When you grow service businesses, it’s much harder than scaling a product-based brand.
With services, you often have to play the long game and nurture clients over weeks (if not months) before closing a deal.
The more you grow your service business, the more nurturing you need to do. That means more time, energy, and money spent. The more customers you have, the more time you need to work on those relationships.
This can easily eat into the time you have for generating new leads. And without new leads, your growth will plateau.
What’s the way out? You need a service business mindset geared towards setting up the best lead gen systems that are scalable. Otherwise, you’ll limit your growth.
If you’re an entrepreneur looking to grow your service-based business, read on to find out how. We’ll share actionable tips to start implementing today.
It’s All About The Service Business Mindset
As with most things, to grow service businesses, you need more than a can-do attitude. You need a service business mindset.
What’s that? A service business mindset involves you focusing on everything that will set your business apart from the rest. That includes:
- Provide exceptional customer service to clients old and new
- Build strong relationships with clients
- Improve your processes
- Identify new opportunities to add value to your business
- Ask for feedback – and implement it
- Stay ahead of industry trends
- Learn how to use new technology to grow your service-based business.
So, how do you gain a service business mindset? Invest in yourself. As an entrepreneur, you need to be constantly learning and absorbing knowledge. Investing in your own education and development will give you the resources you need to grow your service business exponentially.
If you’re just starting out in owning a business, you can read our top 3 business book recommendations. Investing in your education to build a service business mindset doesn’t have to cost the world.
You can easily loan books and watch Youtube videos to help you along the way. Once you’re earning a good profit, you can hire consultants or attend masterclasses.
Consider Your Service Goals
Who are you trying to target with your service offering?
Growing a service business needs you to target the right people at the right time.
There are two core service goals you want to consider:
1. What problem is your service going to solve?
2. Who is your service for (and not for)?
Your service should focus on solving one problem well. This will help you identify potential clients and market your offering correctly. Remember, it’s also helpful to know who your service is not for – who won’t it help? Who won’t be able to access your service offering? Discounting people helps you hone into your ideal target audience.
By having a clear service goal, you can grow your service business and become the go-to person in your industry.
Provide Better Services
This one is pretty obvious. You can only grow service business brands if your services are useful to your target audience.
Many entrepreneurs set up a service and then focus only on generating leads. While this will help in growing a service business at first, it will quickly plateau.
Constant testing and analysis will give you key information that will help you develop your offer and refine your messaging. With analysis, you can see if there’s been a dip in performance or a drop in customer retention. These metrics will show that something isn’t quite right.
Comparing your services to your competitors will also keep you one step ahead. You can see what they’re offering and consider how you can provide a better service. A high-quality service should be at the forefront of your growth plan.
As we mentioned above, having a service business mindset includes asking for feedback. But it’s what you do with this feedback that will really help you grow.
Speak to your customers and find out what you can do to improve your service. It might be small tweaks or a serious gap that you never considered. Customers that see you’re taking on their feedback are also more likely to stay loyal.
With a great service offering, the clients will follow.
Generate More Leads
Without generating leads, scaling service business brands is impossible. While creating long-standing customer relationships with current clients is important, you also need new leads.
To gain leads, you need a killer marketing strategy to serve ads in all the right places. Whether you work with an advertising agency or you have in-house marketing, you need a solid plan.
Setting up an affiliate program for current clients is a great trick. It’s based on word of mouth and reviews from your real customers.
To create an affiliate program that will grow your service business, you will provide clients with a special code or link. They’ll then pass this on to other entrepreneurs, businesses, and friends.
It’s a win-win, as the customer will earn a commission, and you gain access to new leads. As these leads come from positive reviews from trusted friends, they’re more likely to turn into customers.
Digital marketing is another great way to ensure your marketing efforts don’t go unrewarded. Facebook Ads, SEO, and social media will all help you reach new clients where they already spend their time: Online.
There are 3.5 billion Google searches every day. Digital marketing and SEO are the only ways you’ll get your fair share of leads.
You can learn tons about digital marketing on our blog. To get started, here are a few articles we recommend:
- How to grow your business on social media
- How to grow your business on Instagram
- Spending money on ads – the right way
Increase Profit Through Pricing
It’s much easier to grow service business brands by leveraging clients you already have. You can increase profits by raising the price of your service. A small increase in price should be no problem for your loyal customers. Just don’t increase the price too dramatically or too frequently.
Ask for more money from your current customers (obviously, not so overtly). By nailing down repeat purchases for your services, you’ll increase profits and grow your service business fast.
Work with a pricing strategy. Premium, bundle, and value-based pricing are great strategies for growing a service business.
Premium pricing is based on brand perception. If you provide a luxury service with a focus on a premium brand image, your customers will expect to pay premium prices from the get-go.
Bundle pricing involves upselling different products to your existing customers. You will increase your customer lifetime value without changing the pricing of single services. Bundle pricing is a much more cost-effective way to grow your service-based business.
Value-based pricing is a case of trial and error. When you set up your business, you can test different price points. This will help you see what price is too high, and too low. The price you settle on is based on what your customers are willing to pay for your service. Why charge $2000 for a service, if your customer thinks it’s worth $4000?
You can read more about pricing strategies here.
Manage Pricing
It’s a slippery slope to increase prices in a tough economy. It’s a risk you might not be willing to take if you’re just starting out on your service based business growing journey.
Reducing variable costs will allow you to protect your cash flow. By reducing these costs and limiting your overheads, you can protect your cash flow.
To decrease these costs, outsource jobs like marketing and HR. Agencies are likely to cost less than hiring full-time staff. Remote working can also remove costs associated with business premises.
If you manage to reduce your overheads, you may find you don’t have to increase your pricing at all. Just remember that if you do increase your pricing, you need to make sure you’re offering a quality service.
Go After Partnerships
When you are growing your service business alongside other professionals and teams, you’ll get access to more clients with less effort. Depending on the group, you might offer your services at a discounted rate. While this might seem like a backwards step, the positive feedback you gain will draw in full-paying customers.
You could also work with other service businesses to provide companies with bundle offers. This type of partnership benefits both parties while giving you ‘an in’ with businesses you’ve been unable to reach.
Use the Right Technology
For service-based businesses to grow fast, they need to embrace technology (especially as it continues to advance). Automation lets you engage with your customers and clients more consistently than if you were manually doing all of your tasks.
Why? Because you can scale automation. There is only so much one person can do manually. It’ll take jobs off of your to-do list, so you spend less time managing clients. That’ll give you more time to generate leads.
Reduce your workload while boosting productivity with the right technology. One of our favorite automation technologies we use at Scaling With Systems is Zapier. (Check out this article next, to learn how to use it in your business).
Technology can help you communicate with clients faster, maintain relationships with leads, manage internal workflows, and so much more.
Build Good Relationships with Your Customers
Building good relationships with customers should be at the forefront of growing a service business. Without your customers, your business can’t succeed.
You need to be taking time to nurture those relationships. Show appreciation to your most loyal customers, take on feedback, and offer rewards.
Good relationships with customers will also help with generating leads. A happy customer is bound to tell their friends and colleagues about the services they rate. And word of mouth is by far the most trusted advertising technique. 92% of cosumers trust word of mouth recommendations over any other type of advertisement.
It’s possible to grow service businesses while solely focusing on lead generation. But without giving your clients a reason to stay, you’re constantly at risk of losing them.
Grow Your Service-Based Business: FAQs
What are the best ways to market a new service based business?
Marketing a new service-based business is much harder than marketing a product. But with strong SEO and a killer digital marketing strategy, you can grow your service business. Email marketing is a great way to market your business if you already have subscribers. Networking with your target audience and industry experts can also help.
The easiest way, however, is to use word of mouth. And that means you should focus on giving your small number of customers exceptional service, so they’re inclined to tell others.
What are the 5 growth strategies?
The five growth strategies are Market penetration, Market development, Product development, Diversification, and Acquisition.
How do you grow a service based business?
To grow service businesses, you need to have the right mindset, be clear on your target audience and set service goals. Using a combination of marketing techniques, you can generate leads and grow your service business. Take on feedback from your customers to ensure your service is the best it can be.
Grow Service Based Business: Wrapping Up
To grow service businesses is no easy feat. But our company is proof it can be done. With great customer service, a strong mindset, and an excellent marketing strategy, scaling service businesses can be done fast.
With the help of Scaling With Systems, it can be even faster. Book a consultation call with one of our team today to see how we can create client acquisition funnels that will grow your service-based business.