What Are The 7 Ps Of Services Marketing And Why Do They Matter?

When you’re in the online marketing space, whether you’re selling one-on-one services, coaching, memberships, or courses, ultimately, you’re really in the services industry. Since you’re not selling physical products, it’s important to understand the 7 Ps of services marketing.

We talked about the 4 Ps of marketing in another post. These 4 Ps apply to every kind of business: product, price, place, and promotion.

We’ll do a quick recap of those 4 and then talk more deeply about the other 3 Ps that apply particularly to services marketing.

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1.   Product

This is pretty simple. What is the product you’re delivering? It’s about designing the product in a way that meets the needs and the demand of your audience and solves a real problem.

2.   Price

This is about the pricing strategy you will use. It’s an incredibly complicated thing, so you have to figure out your strategy.

3.   Place

Place is how you’re going to deliver the product. Will it be a course, membership, group coaching, or something else? You’ll need to think about what you’re going to do and what channel you’re going to use to deliver your product.

4.   Promotion

This is how you create the message and advertise your product.

Promotion is what most people in the online world mean when they say marketing. But promotion is much broader.

5.   People

The people who work in your business and help serve your clients are an important part of services marketing.

When you’re starting as a solopreneur, you’re probably going to be the only person working in your business. But soon enough, you’ll discover that you’re not going to be the only one who is interacting with your customers.

You’ll recognize that people are quite an important component of your marketing, so you’ll need a team. You may need a community manager, a content manager, and an integrator like I do in my business.

They are often the first point of contact for my audience and have a clear understanding of what we do in the business. So they can answer and provide support to customers before I have to.

It’s not simply about hiring people. It also involves making sure that these people are approaching things your way. You don’t want to have a bunch of people coming from all over the map, giving all kinds of advice that doesn’t work, and so on.

As you build your business, the people who are involved in delivering value to your customers are an incredibly important part of your marketing.

6.   Process

The process is important because what we’re delivering is often intangible. It’s not a physical product where we’re showing people how to do something or we’re doing it for them.

That means establishing a process to help people get results and create efficiency. The process needs to be something you can replicate so that you aren’t recreating the wheel every time.

7.   Physical Evidence

This part of marketing is about establishing credibility and helping customers recognize the successes they’ve made.

We need to be sure that people recognize the leaps and bounds of growth they’ve had even if they don’t necessarily get as far as they hoped or wanted.

For example, if you have a year-long program, people aren’t going to remember where they were at the beginning of the year unless you help them create physical evidence.

If you’re a fitness coach, for instance, it’s important to have beginning measurements so that people know they started at X weight and in six months, they can see the progress they’ve made.

You also want physical evidence of success upfront, like credibility boosters, just so people can see other people are trusting you. It’s a sign that maybe they should trust you as well.

In Summary

As you’re developing your knowledge brand business (one-on-one services, coaching, courses, memberships, etc.), you need to be laser-focused on these 7 Ps of marketing.

Who are the people in your audience and how are you serving them? What are the processes you’re going to use internally? What processes can you teach to your audience that they can implement? How do you help establish physical evidence of success so that your customers can see the progress?

You need to be thinking about these as part of your marketing.

If you’re ready to learn more about marketing your online business, be sure to join my FREE program, BADA$$ Online Marketing University (BOMU).