As a service-based business owner, especially at the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey, you likely feel stuck, uninspired or demotivated from time to time. It is not for the faint at heart. Starting and running your business requires a large amount of determination and strength to keep on going, even when you face (unexpected) setbacks. 

 How to Grow Your Service-Based Business

One of the most critical parts of business success is to have clarity and a strategy about where you are heading and how you will get there. I've collected six steps to help you build your strategy and understand how you create clarity in your business: 

1. Goal Setting 

You need some goals! And when you outline your primary and secondary goals, and to each, you assign specific tasks with deadlines, you create an actionable plan. Now you might be wondering, what are the primary and secondary goals? Easy! Primary goals are the big things that you want to achieve, let's say, within the next 1-5 years. Primary goals can be earning a six or seven-figure business and publishing your first online course or signing monthly two high-ticket clients in your service-based business. 

Secondary goals are smaller steps to facilitate the success of your primary goals. For example, if you want to create an online course (primary goals), you need to set up a platform, like Kajabi, where you host your courses (secondary goal). 

Once you have your primary and secondary goals outlined, make yourself accountable for what you plan to do. What you have now is not a vague idea anymore; it is a plan! You can share your goals and objectives with your family, friends, or even better, with your accountability partner. 

If you are only at the "thinking" stage and dreaming about setting up your own business - but not sure what, I've collected 20 Business Ideas to Go From Employee to Entrepreneur in this blog post. 

When you are ready, you can move on to these four steps you need to take to Develop a Digital Marketing Strategy and build a solid marketing foundation for your business. 

 2. Clarity About your Offer

The key components of your digital marketing strategy where you must have clarity are the following: 

• What your services are
• What is your niche 
• What is your target market
• Your unique selling point and value proposition - how you differentiate from your competitors on the market. 

3. Create a Signature Service Offer

When you have a specific offer (signature offer), it helps to zero in on what you do and whom you offer your services. By providing a transformation to your clients over a specific timeframe, you can become well-known for doing that one thing and doing it very well. This approach can be a strong start for your business, and I guarantee you that as you go, you will learn plenty from your audience to understand what else can you offer to your target market in the future. 

Alternatively, if you have already multiple services, you can also bundle them together to provide an end-to-end program. However, before you take the step of building a bigger, signature offering, you would want to do market research and have a clear understanding that your offer indeed will be needed (and purchased) by your ideal customers. 

In addition to building a signature service, you'll also need to create your sales plan. It will help you understand your figures and know precisely how many programs or packages you'll need to sell to hit your monthly and yearly revenue goals.

 4. Automation of Systems, Marketing Tools, and Processes

To grow your service-based business, you'll need to implement marketing tools, systems, and processes that are the best suited for you personally and your business.

Where you might be looking for tools to support your business operation are the following areas: email autoresponder, writing support, image foundry, social media scheduling tools, graphic design tool, database management and team management tools. 

There are many options for automating your business, and new options are still popping up regularly. Instead of hopping from one to another, first, I recommend that you identify where you need help in your business that you want to handle via a platform or an automation tool. For example, if you're going to automate your social media posts, you want to find a platform that helps you do just that. You might need software or tool to help you edit all your written content to make sure whatever you put out is grammatically correct, hence you need a grammar editor. I use Grammarly, and I can't recommend it enough! 

Once you are clear on what tools you need, do research and check out what works best for your needs. As I mentioned above, there will be plenty of options for anything and everything, but the best way to choose is to research some comparisons and choose accordingly. Most likely, you will consider your budget, the ease of use of the available tools and what functionality they offer. 

You will want to streamline your repetitive tasks and develop a process that you follow every time, for example: 

• Writing and publishing blog posts
• Creating content for social media
• Emailing your list
• Producing your podcast 
• Creating and publishing your videos
• Onboarding and welcoming new clients 
• Sales funnels 

Once you commit to using a platform or tool, take some time to learn to use it properly. I strongly recommend not to shop around too much testing and trying many different tools because none of them are perfect. You will probably find some small issues with every one of them, so don't look for the perfect one. Look for the solutions that cater to your needs the most. 

 5. Create Your Marketing Plan

Your marketing plan has to contain your goals, strategies, specific activities, and resources you'll need to promote your services effectively: 

• Identify your marketing objective and your marketing goals 
• What marketing channels you're going to use, and how 
• Identify the time and place for your marketing activities 
• What resources, offers, and preparation will you need to make your campaigns and overall marketing activity successful. 
• What content you need to create, and how frequently do you need to show up online to connect with your target audience. 

6. Build a Support Network Around your Business

Being part of a community where people face similar challenges makes a huge difference! It can be hard sometimes to figure out how to grow your business independently. Make conscious steps to build your own support network. Find like-minded people, Facebook groups, accountability groups to join where you can learn, ask questions, get feedback and feel supported and cheered along your journey. 

Want More Support to Grow your Service-Based Business?

If you'd like to get guidance and learn how to grow your business, my 4-weeks Marketing and Business Mentorship program may be the perfect fit for you.⁠

During the 4-week Business Mentorship Program, you will:

• Work with a weekly framework of actionable steps and receive constructive feedback 
• Define your brand value, your vision and mission as a brand
• Create your brand tone of voice so that you can connect with your audience
• Conduct market research and gain a better understanding of the market you operate in. Analyse your competitors and find inspiration on the market.
• Define your ideal customer and get clarity on where and how to connect with them.
• Get guidance on how to create your visual branding without previous design skills
• Develop a digital marketing strategy that meets your business goals
• Construct your digital marketing strategy with actionable steps and understand how to keep track of your own performance.

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Want to know more? Then email us at [email protected] and find out if we're a good fit to work together!

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