Promoting online and offline services?

I think you're on the right track with your last sentence. They should try to target a specific industry through which they can quickly replicate their services and gain recognition as experts. In a service like that your best bet would be to approach some ideal target clients and offer some deep discounts just for the opportunity to prove themselves and develop a case study as well as get valuable testimonials and referrals.

Non-profits, churches and educational institutions can be good places to offer free or discounted services because all of the people involved will help tremendously with word of mouth promotion and many of them may be decision makers in businesses that could turn into clients. I wouldn't make it a habit though as at some point they need to make money, not be a charity.

As far as internet marketing goes sometimes the offline methods can still be your best options, but if you augment them with online methods such as social media it will help a lot. LinkedIn can help them discover and target company decision makers who volunteer at any non-profits they're doing discounted work for. General word of mouth referrals from clients and other contacts will be helped if they can easily find your company's facebook page or other social media to like and share with their friends.

A short video series of helpful computer tips posted to their YouTube channel can help drive tons of traffic especially if you target certain keywords related to that industry.

As far as paid or free online traffic goes this can be tough. For Bing/Adwords PPC there are TONS of keyword combinations that could potentially work for IT companies. You just need to find a good keyword research tool and come up with the thousands of potential keywords and then begin to whittle away at it until you have a manageable targeted list. With a low budget this could be restrictive, but then again a low budget makes any kind of advertising restrictive. Your best bet with free and cheap methods are to do what I recommended above. Also, it sounds like most of their big money initially will come from actual hands-on implementation of services for local clients rather than online coaching. I would strongly recommend they start with that to get a solid footing and then expand to the online coaching when they have the money to run more aggressive online advertising. Starting out they should join every local networking organization they can join and get to know as many local business owners as possible and offer a special deal for their first few clients. Hope this helps.