How to Develop a Good Content Marketing Strategy for a Service Business

Many service businesses have since discovered that content marketing on the internet is one of the most powerful lead generation tools they can depend on to grow their businesses. This is because through the internet they can publish thought-provoking content, market their services, follow up with clients/customers, get leads and make sales. Service businesses are hugely dependent on good content to market their businesses online across multi-channel. To do this successfully, they rely on their content marketing strategy to reach the right audience at the right time with their marketing messages. A good content marketing strategy can assist service businesses to reach more customers through high-quality, informative, valuable, relevant, and engaging content.

These here tips can help you to create an effective, customer-attracting content plan to get more leads and customers to grow your service business.

What’s Your Primary Marketing Objective?

If you run a service business, this question must be answered right from the outset of your marketing strategy. Exactly what do you want to achieve with your content marketing efforts? That is, your primary marketing objective? Content usually serves a variety of purposes for marketers. Some of these purposes include, improving SEO, getting more leads, attracting more backlinks, attracting more website visitors, increasing engagement on social media, growing your email list and so on. Before creating content, these factors must come into play to decide on a primary marketing objective since different types of content usually work to generate different results.

Tap Ideas from Your Audience

What keeps a service business in business is its client/customer base. That is the main audience it serves. Without this audience you cannot remain in the business. So, what is good for your audience is what is good for your business. For this reason, sourcing ideas and suggestions from your audience is good marketing. You can find out from your audience what topics they’re interested in and what questions they have about the services you offer even if by way of email questionnaire, social media posts or through anonymous surveys. From the information you gather from these efforts, you can turn some of the questions/topics into blog posts. Better still, you can create a Frequently Asked Questions, FAQ page on your website from this information.

Create a Content Marketing Schedule

This is one effective way to plan and distribute your content. In matters of content marketing, quality comes first but consistency tends to make the real difference. If you have a credible content marketing strategy in place, it is made more effective when you are writing, publishing, posting, distributing and marketing your content on a regular and reliable schedule. You can engage project management tools like Asana and Monday.com to help you stay on schedule, organize your content details, and ensure that you’re distributing your content regularly across multi-channel.

Diligently Research Keywords for SEO

You cannot have a good SEO for your service business if you do not have searchable keywords to use in your content. That makes it imperative for you to thoroughly research keywords, using online keyword research tools like SEMRush.com or Ahrefs.com to find keywords to use on your web pages or in your blog posts. It involves identifying keywords your target audience is searching for to find the type of service your business is rendering. SEO is a bit technical in implementation. You can hire the services of professional webmasters to help you with SEO on your website if you are unable to do it yourself.

Spy on Your Competition

It is smart digital marketing to always keep an eye on what your competition is doing. By doing so, you can get to find out what they are doing better than you and how they are doing it. It is ok to spy on their content strategies to see what keywords they are targeting and what content they’re posting on social media and even in other web channels. You can use keyword research tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs to search for your competitors’ domain names and see what keywords they are ranking for. This can be a credible and effective way to find keywords you should be targeting on your own site. What your competition is posting on their blogs or social media channels, can give you some very helpful insights on the type of content you can create to increase engagement, boost your brand authority, and even attract more leads and customers to your own website.

Create Linkable Assets

There are many types of linkable assets content marketers like to create and use. These range from research findings to eBooks to guest articles to industry leaders’ interviews to webinars and so on. A linkable asset is a type of content that works to attract backlinks to your website. If such links are from high-quality and reputable sites, they can help to improve your own website’s SEO. An improved SEO helps to increase your website’s rankings, increase traffic and draw in more website visitors. If you are smart enough to share content that services many purposes, you can have just one SEO-friendly blog post that generates traffic, attracts backlinks, boosts engagement on social media, and converts your blog readers into leads/customers. Now, that’s great!

Have Content Distribution Plan

After planning your topics, writing your content, and publishing it, the next thing is to be sure it is widely distributed. That calls for a content distribution plan. The plan allows you to explore all viable ways to widely distribute your content multi-channel to reach as many eyes as possible. You may choose to distribute your content manually if you have the time and the patience. On the alternative, you can use content distribution tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to share your content on social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and some other web channels like email, Google ads, Blogs, GMB and the likes.

Generate Leads

If you have leads generation as one of your content marketing objectives, you must give your readers ample opportunities to make contact with you. Make sure your website has a CTA feature to invite/direct your visitors to take desired steps. Include contact forms and be sure they are easily noticeable on the service pages of your website. Offer value, by way of downloadable eBooks or infographics on your website posts in exchange for users to provide their email addresses. Have an easily noticeable “contact me” feature on your website to include email address, telephone, chat bot, office address for physical visits. It helps to make it easy for prospects to easily make contact with you. When a contact is made, that is some kind of lead when qualified.
 
Maintain Contact with Prospects

It is just not enough to have leads, the leads must be nurtured. A lead is of no use without a diligent follow up. The contacts information you generate in your business must be used to keep communications open with prospects. Either by regular emails or even occasional telephone calls, if you maintain contact with your prospects, you can turn them to customers. With online Customer Relationship Management, CRM tools, you can keep your lead information organized, check follow-up status, send customers business information, and much more. These tools are great to help you follow up with every lead to be sure you are not missing out on any new customer opportunities.

Final Thoughts

From the foregoing, you can easily deduce that with good writing skills, the right planning, tools, and great scheduling/distribution, you can create amazing content that helps to grow your service business. The more content you create, the more beneficial experience you’ll have, the more your skills will improve and the better you’ll become at using content to turn prospective visitors into new leads/customers.