Value is what makes a potential buyer want to engage with your brand. This comes in the form of exchanging benefits for more information from the buyer, their progress down the pipeline, or just their time. It works in the same way that a vending machine is an exchange of currency for a snack.
In the end, your ability to justify value to the buyer determines whether you make a sale.
How your brand chooses to provide value to your target audience is as important as the benefits of your offering.
Certain buyers are looking for specific forms of value in their content. Learn what types of value your content can provide and how to wield them in today’s post.
Comedic Value
A lot of B2B content can be dry, but there’s no reason you can’t add some juicy comedic value.
Humor evokes emotions, and emotions drive more decisions than facts. That is a fact. In a study by CEB, it was found that “71% of buyers who see a personal value in a B2B purchase will end up buying the product or service.” Here, personal value equates to emotional value.
Humor makes your customers feel good and makes it easier to connect with them, because it makes your brand voice more human. When you make someone laugh, you start a relationship with them, based on that point of interaction.
Deciding how to wield humor is easier said than done. Often, humor has a target, which risks offending someone.
That’s why some brands often use self-deprecating humor. By making your own brand the butt of the joke, you make it seem more human and less perfect.
Educational Value
This form of value stems from creating content that educates the audience about the things they need. This is the category that most B2B content falls under, but often the content created doesn’t have any useful educational value to the audience.
To remedy this, find out what your audience is trying to learn about, then teach it to them.
For example, those who buy services from HIPB2B need to know more about the process of email marketing (so they know what to do with the leads they buy from us). We created an infographic on lead nurture and write blog posts about how to capitalize subject lines.
Find the knowledge you have that your prospects want or the knowledge they need to use your product the best way possible.
Give away some secrets, the stuff no one else wants to give away for free. Doing this will increase your brand’s credibility in the eyes of your leads and prospects.
Practical Value
This type of value is incredibly close to educational value, but instead of just teaching skills or informing your audience, you are creating tools for them to utilize.
Examples of this include templates, tools that help you generate blog ideas, etc.
This type of value enables your audience to DO things instead of just reading advice about them. Think calendars and calculators, stuff that will make your leads’ lives easier.
There are a few more types of value, like entertainment value, but these three are the ones that marketers should focus on if they want to ensure that their content is valuable. The more value that is jam-packed into each piece of content, the more likely your customers will come back for more.
What are your favorite types of value? Did we include them on this list? What else would you like to see here?
