Service Marketing is the specialized branch of marketing that focuses on strategies specifically suited for promoting and selling services.
It’s important to understand that marketing to sell a service is completely different from marketing a product. Goods and services have distinct characteristics, and these differences directly impact a company’s marketing activities and consumer purchasing behavior.
Services marketing applies to both B2C and B2B sectors, but to fully appreciate the numerous benefits it offers businesses, you need to understand the defining characteristics of a service.
Services are economic activities and performances that satisfy a customer’s need but do not involve transferring ownership to the beneficiary.
In a service, most elements are intangible: they cannot be touched or seen, making it difficult for customers to perceive the true value at the moment of purchase.
For example, a hotel guest does not acquire ownership of the room they stayed in, the physiotherapist who treated their knee, or the concert they attended.
For this reason, selling a service requires building a strong trust relationship with the customer, without which the purchase will not happen.
Selling a service means selling a potential future outcome; the customer is essentially buying a promise and must trust that it will be fulfilled.
In the case of a physical product, which can be touched and handled, its value depends on two factors: the value of the raw materials and the customer's perceived value.
Whereas in a service, which is often difficult to contextualize and understand because most elements are intangible, the value depends solely on the potential customer's perception.
Doing so allows you to:
Since products and services have different characteristics, it’s important to understand that this has a significant impact on both the customer’s buying journey and the company’s marketing activities.
To fully illustrate the differences between the Customer Journey for services and products, here’s a practical example:
If you want to buy a smartphone, you can walk into a store, touch it, review its technical and aesthetic specifications, evaluate its features, test it out, and then decide whether to buy..
In this case, the trust relationship between the brand and the consumer is established after the actual purchase, and if the customer judges the product positively, they are likely to return to the same company in the future.
In contrast, with services—which are <STRONG<intangible goods—the service itself cannot be tested before purchase. The potential customer will have much more difficulty perceiving the benefit they will receive and will therefore buy only the promise of a future outcome.
This major difference in the customer’s buying journey means that marketing strategies for selling products and services are very different. This creates a significant problem: most Italian service companies use generic strategies or those suited for selling physical products, resulting in poor outcomes and wasted resources.
Do you know why?
Although services dominate the world economy, accounting for 61.4% of global gross product, Italy is known as a product-oriented country. Most of the strategies used were designed to sell products, and service marketing remains insufficiently understood. Now, let’s look at the main characteristics of a service.
In a service, most elements are intangible because the customer cannot smell, touch, taste, and often cannot even see or hear these elements.
The solution to intangibility is to build a strong positioning that allows you to differentiate yourself from competitors by leveraging trust factors, such as testimonials from satisfied customers.
It means that the service delivery can vary depending on the customer's personal conditions and the methods of provision. Therefore, standardizing and controlling the quality of the service is very challenging. One possible solution is to personalize the customer experience.
With services, you cannot produce, store, and then sell; service delivery happens simultaneously with consumption. For this reason, to avoid customer wait times and periods when the company is either underutilized or overwhelmed, it is essential to regulate demand through marketing activities and manage service delivery capacity.
Get results from your marketing activities
This section of the page is dedicated to case studies and success stories of service companies supported by ROMI. Specifically, we would like to showcase the business cases of MTS and Studio Leone, two client companies for whom we have developed tailored service marketing strategies.
MTS is the first specialized school that transforms you into a Motorsport Professional. The school’s goal is to train highly skilled professionals who meet the demands of the racing industry.
The company started from a challenging position, facing several issues: ineffective communication, no lead management strategy, lack of data analysis tools to evaluate campaign performance, and difficulty selling some courses.
Our intervention was divided into three phases:
After careful market analysis and research, we identified the differentiating elements of MTS’s offering and the levers to use during promotion and sales phases.
The final result was the creation of MTS’s Growth Plan, a strategic document of over 200 pages outlining a clear plan of actions, objectives, and strategies to implement..
For the company, we enhanced or created digital assets that became important business resources:
To manage all sales opportunities generated by advertising campaigns smoothly, automatically, and structurally.
To increase MTS’s awareness and authority among potential students.
We reviewed telephone sales processes with the sales department, reducing negotiation times by 30% and cutting the number of calls needed to convert leads by 25%.
The MTS logo had several issues, which we addressed through a restyling effort that preserved the brand’s identity.
We created specific vertical landing pages, tripling lead conversion rates.
We made the application process interactive, generating leads at a much lower cost than the previous strategy (a 15% conversion rate compared to 4% before).
In developing advertising campaigns, we segmented the target audience more specifically across the various courses and created tailored campaigns, generating in six months the total number of leads MTS had accumulated over four years.
Thanks to these interventions and the optimization of marketing activities, we reduced the cost per lead by 34%. Within just two months, six MTS courses sold out—including those that had previously struggled to sell.
Among the business cases we’d like to showcase is that of Studio Leone-Fell & C, the largest law firm in Italy specializing in administrative law. The firm focuses on administrative appeals and class actions..
At the beginning of our intervention, the company faced several challenges: there was no internal marketing team, no defined marketing strategy, and advertising campaigns were not properly optimized. Additionally, the telephone customer service incurred high costs due to inefficient lead management.
After defining the details of each objective, we divided our work into several phases of intervention:
This initial phase of work allowed us to define all the strategies that, in the shortest time and with the lowest investment, would lead us to achieve the set objectives.
The outcome of this first activity was the creation of the Growth Plan for Leone & Fell Law-Firm, a strategic document of over 200 pages containing a clear plan of actions, objectives, and strategies to implement.
We created several landing pages with specific objectives tailored to each phase and marketing strategy.
We customized the CRM to enable the law firm to manage leads from advertising campaigns in an automated and structured way. Additionally, with a lead profiling system upstream, the sales department was able to work more effectively.
Through a series of emails, we made the potential customer’s education and conversion process more effective and seamless.
We implemented various monitoring and data analysis systems. The client also has access to a live dashboard to view advertising campaign results in real time.
We divided the strategic actions into three steps to achieve a single goal: to become the top choice for potential customers and stay ahead of competitors.
To reach this result, we also created a training guide for students and promoted private consultations. Additionally, we organized a series of free informational webinars with specially designed landing pages.
These actions allowed us to build a strong trust relationship with the target audience and exponentially increase sales conversions.
We leveraged Leone Law-Firm’s Facebook and Instagram channels, driving over 1,000 users to our landing pages without spending on advertising. Then, we created an email sequence aimed at educating and converting acquired leads, as well as reactivating leads acquired in previous years. This strategy was crucial for closing sales with all contacts gathered during earlier phases.
You should know that the market for administrative appeals against entrance exams for the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery is saturated and full of competitors offering legal assistance services at half the price of Leone Law-Firm.
Thanks to the marketing strategies we implemented, we managed to reverse this trend and surpass previous years’ revenue without lowering prices.
The business cases of MTS and Leone Law-Firm demonstrate how it is possible to achieve significant objectives by leveraging tailored services marketing strategies for the company.
Services marketing is designed to address the specific needs of your company and encompasses a range of strategies aimed at increasing the perceived value of the services you offer. This helps multiply sales, target only your best potential customers, and build customer loyalty. Here are the main benefits of services marketing:
Service Marketing allows you to create a unique positioning that sets you apart from the competition. Through targeted communication and branding strategies, you highlight the strengths and distinctive features of your services. This enables you to increase the perceived value among potential customers, helping you sell more effectively and at higher prices.
This approach increases their trust in you. Purchasing decisions depend on the level of trust established even before the purchase takes place; without it, negotiations would always revolve solely around price.
Applying the right services marketing strategies enables you to acquire high-quality customers who are willing to pay for the true value of your services, thereby increasing sales. Additionally, you can be confident that not a single euro of your marketing budget is wasted.
In today’s highly competitive market, you must adapt to both changing customer needs and market conditions. Using Service Marketing strategies enables your company to remain flexible and responsive, ensuring you maintain a competitive edge.
Service Marketing is still a relatively unknown branch of marketing in Italy—and that’s why the few companies able to apply it enjoy a significant advantage over their competitors.
ROMI Agency is the first Italian agency exclusively specialized in marketing for companies that sell services.
If you want to leverage services marketing to achieve tangible results from your marketing efforts, increase sales, and target the best potential customers for your business, request an initial consultation with ROMI..
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