Four Ways a Service Business Can Reach More People

At a very elementary level, there are four ways to reach people: one-to-one warm, one-to-one cold, one-to-many warm, and one-to-many cold. You’re either communicating with one person or many people, and those people either already know your business or haven’t gotten familiar with you yet.

For a service business owner, this gives you a simple way to think about where your marketing effort goes. Calling someone, sending an email, and posting a video may look like separate activities. But each fits into one of those four combinations.

What do warm, cold, one-to-one, and one-to-many mean?

Warm means someone has some familiarity with your business. Cold means they don’t know you yet. Neither term tells you whether that person is ready to hire you.

One-to-one means you’re communicating with one person at a time. One-to-many means one message can reach multiple people.

• One-to-one warm: A personal conversation with someone who already knows your business. For example, you could check in with a past customer.
• One-to-one cold: An individual introduction to someone who doesn’t know your business yet.
• One-to-many warm: Content for people who have started getting familiar with you, such as an email to subscribers or a video your followers watch.
• One-to-many cold: A message reaching people who haven’t encountered your business before, such as an ad or a public post shown to a new audience.

These are ways to sort your outreach, not four separate platforms. The same social post can reach a longtime follower and a complete stranger.

Why one-to-many warm is worth building around

One-to-many warm is the approach Protocol revolves around. The most familiar versions are social media and an email list.

People can spend time getting to know you through the content you put out. They can watch your videos, read your articles, and follow along with what you’re doing. Every time you publish, you have another chance to reach people who have already started getting familiar with your business.

That can feel a lot like an in-person relationship because people are essentially spending time with you. They hear how you explain things. They get a sense of how you think about your work.

And you don’t have to have that conversation separately with every person. One useful article or video can reach many people, including strangers who can then start getting to know you.

Does reaching people through content cost nothing?

You don’t have to pay for every person who watches an organic video or reads a public post. That’s an important difference from paying to distribute an ad.

But creating content still takes time, and you may choose to pay for help. The useful point is that one piece of content can keep introducing people to your business without requiring a separate conversation or a payment for each viewer.

How to put this into practice in your service business

Start with a question customers regularly ask you. Record an explanation or write an answer in the same words you’d use in a conversation. Explain what they need to understand before making a decision.

You could publish that answer as a video or article, then share it with your existing audience. If you have an email list, it can give subscribers another reason to spend time with your business. A public post can also introduce the answer to people who haven’t heard of you.

Don’t assume one post will bring immediate results. The value described here comes from people having repeated opportunities to get familiar with you.

You can still use personal outreach or paid distribution where it makes sense. For your content, choose a pace you can keep up with and keep answering real questions. That gives people something useful to come back to.

Protocol Text is a marketing services business based in Lincoln, Nebraska, built around this one-to-many warm approach. To talk about reaching more people with your service business, visit Protocol Text.