Start with a 'plan for a plan'

Admittedly, it's a little late for New Year resolutions, but at least now you're doing some serious thinking about how to more effectively market your service business.

Here’s a simple three-step “plan for a plan” to help you begin the process:

1. Consider the problem areas in marketing your service. You’re welcome to my free research report: The 7 Most Common Marketing Challenges faced by Service Businesses and How to Recognise Them.

2. Define the important marketing problems your business faces. These are not necessarily the apparently urgent. These are the areas which, if resolved, will have the greatest positive on-going impact on your business.

3. Make a start on dealing with the important problems. You do need to develop and follow a logical plan, but there’s also paralysis by analysis. Sometimes it’s necessary to start in the middle, just to make a start.

Focusing on problems may sound negative, but it’s the key to identifying opportunities.

Is your problem that potential clients don’t know you exist (visibility), that they don’t see the value in what you offer (perception), or that you’re spending so much time dealing with prospects you can’t get any work done (marketing process)?

Is your budget being swallowed up by areas which don’t generate a great deal of business? And is that because of lack of response, poor conversion rate, or both?

Which generates the most business for you — the strategies which you pay to implement, or “word of mouth”?

In your case, does the latter result only from doing good work and providing excellent service, or also from a continuous campaign to ramp up those effects?

Of all the things you do to market your business services or your service business, how many provide leverage by extension into other communication channels, how many can be leveraged by adaptation to other uses, and how many can be leveraged by repetition at less (or no) cost?

Click here to request a free copy of the research report: The 7 Most Common Marketing Challenges faced by Service Businesses and How to Recognise Them.