What You Need To Know To Market Your Service Business Effectively
Wondering how to market your service business? Learn how to effectively market a service-based business to grow quickly and boost your marketing and your business traffic.
If you want to boost your marketing and business traffic, you need to read on. We are going to go over how to market your service business to grow quickly and adequately.
Marketing your service business is extremely important, but many do not know exactly what we should do to achieve success.
I have spent a lot of time working on acquiring traffic which helped me create quite a few streams of income for my business.
Unfortunately, I have observed and studied many firms and consultancies during the past years.
I often see those income streams come and go without knowing how to market them properly.
My goal is to help you bypass the same mistake I saw.
You see, with all the choices out there, it’s very easy to get distracted and off track by marketing methods that are sold as the next best thing.
Luckily for you, I have tested and experimented with countless ways to drive traffic to determine which ones work and don’t work. In this post, I’ll show you what I found works and doesn’t work with proper marketing methods and tips on how to use each one.
Building a procedure
The quicker you can get your potential customers engaged with you, your product, and your service, the easier it will be for them to buy from you.
By following this process, you’ll have a better sense of where your initial efforts should focus and where you can optimize for more exposure.
A successful business is, in many ways, the culmination of a lot of hard work. Still, it’s also the result of learning what your target market wants and needs.
Along the way, you’re going to need to make some adjustments to your marketing and advertising efforts so that you can create business opportunities for yourself.
This three-pronged approach is especially important if you have a service-based business selling to other businesses. In this case, your marketing efforts will have to focus on building awareness, creating interest, and then getting people to take action.
The first step in this process is identifying your target market: They’re the people who will be interested in what you’re offering.
Other service providers or companies might look for someone to perform a particular type of work, such as cleaning services.
You want to identify potential clients before you start advertising and marketing so you can get in front of the right people at the right time.
Building awareness
Building brand awareness is the process of determining the characteristics of the individuals you want to attract and making them aware of your company’s existence.
“If you build it, they will come” is a common phrase in business, but how do you get people to your door?
Just because you have the best service business in the town doesn’t mean that people will walk through your doors.
It would be best if you marketed your business and were seen by the right people so that they would spend their hard-earned money with your company.
Marketing your service business can be divided into two main categories: awareness and conversion.
The first step is getting known to potential customers.
This is about identifying the profile of the people you want to attract and making them aware of your brand.
The second part is converting those people into paying customers.
Below are some ways to get more customers for your service business:
- Make offers and deals for first-time or returning visitors
- Make sure that your website’s landing page has an easy way for visitors to contact you
- Offer discounts or deals on social media advertising
- Create an email list and send weekly emails about new products or services
- Check out local associations in town and join them
Get more customers by building relationships with influencers and experts in your industry
When you market your service business effectively, you’re making it easy for people to find you, understand what you’re all about, and want to do business with you. That’s the first step to getting more clients.
Blog about it: Maintaining an informative blog is good for marketing your service business, but it will not bring in new customers. However, suppose you can attract a large number of people. In that case, it is much easier to convert that large number of people into potential clients. The likelihood that someone will enjoy working with you increases when reading your blog. If you’re looking for a location to start blogging, look no further than this page.
Create and distribute a free report: Providing value to your customers through content marketing is another effective strategy to attract new customers. When you publish articles or books and give them away for free, people are more likely to like you because they believe they are receiving something of value due to the transaction.
It also gives them the impression that they know you… which makes them more likely to conduct business with you when they require assistance in your field.
Tip: Remember that the most rapidly expanding service businesses are highly specialized or occupy a specific niche in the marketplace.
Meanwhile, a large number of service businesses are generalists who serve multiple industries or niches.
Your website
Attract new clients with your website: The internet has become an important way to attract new clients for many service businesses.
The problem with the internet is that it can be difficult to understand what people are looking for and how to reach them.
The solution to this problem is to build an attractive website that provides helpful information to potential customers and makes it easy to find.
When designing your website, keep the following points in mind:
- Focus on one main topic.
- It’s important that visitors know exactly what they’re getting when they come to your site.
- Provide relevant content to visitors. Make sure that your web pages have information that will help you convert them into paying clients.
- Offer a solution to their problem. Create landing pages on your website where you can showcase a case study of a satisfied client who used your services.
- Use clear language. Keep your website simple and easy to navigate so that people can find what they’re looking for quickly.
The next part of crafting a website like a business machine for your marketing and service business is creating a professional image for yourself.
It helps build trust with your customers and creates a good first impression.
This is achieved by: Building your brand and personal image.
You are an expert in your field.
If you market your service business effectively, you can become an expert in your industry.
This will give you credibility and help people recognize you as someone who can provide them with the best solutions.
Tip: Create the website or other online presence. Having a website that is easy to navigate and provides helpful information always makes your business more attractive to potential customers.
But, I really want to go into the details here!
And definitely go over the systems you'll need to put in place to market your business in order to finally increase traffic to your website or to your local door.
It’s been a crazy few months for digital marketing in particular, whether it’s due to changes in privacy that have limited the quantity of data we have in Facebook, whether it’s due to GDPR and the changes around personal data handling, steadily increasing competition due to everyone going online because of lockdowns, or changes at Google with everything that’s happened recently.
So, what is still functional?
So, where should we be devoting our time and effort right now?
We want to greatly boost website traffic and sales over the next 12 months. What should we prioritize over the next 12 months?
We all only want strategies that still work. Right?
But, how do we know that they work?
Because we’ve been using them with clients on some incredibly successful campaigns for quite some time.
Let’s get started.
We can divide these traffic methods into four categories: content marketing, social media, search, and digital public relations (public relations online).
Now, before we go headfirst into traffic methods, it’s crucial to consider which ones are most likely to generate traction for your company since, let’s face it, the truth is that not all of them will work.
Some traffic channels just do not work for certain types of organizations, and the majority of firms have a natural affinity for a particular type of revenue source or traffic sources.
With good reason, you’ll hear us talk a lot about the significance of understanding your target audience, but when it comes to determining the best traffic channels to target, the most important question we want to ask is: how do our prospective customers find what we’re selling?
Now, in general, there are two categories to consider.
There is search and there is interruption.
Now, businesses who are focused on search will be selling something that their clients are looking for. As a result, your client is aware that they have an issue.
It is then that individuals turn to Google, Amazon, or voice search and ask for a solution to their problem or for information on their problem.
An example of this would be a corporation that provides sanitization supplies. Whenever I’m in need of a new air purifier or a new set of gel sanitizer, I’m going to search for it on Google.
I’m not going to open Instagram and hope that an ad for an air purifier appears, am I? Obviously, that is not going to happen.
So that’s an example of a business that prioritizes search.
Interruption or impulse is the other bucket.
Interruption or impulsive businesses sell something that the audience does not know they need, but when they see it, they are typically enticed to make an impulse purchase.
Nobody thinks about a one-wheel electric bike all day around, right? But when they are scrolling on YouTube shorts or tick-tock, and they see this thing, a proportion of people think: that would be pretty cool. And they start considering buying it, possibly searching into it now accurately.
For another example, if they witness an influencer using it, they may be persuaded to make an impulse purchase.
That being said, let’s get to the traffic strategies.
Your traffic strategies
The first traffic method we’ll discuss today is blogging. Google continues to rank high-quality material or content for a variety of informational and commercial keywords.
Blogs are an excellent digital marketing asset that you can create for your company not just to target search, but also to update your social media followers.
So, as we are here talking about your service business, you definitely are one of the businesses that should be using blogs, as you are a business that either solves a problem for your customers or can entertain, inform and educate your customers to build a relationship.
Blogs can serve as the foundation for your social media material. However, most businesses still don’t generate much traction with their blogs, and the primary reason for this is that they don’t approach topic selection correctly.
So now we’ll perform a little exercise for a fictitious consulting firm, and let’s pretend you’re a marketer!
The first thing we want to consider when choosing blog themes is our target audience, what interests them the most, and what difficulties they are experiencing.
We can get them into our website and convince them that we have the solution to whatever difficulty they’re facing if we can write content that is a solution to their problem.
So if our consultant of this story wants to find some effective but low cost ways of getting visitors onto our site. Well he can go on to answer the public type in ‘’marketing for consulting’’ and find a list of questions that people are asking on Google about this topic.
Now, not all of these are relevant to our target customer. And not all keywords have some sort of commercial intent. Some questions are being asked by someone who is about to contact a consultant, some are being asked by someone who is looking to improve their efficiency or their productivity.
So we have some blogs to write further down the line, some blogs to prioritize.
There are always some questions which carry a lot of commercial intent.
To avoid excessively competitive keywords at first, we could want to narrow this down further into subtopics of the primary themes and queries, which will be less competitive and have a lot higher commercial intent than some of the really broad informational and quite irrelevant terms.
So you may replicate this procedure for your company and its target clients.
Consider the three stages of the buyer’s curiosity trip.
Some folks are simply curious. They’re unlikely to buy at this point, but they do signal that they may have an issue with their business and may require advice, a strategy, or consulting.
Some are progressing in their mental journey. They are starting to weigh their alternatives.
Some folks are only interested in making a purchase. As a result, consumers look for a certain consultant’s name.
You may then produce blog entries on your site that target visitors at each of these three stages of the buyer journey, with the appropriate call to action for the person at that time.
Next!
Videos
With video making up 80 percent of all internet traffic, it’s hard for organizations and brands to overlook the need for a video strategy.
You can use every available method to create scripts from your blog posts and compelling craft videos. Of course, you’ll need to consider lighting and a set or be organized to craft faceless videos, but the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll get it right.
Videos receive more attention on social media, and it can be used in various formats and venues.
It also has the benefit of being search-based. People are more likely to engage in a relationship if they can see the person they’re engaging with face-to-face.
Last but not least!
We must take a look at some psychological aspects that service businesses often fail to consider
You’ll be disappointed if you try to sell your service-based business like any other firm because service-based businesses require a very distinct and very different approach to succeed in terms of generating more leads, clients, and sales.
It is no secret that marketing a service-based business is one of my favorite things to do.
It offers a wide range of distinct approaches and problems that marketing product-based enterprises do not have.
Particularly the notion that you’re selling something intangible, something they can’t see, feel, touch, taste, or smell.
So, to present a clear and convincing image of why people should do business with you, we’ll have to get creative with our marketing.
Service businesses often use generic, bland, and boring statements like: we provide better service, have higher quality, or do things faster. Well, those statements make you sound the same as every single one of your competitors.
So let’s fix that now!
Let’s see how to put in place the best service-based marketing strategies, so you can apply them in your business and get way better results.
Number one
Sell the end result!
You see, when it comes to service-based marketing, it’s all about the end product you deliver. That is essentially what you should be selling and communicating through all of your marketing and advertising materials.
Practically, the benefits of what your service provides should be discussed in your company’s marketing and the end state that will help your clients or customers get there basically all of the ways that their lives will be better as a result of doing business with you. And practically anything that would go wrong in their life if they didn’t do business with you.
Define the two separate states that your clients are in right now with your copywriting and storytelling.
Basically, they’re in a situation where they’re present in an active state, which includes suffering, issues, and everything they’re wanting to get away from, and a place where they aspire to be, which is their dreams and desires.
Essentially, they want to go away from pain and into pleasure, and your company serves as the bridge that allows them to do so.
When it comes to marketing, rather than just reprimanding them for all the awful things that are happening, we want to offer them a solution, which is your company! You owe it to them to provide the remedy and assist them in transitioning from agony to pleasure.
Number 2
In all of your marketing, tell stories.
Remember that you don’t have something concrete for them to see, grasp, feel, touch, or smell. You must utilize stories to aid in the construction of these models and images in their minds.
It’s never enough to simply say things like “we’re better,” “we’re faster,” “we have better service,” “we have higher quality,” and so on. Because these are only assertions that are based on nothing.
As a result, we’ll need to back it up.
Storytelling is a fantastic technique to accomplish this.
Examine a well picked list of your company’s successes and case studies, as well as how you’ve previously assisted customers or clients. And when you’re developing marketing content, you’ll be able to draw from this and use it as inspiration.
Share your personal philosophy, as well as your thoughts on business, the market, and the industry.
For example, I believe that every marketing campaign should start with a strategy.
I’m quick to stress out that I disagree with a lot of the industry’s methods and shiny object nonsense that is leading many businesses mislead and causing them to waste time, money, and energy.
Remember! When someone sees someone who looks like them or is in the same position as them and they receive results, this eliminates a lot of potential objections.
Number 3
Your customers aren’t very interested with you; rather, they are focused with themselves and with how they might utilize you to achieve the desired goals. I realize it seems incredibly cynical, but the reality is that they are truly behaving in their own best interests, as they should be doing.
So, rather than fighting this and claiming that it is unfair and all that, it is preferable to simply embrace it and create your marketing in accordance with this reality by ensuring that it is designed in such a way that it is truly all about them and less about you and your company.
Number 4
Nurture them.
What this means is that if you’re selling a service to your market, you’ll need to provide some kind of value or a story like we just discussed, or some kind of content or authority stuff to put in front of them and show that you know what you’re talking about and that you’re the right person for the job.
One of the most common and fatal mistakes I see, particularly with service-based businesses that are new to advertising, is that they try to go out there and produce an ad that goes straight to sale.
In essence, the individual has no notion who you are, what you do, or why they should care.
It’s critical to recognize that all of your marketing should aim to increase touch points.
This is essentially engagements or moments of truth in which you appear directly in front of your target market, whether through content, advertising, or any other form of marketing.
You must appear in front of your consumers 7 to 12 times before they are willing to contemplate purchasing from you.
You must devise a nurturing sequence. And the way you build on a nurturing sequence is to let the funnel loose. A marketing funnel is simply a process that walks them through the customer journey from cold traffic, where they have no idea who you are, what you do, or why they should care, to warm, where they know you and are starting to understand a little more, and all the way to hot, where they actually buy from you and become a paying client or customer.
Whether through email, or retargeting ads. It’s an incredibly effective system and each step takes them closer to doing business with you through a series of micro commitments and ever increasing value, basically creating more and more touch points.
And here we go again…
We are back to our beloved landing page
Back in time.
Every page on your website can and should be a landing page.
Is that a strong statement? Not if you think this through carefully.
When your website is correctly optimized for search, you will have all types of pages bringing in traffic, ranking, and serving as landing pages for new visitors.
When you run an e-commerce site, visitors will come to your product category pages, product pages, homepage, blog posts, resources, and knowledge base.
When you offer services, you’ll get traffic to both your service pages and your homepage.
Now!
This is an issue for many firms because their websites are not built in this manner.
The majority of websites are designed to have visitors follow a neat cube in a straight line.
So people go to the homepage, read it all the way through, then move on to a subpage, and so on. This is not typical of modern user behavior.
The trouble is that the information on your second page assumes prior knowledge. It is assumed that someone has viewed your website and is familiar with your company. They’re relevant, but that’s not how we use the internet.
Every page must do an excellent job of setting the scene and providing your clients with all of the information they require to proceed, to buy.
Let’s say you spent all this time making these amazing blogs and they’re ranking really well. You’re sharing them on social media, they’re getting loads of engagement.
Awesome.
But then people go to those pages on your site from search or social media and assume that you are just a content site because they can’t see any info about the business.
So we need to make sure we include calls to action, introductions to the business, information about what you do.
And we’re linking people through to the commercial pages on your site so they can go through and make a purchase or become a lead or whatever.
All you’re doing is paying the server costs to give Google information to give to people free of charge. There is no benefit to you at all. You’re just sending your stuff out into the world to just help people with no expectation of anything back.
And by the way. My guides here.
Social media
Social media is here to stay.
And the time people are spending on social media is only going in one direction.
Now.
Businesses fail on social media because their audience isn’t in the right frame of mind for the content they’re posting.
Step back from the solution you offer, and instead focus on the problem you are solving. So let’s make ourselves a little authority and influencer, all around the problem you solve for your clients.
Let’s share tips about common mistakes, business conditions, and solutions. Let’s share inspiring and educational stories from people that have overcome those problems before.
Because that is the stuff that people go on social media for.
They go on social media to be entertained and informed.
Another reason that brands fail on social media is that they choose their channels based on their preference rather than the preference of their customers.
This is particularly acute when a younger marketing manager will assume that the brand needs to be visible on Instagram or Tiktok because that’s where they spend their time, rather than looking at where their audience is.
Suppose that audience is much older than they are. In that case, they might be spending much more time on Facebook and LinkedIn, where the largest user group is 46 to 55.
A third reason businesses fail on social media is that their content is purely self-promotional and is all about the company. There’s nothing to entertain. They’re not really speaking their client’s language.
Look at fantastic examples like:
- GymShark and their facebook page.
- Grenade.com and their page.
- Huel.com and their impressive facebook page.
SEO
Now let’s get super serious!
If we could pick anywhere to be seen by potential clients, it would be right where they are searching for what we sell.
That is exactly what search is.
There is no better spot in the history of marketing to be seen than at the top of Google when somebody is searching for what you sell.
Now.
When it comes to SEO, there are no two ways about it.
There are 10 spots on that front page. If you want to be discovered there, you are going to be banging someone else off. They are going to be pushing to knock you off. It is a competition.
That implies the level against which you will have to compete if you want to be ranked first is greater than ever.
So, stick to the basics and get excellent at it. Focus on the basics such as the Page Titles and Meta descriptions, deal with the fact that you need excellent content on every page.
If you are an e-commerce business, you need great content on your product pages as well!
Every page on your site that you want to rank needs to be crafted at perfection.
If you’re a service business, those service pages need to be longer, more in-depth, and more useful than ever before, performing with an excellent user experience.
There are no two ways about it.
Getting ranked on Google and the other search engines to be seen where people are searching for exactly what you do is the holy grail of digital marketing and will be for the foreseeable future.
Tip of the day!?
Making sure that you do have a funnel that is proven to work is like having 1000 of tiny little salespeople out there all the time doing business for you 24/7 generating leads, converting them into clients and nurturing them the whole process.
Avoid wasting time!
One of the most important things I can tell you is to avoid the marketing wasteland.
The marketing wasteland is littered with defunct businesses and failed marketing strategies.
The fact that far too many businesses have bought into the idea that they must do everything and be everywhere is possibly the worst marketing advice ever.
To begin with, trying to do everything and be everywhere is one of the quickest ways to burnout and overload.
Second, you will feel exhausted and stressed. It’s also a poor strategy because you want to reach your ideal target market where they are.
Only a few carefully selected channels and platforms are utilized. So why not try it? How do you get there? The first stage is to design an ideal customer avatar, a virtual representation of your ideal client or customer.
What exactly do they do, where do they go, and who are they? When you’ve figured out all of this, simply go to Google and type in a simple search term like social media network demographics.
You’ll be able to readily discover your target market and their favourite platforms.
Then, as a basic example, disregard everything else. Assume you’re looking for males aged 35 to 55.
So, according to Google and demography, Facebook and YouTube are unquestionably your best bets.
If you want to reach women between the ages of 18 and 35. You should also consider investing in Instagram and possibly Pinterest depending on your industry.
When it comes to reaching out to business-to-business leaders, age is meaningless.
LinkedIn should be the primary focus of your strategy, with other media serving as backups. Facebook.
Don’t be everywhere if you want to avoid the wasteland. Not to everyone. Rather, it is to pinpoint your ideal target market.
Find out where they’re active online and disregard everything else.
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