Grow With Soul: Ep. 97 - Deep Dive On Value In Marketing
Today I wanted to look at value. The truth is that ‘value’ is more multi-layered than it at first seems - there is the identifying it, the believing it, and then the applying of it. Understanding your value is not just important for your marketing going forward, but really knowing and believing in your value can also help to highlight the right direction for you and where you can best serve others with your business.
Here's what I talk about in this episode:
The theory behind value in marketing
Different types of value
Separating value and helpfulness
Finding your own value and how to use it
Read the episode transcript:
Hello, and welcome to episode 97 of Grow with Soul. Today I wanted to look at value. You hear about value everywhere it seems; marketing advice is always ‘be valuable’, ‘demonstrate your value’, ‘create products based on your value’, which sounds easy on the face of it until you have to try and figure out what your value even is. The truth is that ‘value’ is more multi-layered than it at first seems – there is the identifying it, the believing it, and then the applying of it. All while negotiating a battering of negative self-talk, questioning who you think you are and whether this value is truly ‘enough’.
Understanding your value is not just important for your marketing going forward, but really knowing and believing in your value can also help to highlight the right direction for you and where you can best serve others with your business.
THE THEORY BEHIND VALUE IN MARKETING
Ok, let’s start with some theory. Why is value important in marketing? Why is it that people always talk about using it? The reasons, I believe, are two-fold.
Firstly, what is valuable is attention-worthy. You pay attention to what you find valuable in some way, and ignore the things that you don’t. In a competitive landscape, whether that’s a high street full of shops, a craft market, or the internet, gaining someone’s attention is half the battle. With so much else out there distracting your customer, from competitors to funny videos, gaining their attention can often be more difficult than making the sale.
But once you have got their attention and they’re in your shop or following along with what you’re doing, that second reason kicks in – people won’t buy what’s not valuable to them. Selling is just an exchange of value, goods or a service in exchange for money. In order for them to exchange their money, they have to believe that what they get in return will be equal value. This is to do with the quality of your product, yes, but also the quality of your marketing – they have to believe that you’ll provide value, and the value they’ve got from you so far is all they’ve got to go on.
So you see, value is embedded throughout the customer journey, from discovery, to community, to sale, and after-sales. This is because it is such an intrinsic part of forming trust, and if they don’t trust you, they’re definitely not going to buy from you. So, if you’re unsure of your value, that’s a big chunk of your marketing and sales plan that’s missing!
DEFINITIONS AND EXAMPLES OF VALUE
Defined, value means ‘the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something’. What I think is important in that definition is that value is subjective – the regard it is held to deserve. There is no specific stipulation of what counts as valuable.
In marketing, we can narrow into different types of value.
Functional Value: This type of value is what an offer does, it’s the solution an offer provides to the customer. So, you need a pair of socks and someone is selling a pair of socks.
Monetary Value: This is where the price paid is relative to an offering’s perceived worth; the item’s worth in terms of currency. So, you know that a pair socks on average is about £5, so you don’t want to spend much more than that.
Social Value: The extent to which owning a product or engaging in a service allows the consumer to connect with others. So you buy a pair of socks from a seller at a craft fair or an independent shop so you can engage in the interaction and share about the product later.
Psychological Value: The extent to which a product allows consumers to express themselves or feel better. This is where the pair of socks isn’t just a pair of socks but a statement about who you are as a person – you choose hand knitted alpaca wool socks because of the kind of person that it makes you.
Most of us will be operating more at the social and psychological value end of the spectrum, as functional and monetary value is more important in the realm of more essential products, like groceries and necessities. However, it is good to have them as a final check to run things by because they will still be a factor in a customer’s decision-making – it can make them feel great about themselves, but if they can’t see that the thing itself is worth the money they still won’t buy. This is something to bear in mind when you’re creating products, but is also really useful for marketing your stuff too.
You can use these types of value to start to structure how you talk about what you do. Think about how you can provide these types of value. For me, I can provide social value by groups and courses, but also by facilitating conversations through my podcast and Instagram. I can provide psychological value by creating content that helps people believe they’re able to create and work and life that feels more like them, and create practical tools to help them get there. Just as long as I join that up with making sure the products themselves are functionally good enough (for example, not selling a programme and not keeping the promise of what people get!), and that the pricing is fair, then I need only really focus on the other types of value.
Sometimes words take on extra meanings. I read you the definition of value, we’ve talked through types of marketing value, but still there are unsaid definitions swirling in our heads, cultural meanings and assumptions that we bring to the word whether we realise it or not. The most common of these that I’ve come across in my work is the conflation of valuable and helpful. This may be because a lot of marketing content out there is really focused towards service business, but I often hear from product businesses who say they can’t provide value because they can’t help people with something or give away free stuff. Even within service businesses, a common worry is how to provide help without giving too much of a product away. Somewhere along the way, we got into a rut that meant value was giving away help for free.
And, sure, that’s a type of value. But think about the people you love to follow, the people whose emails you always open, whose Stories you always watch. Get someone in mind. What do you get from them, why are you there? They’re getting your attention, so you must be getting something valuable. I will go out on a limb here and suggest that not everyone you love to follow is giving out help for free.
Really, there are four purposes of content: to entertain, to educate, to inspire, to convince. Thinking about types of value, we’re looking at the first three. Giving away help likely comes under ‘to educate’, where you might be putting together a how-to ebook, or sharing the step by step of how you’re doing something. But that’s not all that’s valuable – you can also entertain, and inspire. I know that one of the people whose Stories I watch every day; I do so because I find her chats about what’s going on in their business entertaining – and look at Celeste Barber, she’s all about the entertainment. I also follow accounts because their photography or way of life is inspiring to me and I want to be immersed in it – after all, this is how blogging and the influencer industry took off, with people inspiring others.
Think back to those people that you love to follow – are they entertaining, educating or inspiring you? I’m not saying that you have to pick one, just that there is more to value than giving away help. You can choose which of entertain, educate and inspire feels most like you, where you feel most comfortable, and use that as your dominant type, whilst also mixing in some of the others.
FINDING YOUR OWN VALUE
Very often when faced with the question ‘what is valuable about you or what you do?’, we go straight to our skillset for answers. We look for the quantifiable things we can do, the stuff that people can see; the qualifications or the big wins. Of course, this also means that we open up a box of insecurity. By looking for those tangible things that we have, it can highlight the things we don’t have. We can look at our skills and see all the ones that aren’t there, the qualifications we should probably get, the gaps and the things that we’re not the world’s biggest expert on. And that can very easily overpower what is there, and leave you feeling like you don’t have enough to be valuable.
So in that way, it’s really not a very useful question! It puts you on the spot to think of something, which causes panic when you can’t. It highlights your perceived lack. And it also places you at the centre of the conundrum, when really you aren’t the most important factor. It sounds upside down, that your value isn’t really anything to do with you, but it’s not. It’s about your customer. It doesn’t really matter what you think is your value, it matters what they think it is. What they need, and how and why. It doesn’t matter what your value says about you, it matters what it provides to them.
Personally, I find this quite freeing. When defining and using your value stops being about you, and inevitably what you think about yourself, what others will think you think about yourself, and starts being about what other people need, the pressure is lifted. It’s not about you as a person anymore, you are a vessel, a conduit providing value to others. You as a human being are at a remove, it has no bearing on how good or not good you are. I also find that taking this customer-first approach also helps to highlight what you do have, rather than focus on all the things that you don’t.
Let’s take a real example from my business. There have been times where I’ve worried I don’t have enough value to give because I don’t have a coaching qualification, that without that, anything I have to give is somehow sullied or not good enough – but that is an ego-centric way of thinking. When I actually take a customer-first approach, I can see that coaching methodologies and qualifications are really low down the list of their priorities. What’s valuable to my customers is understanding marketing and how they can make it work for them, permission slips to follow their gut feeling, showing them a different approach to business.
Any time I’ve done a survey and asked what people like about following me, it’s always about my approach, how I make them feel, the way in which I do things. That’s where the value lives. Not in qualifications, not in a CV, but in your approach. The way you do things, the different things you can show them, the way you think, your ideas.
HOW CAN YOU USE THAT VALUE?
If you plan your business to get that value out to the right people as much as possible, then you can be spending more of your time in action, creating content and products, rather than thinking and worrying and taking course after course to fill a perceived hole. Once you have a handle on your value you can put that together with your personal motivations to create a business model and income streams that feel really aligned. But you can use your value in other ways too, on a more day to day level, in your marketing.
Deciding between ideas
Being honest with yourself about how much of an idea is driven by ego can help you to make a decision. It might be that you were chasing an idea that actually isn’t the most valuable option for your customer, it might be that you were telling yourself an idea needed to be more when really your customer needs a basic version. It might simply be than one idea is more valuable than another and you can start to see that more clearly. But, by having a short bullet point list of the key value you can provide gives you a benchmark to hold idea to and make decisions more objectively.
Creating new products/offerings
Again, when you’re creating new products or services you can really tailor them in specifically to the value you customers will want from you. There’s no need to over egg things, or try to include a little bit of everything, you can keep within the parameters of your value. I’ve worked with people who have struggled to shake the feeling that they need to know absolutely everything, that somehow it’s not professional as a web designer to not to every programming language on every platform, or as a florist to not have instant recognition of every flower in the northern hemisphere. Your value gives you your wheelhouse, a boundaried area that you can feel confident in – anything outside of that is ok for you to not to know. You can always tell when someone is confident and knowledgeable about what they do because they don’t mind saying they don’t know something. Taking me as an example; I don’t know anything about ads! I can’t do an episode here about how to do Facebook ads or any kind of ads, because I don’t know how to do that – it’s not my wheelhouse. But I can tell you about creating content all day long!
Branding and business values
Your value can work closely with your brand, both in determining it and in giving it depth. Taking me as an example again, the value I can give of showing how to use marketing in a more soulful way, is deeply connected to my brand values too. So if you’ve felt like your brand feels a bit misaligned or disconnected, you can mine your value to help you with this.
Content creation
Perhaps most obviously of all, your value can really help you when it comes to creating content. There are definite trends in marketing content, from Instagram to podcasting and blog post styles. Remember when everyone got heavily into edited photos on Instagram, when there was a spate of raw and vulnerable blog posts, when every podcast seemed to be interviewing the same people? It can be really easy to fall into feeling like you should be doing a bit of what everyone else is doing, even though you really know that the things that stand out are the things that are completely different. If you instead concentrate on making sure your content comes from your intrinsic value, and try to give that value in some way (entertaining, educating, inspiring, like we said before), then you’re less likely to be swayed by trends, and can make sure your content doesn’t veer off from the road you’ve chosen.
So, that’s our deep dive on value, and finding it and using it – I hope that gives you some jumping off points, or has sparked something for you.
