Six Steps To Success

Marketing Service Companies

At Diginius we work with companies across many different industries, but most businesses are either in the service or product sectors. As we work with clients to devise strategies and solutions to grow business online, there are several reoccurring themes that tend to achieve solid results and high return on investment.

Marketing Service Companies

Service Companies

Service companies cover a range of industries, from healthcare to legal to accounting, consulting, IT support, advertising agencies to call centers and window cleaners. They all have a common desire to grow their customer base, but sales cycles are often long and involve sophisticated marketing efforts, quotes and proposals, etc. It is often difficult to assign marketing efforts and advertising spend to final sales and therefore judge return on investment.

Furthermore the activities and tools to optimize the sales process take some organization and testing in order to align with the general operations of the business.

Whilst every organization has to work out their specific approach, at Diginius after extensive testing we have found that there are some general approaches that tend to provide solid results for driving, tracking and converting sales leads. These include the following steps:

1) Search campaigns – search is the medium that is used in order to research by the vast majority of those seeking solutions with an estimated 97% of all purchase decisions originating online. Businesses need an aligned search solution to continuously deliver leads is essential in growing business and discovering customer needs – paid search is controllable and scalable, whilst optimization for search engines of the company site is cost effective and key to being found.

2) Social media strategy – a sensible social media strategy in the social networks that your customers use can keep you in front of the eyes of your customers and provide a way to communicate and grow your influence. However, social channels can consume inordinate amounts of time and energy with diminishing return so the strategy must be considered and controlled.

3) Email marketing – email is generally the most cost effective method to communicate with your customers and drip feed information. The importance of this channel cannot be overstated.

4) Live Chat – companies that use live chat tend to get a much higher engagement level with the traffic on their site, as this is a non-confrontational way to communicate with prospects who may not want to pick up the phone and call or fill out a form or email. The staffing of this service does not need to be intensive as many of the processes can be automated and fit within existing workflows

5) Phone tracking – service companies often have 50-80% of their new business come over the phone. If this is not tracked back to the source (such as organic or paid traffic) it is impossible to attribute leads to the correct source and therefore allocate efforts correctly moving forward. There are simple solutions that can be deployed to simply track phone efforts to the exact ad and keyword.

6) IP data – one of the potential golden nuggets of higher returns is making sense of those companies who are interacting with your website, but not necessarily contacting you. IP intelligence includes matching the IP address of the company so that you can better identify traffic. For example if you know that a company clicked on one of your ads, looking at 4 pages and spent 12 minutes on your site, your sales or marketing staff may want to follow up with an email or phone call as you know they are in the market. Adding this level of intelligence into your sales processes can significantly increase the return on ad investment.

As a result of the needs of our clients, Diginius has developed Diginius Insight, a sales and marketing platform designed to provide information back to the business covering online operations and the competitive environment as well as automating processes and providing the infrastructure to compete effectively in the online market. If you would like to see a demonstration of the Diginius Insight software or discuss your online strategy, please get in touch.

Written by Nate Burke

Chester Yang is the Microsoft Program Manager at Diginius with a background in economics and quantitative research.  

At Diginius, Chester focuses on nurturing partnerships with PPC agencies and integrating marketing and sales solutions.