What Is Service Marketing? Service Marketing Tips

Marketing your service business comes with a unique challenge: Since your product is invisible, customers can’t try it before purchase, and they can’t return it if they’re unsatisfied.

“Service marketing and product marketing are different,” says Alston Change, CEO and founding partner of recruiting firm Acacia. “There’s a lot more conceptual marketing that you have to pitch, coupled with outcomes.” This is why service businesses require specific marketing strategies.

Here’s what you need to know about marketing services, including the importance of a superior customer experience and the unique elements of a service marketing mix—plus expert insights based on Alston’s experience marketing services to both B2B and B2C audiences. 

What is service marketing?

Service marketing (or services marketing) is the promotion of businesses that sell intangible services rather than physical products. The goal of service marketing is to differentiate your service business in the market, communicate service quality, and build customer trust. 

Here are some service company types that rely on this approach:

• Rental service companies
• Branding and marketing agencies
• Consulting service firms
• Management service firms
• Professional services firms
• Educational service providers
• Beauty, health, and wellness service providers
• Financial service companies
• Medical services providers
• Travel and entertainment service companies

Service marketing vs. product marketing

Service marketing and product marketing strategies differ. Although they share objectives like attracting potential customers and increasing sales, they take distinct approaches to communicating value due to the differences in how physical products and intangible services are produced, consumed, and evaluated by consumers.

“In product marketing, you’re selling an actual product, like a technical product that has functionality that’s built for a specific user,” says Alston. “In service marketing, the product is invisible, and there’s a lot of variability in how the service can go.”

Here are some unique characteristics of service marketing:

• Intangibility: Services are intangible; you can’t hold one, measure its dimensions, or put it on a shelf. It’s up to you to help your target audience understand what they get if they buy it.
• Inseparability: You can’t separate a service from the delivery of that service, which means the quality of the service provider’s interaction with customers is part of the value proposition. 
• Variability: Since services are generally delivered by people, there’s natural variation in the delivery process and experience. When marketing services, you need to manage your buyers’ expectations about that variability.
• Perishability: You can’t produce a service in advance, store it for later use, or ship it to a different location to meet customer demand. This means that your marketing materials need to be clear about the lead time customers can expect when buying your services. 
• Customer participation: Because customers participate in service delivery, service marketing helps potential customers understand their role in an interaction. If there are prerequisites or a level of engagement you require from clients, make that clear.

What is a service marketing mix?

Your marketing mix is the collection of marketing elements you use to promote your business. In product marketing, companies use a marketing mix known as the four Ps: place, promotion, product, and price. In contrast, the service marketing mix contains seven Ps: product, price, place, promotion, people, processes, and physical evidence. 

Here’s an overview of the seven Ps of marketing services:

1. Product: Your product is the service you provide to customers. Service marketing teams use something known as a service blueprint to define the scope and process. Service blueprints tell customers what they are purchasing. Some businesses even productize their services to add further clarity.

2. Price: Price refers to the cost of your service. Service marketing pricing strategies often factor in costs for labor, overhead, materials, markup, competitor pricing, and—especially in business-to-business (B2B) contexts—the value of the outcome.

3. Place: Place refers to your service location or distribution channel. It can be a physical environment or an online platform.

4. Promotion: Promotional activities raise awareness and increase demand for a business’s services. They can involve paid advertisements, public relations campaigns, social media marketing, and other service marketing strategies.

5. People: People deliver your service, and they’re directly responsible for service quality. Many service-industry companies invest in training programs to help employees build skills to meet customer needs.

6. Process: Your service process is how you deliver your services. A good service process should be both efficient for your team and positive for the clients. 

7. Physical evidence: These are the visual cues a customer receives during service delivery, such as the physical environment and branding efforts. Your service marketing team can use them to influence customers’ perception of service quality; for example, a consulting practice might require their team to wear professional attire, even on video.

How to market your services

• Focus on outcomes
• Generate referrals
• Train your customers
• Sell expertise

Here are four strategies to help you effectively market services to your target audience:

Focus on outcomes

People and businesses hire service businesses to deliver outcomes for them. Your business’s track record of delivering these outcomes while providing a positive customer experience should be front and center in your marketing. For example: 

• A hair salon might post before-and-after photos of customers to its social media accounts.
• A consulting firm might publish case studies demonstrating their impact on their clients’ businesses and share them through marketing channels like email and social media.
• A massage therapist might publish testimonials on their website in which clients share their experiences of improved athletic performance and decreased pain.

One challenge, though, is that service businesses can’t always promise an outcome. A hair salon can’t promise to give you a haircut you’ll love, for example, and an SEO business can’t guarantee that their customers will rank #1 on Google. 

For this reason, Alston advises against guarantees. 

“No outcomes are guaranteed, so we try to stay away from that in our marketing efforts,” he says. “We don’t say ’Work with Acacia because we fill your role in 30 days,’ because I can’t control if a candidate’s going to take a job.” 

He also recommends omitting detailed process descriptions from marketing materials. “The client doesn’t care. They just want to know that you’re going to fill the role,” he says, adding that this strategy also increases flexibility. 

For example, Acacia found that specifying the number of LinkedIn messages to be sent on a client’s behalf limited its ability to adjust strategy based on results. Instead, the company now opts for process descriptions that emphasize outcome over business activities. 

“We say things that are pretty operationally generic, like, ‘We’ll manage your talent brand,’” says Alston.

Generate referrals

Since service businesses sell intangibles, word-of-mouth marketing is essential. That’s why referrals are a major customer acquisition channel for Acacia. “The service that I do is referral-heavy,” says Alston, “So I’ll ask for referrals from clients we’ve worked with.”

A customer’s willingness to refer a service business hinges on the caliber of customer experience they received. Acacia optimizes the customer experience by using artificial intelligence (AI) to track account information.

“The hardest thing for a recruiter is recall,” says Alston. “We’re brainstorming for a client, and they might ask, ‘You talked to that software engineer at Chime in San Francisco last month. What was his name?’ and a recruiter might think, ‘I must have 60 candidates a week; I don’t know.’ A really good senior recruiter says, ‘Oh yeah, it was Kevin Bob; here’s his email; boom, boom, boom. But that’s really hard to do.’”

The company uses an AI tool called Elly to transcribe and store calls, creating a searchable record of every business conversation.

“AI makes recall just not a thing,” says Alston. “I can type into Elly, ‘Who was that candidate that worked at Chime that I talked with last month?’ and pull it up.” 

AI also helps Acacia save time while maintaining excellent customer communication. “Elly takes the video recording or phone conversation, records it, and then puts it into a note card that we can then send right to our client,” says Alston. “Previously, we’d have to write all the notes and then format them.” 

Train your customers

Unlike product marketing, service marketing requires customer participation. Effective service marketing strategies coach potential customers, encouraging behaviors that help the service provider meet their needs.

For example, a real estate agent’s marketing efforts might include a newsletter or blog posts that talk about how to best work with an agent, such as the importance of setting a realistic budget, being upfront about priorities, and communicating when those priorities change.

Acacia is in the unique position of serving two sets of customers: clients and candidates. Successful service delivery requires effective participation from both. The company recently launched a Substack to coach prospective applicants in the interview process.

“We’re building out more free resources for candidates who are on the job market,” Alston says. “We’re hoping that the Substack will help that information be more visible and easily distributable.”

Sell expertise

The training, skill, and judgment of service personnel are a major part of a service company’s value proposition, so they should be a key focus area of service marketing efforts.

Early on, Acacia demonstrated expertise by promoting the founder’s experience, including Alston’s 13 years in the technical recruiting industry and role at an AI company with notable venture capital backing. “That was a great way to say, ‘Hey, I’ve had this accolade; I hired an engineering team; We got acquired for a billion dollars; Do you want to work with me?’” says Alston.

But using reputation marketing to promote the founder’s credentials only goes so far. Ultimately, you want to sell the expertise and track record of the entire service team.

Today, Acacia points to its track record of previously placed candidates and continues to emphasize provider background. “The thing we say in all of our pitches is that everyone on my team has both internal recruiting experience and agency experience,” says Alston. “Startups love that because what that signals to them is that we know how to work at the pace of an agency recruiter, but we also know how to operationally set up the founder for success because we’ve all been either a head of talent or the first recruiter at a company.”

To highlight your team’s expertise outside of the context of a pitch, try showcasing your team on social media, writing detailed bios on your website, or even offering free classes or webinars.