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Spring is a time for rejuvenation, an opportunity to give your brand a fresh chance to bloom. That's not always easy to do if you’re stuck juggling too many roles, figuring out how to retain clients, and switching between different platforms and apps for day-to-day operations.
A clear game plan for scaling your service-based business—and the right tools—can help you overcome those challenges and be the foundation for converting opportunities to revenue and developing stronger client relationships.
Let’s take a close look at some proven strategies and tools for growing a service business that can help your brand reach the next level and simplify how you manage daily tasks.
1. Choose growth goals and strategies
Understanding where you want to go and how to get there is critical for growing your business. This means setting actionable, measurable goals and creating strategies to achieve them, with clear metrics that show you where you’re succeeding and where you can improve.
Start by identifying your goals: Let’s say you own a financial consulting business with a focus on estate planning. You’re looking to expand your business and serve a larger base of clients. So, you might set a goal of generating four new leads per month.
In this scenario, you’ll need a marketing strategy to scale your business. Your first move might be testing out some different marketing channels to reach more potential clients. For example, you might try launching a new social media account for your business on a platform you haven’t tried yet, or using paid advertising on websites and social media. This will help you attract new clients looking for consultants with your specialization.
Another strategy might be updating your website to clearly explain your financial planning approach and add some testimonials and case studies. This will show website visitors what makes your consulting business different and earn their trust by showing your previous successes.
Then, establish a relationship by incentivizing visitors to sign up for your mailing list by offering them a free resource, such as a guide or checklist. That way, you’ve converted those visitors into leads who you can keep in regular contact with via a newsletter, promotions, and other marketing content using email campaigns.
Leaning into what makes your business distinct from others and actively reaching out to your audience will help you stand out from the competition and attract new clients.
Read our guide to setting clear business goals
2. Optimize your operations
When everything’s running smoothly, it can create momentum that grows your business faster. Look for ways to automate time-consuming tasks that slow you down, like recreating forms for each new client or project. Or see if you can centralize operations into one platform for common daily tasks.
For example, if you’re a wedding planner, you’re likely getting paid by invoice. But rather than use a separate tool to get paid, you can choose an all-in-one solution to manage your business.
Squarespace Invoices offer a simplified way to securely create, send, and manage all your invoices from a single platform, so you get paid faster. You can easily customize your invoices to match your website styles to create a consistent, branded experience for clients and validate your business, and schedule them to send at a later date if needed.
And if you tend to invoice for the same set of services, instead of building a new invoice for every client, you can save time by duplicating an existing invoice and editing it to reflect new information before sending it.
To further streamline getting paid, Squarespace Payments integrates directly with your website and invoices to centralize your billing and payments. Rather than switching between invoicing and payments systems, track payments, accept a range of payment methods, and manage all your transactions with one integrated tool.
3. Know your customers
Another essential strategy for growing your business is understanding your clients, so you can build stronger relationships with them that inspire them to keep coming back.
Split your customer base into two segments to start: new or untapped customers and existing customers.
New customers
Take stock of untapped customers and what drives them to identify new services tailored to their needs. For a professional home cleaning brand, that might involve reaching out to businesses that typically use janitorial services, such as banks, fitness centers, or office buildings.
Or, it could mean expanding their range of services to cater to businesses that may not recognize a need for janitorial assistance, such as mobile businesses or short-term construction sites.
Existing clients
On the other hand, customer retention is just as important as customer acquisition, so understanding your clients also means serving the ones you already have. Retention may even be more important than acquisition: Acquiring a new customer can cost 5 to 25 times more than retaining one. Meanwhile, a 5% increase in customer retention can boost profits by 25% to 95%.
While you’re advertising your expanded range of services, don’t forget to target existing customers with those services, too. Or run a survey to check in on their pain points and needs, then use responses to inform new products or service changes. That shows them that you’re tuned into their requests and care that they’re getting everything they expect from you.
Read an expert’s tips for managing client relationships
4. Polish your customer experience
When customers have a positive experience with your brand, the results can ripple in ways that lead to business growth. For one, it can result in more client testimonials on review sites and your own website, which can convert more clients. Great service also keeps existing customers loyal.
Three keys to positive client experiences:
Personalize service. Identify clients’ specific needs and cater to them to ensure you’re giving them what they want.
Gather feedback. There are many ways to do this—automate a follow-up email with Squarespace, field a survey, monitor social media comments, or request a review, among others—to stay on top of client concerns.
Respond quickly. When you get feedback, waiting to respond—whether it’s a thank you, an apology, or a solution—can lead customers to believe you’re not concerned with their feelings about your business. Getting back to them promptly makes them feel valued.
One way to ensure a positive customer experience is to make the intake process painless. Intake forms are often the first interaction a client has with your business, so you want to make a good impression right off the bat. A good intake form includes questions about the client and their needs, and helps you:
Understand client needs
Determine that a client is a good fit for your services
Create personalized project proposals for potential clients
Prep for meetings with clients
On Squarespace, you can customize intake forms to gather all of the upfront details you need and accept documents, images, videos, and other files.
After the client expresses interest in working with you, use the custom proposals tool to help you land the project or create professional contracts to outline project scope, fees, and terms of service.
5. Turn clients into a sales team
Are you leveraging your clients to generate more business for you? It’s more simple than it might sound, and your clients can benefit, too.
Keep clients coming back with loyalty programs.
Incentivize them to refer friends with discounts and gifts.
Encourage them to leave reviews on popular platforms.
Use email marketing to follow up with them and request feedback.
Make sure your rewards, referrals, and reviews programs are easy to understand and participate in. Promote them on your website and other channels, and remember to send thank yous to all those who participate.
6. Review and refresh your online presence
It’s a good idea to pressure test your website and social media accounts periodically to make sure they’re optimized. These platforms are likely big sources of new leads, so you want to ensure your online presence is doing everything it can to attract more clients.
SEO
Search engine optimization helps people find you when they search online. Ranking higher in search results is ultimately about making sure your online presence speaks to your target customer’s needs. Confirm that your website is still set up for SEO success by:
Searching for your business and related terms to check your search rankings
Ensuring your website is user-friendly
Researching relevant search keywords and weaving them into your web copy
Making important information and links easy to find on your web pages
Every Squarespace website and online store features built-in SEO features to help you rank higher in search results. You can also take advantage of SEO tools, like AI-generated meta titles and descriptions and image alt text, or add-ons like SEOSpace.
Social media
Consider whether you’re using your brand social media to your advantage. Are you satisfied with your follower count and audience interaction? If you post regularly and encourage engagement, you can build a captive audience to promote your offerings or reach new customers.
You can also make it easier for followers to jump from your social profile to your website or services. Use linking features in your posts or add a link in bio page to display URLs for appointment booking, content, or your website.
Email marketing
Another effective way to stay top-of-mind with customers and leads is with email marketing. Review your email strategy: Do you send messages infrequently? Do your emails see low interaction from subscribers?
Return to your goals and consider whether you could use email to achieve them. For example, you might use monthly emails to drive website traffic or automated emails to connect with customers based on their interactions with your site.
Using Squarespace Email Campaigns, you can create emails to welcome new community members, follow up with customers post-service, send discounts and promotions, and more. Predesigned, editable email layouts and Squarespace’s AI writer can help you create effective messages quickly.
Then, get real-time analytics that give you insight into how your emails are performing, from open rates and click-through rates to conversions.
7. Partner with other brands
While business growth often entails competing with other brands, partnering with peers who offer complementary services or products can be an overlooked growth strategy. It’s a mutually beneficial agreement that has significant advantages for both parties.
Partnerships might involve running a co-branded giveaway, featuring in each others’ content, or some other crossover between your audiences. These pairings increase brand awareness by giving you an entryway into your partner’s customer base. And partnering with an established, trusted brand can lend credibility to your business.
Collaborating on marketing campaigns can also be more cost-effective, since you’re sharing costs and resources. That reduces your financial risk and gives you room to experiment with new approaches to marketing.
8. Explore expansion opportunities
Growing your brand means looking at ways to expand what you already do. There are many methods to do this, depending on the type of business you own. For service-based businesses, one important avenue for growth is exploring new markets that you haven’t targeted yet.
That could mean geographic expansion, where you start offering your services in nearby towns or regions. Or it could mean targeting new industries, going from servicing small businesses to catering to larger industries or enterprises.
Another way to expand is by providing services that are complementary to your current offerings. If you’re a landscaping business, that could mean adding pressure washing or driveway sealing to your service menu.
Or maybe it means finding ways to diversify your business. A personal trainer might start recording training videos and selling them on a subscription basis for recurring revenue, or a personal chef could start providing a paid subscription to new recipes and kitchen how-tos.
Understanding how to grow a small service business requires wearing a lot of hats, from CEO to marketer to customer service rep to administrative assistant. Streamlining your operations can free up time for you to test new strategies and focus on turning your growth vision into a reality.