You’ve probably heard or seen this many times before, but we’ll say it again: marketing is crucial for business to consumer (B2C) businesses. Leads must be generated before sales can be made. For service businesses, the intangible nature of services makes marketing that much more important. In today’s Internet-driven world, digital marketing plays a huge role generating leads and driving sales due to its ability to reach a huge audience.

Using pest control in Singapore as an example, this article will look at how three key drivers of digital marketing can benefit B2C companies.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a key component of digital marketing. Simply put, SEO makes a website as search-engine-friendly as possible. The goal of SEO is ensuring your website always ranks at or near the top of the list of search results whenever a service or keyword is searched.

The numbers show just how important SEO is. Google itself goes through an estimated 3.5 billion searches every day! Being at the top of search results connects you to more potential customers for free. A higher ranking gets your website more traffic from potential customers, bringing in more leads and potential sales.

For businesses offering services as specific as pest control, the majority of the traffic to your website are customers in need of your services. Closure rates will be high as there is already a strong interest in your services. SEO is the first step to organically increasing your sales and customer base.

Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is another Internet marketing strategy, using paid advertising to generate more visits to your website. In practice, you pay to advertise your services on different platforms every time someone clicks on your ad. Popular examples are Google’s AdWords or Yahoo’s Bing Ads.

PPC uses a similar concept as SEO, allowing interested customers to view your services. Instead of being directed to your website, a click brings customers directly to a specific page called the landing page. Properly planning a PPC campaign and optimising your landing page means higher conversion rates and sales. Interested customers can easily see what you offer, at what prices and can easily make a decision.

For service businesses facing stiff competition, a properly planned out, optimised and managed PPC campaign has a proven track record of generating more leads and sales. You can easily track your budget’s consumption.

Social Media Marketing

The last, but certainly not least, Internet marketing strategy we look at today is Social Media Marketing. Social media marketing is the process of generating leads using social media platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn.

Why use social media? Without diving into its technical details, social media marketing is essentially word of mouth marketing on a global scale. Businesses produce targeted ads or advertise their products or services on Facebook pages. Users can comment on or leave reviews about their experiences.

Any of Facebook’s 2.2 billion members can read another user’s personal experiences with different companies. Customers will trust these reviews more than a company’s marketing,

For service businesses like pest control firms, word of mouth draws in more leads and potential customers than any other marketing strategy. A solid social media presence makes a service business more trustworthy and increases the chances of more visits and higher conversion rates.