Marketing Value
Want to know what’s under the hood here at WriterAccess? This series will give you a better understanding of how a business like ours markets itself. And it’s straight from the man responsible for keeping WriterAccess marketing moving.
In the previous post, Marketing Nuts and Bolts, I reviewed three concepts that marketers need to keep in mind in order to start marketing. Those concepts weighed heavily on the concept of value.
So why is value important?
The secret? Value is actually an equation. Merriam Webster describes value as, “a fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money for something exchanged.” Translating this into an equation looks like this:
The Value Equation
Keep the Ratio Over One
The key to marketing value is keeping the ratio as high as possible. Make sure customers are always getting more than what they’re giving up. If marketers are charging $1.50 for a candy bar, make sure the candy bar is worth at least $1.50 to the person buying it. This seems simple enough, but it’s more complicated than one would think.
What You Give Up
What You Give Up may seem like a simple concept. “It’s the money that a customer spends, right?” Wrong. Marketers need to realize that customers are giving up time and brainpower in the exchange. It’s easy to understand how much money customers are giving up, but it takes a more trained eye to see the brainpower and time that goes into making that purchase. Try and establish a dollar value for the brainpower and time that goes into the exchange and add that to the cost of the product. And the lower you keep that number, the more value can be delivered to customers.
What You Get
What You Get is different for each customer. One customer could view a candy bar as a sweet treat, while another could view it as a quick way to quell hunger. Another could view it as a nice gift. Who knows? You should. The key is understanding customer wants and needs. An easy way to do this is to establish a dollar value for each of the benefits your product offers. Add them all together and you get a better perspective of what the customer is getting in the exchange. Keeping that number as high as possible adds more value.
Finding Value in Marketing Your Valuable Product
Blog posts are a main product of WriterAccess. So how do we establish the value of blog posts our customers buy?
First let’s put a dollar value on what WriterAccess customers get. The main benefits of posting blogs are: establishing a brand, positioning a company as a thought leader, showing business activity, building relationships with writers, gaining listing positions for keywords, informing customers, and providing entertainment. We like to think that each one of those benefits creates $20 of revenue, so the total of what each customer is getting is $140 to their bottom line.
Now what are customers giving up? The average cost of a blog post through our system is around $40. And the combination of the brainpower and time going into the process adds about an hour for one of our clients, and at an average salary of $30 per hour, adds another $30 to the cost. So the total cost of the blog post is really around $70.
This means that the value, or ratio of what our customers are getting compared to what they’re giving up, for a blog post is 2 to 1. This shows that our customers are getting two dollars for every dollar that they give up—not a bad investment.
There’s Value… Now What?
Once a marketer knows there’s value in their product, they need to market it. Show people that the benefits far outweigh what they need to give up getting it. If you can do this, you will have successfully used value in your marketing.
Glen Jackman is the Marketing Specialist at WriterAccess and ideaLaunch. He’s responsible for managing the database, running email marketing campaigns, executing SEO and content marketing strategies, and managing social media marketing. Contact Glen on Twitter @GlenJackman or by email Glen (at) WriterAccess.com.
