Why do some service businesses thrive while others struggle to put food on the table?

We decided to dig into how to market a service business successfully. In the process, we met Brandon Vaughn, who took his idea for Wise Coatings and turned it into a turnkey franchise with a revenue of $1M per franchise during the first year.

We’ll discuss the types of businesses this advice applies to, why you need to market a business, and the role your service plays in marketing. We’ll also provide strategies, examples, and tips for service business marketing.

Let’s define services in marketing first.

What is a service business?

A service business provides customers with a service instead of a physical product. Some examples of service businesses include:

• Accounting firms
• Cleaning businesses
• Coffee shops
• Consulting firms
• Dentist offices
• Digital marketing agencies
• Financial advisors
• Vending businesses
• Hospitality businesses
• Information technology businesses
• Law firms
• Maintenance companies
• Procurement
• Shipping services
• Tax adviser services
• Training and course creators
• Transportation of people and products

Check out our blog about the best service business ideas to learn more.

Why does a business need marketing if it has a good service?

Quality service isn’t enough to succeed. You have to let people know about your service-based business. Marketing helps you reach your target market and increase sales. In addition, marketing helps service businesses:

• Increase brand awareness by helping customers recognize your service business
• Create loyal customers by maintaining good relationships with them
• Improve communication throughout the buying process
• Understand consumer needs and provide the services that fill them
• Increase profits by creating demand and building a reputation

Common forms of service business marketing include:

• Paid advertising
• Search engine optimization
• Business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing
• Content creation
• Growing brand awareness
• Routine service discounts
• Email and SMS marketing

What role does service management play in marketing?

Service management, the process of managing your customer service business, plays a crucial function in marketing service businesses. A company that doesn’t effectively provide the services it markets will have difficulty obtaining customers, developing new services, maintaining a client list, improving its procedures, and responding to new market opportunities.

Likewise, marketing activities are responsible for getting reviews, keeping the client list engaged, determining customers’ needs, and staying up-to-date with industry trends.

Combining the two shows how a service business’s marketing strategy and business operations need to function cohesively to generate better results.

The benefits of providing excellent customer service along with a solid marketing strategy include:

• Reduced cost of customer acquisition
• Improved messaging focused on the customer’s needs and wants
• Differentiation from competition
• More funds to help comply with government regulations
• Ability to adjust to industry trends

Marketing Example: Wise Coatings

Wise Coating’s marketing strategy is full of service marketing examples you should try. In their logo, they use an orange, black, and gray palette with an elephant holding an epoxy roller. Their phone number includes the word COATING, which makes it easy to remember.

They also use a variety of marketing strategies, including email, text, five rounds, referrals, review requests, and yard signs, and tie them all together by using automation and customer relationship management software.

They also spend nearly $1M annually across their franchises on national and local service marketing. Based on a recent UpFlip survey, that’s 1,000 times what most businesses spend on marketing.

The Foundations of Marketing a Service Business

Establish Credibility

Credibility is public confidence that you back up what you say you’ll do. There is no bigger contributor to credibility than lots of customer reviews. That means you’ll need to make it easy for the customer to review your service business. Then you should highlight the positive reviews on your marketing materials.

Build Trust

Along with credibility, you also need trust. You are coming into people’s businesses and homes. Consider providing your business license number, insurance information, and clear criminal background checks to help your customers know they are in good hands.

Share Your Mission and Values

People love to know your mission and values. Highlight them prominently in your marketing. What are you setting out to do? How do you conduct your business?

Your mission might be as simple as providing everyone with beautiful driveways, or you might want to provide free pressure washing to one lucky widow per week, like Brown’s Pressure Washing. Your values might be to treat everyone with respect, never take shortcuts, and keep prices low.

Check out our interview with Brown’s Pressure Washing below.

Communicate Effectively

Your service marketing strategy is dependent on clear communication. You need to understand what your customers need and communicate how you’ll satisfy them better than any other business.

Provide Customized Services

Consider each person’s circumstances to provide solutions that help them accomplish their goals. Sometimes, someone doesn’t need your service. Saving them money will build loyalty and trust when they need your business.

Personalize Communications

Personalize your message to each segment of your audience. A single mom might need a cleaning service weekly. At the same time, a person who lives alone and travels nine months out of the year might only need quarterly cleanings. Offer a service that works for them, and they will become satisfied customers.

Creating a Service Business Marketing Plan

A service business marketing plan lays out the process you’ll use to accomplish your marketing goals. You’ll use it consistently throughout the life of your business.

The main pieces of a marketing plan for a services business include your:

• Executive summary: A single page describing what the document covers.
• Marketing goals/objectives: Marketing goals should be tied to business goals and might include items like number of customers, revenue per customer, how much to spend per customer, customer satisfaction scores, and the perceived value you want among existing customers.
• Niche audience: Define relevant audiences as narrowly as possible. With each marketing campaign, you should update what you have learned about the audience, their pain points, and how to communicate with them to increase marketing effectiveness.
• Services: You’ll showcase your brand, values, and services in marketing content. Make sure to define them and provide information about how your service benefits the customers.
• Distribution strategy: Unlike product marketing, service provider marketing must explain how you will provide the service to the customer.
• Promotional strategy: Your promotional strategies are the processes you will use to accomplish your marketing goals and distribution strategy. Think of this as outlining your marketing workflows.
• Pricing strategy: Your pricing strategy might be focused on fixed rates, time materials billing, or subscriptions.
• Marketing budget: Your marketing budget is simply a financial document detailing the expected costs of marketing and the expected results. As you gather more data, you should adjust it as needed to stay on track and meet your goals.

Creating these sections in a marketing plan will simplify your marketing and help you measure the success of each campaign.

How to Market a Service Business

Marketing a service business is easiest if you follow a consistent process. We suggest using this 11-step process to start marketing your service business:

1. Identify your target audience.
2. Define your service’s value.
3. Analyze the market.
4. Create your brand.
5. Use social media
6. Use search engine optimization (SEO).
7. Run paid ads to ramp sales up (and down as needed).
8. Make booking easy.
9. Use marketing automation.
10. Build relationships.
11. Encourage customer reviews.

Identify Your Target Audience

Learn everything you can about your target audience to develop an effective marketing strategy. You’ll want to know where they live, how they find a local business to hire, and what services and price points they expect. Any information you can find to help guide your marketing strategy can help your service business.

Define Your Values

A service business should define its values to let customers and employees know what the business stands for. Brandon Vaughn explains the values of Wise Coatings by using the acronym B.A.S.E., which means:

• Buffalo: Cows run away from the storm, then with the storm. A buffalo runs through the storm. Charge the storm!
• Ascend: Always level up.
• Serve: Take care of others first.
• Efficiency: Optimize every motion.

Ultimately, you use this strategy to help the customer understand what you promise to deliver. Put yourself in your customer’s place and ask “why?” to uncover these values.

Analyze the Market

Every local service business will be competing against other service businesses. As a service provider, you’ll want to understand what people in your service industry are doing. You’ll want to understand their:

• Pricing: How much are they charging? Are they profitable?
• Services: What services do competitors offer?
• Customer satisfaction: Are existing clients satisfied?
• Marketing strategies: How do they find potential customers? What marketing channels are they using? What marketing messages are they using to communicate with new customers?

You’ll be able to understand many of the marketing strategies by looking at their reviews and social media. It’s a competitive market, so look for ways to differentiate your business from the existing service-based companies.

Create Your Brand

Service marketing efforts start with your brand. To create one…

• Decide your brand personality: It must fit your personality so you won’t struggle with the communication style in your digital marketing.
• Choose a business name: You’ll need a business name that your customer base will remember. Learn how to choose a business name for your service-based business.
• Write your slogan: While a slogan isn’t required, marketing campaigns can use it to help stand out in the customer base’s minds.
• Brand colors and fonts: Different colors and fonds have different psychological effects. Use them effectively.
• Design your brand logo: A service business logo will be on your website, social media, vehicles, uniforms, invoices, and more. While you don’t have to make it anything fancy, service industries look more professional when they have this branding element.

Use your branding in every marketing campaign to help prospective customers think about you the next time they need your services.

Use Social Media

Services marketing relies heavily on social media. You’ll use it to conduct research, convey your marketing message, share social proof, book clients, and potentially pay for ads.

You’ll want to create a social media account under your small business name. You’ll also want to add your business logo as the profile picture and your slogan as the cover photo. You might also want a picture of your team in the cover photo so people recognize your service technicians.

Your social media accounts should include your business’s address, phone number, website, services, plus many pictures or videos. Videos showing your process and before-and-after photos are some of the best marketing in the service industry. Arm your employees with Company Cam for marketing of business services.

Optimize for Search Engines

Local businesses can stand out from direct competition by using SEO. Providing customers with informative content that speaks to their pain points and search inquiries can build trust and reach a broader audience.

One way to increase SEO is to write blogs. You can share the blogs in social media posts, which helps with content marketing and can bring your ideal customer from a social media platform to your website, where you can collect more data. Combine this with promotional ads to lower your costs of paid advertising.

Run Paid Ads to Ramp Sales Up (and Down as Needed)

Advertising a service uses numerous strategies, but you can run promotional ads to help increase revenue quickly. You’ll want to get your marketing message out to customers about three weeks to a month in advance.

Then, when you want to slow down the new customers requesting bids, just spend less on ads. This makes it easier to stabilize the revenue.

Make Booking Easy

Your services business will benefit tremendously if you make it easy for more customers to book your services through their preferred method. That means you need to have easy ways to book your services on your website and via phone, email, and text messaging. 

Check out Booking Koala for a great online booking platform.

Use Marketing Automation

There’s a lot to keep up with when you advertise a service. Reduce your time on service company marketing by automating as much as possible.

Housecall Pro has a lot of useful functionality for small businesses built in, but plenty of other software options exist.

Automation doesn’t have to be boring. For instance, Brandon sends his existing customers a batch of brownies after he finishes a job, and the process is automated.

How can your business have a unique value proposition?

Build Relationships

A large part of marketing a service business is building relationships. You’ll want to build new relationships and enhance your existing customer relationships. That means you’ll need a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to keep track of your relationships.

A service-based business will also want to build other relationships throughout the community. Some great places to meet other service-based businesses and other business owners include:

• Local business networking groups: Check social media platforms and web searches to find them.
• Better Business Bureau: You can list your business online for free (it takes five minutes) or apply for accreditation, a more intensive review.
• Building Owners and Management Association: Joining his network is an effective service marketing strategy because it can help you connect with prospective clients. It also gives you access to industry news and continuing education opportunities.
• Other industry groups: Numerous industry groups can act as marketing channels, networking and education opportunities, and sometimes ways to get referrals for service-based businesses. Find ones that interest you in the directory of associations.

Request Reviews to Build Trust and Credibility

Small business owners need social proof to succeed. That means you’ll have to ask for customer feedback from current and past clients. One of the best ways to request reviews is with software like Housecall Pro, which allows automated review requests.

Should local firms use immediate response advertising?

Also known as direct response marketing, this marketing strategy seeks an immediate customer decision. And yes, immediate response ads are some of local firms’ most successful service marketing strategies.

You might pursue actions like filling out a form, signing up for a free trial, or making a purchase to:

• Target specific markets
• Identify prospects
• Measure and track the service business interactions
• Increase customer engagement
• Increase communication

Your services business might use Google Local Services Ads, social media platforms, flyers, and radio ads for immediate response marketing. Most service business owners agree local SEO combined with local ads tends to have the best results in getting new clients, but Brandon told us:

Are you ready to market your service business?

Building trust, managing existing client relationships, and everything else that goes into learning how to market services can be overwhelming. We hope you save this as a resource for when the waters feel high.

Now that you know how to market a service business, what strategies will you use?