Photo by Leslie Cross on Unsplash
Question: When marketing your business, what’s the one thing that you know you need to offer prospective and existing clients?
Answer: If you said Value, then you’d be right!
Value is often missed when we talk about writing copy and content for business marketing. Yet value is what people demand from our products and services.
Our customers want to know how we can help them, and how we’re better than our competitors. When your copy explains how you offer value, you’re on to an excellent start.
Value is also wrapped up within building relationships, and encompasses the customer perception of your service or product.
To offer value, we need to be helpful, educational, and maybe even inspirational depending on your business. By continually working on our values, we may even exceed our clients’ expectations. What an ideal way to keep them coming back for more!
What we’re also talking about here is your value proposition, which is probably linked to your USP – Unique Selling Proposition.
How do you Quantify your Value?
1. From the benefits of your product or service. How it saves time, or makes you feel when you wear it or use it. For example, Apple says about its iPhones: Above all, a phone should be absolutely simple, beautiful, and magical to use.
2. By connecting your value proposition to your customers' issues. In other words, explain how you take away their pain; show how you differ from your competitors. Spelling this out in your marketing makes it easy for people to see how you align with their own values as well as their needs, helping to make it an easier choice to buy from you.
3. Your personal service. If you always dedicate one named person to every client, that’s worth shouting about. This valuable offer helps to build lasting relationships and provides the support your customers need. Maybe you’re a VA and your service is doing the daily administration for your clients. Perhaps you provide IT support within, say, 10 minutes of a call. Or you could be caterers, cleaners or chauffeurs.
I’m sure there must be more. Whatever your value is, state it loud and clear in your content!
If you’re not sure what your value proposition is, HubSpot has written a helpful article with lots of great examples. Have a read of it here.
Focus on your Value
When writing new web content, newsletters, blogs and social media posts, regularly refer to how you provide value within the structure of your writing. This helps people understand both your products and the value they provide much faster. Yes, this means talking about their benefits. But it's also to do with clearly spelling out both how and why they, or your business service, help.
Craft a succinct sentence or two explaining the value you offer near the beginning, connecting it with your customers’ issues to really grab their attention. That should make them think: Wow, these guys get it! They know our industry issues! If it’s linked to your product benefits (likely), include that in your headline, too.
Next, write in more detail about how your value benefits your customers. This is an ideal time to mention and link to your case studies, demonstrating how your service helped others in similar situations, and the value you provided them.
Increase your Reputation through your Value and your Tone of Voice
You don’t necessarily need to spell out your value in every piece of marketing content or activity. That could get too repetitive.
Instead, your brand tone of voice will help people to recognise that it’s your business. Your voice will help to grow your reputation as an organisation that provides value. Prospective customers will be reminded that it’s you simply because of how you’re saying it.
Your brand voice will remind people of the value you provide. Whereas your tone of voice is how you communicate in all your marketing. If you haven’t developed your brand’s tone of voice yet, I can help. And this Semrush blog will, too. As will this one from Brain Labs Digital.
I can’t believe I haven’t written more about tone of voice myself before! I’ll put that right soon.
Offering Value through Visuals
You only have seconds to capture people’s attention in your advertising and marketing. So, visuals are essential. Position good-quality visuals near your punchy headline and those all-important opening sentences, scattering more (not too many) throughout to keep people reading.
Visuals also help to build your brand identity, so choose those essential images carefully.
Visuals can be anything from professional photographs to videos, illustrations and infographics. Whether you use one of the many online photographic library sources, like Unsplash or Pexels, or find a good photographer for your products, photos are an important addition to your advertising and marketing.
For the best graphics and illustrations, use a good graphic designer. The designer in Oxfordshire I tend to recommend is Designs Like These.
Of course, Canva is great, but a professional graphic designer will create something special that reflects your brand and value.
Keep their Eyes on the Page!
Visuals add colour and interest. They also do the important job of breaking up a page of text. Being confronted by a web page, blog or newsletter that’s solid text can be overwhelming, putting people off reading it. So, having photos, graphics, subheads and bullet points really help. That way, the reader’s eye can follow the text and absorb your messages far more easily.
Plus, visuals help your readers to remember your messages. A good visual can increase engagement in your digital marketing – apparently, content that uses images is shared up to 40% more than text alone!
If you need any help with finding your tone of voice and deciphering exactly what your value is, let’s have a chat about it. Click here to find a suitable time for a video call, or email me at jen@jennyhaken.co.uk. Consider me your virtual in-house copywriter!
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