Marketing for the Genealogist
Your biggest asset as a marketer is your website, so the information below should be specifically applied to your website.
- Be specific about your services
- It will be hard to sell your genealogical services if you can’t clearly express what services you offer! There should be a page on your website dedicated to describing your services. Please check out this page as an example.
- Clearly identify your region
- to let your customer know what you genealogy information you have the most access to. Don’t be afraid to list an area/region for fear of limiting the number of clients. A genealogy client is much more likely to contract a genealogist who is a research expert in a certain location. List your location expertise!
- Identify your region above your surname specialty
- If you are an expert on the surname “Smith,” it is still important to emphasize from what location or region that you are based and where your surname is based.
- To get even more specific information about marketing for the genealogist, pick up a digital copy of the book by Kelly Lee, founder of Root Pursuit, “Marketing for the Professional Genealogist”. If you purchase this book and get one client as a result of information, you will have recovered the cost of the book.
The Root Pursuit Genealogist Directory is a great guide for narrowing your goals as a professional consultant. Make sure you can answer all of these questions that are built into the structure of a directory listing.
- Name of Business (Use your name for personal branding)
- Summary of Business (4 sentence description of your services and philosophy)
- Website Url
- Contact email
- What categories of services do you offer: Select all that apply. Family History (and/or Surname) website, Genealogist Consultant, Genealogy Services, Genealogy News & Resources, Genealogy Related Products
- Keyword listing and development. (Try to think of all the variations) Example “Scottish Genealogy” should include keywords: Scottish, Scotch-Irish, Scotland.
- Country of Origin (This is likely where you live, but might just be a place that you have the most research expertise. An exception could be someone who was born, raised, and trained in London but has moved to the U.S. to offer their expertise to Americans with English Heritage. )
- State or Region of Origin
- USA County, Parrish, or Burrough. If you are not from the US, leave this blank, not a big deal. This extra space is designed to help with local lookups and the future of genealogy exchange of services.
More Considerations:
- Are you self-branding or company branding? For instance, Root Pursuit is a company branding, however, founder Kelly Lee (find her on Twitter: Inscribe99) also works on her personal branding. Personal branding is very effective for consultants and freelancers. If you are a consultant or a freelancer, I highly recommend that you focus on a personal brand instead of a company brand. Know the difference and how you fit into the picture.
- Social Media: I highly encourage you to get all of the above questions answered before contemplating sharing on social media. Once you have decided how you will market yourself and what services you are offering, then attack how you will present this information on social media. This step can NOT be done until you know WHAT you are marketing.
- Facebook and Twitter are highly effective platforms and will likely give you nice results for the genealogist consultant (or for any other type of service consultant) Many social media marketing experts will tell you that you should pick one platform and stick with that, become an expert on that social media platform. Any one of the platforms has plenty of customers with the right strategy.
What is the importance of listing your SERVICES?
The biggest obstacle for obtaining clients in the genealogy industry is teaching people how to purchase genealogy services. This is completely new territory. People want to know about their genealogy, however, they don’t understand how to pay for this information as a SERVICE. It is our job to teach people how to be a genealogy service customer. Listing your SERVICES is the key! If you explain exactly what you will give them and what it will cost, the potential customer will be able to visualize the process and understand how they will benefit. (And be more likely to pull cash out of their wallet for your services!)
Step 1: Understand how a genealogy SERVICE is offered (great information about this in my book)
Step 2: Teach your potential customers what those SERVICES are.
For specific questions about marketing yourself as a genealogist, send us a message via the contact page. I would love to hear from you! All messages will receive a reply (unless you are a spammer). Please ask questions and let’s work together!
