Values-based marketing is a marketing strategy that appeals to your customers’ values and ethics. The strategy focuses on making a genuine connection with the customer beyond interest in a product or service. 

A values-based marketing strategy can help your brand establish greater trust with consumers. When you deliver on the promises you make through your marketing, you establish that you’ll actually practice what you preach. People are passionate about the causes they support and the values they hold dear. If your brand resonates with them in a powerful way, they’ll be eager to engage with you and spread the word.

Today’s work has become primarily digital, breaking through the clutter is increasingly difficult. Marketers have to do much more than simply capture demand. Today, it’s about creating demand and, ultimately, sustaining it.

That’s where value can play a critical role. By giving marketing efforts greater tangibility, value is an essential ingredient in interactions from the very outset. Leveraging aggregated value to highlight your product or service’s impact during early acquisition efforts lays important groundwork for tailored business value hypotheses as prospects move through the funnel.

Customer Values

An important part of developing values-based strategies is discovering what customers value. Attention should be paid to quantitative data that reports customer preferences. Qualitative research, such as surveys and focus groups, can also provide important insights on customer values. A company can then develop a values-based marketing strategy using the vision and mission statements as vehicles for articulating customer-centric goals and objectives.

Demonstrating values-based marketing, and actually living those values, will help you build trust with your audience. An audience that trusts your brand will, in turn, send you to their friends and family through word of mouth. Not only will you gain loyal followers; they will bring other loyal followers with them.

No matter how many leads your marketing generates, the real power of value-based marketing comes with scoring. By leveraging the data you have on existing customers, companies can identify shared characteristics that will make them much smarter about scoring leads.

What Do Customers Look for in Values-Based Marketing?

There are a number of attributes that customers look for in brands that practice values-based marketing. Some of these include:

• Familiar value systems that they instinctively align with based on their own experiences.
• An authentic position that shows the business truly believes in the values they project.
• Decisions and follow-through by the brand that prove they truly hold these values close
• Meaningful interactions with brand representatives that solidify the customer’s overarching relationship with the brand.
• Support for specific organizations and causes that your audience can get behind.

Values-based marketing brings your consumers to the forefront of your marketing campaigns, rather than your products or services. It is a strategy that appeals to their deepest values and builds a strong relationship between you and them.

When the value is kept front and center, customers have a clear vision of the utility they receive from your products and services. This transforms customers into advocates in a very organic way. And ultimately, peer recommendation is one of the most powerful marketing tools out there. From case studies and referrals to speaking engagements and social media, when your customers can share the value you’ve delivered, you’ve won the marketing game.

The Elements Of An Effective Cause Marketing Campaign

The five elements of an effective values-based marketing campaign originated, when a comparison of top values-based marketing campaigns revealed that campaigns tended to spread sporadically across a grid of “rational” to “emotional” and “whimsical” to “threatening,” meaning there was no one way to conduct an effective values-based campaign. Rather, these elements, or commonalities, were gathered through analysis of the many successful values-based marketing campaigns, which include:

1. Simple and Inspiring Messaging, which incorporates a simple handle or hashtag;
2. Strong Visual Storytelling, since people only read about 20% of a webpage;
3. A Physical Element or Exhibit, because it will contextualize in the real world, what people relate to;
4. Strong Emphasis on Social Sharing and Earned Media, to broaden your reach, designed specifically for multiple types of targeted audiences; and
5. Focus on a Big Issue Coupled with a Request for a Small Personal Action, which provides a small step that still calls for people’s attention.

Furthermore, following a survey of 1,000 consumers, which asked what values-based marketing campaigns they remembered best, a consistent 69%of people responded by saying straight-forwardness was best.

What do we gain from knowing all this? Well, we can assume that campaigns oriented towards customer experience will attain larger success in the long-run, which, of course, includes values-based marketing campaigns. So, whether you’re demonstrating this through how you’re blogging, marketing over social media, or in-person, you’ll want to understand the woes and worries of your target audience, and only then, will you then be able to optimize how you nurture leads.

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