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- Value is Your Secret Sauce to Success
Recently, I was having a conversation with a client about a marketing strategy I was proposing for their organization. When we got to the talking point about newsletters, they commented that newsletters were dead. I found this statement very interesting and wanted to know their thoughts on the subject. It turns out, that they, and many of their peers, never actually read the newsletters they are signed up for - so the newsletters just clutter their inbox and cause them stress. After diving down that rabbit hole a bit more, we hit on the truth of the issue…the newsletters they were subscribed to were no longer “valuable” enough to spend the time reading them. The issue wasn’t the newsletters - it was the value the newsletters were providing!
PS - Newsletters are NOT dead. In many ways, they are stronger than ever depending on your audience. If you would like to investigate whether a newsletter could help grow your marketing strategy, please book a Discovery Call.
What is Value?
Now, let’s be clear, “value” isn’t just a newsletter concern. It should be a vital element with every single message, product, service, and customer touchpoint with your brand.
Value, at its essence, is when your customer feels like they get a lot more worth from an interaction with your brand than they had to give.
Too often we equate Value with a monetary exchange. For example, I paid $10 for a widget and it brought me so much satisfaction that I would have gladly paid $20 for the item. That is indeed dealing with the value proposition of a product. But we need to look deeper than that if we want to maximize the impact of our brand’s user experience. For instance, when we ask for our customer’s contact information, are we affording them a high level of value for the honor of getting passed such important information? When we ask them to spend time on our social media channels, how much value do we bring to the experience - or do we just shower them with tons of “buy now” messages? When someone visits our website, do we provide a high level of value by cherishing their time and energy by providing a great user experience and lots of easily accessible information?
Growing your brand’s value can take on many forms…
One of my large corporate clients was struggling to sell a recently released product. They had asked me for marketing ideas and strategies to improve the sale of the item. Anytime I’m doing product marketing, I start by doing a value proposition assessment of the product, marketplace, and competitors. In this case, they were competing with a host of Etsy competitors that were beating them on retail price and shipping costs. The only way they could hope to beat out their competitors was to highlight the product features that set them apart from their competitors - in other words, they needed to play up the additional value their product offered. Luckily, they have some key features that their audience found highly desirable and that the competitors didn’t offer. These features became the key marketing beats of their marketing campaign.
This also raises a very important aspect of “value” that must be considered. Value isn’t measured in your eyes - it is measured and determined to be valuable by your customer! I can’t tell you how many board meetings I’ve been in where sales reps were telling me all of the great features of a new product they were struggling to sell. When I asked to see the marketing research that showed that their audience wanted those features, or that the features were solving some pain point for their customers…well, they didn’t have the data. Turns out, they were struggling to sell the product because the features they felt added value weren’t features their customer prioritized.
How do you adopt the notion of value to your brand, service, or product?
Finding, showing, and providing value is going to be different in every circumstance. The secret is to always start the conversation with “How will this ___________ add value to my customer?”
Whether you want to create a killer newsletter, a highly engaging social media channel, an authentic micro-influencer program, a successful Kickstarter product launch, or a new SAAS or digital app - then you need to understand what your audience will find valuable and how you can communicate those value propositions.
How can you create Value?
To create value, several key strategies and approaches can be employed:
Understand Customer Needs: Understanding customer pain points, using market segmentation, and enhancing the brand experience are essential steps in creating value for your customers.
Customer Value Models: Developing customer value models can help you understand what your offerings are worth to customers, enabling you to tailor products and services accordingly.
Enhance Customer Experiences: Providing benefits that outweigh costs, such as quality, accessibility, convenience, and an abundance of features, can increase the perceived value of products or services for customers.
Loyalty Programs: Implementing loyalty programs that offer both hard (tangible rewards) and soft benefits (emotional value) can enhance customer loyalty and retention.
Differentiation: Differentiating products or services to fulfill real needs and attract specific audiences can create a competitive advantage and increase perceived value.
SWOT Analysis: Conducting a SWOT analysis helps in identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to communicate the unique value proposition effectively to target customers.
Customer Segmentation: Segmenting customers based on demographics, behaviors, and preferences allows for personalized marketing strategies that resonate with specific audience segments.
Prioritize Quality: Emphasizing quality over price can attract customers willing to pay more for superior products or services that offer greater value.
Brand Image: Building a strong brand image enhances customer trust, loyalty, and retention by communicating value effectively through branding efforts.
Customer Journey: Optimizing the customer journey to minimize the time and energy it takes a customer to engage with your brand and maximize the takeaways they gain from the experience.
By implementing these strategies effectively, businesses can create and deliver value that resonates with customers, fosters loyalty, and drives business success in competitive markets.
I strive to take the “Buy Me” mentality out of my marketing messages. When possible, I like to limit direct sales messages to 30% of my communications. Sometimes that can be tough when all your client wants to do is sell something. When that happens, I endeavor to come at the message from a different point of view. One of my favorite examples of this was the Mass Effect line of Cookie Cutters I worked on for BioWare a few years ago. Rather than pushing the cookie cutters as a “buy me” marketing campaign, we chose to create some light-hearted videos that focused on making holiday cookies that were themed with some of the fan’s favorite Mass Effect characters. We purposely kept the videos low-budget and with a DIY vibe. We had a teammate who loved to decorate cookies and was quite good at it. We asked her if she would be willing to make us some cookies using the new cookie cutters and video the process on her cell phone. We did a little bit of post-processing for editing and adding sound and graphics, but we took a light touch and wanted to keep them feeling very authentic. These videos were on the YouTube channel, in emails, on social, and on the product pages… and they generated a lot of customer chatter. It was one of the most effective product launches in that product category in years.
So, start asking how you add value to your audience and customers. Center your products, services, communications, and brand experience around the value-add you are creating.
NOTE: If you are struggling to find your value add, you may need to reassess what you are creating. Sometimes going back to the blackboard is far more effective than trying to “make” value propositions out of thin air.
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