We all know that marketing a service is very different from marketing a product, and it can be much more challenging.
The most common challenge in marketing a service-based business is the lack of physical product itself: it’s difficult to promote something without tangible, physical proof that your customers can see or feel.
Thus, we’ll need to be more creative in marketing our services, and here we will share some effective tips you can use to market your service businesses.
Before we begin, however, let us briefly discuss why you need to market a service-based business differently than your traditional product-based businesses.
Marketing a Service Business: Establishing Trust
The most important thing to consider especially in marketing services is that people don’t actually buy what you sell, but rather, they buy the benefits they get from your product or service.
While this principle also applies when marketing products, it’s even more difficult to communicate the benefits of your service. People only purchase things from brands they can trust, and the key to marketing services is to establish your credibility: your customers need to be assured of the fact that they can trust your brand and the services you offer.
With that being said, the tips we’ll share below will be focused on this fact.
Effective Marketing Strategies To Promote Your Service
1. Know Your Audience and Effectively Communicate Your Message
The secret to any marketing is to identify and understand your target audience. Then, you should be as clear as possible with the marketing message you’d like to deliver.
Understand what your audience’s needs and pain points are. The clearer you can communicate how you can help them with their problems, the more likely you’ll be able to get their attention.
When designing your promotional campaigns, it’s important to highlight how your service can be a solution for your audience’s pain points. For example, if you are a hair salon, your marketing message can communicate how your audience can have a better hairdo in a faster timeframe.
2. Up Your Local SEO Game
There are two main ways people learn about local businesses these days: via social media and via Google search.
You have to make sure your business is featured by Google when your potential clients search for “spas near me” or “spas in (your city name)”.
Google pulls results from Google Maps for these kinds of queries, and this is why you should make sure to optimize your Google Maps listing with four simple steps:
- Claim and verify your Google My Business listing
- Optimize your Google My Business listing. Focus on providing accurate and complete information for your target clients.
- Build local citations by listing your business on various online directories relevant to your niche and your location.
- Encourage your clients to leave more positive reviews both on Google Maps and other review platforms.
3. Find a Unique Value Proposition
Most service-centric industries are very competitive, and it’s very important to ensure that your business stands out from your competitors. What is your unique selling proposition (USP)?
It’s possible that you are providing the most affordable service in your area, which is a viable USP. If you can provide a unique service nobody else can, then it’s also a viable USP.
Nevertheless, you should carefully analyze your competitors and check what they do: avoid their mistakes, and imitate (while modifying) what works for them.
Once you’ve found your UVP, again, it’s very important to clearly communicate its benefits to your target audience.
4. Build Valuable Partnerships
Don’t hesitate to join your local community like the local chamber of commerce in your town, and attend relevant local events.
You should build mutual relationships with other businesses and create valuable partnerships where you can offer each other’s products or services. For example, if you are a beauty salon, you can partner up with local coffee shops to reach out to each other’s customers. This can help amplify your reach, and as you can see, it’s okay to partner up with businesses that are not directly related to your niche.
5. Have an Easy-To-Use Online Booking System
After all the efforts you’ve made to capture your potential client’s attention, you’ll need to make sure it’s as easy as possible for them to book your service. It’s already hard enough to get their attention, and even a minimal obstacle can cause them to forget your brand right away.
This is where having an intuitive, easy-to-use online booking system is a must: you’ll need to ensure your prospects can book your service from anywhere and with any device, including and especially mobile devices.
With an online booking system, you can easily integrate an online booking system to your website and Facebook pages.
With Bookeo you’ll gain access to various features to improve your business’s service quality, including:
- Send automatic notifications and reminders to your clients to reduce missed appointments
- Provide a seamless way for your clients to book your service on any device (including mobile devices)
- Notify staff with automatic email and text notifications for new, rescheduled, or canceled appointments
- Customize your appointment calendar with color-coding, and customize your business hours as required.
Conclusion
The most crucial aspect of marketing a service-centric business is how you can communicate your value and benefits to your target audience without any physical proof. Also, when marketing services, the sale isn’t actually complete when your customers made the purchase. You’ve got to maintain your excellent service throughout your relationship with your customers, including providing customer support.
The tips we’ve shared above can be your foundation in planning a marketing strategy for your service-based business, but above all, the most important thing is to consistently improve your customer relationships and service quality.
Interesting Related Article: “5 Out of the Box Marketing Ideas“
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