A simple way to think about it:

• Social media helps people notice your judgment.
• Your website helps people verify your expertise.
• Your email newsletter helps people spend more time with your thinking.

You may use all three, but one should lead for the next 30 days.

Start With the Client Decision Process

Before choosing a channel, look at how prospective clients decide whether to hire you.

Ask yourself:

• How do people usually find me?
• What do they read before they contact me?
• How long have they known me before they inquire?
• Where do interested people seem to stop?
• What questions do they still have before they are ready?

This gives you better information than asking which platform is best.

The best channel is the one that helps repair the weakest point in your client decision process.

Choose Social Media When People Need to Notice Your Thinking

Social media is useful when prospective clients need to become familiar with you.

This may happen on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Threads, Substack Notes, or another platform where your people already spend time.

Social media lets people observe:

• What topics you return to
• What you notice
• What you question
• What you recommend
• How you respond to other people’s ideas
• How you think through a situation

For an experienced consultant, coach, or service provider, judgment matters.

A useful social post does more than share a tip. It shows how you assess a problem.

You might share:

• A recommendation you gave a client and why
• A marketing tactic you chose to skip
• A pattern you noticed across several client projects
• A choice that saved time or prevented wasted work
• A commonly repeated recommendation that lacks context

The post should give the reader enough information to understand your thinking.

It should also lead somewhere.

That next step might be:

• A related article
• A newsletter subscription
• A short assessment
• A service page
• A workshop
• A reply or conversation

Without a next step, social media can create recognition without creating a client path.

Choose Your Website When People Need Proof

Your website matters when people already know your name or have become curious about your work.

At that stage, they may be asking:

• Does this person work with people like me?
• Do they understand my situation?
• Have they handled this kind of problem before?
• Can I understand their process?
• What do they sell?
• What happens if I contact them?

Your website needs to support that review.

A homepage alone usually cannot do the whole job.

Your website should include pages that help prospective clients understand your expertise, your process, your offers, and your point of view.

This may include:

• Articles that answer questions clients ask before hiring
• FAQ pages that answer specific decision-stage questions
• Service pages built around client situations
• Case examples or client stories
• A clear description of your process
• Proof tied to the type of work you want to sell
• A next step that fits the reader’s level of interest

I would focus on your website when people know your name, but your inquiries are vague, inconsistent, or poorly matched.

That often points to missing information during the research stage.

Choose Your Email Newsletter When People Need More Time

Some services require more trust than one website visit can create.

A prospective client may be considering a longer engagement, sharing private business information, changing a process they have used for years, or paying for advice they cannot fully evaluate in advance.

An email newsletter gives that person repeated contact with your thinking.

Over time, the reader learns:

• Which problems you take seriously
• How you make recommendations
• How you treat clients
• What you believe leads to a good result
• Whether your advice fits their working style
• What kind of work you are available to do

This creates a record of your thinking.

But a newsletter needs to connect your ideas to your paid work.

A reader can enjoy your emails for months and still miss the fact that you offer a service that helps with the exact problem you write about.

Your offers need to appear often enough that the connection becomes clear.

You can mention a client question, explain part of your process, share what you are seeing in your work, or invite readers to get help with the decision covered in the email.

I would focus on your newsletter when people need time before hiring you, referrals matter to your business, or your best clients tend to follow your work for several months before getting in touch.

Give Each Channel a Different Job

You do not need every channel to do the same thing.

That creates extra work and mixed messages.

Instead, give each channel a clear job.

Once each channel has a job, choose one lead channel for the next 30 days.

Your lead channel gets your strongest thinking, your clearest invitation, and most of your attention.

The other channels support it.

For example:

You might publish the full article on your website, share one decision from it on LinkedIn, and send the article to your newsletter subscribers with a short story and an invitation to reply.

Or your newsletter may contain the full article. Your social post introduces the central idea, and your website holds the service page, FAQ pages, and related resources.

The point is not to be everywhere.

The point is to help the right person keep moving.

How to Know Which Channel Should Lead

Focus on the channel closest to the gap in your client decision process.

Choose social media when:

• Qualified people need to discover your thinking
• You need more visibility with the right audience
• People do not yet associate you with a clear topic
• Your network needs reminders about what you do
• You want to start more conversations

Choose your website when:

• People visit but do not inquire
• Your offers are not clear enough
• Your articles answer questions but do not lead anywhere
• Your expertise is scattered across too many places
• Prospective clients need proof before contacting you

Choose your email newsletter when:

• People need more time before hiring
• Your service requires trust
• Referrals matter to your business
• You want to build a stronger relationship with readers
• Your best clients tend to follow your work before reaching out

The lead channel can change.

You are not making a permanent decision. You are choosing where to focus your best effort for the next 30 days.

Connect Each Piece of Content to a Client Decision

A good piece of content should help the reader make a decision.

It may help them:

• Name the problem
• See why the problem keeps happening
• Compare possible choices
• Rule out a poor fit
• Decide what to do next
• Decide who they trust to help

Before you publish, ask:

What decision can the reader make after reading this?

Then ask:

What decision comes after that?

Your call to action should match the second answer.

For example:

The connection should feel natural. The paid offer should continue the work started by the content.

A Simple Channel Decision Check

Use this before choosing where to focus next.

If you cannot answer these questions, do not start by posting more.

Start by looking at the path a prospective client follows before deciding whether to contact you.

Examples of Weak and Strong Channel Choices

Weak choice

“I need to be better at LinkedIn.”

This is too broad.

It does not say what LinkedIn needs to do, who the content is for, or what should happen next.

Stronger choice

“For the next 30 days, I will use LinkedIn to show how I think about content decisions. Each post will lead to a related article or newsletter issue, so interested readers have a next step.”

This gives the channel a job.

Weak choice

“I should update my website.”

This may be true, but it is not specific enough to guide action.

Stronger choice

“I will update my service page and add two FAQ articles that answer the questions people ask before booking a marketing planning session.”

Now the website has a role in the client decision process.

Weak choice

“I need to send my newsletter more often.”

Frequency alone is not the strategy.

Stronger choice

“I will send one useful email each week that connects a client question to my point of view, then include a clear invitation when I can help with that problem.”

This makes the newsletter part of the path from trust to inquiry.

What Should I Do First?

Choose one channel to lead for the next 30 days.

Then give it one clear job.

Ask:

• Do I need people to notice my thinking?
• Do I need stronger proof on my website?
• Do I need more repeated contact with people who already know me?

Once you answer that, choose the channel that fits the gap.

Then create content that helps the reader make one useful decision and gives them a relevant next step.

You do not need your website, social media, and newsletter to do the same work.

You need them to work together.

If you want help choosing the right focus and turning it into a 30-day plan, Clarity & Action: Your 30-Day Marketing Plan gives you a focused session and 30 days of support to help you follow through.

Related Reading (Similar, and paid version has 5 advanced prompts to help you implement this system.)

The post Should I Focus on My Website, Social Media, or an Email Newsletter? appeared first on Adventures in Visibility.

In this free Community Connect call, I share one of nine current trends in email marketing. The 7-minute clip is an introduction to the full one hour call focusing on 9 current email marketing trends.

You get access to the free training along with previous and all future Community Connect events and resources at http://AskDeniseWakeman.com

Community Connect calls are sponsored by the Marketing Trailblazers Community.

The transcript, lightly edited for better readability, is below the video.

[ssp-video id=”513148769251145″]

Transcript

If you prefer to read the content of the short audiogram above, here it is for you…

I will state that these are not in any specific order, any special order of importance. These are things that I just kept running into, and experiencing and then found names for. And there’s a thing, the first trend is interactivity in emails, and I was like, “Interactivity. What do you mean? Like playing games or what does that mean?” Well, interactivity is a huge trend that continues to grow. In a nutshell, it’s when a reader of your email takes some action. That means you have to put that action in the email. It’s clicking a link. It’s clicking a link to watch a video. It’s clicking a link to buy. It’s clicking a link to register. It’s clicking a link to take a survey, or to do a quiz, or to reply to you. That is what email interactivity is.

You’re probably also seeing more of that in your emails, that people are asking more questions. They are asking you to reply. I just sent one out as a test, as you probably saw, because many of you replied. I will say that I got more replies to asking that question about lead magnets than I ever get on any email where I ask for people to reply and tell me something or give me some feedback or something. They’re still coming in, and it’s three days since I sent that.

When you think about another step, … I didn’t write it down, but I’m remembering it from what I was reading, is that most email is opened … Like 20% of emails are opened within the first hour [of being sent]. And after that, opens decline. So the fact that two to three days later people are still responding to that one, that’s pretty good.

Now, why do you want interactivity? This is why this is so important and why people are doing it. You want that interactivity because it tells your email service provider, plus the one that’s receiving it on the other end, that you and the receiver are friends. The fact that they’re taking action, it’s as if they are getting a personal email and replying to you or doing something you asked them to do. That is important for keeping your emails, your broadcast emails, your email marketing emails out of the spam filters.

What it comes down to is that you want your readers to do something, not just read passively and then file it away and move on to the next thing. You want them to do something in your email because that is a clue to the email service providers that that is an active person who wants your content. I think I’ve known this intuitively, but I’ve now read this in lots of places about this whole spam thing and that you just want to make sure that happens.

You saw the survey that I did … And that’s a real survey. I was really curious. It really is a conversation. I didn’t make this up. It was a conversation that’s been going on in the Marketing Trailblazers Community. But then I wanted to test it. So I was like, “Well, what can I ask? Oh, we want to know this,” so I test it. The answers are all over the place. That is fantastic because it’s giving me, and when I share it with my audience, it’s going to give us some rich data and information about what we can do in the long run.

Depending on the question … A very common one is, on a first email, thanks for joining my list. Now could you reply and tell me your biggest challenge with X, Y, Z? We’ve all seen that; it is still a valid way to start getting to know your audience.

Plus, one of the things I read about this spam thing is that you want people to respond to the very first email that they get from you, the very first one. I was reading something where somebody gave several examples that I’ll tell you. So the first one he talks about is what is your biggest challenge, or what is your biggest problem, or that sort of thing. So you get to know your audience better. You get to know their pain points, and you can use this for segmenting, which I’ll talk about a minute, and building relationships by asking them questions and replying back to them. Of course, if somebody sends you [an email], you need to reply back to them.

The other thing is, he had a couple of really good things here, asking, “If you find the tips in this email useful to you for blah, blah, blah, reply back to this email by saying, “Give me more.'” So then you have an opportunity to send out another piece of valuable content to that person when they reply.  liked that one, too.

The other thing is if you’re sending out a lead magnet, if somebody subscribes to your lead magnet, the first email can include in it something like, “Is the access link working with you? Please reply and just let me know. Got it or no I didn’t. Then, I’ll make sure I take care of that and get it to you.” That’s being helpful. That’s being useful.

Those are some ideas for how to start that conversation and encourage people to reply to you. As I said, there are quizzes, surveys, games, contests, calls to action are what’s important in your interactive messaging because you want them to engage with you – in the email – in some way.

I saw Elizabeth asking, “Why didn’t you use a survey program like SurveyMonkey?” Yes, totally intentional, as I’m saying because I wanted people to reply to my email. I wanted to get the interaction on the email because that is what is sending a signal to the service providers on either end that it’s a legitimate email. It’s not a spam email. I hope that makes sense. Okay, that’s trend number one, email interactivity in your email.

To be continued…sign up for the free Community Connect calls and you’ll get access to all past (including this one on email marketing) and future training. Click the button below to join.

Recommended Listening

Email Marketing: Know Your Audience and What They Want

The post Community Connect -Current Trends in Email Marketing [video] appeared first on Adventures in Visibility.

When designing email newsletters and marketing campaigns, it is important that you consider the limitations presented by email readers. Many users, either by personal preference or email client defaults, are blocking images from being downloaded in the HTML-formatted messages they receive. Thus, it is a good practice for email designers to prepare for both image "off" and "on" scenarios. Here are some of the basics you need to know about using images in email:

Obstacles to Using Image-based Email Campaigns

Workaround for Image Obstacles

Keep your introduction text based. We recommend not using large banners or clickable graphics in the header. Since most recipients preview their messages in a small email preview pane, consider what the preview pane looks like when there are no images, and add a few lines of text that clearly states your message. This will be especially helpful to those recipients that elect to receive text-only versions on an email.

 

Provide ALT text to describe images. As stated above, many recipients receive email with images blocked (perhaps by the default of their email client). To ensure that a brief image description is displayed in place of the image for those recipients who have their image reader turned "off" or the reader is set "off" as a default, use ALT tags (ALT text displays useful text before the image is loaded). This will give users an indication of what they will see if they choose to download images. Remember that ALT text must be able to essentially replace an image; and any meaning the image provides should be provided by the ALT text.

 

Include photo captions under images. If you place the caption within the image, the message will not be seen if the images are disabled or blocked, so add a caption under contextually-important images.

 

Do not use image-based emails. Avoid using multiple images. Since most image-based email is detected as spam, your message and content may never reach the recipient.

 

Don’t use one large image as the sole content of your email. If your email consists of only one large image, or multiple images, and your recipient's reader has images turned off, the first thing they'll see is your unsubscribe link.

 

Use smaller images to reduce load time. When sending embedded images by email, it's important to keep the image size small (under 25k) so they transfer faster and are more easily viewable by your recipient. Embedded images are a part of the message as opposed to linked images which reside on a remote web server. With embedded images, you are dependent on the recipient enabling image downloads on their email client.

 

The advantage of uploading images to a web server is that they’re not contained in the actual email message, so there is no file size associated with the images that you are using in your email. By using an absolute path to the image being referenced (an absolute path contains the full URL: e.g., http://yourwebsite.com/images/imagename.gif), your image will load quickly, correctly appear in your recipient's email, and keep your email campaigns user-friendly…which will help you avoid the image spam filters and increase open rates.

Use the Least Possible Amount of Images

Optimize Images for the Preview Pane

What kind of challenges have you encounted with your email marketing and getting your messages seen by your subscribers?

The post Do Your Images Detract From Your Message? appeared first on Adventures in Visibility.