Top tips for marketing your company's services, rather than just products

Every business owner knows that having a good marketing plan is absolutely vital to the success of their business venture. If you don't have a good marketing plan, then you don't know how to get where you want to go. You will just be shooting in the dark and you won't be able to see how you can achieve your goals within the market that you are working within.

However, you need to have different approaches to marketing based on whether or not you are marketing products or if you are marketing services. If you are marketing both services and products, then you need to develop two different marketing plans that share some similarities-such as the type of business and the company image that you want to portray-but are also different. Different tactics work better for services versus products. You need to develop marketing plans for each and every one of them.

Product marketing versus service marketing: what you need to know

So what are the differences between product marketing and service marketing? Many businesses know how to market products, but it is trickier to market services. Here are some things that you need to know about the differences between products and services.

Differences between service marketing and product marketing

1. When you are marketing a service, you are really marketing relationship and value. This relationship and value needs to be marketed differently than if you are marketing actual products.
2. Another major difference between marketing services and marketing products is that when a buyer purchases a service, the buyer is purchasing something that is intangible, instead of a tangible product, like a computer or a sprinkler system or a web page.
3. Consumers' concept of a service is often times based on just the reputation of only one single person. Instead of building a reputation based on the quality of a number of different products, a service is built on how well a particular person delivers on a service, such as how well a stock advisor does with your stock portfolio.
4. It is pretty easy to compare the quality of different products. It's easy for you to see if one computer works more quickly than another computer, or if one TV has a better picture than another picture, or if your child can break a toy more easily than another toy. However, it is much more difficult to compare the quality of similar services that are provided.
5. Products are returnable. However, services are not returnable.

How to market services

Generally speaking, marketing a product requires what are known as the "4 P's": Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Marketing a service adds three more "P's" to the traditional "4 P's": People, Physical evidence, and Process. Service marketing also includes marketing what is known as the servicescape, which is the aesthetics of your business place: the outside of your business building, the inside of your business building, and the way that the employees look.

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