JoomConnect Blog
7 Ways to Show Your Clients and Customers the Value You Offer
It shouldn’t be surprising to think that your prospects—or even businesses you already work with—aren’t going to take you at your word that you and your services are the best option for their needs… as easy as that might make things. No, the hard truth is that you need your marketing to communicate the value your business and its services offer. Let’s go over a few ways you can ensure it does.
You Need to Develop (Then Publicize) a Value Proposition
A value proposition is pretty much what it sounds like: a statement that succinctly defines what benefits something (in this case, your business or a relationship with it) has to offer to those who embrace it. It is important for a business to have one, as it helps create a starting foundation to help build a marketing approach around.
A good value proposition is more than a quick sound bite that summarizes what you want your audience to see about you and your business services. It is specific and quantifiable, directly comparing your capabilities to what your competition offers and providing evidence to support your claims.
- What do your clients and customers most often need from you, in as specific terms as possible?
- Where is what you offer similar to what your competitors do, and where does it differ?
- How do your clients/customers see benefits by working with you, also as specifically as you can define it?
- Who can back up what you’re saying and advocate for your business amongst your prospects?
Let’s say this process gives you a value proposition that looks something like, “We help such-and-such companies deal with x-issues and y-challenges, using our unique process to improve our clients’ situations in a and b ways. This results in these clients seeing benefit 1 and benefit 2.”
This statement should then be used to inform a variety of your efforts, from your marketing messages to enhancing your business model. Let’s go through seven ways your value can be communicated.
How To Communicate Your Value to Your Customers and Clients
1. Show How You Measure Up to the Competition
It’s a simple fact that your prospects, clients, and customers will do some comparison shopping. Take some time to join them in doing so! Learning about your competitors will help you identify what does and doesn’t work in your market niche and give you insights into how you can differentiate yourself and your business from the rest of the herd. What benefits do you provide that the other businesses around you simply can’t? Make these benefits the focus of your marketing, and your value will be much more evident.
2. Demonstrate Your Value Through Outcomes
Similarly, you must consistently show your current clientele that they are receiving what they expect from you and your business offering. One of the best ways to do that is to underpromise and overdeliver, naturally, but it is also important to be totally transparent when obstacles do arise. This will help instill trust amongst your clients, as they’ll know that you’ll deliver what they need and operate openly as you do.
3. Collect and Use Social Proof
At the end of the day, your marketing is intended to convince your audience that what you have to offer is their best option. The challenge then becomes how to educate them without them assuming that you’re exaggerating your own capabilities. Social proof and its many forms are an excellent means of doing so, as it gives them the perspective of one of their peers, as compared to you touting your expertise for yourself. Things like testimonials and case studies are highly invaluable to your marketing efforts for this very reason, as are positive reviews left online.
4. Generate Content Directed Toward Your Audience’s Pain Points
Who would you rather work with… a provider offering a cookie-cutter approach to every client or a provider demonstrating an understanding of your specific situation and challenges? Most people would sooner seek out the latter, which means you need to generate content that addresses actual issues that your target audience suffers from a perspective that resonates with them.
5. Gather Feedback and Put it to Use
Another excellent way to help express your value is to clarify that you’re trying to offer more. To accomplish this, you should take every opportunity to understand how your clients and customers feel about your services. So, ask them! Leave behind feedback cards every time you interact with them, call them up to check in and see how they’re feeling about your services, and put customer satisfaction polls on your website.
Then, once you receive feedback, act on it! Doing so helps your business improve in general while also showing your clients that you care about delivering what they need.
6. Highlight What Your Services Provide and Enable
As an expert in your field, it can be challenging to balance between clearly communicating with your prospects and demonstrating proof of knowledge. On the one hand, you want them to see you know what you’re talking about, but on the other, you also want them to follow what you’re saying—simple enough that they understand what they need to do and why they need to do it, but complex or involved enough that they don’t want to handle it alone.
An effective way to strike this balance is by heavily focusing on the outcomes that success brings while explaining the overarching concepts that will bring them this success. Make sure these outcomes are framed to put your services at the forefront of the narrative.
Again, you really want to highlight what you can provide for them… and should you offer an additional benefit to what they would see by doing it independently, make sure to focus on that.
7. Cultivate a Community
Finally, you may want to create a hub where your clients and customers can interact with you and with one another, allowing them to exchange information and share their experiences—or reach out to you specifically as another means of engaging with them. Depending on your capabilities, this can be anything from a Facebook group to a specialized section on your website. You just need to be there to keep engagement up.
Consistently show your clients your value, and they’ll want to stick around.
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