Professional service businesses encompass a vast spectrum. As experts in making business strategies for different industries, you offer ideas after consulting your B2B clients by focusing on their core business goals. A report from The Business Research Company says that this industry is expected to grow at 9.2% CAGR in the coming years. So as a professional service consultant, now it’s your time to bring your business goals to fruition. This also means tougher competition and managing a more extensive customer base.
The question of managing an extensive customer base only arises when you generate enough quality leads. It is seemingly difficult for a professional service business, but here are 8 surefire tricks to help you ace your lead-generation goals.
Before you start relying on the 7 methods, you need a few things straight. Here’s what you should do first.
Marketing is a lot of work. You cannot expect hundreds of leads pouring in, the minute you create an online presence. Follow the 80-20 rule. 80% of your efforts might generate 20% of leads. So here is what you need to do first.
As a professional service business person, you are offering your expert ideas and solutions to your clients. Ask questions like, what kind of clientele are you targeting to sell your services? How can your services benefit them and make them see your service value? These are the questions that you should be posing, as a beginner in the field.
Begin with surveys on social media platforms like LinkedIn to conduct market research. Categorize the different industries you want to target, learn about their demographics, and understand their preferences. Do an in-depth analysis of how your services can benefit them and present the same as your company’s USP.
Let’s say you are pitching your consulting ideas to your B2B clients. It becomes more effective when you identify the pain points or roadblocks they are currently facing, and what is the lack in their current business process. The more you understand the pain points, the more your solution will benefit them.
You want to take action in enticing your audience to engage with you for business? Start delivering compelling messages. You might want to create a smart portfolio for social platforms for professionals like LinkedIn with a firm message about what you bring to the table. Your portfolio can include your consulting services for different industries, expertise, the unique value you possess, and your pricing chart.
Promote your consultancy service by putting forward your value proposition – a concise statement of how your potential clients can benefit from your business. It communicates the number one reason why your service is crucial for that particular clientele via the company website or other marketing channels.
Now that you have your business core carved out, get ready for these 7 reliable tricks to achieve your lead generation goals.
The content marketing strategy for you is going to be slightly different than other industries. Because you are not just pushing your product benefits but also capil\talizing your expertise in the form of content ideas. Your best bets in marketing through content are blog articles, video tutorials, and case studies. You can produce content that resonates with your audience’s interest and offers informative solutions to the most commonly faced challenges. Research the highly-trafficked keywords and situate them in your content. Blogs and videos are the best to communicate your business benefits and locate your CTA to generate organic leads. Directly upload them from the place, you know people are already looking at – your website.
Granted, you have great content ready at your fingertips. Is that enough to reach your target audience? No. You need to focus on your SEO to up your marketing game, improve website visibility and generate more sales-worthy leads. 70% of marketers think SEO helps you generate comparatively more leads.
How do you start?
Extensive research on the most trafficked keywords on Google, and make a list of what your audience is searching for. Optimize your site content with meta tags with the same keywords.
Include internal links with related posts from your website to make it easy for search engines to result pages to locate your site.
Design your website with optimized keywords, friendly tonality with a familiar yet fast-paced user interface and experience. Make sure your mobile is adaptive as most users use mobile phones to regulate their searches.
Implement WordPress or Gutenberg along with Yoast which helps you check your content with pointers
Since you do business with B2B clients, networking plays a crucial role. Speaking of socializing for business, you just cannot miss LinkedIn’s usefulness. As an independent user or as a member of a group from your industry, you can post your queries, surveys, blogs, or videos to build a connection with them. You can use this platform to collaborate with the group members to explore new ideas, know about the latest trends and overcome tricky client problems. When you connect with people from tangential professional fields, you can use them as referral sources, and post your own relevant content to generate more leads and build familiarity with them. To walk an extra mile you can produce informative videos and talk about the solutions to specific client problems. Videos are much more effective when you want to build familiarity between your audience and your organization.
A business person needs to be firm in his/ her sales pitch, expressing thought leadership. And what better way to do that than hosting webinars? These online events are easier to manage and execute and are the perfect platform to educate and establish your authority message without advertising your professional service, except pitching subtly near the end.
95% of marketers host webinars to generate leads and 76% claim that webinars empower them to build trust amongst audience and increase conversion rates. Start by selecting a topic within your expertise to appeal to your audience. Capture the registrant’s contact information via web forms. You can even follow up with your attendees for future webinars, and boost your sign-up rates upon effective promotional activities.
Your potential B2B clients will support and engage with you in business only after you build a strong connection with them. Referrals are a powerful source of lead generation. You can effectively increase the chances of getting their references or recommendations by delivering unmatched expert solutions.
Once you generate sales-worthy leads, you would want to increase their lifetime sales value. So you must retarget or remarket your services to your existing audience who have already communicated with you. Or they might have interacted with your website or viewed content through blogs or videos. With this retargeting strategy, you can appropriately budget your marketing efforts as customer acquisition 3x times more than customer retention.
You can implement targeted or sponsored ads to reach out to your target audience. When they actively search for consulting service that is relevant to your expertise, Google places your website page at the top of the search results. The best platforms for advertising are Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Start by creating an engaging copy that arrests attention and highlights your company’s USP feature and choose a platform that aptly aligns with your professional service industry. For example, the most eminent platform for you will be LinkedIn, since it houses the largest group of professionals.
You can use visually appealing images, videos, infographics, or any other social posts that are relevant to your advertisements. And when you do generate considerable traffic for your landing page, optimize them for conversion and monitor your performance to improve for betterment.
Is generating multitudes of leads enough for you? You need to capture your leads and convert them for sales for an unhinged cash flow. That is your ultimate goal. Now that depends on how well your sales cycle is streamlined. And this is where you need Zoho One For Professional Services. It is a solution that comes with a flexible interface as a unified operating suite of intuitive applications that helps you manage your business extensively.
You can direct and monitor your system operations under one parent console. Be it managing your leads in the pre-sales stage, monitoring projects in the delivery stage, gaining customer feedback, or reaching out to your target community– Zoho One is the ultimate solution.
Want to know more about this solution? Schedule a 90-minute no-obligation free consultation with our experts right away!