Marketing strategy for launching a new service

Where not to focus the bulk of your energy

It’s very easy to waste a lot of time and energy when marketing your new service.

There are several marketing methods that probably won’t help you (much) in the beginning.

Inbound is probably not your primary starting point

RocLogic is a huge fan of inbound, but it’s not always appropriate (see pros and cons of inbound). When you do inbound marketing, your potential customers are usually strangers. This scenario lacks a lot of trust. To compensate for this, you need a solid amount of experience within the realm that you’re trying to sell. That means you want to have various proof points (e.g. case studies, metrics, capabilities).

When you’ve not done much of the sort of work you’re pursuing (i.e. the new service you’re trying to launch), proof points will naturally be lacking.

On top of that, the more mature the market is you’re trying to play in, the stronger your proof points need to be. In a fledgling market, your potential customers will likely have lower expectations.

The gotcha here is that you probably do want to start laying the foundation for the organic side of inbound marketing (SEO).

Check out this inbound readiness self-assessment as a data point. Be sure to think about your answers within the context of the new service you’re trying to launch.

SEO – do just enough to start chipping away

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not a focus area (see Pros and cons of SEO for more detail). However, you do want to start laying the foundation. You’ll want to start chipping away at building up your authority in the background because you’ve got such a long road (years) ahead of you. There are two main pieces to laying this foundation:

1. contributing to off-site content
2. developing good thought-leadership content.

There’s admittedly a chicken and egg problem here, because why would you want to put in the effort if the service is a flop, but if the service isn’t a flop, you may end up years behind the curve, and in some cases, unable to catch up.

Trade shows

This isn’t a strong candidate for marketing / selling a new service.

• It’s expensive (not so much the cost of having a booth, but the cost of prep, travel, labor).
• You’ll be talking to strangers mostly.
• And you’re asynchronous to the buyer’s timing.

You’ll likely learn some things if you put yourself out there, but this would not be my favorite approach.

Attending trade shows (not exhibiting, attending as an attendee) can give you some great tidbits of insight into your target customer base, the ecosystem, and the competitive landscape.

Social media

Start by asking yourself these 3 questions:

1. Is what you’re offering very compelling to the group of people you’re trying to reach?
2. Can you target them directly?
3. Is the market for this service a relatively blue ocean?

If you answered yes to all these questions, then feel free to give it a shot, but I wouldn’t generally put a lot of eggs in this basket. It’s very noisy out there and the algorithms tend to reward flashy / emotion-evoking content. If you do dabble within this realm, you’ll probably want to select 1-2 platforms (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) to start with, otherwise your efforts may be spread too thin.

Email

Who are you going to email? If you already have an appropriate list that’s aligned with your customer profile (persona), then this may be worth exploring, but if you’re really early stage you’re likely better off strategically approaching existing customers in a very targeted way (i.e. account-based engagement).

Paid Search

Paid search (e.g. Google Ads) can be a great method to test the market to see if you’ve crossed over the trust barrier.

Unfortunately, if you’ve not crossed the trust barrier, then you’ve just validated that you’ve not gained enough experience. You need more.

Account-Based Engagement

Account-based engagement (ABE, aka ABM (Account Based Marketing) and ABS (Account Based Selling)) is a huge beast. Of these three terms, I like the term ABE most because it captures the reality that this isn’t a marketing-specific approach, nor a sales-specific approach. It’s an organizational approach.

The core of the concept is that you:

1. start by identifying your ideal target customers (with something called an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)),
2. create a list of ideal accounts,
3. focus your effort on growing your business as much as possible within those accounts.

An important aspect of ABE is that you’ve got existing accounts (those that are currently customers) and new accounts (those that are of interest but not yet customers).

For bootstrapping, you’ll want to mostly start with existing accounts. Why? Because you haven’t proven yourself enough at this point with your new service to approach strangers, but you do have a relationship (with corresponding trust / credibility) with your existing customers (see the section on “start with your existing customers” for more on this).

Okay, so now here’s where to focus……

Start with existing customers.

A lot of blood, sweat and tears went into building trust with your existing customers.

It’s time to leverage that trust.

Which of your existing customers have the need for your new service based on what they do / make?

There are two likely scenarios:

1. Overload – your customer already has the internal capabilities to accomplish what your new service provides, but they likely get overloaded with too many projects sometimes. That’s a potential opportunity for you.
   1. What do they do then?
   2. Is there already someone providing that service externally?
2. Not a core capability – If your customer doesn’t already have the capability in-house, that could be an opportunity for you, but proceed cautiously here.
   1. Why don’t they do it in-house?
   2. How have they been getting the job done when the need arose in the past?
   3. Is there already someone providing them the service you’re interested in providing?
   4. Does their need come up very infrequently? That could still be a good opportunity for you to build your capability.

Some things you’ll want to start doing:

1. Identify / designate a new-service lead at your company. This is the main person that all things related to this new service will funnel back to, whether it’s technical, business, marketing, or sales-related. This person doesn’t need to do everything, but they do need to be the primary person that knows the most about the new service from all angles. This is your SME (Subject Matter Expert). You can have helper-SMEs as well, but you need one primary.
2. Create a list of existing customers that are a good fit for your new service (anywhere from 4-10 companies). The size of this list should depend on the size of your organization and how aggressively you want to grow this new service.
3. Have your project lead for each customer introduce your SME(s) to that customer to start building a relationship before there’s a need.
4. When the timing is right, have the SME ask for a chat or a site visit. They need to start learning about how they can be of most value when the time is right.
5. Have the SME share proof points (e.g. case studies) with your customer.
6. Have your project lead get more curious whenever they’re with the customer doing the work you already do for them. Ask things like: “What’s that over there? I noticed….”.
7. Check out How to sell to existing customers for more thoughts.

If you can’t get existing customers interested in your new service, this should be a red flag. It’s way harder to sell to strangers than people you already have a relationship with!

Start thinking about who your ideal customer is and what problems you’re solving for them

This isn’t a one-time event. It’s a continuous iterative process of refinement. It’ll evolve, especially as you bootstrap. No time like the present to take a first cut at this.

How well can you describe your ideal customer with observable characteristics?

Capture these characteristics for starters (add/remove as you see fit):

1. Role & titles
2. Skills
3. Education
4. Company size
5. Company maturity
6. Types of products they tend to make or types of services they offer
7. Top ~3-4 industry verticals they tend to live in

Then, from a less observable standpoint, how well do you understand the problems you can help them solve? This includes their primary pain points and jobs they need to get done that would indicate they could use your help?

Going through this process can help solidify your thinking about whether you’re talking to the right people about the things they care most about.

Engage your network – introductions

What relationships do you have that are connected to the people you want to do more work for?

You need to have a strong relationship with this person (because they need to trust you), and they need to have a decent relationship with the potential customer that you want access to (because you want them to pass along a piece of that trust to you).

1. Do your research. Find out who your connections have connections to that you’d like to connect with. Create a list of 1-4 people for each of your connections.
2. Be ready to give them a reason to connect you. Create a draft intro for them to decrease the amount of work they have to do. The less work your connection has to do to make an intro, the more likely they are to connect you.
3. When you get the introduction, be clear about your intent, and be succinct. Your intro should not be a sales pitch, unless maybe if you already have a solid understanding of the potential customer’s problem. First seek to understand their problems and if/how you can help. If there’s a true and obvious need that you’re well-positioned to help with, you stand a chance.
4. Depending on the direction the conversation goes, be ready with proof points to share to support validation.

Keep in mind that this isn’t an unsolicited referral.

It’s an introduction.

An introduction to someone that didn’t ask for help, so your probability of success is generally going to be lower than for someone who was sent to you unsolicited, with a need in hand.

Explore partner relationships

You have to figure out really early on how you’re going to add value to the partner, not how the partner is going to help you. If you really want to get their attention, start bringing opportunities to them.

For example, if they’re an established company and you’re leveraging one of their products in your service, there’s a decent chance they could be naturally motivated to help you sell your service (assuming you meet their criteria for competence, and they have a need that’s not being met).

Another example of a potentially decent partnership is when your service helps the partner complete a solution that they aren’t able to otherwise. The caution flag with this one is asking yourself: why don’t they have this capability internally so that they can offer the complete solution?

Things to consider with partners:

1. Content – Does it make sense to share some case studies with them? Point them to your landing page?
2. Active participation – Is there a way to actively participate in a real partnership? How can you help them be more successful?
   1. Participate in demos / facilitate the sales process – you’ll gather great feedback on what potential customers do and don’t care about.
   2. Participate in a webinar or two – this can be useful for a couple reasons. It forces you to add clarity to your messaging and thought process, and highlights gaps in your content. It also lets you piggyback off of a potentially larger, more well-known company.

Offer it up for free (or at a loss)

Yep, if you really want to play in this new world, you may need to actually do the work for free the first couple times.

Money is a barrier in decision making.

Maybe there’s a pilot project that you can do in exchange for a fully supported case study.

Free may be a bit extreme depending on the service you’re offering, in which case maybe you could just do the work at-cost or even take a hit in order to gain the experience.

Content Marketing – Are you creating the right info?

Content is important. You need the right info at your fingertips so that when you do manage to engage a potential customer, you’ll be able to coherently and succinctly explain why you think you’re well-positioned to help.

There are ~3 main pieces of content you need to start building your online presence:

1. Landing page – this is your home base for everything related to this new service – are you clear on your value prop? How do you describe how you can help someone you connect with? Why should they consider you for this work? How are you different from other companies they may be considering?
2. Case studies – if you don’t have any, that’s a really big caution flag for you. You’re really going to have to dig in with those that already trust you.
3. Thought leadership content – basically this is content that’s going to teach people about some of the useful things you know about that can help them. Be careful. Thought leadership content is a long game. You’re unlikely to attract sales-ready leads with this method at this stage of the game. However, you do want to start laying the foundation for your niche (see why you need a niche and niche selection obstacles).

Next Steps

So now what?

1. You need to decide if you’re still interested in launching your new service after reading this (it really is a lot of work).
2. Start creating baseline / foundational content to start building your online presence.
3. Create a manageable list of existing customers, connections, and partners to start reaching out to. Give yourself some deadlines.
4. Don’t let perfection get in the way of the good enough. Get into the trenches and go.

Feel free to reach out if you’d like someone to help guide you along your journey.

In learning mode? Check these out:

• Why you need a niche – and what to do about it
• Inbound Marketing Readiness Self-Assessment Calculator
• Marketing for custom software development services companies
• Digital marketing for engineering companies
• Pitfalls of a growth goal as a business strategy
• Pros and cons of inbound marketing
• The problem with marketing plans for small B2B companies – and what to do instead
• Content Marketing for Engineering Companies
• Creating a marketing strategy for your engineering company
• How to Sell Engineering Services
• How to market a B2B service – strategy tips
• How to bootstrap your marketing (for early-stage companies)