How To Add Value To Your Business

Perhaps it shouldn't surprise me that this week as I delivered two separate day long courses on Social Media marketing and Selling Skills, I was asked the same question by members of both classes. Namely what's the best way to add value to my business? Certainly this is the million dollar question that as marketers we all need to ask as the basis for meaningful differentiation.

As I've alluded to several times over the years with this blog the  key is to refer this question back to the unresolved portion of the customers need and focus on providing solutions around those.
In particular the two broad areas that yield the most benefit for businesses I believe are the ability to increase the amount of benefits customers receive whist concurrently decreasing the effort required to deal with your business. Each of these broad categories plays a huge part in the delivery of true value.

Added Benefits

Again it's easy to say that we all want to add benefits to our clients and prospects alike but how. Simply stacking on additional elements of the offering may in itself not motivate the customer because they may see little or no benefit in it. Suffice to say the more closely related these additional product offerings are to customers own need, the more they will be sought after and valued.
Key examples of added benefits include:

• Extended warranties
• In house training
• Free servicing
• 24/7 Online and /or phone technical support
• Free placement parts under warranty

Decreased Effort

Equally as important as adding additional benefits to your product offering is the notion of reducing effort through any form of improved efficiency and /or increased convenience.  There are several examples that can be used to illustrate this area of value adding such as:

• Extended trading hours each day or week
• Free home delivery service
• Free assembly service
• More locations
• Multiple payment options

Ultimately the aim of leading brands will be to optimise value added offerings by both adding sought after benefits whilst concurrently decreasing the effort required to buy, set up, run, maintain and ultimately dispose of the product or brand.

As a challenge then I ask every reader to examine their own key market offering and detirmine at least one additional way they plan to increase the marketability of the product by increasing value add and formally plan to make that change in as quick a timeframe as possible. In thirty years in Marketing I have consistently found that the best approach is to actively strive to offer both sides of the Value Adding equation together, rather than one or the other per-se.

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So until next time, good luck and good marketing.
Regards,
Daniele.