Marketing Your Services Online

Is it possible to effectively market a service online?

We're talking specifically about services here - no physical products. We often hear that services can't be marketed online. While it may be difficult to market online the amount of competition for services such as home remodelers and cosmetic surgery says this is a lucrative medium.

Certainly services are applicable to the Internet Marketing rule but you need to be careful when applying your marketing message and judging ROI.

It's easy to judge ROI of a point of purchase website. Trap organic and PPC traffic coming in to your pages, analyze purchases for each traffic group and you have your return on investment.

Services are different.

There isn't an online reservation system or final point of purchase in your log files so your tracking tool is unable to measure specific sales. Add the fact that some services have significant price points and an extended sales cycle and you have a real battle measuring ROI.

Marketing services online is easy if you remember 3 major points:

1. Remember your market - For the most part you will do well to expend marketing energy only in those areas where you can deliver your service. A product can be shipped worldwide but a service has a short reach. You can use the Internet to market your service globally but that's rarely applicable to services.

2. Fine-tune your message - This is the easiest step of all. Use a quality analytics tool and respond to the traffic trends in your website. Create a call to action on your main services page and watch the traffic flow (conversion) through that message. Adjust your message if conversions go down or stay flat.

We rely heavily on Unica NetTracker in our office because the tool is the best we've seen at creating conversion scenarios. Find a good analytics tool and measure your conversion. Then go back and adjust your message until you get it right!

3. Relentlessly measure ROI -Roughly 1/3rd of all people who contact us for our services contact us by our online form. That means 2/3rds of our initial contacts occur in a way that is difficult or impossible to measure from our tracking tools.

a. Email - Create an email address specific to the website and offer it as an additional contact option.

b. Telephone - Get a different phone number that only appears on the website.

c. Ask the question - Ask each new client how they found you. Most importantly, write the information down so you can measure it at the end of the year.

Services are highly appropriate for the Internet and your competition is undoubtedly already taking part in the frenzy. Be smart about where you market and tenaciously measure success. Increase budget to measurable returns and cut out of low conversion efforts.