value Archives - Switch - Digital & Brand

Creating valuable content

David Attard — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 09:02:18 +0000

One of the things bloggers, website owners, and content marketers tend to struggle with is getting their content in front of as many people as possible – specifically getting their content shared to as wide an audience of their desired demographic as possible. The reason why the content may fall flat on its face is because it may be missing a crucial ingredient.

Value

Your content must provide value to the audience you are targeting. Moreover, if you really want to make a hit and get your content shared, it must significantly exceed the expectations of the user who happened upon your content.
Value comes in all kinds of forms. Whatever your industry, website, product, or blog – your primary goal is to provide very specific value to your target audience. Creating valuable content can be done via tutorials, advice for your industry, recipes, free resources, awesome content full of information, entertainment (humour, music, video), cutting edge news value, tools, imagery, commentary, fashion advice – any website for any industry can provide lots of value via the content on their site.
Think about the websites you yourself visit and see what kind of value these sites offer. Let’s start with the big ones.
Facebook – provides entertainment value for “normal” users whilst offering marketers a very targeted audience to market to.
Google – provides exceptional informational value through giving you access to the right information when you need it. It also offers marketers a very good opportunity to market their wares at the specific point when a customer is searching for them.
YouTube – provides entertainment and informational value to the end users whilst providing very good exposure to video publishers.
Your favourite news website – provides information on international and local news value.
Your favourite daily site(s) – trending and topical news about topics which interest you.
The real reason for visiting these sites if you had to think a little bit about it – they provide essential value to your everyday life at the point which you need it.
So on to the question you need to ask yourself as a content provider…

What is the essential value your audience is looking for?

Figure this out – it may be a simple question, but the definitive right answer is probably not very simple. Once you’ve figured this out – give your audience this value in the form of your content. And if you want your content to stand out – you need to give it to your audience bigger and better than your competitor.
Let’s give a few examples of providing essential value via your website

Switch Digital

We are a digital marketing agency. Our target demographic is small businesses who want to do digital marketing. So our blog (tries to) provide essential topics and content for those who are trying to figure out digital marketing – content such as “A Social Media Primer – ”, “10 simple growth hacks for your business’ Instagram feed” and “Why are people not seeing my Facebook posts any more” provide essential reading for our demographic.

BeeWits

We are an upcoming project management service for web designers. Our target demographic is web designers. So we create and share content which provides real value for web designers. Examples of some our awesome, high value content for web designers are “101 awesome tools for web designers and developers”, a quotation generator for web designers, and “The Ultimate Web Design checklist”

Switch

Our 3D designers follow these blogs: Dezeen, Contemporist. Our graphic designers follow The Fox is Black, Bored Panda, and Blood, Sweat and Vector. The reason why they follow these blogs is because these blogs provide essential inspirational value.
Being a bit of a geek I follow XKCD.com, and also The Oatmeal. Not for their value in Product Management but for what I believe is very particular entertainment value.

Let’s go on a tangent to completely different sites.
Airbnb – AirBnB provides exceptional value to two specific kinds of people. Those people who have a room/place to rent and don’t have enough clout to attract sufficient customers to their service by themselves, and those looking for cheap accommodation in the places they are travelling to
Booking.com – again, besides being a one stop shop for all your hotel booking needs, it enables small hotels to piggy back on the popularity of the site to get additional exposure and bookings than they would have been able to get if they were going it alone
TripAdvisor – Whilst customers can be well advised about the place they are about to visit, service providers can ensure that their good service is well-rewarded by getting even more exposure and customers
Amazon – widest choice and cheapest prices for nearly anything for customers, whilst being a massive opportunity for small business selling their goods
Look around you, reflect on the sites you visit, and understand the value that site provides to you. Now – figure out how to provide that essential value to your own target audience.
The more value your content provides – the easier it is to hit the spot with your audience – and the more likely it is that they will come back to you for more… Even for offline goods and services, content of your website can still provide much value for your specific customers. Just take your specific industry, and write content about questions or concerns your customers typically have.
…and yes, they will eventually give you their money. Which brings us to our next topic.

Value in your sellable goods

Whatever you are selling, whether it is expertise, services, consultancy, freelancing, digital or physical goods – you must be providing MORE value than you are selling your product for. If you aren’t providing sufficient value at the price you are selling for – you are going to have a hard-time selling. Value in sellable goods of course comes in various forms, operational efficiency, increased productivity, entertainment value…
So the question you’ll need to figure out when you are selling goods is:

Am I providing enough value for the price I’m selling my product?
How do I provide more value than my competitors?

At Switch Digital / BeeWits – one of my primary concerns as the Product Manager of new SaaS products, is ensuring that the product(s) we are developing deliver value to our customers.
Whether those customers are readers of our blogs, users of our free tools, or paying customers of the services we develop – we need to ensure that we provide enough value to our customer that they come back because they want to, not because they have to. With BeeWits – a project management service for web designers – we want to offer exceptional value to web designers. Rather than provide a generic project management service, we provide a service which is specifically tuned for the needs of people designing websites. And more than anything, we want to provide the service at prices which given the improved efficiency of our customers, will make it a natural selection for our demographic.

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This marketing mistake costs money, fix it to turn your budget into an investment

Ed — Mon, 30 Jun 2014 14:18:56 +0000

When times are tough, the first casualty is the marketing budget.
That makes sense, especially when a quick look around the communication landscape reveals that more money is wasted on marketing than invested. Visuals with pretty pictures and no strategy pepper our billboards. Screaming headlines that are all but indecipherable are an expensive equivalent to talking to oneself. And overly generic ads that simply point out a fact without calling the audience to some form of action are just as useless.
Think of the January billboards that say “You’ve eaten too much in December – get to the gym”. Add a picture of a gym, with or without the obligatory fit dude working out, and slap a logo on at the bottom. While driving, your mind is idling. Taking up some of that slack to make you ponder your gastronomic excess is a good idea.
However, with such a generic message, there is little to tie your predicament with the gym that has paid for the billboard. You’ll drive home, eat a little more healthily, and renew your old gym membership, without remembering what gym paid for the billboard.
You’re wasting money.
So what should we do? How can we make sure every cent is an investment?

We start with brand

Your brand is not your logo, not the fonts or colours you associate with your identity, and surely not an advert that includes absolutely everything in your visual toolkit.

These companies have invested heavily in their brand – and it’s paying off.

Your brand is your set of core values, your most essential promise to your clients, the set of characteristics that define your very foundation. Start here:

Write down your brand values. If you’ve worked hard enough at defining them, chances are you only need to write four words.
Read them. Several times. Look away and repeat them to yourself. Shout them at someone if necessary. Just make sure you’re totally immersed in what your brand is and what it really means to you and to your audience.
Consider your current communication need within this context. Your communication need could be simply the desire to remind people that your product is essential to their summer. That their world will be a slightly better place as a result. That the story they will tell about their summer will be, even slightly, a better story with your product or service in it.
Carefully design your communication to tell this story, making sure your brand values are implicitly or explicitly represented.
Check your work. So far you should have a sheet of paper with the following on it:
- Your brand values.
- Scribbled just beneath, your communication need. Possibly underlined. Or highlighted.
- Your communication plan.
Have it styled to match your visual identity.

What do we have now?

We have promotional communication that should accurately represent who you are. We have an item of collateral that will tell your story to those who could be interested in an immediate purchase. What we also have, and this is what turns an expense into an investment, is an item of collateral that reinforces your brand values.
So all of your audience, even those who might not immediately purchase, have had the opportunity to experience your brand in its full glory. They might not purchase today, but you’ve left a positive impression on them. And when they eventually reach for their wallets to purchase your product, they are giving you cold, hard, cash as return on your wise investment.

DO

Think. Does the action you’re about to take violate any one of your brand values? If it does, you’re better off thinking a while longer and finding the tougher, but more effective, course of action that’s aligned with your true values.
Test. Pick one communication route and one person with a deep and thorough understanding of your brand. Tear the communication to bits and reconstruct it. If you reconstruct it pretty much in the same way, you were right the first time. If not, don’t be precious with your own ideas – be mindful of what will best suit your communication needs.

DON’T

Fight tactical battles and lose sight of your core mission.
Spot a competitor’s move and react to it hastily without regard for your brand values. This always leads to communication with short-term goals that will be expensive to fix later.
Design by committee. Showing an item of collateral to ten people will have them strip every aspect of creative thinking and leave you with a product and a logo. The world is fed up of safe ads.

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