How to Create “Value” Marketing
Continuing on what has been discussed on “Time to Kill the Content in Content Marketing”, we strongly believe in providing value as the main focus of marketing efforts. At the end of the day, content can be anything, it could be advice, comic relief, eye candy, … it could even be promotions or sales.
Once we focus on what is of value to our target market, we can justify promotional posts. Wouldn’t our customers be interested in how they can purchase more for less or learn about a new service that we offer for a better price? Of course they do. However, barraging them with promotions, would not be valuable (and it cheapens your brand).
The beauty of value marketing is that we focus on what our clients or customers need as opposed to thinking about what type of content to create. In order for us to create value, we need to properly identify our target audience and define their needs. This is where businesses need to think more like a media company. Who are we talking to? What are they interested in? What do they care about? What is important to them? What are the emotions that we want to get out of them?
In a way, we still have an early 2000s approach to web marketing, especially in B2B. We have understood a lot since, like the importance of design and the fact that visitors want to understand and find information quickly or they will get frustrated. Unfortunately, most websites today are still used as a lengthy poster to describe products and services.
Especially in B2B, the website is only one touch point in the sales funnel. Human interactions are key for developing the relationship and move the potential client further into the sales funnel until the deal is closed. Since the rise of social media, why do we still look at websites like an informative version of a business card? We have the power to create information in a way that is easily digestible over a long period of time, so we can maintain multiple touch points over a longer period of time. Social media is humanizing the web. Marketing and Sales team have many messages that are constantly repeated to prospective clients. Let’s use Social Media as a way to humanize business relationships, not to just advertise.
The final component to providing value is in our business objectives:
If we only cater to our audience’s needs and ignore our own, we run out of business.
If we can combine our key messages with our audience’s needs and ignore our business objectives, we may invest a lot of time, ressources, and budget in creating “content” that has neither a good ROI or an ROI that can’t be measured.
By looking at the intersection between our audience’s needs, our key messages, and our business objectives, then we can create valuable content. As long as we properly defined the 3 elements, we have a clear guideline on what is of value. Now, we can simply focus on how to keep providing value, rather than thinking and worrying about what type of content to produce.