Marketing 101 for Service Based Businesses
Marketing 101 for Service Based Businesses – A lot of our customers at Stay Wild Digital Marketing are services or service based businesses. This article is about the essential elements of digital marketing for services.
Marketing for services is not the same as marketing products. After all, products are tangible. You can touch them. You can experiment with them. You can physically see how well they work for yourself.
But services are not like that at all. Can you touch or feel or even know how good your chiropractor is? Are they good at what they do? How would you know?
How can people tell if a service provider is good at what they do? Answering this question is at the heart of service based marketing.
How Do People Choose Services?
Before you start thinking about how you are going to market your service based business, you need to come to understand the psychology of how people choose the companies who provide services to them.
Remember, they can’t taste or try out a service before they buy it.
They have no tangible way to know if that electrician or plumber is good at what they do.
Even once the work is complete, it is usually hidden either by knowledge or by view (if it is in the wall you can’t see the work). So how does a person even know if the service provider did a good job or not?
The truth is – they don’t. They don’t have a clue in the world whether you are a good electrician, or plumber, or roofer, or surgeon.
Even after the service is complete, people have no idea if you did a good job or not.
Because of this not knowing and not being able to tell if you are good at what you do, people tend to rely on some very strange methods to determine if you are worth hiring or not.
How Do People Decide What Services to Hire?
- Social Proof (Reviews)
- Vibe They Get From Initial Interractions
- Awards You’ve Won
- Number of Employees They Perceive You Have
- Credentials, Certifications, Education
- Volume of People Using Your Service Already
- Referrals From Other People
- Responsiveness (How Fast You Respond to Emails, Phone Calls, and Voicemails)
- Your Personal Appearance (Do You Look Like You “Have Your Stuff Together)
- Wealth – Do You Look Like You Are Financially Successful
These are the ways people decide whether or not they should hire your service. They can’t tell how good you are, so they look for clues that you are successful.
Knowing that these are the places people look for clues to figure out of if you are any good at your job or not, this is where your marketing should begin.
Invisible Marketing For Services
Now that you know how people choose their service providers, you are ready to start thinking about marketing.
There is a great book out there called The Invisible Touch. The same author wrote a booked called Selling The Invisible. Both of these books are about selling and marketing services and are excellent reads.
You can buy either one on Amazon by clicking the hyperlink below:
Refer to the list above of the ways people choose their service providers. It matters, because these are the things your marketing can and must control.
You must appear on your website and social media to the world as though you really “have your stuff together” and are successful, and that other people have already tried your service and found it awesome.
Everything about your business needs to scream silently to the world, both online and in person, that you are successful and therefor trustworthy.
To do this (again, refer to the list above) you need to start looking at your website, your employees, and yourself, and figure out if everything you are doing increases or decreases someone’s confidence in your service.
Some of these are easy to control. Take responsiveness for instance. People judge services on how fast they respond to requests for service. The faster you respond to that email or voicemail, the more competent you appear.
Customer Reviews – for services, customer reviews are everything. You need to get as many reviews as you can with as many glowing reports as you can.
People trust other people, and if lots of people have used your service, and everyone says it was good, people assume it must be.
Pay attention to your reviews and ask every customer you work with to review your service. It matters more than nearly anything else.
Appear Successful In Every Way
Perhaps the most challenging of these to control is to appear successful in every way. This one often requires the most personal discipline and is the most expensive.
Your website needs to scream to the world that you are successful and professional.
Your vehicles and office must do the same.
And lastly, you as a person must inspire people to believe you are successful and have your personal life together. People are judging you on everything from your clothes, to your haircut to your physical fitness.
After all, most people know that if you have your personal life together, there is a good chance your professional life will be the same.
Conversely, they also know that if you don’t take care of yourself, there is little chance you are competent to take care of them.
Summary - Marketing 101 For Service Based Businesses
I called this article marketing 101 for service based businesses because this is the bare bones structure of what you need to know to successfully market any type of service.
Services are different than products. You can’t taste, touch, see or test out a service. Because of this, people tend to rely on strange methods for deciding who to work with.
The bottom line about being a service provider whether you are an electrician, plumber, auto repair shop, lawyer, surgeon, or car wash is that everything about your service must scream to the public that you “have your stuff together.”
How Do People Decide What Services to Hire?
- Social Proof (Reviews)
- Vibe They Get From Initial Interractions
- Awards You’ve Won
- Number of Employees They Perceive You Have
- Credentials, Certifications, Education
- Volume of People Using Your Service Already
- Referrals From Other People
- Responsiveness (How Fast You Respond to Emails, Phone Calls, and Voicemails)
- Your Personal Appearance (Do You Look Like You “Have Your Stuff Together)
- Wealth – Do You Look Like You Are Financially Successful