service business marketing

Recently, a new professional services client told me that “no one looks for financial advisors online.” The following email was my reply to his comment.

Just a quick note in reference to Earle’s assertion that “no one looks for a financial advisor online.”

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project:

• 81% look for information about a product or service before buying it.
• 73% get travel info online.
• 51% take a virtual tour of a location online.

And according to BIGResearch:

Yesterday, I was a guest on WCCO Radio and I was stressing that almost any business could be adapted to the Internet. The example I gave was a residential window washing business.

You might wonder how a window washing business could be adapted to the web. Here’s how he did it.

The guy had a residential window washing business. He contacted a web designer and had a web site designed where people could sign up for window washing service in his city. Next they designed a calendar with week days between Monday and Friday and times  between 9am and 5pm where people could sign up for window washing service.

Reid of Bottom Line Business Advisors, Inc. was the featured speaker last night at the TC Entrepreneurs event at Best Buy headquarters. If you weren’t there you missed a great networking opportunity along with Jim’s speech and a fiery (as always) inspirational speech by Kenny Ray Morgan on procrastination.

Jim covered “Secrets to Successfully Marketing Your Service Business”. He opened defining the difference (from a marketer’s standpoint) between a product-based business and a service-based business. Trying to define the intangibles of a service business versus the tangibles of a product business.