If you’ve worked in marketing for any length of time, you’ll know and appreciate that every sector comes with its own unique challenges. What works well for one sector, might not necessarily work for another, and understanding the nuances of this is vital to profitable success.
So what about service businesses? Clearly this is taking a bit of a broad stroke as there are many companies and specific services that fit into this statement (with an absolute ton of variation for each!), but essentially what we are talking about here is any company that provides expertise and knowledge to help their clients or clients businesses.
Compared to a tech business or a SAAS company, service businesses require a different approach to customer acquisition. Sales journeys can be long and complex, and acquiring the right type of new business is often less than simple.
This is our roundup of top advice from working with a multitude of clients in this area, and what we’ve found to be the most critical points to consider.
Goals:
First and foremost you must define your goals and consider these carefully. Depending on your sales cycle and the complexity of your service, this could vary from a cost per signed new customer right through to generating top of funnel awareness.
What we have learnt time and time again, is that the higher value your service (and typically the longer your sales cycle), the harder and more expensive it is to acquire leads closer to purchase.
If PPC or paid social is a new channel for your business, my best advice is to start with a very simple and clear objective and test from there. This could be something like growing your email database, or even getting views on your case studies from key target companies.
Obviously everything has to eventually come back to signed revenue and cash in the bank, but do consider your goals carefully.
Channel selection:
As with selecting your goals and KPIs, you really need to work out what channels are going to deliver the best results for you. Do not fall into the trap of picking platforms because everyone else is using them, really work back from your goals and make your decisions from there.
To provide an example; the classic platforms for use in B2B marketing are usually LinkedIn Ads and Google Ads. Both can be highly effective, but depending on your business you may want to start with one over the other, or prioritise spend towards one.
LinkedIn is generally extremely effective at putting your brand and content in front of potential buyers, but it’s very hard to know if someone is actively in the market. Conversely, Google Ads allows you to advertise to people looking for exactly what you want, exactly when they want it, but it’s very hard to qualify that traffic.
You must also consider your budget vs expected cost per acquisition. Again, talking very broad strokes here but if your budget is under £5k per month, then you’ll probably struggle to get traction on any platform.
I’m always a huge fan of picking your battles, and it’s always far better to do a great job of one thing than an average job of many.
Creative:
When planning your ad creative, there are a few things to work out that are going to dramatically increase your chances of success.
The first thing is that generally speaking, ad creative in professional services tends to be extremely dull. If you can work out a way to inject some personality and make your ads interesting, you’ll instantly stand out from the crowd.
The second thing is to plan for a variation of ad formats and messaging. When identifying the best creative for your business, you won’t really know what’s best until you’ve tested everything you possibly can.
This could and should include thought leadership type content, illustrations and images, customer testimonials and a range of messaging. The more you can test, the more chance you’ve got of achieving the very best results.
Automated bidding:
Be warned here! Every platform you choose to experiment with is going to do its absolute best to encourage you to use automated campaign types and automated bidding.
As we’ve discussed many times on this blog before, B2B and automated bidding don’t always match up in the best way. The reason for this is that conversion volumes tend to be far lower than B2C and automated bidding thrives on volume. When running ads for professional services, volumes of conversions are usually much lower than other businesses.
I’m not saying never use automated bidding, but you have to be aware that ‘best practice’ doesn’t always apply and you need to test and proceed with caution.
CRM data tracking:
My final point and piece of advice is to make sure your CRM tracking is absolutely rock solid. Simply tracking form completions on a website is not enough. You need a complete view on what happens next, with clarity on KPIs such as cost per MQL and attributed pipeline & revenue back to your activity.
If you can’t see the above, then you could very easily be investing your marketing towards generating junk leads and huge amounts of sales inefficiency.
It’s amazing how many companies don’t have robust CRM tracking (in relation to paid media investment) in place and are essentially flying blind. Ideally you’ll be able to track sales performance back to platforms, campaigns, keywords and ad creative, thus showing you exactly what’s working and what is not.
Very much hope the above is helpful and as always, if you need some help then please do get in touch for a chat!
