In this blog post, I'm giving you a done-for-you marketing plan for service businesses because being a service-based business owner sometimes feels impossible. You’re working in the business, so much, serving your clients. That it can often leave less and less time for working on your business. On things like your systems, your admin, your messaging, and very very importantly, your marketing.
So what can happen is you get busy and booked (yay!) but then you hit the brakes on marketing. Those client projects wrap up and you're left panicking because you don’t have a backlog of potential clients waiting to fill those spots. It can be an endless feast and famine cycle.
What’s most important is finding a marketing that’s going to WORK and won’t take up all your time.
So in this video, I’m going to share a done-for-you marketing plan exclusively for service-based business owners.
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A couple of months ago, I did a video on a Done-For-You: Monthly Marketing Plan for Membership Owners. And I mentioned that memberships are one of my favourite business models from a content opportunity standout. Another really great business model for content opportunities is service-based businesses. Every single client you get, is an opportunity to multiply that one client into several more using content.
This strategy comes from an in-person VIP day I ran recently with 2 business owners who were both struggling to balance serving their clients and serving their businesses. One of them described it as feeling pulled between the client deliverables, meetings and emails and their editorial calendar and dreams for where they wanted to take the business next. They felt like they weren’t making any progress on those goals because they were so bogged down in the day to day client work.
So for them, and for you, in this video. We’re going to cover a 2-level monthly content strategy for service-preneurs. So you can pick either level or start with one and then graduate to the next one, once that first level feels easy and more than doable.
So grab your glitter gel pens and a calendar, and let’s design your monthly content strategy:
The Strategy: Done-For-You Monthly Marketing Plan for Service-Preneurs
This strategy is all about getting more clients but doing it in a way that is super strategic and won’t take a bunch of time that you don’t have. So where can we make the most of the time you do have available for working on your business.
What I recommend, first and foremost, is adding your own business as a client on your docket.
Can you carve out one day a week that’s just for working on YOUR business and goals? Or if that’s not doable, can you carve our 2 half days where you can zero in and focus on your business? This is an important habit that’s going to make all the difference in your ability to create a steady stream of clients, that’s manageable and maybe even start building up a waitlist so you never find yourself in that client feast and famine cycle again.
The second thing that I recommend getting into place is a preview freebie that you can use as a call to action on all of your content as a way of starting to build an interest list.
Picking the RIGHT freebie is really the key here. You have to remember, you want to attract people who’ll be interested in hiring YOU, not learning from you and doing it for themselves.
Some good options are: really juicy case studies that demonstrate your brilliance and your method and the swoon worthy results they lead to. Or you can design something that helps them complete an important prerequisite to working with you that’ll help prepare them and get them ready to be a dream client for your services. The third option that I most often recommend for service businesses is some kind of assessment or thoughtful that again will give you some insights BEFORE working with them into their current situation, goals and challenges.
Once you have those 2 things in place, you’re ready to dive into level 1 of this monthly strategy ↓
Level 1: Bi-Weekly Content Publishing for Service-Based Business Owners
Level 1 is to publish on a bi-weekly basis. You might come into this thinking, the more I publish, the more clients I’m going to get. While it is true that more frequent publishing does help you stay top of mind, what’s more important is quality and consistency. So I find it much more effective to start with less, master that and then as it feels easy, you have the systems in place then level up to publishing more frequently. Ultimately, the decision is yours. This is just based on observations from almost 10 years and working with hundreds of business owners at this point.
So what is level 1?
For level 1, we’re going to publish in week 1 and week 3 of the month. For both levels, the main thing is to choose 1 big problem or goal that your offer solves or helps achieve to base your content around. Which is one of the most powerful parts of this strategy. We’re tying back directly to your offer. So anyone who clicks and reads slash listens or slash watches your content, it probably an ideal client or very close to one. It also means that over the course of a year of creating content this way, you’ll be building up an incredible database of content, directly linked to your offer and selling it from different angles that are going to speak to and appeal to different segments of your audience. What I respond to, someone else might not really care about. And vice versa. What makes them respond to your content and go gaga for your offer, might be a non-starter with me. The other great thing is that after about a year of creating this way, you might not need to create any other content around this offer. You may be able to recycle and republish your content to clear up some major space and time in your business to focus on other things.
So step #1 is to choose a problem that your offer solves or a goal that your offer helps achieve. What do your clients want? What do they gain or avoid or stop from using your service?
Then step #2, for your week 1 blog post, podcast episode or video – I want you to explore that problem or goal. Talk about the symptoms. Talk about why it isn’t their fault. Talk about why it happens. The goal of this post is to give some clarity around the problem or goal and help them identify what it’s causing in their business or life. One of my own posts that I’d put in this bucket is a post I did titled, The “Top 10 Reasons You Didn’t Reach Your Launch Goals.”
Step #3 is to come up with your topic and post for week #3. For this post, podcast or video, you want to talk about how to solve this problem. The goal here is to position your service as the solution to that problem. So what is it about your offer that makes it tailor made for fixing this problem or reaching this goal? This is where you can really get into the design of the offer, go through the steps and keep bringing it back to what’s included in your offer. This isn’t an infomercial. It needs to stand on its own outside of your offer, we’re just using your offer as a product placement in the post. An example of this would be my video on “The 5 Content Projects That’ll Make You The Most Money” I created for potential coaching clients to show the different projects (and why they’re valuable) we can tackle in my 1-1 coaching/consulting package.
For each of these posts, you’ll also send 1 newsletter with a power p.s. about your offer so that anyone interested in applying or a discovery call can get started right away.
Then you’ll also have at least 3 social media posts for the blog post to share on each platform you happen to be using. If you’re familiar with my EASE content strategy, you’ll be unfazed to know I recommend picking 2 platforms – 1 for getting in front of new ideal customers and eyeballs and 1 for engaging with your existing audience.
Every other month, I want to directly sell your service through a 3-5 email campaign in the last week of the month.
Level 2: Weekly Content Publishing for Service-Based Business Owners
For level 2, we’re shifting things around a little bit. Week 1 stays the exact same. Week 3 from level 1 becomes our week 2 for this level.
So week 1 – exploring the problem or the goal in order to provide some clarity and identification. Then week 2 – we’re talking about how to solve the problem and tying it back to your offer.
Here’s what's new:
For week 3, we’re giving some social proof. Here’s the formula: How (insert name) got (add big result) or (fixed big problem). If you don’t have a lot of client proof right now, you can also share your own story. Or a mix of both. We’re going to talk about helpful systems to have in place, but as a teaser, a good one that will help a lot with this week is a case study and testimonial system. When creating this content, always think about the takeaways for the readers. What are the even-if-you-weren’t-there lessons they can benefit from? The goal here is to inspire and provide backup results.
For week 4, we’re going to overcome 1 major objection your audience likely has to solving that problem or achieving that goal. Notice I didn’t overcome an objection to your offer. There are definitely objections they have to the problem itself that if you don’t overcome, won’t even let them consider your offer. So our goal here is to reframe and get ahead of those objections or excuses.
Same as before, for each post (and each week), you’ll publish at least 3 posts on your social profiles promoting the blog posts, podcasts or videos and send 1 email newsletter with a power ps for your service.
The call to action for each of these posts is to sign up for your freebie – that way you can get back in touch with them and get these potential perfect clients on your email list.
Systems to Set Up
There are a handful of systems that’ll make this strategy oodles easier that are worth the time to set up. So as you’re setting these up, maybe start with level 1 of the strategy and then once they’re finished, moved onto level 2.
Here are the systems in order of the impact they’ll make in saving you time:
System #1: Automated Sales System
The first system to set up is your automated sales system. This is important for giving your content a purpose. We want it set up so that if people come across your content in the wild (aka on social media), click through to read, watch or listen to it and then decide your call-to-action to sign up for your freebie is speaking to them, that you have a system in place to follow up automatically with them. All you really need is 2-3 emails that educate them on your services, inspire them with the results you’ve gotten and invite them to the point of sale whether that’s a free call or an application.
System #2: Case Study System
The second system that’ll help you execute this strategy more easily is a case study and testimonial system. For my businesses, this looks like a template that we fill out as soon as the project is over. With starting places pulled from the intake questionnaire. Process pulled from the project plan. And results pull from the final measurement report. There’s also spots for testimonials or words directly from the client. Then we have a website and social media template for copy and pasting the specific project information and images. This makes putting case studies together much quicker.
System #3: Content Workflow
An important system to set up next is your content workflows. This is everything you do to plan your content, produce your content, publish your content and promote your content (the 4Ps of content systems). When I’m setting these up, I like to braindump all my steps, fine tune each step of the process by using it several times, create templates and swipe copy that make each step easier and then finalize the steps into an SOP (standard operating procedure). If you’d like my done-for-you systems kit as a head start, check them out at the link below.
System #4: Content Bank
The final system that will help you execute your content strategy more consistently is a content bank. Every time you create a piece of content, make sure to add it to your content bank. So that if you do get really busy with client work and are tempted to miss a week in your content calendar, you can republish something you’ve already created instead. Think of it, not only as a way of keeping track of your valuable content assets, but also as a backup plan for your content calendar.
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