Selling services is very different from selling products online. The same marketing techniques simply do not work for service based industries and businesses.
A lawyer cannot advertise on Amazon as a packaged food company like Oroeos can. The whole playing field is different with a set of different rules.
However, there are rules and competition is stiff. If you want to have a net positive month, you need to double down on your marketing efforts.
This is something as simple as making sure your customers receive a good customer service experience.
89% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience.
It means making sure your sales team asks for referrals at the end of the sales cycle. Only 11% of salespeople ask for referrals!
But it is also much more than that which is why we are going to explore some strategies that you could consider using for your own business.
What are service based businesses?
Simply put a service-based business is when a company does not rely on the sale of goods and services. Instead they provide services to the public like legal representation, medical aid, or accounting services.
In the current post-COVID landscape, these service based businesses have now been able to deliver their services online as well through Zoom consultations and online software.
Keeping this in mind, let is explore some marketing strategies that work well for these companies.
#1: Create a Content Marketing Strategy
Traditionally, most marketing strategies disrupted consumers to catch their attention and tell them about a product. But now, a more relationship-driven strategy has shown to perform highly in not only new revenue but also strong retention.
Content marketing is an inbound marketing strategy that aims to build awareness around your brand, establish trust, convert customers, and then make them loyal ambassadors.
It achieves this by providing consumers with value before ever trying to sell them anything in the form of content. The most common types include:
- Blog posts
- Social media posts
- Videos
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Emails
- And many more
To start creating a content strategy, you’ll need to first research your target demographic and create buyer personas that represent them. These are semi-fictional characters that share traits with your target audience. Any time you produce content, think about what that person would want or need to see from you.
Then, brainstorm ideas for content and choose your delivery type (blog posts, videos, etc.). Once you’ve mapped out some topics, start educating and entertaining your audience with them to build trust.
Goldenzweig Law Group does this well by investing time and money into their content marketing strategy with content that their ideal client is searching for when they need help and answers.
Monday does an amazing job of this on their blog. Since they have clients in multiple industries, they make it a point to have blog posts that cater to their multiple buyer personas.
A quick dropdown of their blog topics menu shows just how much effort they have put into their content marketing strategy:
Business Insurance Save is another great example. Since they provide business insurance to multiple different types of businesses, they make it a point to target multiple keywords to bring in traffic for different buyer personas.
Their Ahrefs profile shows how successful they are at ranking for different types of business insurance across multiple fields:
Another example of content, this time on social media, is the Goldenzweig Law Group, PLLC. They have an active Facebook page where they share information that their clients might need and they often end by linking to a blog post that can provide more information.
#2: Learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO–search engine optimization–is the next step to achieving major success with any content marketing strategy.
Specifically, this is the practice of optimizing your content for search engine algorithms so that when published, it appears among the first results on the search engine results page (SERP).
The search engine that drives the majority of website traffic is by far Google. Therefore, any time you publish content online, you’ll want to keep its algorithm in mind.
SEO goes beyond having great web hosting, going after the right keyword, or simply producing content. Google is constantly unrolling new updates and your competition is only growing. Making sure you stay updated on the best SEO strategies is of paramount importance if you want to rank your content.
There are hundreds of factors (many unknown) that Google uses to rank published and indexed web pages, making it impossible to cover them all in this post. However, you (or someone on your team) can take a variety of SEO courses, many of which are free, to start mastering the practice of SEO.
Some awesome blogs to start off your learning journey would be:
- Search Engine Journal
- Moz
- Content Marketing Institute
- More specific blogs for your niche (For example, LawRank focuses more on SEO for lawyers)
#3: Build an Email List and Practice Email Marketing
Email marketing is a popular digital marketing practice with an almost too good to be true ROI (return on investment). $1 spent on email marketing generates an ROI of $36, on average.
Email is an especially powerful tool for those in the CPG space. Since customers need to replace the products they’ve purchased from you regularly, staying active in their inbox helps them remember where they bought from last–making them more likely to return.
Be careful to ensure that not all your emails are purely promotional, however. When done properly, email marketing is very similar to the umbrella term content marketing–it provides value and builds trust. Create conversations, engage with your subscribers, and give them information they’d benefit from knowing, rather than simply bombarding their inbox with new offers.
Building an email list can be simple, too. You’ll first need an opt-in, which is something that consumers receive in exchange for signing up. It could be a discount, weekly newsletter, free downloadable, or the like.
When it comes time to send emails to your list, this process can (and should) be automated to a tee. Consider investing in an email platform–like Sendinblue or ConvertKit–to schedule emails, draft content, view your email marketing stats, and more.
You can even store email templates for easy use, such as for promotions or follow-up emails.
#4: Offer and Build Value in Subscriptions
Your target customers might need your services on a recurring bases. So why not offer them in the form of a subscription?
By allowing customers to automate their purchases, you can expect more recurring sales.
An easy way to do this is by offering customers a discount if they select monthly or weekly subscriptions. For example, offering the product for 10 or 15% off for a monthly subscription.
Software tools like Xero do this when they want to sell their accounting software to people. They offer heavy discounts if subscribers take longer plans.
Since they know they’ll need to buy it again, they might as well choose to save money over the long term. It’s a smart investment for the customer, and for you as a business.
If you choose to go this route, using a product-led growth strategy might be a good idea for your company. What does this mean? You could offer a free or freemium version of your product to give new customers a taste so you leave them wanting more.
Examples of companies that employed product-led strategies would be Facebook and Twitter.
For the longest time, these companies did not turn a profit since a lot of their services were free but over time their massive customer base made them two of the most successful companies in the world.
#5: Leverage User-Generated Content
Social media is more than just a place where friends and family can connect. Today, it’s also a marketing channel for businesses and a product research tool for consumers.
Research from GlobalWebIndex found that 54% of people who browse social media do so to research products. By simply being present and strategically posting content on the channels your audience uses most, you’re exposing yourself to the large demographic of people who have replaced catalogs that come in the mail with social media pages.
What’s more, Lyfe Marketing also reports that a whopping 71% of consumers are more likely to recommend a brand to people they know after having a positive experience with them on social media alone.
The reasons to add social media to your list of marketing strategies are substantial. But how do you go about bringing awareness to your brand once you’ve created a profile, and start building up a loyal following?
One easy answer: leverage user-generated content (UGC).
UGC is content created about your brand by consumers, similar to a review. A fitness model on Instagram posing in her favorite activewear and tagging the brand is a prime example.
While an obvious way to look for UGC is to closely monitor your tags, mentions, and direct messages, if you’re just getting started on social media, you won’t have a compilation of it waiting at your fingertips.
In this case, you’ll need to prompt the creation of UGC. For example, you can encourage followers to tag your page in their posts with your products to be entered into a giveaway.
Photo by Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash
#6: Influencer Marketing and Affiliate Marketing
Two more popular social media strategies are influencer marketing and affiliate marketing.
Influencer marketing involves partnering, collaborating with, and/or endorsing certain online influencers who act as ambassadors for your brand. By offering them some sort of incentive, –such as free products, discounts, or even payments–they in turn promote your products to their large follower base.
Affiliate marketing is similar, but instead of the brand seeking out the influencer, content creators seek out the brand and request to become part of their affiliate program. Once accepted, the affiliate (content creator) will earn a certain percentage of the sales that come from customers who buy products using their special link.
#7: Highlight Product Reviews
Don’t bury customer reviews at the very bottom of your product pages. Maximize the ones you already have by highlighting them at the top and using them in your copy (such as ads, social media posts, and emails).
If you don’t have many reviews yet, it’s time to start prompting customers to leave them.
This can be as simple as sending an automated follow-up email after they’ve made a purchase that thanks them for their business and reminds them to leave a review. Or, similar to UGC, you can encourage customers to write them by offering an incentive.
You should also make sure to include these reviews on your own website. This could be on specific landing pages and also on your homepage. Rosenbaum & Rosenbaum personal injury lawyers does this on by creating a page dedicated to client reviews to increase conversions:
Another way to do this is by creating a carousel of reviews from clients that you can feature on your homepage like Allen Law Firm do.
#8: Invest in Paid Advertising
Of course, there’s always the option of investing in paid advertisements–and it’s not a bad one!
Seeing the results from the hard work poured into organic marketing channels like content marketing and social media takes time and doesn’t happen overnight. But until then, opting to pay for ads is usually a worthwhile way to spike business when your other streams are still growing.
Note the word “usually,” however.
It’s vital that when investing in paid advertising, you put your money in the right place. And the right place is always where your target audience is already hanging out. For some industries, this will be Facebook, while for others it will be Instagram.
Think outside the box, too.
If content marketing and SEO are already part of your strategy, why not invest in PPC (pay-per-click) while you’re still working your way up in the Google SERPs organically?
PPC ads are the web pages you see at the very top of a Google search result page. They have the word “ad” above them to clearly distinguish them from the page that achieved the #1 ranking position organically.
#9: Offer Discounts to Returning Customers
Once you’ve made a handful of sales, you need to focus even more attention on ensuring you do it again. We already established that offering subscriptions is one way to do so.
But what about those buyers who haven’t opted for this?
This is where your site pop-ups and email list become essential. You can start by emailing all previous customers an exclusive discount on their next purchase. Or, once they log in to their account, a pop-up can greet them with the offer.
You can then use software to track emails. This will help you see which customers are opening and replying to emails, and you will know better where to focus your efforts.
This works well if you have a relatively small client base.
As you start to scale up, it would make sense to automate these emails completely and send routine discount offers to previous customers.
The service based industry is headed for a year of growth. Sales are going up, but competition is also intensifying. These marketing strategies will give you the armor you need to combat the competition but also the tools to build sustainable, long-lasting success in a more digitalized world.
