How to Incorporate Value-Based Marketing Into Your Campaigns

TL;DR:

• Value-based marketing is all about providing customer value through an approach that prioritizes the understanding of customer needs and desires.
• This approach is instrumental in building brand loyalty, customer advocacy, customer retention, and sustainable business growth.
• Value-based marketing relies on several strategies, including brand storytelling, the creation of a top-notch digital experience, collaboration between sales and marketing, and a solid data strategy.
• Discover how Indie Lee used a quiz created via Jebbit to engage and inform customers — while collecting data to inform their marketing strategy.

Let’s be honest: Running effective and successful marketing in a volatile economy is not a walk in the park. The competition is fierce, customers are more insightful than ever before, and budgets are often limited.

There is, however, one specific strategy that can help steer your efforts in the right direction: value-based marketing.

Not to be confused with values-based marketing (we will soon explain what this means, too), value-based marketing is rapidly coming to the fore as the best way to attract customers, retain their loyalty, and boost profits.

Want to find out more about this marketing approach and how to use it to scale your business? Then, our guide right here is exactly what you need.

What Is Value-Based Marketing?

Before we jump into the meat of this guide, it’s important to clarify what value-based marketing is — and what it is not.

Also known as customer-centric marketing, value-based marketing prioritizes offering unique, genuine, and exceptional value to the end customer. It achieves this by — you guessed it — putting the customer at the center of the entire process, understanding their needs, and fulfilling their desires. Ultimately, if carried out correctly, this type of marketing can truly enable companies to skyrocket both customer retention and revenues.

Earlier, we mentioned that value-based marketing differs from values-based marketing. You can remember the difference this way: The “value” in value-based marketing refers to providing value to the customer whereas the “values” in values-based marketing refers to shared values like morals, beliefs, and interests that your customers have in common.

Think about, for example, brand activism that sparks conversations and real action in fields such as climate change, social justice, inclusivity and diversity, and more. This is all values-based marketing — and while it’s becoming increasingly more prominent across companies big and small as part of an integrated marketing strategy, it’s different from the value-based marketing we are discussing today.

The Benefits of a Value-Based Approach in Marketing

So, what can companies achieve through a value-based approach in marketing? Let’s find out some of the most impressive and widely reported benefits.

Strengthens Customer Loyalty

A well-thought-out value-based marketing strategy can build — and strengthen — customer loyalty. Why? It’s simple.

Through this type of marketing, brands can craft genuine, personalized, and valuable connections with their customers, and provide them with what they want, need, and expect.

The result? Happy, loyal customers who keep coming back for more — and spread the word about how excellent a particular brand is.

Boosts Advocacy

If you thought customer loyalty was the pinnacle of a brand-customer relationship, you might need to think again. Take a happy customer, engage them with more value, encourage them to share their positive experiences with your brand, and you might just have a brand advocate. Brand advocacy is a fundamental aspect of both brand reputation and profit margins. 

A  customer-centric approach to your content marketing will lead to positive brand experiences. By providing customers what they need in the moment, like this Denim Finder experience powered by Jebbit for Free People, customers are not only more likely to complete a purchase, but also likely to share their experience. 

Helps With Customer Retention

As we briefly mentioned earlier, a value-based marketing strategy allows companies to boost customer retention — but why and how does this happen in practice?

Well, consider this: If a potential customer feels that you know them well and genuinely want to provide them with what they want or need, they will be more drawn to choose you instead of one of your competitors.

To pull this off, you need to show them that you have their best interests at heart. You can do this in a few rather simple ways. For example, you could create personalized product recommendation quizzes, fun polls and surveys, or even launch a playful challenge on social media. The name of the game is engagement, though remember that your ultimate goal is to always offer real value.

Fosters Solid, Sustainable, and Future-Ready Business Growth

Are you looking to expand and thrive in an increasingly unreliable, uncertain, and complex marketplace? Wondering how to scale your small business? Then, you should know that standard marketing tactics will no longer be sufficient.

Enter value-based marketing. Not only will this marketing approach support your customer-facing efforts, but it will also enable your business to keep growing sustainably in the future.

One of the main reasons why this is true is the financial investment needed to run value-based marketing campaigns. Because value-based marketing is primarily focused on keeping your existing customers happy and satisfied instead of blindly reaching for more and more new opportunities, your marketing spend will be much lower than traditional marketing.

As you surely know, the tactics involved with winning new customers are generally much more expensive compared to those needed to nurture and look after your existing customer base. That is why value-based marketing makes a lot more financial sense.

Value-Based Marketing: How to Incorporate It Into Your Campaigns

Now that you know how value-based marketing benefits businesses, let’s take a look at how you can integrate it into your overall marketing campaigns.

Take Your Customers Behind the Scenes

One of the best — and most entertaining — ways to show customers how you can fulfill their needs is by giving them a look behind the scenes of your brand. 

Regardless of what you sell, whether it’s physical products or services, there are many ways you can give your customers a sneak peek into what goes on at your company. Take them on a journey that shows them how your brand values align with their core values, and show them what enables you to craft the products or services they love.

To achieve this, you can use a combination of digital marketing assets that include:

• Live videos
• Educational and informative videos
• Interactive web content, like lookbooks
• Visually appealing infographics
• Social media stories and reels

Remember, though: Your top priority is to maximize perceived value through each asset you produce and share by providing something educational, entertaining, or inspiring.

Leverage Storytelling to Generate Emotions

It’s no surprise that storytelling and marketing go so well together. Telling a relatable, authentic, and captivating story has the potential to entice your audience to check out your brand and, ultimately, buy your products or services. The main reason behind this is that storytelling fulfills our human need for connection, emotion, and social relationships.

Therefore, focus on crafting a solid narrative around why a specific product or service is so valuable to your customers, and remember to include snippets or testimonials that feature the stories of some of your happy, real-life customers. This will help you connect more deeply and authentically with your target audience, which in turn will allow your value proposition to shine through in a much clearer and more detailed way. As a result, you’ll find that more and more people become interested in your brand and buy from you instead of a competitor.

Offer a Top-Notch Digital Experience

Interactive content is another vital part of your value-based marketing strategy. That’s because this content type is incredibly personalized and attractive, and it helps keep your audience’s attention for longer.

Whether you opt for a product recommendation quiz, clickable Instagram stories, live chats, or anything else, you’ll want your interactive content to generate a positive, memorable digital experience that leads to tangible action.

Get Your Salespeople on Board

What we have discussed so far is extremely important, but it would also be totally useless if you didn’t also rope in your sales team. Marketing teams and sales teams have — or should have — a very strong connection so that your salespeople can get on board whenever you launch a new value-based marketing campaign.

Try to empower your salespeople with the tools, resources, and knowledge they need to truly illustrate the value of your products or services when it’s time to close a deal. To achieve this, you’ll want to organize regular value-marketing training sessions, and share data, findings, and objectives with your sales department.

Fuel Your Marketing Plan With Data

Value-based marketing is all about understanding what your customers most value so that you can give it to them. But how do you get this level of insight into the wants and needs across all the various segments of your target market?

You can do it with data. In fact, value-based marketing strategies are usually also data-driven marketing strategies because you’ll need vast knowledge about your audience so that you can create the kind of customer satisfaction that keeps them coming back for more.

Fortunately, there are many ways to gather the data you need. Your own website, for example, is an excellent resource for browsing data. Another way to gather information on customer needs is through call center analytics so that you can gain insights into customer pain points as well as refine the customer experience by improving agent performance, customer service, and operational efficiency.

You can also turn the data collection process into a one-two punch that both helps you collect data while also engaging and entertaining your customers with a high-quality interactive experience. We’ll show you an example that the beauty brand Indie Lee created in partnership with Jebbit.

Indie Lee launched a quiz on their website in order to help their customers quickly and easily find the right products to build a personalized skincare routine. In terms of engagement, it’s been a huge success. People flock to this quiz because it saves them valuable time they’d otherwise spend navigating a large product lineup to narrow their choices down. Even better, it has a high completion rate — 84% of people who start it go on to complete it.

And in terms of collecting data? Up to 67% of people who complete the quiz submit lead information, which represents a vast influx of new zero-party data. All told, this quiz has collected 21,000+ zero-party data attributes that Indie Lee’s marketers can use to inform a value-based marketing strategy.

Take Your Marketing to the Next Level

Adopting a customer-centric culture strengthens customer loyalty, builds brand advocacy, and supercharges profit margins. Businesses can achieve this by implementing a value-based marketing strategy. The first step is to emphasize the genuine, real value of your products or services to your customers. From there, you can take your business to the next level.

Will you embrace the value-based marketing revolution? Get started today by talking with one of our experts.