Published 28 September 2020

Service Marketing – Planning And Strategy Guide

Service marketing is a specialized field that deals with the unique characteristics of services, such as intangibility, heterogeneity, perishability, and inseparability. This article covers the types of service marketing, the service marketing mix, and strategies to improve service marketing. It emphasizes the importance of building trust, demonstrating expertise through content marketing, offering trial experiences, and optimizing online presence. Successful service marketing involves understanding customer needs, delivering value, and creating meaningful customer relationships.

Introduction: What is Service Marketing?

Services have increased in prominence globally, prompting the need for more expertise in service selling and marketing. But marketing a service is not a walk in the park. Why? This is because of the following characteristics, that differentiate services from physical products:

Intangible
Heterogeneous
Perishable
Inseparable from their user, among others

These very characteristics are what make marketing a service starkly different from marketing a physical product. Whereas the service marketing mix might not be all that different from marketing strategies used for physical products, some of the mechanics involved differ.

In this article, we will take a deeper look at the features listed above, as well as:

Types of service marketing
Service marketing mix
Strategies for marketing your service

Types of Service Marketing

Service marketing falls into the following categories

Consumer services. These include services that cater directly to individual needs. Consumer services can further be classified as:

Food services, e.g, fast food joints, bakeries, restaurants
Boarding and lodging facilities such as hotels and motels
Health and personal care services, e.g, beauty salons, barber shops, dry cleaners, gymnastics, etcetera
Finance and insurance services
Entertainment
Transport and communication

Industrial services. These are services created for industries, or other businesses. Such services help the companies buying them to conduct their commercial activities more efficiently. The include:

Financial and insurance services
Consultancy, e.g engineering, design and management consultancies
Marketing and advertising
Office services

Features Of A Service

Services have the following features:

1. Intangibility

You cannot see or touch a product. Unlike physical products, services aren’t concrete or visible. When selling a service, what you are basically doing is selling yours and your employees’ skills by demonstrating value, and through creating relationships.

This means that before you convert a client, you have to create a relationship with them, then highlight the value of the product through well thought-out engagement tactics.

2. Inseparability

A customer receives a service at the same time it is being created. You cannot create a service and leave it for future use. You can however plan service marketing strategies to make the customer aware that you exist.

3. Variability

Since services are offered by people, the level of service that a customer receives will depend on the specific person offering that service. Even if the service is being offered by one person, that individual can vary their approach.

Customer facing staff influence how customers see the services they are receiving. If staff skills, morale or motivation is low, this inevitably results in poor customer service perception. You can offer training as a method to ensure more standardization of quality and service provision.

4. Perishability

You are likely to suffer from economic losses if your services aren’t utilized as per your planned schedule. For instance, if you don’t meet your hotel room bookings per night, you cannot transfer that unused capacity to another day.

5. Changing demand

Services fluctuate in demand based on seasons. Tourism for instance, has its high and low seasons.

6. Pricing

How you price your service offering depends on seasonality and competitor pricing. While these parameters also apply to products, pricing for physical products also factors price of raw materials, production costs, transport and logistics.

These characteristics make marketing services difficult. Services should however be marketed, as it is in so doing that you can sustain a steady flow of customers.

This brings us to the next point: the service marketing mix.

The Service Marketing Mix

Traditionally, marketing a product involves getting the following elements right: product, price, place, promotion.

With services, you need to figure out how to work without physical evidence. This in turn introduces more complexity in process and people.

Product

The service itself is the product. The perceived value of a service lies in its availability, features, quality and customer service.

How then, as a marketer, do you ensure you raise the perceived value of your product?

Package your core service in a way that highlights its value and relevance to the customer
Invest in your facilitation services. For instance, if you run a physical office, make sure your service outlet should inspire customer confidence. That is, the location must be right, furnishings and equipment state of the art and staff members professional. Marketing services, both digital and physical should be consistent and professionally done.
Offer other support services to augment your core service

Price

How can your price your service appropriately so that you remain profitable while also avoiding pricing discrimination? There is the notion that a high price package equals more value. But is your service valuable enough?

These are the questions you need to be asking yourself while pricing your service.

Given that products or services with a high-value price tag tend to have a longer sales cycle, your marketing mix should be effective enough to deliver value.

Place

Where can the customer get the service? Have you figured out your distribution channels? Have you worked on those channels to make them highly converting?

Promotion

How will you market your service? Are you using traditional marketing, digital channels or a mix of both?

Some of the most effective methods for promoting services include:

Word of mouth
Paid advertising
Free trials
Webinars
Loyalty programs
Sales and discounts

People

Invest in your sales, marketing, and customer service personnel so that they always give a great first impression to customers.

Hire the right people
Invest in their training
Motivate your direct staff with appropriately-sized pay packages
Work with the right lead generation services. This is because the cost of upskilling your employees can be quite high and limit expansion efforts.

Process

The procedures and mechanisms through which you deliver your service to the customer influences how they perceive your service. As the value of a service can be quite difficult to measure, what you want is to ensure a smooth flow of service from your company to the customer.

Be prompt, efficient, meet the customer’s needs, and exceed their expectations.

Strategies to Improve Your Service Marketing

Below are strategies you can use to improve your service marketing:

Build Trust With Referral Marketing

Did you now that 92% of millennials don’t trust institutions offering financial services? This is according to research conducted by FaceBook.

On the flip side, research from Nielsen shows that a referral from a trusted source is more effective than most other marketing strategies. So, whether it’s online reviews or in person word of mouth, a referral from an actual consumer who has experienced a brand is a powerful way to get people to buy from you.

In service selling, reputation is just as important as the service you are selling. Referrals will help you sell your reputation. As such, invest in referrals from your existing customers. Ask them to leave a testimonial of their experience with you.

Referrals by influencers are also quite powerful especially for younger generations. A study by McCarthy group found that while 84% of young people don’t trust brand advertisements, 58% do not mind ads that feature their favorite celebrities.

Examples:

Drop box is a great example of a company that used referrals to grow its business, by incentivizing customers for referrals.
NordVPN used influencer marketing to market its cyber security tokens. This advert is simply saying: just as Liverpool’s defense is one of the best in the world, so is Nord’s defense services.

Source: NORDVPN

Increase Brand Authority With Content Marketing

Service marketing involves selling expertise. How can you demonstrate expertise?

By offering educational content in your service area. For example, how-to-content, webinars, demo videos, case studies, etcetera
Publishing a book that dives in-depth into your area of service
Speaking at events and conferences
Social media marketing

One of the best ways to guarantee that your content will receive viewers and readers is by promoting it on social media. Whenever you post content on your website, push it to your social media accounts. Join networks and contribute widely to them, so that they and others can view you as a key resource they can turn to for information.

Example

Intrepid travel, a company that offers sustainable tourism, uses content marketing to promote its themed travel packages.

Invest In Experiential Marketing

Allow your potential customers to try out your service before they buy. A trial period is one way to do this. According to Totango, 62% of companies get new business from free trials.

Experiential marketing - free trials and Freemium

Source: Totango

When offering trials, how you word your offer is very important. For instance, while free is good, actually using the word in your marketing material may be a deterrent for some customers. one company for instance, eliminated the word “free” from their landing page, and experienced a 73% jump in trial sign ups. How did they entice customers? By emphasizing value and convenience.

Other valuable offerings that you can give for free include consultation, 24-7 customer service and free support services.

Optimize Your Website And Content

Research shows that 81% of people search online before they buy a product or service. You therefore should invest in search engine optimization so that your content shows up on google, Bing, and other search engines. Below are different ways to make the most of your SEO strategy:

Once you create content, optimize it with keywords
Invest in backlinks through guest posts and on social media

In the image below, you can see how executing SEO tactics such as keyword optimization and tags is not only effective, but also quite simple.

Source: searchengineland

In addition to using SEO to increase traffic, you can also:

Invest in paid traffic so that your content gets top-ranking priority
Create company profiles in online directories such as Google My business and Bing places for business.