’t always easy.
High-value is often equated with a ton of time. How can you add value to your services without sacrificing time? This blog posts explores this question.
Expand Your Touchpoints
Touchpoints are the ways that your clients interact with you. Most often, this becomes synonymous with meetings. But a meeting, whether in person or virtual, often takes up a good chunk of time—time you could be spending on client work and growing your practice.
It should come as little surprise that people spend way too much time in meetings. According to a study documented in the Harvard Business Review, 65 percent of senior managers felt that meetings keep them from their own work and 71 percent reported their meetings to be unproductive. Entrepreneurs have little time to spend on meetings with the million other responsibilities on their plate: invoicing, payroll, internal growth, client work, marketing, etc.
So they need to find other ways to save time while still engaging their clients. That is why non-meeting touchpoints exist. When you expand the way you reach your clients, you are able to be more creative in
how you reach them. These touchpoints, while not in person, can still be personal. Between blogs, newsletters, videos, emails and more, you will be adding immense value to the client experience.
Remember, you don’t have to add more meetings to increase the value you provide.
Double Down on Your Content
If you are going to reduce your meeting workload, you’ll need to take some serious steps to implement a strong content marketing facet of your business.
Contrary to popular belief and current discourse, content marketing isn’t just to attract prospective clients. It is also used as a touchpoint for your current clients as well. Blogs, for example, are an excellent resource for you to add value to your client’s life. If, for example, you were going to chat about IRAs with your clients that month, put out a blog that focuses on the different types of IRAs and how it can work for them. This way, you are still giving them the information they need in a personal way that isn’t a meeting.
Take some time to think about your global communication strategy. How do you interact with your clients and how can that communication be improved? You could implement a monthly newsletter, updating your clients on the firm and a topic that you want to bring to their attention. Another idea is providing a quarterly market update.
Video is another excellent medium for communication, so you can send out monthly or quarterly videos, detailing upcoming dates or topics to keep in mind such as tax season, charitable giving and maxing out your 401(k) contributions.
Remember to consider your audience when you create your content. You can do this by brainstorming different subsections of your audience, or tag groups. For you that might be young adults or new business owners or pre-retirees. Take a look at the different sections of your audience and create content that is unique to them.
Increasing your client touchpoints supports a subscription billing structure. Since you have created a strategy to nurture and reach out to your clients through multiple channels, they won’t be surprised when the bill comes. If you only speak to them once per quarter and they receive a bill from you, they may not feel like they have received optimum value. But if they speak to you once per quarter, receive monthly newsletters and blogs and also a regular video update, you are providing more value to them and people will pay for valuable services.
When You Can, Automate
When you have multiple touchpoints: newsletters, blogs, videos, etc. it can be tough to organize all of the information and ensure it actually reaches your audience. That is where automation comes in.
Schedule your blog posts, newsletters and email updates. You can batch create or outsource your content and then from there plug them into your website and email service so you won’t have to think about it.
Every business owner wishes there were more than 24 hours in a day. But since there isn’t, it is important to find scalable ways to maximize the impact of your time.
One way you can do that with your clients is by increasing non-meeting touchpoints by adding high-value content your audience will love.
Charesse Hagan helps financial planners work smarter, grow their firms and offer exceptional services to their clients. She holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration and is an operations consultant at Charesse J. Hagan, LLC, and an FPA Coaches Corner coach for technology and operations. Find more resources from Hagan here.
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