Adding value is marketing good. Activating value is marketing great
Image by: @johnishappysometimes
Your website is the face of your business 24 HOURS A DAY, 365 DAYS A YEAR. It puts in more time than you ever will into your business. And because it puts in the time, it frees you to put time into other areas. You couldn’t even pay someone to be that dedicated! It is one of the most VALUABLE tools in your marketing toolkit.
Is it doing its job? It is up to you to make your website engaging, sparkling, and CONVERTING. Make it the best it can be, so it can be the workhorse for those leads.
This is advice we hear all the time, but especially we hear it when we are considering adding discounts as a way to drum up business. Don’t drop price, add value instead. What does it really mean?
The dictionary meaning of value is “the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.”
Adding value would therefore increase the perception of importance, worth or usefulness.
Conversely, what happens when we discount?
The dictionary meaning is “to decide that something or someone is not worth considering or giving attention.”
Discounting implies less importance, worth and usefulness.
An important truth to embody as business owners is that people don’t necessarily want the lowest priced item. What they want is to receive excellent value (importance, worth and usefulness) for the dollars invested. It is a hugely important distinction. This is why we add value instead of discounting. If you know that for a slightly higher price you get so much more worth and usefulness, you can usually get behind the money spend happily. Because as humans, we want things that make us feel good, look good and be comfortable, and cold, hard cash in the wallet may not be as comfy and cozy as a cashmere bathrobe! It’s always the interplay of money with psychology that we must be mindful of. Our psychology which includes emotions and feelings will often trump any logical thought around money.
If you are adding value, that’s good marketing. Sweetening the deal to encourage bookings and sales. But can we get deeper, seeing as how important the psychological factors are? Yes. How?
Activating value
What the heck is the difference? We typically add value with tangible items, and sometimes we can get it wrong when it comes to that psychological interplay. Because the things we use to sweeten the deal must motivate the buyer. Thing is, we often don’t get enough into the heads of the buyer to know what is truly motivating them. So we add things that we believe will be of value.
On an aside, how many posts have we seen where a photographer needed advice with a difficult situation. They were late so I added time. I added more images to the proofing gallery than promised. And then they say that the client still returned with a complaint, even thought they did these things. That’s a huge clue that those things were not of value to the client. One might argue that the client had a discount mindset with the whole thing if they showed up late! But it proves that sometimes we do what we consider to be above and beyond and yet it’s not met with gratitude. Because we did what we believed would be of value and it didn’t match.
So let’s qualify the whole added value concept:
People buy their OWN value relative to how you can help reveal, activate and achieve that value for them.
Stated another way: People want to improve their importance, worth and usefulness. Don’t you? How often do photographers say they have low self-worth? If you bought something that guaranteed an improvement in self-worth, how much money would you be willing to spend on that? This is often what leads us to irrational buying - well over our budget. If your services activate and boost their own value - meaning they think more highly of themselves having your services, then they will extend the perception of value to you and thus consider your service highly valuable and investable.
Yes, we produce an important product end result - photographs. But no one is buying the paper and ink, and no one is buying a set of pixels. What they are buying is an energetic catalyst. A catalyst that gets them to a psychological result and a certain vibration of energy, through activation of value.
When a client's value is activated within them, many other things - notably price - matters less, or not at all. Because if the energy is right, we will go to great lengths to get it and hold on to it.
Let’s use shopping with a budget for a house, as an example. A couple has a lifestyle value that they are holding and are looking for their dream home. Their agent shows them a house that doesn’t activate value in them. They just don’t like it and the energy isn’t right. The agent can tell them that the sellers will throw in the furniture and pay for the closing costs and the building inspection — things he believes add value or sweetens the pot — and yet no amount of extra value-adds will change this couple’s mind. They move on and find their dream home because their lifestyle value is activated and they can imagine themselves in that house. All of a sudden, the budget is flexible, and it doesn’t even bother them that they need to furnish the entire house and pay closing costs and the building inspection. This is the difference between value-add and value-activate.
Activating value kickstarts an internal energetic process in the mind and heart of the buyer that they are very attuned and committed to. It’s a deeper level, way beyond money and tangibles. A mom who purchases a session might be activated by fulfilling her duty as a mother to document her family and be the creator and keeper of that legacy. She may also be activated by the thought of looking amazing in photos, triggered by low self-esteem. She wants to look like the IG moms who look like they’ve got it all and your offer of included hair and makeup (value-add) is spot on as the tangible manifestation of the value activation.
How to activate value
It is critical to get into the buyer’s mind and this is done through our reflection and creation of an ideal client profile. There is a saying I heard and I know I can’t recite it accurately but it goes something like “you must see through Johnny’s eyes if you want to know what Johnny buys.”
If this is tough, think about what you buy and what that awakens and activates in you. Why do you buy the brands you do? What do you aspire to buy and why? What feelings do you want to awaken and boost in yourself, using the things you buy as the catalyst to do so? And then the critical part - translating that into marketing messaging. Using our mom example above, don’t just create messaging that says “hair and makeup included.” State what the hair and makeup represents, and activate mom’s desire to improve her own value through the purchase of your services. Because if she wants to feel like a million bucks, well….!
That would be marketing great.
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