Seven Digital Marketing Tactics Tailored for Service Sector Businesses

Digital marketing tactics are essential for service sector businesses to stand out in today’s hypercompetitive marketplace. Search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, and content, social media and email marketing are cost-effective, high impact tactics that can give your service business a competitive advantage.

Service businesses are part of every industry, whether its retail, health care, energy, finance, hospitality or technology. Across the board, competition in the service sector continues to grow, making it more difficult than ever to stand out and reach the right audience.

Digital marketing is essential to raise brand awareness, attract customers and drive sustainable growth and long-term success. Search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and content, social media and email marketing are cost-effective, high impact tactics that can help service businesses stand out from the competition.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is all marketing that happens on digital platforms. Unlike online marketing, digital marketing does not have to be executed via the internet. An easy-to-navigate website and vibrant social media channels form the foundation of effective digital marketing. On this foundation you can build a holistic, unified strategy across digital channels and use tactics designed to:

• build awareness;
• expand reach;
• support and advance potential clients at each stage of the buying journey;
• foster loyalty; and
• ultimately, drive conversions.

Digital tools, such as Google Surveys and Google Trends, can help marketers conduct market research and gain detailed insights into your customers’ interests and buying preferences. This will help you develop data-informed marketing strategies and select the right tactics to drive results.

Benefits of digital marketing for service businesses

Consumers are online every day, checking email, engaging on social media, reading news, researching and shopping. In today’s technology-driven world, digital marketing is essential to help service businesses grow. In addition to increased brand awareness and expanded reach, the benefits of digital marketing include:

• Effective targeting. Digital marketing allows brands to segment audiences based on their interests, demographics, location and behaviours.
• High-impact personalized messaging and content. Digital marketing uses the data collected about existing and potential customers to create relevant, personalized content.
• Authentic customer connection and increased engagement. Digital marketing allows brands to interact with customers where they are, both online and in the buying journey, and in the ways they want.
• Cost-effectiveness and better conversion rates. Digital marketing levels the playing field for small and midsize businesses because even small budgets can drive big impact.
• Measurable results and greater return on investment. Digital marketing makes it easy to track users across the buying journey and attribute conversions to specific marketing actions.

Seven top marketing tactics for service sector businesses

Postmedia recommends service sector businesses use these seven digital marketing tactics to achieve their sales and marketing goals and objectives:

1. Seek out feedback

Encourage customers to share their experiences using your services, provide their ideas for improvement and write online reviews. Consumers are looking for ways to reduce the uncertainty around purchases, and they trust what other customers have to say about a business. Google reviews can affect your site’s position on search engine results pages (SERPs) because they influence how Google evaluates your relevance for searches. Feedback and reviews can build engagement, trust and credibility.

2. Adapt tried and true SEO techniques

There are two important trends to understand when implementing SEO techniques. One is that more people are using voice search. In addition to keyword optimization for traditional search, it’s also important to optimize for voice searches, which use conversational phrases instead of short keywords. This requires creating content that provides clear, direct answers to specific questions in a conversational way. Tools such as AnswerThePublic can help you identify the phrases people are using. Another important trend is the rise in local searches by mobile users.  Make it easy for people to find you by claiming your Google My Business (GMB) listing. This is a free business profile that shows up on Google search results and maps. It includes your business name, location and category. It may also include other information Google has indexed from across the internet. To boost your visibility further, keep your page up to date, add photos and FAQs, and ask for and respond to consumer reviews.

Tip: Implement Geofencing marketing campaigns to target customers with relevant mobile ads when they are near your physical location.

3. Embrace text messaging and automation

Effective, ongoing communication is critical to stay top of mind and connected with existing and potential customers. More and more, the technology behind that outreach matters. A survey of 1,000 consumers across Canada and the U.S. revealed that 82 per cent texted with businesses. It also found 71 per cent of those who were already a customer of a company preferred to connect with that company via text, while 55 per cent preferred email and 34 per cent preferred phone. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are providing new insights that can help service businesses better understand and target audiences, analyze user interactions and adapt campaigns in real-time. As well, chatbots that are always available to answer questions are an important tool to enhance customer service.

4.  Put social media to work for your brand

Building your presence and credibility on social media complements more direct SEO efforts by giving you another way to engage with customers, build trust and expand your reach. Social media channels make it easy for customers to share photos, reviews and testimonials, and will help drive people to your web properties. You can use both organic posts and paid advertising to get your messages out. Most social media platforms offer tools and advertising products to help brands tell their stories and promote their services directly on their channels. Unlike organic posts, these ads are sponsored and can take the form of PPC advertising, branded content and display ads. Nearly five billion people around the world use social media. For service businesses, these channels present an important opportunity to reach your target audience where they like to spend time: on their social feeds.

Tip: Seek out authentic partnerships with niche social media influencers in your industry. Partnering with an influencer who shares your brand’s values and focuses on topics that align with your service business is a powerful way to build awareness and expand your reach.

5. Invest in a vibrant, optimized-for-mobile landing page

Your website landing page is a visitor’s first impression of your business. Make sure it is up to date, that all your services are clearly described and that your contact information is easy to find. Beyond making a good first impression, a well-designed and informative landing page offers the ability to capture a visitor’s information through a lead-capture conversion form and to support specific and overarching marketing efforts.

6. Create compelling content

Effective content marketing can help you stand out as a thought leader in your industry and your business stand out from your competitors. By tailoring your digital storytelling to build a connection with your intended audience, you can quickly demonstrate you understand their unique needs. The content can be shared in forms such as blogs, articles, social media posts, ebooks, infographics, videos and podcasts. Note that visual storytelling is gaining traction, with short-form immersive mobile-first, long-form and live videos emerging as top trends in content marketing.

Tip: Video marketing continues to grow in importance as a tool to build an emotional connection with potential and existing customers. Consider creating: short-form video content for social channels such as TikTok and Instagram; educational videos such as tutorials and how-tos; live streams of Q&A sessions; and behind-the-scenes videos to introduce team members.

7. Leverage customer relationship management

One of the big benefits of using a customer relationship management (CRM) solution is the ability to customize it to meet your service business’s specific needs. From automated renewal alerts, appointment scheduling and workflow to custom fields to track whatever you need to track, CRM systems can save time and reduce human error, driving important efficiencies and cost savings. To maximize the impact of your CRM system on your marketing efforts, connect it to other digital marketing tools, such as Google Analytics, to gain detailed information about customer behaviours and how well your marketing initiatives are performing.

In today’s online marketplace, effective digital marketing strategies are essential to create brand awareness, build engagement and trust, and drive long-term success. Implementing the tactics outlined here will help your service business stand out and win.