Using the Internet to create a good service reputation

Everyone realises that Internet Marketing is now vitally important to business, but how should it be used when your business depends on reputation for referrals and enquiries? Nick Henley of online marketing specialist Blended Content, explains what you need to think about.

Businesses offering specialist or personal services know that a large proportion of their work comes from referrals. One satisfied customer tends to lead to another as word-of-mouth recommendations are made between mums at the school gate, friends over a beer or colleagues at work. Networking plays a big part too, with a need to attend or create local small scale, but personal, events.

These service businesses depend on creating a great experience for the customer. The professionals providing the service, who are also often the proprietors, know that personal contact, a friendly and professional demeanour and going the extra mile count for a lot.

So how can Internet Marketing help these businesses?

From a user perspective, poorly planned Internet marketing can be associated with an email box full of spam mail, frustrating searches, and a huge number of faceless businesses to consider from search results. It can put you off.

But managed well it can also be associated with finding what you are looking for quickly and easily, being able to understand the service area in general, and being able to identify one or two businesses worth consideration and which ‘feel’ right for you.

This type of Internet experience seems much more relevant to a business that depends on reputation and word-of-mouth recommendation. So how do you create this feeling online?

Reflect the customer’s decision making process in your marketing plan

The best way to ensure that Internet marketing works for service businesses is to ensure that it helps prospective customers make a decision and take action in an appropriate and timely way.

Online marketing depends more than ever on being relevant, as personal as possible, and creating attractive offers in exchange for people’s time and attention.

When making a decision to do something, people typically go through a number of key stages of thought and action. Keeping these states in mind when organising your marketing, including your Internet marketing, means you will meet the customer’s needs better; that way your marketing message gets listened to and is more relevant.

Typical stages of customer thought and action

A typical customer might go through these stages of thought and behaviour, so be careful to provide the right information and the right level of personalisation as interest changes.

• Pre-contemplation – prospective customers haven’t thought about using this service and certainly haven’t looked for information about it, but they may have overheard something or seen something in the past.
   
• Contemplation – some change of situation in their life triggers a higher level of interest or they become aware of a particular service and what it does for people. They are now thinking of doing something in the near future (weeks or months); visiting a health specialist or addressing a personal issue.
   
• Preparation – they are preparing to take action in the immediate future (hours or days) and just need to decide exactly who they would like to approach about a service.
   
• Action – people move forward to engage with a particular service provider. The thinking and indirect enquiry is over and they take action.
   

What is relevant when?

There are so many ways in which the Internet can be used for marketing and advertising, so how do you choose what to do?

Well everyone has a limited budget, so identifying what is most important is critical. But many Internet marketing options don’t need to cost a fortune if you’re prepared to spend a little time creating and managing them. Here are some pointers of what should work best for service businesses. The important thing is to integrate them altogether.

Write a targeted article and place it online

Identifying customer segments that are most likely to need one or more of your services allows you to focus your message and to place it in the most relevant places. For the customer it means they will associate you with that specialist service area.

For example, if women expecting babies are most likely to want relaxing foot massages due to carrying excess weight, then you can talk to them about the massage services your business offers. But how?

Write an article about foot massage for expectant mothers and offer it not only to local newspapers and local pre-natal groups, but also offer it to online baby groups, online health portals and place the article with PR services; including links to your site of course.

Create and publicise a community event

If massage and skin care is your thing, then arrange to offer massages at the PTA organised school fete, providing free foot massage to any expectant mother attending the event. You could even include this offer in your article to help publicise the fete and your presence.

That will get people talking at the event, but then use the pictures you take at the event to create an online news story and again send a PR release and pictures, with links to your website, to the press and to online news channels.

Be found when people start searching

The most important thing at the contemplation stage when customers are gathering information is for your business to be found high up among the results relevant to their search.

But it is important to remember that they are not necessarily looking for your business at an early stage. Instead they are finding out about the possible types of solution.

At this stage they will be looking for advice and expertise, as well as testimonials from other people, about how they can find a solution. This is where the Internet has a clear advantage over other sources of information and where user generated content is so useful. Almost instantaneously people can search for a solution and can learn about the types of services available and their benefits.

This is where specialists and professionals can really help prospective customers. By providing wide ranging advice to help people understand an aspect of their lives, you not only help them progress towards a decision, but also introduce yourself as an expert; a trusted source of information.

Search engine optimisation of your business website and marketing materials linking to your site (PR stories, articles etc) means that you will appear more relevant to the key words and phrases people typically search for.

It also opens up the possibility of using social media. Having a business-related but not direct business conversation with people likely to be interested in your services at some time in the future is definitely useful. It reflects the sort of conversation people have at the school gate or at work where advice is sought and anecdotes exchanged.

Think what subjects you can talk about with authority and relevance and create a tweet in Twitter, a Facebook page or a blog. If you can’t write, get someone who can to help write and do this regularly so that you gain trust within an online community.

Create a website experience to enhance your reputation

Although online marketing seeks to place content about you and your business widely throughout the Internet, it is still important to have an effective website. All articles, reviews, press releases, interviews or advertising should include a link to your website. So it had better be well designed to meet the needs of your business and to channel enquiries to you.

If referral and word-of-mouth recommendation is important then you can be sure that 9 out of 10 people receiving the recommendation will want to find out more about your services before calling. Just like a well-designed brochure, your website needs to be attractive, to inform and to encourage direct contact or enquiries.

But for a specialist personal service business it also has to make people feel something – your site needs a personality. Besides being informative and providing physical links back to you and your business the site needs to make people feel you are approachable and to ease them closer to making a call or enquiring via email.

Provide material for your fans to distribute

Once you have found a number of customers and provided a special service experience then you can help them to tell others about you.

Creating a website with clear descriptive links to sections detailing your specific services will allow you to send information by email in the form of links back to your site. Do the thinking and hard work for your satisfied customer, but writing the email you’d like them to send to a contact or friend who might need the same service.

Enhancing the personal referral not replacing it

Importantly, creating the right range of information, stories and links online, both in important social media spaces and on your own site will support the referral process. If you have these links and materials ready for them, then the conversation in which the introduction is made can be followed up by a simple email with details of your article, your event or your services.

The role of your website is not to replace referral mechanisms, but instead to turbo-charge them and to make referrals more likely and more successful for your business.

Nick Henley is a veteran online marketing specialist working with service businesses. He runs an integrated brand communications consultancy called Blended Content, which as the name suggests plans, designs and creates content for brand marketing. Visit www.blendedcontent.co.uk or email nick@blendedcontent.co.uk for more details.

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