Inbound marketing strategy
for business services

For small’ish (less than ~200 employees) B2B services businesses.

Interested in inbound marketing for your business services company?

Here are some important elements to consider as you go through your journey.

Are you solving real problems? Do you know what they are? Do you know who for?

You might say: “Of course we’re solving real problems!”.

I’d probably say something like: “Great. Now describe those problems to me. What are the most valuable things you’re doing for your customers? Not the solutions to those problems, but the problems themselves.”

You need to be able to understand and describe those problems in the ways your customers describe them and be able to talk about how you can address those problems.

How can you make their lives better?

Do you know what triggers your customers to look for help?

You’ll want to. If not, you should figure it out. Triggers might include things like:

  1. We’ve got a new company initiative to X.
  2. X has been too painful for too long. Y just happened. We need to do something different.
  3. We’ve got a new VP of X and they want to do this because Y.
  4. Our customers are forcing us to do X because Y.
  5. X is no longer supported.

You should be using this information to influence both your messaging and your thought leadership content.

How do you differentiate yourself? – the importance of the niche

You need a niche. Perhaps more than one. Here’s why:

People have easy access to information (i.e., the internet). How are they supposed to decide who to get help from if they can’t see any notable differences between you and the numerous other companies out there that do what you do?

You must separate yourself from the masses. No, that doesn’t mean you have to be the only company that does what you do (caution flag if you’re the only. Why is that?), but someone should be able to look at your website and easily distinguish relevant factors about why they might use your services as opposed to another company’s services.

It’s worth pointing out that there’s a decent chance that the niche you start with won’t be the niche you end with. You need to iterate as you learn from market feedback.

A few ways to consider separating your company (not all of these apply in every situation):

  1. The specific problems you solve.
  2. The depth of knowledge you have on a particular topic.
  3. The platforms you leverage.
  4. The industries you focus on.
  5. The personality / culture of your company.
  6. The trust you can build on your website.
  7. Your approach to solving problems.
  8. Your location.

Focus.

You need to figure out how to convey this niche to your potential customers. You don’t want to overwhelm them. That’s making them do more mental work. That’s a bad thing.

If you spread your energy out over all the various ways you can help, you’ll likely have a hard time rising above the noise in any single niche.

Focus.

Content marketing – Are you interested in, and capable of, sharing your uncommon opinions and knowledge?

If you’re lacking interest or capability, you’ll probably need to work on both if you want a long-term viable business.

Why?

A few reasons:

  1. You’re selling things that don’t exist yet (services). You need to show people that you have a clue what you’re talking about. You can do this through proof points (e.g. case studies), and teaching (e.g. articles).
  2. People expect to be able to find what they’re looking for, and you want to engage them.
  3. AI is making it more important to showcase uncommon perspectives / opinions.

The good news about getting better at developing content is that you can often leverage it for other marketing methods (e.g. social, email, account-based). It’s fundamental to explaining your perspective to your customer base.

Performance indicators to track progress

There are quite a few performance indicators for business services companies to consider. My favorite indicators (in rank order) are usually:

  1. # of sales-ready leads
  2. Quality of sales-ready leads
  3. Organic ranking for topics of interest

This small number of indicators tends to keep you laser-focused on what usually matters most to services businesses from a marketing standpoint.

How to get started

You need to build an inbound marketing machine.

It’s hard work.

It’s not magic, but it’s also not a mechanical go-through-the-motions sort of process.

There are many complex interactions, partially observable information, and human decision making.

At a high level, the general steps look something like:

  1. Find a niche.
  2. Create / update content.
  3. Test.
  4. Assess market feedback.
  5. Iterate / pivot / refine.

Next steps

If you want help along your inbound journey, check out RocLogic’s services and reach out if you’d like to chat.

If you’re deep in learning mode, check these out:

Let’s chat