As a solo entrepreneur, you lack the resources to market your consultancy the right way. You neither have the time, money or staff to research your market, analyze your market, plan how you’re going to reach your market and implement that plan. Your needs are more immediate; you need to find clients NOW. Long term marketing isn’t in your field of vision.

What would you say to a marketing plan that combines the immediate with the future? What would you say to a marketing plan that allows you to choose from among a variety of marketing methods? Would you give it a shot? The Easy As 1-2-3 Marketing Plan allows you to meet your immediate need for clients while laying the foundation for long-term marketing that meets future needs. Download your Easy As 1-2-3 Marketing Plan for HR Consultants here.

By the way, if you sign up for my monthly ezine, you’ll get more tips like this one direct to your inbox. The sign-up box is on the right; please take a minute to sign-up.

A website markets your consultancy 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. When you’re sleeping, eating or partying your website is providing potential customers with information about you and your consultancy. I, personally, can attest to midnight madness. I’m one of those people whose body clock runs from 12:00 p.m. – 1 a.m. I do my best work during these hours, and I prefer to roam the Web during the hours when most folks are sleeping.

A website gives you another source of Web exposure/visibility. The more ways you have of exposing yourself on the Web, the better your chances of being found by potential customers. Limiting your Web exposure to social media, limits your chances of being found by potential customers. It’s not that potential customers won’t find you via social media; it’s that you limit the number of potential customers that find you.

A website provides a foundation for all your Web activities. A website not only provides 24×7 Web visibility, it also provides you with a Web base for your consultancy. A website contains information about you and your consultancy. A website also contains links to your social media activities, blog posts, your email newsletter, reports/whitepapers, educational materials, etc.

People use the Web to check out a product or service before making a purchase. Personally, I go to the Web to check out the menu of a restaurant, my competitors and even apartment reviews. The last was especially helpful to me after I sold my home. A first-time renter, I didn’t know if what looked like a nice apartment was really a nice apartment. A website that included reviews of local apartment complexes told me that the apartments that looked lovely and had a lovely price tag to match were, in actuality, rodent-infested. Thanks but no thanks.

A website establishes your credibility and expertise. Your website is your platform for showcasing your human resource expertise. Whether your HR niche is compensation, training, or compliance your website is the platform from which you tell the world that you know your stuff.

Your competitors have a website. I happen to know this for a fact. Several months ago, I embarked on a series of telephone interviews with a number of independent HR consultants. Each and every one of these HR consultants had a website, and each of them knew the value of that website presence.

Your clients have a website. More often than not, this is the case. Everything from solo enterprises to McDonalds has a website.

Your potential clients use the Web to find the services you offer. If you rely only on social media to market your consultancy, a potential client may find you by typing your name into a search engine such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., but if a potential client is looking for an “independent human resource consultant,” chances are good that your name won’t come up in the organic search engine listings. Why? Because you don’t have a website. In order for a potential client looking for a HR consultant to find you, the client must know your name, which is how search engines pick up people using social media, or you must have a website that uses the keywords (HR consultant, HR consulting and a slew of others) that clients would use in looking for HR consultants. If you don’t have a website, you’re limiting your opportunities to reach potential clients.

Businesses are expected to have a website. Decades ago it was expected that a business have a listing in the yellow pages of their local telephone directory. In the 21st century, it is expected that business have a website.

A website provides you with inexpensive advertising. Where else can you advertise your consultancy, in multiple categories, 24×7, for less than 55 cents a day? That figure includes web hosting, a domain name, unlimited email addresses and a blog that you can easily update yourself. Heck, a cup of coffee will cost you more than that.

Your website can provide your clients with value-added services. You can add a “clients only” area to your website where your clients get together in a website forum or bulletin board and talk among themselves and share information. A “clients only” area can contain HR updates and other news just for your clients. What you can do with your website is limited only by your imagination and budget.

A website is environmentally friendly. No trees are felled when a website is created. It’s all bits and bytes and a small way you can get on the “green” bandwagon because every little bit and byte helps .

FastCompany has launched the Influence Project. You can go to http://fcinf.com/v/dlew/welcome to register yourself as an influencer or to vote for someone who’s already registered as an influencer. Everyone who registers gets their picture in the November 2010 issue of FastCompany.

Of course, you want to thank me for telling you about this hot, hot, hot opportunity . Go to http://fcinf.com/v/dlew and when my caricature pops up on the screen, click the big blue button that says “spread Donna’s influence further.”

What do you think of FastCompany’s Influence Project? Did you register? Did you vote for me ? How can you leverage your registration as an influencer in your marketing efforts? Leave a comment and let me know!

Why: do you use social media or why do you want to use social media? Is your social media participation geared to staying in touch with friends? Is it to enhance client relationships? Is it to gain new clients?

Who: directly relates to why. If you participate in social media to stay in touch with friends or to enhance client relationships, then you already know the who, but if you participate in social media to reach potential new clients, then who refers to your target market.

Who is your target market? You’re probably thinking “everyone.” Marketing to everyone, though, is like trying to hit a bullseye with a needle from several miles away. Although “everyone” may seem like a large target that’s impossible to miss, it’s for exactly that reason that you don’t want to market to everyone — everyone is too large a target market. There are too many variables in the “everyone” target market. You need to narrow down your target market from everyone to a more manageable niche, and there are lots of niches to choose from.

Sit down right now and think about your strengths. What areas of human resources (HR) do you excel in or prefer? Maybe you should focus your effort on compensation or maybe training or maybe leadership development. Maybe you should remain a generalist but focus your marketing efforts on heavy industry, or small business, or new and emerging businesses. By narrowing your marketing focus away from everyone, you’ll save yourself time and effort and produce better marketing results.

Where: relates to where does your target market gather and hang out? What forms of connecting does your target market use? This is where the “birds of a feather” element comes into play. Chances are pretty good that your target market doesn’t hang out at meetings, forums, email lists and websites that HR consultants hang out in. The desire to hang out with others in your industry is primal, but hanging out and following other HR consultants won’t gain you clients unless HR consultants are your target market.

You need to invest the time and effort in finding out where the members of your target market hangs out, and then you need to hang out in those places yourself. LinkedIn and Twitter are very popular social media hangouts for HR consultants, but unless other HR professionals are your potential clients, you don’t want to follow other HR professionals. Utilize LinkedIn to find groups of people in your target market and join them. Utilize search engines to find your target market on the Internet. Spend 95% of your social media activity with your target market and only 5% of your social media activity with your specific industry (other HR professionals).

What: refers to what social media activities are you going to engage in to reach your target market? Will you join the same social media sites they join and lurk until someone asks a question you can answer? Will you go to in-person conferences, training and networking meetings that they attend? Of course, your best bet is a combination of the two, but you shouldn’t spend all your online social media activity time just listening.

Start by listening and after you’ve gotten comfortable with the flow, do some postings yourself. On online social media sites, don’t use in-your-face marketing. Instead, use information marketing. Post the url to an interesting blog post, preferably yours. Post the url for the Department of Labor (DOL) announcement about a new employment law/regulation; include a comment that you’re willing to explain the announcement to those who don’t understand government-speak. Tweet from an HR conference you’re attending.

When: actually refers to how often. How often should you participate in social media? If you’re using social media for keeping up with friends, how often is dictated by how much online time you want to spend with your friends. If you use social media for enhancing client relationships or to gain clients, how often translates to as often as possible. Because that can sound daunting, I recommend a minimum of once a week to three times a week. If you choose once a week, plan to spend at least an hour total time on social media sites. If you choose three times a week or more, plan to spend a total of 30 minutes on social media sites.

Summary: There you go; the who, what, when, where and why of a successful social media marketing plan for your HR consultancy with the emphasis on plan. Everything you do in your consultancy should have a plan, including social media marketing.

What is your social media marketing plan? Does it include the five elements of who, what, when, where and why, or does it include different elements? Please share your social media marketing know-how with everyone by leaving a comment.

Annual Reports: On this site you can find the annual reports of public companies. Once you call up the annual report, search it for Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance.

Lead 411: This site lets you search for companies and people. A company search brings you to a screen with tabbed content. The first tab contains a list of all the executives in the company, and the second tab contains a link to LinkedIn. Once you log in to your LinkedIn account, Lead411 downloads the profiles of company executives to the LinkedIn tab on Lead411.

If you’re an independent HR consultant, Lead411’s LinkedIn connection will be of particular interest to you. The test search I conducted on Lead411 lead me to three HR head honchos, which downloaded via Lead411’s LinkedIn connection.

An interesting thing to note about Lead411 is that you can use it to search for privately held companies too. Although it didn’t find my company, ExtraOrdinary Assistance, it did find a biotech company I know of that’s still in research phase.

Google Search: This is probably the easiest way to find information about any company. In the Google search box, enter the name of the company you want information on, and surround the company name in quotation marks. For example, if you want information about my company, ExtraOrdinary Assistance, you’d enter it into the Google search box like this: “ExtraOrdinary Assistance”.

Need to find a particular person at a company? In the Google search box, enter the person’s title (surrounded by quotes), followed by the plus sign, enter the company name (surrounded by quotes). For example, I recently needed to find out who was the vice president of human resources at Fidelity Investments. In the Google search box, I entered the following: “vice president of human resources” + “Fidelity Investments”. Within the first three organic listings on Page 1 was the name of Fidelity’s EVP of HR. Cool!

Jigsaw: If you already know the name of the person you’re looking to find contact information for, then Jigsaw is the way to go. Entering a person’s name in the Jigsaw search box, will yield full contact information. Looking up a company on Jigsaw yields too many results to make it worthwhile to find people on Jigsaw.

Manta: Manta allows you to search for information for both U.S. and non-U.S. companies.

Hoovers: A search of Hoovers led to a mother-load of information. Hoovers not only found the company I searched for, but they also indicated that D&B (Dunn & Bradstreet) had information on the company I searched for. The D&B information was available for a fee, but the basic information from Hoovers was free.

Yahoo Finance: Searching Yahoo for a company is a bit convoluted, unless you know the company’s stock exchange ticker symbol off the top of your head. If you do, all you have to do is enter the company’s ticker symbol into Yahoo Finance’s search box, and you’ll find all the information you could ever want on the company.

If you don’t know the company’s ticker symbol, look it up on Google. For example, to find the ticker symbol for Charter Communications, I entered the following words into the Google search box: Charter Communications ticker symbol.

How do you find the head honchos in your industry or target market? Do you do anything different? Please share by leaving a comment.

• Networking venues.
• Recommendations of trusted colleagues.
• Lunches, dinners, etc.

Give It Away

Have you tried giving away an inconsequential, yet important piece of information? The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is giving you just such an opportunity. In two weeks, a law will go into effect in Massachusetts governing the protection of information. The law has far-reaching effects, in that it also applies to businesses residing outside of Massachusetts but doing business with Massachusetts consumers and businesses. The law applies to both brick and mortar and online businesses.

How It’s An Opportunity

Self-employed human resource consultants can use this new law as an opportunity to showcase their expertise to potential clients.

• If you have email addresses for potential clients, send them an email alert about the law. Include a brief explanation of the law, compliance dates and penalties for non-compliance. Last paragraph of the email alert should include a call to action, something along the lines of “if you have any questions or would like help complying with the new law, please contact us at __________.”
• If you have telephone numbers for potential clients, call them and alert them to the new law. Give them the information outlined in the above item, and include your call to action.
• If you have the postal addresses of your potential clients, postal mail a pdf copy of the law to your potential clients. Paper clip or staple your business card or a compliment card to the pdf and include a handwritten call to action.
• This is an ideal opportunity for a teleseminar or webinar, which is a bit more work than any of the above listed items, but a teleseminar or webinar enables you to showcase your expertise to a large group of potential clients all at the same time

If you don’t have the time to do any of the above, a new-fangled careerist known as a Human Resource Virtual Assistant (HRVA) can do all of the above (and more) for you. An HRVA will also track the number of responses you receive relative to this marketing campaign as well as design (draft the email message, pretty-up the pdf with your logo and consultancy information, etc.) the elements of the campaign.

A pdf copy of the new law is available at: http://mass.gov/Eoca/docs/idtheft/201CMR1700reg.pdf.

If you would like to know more about HRVAs, and how they can help self-employed human resource consultants create the levels of success they’ve always dreamed of, please email hrva@extra-assist.com.

P.S. Remember to notify your current clients about the new law too .

=>Donna Caissie, the ExtraOrdinary HRVA

hrva@extra-assist.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/donnacaissie

http://twitter.com/donnacaissie

Imagine working for a company that arranges to have your dry cleaning picked up and delivered to you. Imagine that this same company can arrange for someone to go out and buy a birthday gift for your child, niece, nephew or grandchild. This company can also arrange for someone to wait on the telephone for hours and grab those hard-to-get concert tickets for you (personally, I’ve got a yen for Eric Clapton concert tickets). Imagine what it would be like to work for a company like that.

Easy to Implement

Lifestyle benefit programs are relatively easy to implement and surprisingly no-cost or low cost to the employer. For example, here in the northeast there is a chain of dry cleaners called Zoots, and they pick up and deliver dry cleaning for FREE. Don’t have a Zoots in your area, talk to your local dry cleaner and see if he’d be willing to pick up and deliver your employees’ dry cleaning on a weekly basis.

Negligible Cost/FREE

If you’re a self-employed human resource consultant, designing and implementing lifestyle benefit programs for your clients could be a huge, value-added service you provide to your clients, especially those small or micro businesses. Do you have startup companies among your clientele? Employee-paid benefits can be the answer. There are many companies that provide medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance at group rates without an employer contribution. 401(k) plans can be instituted without an employer contribution too. Some of these plans may require administration fees, which can be rolled into the cost to the employees, but hey, the administration fees are negligible compared to what an employer would have to pay if he used traditional benefit plans.

Perfect Timing

I realize that with the job market the way it is now, there’s no motivation for employers to even think about benefit plans, never mind implement them. In today’s job market, employers can cut back on benefits and not worry about employees jumping ship. What you and I, dear HR consultant, know is that the job market isn’t going to be this sad forever. It will bounce back, and employers will be competing for workers again. If they want to be competitive in that job market, employers will have to beef up the benefits they cut back, or they’ll have to find another way to lure candidates. Imagine how perfect your timing will be, if you can suggest a lifestyle benefit program all ready to roll out. If you do the work now, while things are slow, you’ll be at the ready when the time is right.

Lifestyle Benefits Resource

Want to know more about lifestyle benefit programs, or want help designing a lifestyle benefit program for your clients? Contact me at hrva@extra-assist.com. I’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have or to send you my one-page document with tips for designing a lifestyle benefit program.

What do you think about a lifestyle benefits program? Got your own ideas for lifestyle benefits, let everyone know by leaving a comment to this blog posting.

=>Donna Caissie, the ExtraOrdinary HR Assistant

Do you recruit candidates for employment for a living? Do you have boxes, or worse yet piles, of candidate resumes sitting around? There must be a better way, right? Have you considered creating a database to store candidate information? The advantages of a candidate database are enormous:

• The ability to categorize candidates by job title, ranking, salary requirements, etc.
• The ability to get a listing of candidates that fit specific criteria vs. depending on your memory or rummaging through boxes or piles of paper.
• The ability to get rid of all those boxes or piles of resumes and put the space they were taking up to better use.

Let’s look at an example of how a candidate database will help your recruiting efforts. Imagine a client calls you to say she has an opening for an IT director. Before you had a candidate database, you would tell your client that you’d look through your files and get back to her. Now, if you’re super organized, you’ve got all those candidate resumes filed by job title. If you’re not super organized, you’ve got all those candidate resumes filed alphabetically. If you’re not organized at all, you’ve got a hodge-podge of resumes, in no particular order, scattered everywhere. If you pull an all-nighter, you might be able to get back to your client the following day with some candidate names, but chances are that you won’t be able to get back to your client with candidate names for a few days. That’s the pre-database scenario.

The post-database scenario is that you tell your client that you’ll search your files and get back to her within the hour. You go into your database and pull a list of IT director candidates sorted by A-ranked candidates, B-ranked candidates, C-ranked candidates, etc. You call your client back within the half-hour and tell her that you’ve got ten A-ranked candidates that she might like to talk to, and you offer to setup the interviews for her. Not only does your client agree to talk with the candidates, but she’s impressed that you were able to put your fingers on the information she wanted so quickly.

Don’t have the time or expertise to create a candidate database? I do. As your Human Resource Virtual Assistant (HRVA), I can create and maintain the database for you. Because I subscribe to the KISS method, your candidate database will be functional as well as simple.

In the post-database scenario, above, you email or call your HRVA and ask her for a listing of IT director candidates, which she emails to you. After your client agrees to talk to those A-ranked candidates, you email your HRVA and ask her to set up the interviews for your client. Your HRVA consults with your client to get dates and times for the interviews, and she sets up the interviews.

To find out what else an HRVA can do to help you, email me at hrva@extra-assist.com for an appointment for a FREE telephone consultation.

=>Donna Caissie, the ExtraOrdinary Assistant

As a Virtual Assistant (VA), there is a very large world of market niches open to me, and like most VAs, I struggled to determine which portion of the world I’d stake out as my niche. I explored the niches of coaching professionals, authors, marketing professionals, real estate professionals, financial planners, lawyers, startup businesses, etc., but in the end I had a “duh” moment that led me to where my heart lies — human resource consultants.

Why I hadn’t thought of supporting human resource consultants long before now is simply a matter of being so close to the forest that I couldn’t see the trees. As a matter of fact, if the trees had been any closer to me a tree limb would’ve reached out and swatted me. LOL.

Back in my corporate days, the part of my office manager jobs that I loved so much was the human resource portion. I enjoyed helping my fellow employees with their benefits questions and cutting through the red tape, advising new managers regarding hiring practices and disciplinary issues, etc. In a nutshell, helping my coworkers so that they could focus on the job at hand was a rewarding experience.

As a Human Resource Virtual Assistant (HRVA), what can I offer you, the busy human resource consultant? Not only do I offer experience in human resources, but I also offer you a virtual partner who is as interested in your success as you. When you partner with this HRVA, you not only get administrative and secretarial expertise, you also get someone:

• you can brainstorm with
• who can suggest ways to market your consultancy
• who will help you automate repetitive tasks
• who can free you from the tedious, daily admin work
• who can help you find the time to build and expand your consultancy and
• who can help you focus on what you do best — human resource consulting.

What do you think; if you could create the perfect human resource assistant, what would she do for you?