Imagine that you have an amazing product to sell. Few other people provide it, and it can change clients’ lives for the better.

The trouble is, it’s invisible. Your customers can’t test it before purchase or return it if they’re unsatisfied. Sounds hard to sell, right?

If you own a service industry business, this is your problem to solve. This is why service businesses require a specific marketing approach, commonly known as service or services marketing.

Here’s what you need to know about marketing services, including the importance of customer support and the unique elements of a service marketing mix.

What is service marketing?

Service marketing (or services marketing) is the promotion of businesses that sell intangible services rather than physical products. Services marketing emerged to help these kinds of businesses understand and respond to the unique challenges of marketing services.

Service business marketing can help companies differentiate themselves in a market, communicate service quality, and build customer trust. Here are some service company types that rely on this approach to advertising:

Characteristics of service marketing

Service marketing strategies and product marketing strategies differ significantly. Although they share marketing objectives like attracting potential customers, boosting customer satisfaction, and increasing sales, an effective service marketing strategy has to account for the lack of physical products.

Here’s an overview of the unique characteristics of service marketing and how service and product marketing efforts differ:

• Intangibility. Services are intangible—you can’t hold one, measure its dimensions, or put it on a shelf. It’s up to a service marketing team to help a target audience understand service quality and value these intangible benefits.
• Inseparability. Services are produced and consumed simultaneously, which means that the value proposition of a service is a quality interaction with the service provider.
• Variability. Service quality depends on the service producer. No two service interactions are the same, so service marketers focus on helping customers recognize quality service and managing their expectations around potential variability.
• Perishability. Services require direct distribution: You can’t produce them in advance, store them for later use, or ship them to a different location to meet customer demand. This means that service marketing teams are also responsible for managing demand patterns to avoid bottlenecks that could hurt service quality or employee satisfaction.
• Customer participation. Because customers participate in service delivery, service marketing helps potential customers understand their role in an interaction. Product-based businesses can deliver on their value proposition with little customer cooperation, so product marketing focuses less on customer education.

What is a service marketing mix?

Your marketing mix is the collection of conceptual marketing tools you use to promote a product or service. In product marketing, companies use a marketing mix known as the four Ps: place, promotion, product, and price. By 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 and align business and customer expectations.

2. Price. Price refers to the cost of your service. Service marketing pricing strategies often factor in costs for labor, overhead, materials, markup, and competitor pricing.

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 service offerings. They can involve promoting services through 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 maximizes efficiency and streamlines procedures for employees and internal teams. Although a positive customer experience is critical to service companies, delivering that experience at the expense of employee satisfaction can be detrimental to your company in the long run.

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 customer perception of service quality; for example, a business consulting team might arrive on a client’s premises in professional attire and present a polished, branded slide deck of findings.

Crafting an effective service marketing campaign

Service marketing isn’t about reinventing the marketing wheel—it’s about subtle strategic adjustments designed with service promotion in mind. Here are five strategies to help you effectively market services to your target audience:

Visualize outcomes

Effective service marketing strategies make intangible benefits as tangible as possible. Your customers might not be able to hold or point to the service provided, but they’re more likely to buy if they understand how it will solve a problem or improve their lives.

What this looks like will depend on your specific service product and target audience, but here are a few examples:

• A hair salon might post before-and-after photos of customers to its social media accounts.
• A business-to-business (B2B) consulting firm might create case studies demonstrating its impact on client sales figures and business success, sharing them through email and social media.
• A massage therapist might maintain a blog about the benefits of massage, highlighting improvements in athletic performance with less pain.

Provide a quality customer experience

Customer experience is important for all business types, but it’s a particularly important factor for service sector companies. Customers have longer and repeated interaction with your business, and the service delivery process can affect their perception of service quality. Here are a few strategies:

• Appoint account managers. Account management is essential to building and maintaining positive customer relationships. Dedicated account managers can help you understand and meet customer expectations, boost customer retention, and improve customer satisfaction.
• Invest in customer support. High-quality customer support is a critical part of service marketing. You might provide multiple contact options (including phone, chat, and social media) and proactively follow up with customers after service delivery.
• Gather customer feedback. Customer feedback can provide valuable insights into customer perceptions.