When The Sara Service began back in 2004, we began with the idea of offering long term rentals in Calahonda, Marbella and up and down the Costa del Sol. Our business plan was simple but solid and we built a useful web site and began the process of trying to find clients and listings. We struck a problem, however, as little to no-one was finding our site and we were getting little to no enquiries.
Knowing a little about computers and web sites it began to dawn on us that we were going to have to pull something bigger out of the bag if we were to leave the land of mediocrity and really get in touch with the modern world and more importantly, new clients. After a recommendation from a business colleague at Marbella Consulting who had used Justin Parks in the past, we got in touch and asked for a little get together to chat about if and how he could help us move forward and really get our site out there and in front of client’s eyes.
So we got together and the way he handled the project from beginning to end was nothing short of pure professionalism. He worked alongside us all the way, talking us through what was new stuff to me really, social networking and client-building.
So how did we do it? Well we’re not ones to keep business secrets to ourselves as we have often benefited from the wisdom of others. Justin took a look at our site, saw that we had done a bit of work with it in order to try and get some hits from the search engines (which was just getting harder and harder as Google kept moving the goal posts on us), so he suggested that we go with what’s happening in the world today and get networked up socially with an aim to benefit both the rankings on the search engines and our brand and service profile on the social media networks.
To be honest we were a small bit sceptical at first about how that could help our business as we are a bit old school in terms of sites and publicity (add the site to a few directories, exchange links with a few sites and wait for the money to roll in!), but we discussed setting up a Facebook page for The Sara Service, which we did then asked all of our friends to join and all of their friends. Honestly, we was astounded by the response, it had never twigged with us that Facebook could also be used as a business networking tool.
We did more than a few deals using Facebook, mostly by being able to put last-minute and bargain stuff straight in front of people’s eyes. Then the next stage of the plan we discussed was creating a Sara Service Twitter account (which was news to me again), so I followed Justin’s advice and again, once we understood how it can and should be utilised we found that with Twitter the potential was even greater because basically we had the chance of getting in front of not just people we knew, but people who we wanted to know, people who had the capital to do bigger deals and more importantly, people who were interested in what we were selling. Its early days but its obvious what this can achieve when its been explained!
To wrap it up we’d say the 3 best things to come from this campaign are:
- The extra clients of course
- The feedback we have been getting from clients who have already been using social networking
- The power to stay in touch with our past and current clients at the touch of a button, keeping our repeat business and opening up our business to them and giving them access to contact us in a million different ways.
Thank you Justin from everyone here at The Sara Service, good job!
Sorrel Lewis & Jane Frith
Managing Partners
The Sara Service
Web: http://www.thesaraservice.com/
Tel: +34 695 082 710 / +34 661 801 627
Email: info@thesaraservice.com
