5 Strategies to Marketing Your Professional Services Online

It has been talked to death about how different online marketing is to anything else you may have encountered before, but that is a point that really can’t be stressed enough. Trying to market your professional services in a way that mirrors off line techniques will not be effective.

However, endless amounts of theory have been developed for how to go about properly marketing your professional services online, and it’s not really that difficult.

1. Get a Plan

The first thing that you’re going to want to do is to develop a strategy and a game plan. These are not the same thing. A strategy is more akin to a goal or a mission statement where you can say in the simplest terms why you have a website, what position you want to get it to, and how you plan to use it to collect leads.

That is all you need for an effective strategy. A game plan, on the other hand, is how you plan to accomplish these things, and they can be a bit more in depth.

In order to have an effective game plan, you must understand the resources that you have available to you and which ones are going to be the most useful in drawing traffic to your website, a process that may take some time and experimentation based on where your business is and what you do.

Do what you do best and ignore the rest. Sometimes this can mean outsourcing the things you’re not good at. For example, are you a lawyer and don’t know how to market your practice online? Have someone else do your marketing.

2. Stay Fresh

The next thing to focus on is to get rid of any trace of a “set and forget” mentality. Online marketing is active and requires you to be constantly updating your website, talking to people online, searching for new outlets to draw attention, and doing everything in your power to keep people coming to your site.

More than anything, you want people to find value in the things you say and the content that you provide, and in our increasingly fast world that means new, fresh information is always in demand. Stay on top of your online marketing, don’t just put up a website and wait for people to find it because that is highly unlikely to ever happen.

3. Set Yourself Apart from the Competition

The broad reach of the Internet means that people can find dozens of other professional services that do exactly what you do, so trying to fill a niche may be an effective strategy to consider. You can’t just be selling your services, you must primarily be selling your expertise and put an emphasis on what makes you different from everyone else.

Selling your expertise sets you apart from your competition by showing why people should trust you to deal with their problem rather than somebody else who may have better prices or a better looking website.

Ultimately, your customers want somebody who is going to make whatever issue they have go away quickly and painlessly and it’s vitally important that you sell that about yourself, not just list and describe what it is that you do.

4. Find and Fill the Demand

Understanding the way demand works necessarily applies online to customers as well as products and services. The Internet is massive, and trying to think of everybody as a potential customer will sink your business very quickly since you cannot possibly meet the needs of every person that you’re likely to encounter.

Feel free to be more selective about your clientele and don’t be afraid to say to somebody that you don’t feel you’re the right person for a particular job. Focus your attention instead of the people you do want as customers and don’t try to stretch your services to meet everybody’s needs.

5. Don’t Be Afraid to Share

Most importantly, don’t be afraid to share knowledge and do so personally. The Internet was created and designed as an information sharing tool, and the idea that there are industry secrets that the public cannot know is a thing of the past.

Instead, make sure that you’re taking the time to share your knowledge, let people know how things work, explain to them the details of your industry and why they should trust you to take care of them. It’s absolutely vital that you inject personality into this process to give your customers somebody to connect with, a real person and not a faceless machine.

There may be very different techniques to marketing online, but the principles remain the same. You need to find ways to make your potential customers think of you as a person who has a lot of knowledge and is able to use it to their advantage. Keep that in mind, and you should have no problem marketing your professional services on the Internet.