How to Promote Your Service Business Online

If you are a service provider, just like every business owner, your business must have been adversely affected by the general restrictions occasioned by the covid-19 pandemic. What you should worry about now is how to promote your service business to create a better online presence or boost your existing online presence with a view to attracting more customers back to your business. However, the unique nature of service businesses warrants unique business promotion activities and somewhat different marketing strategy simply because services involve intangible products.

If you want to effectively promote your service business online, here are some tips for getting found online.

Create a Blog

Because of the intangible nature of services, every service business thrives on reviews, recommendations or word of mouth. Technically, the trial of a service is often impractical because it is an intangible product. This is why it relies hugely on recommendations to generate trust in its ability to meet the needs of customers. If you create a blog on your website and encourage user-generated content in the form of reviews and articles, it is one effective way to ensure visitors to your website trust and believe in the service you offer. By writing good content on your blog about customers’ experiences with your services, it somehow helps to build the much needed credibility for your business. Continuously writing in-depth, factual, and relevant articles in your blog posts is one great way to sustain customers’ interest in your service business. A good blog does that seamlessly.  

Invest in Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is the key to helping your target market find your service business online. It is what helps search engines to rank your website in their SERPs. If you are offering a service online, because it is intangible, you really need a very good SEO to get noticed online. SEO simply involves a complex set of algorithms created by various search engines to determine the rank of links that address a user’s query. That is what enables search engines to make the highest quality links appear highest in search results. As such, these links get noticed by searchers first and they tend to click on them first in order of priority. That simply translates to higher organic traffic through such high ranked links. Your website benefits from good organic traffic by these efforts. SEO is hugely technical in nature because of its complexity. Because of this, you can only implement a good SEO strategy yourself if you have the knowledge, technical skills, education, experience, and the right SEO software. Alternatively, just like many business owners do, you can hire the services of professional agencies or individual SEO experts to handle SEO for your business website. In terms of costs, doing it yourself is most cost-effective if you know how to.

Use Emails to Market

Email marketing is extremely effective to promote a service business. It is not only cost-effective, it is also very effective to get new customers. By using emails to market newsletters, marketers get better results for their service businesses than marketing on very popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The reason for this effectiveness is simple. Emails are direct, reduce noise, and are guaranteed to reach the intended audience in the form intended. It is however very important to know how to get your potential customers’ email addresses before you can optimize email results. By deliberate efforts, you can build a reliable email list of your customers and potential customers over time. Without this list, the effectiveness of email as a marketing tool is greatly reduced. Marketers can build this list from a combination of existing customer lists, lists obtained by offering webinars and physical meetings, and email lists of potential customers obtained by offering an incentive to them in exchange for their email addresses.

Collaborate with Other Businesses

Many service businesses need some form of synergy to grow. That calls for business collaboration with other businesses. Through faithful friendship and cooperation, a service business can collaborate with another for a mutually beneficial fruitful relationship. The symbiotic nature of this arrangement ensures that both businesses benefit from each other’s audiences without any encroachments. For instance, a logistics business can collaborate with a courier business and they both benefit handsomely from the arrangement. Same way businesses can collaborate and mutually benefit from business networks common to both.

Teach Online Courses

Service business owners can promote their businesses by teaching online courses/ tutorials related their business niche. If you offer such technical online courses/tutorials to your website visitors, and what you offer has high quality, it can help generate a lot of traffic for your business. This traffic comes in two ways for two reasons. The first is that people are always eager to learn, especially if it is free, qualitative and beneficial. Secondly, free courses and tutorials help to build some form of rapport with customers even before you offer your services to them. From these efforts, you can arouse the curiosity of your consumers. Next is to make your sales pitches and make your sales. Businesses operating professional services online can do so effectively by offering free apps, free software, or other types of training as a way to demonstrate their proficiency and to garner new customers. Free apps offers and the training to use the apps effectively can often lead users to purchase the apps. That is good business.