So before embarking on any marketing for your business do think about the following and make sure you choose suppliers who understand the particular challenges you face if you are marketing a service.

Immediate Consumption
Can clients buy and receive what you offer now, to use later? If it’s a service chances are they can’t. You can’t buy a holiday and keep it in your pocket until you need to use it! You might pay for the service now – but you won’t actually receive it until later, sometimes much later. Which has interesting implications on your need to keep your clients informed and make sure they don’t change their mind or suffer doubts about their purchase, which could result in problems with complaints, queries and changes later.

The same or different?
Can the offer to your clients be standardised? If so – it’s most likely a product. This is an interesting one really – and one that a number of professional service businesses have tried to develop product offers around, with varying degrees of success. Just think of the debt recovery services, based on 7-day letters, offered by many of the larger law firms. Or the accountancy firms offering a formulaic approach to preparing reports and accounts on a fixed-fee basis. Of course the danger here is that in making the service a commodity you leave yourself open to direct price competition or devaluation of your full service offer.

So what should you do differently if you are marketing a service rather than a product?

The first, and probably the most important thing is to make your service tangible, to help clients and potential clients understand what they will get from using your service. It means clearly articulating what is involved in your service, defining what real benefits clients can receive and highlighting what’s unique about your way of doing things. Don’t forget they don’t want to know the details of how you do things – but instead want to understand the WIFIM factor (what’s in it for me!) Find ways to make the service tangible, even if that’s only in terms of a membership card, a full itinerary for a holiday (well before tickets are dispatched and it starts to become real) or a confirmatory note of what clients can expect from your service (including things like turn around times – say for preparing accounts or writing legal documents).

Secondly, if your service is something that is paid for now but used or experienced later you need to think carefully about how your clients feel about you from the time of purchase throughout their relationship with your organisation. So for example – I pay a subscription to a business club like the Chamber of Commerce. It entitles me to certain services from them (newsletters, events and information). The danger is, that if they just take my money and ignore me until my next subscription is due I might decide not to renew. So it’s important to keep an open dialogue and make it easy for your clients to contact you with questions and queries and remind them of the value they get from membership, even if they choose not to use all of the services on offer.

Thirdly, keep your promises or better still over-deliver. I admit to being a demanding consumer, customer and client – but there are plenty out there like me. We demand that the obvious hygiene factors - like handling payments efficiently, responding quickly to calls or queries and delivering what you’ve said you’ll deliver, when you say you will deliver it – are met. This is even more important in a service environment, where the client or customer may feel dissatisfied after their purchase, for no other reason than the fact they’ve apparently got nothing to show for the money they’ve spent.

If you sell a service that is perhaps a once a year purchase (car insurance) or is available on an on-going basis (membership of an organisation like the AA) think carefully about how you treat your customers – not just at the time that they decide to buy, but during the whole time they are experiencing your service. Why should they come back to you next time? How can you make sure they want to buy again from you and aren’t tempted to try the competition? And possibly most importantly - are all of your employees delivering a consistent service and message?

Of course, you need to use the traditional methods to market and sell services, just as you would products – so the 4 Ps of marketing (product, price, place and promotion) all have a role to play – but so do your people, processes and procedures because invariably they are inextricably linked to the service that you offer.

Why market services differently? Because they are different – the tools and tactics you use may ultimately be the same – but the initial process that you need to go through to create interest and desire are different – and true after sales service must become an integral part of the mix. Embrace the difference, crack the intangibility barrier, have a clear plan for serving customers well, and you can develop a winning marketing plan for your service business.

Article written by Teresa Harris, Second Opinion Marketing. Teresa is an independent marketing consultant specialising in communication solutions and the customer experience. To contact Second Opinion Marketing call 01789 740396 or email tah@secondopinionmarketing.co.uk.

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