How To Startup Your Own Home Computer Support Company [Part 3 - Marketing]
Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 11:03PMIf you haven't yet, read part 1 and part 2 of this series of posts.
Okay, so you have the skills, personality and will to start up your computer support business. Great! Now you need customers. How do businesses get customers? Most companies get customers through some form of advertising. Advertising can be expensive, so unless you have a lot of money saved up, you won't have much for a marketing budget. And that is perfectly OKAY as there are plenty of ways to market effectively and cheaply.
Read on for more...
Who am I marketing to?
The first question you have to ask yourself is, who could use my services? In my case I have found that most of my customers are going to be between the ages of 30-60. Any younger than 30 and they can probably fix the majority of their own computer issues, or know a friend who can. Also, people younger than 30 on average do not have as much money as people in their 30's or 40's. Our services are quite expensive, I personally charge $45 an hour. Older than 60 and the possibility of the person owning a computer goes down.
Obviously we are looking for people who have computers, but don't discount that little bit of self evident information. Knowing that we can understand that anyone we market to online is someone who could potentially need our services. That is an advantage that most other industries don't have!
What tools should I use to market effectively?
Like I said earlier in this post, you don't have to spend a lot of money on marketing to get results. The absolute best way to market is word of mouth. It is free and the person that heard of you from their friend is automatically going to trust you more than some random service in the Yellow Pages. Word of mouth advertising requires that you actually provide a good service, and that you have some customers that you have already taken care of. A great way to get more people referring you is to offer your current customers a free hour or half hour of service for every person they refer to you. Consider giving every customer you go to a couple of your business cards, this way you still stay in their mind and will think of you when someone is complaining about their computer. Speaking of business cards... make sure you get some! They are cheap and effective, and gives your business a little bit more legitimacy in the eye of a potential customer. They go hand in hand with word of mouth advertising.
After word of mouth, the absolute best way I have found to advertise is on Craigslist. Craigslist is great because it is:
- Free
- Geographically targeted
- Targeted to customers who are actively interested in your service
I post under Services --> Computers and generally get 2-3 calls off of each posting. Here is one of my postings. ;)
I highly suggest using Craigslist to advertise as you have nothing to lose! As you can see from the image, I posted a phone number. That isn't actually my cell number, it is a number provided by Google's GrandCentral service. GrandCentral allows you to screen calls, mark numbers as spammers, and have multiple phones be called when the GrandCentral number is called. This is another completely free service, definitely worth a look.
Another great marketing option is Google's AdWords service. This allows you to target users based on what they are searching for and within a closely defined geographical location. There is a ton of information out there on how to use AdWords, and I'm not an expert so I'll let you do a little digging yourself. A website is going to be needed to use AdWords, I suggest using SquareSpace as they make it incredibly easy to create a professional looking website in minutes.
There are of course many other ways to advertise, and I just scratched the surface. But if you utilize just word of mouth and Craigslist I think you will see a fair amount of customers coming your way. I will continue to make some more posts over the coming months regarding owning a computer support business, but that does it for this particular series of posts. I hope you enjoyed it and learned something that you didn't know of before!
Reader Comments (7)
I just wanted to say...thank you...for the information about starting my own CSP! It has been really helpful, and has answered a few questions I had in my mind about actually starting my side business.
Hey Alexander, I'm very happy that you have found the posts useful! Please let me know if you have any other questions, I'd be more than willing to answer them to the best of my ability.
Great post. Another thing you might want to do is work on SEO. This is another free way to attract customers.
Great series of articles! And timely. I am looking at starting up a side-business. These are great tips and ideas. One thing, it looks like GrandCentral is invitation-only right now. I signed up to reserve a number, but don't know when that will be available. Looks like a cool service, though.
Darn, your right Derek. I didn't even realize it was invite only, I must have gotten in before they closed it up. I just spent 20 minutes trying to figure out if I had an invite I could send out your way, but apparently not.
Just wait patiently for that GrandCentral invite to come, from what I've read online they will eventually get one to you. If the functionality is really important to you and you can't wait, then you might want to look into a hosted PBX service, some worth looking at are virtualpbx.com or ringcentral.com
Hope that helps!
As for SEO Trevor... that is honestly a really hard way to bring in traffic. It is certainly something worth looking into, but to do a good job with SEO you need a lot of content. Content takes time to create, so ads are oftentimes a better way of getting targeted traffic. One other really good way to go is to sign up for Google Maps, this way your business will come up if someone searches for computer support in your area. This is a free service and just like Craigslist is extremely targeted.
thanks so much for posting this ive been looking for something like this on the net for ages.I just went self employed there but didnt know where to start especially the advertising side of things.This will help me so much.
Great post keep them coming :)
Glad I could be of some help Stevie! Feel free to contact me via email or leave a comment if you have any questions you think I could help you with.