Service based businesses have a unique set of features that need to communicate a clear picture of what services you offer, assistance, answer the questions the customer is asking, and be easy-to-use. The key features of a service based website page are:
Social media is now part of our lives. Whether you have our social media team do it or you do it you need to have a social media presence. If we're not doing it for you we will help give you ideas to help build your audience. In many ways your maintaining is often one of the best ways to keep getting the word about your business out. This may sound counter-productive from a company that is offering these services. The key here is you are in the field, talking directly with your customers.You can take a before picture, after picture, and write up what was done quickly and easily. We comein when you provide us that information and then want to use it on a blog and newsletter in addition to social media.
This is one of the biggest items you need once your website is up and running. You need to keep not only Google happy but the other search engines, like Bing. Information nneeds to be updated often and changes often. Google alone puts out thousands of changes per year.You need to adapt to these changes and constantly update your site to provide the best experience, adapt to what your users need, and get those valuable leads.
To have a website you obviously need it hosted. That's easy to understand. The other key itemm is email hosting to have that polished image of your overall company branding.
With web hosting you will need to ake certain you have updates to your site. These updates are security, plug-in, and core system updates. You need to make certain you have an effective firewall to protect your business from malicious users (e.g., hackers), backups, and a plan to keep everything running effectively.
Nothing says a business doesn't care more than having their primary email address at gmail.com, yahoo.com, or even aol.com. You need to have an email at yourDomain.com which matchees your website. This gives a simple indication to your potential customers that you care about the details and are a serious business owner. This also gives you, the business owner, the ability to protect your valuable company assets for when an employee is no longer with your business. Are you thinking you don't need this because you are your own person and the only employee? That may be the case but we've seen it many times that a business chooses one business over the other for showing a more professional and great first impression.
Many businesses will use QuickBooks or another accounting package to keep track of their customers. Others use Post-It Notes, Excel files, pads of paper, or individual email clients to keep track of their customers. There is a better way, and that is a CRM or Customer Relationship Management system. A CRM system will allow you to:
nothing helps give your business a source of leads better than reviews (testimonials) from previous customers stating how great your service was with them. We focus on helping you ask for those reviews from existing customers but also reply to each and every one you receive to show that personal experience. You focus on your business while we focus on your onliine reputation.
Did you get a negative review? We will work on getting them removed as well. We can't get rid of them all but we can use each platforms features to remove as many as we can. Note: A bad review can be as good, sometimes better, than a good review. With the right reply to a bad review you can take something negative and truly make it into a great review. We've often left a bad review, put in an awesome reply, and that one review will generate more business for you. Of course, this is after we try to remove and if we can't we work with you directly so that you know what we're doing. It's your business afterall!
We have a client that was using HomeAdvisor and CraftJack. Both of these are owned by Angie's List (now Angi). The deal our client had was that they would get leads from both companies. That is where things got interesting for our client and we're going to tell the story from what they've told us. This aligned with what we had heard from other service-based companies that we felt we need to educate service-based businesses as a good portion of our work comes from them.