6 Service Branding Strategies for Small Business Owners

Branding a service business with no physical products can be tricky, but with the right strategies, you can build brand authority and trust.

Building a brand for your business takes careful consideration of what you want customers to associate with your business’s name and offerings. For businesses that provide services instead of products, the process can feel especially challenging.

That’s where service branding strategies come in. Effective service branding communicates what you offer and clarifies the experience and benefits your customers can expect. When done well, it can help differentiate your service business from competitors, boost brand recognition, and attract customers.

What is service branding?

Service branding is developing a unique brand identity for a company that sells services. Here’s a breakdown:

• Brand identity. A brand identity refers to the elements and characteristics that represent a brand, including a business name, brand story, mission statement, values, visual identity, voice, and tone.

• Service-based company. A service company is any business that sells services instead of physical products. Hair salons, auto repair shops, and consulting firms are all examples.

The baby registry service Babylist is one example of a service business with strong branding. The company’s streamlined user experience and valuable content made it the go-to registry service for expecting parents. This success even led to the launch of its own branded products, like the Babylist Bottle Box, as a tangible addition to its core registry service.

Service-based vs. product-based branding: What’s the difference?

Service branding and product branding are analogous: both aim to help clients understand what your business offers, what it values, and what sets it apart from the competition. The difference is that the service branding process has to compensate for the intangible nature of services.

Consider a menswear retailer and a barber shop, for example. Both emphasize heritage and timeless style, but the product brand has an easier time proving it. Customers can visit a store and inspect fabrics, browse collections online, and take home high-quality garments wrapped in luxury paper.

The barber shop has fewer physical and visual touchpoints, so it focuses on helping clients recognize quality and signals value throughout the customer experience. It might publish educational materials on straight razor shaving techniques, invest in an elegant physical shop with an Old World feel, and send clients home with handwritten care instructions.

6 service branding strategies

1. Get organized
2. Establish authority
3. Lead with a personal brand
4. Build customer relationships
5. Use service marketing
6. Be authentic

A strong brand can help you attract and retain customers and stand out in a crowded marketplace. Here are six strategies to help you develop a successful brand strategy for your service business—with expert insights from Lars Lofgren, cofounder and chief growth officer of performance marketing agency Stone Press:

1. Get organized

Before you dive into the service branding process, make sure that you have access to current information about your brand and market, which you’ll use to build your brand strategy later on. Gather information about the following:

• Target audience. Start by determining your target audience. Collect data about your customers, such as age, gender, geographical location, and online shopping preferences. 

• Market. Begin or refresh your market research to identify major players, relevant trends, and external forces linked to market demand. You can also perform a competitive analysis to identify your brand’s strengths and weaknesses relative to the competition and evaluate the strength of your brand positioning in the market.

• Brand. Next, perform a brand audit to assess your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (a SWOT analysis). Brand audits also give you the time and space to review brand compliance (or how well you adhere to your own brand guidelines) and your company’s reputation with audiences.

• Management approach. Finally, review your approach to brand management, or how your marketing strategy increases your brand value over time. It involves overseeing the use of your brand and identifying opportunities to enhance your brand image.

2. Establish authority

Successful service brands are authoritative, meaning they’re trusted, respected, and reliable. Review your brand audit results to measure consumer perception, and use your competitive analysis to see how your brand compares to the competition. Pay special attention to competitors’ brand messaging, brand voice, and marketing strategies to understand how they establish authority.

You can also build authority with brand-building strategies like starting a blog, hosting webinars, or sharing thought leadership on social media channels—but just providing content to your audience isn’t enough. You need to stand out and be consistent. “This is the tough part,” Lars says. “Really breaking through in a crazy way is extremely difficult. Most people can’t pull it off because, fundamentally, you have to be able to say something that hasn’t been said before.”

To improve your odds, Lars suggests identifying a less competitive niche in your market: “The way you make this way easier for yourself is you pick a niche that’s small enough and targeted enough, and the bar comes way down.”

Next, find your differentiator. Give yourself time, and be prepared to work through some unoriginal content until you’ve found your voice. “You have to get through that in order to get to the good stuff,” Lars says. He suggests using the 80/20 content marketing rule: 80% of content should entertain or inform, while no more than 20% should promote your brand.

3. Lead with a personal brand

The value of a service depends on the service provider. Consider focusing your service branding efforts on an individual company representative. Personal branding is particularly popular among consulting firms, agencies, and professional services businesses, but it can be effective for any service type.

“Leading with an individual has always worked better than a company-branded account,” Lars says. Whether that person is the founder, CEO, or an especially charismatic employee, encourage them to share their thought leadership on your company’s social channels and their personal accounts, if they’re comfortable.

Lars adds that you don’t need to abandon this strategy as your company grows. Customers understand that a figurehead represents a company but might not be involved with every account.

4. Build customer relationships

For service brands, strong customer relationships are vital. “It helps people warm up to you a bit more,” Lars says. Look for opportunities to build customer loyalty and trust by providing exceptional customer service, soliciting and responding to customer feedback, and using surveys, interviews, or focus groups to monitor customer satisfaction.

Attaching a personal brand to your business also helps build trust because customers have a single, recognizable personality to connect with. “People get to know you, and then they’re like, ’Oh, this person actually does know what they’re talking about,’” Lars says.

5. Use service marketing

Even the best service provider can’t reach potential customers in a vacuum—you need a solid marketing strategy to get the word out. Service marketing connects audiences with your brand identity, teaching them what to expect in your services and ultimately persuading them to choose your brand. Here are some options:

• Post on social media. Lars recommends using social media marketing for brand awareness and customer acquisition. “It’s that very top of the funnel, just getting your name in front of someone,” he says. To maximize effectiveness, he recommends focusing on one channel at a time.

• Build your email list. Start building your email list from day one to ensure you always have a way to connect directly with your audience. “This has been true for the last 20 years, but I’m even more militant about it now because [social media] platforms are not working on behalf of their creators,” Lars says. Collect emails through your website or scheduling software and in person at events.

• Leverage SEO. You’ve created great content, but you also need to ensure it’s getting in front of the right eyes. Search engine optimization (SEO) strategies help you target keywords your audience is searching for, so that your business website is at the top of their search results.

6. Be authentic

“Create authentic content” is not new advice, but it’s especially important with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs). Differentiate your brand from the others on the market by inserting your unique brand voice and personality. Know your brand values and mission and convey them in your brand materials. This will help your target audience connect and return to your brand.

Service branding FAQ

What is a service brand example?

Babylist is a great example of a service brand. Although it’s since expanded into retail, the company started out as a registry for expectant families. By providing the unique opportunity for users to create registries with products across multiple websites and compare prices, and also providing valuable content for its audience base, it established itself as a go-to brand in the baby registry space.

What is the difference between product branding and service branding?

Product branding and service branding pursue the same goals but require distinct strategic approaches. Because service companies provide experiences, which tend to be more subjective than physical products, service branding efforts rely on a company’s reputation, personal brands, and customer experience to signal value and attract customers.

Why is branding important in services?

Successful service branding (or services branding) can boost brand recognition, increase sales, and improve customer loyalty.