Planning and Management of Service Marketing
How to market your service
business
First step: Business objectives
Where is your business now and
where do you want it to go over the next few months / year?
To define this, you may use the SWOT
analysis test which will help you identify the strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities & threats of your business. Make sure your objectives are
SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bound).
Step 2: Marketing
objectives
Ask yourself; what are MY marketing
objectives?
They could be any of the following;
1. to create awareness of your service,
2. to generate customer leads for your
service,
3. to increase website clicks,
4. to get more referrals for your
service etc.
Step 3: Discovering
your target audience
Your target audience is the people who
will buy / purchase your services. Be as detailed as possible when drawing out
your target audience, include demographics (age & gender) and
psychographics (interests and behaviours).
Step 4: Key marketing
messages
With each marketing plan, you need to outline
what is your key marketing messages are. Think about what differentiates you
from your competitors. What is your unique value proposition?
This is the message that will form the
theme for your marketing communications. It could be centred around the
affordability of your service / product, convenience or even quality.
Step 5: Brand
positioning
This is basically what you want to be
known for. Take these examples
·
The best coffee house in particular city /
country.
·
Best service provider of a particular town /
city.
·
Exotic travel destinations for young travellers
·
The most efficient tax consultant in city.
Now it’s your turn, how will you
position your brand so that it’s attractive to your target audience?
Step 6: Deciding which
marketing channels to use
How / where will you reach your
customers effectively? This could be via Traditional Marketing Channels, Facebook,
Twitter, email, your company’s website or YouTube. It doesn’t have to be
entirely online, think of where your target audience is. Other marketing
channels include SMS, posters, and word of mouth.
Step 7: Your content
marketing plan.
Now you know what marketing channels
you’ll be using, what kind of content will you share on them?
Think about utilising lots of images of
your product / service. How to use your service, tips and informative
information about your service. Articles and blog posts related to your
service. Also, consider how much content you will publish or broadcast and how frequently?
Step 8: Keeping in
touch with your customers.
The most effective keep in touch
strategy for the service industry is email marketing (online marketing). Grow
your list of customers by collecting their email addresses and purpose to send an
organisation’s newsletter to them.
Step 9: Evaluating your
efforts
How many people do I want to reach on
Facebook? What’s the number of new sign-ups I am targeting at the end of each
month? How many monthly website visits do I want? How many people do I want to
read my e-newsletter every month?
In summary
Before you start typing down a marketing
plan, you need to know
·
What you
want to achieve with your marketing
·
Who you want your marketing
efforts to reach?
·
Why you
want to market your services
·
How you
will be marketing your services
·
When you
will implement your marketing plan
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