Beginner's guide to service marketing strategy

Selling a product like shoes, cupcakes or a piece of software has one set of challenges. Selling a service, such as IT support or a massage treatment, has a whole other can of worms.

That’s because services are intangible. No one can see them, touch them, taste them or try them on. With services, you’re selling an experience.

How do you communicate the value of an experience? The answer lies in part, how differently the importance of a product is viewed. Understanding that viewpoint can have a huge and positive impact on your overall marketing plan.

What is service marketing?

Service marketing is a marketing category that takes into account the unique aspects of a service. A product can be tested and returned and is usually the same no matter who you sell it to. But a service, even if it is consistently high-quality, can’t be identical each time. It also can’t be “returned” in the same way.

Over time, marketers began to realize that the strategies needed to market a service successfully deserved their own category. Traditional marketing often calls the main factors involved in an overall strategy the “four Ps”: product, price, promotion and place.

Service marketing adds three more: people, process and physical evidence. People are crucial to service because people create the experience. The process, or delivery of service to a client, is also especially critical here. And “physical evidence” refers to the need to provide real evidence to support claims about quality, given that the product itself is not tangible.

For example, tasteful décor, comfortable seats and free sparkling water at a hair salon can serve as concrete signals that the service will be worth the price.

How to think about service marketing

To sum up:

• Your product is your people.
• In a pretty literal way, you’re selling the value of your employees’ time and skill. Whether that’s a cleaning service, a realtor service or a health care service, it can’t happen without an employee present. In other words, you’re not selling the rug or the vacuum cleaner: you’re selling the cleaning itself.
• Therefore, the better you understand who your employees are and what value they add, the more successful your service marketing strategies will be.
• Service is naturally variable.
• Unlike a physical, mass-produced product, a service can only be standardized to a degree. When your product is people, it will inevitably vary.
• That can be a good thing. A personal touch can be the best part of a successful service. But to provide a consistent product with consistently positive customer reviews, marketers need to figure out which parts of a service can be standardized and which can’t, to better communicate the strengths and deliverables of a service.
• Service is generated and consumed at the same time.
• You can’t store service on a shelf and pack it up for later. One client can’t return a service and sell it to another. Once it happens, it no longer exists as a product.
• This affects the way service providers think about customer service, their business’ reputation in the world and when and how to ask for client feedback.
• There are two kinds of services to sell.
• Core services: These are the primary services provided, such as the food at a restaurant.
• Supplementary services: These are the services often provided to add value to the core service, such as the restaurant’s home delivery option.

Thoroughly understanding all of the services your business provides can help you build a more effective service marketing strategy.