15 Marketing Must-Haves for the Onsite Computer Service of the Future

If you own an onsite computer service business, in a perfect world you’d love to get all of your new clients through word of mouth referrals -- and have to expend virtually nothing on marketing and sales. While it’s OK to dream, when those dreams make your business planning delusional, those dreams become a big problem.

So if you’re ready to get realistic about what needs to be done to cost-effectively create awareness among the right decision makers, most likely to become great clients, consider these 15 marketing must-haves for the onsite computer service of the future:

1. Profiles of Your Ideal Clients – Sometimes called personas, do your homework to make sure you know who your ideal clients are, what they worry about, where they get their information from, how they’d go about finding computer help, and how they spend their spare time.
   
    

2. Keyword Research – Now that you know who your ideal clients are, what are the keywords that they are most likely to search for online? Are these keywords being searched for in enough volume to justify targeting? And which keywords do you have a reasonable chance of ranking for on page one (of search engine results pages, SERPs), given the relative competition.

3. Blogging – What should you blog about? For a good starting point, write blog posts about each and every problem that your ideal clients are worrying about. Be very conscious of writing for your ideal clients’ needs first – search engine optimization (SEO) second. Bloggers who get those priorities mixed up (a) sound like idiots, (b) repulse their ideal clients, and (c) have a hard time getting their posts to reach and stay on page one of SERPs. So don’t be that blogger.

4. Free Offers – In order to convert casual blog readers into leads, you need to offer something of value. Your first instinct, as owner of an onsite computer service, may be to dangle a coupon. But a coupon is only attractive to those that have an immediate need for your service – a tiny percentage of your likely readership. To build a much larger leads database consider creating more information-rich, how-to-, thought leadership offers that appeal to readers at the top of the sales funnel – who aren’t yet searching for a solution to buy. Some examples? If you blog about cloud computing for dentists, consider writing a short report or recording a webinar that answers the top questions that dentists have about moving their practices to the cloud.

5. Landing Pages and Thank You Pages – Once you’ve created a few offers, like white papers or webinars, that address the same pain points that your ideal clients have, and that you’re blogging about, create landing page and thank you page sets that require readers to provide their contact information in return for your highly-valuable, content-rich offer. Be careful to only ask for fields which are absolutely necessary, at this earliest stage of the buying cycle. Asking for too much too soon is like proposing on a first date. Also, wherever possible turn off website navigation on the landing page to focus visitors on one goal at a time.

6. Text and Graphics-Based Call to Actions (CTAs) – So I’ve found your blog post on “8 Ways Cloud Computing Grows Dental Practices” by searching Google for “cloud computing in dental offices.” (Note: This example is fictional, for illustrative purposes only.) To convert impressed readers into leads, within the body of the blog post, mention your related white paper once or twice – usually within the meat of the body and at the end. Also in either the top banner area, sidebar or bottom of the blog post, create and insert a graphics-based call to action that entices readers to click. Both the text mention of your white paper and its graphics-based CTA equivalent should open a new browser tab and link directly to your landing page.

7. Lead Nurturing and Follow-Up Plan – To review: the goal of your blog posts is to attract targeted ideal clients. The goal of your CTAs is to convert a percentage of those targeted ideal clients into leads. Once you have those leads, what should you do next? Qualify those leads, to make sure they match or are reasonably close to your ideal client profile. Then follow-up with lead nurturing messages and campaigns in a value-added way. For an onsite computer service, perhaps this means inviting leads to a webinar or offline seminar – where you might offer a discounted offer for new potential clients.

8. Facebook Business Page – While I could write a whole post, or entire e-book, just on using Facebook business pages for a computer service business, what’s most important is to (a) have a presence (including your full contact information, logo, and website links), (b) attract likes from your clients, partners, friends, and family, (c) interact with your followers, (d) promote your blog posts, (e) promote your offers (in moderation), and (f) share other useful content of interest to solving the problems of your ideal clients.

9. Twitter Profile – Again, it’s the same basic strategy as Facebook. Setup a profile. Start building a following. Interact with your followers. And share useful information, from your business and their parties, that solves the problems of your followers and ideal clients.

10. LinkedIn Company Profile – While again, teaching LinkedIn in a bullet-point is a little over-simplifying, but your onsite computer service business needs to be on LinkedIn. You need to grow your followers to match your ideal client profile. And you need to interact with and share relevant content with your followers.

11. Google+ Business Page – Use a similar strategy with Google+ as you do with Facebook and LinkedIn. However at the most basic level, try to group your followers into Circles that allow you to segment your content a little better than a one-size-fits-all approach.

12. YouTube Channel – While Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ all allow you to share links to video content, YouTube is all about video content. So create a channel for your company. Then as your create video content, whether it be webinar or seminar recordings, screencast demonstrations, interviews, or video podcasts, post these to your YouTube channel with relevant Titles, descriptions, and tags. Then share these videos on all of your other social media profiles.

13. Pinterest Brand Page – Just as all Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ all allow you to share links to video content, those four social media channels also allow you to share pictures and other images. But Pinterest is a little different. Just as YouTube is the big kahuna of video in the social media world, Pinterest has very rapidly ascended to similar popularity with pictures and images in the social media world. What should an onsite computer service share on its Pinterest boards? Pictures of your office and your team members. Pictures of your clients’ offices and their employees. Pictures of your company events – trade shows, seminars, and networking parties for example. Pictures of cool new equipment and gadgets that you service. The sky’s the limit. So share relevant content of interest to your ideal clients and the problems that you can solve for them.

14. SlideShare – If you create Microsoft PowerPoint slide decks or other Adobe Acrobat PDF formatted documents, take a few moments to setup a SlideShare profile and begin sharing your slides. To get more mileage out of SlideShare, in addition using relevant keywords in your Titles, descriptions, and tags, try to cross-pollinate SlideShare into your other social media. In the same way that you can embed a YouTube video into a blog post, you can also embed a SlideShare deck into a blog post.

15. Analytics – You may be surprised to hear that no one in marketing, no matter how smart they profess to be, no matter how many bestsellers they’ve written, and no matter how much they charge per hour, has a crystal ball to predict which campaigns will be winners and which will be losers. With limited resources, be humble and be smart about your marketing from the get-go. Every campaign must be measured with tracking links, so you can regularly (generally weekly) review your analytics to see what’s working and what’s not. That way, you can improve results dramatically over time by doubling-down on the winning campaigns and “firing” the losing campaigns.

So if you’ve been wondering where your company should be planning for its marketing future, and how it’s going to create highly-targeted awareness among decision makers most likely to convert into ideal clients, take to heart these 15 marketing musts for the onsite computer service of the future.

What marketing channels and strategies do you think are most relevant going forward? Got an idea for #16? Please share your tips and hints in the Comments box below.

And to follow-through on the tips introduced in this short article, be sure to download your free copy of the special report on the Top 10 IT Marketing Strategies For Consistently Attracting New Business Clients to Your Small IT Business. 

Creative Commons Image Source: flickr gwire