In the real world, your values stand you out from the rest. It is what defines you, your thoughts, your vision, your mission, and where you want to move ahead.
It is also the same in the world of marketing, if you have not yet defined your values then you’ll be the next forgettable brand in this digital world of competition.
Values-based marketing is incorporating the values in your marketing kit. Values will make you and your brand more authentic and reliable. Let’s get to know more about values-based marketing.
What is Values Based Marketing?
Values-based marketing is sometimes called value-added marketing. It is an outward-focused strategy that works for bringing change in the world by doing some good. It is an appeal to a customer’s values, core beliefs, and ethics. As here we’re talking about the values of our customers so it shifts the marketing approach to customer-centric from product-centric. And businesses add value to the lives of their customer with this marketing strategy which is why it is called value-added marketing.
Value-added marketing keeps the customers first, it focuses on the customer’s needs and wants. This way it’s easy for the customers and brands to make a genuine connection beyond interest in a product or service. It is possible because the brands and customers are sharing the same types of values.
Different marketers define values in different ways, some try to justify it with the cost, and others compare it with the worthiness of the products. What do you think the value is?
Well, according to me value is the combined benefits that customers get whether quantitative or qualitative, after purchasing your products or services along with bettering the world. Some digital marketers take cause-related marketing and values-based marketing as one, but I would say, Cause-related marketing is just an aspect of values-based marketing.
There are different types of values a business and customers can share with each other that are following:
- Business Values: This shows the values a business can get from its customers. In this, we can include the short-term and long-term goals and growth of the business along with enhanced productivity with improved efficiency.
- Social Values: In a way, social values shows the CSR (Corporate Social Responsibilities) of a brand and also how can a user connect with other on social platforms and causes. You can know more about how to incorporate social causes in the marketing in cause-based marketing.
- Cultural Values: It shows your brand’s cultural values. Cultural values can depict any shared beliefs that a brand and consumers resonate with each other. This creates a favourable environment for a brand to operate easily and for a customer to connect with the brand.
- Consumer Values: Consumer values are also the most important part as values based marketing is completely dependent on the needs and wants of a customer. These show thought process, behaviour, attitude, frequency, advocacy, loyalty etc.
- Functional Values: It depicts the solutions to a problem a business is providing to its customers. It shows the functionality of the offer a customer will get after purchasing products or services from a brand.
- Economic or Monetary Values: This is the monetary value a business gets from its consumers in return for services and products. In simple words, the price of functionalities. Here, Functions and price intersect with each other.
- Psychological Values: When we buy some products, no matter what we think we are psychologically attached to the product. These values depict the feelings of a person after purchasing the products or services like is the consumer feeling better after purchasing the product, and being able to express emotions.
The aforementioned are the different types of values that a brand and its customers share with each other in different phases of the sales process. With these 7 types of values every business or brand wants to reflect the following core values in their messaging:
- Freedom
- Purpose
- Tradition
- Security
- Achievement
- Pleasure
The biggest secret to being successful in values-based marketing is, “To practise what you preach” or “Stick to the values you’ve decided for your brand no matter what”. Delivering the promises your brand makes through your promotions helps in establishing unbreakable trust with consumers. This way your brand will resonate with your customers, and they’ll spread the good words about your brand.
I hope you’ve understood clearly what value-added marketing is, now let’s take a look at the steps of incorporating value-added marketing into your brand.
Steps to Incorporate Values Based Marketing
Well, you can add different values to different phases of the marketing funnel. It depends on you how you want to tackle the values for the benefit of both business and consumers.
- Define Your Target Audience & Create a Customer Persona
- Define Your Brand Voice (Tone of Communication)
- Define Your Brand’s Core & Unique Values (Can be based on the results your Brand has helped in achieving for your customers)
- Revisit Target Audience and after getting feedback make improvement
- Follow and Study your successful competitors in Values-based Marketing
- Adapt Your Strategy after identifying your core brand values from the aforementioned
- Continue getting feedback & Keep Improving: Improvement is the key to every successful marketing campaign.
If you’ll follow the above 7 steps then you can get benefitted from the value-added marketing. Every marketing strategy is a lifelong process, it needs improvement from time to time, and a business can’t run the same campaigns for years over years.
Now, let’s move forward and discuss some examples to get more clarity on values-based marketing strategy.
Examples of Values Based Marketing
Messaging
Simple messaging that inspires people to interact with the brand including some simple hashtags. It should be as simple as it can deliver the brand’s values clearly with no confusion. For better understanding, we can take an example of DigiAvtar’s messaging
DigiAvtar: Digitalising Brands for Exponential Growth
I hope everybody can understand with this simple messaging what DigiAvtar is stating and standing for. It says DigiAvtar is a brand that is working in the field of digitalising and positioning brands for their exponential growth with their services.
Storytelling
You need to keep your storytelling strong and visual as visuals grab more attention than texts or static content. It is a fact that people on the internet read only 20% of a webpage, so it’s better to include strong visual storytelling in value-added marketing campaigns. Adding visuals will support your storytelling. Click to know more about Storytelling.
Social Sharing
Social sharing is the easiest way to reach a mass audience with the lowest cost. SMM platforms are very much popular and people spend a lot of time on them. Share your mission, values, and goals on different social platforms you’re active on.
Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate Social Responsibility shows how much your brand is responsible for social causes like environmental causes. Emphasis on social causes your brand is supporting, you can know more about this in cause-related marketing.
Connect with Audience and Share UGC
Connecting with your audience helps both customers and brands to understand each other’s values, beliefs etc. You can run small campaigns like a collage competition, graphic competition, content competition, or anything else. Always share the UGC (user-generated content) on your social media handles or any places your audiences are connected with you. It’ll make them feel valued, and listened.
Strong and One CTA at a Time
A call to action helps people in pushing for purchases. Without a call to action, they don’t really know what to do. But having too many calls to action make them confused, and most of them leave the platform. So, it is good to keep only one strong call to action in one copy.
Now, we’ve also discussed the examples of values based marketing. So, let’s move one step further and discuss the benefits of values-based marketing.
Benefits of Values Based Marketing
The popularity of value-added marketing is increasing day by day as it focuses on the wants, and needs of the consumers. Along with this, there are several benefits you can earn by implementing this marketing strategy in your business that are following:
Builds Strong Relationships
It is easy to build strong relationships when you give priority to other people. And in value-added marketing, customers are first priority. As it is customer-centric, so it’s easy to build strong relationships with the customers in less time. Adding value to the products or services works as a milestone in the foundations of the connection. It’ll further lead to unbreakable trust and then brand loyalty.
Helps Getting Retainer Clients
You can only get retainer clients when you’ve built strong emotional relationships with your clients and your clients are loyal to your brand. And I’m sure values-based marketing is the best way to build strong emotional relationships. Retainer clients give ROI without any promotion. So, if you want to have retaining clients in your business then implement tactics of values-based marketing in your campaigns.
Build Brand Advocates
Brand advocates are those customers who’re completely satisfied with your services, and have unbreakable faith in your business. These people promote your products and services without the cost and help in ROI.
It can only be the result of consistent efforts and improvements in your marketing campaigns, providing a positive customer experience and solving their queries, connecting with them on different occasions, and building strong relationships.
Brand advocates help in growing your community and establishing yourself as an industry expert.
Scoring Better Leads and Easy Conversion
Values-based marketing gives power to your leads. You get better leads, and conversion is easy, as it’s completely based on customer relationships.
Increased Brand Value and Position Higher in the Market
As value-based marketing is completely about providing value to the customers and respecting their values. So, as a result, it also increases brand value. Increased brand value helps a brand in expansion, and position higher in the market. You can beat the competition with help of value-added marketing.
We’ve talked about the benefits you can get from value-added marketing, now let’s talk about some tips you need to consider in the value-based marketing campaigns
Tips for Values Based Marketing Campaigns
We’re going to discuss some tips that will help you in running the campaign smoothly. So, be attentive and focused.
- Stand Out Yourself Unique to be non-comparable
- Target the right audience that’ll help you in saving time, cost and energy, and walking in your customer’s shoes
- Include Visual Storytelling in Your Marketing Content to make the content attention-grabbing.
- Tell Customer Stories through testimonials, reviews, infographics, videos, and case studies to make a connection and build trust.
- Provide your audience good quality educational content through webinars, workshops, eBooks, video tutorials, blog posts, infographics etc.
- Provide exceptional customer service by solving every query of your customers keeping a humble tone of communication.
- Tell Benefits of Your product or services rather than talking about the features, it’ll make them feel attached and emotionally connected with your products and services.
- Understand your clients’ needs and provide them personalized experience by providing customized products and services
- Address your customers’ emotions to make them feel a part of the community, and connected to the products and services.
- Provide a good user interface and experience through your website by making it mobile-friendly and responsive.
- Use the right tools for marketing and automation
- Don’t bargain and leverage customer evidence. Keeping away from bargaining will stand your business as a brand, and leveraging customer evidence help in building strong emotional relationships with your customers.
So, now you know the tips you need to include while performing value-based marketing. I hope we’ve included everything now, so let’s wrap up!
Wrapping UP
Values are the most important aspects whether we are talking about business or people. We are being identified by the values and ethics we walk within the society. Our unique values make us believable, authoritative, unique, and recognizable.
Values based marketing helps us in adding value to businesses and customers along with bettering the world. Values based marketing helps in bettering the world by supporting social causes, which is also a part of cause-related marketing. Well, in other words, we can consider cause-related marketing an aspect of values based marketing, it is what I believe. What do you believe?
We’ve included everything from what is values based marketing to steps of incorporating values based marketing in the business, examples and benefits of values based marketing along with tips for values based marketing campaigns.
If you still have questions, you can ask in the comment section. And if you got valuable information from the blog, please leave some appreciation in the comment section. For more blogs on marketing visit the blog.