Unlike product-based companies which sell customers on a specific item for use, service-based companies provide services that customers don’t want to do themselves — or can’t. This means that a specific type of marketing strategy is required for service-based companies since consumers don’t have a tangible product available for purchase.
Direct techniques are often one of these companies’ main marketing strategies, reaching out to existing customers and prospective clients. For example, contacting clients directly through email campaigns requires compelling and persuasive language to turn leads into sales.
Thanks to advancements in digital marketing, service marketing strategies have grown exponentially over the years. More than that, the way service buyers interact with service-based companies has changed. With the Internet readily available for consumer use, it’s more important than ever for businesses to up the ante with their digital footprint.
Strong marketing strategies for service-based companies are now more important than ever, thanks to everything from reviews and testimonials to case studies showing the efficacy of a service.
But with tons of great options to choose from, which should your company prioritize? Let’s break it down.
Niche Marketing
The niche market serves a purpose that can’t be overlooked in the service-based industry. Although niche marketing is very specific, it can be fine-tuned to meet the specific needs of buyers.
For example, niche marketing can outpace the competition by focusing on a need that’s unique to consumers. Look for existing demands that may or may not be currently met by the competition. From there, a marketing firm can forge connections, funneling leads into sales while offering customers an experience they may have a difficult time finding elsewhere.
Niche marketing also allows service-based companies to focus on a small area of expertise, targeting specific consumers and building trust as a brand. Since niche marketing focuses on small sections of a larger market, these companies can focus on quality over quality, becoming experts in their field. This encourages customers to stay loyal to their services.
To fully understand how niche marketing works, it’s important to put it into perspective using real-world scenarios. Take pest control, for example. In 2023, there were 32,365 reported pest control companies in the United States. If you had an infestation on your property, odds are most companies would sell you on a physical product. However, there is a new trend in pest control — Integrated Pest Management (IPM).
Consumers are less aware of IPM, even though it focuses on long-term pest control that’s beneficial to people and animals. Since this area of pest control is still niche, you’re less likely to find companies that specialize in it. This puts companies that do offer it at an advantage, provided their services are marketed appropriately, and to the correct audience. Since this type of service favors the use of non-toxic measures to control pests, you might want to market it to parents and pet owners.
The same can be applied to areas like skincare. If, for example, a consumer is looking for a specific dermatological service that only select providers offer, it would be advantageous to create a niche campaign that focuses on this lesser-known — yet necessary — area of skin care. Use market research to determine who’s looking for these services and create targeted campaigns based on the data.
Once a specific demographic sees the value in niche services, these companies stand to gain credibility in the field through testimonials, reviews, and referrals. They can also create case studies to show how their services are useful and effective.
Conduct Market Research
Market research assists service-based companies with understanding the specific needs of their existing clients and prospective customers. Before launching a new service, for example, understand what your target audience is looking for.
How can you help them achieve a specific goal? What does your service offer? What makes you stand out amongst the competition?
It’s also important to have a clear understanding of how they see your brand, and market research can help you achieve these goals.
There are multiple ways for companies to conduct market research. For example, companies can use various tools to connect with customers, including phone interviews, focus groups to discuss services, and even questionnaires. From there, these results are analyzed to get a comprehensive overview of what consumers want and how you can best market it to them.
It’s also important to analyze buying trends, along with what your competition excels at, and where they’re lacking. By understanding the limitations of your competition, you can finetune your services to offer something customers need more of. You can also evaluate what your competition is successful with, developing your marketing strategy accordingly.
Website Performance
Never underestimate the power of website performance, especially when enlisting the help of marketing for services. When focusing on website performance, marketers focus on how fast a web page loads and comes up in a browser. The conventional wisdom is that the faster the website, the higher it performs.
Webmasters can implement multiple changes to help your website run faster. For example, they can remove any technical errors that might be slowing it down while reducing how many HTTP requests your website has. They can also optimize files and remove excessively large images.
Aside from speed, there are other ways professional marketing agencies can work to increase website performance. Consider your website’s overall structure. Instead of showcasing a specific service on multiple pages, you might want to feature specific highlights of one service.
The goal is to provide site visitors with digestible information they can readily scroll through instead of overwhelming them with tons of customer testimonials and lengthy copy.
Another excellent way of improving website performance comes with improving the overall quality of your website’s content. This becomes “less is more” in that you may want to replace long blocks of content with more succinct, detail-oriented blog entries that discuss your services and how they benefit customers.
When you have complex copy on your website, it might be overwhelming for consumers. But concise content, infographics, videos, animation, images, and more can all help consumers understand what you have to offer while keeping them interested and engaged.
Seeing as the average attention span is 8.25 seconds, you want to make the best impression when site visitors come to your website.
Consider Paid Ads
Paid ads are an excellent way of controlling your marketing campaign. Pay-per-click (PPC) allows you full control over how a campaign looks and how long you want it to run. This means your advertisement can run from a day to a month (or longer), depending on your budget.
Since you set the budget for these types of ads, you don’t have to worry about spending more than you can reasonably afford. If you want to spend $100, there’s a PPC ad with your name on it. Since you can create ads with a flexible budget, this type of marketing strategy is incredibly popular with businesses.
Another reason to invest in PPC is that it produces immediate results. Yes, you can implement various search engine optimization (SEO) practices, but these results take time. You might slowly climb into a Google search engine results page (SERP), but it won’t be instantaneous. PPC, on the other hand, can be immediate.
As soon as you create your PPC marketing campaign, you’ll be able to track data and analyze its efficacy. You’ll have access to insights and analytics, understanding how many people come across your ad and how they interact with it. You can then use this information to tailor your ad campaign, helping it to perform optimally.
If your campaign needs assistance in an area, you can use this analytical insight to make necessary changes, helping customers to better interact with it. You can use the same data to see where your PPC campaign excels — and where it needs a little work — expanding on this area to connect with more consumers.
Search Engine Optimization (SE0)
Although SEO won’t offer the same type of instant gratification as PPC, it’s still an essential part of any service-based business marketing plan.
SEO offers customers an improved user experience so they can easily navigate your website when visiting it. It also works to drive traffic to your website, making it more visible in a search engine. When your website ranks higher in a search engine, it works to provide your business with credibility.
Consider the following: it’s reported that 75% of people don’t scroll past Google’s first page of search results. If your website isn’t on the first page, then you’re greatly reducing its visibility with consumers. However, organic SEO can work to help it rank appropriately.
There are two main types of SEO: onsite SEO and offsite SEO. As the name suggests, onsite SEO relies on specific keywords that are carefully crafted to draw web traffic from your targeted audience.
This means that if a prospective client is frequently Googling a specific set of keywords, using them organically on your website can work to help your page come up in their search engine. This could be a single word or a longer phrase, depending on what your audience is looking for.
You can also consider offsite SEO. An example of this is backlinking to your website through guest posting. In this instance, you might hire a professional copywriter to create content for another website. While writing, they’ll include a link back to your website. This shows Google that your website is trusted by other authority sites.
This acts as a type of endorsement from a site Google deems trustworthy. The more guest posts you have with links back to your website, the more valuable your website looks and the higher it ranks in a SERP. Just be sure to post on high authority sites in your area of expertise. Professional content writers also conduct research for trending keywords, helping your content rank higher.
Content Marketing
Content marketing isn’t a one-size-fits-all. However, the results should be the same: attract customers by engaging with them while creating and retaining a network of consumers for your services. Content marketing is used to create content so you can share it with existing and prospective customers through different forms of media.
Some types of service marketing strategies include newsletters, infographics, videos, blogs, webinars, white papers, case studies, freebies on your website, podcasts, and more. By using these content marketing techniques, you can showcase your expertise in a certain area while promoting your brand and making consumers aware of what you have to offer.
This works to keep your brand in the spotlight so consumers know who to contact when they need your specific services.
Social Media
Although social media can help you showcase your service-based business, you need to cater to your target audience. If you’ve already conducted market research, this should be an easy task.
Set realistic goals for your social media campaign. What are you hoping to achieve? If you’re unsure, a professional marketing agency can help you narrow down specific goals to market your company.
For example, are you looking to increase brand awareness so consumers can find your business online? Do you want more website visitors? Are you interested in customer loyalty and retaining your current clients? Your specific goals will help with driving a social media campaign and creating a solid services marketing strategy.
When you write content for social media, you need it to be as compelling as possible. If you struggle with finding the right words, a marketing agency can offer custom content writing. They’re adept at including the best business marketing strategies in social media campaigns, so don’t hesitate to consult with professionals.
You can choose from informative posts to help your target audience with a specific challenge. You can also post engaging content that answers common questions that align with your business. Your content should also include videos and images to further connect with your audience. Depending on your budget, you can incorporate paid advertising, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram ads.
When posting on social media, have a schedule — and stick to it. Just remember that too many posts can turn customers off, and they may unfollow you. With Instagram, for example, it’s recommended to post between three and seven times weekly, so set reminders to share frequent content or have a marketing agency post for you.
Email Marketing
Don’t overlook this part of marketing for your service-based business. Considering that professionals alone check their email every 37 minutes (this equates to 15 times a day), a strong email campaign can help to create sales. It’s great when your website has more traffic, but this doesn’t guarantee site visitors will use your services. Email marketing, however, can correct this issue. It works to convert leads into sales, keeping new and prospective customers aware of company updates, informative text, and even promotions.
You can even use this as an opportunity to share with them your website’s blog. Just be sure it has plenty of quality content.
Email marketing lets you create personalized content that’s specific to the needs of your target audience. Social media, although highly effective, is a bit more generalized in who it caters to. But email marketing lets you tailor your communication to the specific needs of your customers.
Customer Relationship Manager (CRM)
CRM is something else you should consider investing in. This data-driven software is specifically integrated so you can not only manage new information about existing and potential customers but analyze and save it for future use.
With CRM, you can improve your overall lead management and tracking. You’ll also spend less time focusing on busywork as this software produces effective means of upselling and even cross-selling your services.
You can use CRM to manage inbound leads, market your business using data-driven methods, and organize the journey you want customers to take. In short, it allows you to build and track different types of customer-based relationships, gathering data to help you understand ways to add personalized touches to your marketing campaigns.
Work With Local Businesses
Sometimes the best marketing strategies involve partnering with other local businesses. If you’re both running a special, consider running it together. This way you can take advantage of both businesses’ social media pages. You might consider working with another business on special giveaways or even livestreaming with them to reach double the audience.
If you both have a promotional event, consider creating coupons that encourage consumers to use both of your services simultaneously, for a discounted price. You can even reach out to influencers to have them help connect customers with your services.
It’s also a great idea to host a local event, encouraging people to come meet you in person and learn more about your brand and why it’s valuable.
Let’s B Media: Unparalleled Service Marketing
Marketing your service-based business can feel daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Yes, creating engaging content — especially for social media — can have its intricacies, but once you determine your target audience through thorough market research, you’ll discover new ways of engaging with new and existing customers.
However, this can often be time-consuming, which is where marketing agencies come into play. They allow you to do what you do best: focus on your business while an experienced professional helps you gain new leads and turn them into sales.
If you’re looking for the best marketing strategies for a service business, Let’s B Media can help. Contact us today to learn how we can turn your next marketing campaign into the most successful one yet.