Promoting your business in a saturated market can be tricky. When customers have so many options, adding value to your marketing strategy can help you differentiate yourself from the competition?
Value based marketing can help you increase brand awareness and help you acquire and retain customers. Let’s look at the example scenario below:
Scenario: Wedding Photographer and Bride
A bride looking for a wedding photographer. She Google’s “wedding photographers” and gets hundreds of results. She clicks on a few sites and for the most part, they look the same. Beautiful images, a page about how much sessions cost, a blog with posts of recent work and a contact form to get in touch. Any one of these people could get the job done.
As a bride, she is stressed out with wedding planning and really could use some help. She then lands on a site with a free PDF checklist called, “5 Things Not To Forget On Your Wedding Day.” The photographer created this checklist for brides because as a wedding photographer for many years, she noticed that brides would always forget these items on their wedding day.
The bride enters her email address on the website to get the free PDF. Many of the items on the checklist were ones she never thought about bringing with her! She sends the checklist to all her bridesmaids so they can have it, too.
Since she had to enter her email to get the checklist, the bride is now on the photographer’s email list. A few days later, she gets an email from the photographer listing her available dates, one of which is the date of her wedding.
The bride contacts the photographer about needing a photographer for her wedding. The photographer responds back, offering to meet the bride in person to discuss her wedding. The bride and the photographer hit it off and the bride books the photographer that day to take her wedding photos.
Without that added piece of value marketing, the bride would have likely skipped over this photographers website, just like the other websites she looked at.
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Takeaways: How Can You Apply This To Your Business?
Think about your customer: The photographer put herself in the bride’s shoes. Planning weddings are stressful and she knows that photography is just one piece of the puzzle. Think about the customers buying your services. What are they stressed about? How can you help alleviate that stress for them?
Show your experience: The photographer created list checklist after seeing brides forget these items at every shoot she did. What has your experience taught you about your customers?
Be genuinely helpful: The photographer knew this simple checklist would be something her brides could really use on their wedding days. There were no sales pitches and she expected nothing in return. What valuable information can you share with your customers for free?
Follow Up: The photographer played the long game with marketing. The checklist got the bride on her email list and she communicated another valuable piece of information a few days later – her available dates for booking. She was then able to start a conversation with an interested bride, which eventually led to an in person meeting. Value marketing is a long game, so think about ways you can continue to communicate and offer value to your customers. You may not get someone to purchase right away, but a few weeks down the road.
Giving valuable information to your customers is a great way to stand out amongst your competition. I hope this article gave you ideas on how to create added value for customers.
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