I spend a lot of time on Reddit doing market research in the small business / entrepreneur communities.

I see the same beginner-level questions over and over again that present a significant opportunity for small business advisors, including:

• Business coaches
• Business attorneys
• CPAs
• Insurance agents

By implementing a proper marketing and sales pipeline (lead magnet > landing page > automated email sequence > sales page), you can market your services a lot more efficiently and help many more people get the info they need to know that you're the person to hire.

Answer Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some very common inquiries that lend themselves to an automated marketing and sales strategy:

• Forming a business
• Forming a partnership
• Commercial real estate
• Accounting and bookkeeping requirements
• Government contracting

There are lots of topics that small business owners need help with.

In order to communicate most effectively with busy small business owners, you have to be able to efficiently deliver to someone the information that's most relevant to them.

Often, this is done with a free consultation.

But there's a more efficient way for both you and the business owner.

Automated Email Marketing

Email marketing using a segmented email list is how you can deliver exactly the information that a business owner needs without it taking any of your time.

If you're a business attorney, for example, you might have separate email sequences for the following topics:

• Forming a business (corporation vs LLC)
• Covid "return to office" policy
• Commercial leases

For each topic, you might have a set of five or ten pre-written emails that go out when someone fills out the contact form on the landing page specific to a given topic.

So someone who fills out the form on the "forming a business" page would get the corresponding email sequence. The person who fills out the form on the "commercial leases" landing page would get a different set of emails.

You might also want to create a curriculum on partnerships.

Every day, I see people on Reddit talking about starting a business with a partner. These people are forming LLCs with no partnership agreement in place, having no idea that most partnerships fail and that a solid partnership agreement is absolutely necessary to avoid problems later.

A great lead magnet that would draw lots of people to a landing page would be "The 5 Ways You Put Your Home At Risk By Forming A Partnership" or something like that to get people's attention and make them want more info.

They go to the landing page, submit their email address, receive the free guide on partnership risks, and get put into the automated email sequence that delivers an email per week with information that's relevant to someone looking to form a partnership.

They will learn that there's so much that they don't know and, in the process, learn why they should engage a professional.

Most people will engage the professional who earned their trust by educating them.

This is what automated marketing looks like.

Sell Without Selling And Save Time

Your automated emails will deliver the same information that you would deliver in a free consultation.

The two big differences are:

• Once you create your email sequences, you are able to deliver the information to an unlimited number of people without it requiring any of your time.
• The information is available to potential clients 24/7/365 instead of just during your office hours.

Making your expertise available this way has two major benefits:

• It allows you to keep the "pick your brain for free" people who were never going to hire you from wasting your time.
• It makes it easier for the people who are legitimately looking to hire professional support to determine that you're the person who can help them.

You don't have to worry about sharing too much information because the DIY people were never going to hire you anyway.

Premium clients have way more money than time on their hands and they have absolutely no desire to do tasks that are best outsourced to a professional.

Those premium clients just need to know that you can solve their problem. Sharing your expertise is how you demonstrate that you can.

Generate Passive Income With Information Products

Your automated email marketing can set the stage for automated sales, as well.

In your emails, you can include links to schedule a paid consultation.

You can also include links to passive income products like your contract templates or your online course on how to set up Quickbooks or how to get started with government contracting.

Professionals who sell expertise for a living have limitless opportunities to turn their expertise into information products that generate passive income.

Online education is projected to be a $300 billion industry by 2025.

Think about what expertise you have that you can turn into an information product.

When you're ready for help building your end-to-end automated marketing and sales system for your information products, be sure to check out my Business In A Box masterclass.

Build Strategic Partnerships

A great way to implement the digital marketing strategy I've presented here is to form strategic marketing partnerships, rather than trying to do it all alone.

The serious small business owners who build profitable, growing businesses don't need a CPA or a lawyer or an insurance agent.

They need all three!

Any successful small business owner needs a team of professionals to support their growing business.

A small team of professionals in complementary professions who conduct joint marketing activities will create a rising tide that lifts the boats of the professionals, as well as the clients they serve.

A weekly email newsletter, for example, with a tip from an accountant, a tip from a business attorney, and a tip from an insurance agent is a much more valuable resource to a small business owner than the newsletter that any of those professionals could have created by themselves.

That newsletter would be less of a burden for each professional because you're sharing the load of creating something worth reading.

And it would be more valuable to the target audience because they'd be getting a bunch of resources they need, all in one place.

A joint "Ask Me Anything" video conference once a month would accomplish the same thing and be fun and interactive.

As any small business advisor knows, there's so much that a small business owner needs that they don't know they need.

A joint email newsletter and/or monthly webinar is a great way for a group of professionals to work together to introduce a small business owner to information that they didn't know they needed and would not have otherwise sought out.

Publishing resources like this is something that can be easily delegated to a virtual assistant or a social media manager for whom the professionals share the cost.

Conclusion

A small team of four to six professionals working together as strategic marketing partners can really make life easier for themselves, as well as for their ideal client!

That team might include:

• A business coach
• A business attorney
• An accountant
• An insurance agent
• A marketing strategist
• A social media manager / virtual assistant

Each of these professionals provides a service that a niche audience needs and they are natural referral partners.

A customer who finds one of these professionals can get connected to all the other resources they need just through that one connection.

Being able to make those connections for your clients makes you so much more valuable as a service provider that you're no longer just a service provider.

You are now a trusted advisor who your client associates with their growth and prosperity.

When a client associates you with the growth of their business, your fees are no longer an expense in their mind. You are their growth partner and they understand that paying you money results in their own prosperity.

Are those the kind of client relationships you'd like to build and is that the type of reputation you'd like to establish for yourself?

Being the expert who makes your ideal client's life easy by connecting them to the other experts they need on their board of advisors is the easiest way to do it.

Teamwork makes everybody's dream work!

Bonus

This episode of the How I Built This podcast that features Telfar Clemens and Babak Radboy is a real world example of the power and the importance of building your own platform, which is what this entire article has been about.

To quote Babak: "You can't be in a position where you're binding your success or your survival to your exploitation."

Far too many supremely talented people have bound their success to how well they're able to be exploited on social media platforms by delivering your expertise for free to build a following on a platform you don't own.

Don't be brainwashed into thinking that the only way you can prosper is by making the CEO and shareholders of [insert platform] rich.

The same things that you would do to grow an Instagram following are the same things you can do to build your email list.

And it's actually much easier to do if you work as a team with just a handful of strategic partners to deliver something of high value on a weekly or monthly basis to your shared target audience.

With the millions of small businesses that start every year, your team's once-a-month Zoom session for small business owners could be the hottest ticket in town and at full capacity every month.

And you wouldn't have to exploit yourself on social media every day, all day to make it happen.