The above statement might sound obvious, but over the years of consulting and marketing for businesses, we’ve heard similar stories: “Our marketing agency couldn’t bring in leads,” “Our website never saw activity,” or “We spent so much money on ads with no conversions.” The issues here aren’t that they were bad marketing agencies, websites, or ads, but that they didn’t know how to sell a service-based business. Let’s talk about what they missed.
Three Defining Characteristics of Services Marketing
Marketing for a service-based business can best be described from two starting points. A contrast between a product-based business (such as in the retail sector) and the customer journey from initial marketing to making a sale. Let’s break it down into three major points.
Explaining Your Service (and Why It’s Better)
The first issue is providing information on what your service is and what differentiates it from others. The nature of the products allows for a harder sell, but for services, you’ll need to focus more on marketing that tells rather than shows. It needs to be clear, concise, and include information that either allows you to dig deeper or go directly to selling.
The Need to Show Expertise (and How)
While a product can stand alone, a service is provided by people. You need to prove you’re the most knowledgeable people in your industry. Often, tools like blogs are used in service-based marketing to both demonstrate expertise and bring people with questions to your website through Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Longer Sales Cycles (Sometimes Very Long)
Unless your service is very simple (and inexpensive), you’re most likely looking at longer sales cycles than a product-based service. This means you’ll need marketing that also goes the distance, including email marketing to follow up on prospects and retain customers. Learn more about the types of marketing needed for long sales cycles.
Interested in learning more about the contrast between services and product marketing? Check out our blog, Working with a Marketing Agency: Products vs. Services, for the details.
The Right Agency for Services Marketing
So, with the groundwork laid, let’s get back to working with a marketing agency for service-based businesses. If you had any of the complaints outlined in the intro, you probably had a failure along one of those three key points of services marketing, because the agency didn’t know how to handle services marketing. You may have also just had a bad marketing agency, some signs of which include a lack of:
- Proactive Marketing: If you’ve had difficulty understanding services or even getting a response from your marketing agency, they may not be proactive enough.
- Consistent Content: You need regular content updates across social media, your website, and your online presence. Are you getting it?
- Goal-Focused Objectives: From an initial marketing plan to reassessments after marketing campaigns, is your marketing goal-focused rather than cookie-cutter?
At Vision, we have years of experience working with service-based businesses, from insurance and home contractors to mid-sized enterprises selling to consumers, businesses, and governments. And we’re ready to help you, too. Contact Vision today to start talking. Looking for more expert marketing advice? Check out the rest of our Vision blogs, our enVisioning Success podcast, and our downloadable Marketing Strategies Playbook.
