Service Strategies To Gain A Competitive Advantage In Marketing Management 🧺

Gaining a competitive advantage in marketing management as a service firm involves coming out with better offerings than your competitors. This includes coming up with better value offerings and selling the goals of your firm. Failing to do so can put you behind other companies and damage your position in the industry. We’ll be discussing a comprehensive overview of what you’ll need to consider when putting together an effective strategy. 

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Service Strategies To Gain A Competitive Advantage In Marketing Management

Effective strategies for competitive marketing management in your business should include a well thought out offering. It’s important to invest time in the planning process, as well as in ensuring quality in your workforce. 

Once you have developed your offering, it’s important to build structures that support the execution of your concept. Marketing strategies can take your business to the next level and help you achieve your company’s goals. These are meant to show customers or potential clients that you are addressing a gap in their needs or providing a solution to their problems. 

It’s important to understand that crafting a successful strategy for a service business is very different from that of a purely product-oriented counterpart. We’ll be outlining the steps you need to take in order to succeed as a service provider. 

Before we focus on competitive advantage in marketing management, let’s first discuss what is competitive advantage.

Competitive advantage refers to attributes that allow a business to produce goods or services better or at a lower cost than competitors. These factors enable the generation of more sales or higher margins than its competitors in the market.

A wide range of factors, such as cost structure, branding, quality of products, distribution system, intellectual property, and customer service, are likened to competitive advantages. We can say that a company has a competitive advantage over its rivals if, for example, it can increase its market share through increased efficiency or productivity.

Service Offering For A Competitive Advantage In Marketing Management

Does your offering fill customers’ needs? Is your service convenient?

The first step towards a successful service business is ensuring that your offering is perfected. Like product-oriented businesses, services won’t stand a chance with a poorly designed offering. 

Your business should effectively meet the needs of your customers or find innovative solutions to a problem. Likewise, value and customer satisfaction need to be at the forefront of your thought process. The experience customers have with your service is crucial, since this is what speaks to your brand. 

Transactions and interactions should be easy and pleasant. Customers also factor in how accessible your service is – and may tend to favour competition if your service is too much of a hassle to find.

Take note that a common key factor in success is sticking to specific targets of excellence and not attempting to have it all. Spreading your business too thinly will also have the same effect on your capabilities beyond top-notch quality. So, focus on elevating your strengths and refining your process around this. 

Resource and Pricing Strategy For A Competitive Advantage In Marketing Management

Is your operation profitable? Do customers gain long-term benefits? 

As with most businesses, the key to profitability is having key strategies for pricing and resource management. In other words, where can you save money and what methods should you use to find the best price point for your service offerings?

Superior quality almost always comes at a high price, so you need to build structures that will allow you to have a stable, if not growing, source of funds. For services, pricing strategies may not be as straightforward. You’ll need to consider value bundling, when to charge (upfront or subscription-based), and how to increase value. 

Likewise, your business should consider how your prices compare to your competitors.

You can compete based on price, or find ways to add value. Your pricing strategy should also align with how your customers use your service, and should not be a deterrent. 

For example, the appeal of coffee houses is that customers can take their time and are not charged based on how long they stay. Meanwhile, the same approach would not be profitable for an internet cafe, which typically charges based on the amount of time spent on the computers. 

Lastly, with any strategy you decide to employ, make sure to think it through carefully before launching. Depending on your business, customers typically won’t react favourably if services or perks that were initially offered for free are now being charged. That is perhaps except free trials or free samples. In this case, customers are aware of the strategy is temporary. 

Workforce Quality For A Competitive Advantage In Marketing Management

Are your employees motivated and excelling in their work? Are customers happy?

Once your business has perfected its offerings and pricing, it’s time to run the business. Doing this is impossible without a high-quality and well-managed workforce. This begins by asking what motivates your employees to excel and what enables them to do this.

Build your system around these core concepts. A sign of a successful workforce is when employees don’t need to bend over backwards just to keep their clients happy. A strained employee is not sustainable. This should be a two-way street where both employees and customers thrive in a relationship. 

Remember that incentives and salary play a big role in finding quality employees. Cutting costs will also cut the production quality of your workforce. 

Customer Relationships For A Competitive Advantage In Marketing Management

Are you maintaining long-term client relationships? Is anything driving customer loyalty down?

Customer relationships are a focal point of service-oriented businesses. For many types of services, such as professional service firms, architectural firms, or banks, customer relationships are long-term. 

It’s essential that you build on these relationships in order to maximise these long-term profits. Strong relationships are built on a well thought out system from beginning to end, and an emphasis on customer service and experience. 

Likewise, it’s important to market properly to the right audience. Failure to do this can result in difficult customer relationships and false expectations or miscommunications with each other. 

Feedback Mechanisms For A Competitive Advantage In Marketing Management

Throughout the lifespan of your business, it’s important that you maintain feedback loops with your clients. These include surveys, interviews, or even suggestion cards. Maintaining lines of feedback can allow you to stay on top of problems and will give you valuable insights into what your customers need. 

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Bottomline

Successfully maintaining a competitive advantage in marketing management of your service business requires that each aspect discussed is integrated properly. There is no room for short-cuts, especially when designing key structures in your business. 

In conclusion, your business needs to invest time and labour into perfecting systems. Though this takes a lot of work, these systems will work to support your business and promote growth and profitability. 

For a comprehensive view on maximising growth in your company,

Download a complimentary whitepaper on How To Drive Pricing Strategy To Maximise EBIT Growth.

Are you a business in need of help to align your pricing strategy, people and operations to deliver an immediate impact on profit?

If so, please call (+61) 2 9000 1115.

You can also email us at team@taylorwells.com.au if you have any further questions.

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