Digitizing the marketing of service companies has become essential. As their customers change their behaviour, these companies can no longer simply use old recipes to survive and grow their business.

Traditionally, consulting firms generated clients through their network. Today, however, it is not enough. Prospects are more connected, so they seek information and solutions to their issues online before deciding which provider will accompany them.

This is why digital marketing is so important for service companies: to have a strong online presence and be easily found by people looking for the services they offer. Marketing automation then transforms these prospects into customers.

From the design of an acquisition campaign to lead processing, things have changed. New channels, new tools, new habits: that’s what digital marketing means. Here are 4 tactics to achieve this.

Tactic #1: Content Marketing

Content marketing are the foundations of your digital marketing. When it comes to fuel for your strategy engine, we let you choose the metaphor that suits you best. In short, in the beginning, there is the content.

To create the solid content marketing strategy, it is essential to start by defining personas. They are fictional representations of ideal clients. This requires identifying their aspirations, their challenges, their key issues and how the services offered address them. The objective is to segment the prospects in order to be able to communicate with them in a personalized way. We forget the generic content: if it suits everyone, it doesn’t suit anyone.

The idea is to design premium content (e-books, guides, white papers or studies) that provide answers to a person’s problems. The more specific and targeted this premium content is, the more qualified leads it will attract.

The second step is to write a series of blog articles, each featuring an element covered in this e-book (no need to reinvent the wheel) to promote it.

Don’t forget the most important thing: add a call to action (CTA) at the end of the articles to direct readers to the landing page where they can download the e-book. To do this, they will, of course, have to fill out a form.

This is how you generate qualified leads by digitizing your marketing. The content makes it possible to adapt to the new habits of B2B prospects whose first reflexes today consist in seeking answers online before contacting a potential service provider.

Tactic #2: SEO

The second tactic goes along with the first. In order to be spotted by new prospects, a service company must ensure its position at the top of Google’s search results.

The goal of SEO is therefore to increase qualified traffic to a website. Without a site with strong authority, however, it is difficult to be well referenced.

Hence the importance of the blog. It allows you to work on many important keywords and, thanks to the internal mesh, to bring up key pages of your site.

When we talk about SEO, we mainly think about 3 types of actions:

Website optimizations: to make sure that the site is easily crawled by Google’s bots, index the site well and set up the right redirections for the website.

to make sure that the site is easily crawled by Google’s bots, index the site well and set up the right redirections for the website. On-page optimizations: these are all the actions to be carried out so that a page is well optimized from an SEO standpoint. This includes HTML tags like Title, H1, alt, meta description, etc. and page elements to be taken into account (URL, page speed, etc.).

these are all the actions to be carried out so that a page is well optimized from an SEO standpoint. This includes HTML tags like Title, H1, alt, meta description, etc. and page elements to be taken into account (URL, page speed, etc.). Backlinks: these are all incoming links which means links that redirect to a site from other web pages. The link to the on-page SEO graphics will be considered as a backlink. The stronger the authority of the referring site, the more weight the link transmits SEO. Conversely, if the referring site is considered suspicious by Google, it can result in penalties.

Tactic #3: Social Networks

Most of the service companies are already present on social networks. However, there is a difference between a passive presence and an active community management.

To stand out from the crowd, win followers and increase commitment, you can’t just publish a tweet from time to time, for the release of a blog article or the announcement of an event for example. It is essential to have a real strategy.

You not only have to publish content that brings value, but also broadcast that value in every Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn post directly. And all in an authentic way. Every business has a voice on social networks or must find its own.

So, promoting a new blog article on LinkedIn by posting only the article title and a link is not enough to show the value it brings. It is indeed a presence on LinkedIn, but nothing more. Writing an article takes time, so to ignore its promotion is to say that the few hours spent on writing were useless. Content cannot perform if it is poorly communicated.

How to make the promotion successful? Ideally, the LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook post should assert a point of view by using one or more key points from the article. The post must be able to live alone and bring value without the article.

On LinkedIn, it is also possible to publish a post in specialized groups in order to increase the visibility of the article with a targeted audience that does not follow you. Finally, we advise to send the link of the article via direct message to people interested by the treated subject, once again in order to bring them value. Be careful not to spam and to write a personalized and well targeted message!

Finally, it is crucial to interact with the community: comment, liker, retweet, show that you are active in a field and that you have real expertise. It is the only way to build a real network, a real community in an organic way.

These are simple actions but they do require time. The results will not be immediate, it is a long-term task: the most persistent will win the bet.

Tactic #4: Online Advertising

Finally, the fourth tactic, online advertising. This is not cheating, this is not money thrown out of the window. On the one hand, it is a question of giving a boost to the Inbound approach when it is set up in the company. On the other hand, online advertising agencies provide good advertising strategy that allows the targeted promotion of inbound campaigns throughout the year. And it’s usually very effective.

In the first case, when a company launches its Inbound approach, we always advise to plan a Paid Search budget, especially for sites with less authority. It is indeed unrealistic to expect to see SEO efforts pay off in two weeks.

We must act. It is not by sitting in front of your computer with your eyes fixed on your dashboard analytics that the visitor curve will suddenly take off. This is why AdWords campaigns are well targeted at the beginning.

Second scenario: Inbound campaign promotion throughout the year. Whether it’s a webinar or an e-book for example, launching ads on Facebook and LinkedIn to boost the number of subscribers or downloads usually pays off. It doesn’t have to become the main acquisition channel, far from it, but it allows you to gain visibility with an audience that doesn’t necessarily know you.

Things to remember

The objective of digital marketing for service companies is to generate qualified leads and convert them into customers faster and more scalable.

For this, there are several tactics to put in place:

Content Marketing

SEO

Social networks

Online advertising

These four tactics are an integral part of a broader inbound and marketing automation strategy.

To help you understand how to develop a service company’s business through marketing automation, mail us at reachout@cruxcreativesolutions.com