As small business owners, we’ve all been there. Whether we’re starting a music studio, a hair salon, a tattoo parlor, or a yoga studio. You have a great skillset to share, a place to provide your service, and all the equipment you need to get started. But how do you start attracting customers? In this post we’ll go over some great ways to find new clients for your service business no matter what your budget is.
1. Set Up and Optimize Your Online Business Profiles
Cost: Free with Optional Paid Advertising
These include:
- Google Business (https://www.google.com/business/?ppsrc=GPDA2) (formerly Google My Business, and before that, Google Local)
- Apple Maps (https://businessconnect.apple.com/)
- Yelp (https://business.yelp.com/)
- Bing Places for Business (https://www.bingplaces.com/)
- Meta (https://business.facebook.com/), (the Facebook/Instagram business suite).
They can all be useful, but if you really only have time to spend optimizing one at the beginning, I’d recommend putting most of your time into Google Maps. Keywording it the right way, which we’ll go over in another post, and ideally, gathering some positive reviews, is crucial for helping your business show up in the Google carousel results.
If you aren’t sure what the Google carousel is, try googling some local service you might want to try, like “piano lessons Chicago.” Scroll down until you see a bunch of local listings, often with addresses and small pictures next to them. Google changes the way things come up constantly, but as I write this, they typically fall under the heading “Places.” (include screen shot).
These local listings are a wonderful, free way to attract local customers, and some small businesses operate almost exclusively using this tool for client acquisition (though it’s becoming increasingly difficult to skip paying for advertising altogether). If you have more than one location, it’s best to set up different business profiles for each one. That way, if someone is searching for a service in a specific place, they’ll run across the one you run that’s closest to them.
For more tips on [optimizing your Google My Business (GMB) profile] (link to how to optimize google my business blog), check out some of our other content.
2. Create and SEO a website
Cost: Anywhere from Free to Tens of Thousands of Dollars
There are lots of tools these days to create a functional website for very little money. Using a built-in template from Wix (https://www.wix.com/), Webador (https://www.webador.com/), or web.com (https://www.web.com/), are just a few of the options. If you have a larger budget, you can also hire a professional to design and customize it.
But a website doesn’t help much if you don’t have a way to get eyes on it. That’s where SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, comes in. Basically, SEO is how you get your website to come up in Google’s organic search results when you aren’t paying for advertising. It’s arguably less important than it used to be because paid ads have squeezed out the organic results, but it’s still relevant. It can also save you some money on advertising because Google serves up ads based on relevance.
SEO is a skillset you can teach yourself if you’re a decent writer and aren’t too tech-phobic, or you can pay a professional SEO strategist to help. There’s a lot that goes into it, but in a nutshell, attracting backlinks and using a great keyword strategy are typically thought to be some of the most important elements. We’ll go over SEO in more detail in future posts, but to get you started, the Moz Blog (https://moz.com/blog) is an excellent resource.
3. Solicit Positive Reviews for Google and Yelp
Cost: Free
First thing’s first. How do you get a positive review if you don’t have clients yet, or if you have very few? Simple. Offer your service for free to some people you know in exchange for a review. There are many places online that you’ll want to collect an assortment of positive reviews, but some of the most important for gaining new customers are Google and Yelp. The two review sites require slightly different strategies.
Google reviews are most important for helping your local listings get noticed on, unsurprisingly, Google. It doesn’t tend to be the first-place people look when they want to read honest reviews, but it can make a difference in your appearance on the carousel. For Google, your reviews almost never get hidden, so while you’ll want to get ones that are trustworthy, you don’t have to move heaven and earth to convince the algorithm that it’s a real, unsolicited review. In a pinch to get going, you can solicit a few from friends and family to start off, but don’t spend too much time on this. It’s always best to strive for authenticity. There’s no substitute for it.
But I’m not going to lie. When I first started my music teaching business, my mom was one of the first to give it 5 stars, and Google never took it down. The best strategy for Google reviews is to ask people to include keywords that you want to rank for. If you’re opening a yoga studio, try to get reviews that actually include keywords like, “yoga classes,” “yoga studio,” or “fitness classes,” for example, as opposed to something more general like, “Jenna is a great teacher, and the place is beautiful.”
Yelp, on the other hand, is where people will search for the best of something in their area. It has its own search feature, so even if you don’t have a website or any of the other things we’ve discussed so far, you can still help people find you on Yelp. Unlike Google, Yelp hides reviews its algorithm doesn’t trust, and the company threatens to penalize you if it thinks you’re trying to game the system. That said, in my 12 years running my music teaching business, I found zero correlation between solicited and unsolicited reviews when it came to Yelp’s algorithm. The app was clueless. I had countless genuine reviews hidden, while the fake one written by my dad under a pseudonym stayed on their site for a decade alongside one written by some weirdo my business never served who wrote two paragraphs raving about how he wanted to clone me.
That said, the Yelp algorithm does appear to look for specific things. We’ll cover more in a separate post, but a few include the reviewer having a picture up, being local, and having a diversified portfolio of positive and negative reviews they’ve written for other businesses.
4. Find Advocates Who'll Talk You Up
Cost: Free, Unless You Offer a Financial Incentive
Word of mouth is still a great way to find new clients, and with the rise of social media, there’s a whole new way for word to get out about your business. If you know anyone who’s active in a local Facebook moms’ group (one of the remaining ways people still interact on Facebook), ask if they’ll bring you up, or at least talk about your business when it’s relevant in their group discussion. It’s way more effective than joining those groups to sell your own wares—something that people are much more, ahem, wary of.
If you already have some customers, you can also offer incentives to ones who refer business to you. In general, I haven’t found my own music students to be that motivated by this tactic. Most likely because it’s hard to track and doesn’t typically feel great to announce that they’re ready for their discount now that they talked me up. However, there are clients who will evangelize for you. If you have one of those, make sure to take care of them. They’re gold.
5. Online Ads
Cost: Whatever Amount You Set as Your Budget
I’ve tried a lot of advertising platforms, including Microsoft, Yelp, and Meta, and Google Ads is still the one to beat in most instances. SEM (or search engine marketing) makes it way more likely that your ads are being clicked on by people who are actively looking for your service. Search ads are ideal for things that people are already searching for, like local martial arts classes. I always recommend search ads as the go-to whenever possible, because when they’re done well, you’re usually only charged when someone searches for exactly what you do, sees your ad, and agrees that it’s what she is, indeed, searching for.
Search ads are less ideal for newer services that people may be interested in but don’t know to search for, like an offbeat camp in which kids ride horses on the beach and then swim with dolphins. That’s where display ads come in. With display ads, you can target a demographic that has kids, lives near the beach, and that google has identified as an animal lover. There are even highly automated performance max ads that combines the various forms of google advertising for you and attempt to optimize them to meet your goals.
If you can afford more than one advertising platform, I do recommend diversifying your ad platforms, especially if you run a larger small business that relies on paid advertising. The reason for this is that it’s best to not be at Google’s mercy. For example, back in January, 2022, there was some sort of algorithm shift Google went through, and all of a sudden my business disappeared from the front-page search results for a couple months. No matter how high I set my budget, I was being beaten in my area by service businesses that weren’t even local. This turbulence didn’t last long, but it was enough that it caused me to miss getting many customers during my typically busy season (the first few months after the new year). This was the last time I let my business rely solely on Google Ads.
Microsoft Ads function very similarly to Google, and you can even cut down on your workload by importing your Google ads into Microsoft. They don’t usually get as many clicks, but there isn’t much of a downside to keeping it running, since it’s only charging you when someone searches and clicks. Just make sure you monitor your budget and don’t forget that your Microsoft ads are running.
Yelp advertising is another useful way to diversify and tends to get a different type of shopper, one who’s particularly focused on finding the best, most trusted business. These types of ads, of course, work best once you have some great reviews, but even if you don’t have many, you can still get some leads this way. Yelp ads also ask you to put in keywords, but it’s much more limited than what you might do for a Google ads campaign. You can also pay for extra features, like making sure someone who’s looking at your reviews doesn’t get hit with a competitor’s Yelp ad.
Each paid advertising platform, Google in particular, certainly warrants its own post, so you can look out for that in the future, along with some more ways to attract customers for your service business.
