How to market a service based business | 4 strategies specific to selling services instead of products

Is your approach to marketing your services a carbon copy of what you’d use to market products? Not getting the results you expected? Don’t worry. We’ve got 4 actionable strategies to re-optimise your outbound communications.

To some degree, marketing products can be relatively easy. You have a physical good which you can point to, put in the customer’s hand, and make detailed videos and content about, showing exactly how and explaining precisely why it’s the best thing since sliced bread, and just like that: “I’ll take it!”

Apply the same approach to marketing a service-based business and you’ll likely find yourself spending a lot of time and effort for very little return. This is because marketing a service is a completely different beast. You’ve gone from having a physical good to connect your customer’s needs to, to suddenly getting bogged down in explaining how you’ll solve a problem that was complicated enough that they couldn’t solve it themselves.

Marketing a service-based business takes a completely different approach. Here are our top strategies for informing that approach.

1. Sell the result, not the process

When marketing your service-based business, it’s really important to focus on the outcomes and benefits your customers will experience rather than the technical aspects of how you’ll deliver the service. Nobody really cares how you do it, they only really care about the end result. Identify what your clients want from you, and make that the lead in your marketing and your pitches.

For example, if you’re a personal trainer running your own PT business, your typical clients aren’t going to be interested in you regurgitating some of the more obscure points from your sports science degree – odds are they just want to lose some weight, get a bit fitter, or feel better. If you’re an event planner, they don’t really care what industry-leading planning software you’re using – that shouldn’t be the focus at all. They just want their event to harvest an audible “Wow!” from their guests, so connecting your service to this should be the lead.

Pro tip: You can gamify connecting your customer’s desired results and preferences to your service or service packages for passive lead generation.

By creating a Product Recommendation Quiz and embedding it on your strategic website pages and across your social media, potential clients can answer a series of questions to identify which of your service packages are right for them, or even if they’d be better served by a different type of business. This is a highly efficient way of generating qualified leads.

2. Tell stories and share your philosophy

When you’re marketing your service-based business, storytelling and weaving your philosophy around your stories will form key elements of your marketing efforts. Because you’ve not got a physical product to act as a lure to your customers, storytelling is a way to connect with potential clients on a deeper level.

One way this could be achieved is by creating case studies and client testimonials that demonstrate how you’ve solved similar problems for your clients. Odds are if one client has had a problem you’ve solved, there are plenty of other potential clients out there just waiting to be shown that your service is the solution.

You could also look to differentiate yourself from competitors by presenting your unique approach and philosophy within your industry, such as dispelling common myths or redundant practices, or other elements of your industry which customers may identify as something that’s not worked for them.

Pro tip: Much like with strategy 1, the key lies in making your stories relatable to your clients’ pain points. Your storytelling needs to be simple enough to understand. (Even if the end-result was super complicated to execute, you need to simplify it so they can understand it. After all, that’s your secret recipe.)

3. Build a sales and marketing approach relevant to the type of service you’re offering

The more premium your service’s price tag, the more you need to manage your expectations about how long your marketing and sales funnel needs to be. If you don’t have a physical product, and your service is more complex than a subscription to get X-amount of free coffees a month or to a streaming platform, conversions are seldom going to be an on-the-spot affair. You need to build a sales and marketing approach that’s appropriate for the type of service you’re offering.

The less tangible, and the more expensive your service, the more nurturing through the sales funnel you’ll need to be prepared to do to be successful. This could involve content marketing campaigns at the top of the funnel, and retargeting ads further along to stay engaged with potential clients.

Pro tip: Gamification can help throughout the sales funnel. By distributing Quizzes and Surveys, you can generate leads, learn about user behaviour, keep lines of contact open with targets, and potentially even identify new markets.

More casual branded marketing games with digital leaderboards incorporated are also an excellent way to help your booth stand out at events to generate leads. They can act as both an icebreaker to get people to let their guards down, and the leaderboard adds a competitive element that fosters interaction and repeat visits. (The more you get to talk to someone, the more opportunities you get to make an impression on them and sell your point of difference.)

4. Use content marketing and SEO to project your authority across all the right channels

When it comes to operating a service-based business, you live and die by your target customers’ perceptions of your competency level. Unless you already have an impressive body of work behind your service-based business, you’re really asking target customers to take a leap of faith in what you say you’re capable of delivering. Projecting your authority to gain the trust of customers is a huge part of closing a deal.

One way to project your authority is by leveraging content marketing and SEO. Creating informative YouTube videos, podcasts, articles, and infographics, can be a great way to attract top-of-the-funnel traffic and showcase your expertise.

Stay on top of modern trends: Youtube Shorts, TikToks and Instagram Reels are becoming more and more relevant to more service-based businesses, particularly in a B2C setting, but increasingly in a B2B setting also, as digital natives are becoming business owners and decision makers.

Key takeaway

A lot of the obvious, more commonly known marketing techniques are based around marketing physical products to consumers, in part because a lot of the most well-known advertising campaigns are based on selling consumer goods. It’s no wonder service-based businesses can often get off on the wrong foot and build their marketing campaigns according to this blueprint.

The keys to successfully marketing a service lie in selling the result your clients want, communicating your point of difference, and projecting enough authority to get your audience to trust that you can deliver that result.

The 4 strategies listed here are actionable starting points any service-based business can use to start putting together a more effective marketing plan.