With the rate of technological developments and trends popping up across industries, it is more important than ever before for service businesses to have a solid foundation and then use innovations and trends to their advantage.
Where to start?
A service-based business needs to get four things right: a strong company offering, stable funding, an employee management system, and effective customer relationship management.
The four pillars
Service businesses must focus their offering on customer experiences as opposed to product features.
Secondly, it is important that a service business gets their pricing right, as the product offering and service given need to be included in the fee, and this can get tricky very quickly!
As a service business is people-intensive, managers need to be able to maximise their employees’ efficiency by knowing what makes them able and motivated to achieve excellence.
Finally, value creation can come from both employees and customers. Remember the Coca-Cola campaign that let you write names on Coke cans? Well, customers helped create the value that was essentially being paid for by them!
Once these four elements have been combined, consider these steps to use digital marketing tactics effectively:
- Offer incentives
For example, offer promos if a user refers a friend to your newsletter. This boosts brand awareness and can be executed through a digital media campaign that is simple yet effective, with a trending hashtag curated to the campaign itself.
- Create high-quality content
- Consumers need to know who you are. A video which gives answers to the most frequent questions from customers is a great example.
- Use all social media platforms available to put this high-quality content out and inform your audience clearly of the service you provide.
- Share interviews and feedback
- With digital platforms as they are today, interviews and referrals from customers are so much easier.
- Use this to your advantage by interviewing users on your social media platforms to gain insights and get referrals. This could include the use of direct marketing channels such as Direct Messages (DMs), Email marketing, or broadcasting on social media.
- Push your online presence
- Engaging in industry-specific Facebook groups is an effective way to ensure that you are available as a strong solution to potential customers’ business problems.
- Potential customers ask questions in these groups, and it is here that your businesses can answer these questions and provide value connecting to your service to get customers to choose your service. Sharing short-form content here and achievements is effective too, as building credibility here is what matters.
- Digital media as a visual tool
- Visually build your brand and show the community what it is that you do through social media, LinkedIn milestones, and regular blog posts as seen on the Yellow Door website.
- Show your community what you do and what you have achieved in an aesthetic way.
If you are ready to take that next step and would like to build your own service business’s online presence, contact us today to get started.