It doesn’t matter what type of service business you operate.
You need to use social media to help with your marketing.
These are the social media marketing tips that you need to know.
Are you looking for some plumber marketing ideas?
Maybe you’re marketing your HVAC business and need a new strategy. Or you’re marketing your furniture business and don’t know where to turn.
Regardless of what service you’re in, social media is the key.
Let me hit you with some stats.
Facebook has damn near 1.5 billion daily active users. That’s a huge audience that you’re not reaching if you don’t have a social media marketing strategy.
Almost 75% of your customers will check social media before making a purchasing decision.
That means that 3 out of every 4 people will look you up on social media before taking a conversation further. What are they going to think about your barren profile that has no followers?
Assuming you even have profiles to begin with.
It’s the 21st century. You can’t stick to the traditional marketing that worked 20 years ago. You need to understand the social media secrets for service businesses that will get you ahead.
Here’s the good news.
Service businesses, by and large, are pretty slow to adopt social media. If you do it now, you’re going to overtake your competitors on one front of the marketing battle.
The question now is simple.
How?
That’s what I’m going to cover with these social media marketing tips.
Secret #1 – Maintain Consistent Branding
Your brand has more power than you realize.
Just ask Warrior Robin Burrill:
- Back in 2017, Robin came to CEO Warrior on a mission. She’d put her remodeling business on hold for three years after a family health crisis. Now, she wanted to get back on track and grow.
- But she had no-one to turn to for guidance. The business had a weak brand that wasn’t attracting clients.
- With CEO Warrior, Robin transformed her business. She rebranded it to Signature Home Services and started a focused social media campaign. Today, the company posts useful and fun content to Facebook every day. It’s on brand and furthers the business’ message.
- Robin’s business has seen a revenue increase of almost 50% since she became a Warrior. She points to her rebranding efforts as key to this transformation.
Your brand is your power in modern marketing. People trust good brands and they buy services from the people they trust.
The key is to create a brand that delivers a consistent message.
In Robin’s case, her business’ Facebook page focuses on providing useful advice to followers. A look at some of the business’ posts from December 2018 shows information on baby-proofing and finding interior designers.
It’s all focused messaging that’s helping her to build a brand around providing extra value to followers.
Here’s the key.
Your social media branding has to be consistent with the messages you’re putting out there.
You can’t just tell clients that you provide more useful information than any other business and then do nothing. They’re going to go to your social media pages and see you’re full of crap.
Establish your brand and its message. Then, use your social media profiles to stay consistent with that brand and message.
Secret #2 – Use Social Media to Generate Calls
Here’s one of the key social media secrets for service businesses.
Your social media pages can become lead generating machines. You just don’t see it yet because you rarely do anything with yours.
You’re struggling to generate calls, just like Glenn Dickey did:
- Glenn Dickey bought Marshall Services with the aim of building a great service business. But he had a key concern. He wasn’t generating the calls that he needed to keep his people busy.
- Using social media effectively, along with other key marketing strategies, helped him to remedy that problem.
- His business has nearly doubled its revenue since he became a Warrior.
Let’s focus on using social media to generate calls. What do you have to do?
Here’s a couple of social media marketing tips that might help:
- Keep your profiles active. Answer questions and get useful content posted on them. A dead page isn’t going to attract any followers.
- Make the content easy to share. A follower may not need what you’re selling with a post. But they may know someone who does.
- Choose the right platform. If you’re serving the consumer market, Twitter and Facebook probably serve your needs best. If you’re a B2B company, get on LinkedIn.
- Don’t be afraid to use ads. If you’ve got some awesome content to share, invest in it a little. Boost it so it grabs people’s attention. Remember, once is never enough when it comes to your marketing. Keep putting your business in front of your followers’ faces.
It’s all about providing value consistently. If you keep doing that, you’ll start generating more calls from social media.
Secret #3 – Demonstrate Your Expertise
What makes you stand out from the dozens of other service providers your clients check out?
It’s your expertise.
That’s an X-Factor that you can take advantage of. In fact, highlighting your expertise is one of the best social media marketing tips.
Warrior Mark Doll highlights the importance of this.
- Mark Doll became a Warrior with CEO Warrior in 2018. In less than a year, he saw his business’ revenue increase from $700,000 to $1 million+.
- Before joining CEO Warrior, Mark followed us through social media. The expertise we shared convinced him to give us a try. And today, he still points to our Facebook Lives as one of the most valuable resources we offer.
Okay, you got me. This isn’t an example of a client using social media for marketing.
It’s how CEO Warrior does it.
But here’s the thing. Demonstrating our expertise using social media convinced Mark to become a Warrior. We’re sure it’s helped other people make the same decision too.
Trust is the key thing here.
Our posts show that we know what we’re talking about. When we post a Facebook Live, we’re actively answering questions from the CEO Warrior community. We are confronting key issues and providing valuable information.
That’s what convinces people to join us.
You can use the same strategy for marketing your furniture business or any other type of service business.
Showcase your expertise with your content to build trust.
Secret #4 – Learn How to Handle Reviews
Social media has made it easier than ever before for people to talk about your business.
If you give someone a service that sucks, it only takes them a couple of minutes to tell you on your Facebook page.
And if they’re telling you, they’re telling every one of your followers too.
Learning how to handle reviews is one of the key social media secrets for service businesses.
I have a three R’s system to help you.
Respond. It doesn’t matter when the client posted the review. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. What matters is that you respond. Show appreciate for good reviews. For bad, don’t excuse the service. Instead, invite the reviewer to talk more about the service and make it clear that you want to do everything you can to fix it.
Relocate. Don’t let a bad review sit there. Once you fix the problem, ask the reviewer to provide an update. This shows you’re making a good faith effort to fix the problem. And it may help you turn a disgruntled client into a raving fan.
Raise. Let your social media reviews set the bar for what you want to achieve. Use them to create a benchmark and base your future service on that.
This just covers the basics.
I go into a lot more detail about handling reviews during this CEO Warrior podcast.
Secret #5 – Make Your Followers Loyal
You want your followers to become rabid fans of your business.
Figuring out how to build that loyalty is one of the key social media secrets for service businesses.
Here’s why.
Your business sucks without loyal customers. You’re just another business alongside dozens of others if you don’t have loyal customers.
But if you have those rabid fans, you’ve got people who’ll go to bat for you. They’re going to tell people who awesome you are, which means you get more clients.
So what are the social media marketing tips for creating those rabid fans?
I’ve covered a few of them above. Handle reviews well and build trust with your content. Give people a reason to keep coming back to you.
Here are a couple more quick social media marketing tips:
- Be human. Use social media to engage people on a personal level.
- Highlight whenever you exceed expectations with new posts to your page.
- Reward people for their loyalty. Build case studies around them to give them more exposure.
The Takeaway
Social media is kind of like unexplored territory for a lot of service businesses.
That creates tons of opportunity for you. With these social media secrets for service businesses, you’re on your way to getting ahead of your competition.
Use your social media presence to build your brand and create trust. Use my three R’s to handle reviews and keep your profile active.
This is just the start though. There’s so much more that you can learn with CEO Warrior.
