8 Marketing Tactics for Brands Selling Service Products

Marketing and selling service products is demanding, especially when breaking into a competitive market or niche. 

The main challenge is more than successfully communicating your unique value proposition. But more importantly, identifying the ideal marketing tactics for your service brand can be even more difficult when you don’t have a product you can show off.

Nevertheless, you can still develop and implement effective marketing strategies, whether you offer online or local services. However, you need to comprehend the benefits your audience seeks fully. Moreover, aim to employ tactics highlighting your business’ primary strengths—like your team’s expertise, the superior equipment you use, or your brand’s reliability.

So, if you’re ready to go above and beyond to grow your business, here are the top eight marketing tactics for brands selling service products.

Ensure Service Value Propositions Resonate With Your Target Audience

As a brand selling service products, one of the most crucial marketing tactics for you to use is ensuring your value propositions resonate with your target audience.

When making purchase decisions, consumers often base their buying behavior on the value they expect to receive from a transaction. And in today’s economic situation, the amount of money people are willing to pay for goods and services may be diminishing.

Despite data showing some increase in people’s spending habits in 2024, Deloitte’s research discovered that consumers are still trying to save when shopping. Some use discounts, and others buy second-hand. McKinsey discovered that two in three buyers are trading down by choosing cheaper brands.

The data clearly shows that successfully selling to your audience — regardless of whether you offer products or services — requires you to become an expert at communicating and demonstrating the value your solutions deliver. To do this, focus on composing value propositions that resonate with your target audience. What does this necessitate? Thorough audience research.

As you begin marketing your service products, do your best to zoom in on your prospects’ pain points. Identify their frustrations. Predict their wants and aspirations. And do your absolute best to ensure your online presence appeals to their desires to convince them to convert.

For example, check out the Alexander Tutoring homepage. The brand goes above and beyond with its unique value propositions. And it doesn’t just do so in the site’s header section. More importantly, this service business continually returns to the idea that it helps students understand math and build their confidence, knowing that many people are frustrated by the thought that this science doesn’t have real-life applications or is impossible to master unless they’re geniuses.

Of course, it’s not just your website that you need to optimize for successfully communicating your unique value proposition. In fact, every single one of your online (and offline) communication channels needs to successfully highlight the value your service offers — including your social media profiles.

To see a great example of this marketing tacting utilized on social media, check out Trusted Homesitters on Instagram. This business helps users find trustworthy pet sitters to care for their furry friends while on vacation.

However, what stands out about the brand’s approach to marketing is that it regularly emphasizes the value its customers (and their pets) receive from the subscription. For instance, in the video below, Trusted Homesitters shares highlights from dogs’ staycations, showing how much fun the puppies can have with their sitters while their owners enjoy their travels.

Utilize Emotional Messaging and Branding

Sometimes, the best way to communicate value and convince prospects to convert isn’t to focus on your value proposition. Instead, it’s to evoke an emotional reaction among your target audience.

If you look at the research regarding people’s buyer journeys, you’ll see that adding emotional marketing tactics to your arsenal makes sense. After all, if people make 95% of their buying decisions based on feelings (or subconsciously), then you should use this data to make your marketing efforts more effective.

Fortunately, utilizing emotional messaging and branding for brands selling service products is relatively straightforward.

For instance, you can address a frustrating customer need that your service removes. Take a look at how Batzner did it. This business tells prospects not to let unwanted pests invade their property this season, which is a message that instantly resonates with most homeowners.

Or, for a more upbeat way of encouraging your target audience to want to invest in your services, call their attention to the positive outcomes they can look forward to if they hire your brand. 

If you check out the Flores Artscape homepage, you’ll notice that the business promises to bring clients’ landscapes to life, which is a result anyone looking to hire a gardening service would be happy to see.

Provide Instant Access to Your Core Service

Even though descriptive messaging can successfully communicate the value your services deliver, it’s still important to understand that many people need to see or experience your service products before becoming ready to invest. So, to maximize the success of your marketing efforts, consider providing instant access to your core service.

Interactive UI elements can: 

• Help web visitors comprehend the value your service business offers
• Allow prospects to interact with your offerings immediately
• Help ensure a more positive customer experience by instantly setting customer expectations (and ensuring your potential buyers don’t form unrealistic assumptions about what your services can achieve)
• Be an exceptional way to maximize site engagement — interactive content receives over 50% more user attention than its non-interactive counterparts.

An exceptional example of this marketing tactic comes from Business For Sale. This service brand features an interactive search element in the hero section of its homepage, allowing prospects to commence their search for a viable business investment instantly. 

What makes this solution so effective at shortening the sales cycle isn’t just how Business For Sale encourages web visitors to begin evaluating potential purchases instantly. More importantly, the site design choice perfectly aligns with people’s online behavior, considering that 69% of online shoppers go straight to the search bar when looking for solutions to buy.

Publish In-Depth Content That Showcases Niche Services

Producing, publishing, and distributing high-quality content is crucial for any successful marketing strategy. Yet many businesses selling services (as well as those in the e-commerce industry) need to pay more attention to the importance of creating in-depth posts that showcase their offer.

Considering how consumers use the internet, not investing in content can be an oversight.

According to some of the latest data, people spend 6 hours and 40 minutes using the internet daily. But even more importantly, 60.9% of them go online to find information, and 43.7% to research products and brands. What does this information indicate? It shows that your target audience is probably using your digital channels to evaluate your services and discover whether they fit their needs.

The marketing approach that can help you present your prospects with the type of info they’re after is trying to empower your audience with knowledge. 

Invest your resources into producing in-depth content that describes your niche services. Share use cases, benefits, features, and how-it-works content with your web visitors. And don’t be afraid to explain in detail why your services represent the best choice in the market.

For a great example of how to do this, check out the Marketplace SEO page on Prosperity Media. Here, the service brand describes how marketplace SEO works. It provides real-life examples and data to illustrate the benefits of investing in this type of service. It even presents prospects with several growth studies to help them comprehend the brand’s unique approach to marketplace SEO and set customer expectations (ensuring higher satisfaction rates down the line).

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For a slightly less technical example of the marketing tactic, check out America’s Swimming Pool Company. On its Professional Pool Cleaning Service page, the organization introduces prospects to the different types of sanitation activities pool owners need to do. What’s great about this particular content page is that it showcases the services ASP offers, but that’s not all. 

More impressively, it could open the brand’s prospects’ eyes to new pain points, creating a need for an additional (or more advanced) service in the “Signs you need to schedule a professional pool cleaning” section of the page.

Produce Informative Short Form Videos That Describe Your Service

As you explore more advanced marketing tactics for your service brand, you can try the “show, don’t tell” rule of effectively selling your solutions. Utilizing multimedia formats doesn’t just help engage more customers. It could also be the key to maximizing service understanding and boosting website conversions.

Furthermore, remember that most consumers don’t want to read lengthy text to evaluate your services. Research from Wyzowl shows that people’s preferred ways of learning about products include video (44%), ebooks or manuals (16%), and infographics (15%).

With this in mind, consider producing informative videos that describe your service. Ideally, these should be short-form (under 120 seconds) to maximize engagement. You can opt for a longer format, but make sure you prioritize viewer value.

An excellent example of a service brand using video to describe its offer comes from Vidpros. On its homepage, the business presents visitors with a two-minute overview of its services and real-life examples of the projects the brand’s team has worked on over the years. 

This is an exceptional marketing tactic. It helps consumers understand Vidpros’s work and communicates the brand’s USP with social proof for a maximum conversion-boosting effect.

If you want to maximize your business’ reach by utilizing social media’s power, why not produce this type of content for your target audience’s preferred social channels?

For example, Mountain Rug Cleaning regularly posts YouTube Shorts featuring some of their most challenging carpet restorations. Considering how popular and engaging these videos are, it’s a superb way for the brand to market its services. 

Ultimately, potential customers aren’t just drawn in by the content. Thanks to YouTube’s algorithm, they continue to be served by similar videos from the same brand. This leads to brand familiarity and a maximum chance of opting to hire Mountain Rug Cleaning in the future.

Give Your Service a Human Face

How do customers decide which companies to support? Most often, consumers prefer to opt for smaller, more relatable brands. 

According to a 2023 study conducted by Adobe, 78% of consumers think a brand must demonstrate that it understands and cares about its customers’ needs. In other words, buyers don’t want to buy from a faceless organization. And they don’t just care about the quality or reliability of a service. Instead, today’s consumers want tailored and meaningful experiences they couldn’t get from big corporations.

If you look at the survey data from the New York Post, you’ll find that 93% of consumers choose small businesses to hire. Even more importantly for service brands, most U.S. Americans prefer these types of organizations for anything ranging from manicures to home repairs to haircuts.

But what marketing tactic can you employ to attract this consumer segment to show with your service brand? Well, one excellent strategy would be to do everything in your power to humanize your business.

In addition to showing the people who make up your team (like Pinch did in the example below), try to embrace alternative ways of making your brand relatable. This can include anything, from presenting your audience with behind-the-scenes content, sharing your business’ unique story, pointing out the causes your team stands for, or simply prioritizing customer care.

Go Beyond the Basics of Social Proof With Case Studies and UGC

You likely already understand the importance of using social proof in your marketing strategy. However, when exploring tactics to maximize your service brand’s reach, you need to remember that almost 100% of people look up reviews when choosing what local businesses to support.

BrightLocal’s latest report reveals that only 3% of consumers ‘never’ read online reviews when evaluating local businesses. On the other hand, 76% of buyers always or regularly seek out this format of social proof, showing just how essential it is for your business to use this type of marketing.

To make your service brand stand out, it’s a good idea to go above and beyond regarding your formats. Yes, traditional testimonials and ratings work wonderfully to prove your brand’s credibility. However, more authentic or data-backed types of content — like UGC and case studies — often work better for converting customers.

With this in mind, explore opportunities to add these formats to your marketing activities. Presenting potential prospects with user-generated content can be super-easy if you add a UGC section to your website. This is what Glamsquad does to show off all the beautiful wedding looks its team of make-up artists and hairstylists have provided to its customers.

If you operate in a niche or highly technical industry, producing and publishing case studies may be the better choice for your service business. 

You can take inspiration from Concentrix. The brand uses case studies to give prospects insights into the effects its services can yield. More importantly, it takes potential customers through the process of helping clients, describing challenges, solutions, and specific outcomes.

Create Email or Text Campaigns Targeting Existing Customers

As a brand selling service products, the success of your business won’t exclusively come from acquiring new customers. On the contrary, to build a resilient, long-lasting business, you must focus your marketing activities on building loyalty among existing customers.

So, look into different tactics for continually re-engaging your clients through low-cost communication channels like text and email.

In addition to creating campaigns targeting existing customers to present them with exclusive offers and loyalty benefits, try to employ these channels to measure customer sentiment and identify new loyalty-building opportunities for your business.

 For inspiration, you can check out the email from Hootsuite below, where the brand invites customers to complete a survey and offers a small prize in exchange for their time.

Final Thoughts on Marketing Tactics

Marketing your service brand may not be as straightforward as attracting and converting e-commerce customers. But, with the right tactics, it’s more than doable.

Implementing the tactics discussed in this article will guarantee success. Nonetheless, conduct in-depth audience research to ensure optimal results and always test how your prospects react to your chosen strategies. And, of course, remember to position your brand as trustworthy, authentic, and relatable. Ultimately, it’s these qualities that today’s consumers seek when choosing businesses to support.