A Super Simple Marketing Strategy For Service Providers
Nearly every founder I speak to is overwhelmed by marketing. It’s easy to feel inundated, there’s so many different techniques - how do you know which is the right one for your brand. Here’s an easy way to break this down and think about your marketing strategy to balance efforts.
Understanding the Market
At any given time, there are 3-5% of people looking for your product or service right now. We call these Hot List Prospects. This is typically who you focus on in direct sales - the quick wins you can get right away.
Then there’s 40-60% that are interested but not looking to buy for the next 6-18 months (varies depending on your industry). These are Prospects, the leads you should be cultivating with social content, emails, etc.
And then there are the 35% who are just not interested. We call these Referral Sources. Just because they’re not looking for your product doesn’t mean they can’t refer you to other customers.
Marketing Simplified
Now, building out a marketing strategy is about understanding which audience you’re looking to market to. Think of it like a stool, with three different legs:
The first leg is outbound marketing (which is direct sales, networking, cold or warm emailing, etc) where the effort is outwardly focused. This is where you can get some quick wins with your right-now buyers - the Hot List Prospects.
The second leg is inbound marketing this is the strategy that’s meant to drive interest & traffic to you via PR, content marketing, influencer marketing, email newsletters, etc. The goal is to nurture your Prospects here until they are ready to buy.
And the third leg is referrals which is somewhere in the middle of these two. Referral sources can be great but too many of you service providers depend on them to generate business. If this is an area you can be better at, consider how you can cultivate more leads for your business with programs or incentives.
Balance Your Marketing Efforts
When you are only utilizing one of these options, you are putting all of your eggs into the proverbial marketing basket. You’re balancing on just one leg of your stool. What happens if you lose that leg? Yikes, leads stop coming and business takes a pitfall. What you should do instead is balance all three approaches with a strategy that makes sense for your brand strategy and audience. By the way, this is why we ALWAYS start with strategy before we ever work on anything for brands.