Promotion for Business IT Support Company

[CommodoreP]

I have been self employed for 10 years now, and started my own company offering ICT support to primary schools. Rather than getting easier, things are getting more technical where they really need more support time, the schools have less money so they are reducing support time (and expecting the same level of support still), becoming academies and using support within the group instead, along with high competition in a niche sector. I also managed to gain a few small business companies I also supply support for.

I decided to start moving away from schools and to offer IT support for local businesses, but am struggling to find the best promotion strategy. At this point just getting one or two new customers would really help.

While not niche like schools, there is high competition and IT support companies are currently banned from using Google AdWords to promote themselves (I found out after spending a lot of time looking into this). Blogging and social media (Twitter and LinkedIn) has so far not helped. I dont think facebook and other social media platforms are suitable for the type of client I am trying to gain (small and medium businesses).

I am currently getting some new brochures made, but still don't know what the best form of promotion is best for me to use to attract new customers. Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[KM-Tiger]

I also managed to gain a few small business companies I also supply support for.

Do these businesses have anything in common? If you can identify the key characteristics of prospective customers, then that should help in finding a way of targeting them in any advertising or promotion.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

What is your specialist skill set, why would anyone want to use you rather than the larger companies who can offer say 24/7 breakdown cover and a range of experts covering many business requirements, my own experience was that when something went wrong I needed to get back online ASAP and the company we used had a team so always had someone available and therefore got any IT requirement requests as well as any problem solving

Therefore who is your market and what is the skills you offer and in what area's

 

[Juraj Vysvader]

One can seem to think that if your customers should be businesses then the best place to target your audience is on LinkedIn (there are no teens or retired, and you know all professions), secondly, it's Twitter. Nevertheless, the Twitter advertisement is usually just a waste of money (on Twitter, you get many clicks from bots). You might consider also Slack (messaging/chatting system for office workers).

Otherway, I'm also gonna start to print flyers... A flyer can cost you a pence per each.

 

[jamieclick]

I dont think facebook and other social media platforms are suitable for the type of client I am trying to gain (small and medium businesses).

This definitely isn't the case, we have a lot of business customers that get amazing results from Facebook.

The key is to have a solid strategy in place from start to finish, just trying new traffic sources isn't going to get you results if the rest of the funnel isn't performing.

Do you currently offer any kind of audit or something that will get you talking to a customer?