B2B marketing creates a number of unique challenges, especially for tech companies. While you may know the immense value your business can provide customers—and how what you offer differs from what your competitors bring to the table—in many cases, technology solutions providers struggle to bring in customers who genuinely understand how your novelty directly translates into value for them. Value-add marketing is a great tactic to demonstrate to potential customers how an investment in your product or services can set their business up for long-term success.
What is Value-Add Marketing?
Value-add marketing is a strategic promotional approach that lays out the benefits your company provides to a potential customer. The content of a value-add marketing campaign will highlight advantages such as:
- Specific features that your solution offers that your competitors’ solutions may not provide.
- How your product can help save money, especially when compared to your competitors’ product offerings.
- Customer success stories that demonstrate why it is more efficient or effective to work with your brand than with your competitors.
By creating a solid value-add marketing campaign, businesses often experience a higher return on their marketing investment because customers will have a better initial understanding of what you bring to the table and why they should trust your company as a services or product provider. Along with marketing your business, value-add campaigns accomplish proactive education and insight into what your brand can provide.
The Benefits of Value-Add Marketing
Value marketing has several critical benefits for your brand.
1. It can help increase the ROI of your marketing efforts.
Most notably, value-add marketing has the potential to substantially increase your overall ROI for marketing. B2B customers aren’t interested in vague promises or fluffy language. Instead, they’re looking at how your brand can benefit their bottom line and why they should trust you. Value-add campaign messaging provides your potential customers with the education and information they need to make the decision to go with your company up front instead of once they’re in your sales cycle.
2. Value-add marketing helps sales and marketing teams stay aligned.
Sales and marketing misalignment is a serious problem for many brands. By focusing on value-add marketing, however, your marketing team must take a closer look at the information the sales team already has at their fingertips: real customer needs and desires. You can bring sales and marketing into better overall alignment through your value-add marketing efforts by encouraging conversation that otherwise may not happen and information that would stay otherwise siloed.
3. Value-add marketing keeps the focus on your customers.
Value-add marketing campaigns force you to track existing and anticipate future customer needs. As a result, you may find that you are better positioned to keep up with and predict trends, allowing you to update your solutions to stay ahead of the competition. competitors. By keeping the focus on your customers and what they need, you always increase your company’s ability to maximize profit.
4. Value-add marketing allows you to assess your position in the marketplace.
Similar to the above point, value-add marketing also encourages awareness of where your brand stands in relation to your competition. As a result of the careful audits and information gathering that value-add marketing demands, you’ll easily be able to focus your campaigns around curating and promoting your company’s niche benefits or value propositions, which ultimately saves time and money and promotes a higher ROI on marketing spend.
How to Construct an Effective Value-Add Marketing Campaign
A value-add marketing campaign can be easily deployed through the channels that are already a part of your marketing efforts. Before constructing a campaign, it is important to have a true understanding of your target audience to best resonate with its needs. That means you must identify relevant pain points or problems and address how your company offers effective solutions in your value-add marketing content.
1. Clearly identify your target market.
A clear understanding of your target market can go a long way toward helping to shape your overall marketing efforts. If you have a robust tech solution with many features, you’re likely targeting larger businesses with considerable functionality and integration needs. Other providers may find small to medium businesses are their bread and butter. If you offer a niche solution, you may be earmarking businesses only within a single industry or vertical. Once you identify the identifying feature of your target market, list the ancillary characteristics of that audience to refine your understanding of who it is you’re trying to reach.
2. Know your target market’s pain points.
In order to effectively create a value-add marketing campaign, you need to know what pain points your solution solves for clients. Some problems are fairly universal. For example, most businesses are looking for strategies that will allow them to cut costs or protect their overall privacy and security. Clearly lay out what pain points your customers are dealing with and need solutions for.
3. Clearly define how your solution helps with pain points.
Look at your offerings from your customer’s point of view to formulate ways to communicate about them. What is it that your brand can do to help solve the problems of your target customers? Why should clients trust you? What specific return or outcome will customers receive by using your product or service? How can you help them run their business more effectively or provide them with options that can help alleviate potential pain points? The more clearly you define your solutions to pain points, the better you can shape your value-add messaging to customers.
4. Know what your competitors have to offer.
As you design your value-add marketing campaign, take a careful look at what your competitors are already offering. While you don’t necessarily need to offer exactly the same as your competitors, you need to know what they are providingand where your brand is positioned within the greater competitor offerings marketplace. Why should businesses choose you, rather than your competitors? When you know the answer to that question, you can provide clearer insights on the unique value you add to your customers’ business processes and bottom line.
5. Provide proof from past customers.
Put together white papers and case studies that clearly define the solutions you have equipped customers with in the past. Include clear examples that demonstrate the benefits of your brand as well as metrics on customer ROI when you can. . Social proof is also powerful: provide the name of companies you’ve supported (with their permission) and include reviews or testimonials from satisfied clients in your marketing content.
Ready to Launch Your Value-Add Marketing Campaign?
If your tech business is ready to launch a value-add marketing campaign that will help improve your overall ROI, contact us to learn more about our services and how we can help advance your marketing efforts.
