Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, The Net Promoter Score (NPS) (47-slide PowerPoint presentation). This presentation covers the Net-Promoter-Score (NPS) and 10 Deployment Best Practices to ensure a successful implementation. The Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty metric developed by (and a registered trademark of) Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix [read more]
The Importance of Value and How to Provide It
Also, if you are interested in becoming an expert on Customer-Centric Design (CCD), take a look at Flevy's Customer-Centric Design (CCD) Frameworks offering here. This is a curated collection of best practice frameworks based on the thought leadership of leading consulting firms, academics, and recognized subject matter experts. By learning and applying these concepts, you can you stay ahead of the curve. Full details here.
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In order to build a more loyal audience, you need to focus on providing value. In the digital age, every business is in a constant struggle to stay one step ahead of the competition, and value is the key to standing out. It is more expensive to attract new customers than it is to get more profitability from an existing audience, but too many businesses fail to recognize or provide value when it comes to their customers. The more value you provide, the greater you’ll be able to develop a brand loyalty advantage, and that can very quickly become the dividing line between you and your competitors. Value is vital, and these methods of improving your value levels can help you succeed above and beyond expectations.
Sharing Knowledge
No matter your sector or industry, you will have specialist knowledge of your product or service. That knowledge is the key to providing better value for website visitors. When most site visits come directly from search engines, that means that an audience will find you in order to source answers to questions. Whether it’s something simple like finding a local DIY store or something more in-depth, optimizing value can help your performance on search engines, drive traffic to your website, and increase your audience reach. Consider adopting:
- Blogs
- How-to guides
- Sharing relevant industry news
By showing that you know your subject and enjoy sharing the knowledge, you provide very real value to consumers, and that can lead them straight to a purchase.
Demonstrate Your Quality
Recommendations from friends and family used to be the primary way that people would find new businesses, but that method has become a lot less effective. Online reviews are the way forward, and if you aren’t making use of your customer testimonials, then you are missing out on a valuable resource. Online reviews are a useful tool for not only providing encouragement to a sale but also for reinforcing your own value. If you have happy customers who will return again and again, then their reviews and testimonials can be the additional value that a new customer needs to encourage a purchase. Click here for more information on requesting testimonials.
Provide Resources
Many visitors will come to your website because they want the answer to a query. If you can provide those answers in a way that channels them into a customer journey, then you might make a sale from even the most random search. There are many ways to provide value through resources, but video content is the most popular option. Modern consumers will watch a video tutorial before they read a long essay covering the same subject. You can use video to:
- Show product demonstrations
- Showcase customer testimonials
- Provide entertainment and information
Video marketing is a very useful resource to use for providing better value, and companies like Promo.com can ensure that you have the video content that you need for improved value provision. Don’t underestimate the impact of video content when it comes to generating larger audience figures.
Know Your Customers
The more that you know what your audience is looking for from you, the easier it will be to provide the value that they’re looking for. Market research into your audience is always vital and should never be overlooked. The modern trend of audience segmentation is becoming more and more critical for aiming marketing at the audience members that it most suitably matches, and that’s the key to being able to build a more robust value strategy. The more than you can narrow down and segment your audience, the easier it will be to have more understanding of what they are looking for, and targeting your marketing at those that it will most benefit. It can take time to develop a useful segmentation strategy, but the rewards can be very worthwhile.
Value in Promotional Selling
If a customer is buying a product that they need, they may benefit from purchasing an additional product. Look at how big players like Amazon promote relevant additional purchases at several stages of the customer journey. You can provide value and make more sales by highlighting the products or additional services that a customer might need if they are in the market for a specific item. This will depend on your sector, but taking a closer look at which of your products complement each other is a useful start.
It’s never been easier to launch a new business idea, but it’s also very easy to fail. The key is to provide the most value to those that need it. Build up your value, and you will establish brand loyalty, and that can make all of the difference when it comes to your end of year profits.
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Gain the knowledge and develop the expertise to become an expert in Customer-Centric Design (CCD). Our frameworks are based on the thought leadership of leading consulting firms, academics, and recognized subject matter experts. Click here for full details.
In the modern Digital Age, advances in technology and communication, combined with the explosive growth in data information, have given rise to a more empowered global customer. Recent economic and political events highlight the need for organizations to understand how consumers view the world and the most important attributes for their purchasing decisions.
Thus, increasingly more organizations are seeking to invest and focus on Customer-centric Design. A clear understanding of customer needs and behaviors across the organization will help drive profitable growth strategies and provide the confidence to invest in opportunities at a time when staying within budget can be extremely difficult.
Learn about our Customer-Centric Design (CCD) Best Practice Frameworks here.
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About Shane Avron
Shane Avron is a freelance writer, specializing in business, general management, enterprise software, and digital technologies. In addition to Flevy, Shane's articles have appeared in Huffington Post, Forbes Magazine, among other business journals.Top 10 Recommended Documents on Customer Retention
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