Your Brand’s Offer Suite: The Ultimate Guide
The term offering simply means the product or service that your business provides, or offers. The phrase "offer suite," sometimes called "product suite" or "suite of products," refers to every one of your offerings. I think "offer ecosystem" is a much better term, but I’ll touch on that a bit later.
Why It’s Important To Understand:
Your offerings are the foundation of your business and any strategy it has. Wrapped up in the strategy of your offerings are what you do, who you do it for, and what they stand to gain. Understanding these facets of your offerings is paramount to your brand’s success. Starting a business without knowing who you’re selling to, what you’re selling, and why they should want it is the fastest way to a failed idea or reeeeeaaaallly slow take off. I know that sounds harsh, but I care about you, so I won’t lie.
On the other hand, having an in-depth understanding of your offerings and how they relate to your audience leads to clarity, confidence, easy selling, and ultimately revenue.
What Does Offer Ecosystem Mean
Your offerings should work together to drive profitability. They should interact with each other, balance each other out, and be extremely high-quality solutions for your audience all at the same time. That’s why the word "ecosystem" is so accurate. Think of a spider web of offerings, each one linking to and benefitting another.
An offer ecosystem encompasses the entirety of products or services that a business provides. It's a holistic view of the various offerings and their relationships, forming a complete and interconnected system.
When creating your offer suite, the goal is to create an ecosystem that allows clients to have their needs met by your offerings regardless of obstacles they face. This isn’t possible with just one offering. No one solution is going to be right for every member of your audience. However, through the creation of an ecosystem of offerings, you can be a valuable resource for your audience regardless of their needs.
The term "ecosystem" emphasizes the interconnectedness and interdependence of your offerings. Like a natural ecosystem, each component plays a role in the overall health and success of the system.
Benefits Of A Well-Crafted Offer Ecosystem
The ability to make multiple sales from the same client
Being able to help clients at different budgets
Help more people
Widen your range of potential clients & help more people
Enhanced Customer Experience
Efficient Marketing
Understanding your ecosystem allows for targeted and effective marketing strategies, reaching the right audience with the right messages.
How Offerings Relate To Each Other
So we know it’s super beneficial for your offerings to be connected but, how should they be connected? And what strategies should you stick to when forming your brand’s offer ecosystem?
I would recommend mapping out your customer journey as it pertains to your offer ecosystem. Ask yourself:
when does someone decides they want to purchase my offering?
what can they do if they face obstacles doing so?
A customer journey is the sum of all experiences that a customer goes through when interacting with your brand, involving all touch points and interactions.
Laying out your customer journey involves thinking about the steps your audience takes when interacting with your brand and in what order they take those steps.
Here’s a simplified version of a popular customer journey that some brands use:
Informational & Engaging Content. This might look like organic content about your industry, audience, or content promoting your actual offering.
Free Offer. This is commonly a workbook, template, guide, etc. Brands often use this stage to provide even more value to their audience, demonstrate their expertise, and give their audience a sneak peak of the benefits of actually buying from them.
Pro Tip: Consider using this offer as an opportunity to garner email addresses from your audience to build your email list!
Core Offerings. Ultimately, your core offerings are the most significant, profitable, and highest priority offerings in your customer’s journey.
After your audience has engaged with stages 1 and 2, they’ll usually be more likely to engage with stage 3. Keep in mind, this isn’t always the case. Your audience may skip stages throughout their journey or even not progress through the journey at all.
However, forming your offer suite with your customer journey in mind formats your offer ecosystem in such a way that customers can naturally and progressively flow from stage to stage. This happens all while providing value to your audience in multiple different ways.
Pricing Strategy
Pricing is so important when it comes to your offers, so price them strategically. This means more than a quick Google search of “how much does Service X cost.”
This deserves an article on its own but here are a few ways to get an understanding of how you should price your offers:
Ask someone who belongs to your target audience how much they would be willing to invest in your type of offering
Investigate what the offerings of other providers are priced at
Gain an understanding of how much money your audience will make or save as a result of your offering
Ultimately, you want to establish a pricing strategy that reflects the value provided by each offer in your ecosystem. Higher-tier offerings should justify a higher price by offering additional features, benefits, or a more comprehensive solution. If your offer makes or saves your audience a large amount of money, you should price it accordingly. Contrarily, if your offer isn’t very valuable to your audience, pricing it at a premium could push potential clients away.
Are you a designer? Read more about pricing your services here.
Why Different Pricing Tiers
Some brand’s organize their offerings in a tiered way. Think “bronze package, silver package, gold package”. They do this primarily because this is an effective way of working with clients at different budgets.
Pricing your offering in tiers gives potential clients the ability to work with you despite financial limitations, which increases the overall accessibility of your offerings allowing you to get more clients (and make more money).
Your Client Always Gets Value
If a client’s budget is $1k, you provide them deliverables that are commensurate with the budget of the project through Offering X. If their budget is $25k, you provide them with deliverables that are commensurate with the budget of the project through Offering Y. If their budget is $500, you do the same thing through Offering Z. By scaling deliverables to directly correlate with the budget of the project, you can ensure you’re always providing your client with value.
When you use this tactic for just one offering, this is commonly referred to as value based pricing.
However, if your offerings are productized, you’re kind of doing value based pricing but in a more efficient way. Instead of pricing your offering and determining its deliverables based on a client’s budget, you form multiple offerings with predetermined pricing and deliverables.
This is more efficient than value based pricing because:
You don’t have to come up with an arbitrary price for each project
You can automate processes and systems easily (contracts, invoices, templates, etc.)
You can market these offerings to different members of your audience (higher specificity and clarity in your messaging & positioning)
By productizing your offering with set pricing and deliverables, you can work with a larger range of clients who have different budgets or needs
Productizing your offerings gives you two really great benefits:
You can always control your profitability by scaling deliverables linearly as you scale price.
By productizing your offering with set pricing and deliverables, you can work with a larger range of clients who have different budgets or needs.
Why Understanding Your Target Audience Matters
If your offerings are the foundation of your business and strategy, your target audience is the foundation of your offerings. When creating an offering, you don’t start with your offering and then find an audience that needs it. Remember, that is how businesses blow up. Instead, you find an existing problem or need that an audience has and then create an offer to satisfy it.
Without an understanding of your target audience, their needs, motivations, and behavior, you’re shooting in the dark when forming your offerings. Forming your offerings with your target audience in mind, however, ensures that your offerings resonate with the right people.
Questions to consider:
What problem does this audience have? How can I solve it?
How bad do they want to solve this problem?
What will it cost me to solve this problem?
Where can I reach them & tell them about it?
Your Core Offering
Before forming your offer ecosystem, you should identify the most pressing need your audience has and your most profitable solution. Where those two things meet, they form your Core Offering. Your Core Offering is your go-to, and it’s best to focus on this offering before forming your offer suite, at least initially. That’s because since this offering will address the primary need of your target audience, it establishes a foundation for your entire offer ecosystem.
The fact is, profitability is the goal. So focus on what’s profitable before trying to throw other things into the mix right away.
On the other hand, if you’re an established business and you already have multiple offerings, hone in on what’s most profitable. Focus on that and make it as efficient, profitable, and valuable for your audience as you can initially.
Pace Yourself
If you have a bunch of ideas and strategies you’d like to try out after thinking more about your offer suite, I’ve been there. But it’s important to take a second and understand that sustainable success happens because of slow and consistent progress, not necessarily dramatic leaps and bounds, at least usually.
Don’t get me wrong, you should document these ideas, save them, even put a date next to them, but perfect and refine that Core Offering first. Then, once you’ve created a foundation of systems, processes, and have some experience with clients, you can introduce other offers. Those offers should have a direct correlation with your Core Offering. Just like your initial offering, each subsequent offer should be designed with a specific goal in mind.
As you develop additional offers, make sure they fit seamlessly into your offer ecosystem, complementing and enhancing the value of your Core Offering.
Profitability Is The Goal
This is of course my recommendation. There are no absolutes in business. If the goal is profitability, don’t let rules someone else is giving you determine how you should get there. But try to balance this mindset with wisdom and strategic thinking. Leverage the lessons you can receive from someone else’s mistakes and experience so that you don’t have to make those mistakes yourself. Alright, back to offer ecosystems.
How To Create Your Offer Suite
Creating a successful offer ecosystem requires a well-thought-out plan of action. Here are a few steps to help you establish a plan:
Identify Your Core Offering: Determine the primary offering that addresses the most significant need of your target audience.
Map Out Customer Journeys: Understand the steps your audience takes when interacting with your brand and how your offerings fit into those steps.
Develop Additional Offers: Create additional offerings that complement your Core Offering and meet the diverse needs of your audience.
Strategic Pricing: Price your offerings strategically, considering the value they provide and the different budgets of your audience.
Quality Assurance: Ensure that each offering, regardless of its price, provides high value and meets the expectations of your clients.
Continuous Improvement: Regularly assess and refine your offer ecosystem based on customer feedback, market trends, and your business goals.
Things To Keep In Mind
Your offerings have a direct impact on your positioning. Positioning refers to how brand distinguishes itself in the mind of its customers.
The pricing of your offers and how many offers you have are the most significant factors that your offerings contribute towards your positioning. If your brand’s offers are more expensive than competitors’ offers, your brand might be seen by audiences as a high-end or luxury brand, especially if you use messaging to support this narrative. The same is true if your offers are less expensive and more affordable; in this case audiences might consider your brand easy going and approachable.
The way you structure your offer suite allows you to also differentiate yourself from competitors. Whether you focus on innovation, affordability, premium quality, or a combination of factors, your position in the market is influenced by how you stand out.
This is important to keep in mind when forming and refining your offer ecosystem.
Front-End vs. Back-End Offers
When thinking about your brand’s offer suite, you should know that offers fall into two categories: front-end offers and back-end offers. A front-end offer is an offering that is offering to new clients while back-end offers are only offered to existing clients or past clients.
For example, an accountant might have a Tax Preparation service they offer to new clients. After this type of project is done with a certain client, they offer Ongoing Bookkeeping to minimize the workload, urgency, and need for ongoing preparation.
The accountant’s Tax Preparation service is a front-end offering; it’s only provided to new clients. While their Ongoing Bookkeeping service is both a front-end and back-end offering because it can be offered to new clients and existing clients.
When curating your offer ecosystem, try to think of opportunities for back-end offers you can use as upsells for existing clients or opportunities to provide value and strengthen relationships with previous clients. Many times, ongoing services are excellent opportunities for back-end offers.
Key Aspects Of Your Offerings
When reviewing your existing offerings or even as you create new ones there are some important factors that you should absolutely understand. These non-negotiable aspects include:
Timeline & Process
Consider documenting how long this project takes to complete, what steps are involved, how long those steps take, and what’s needed for each of them.
Nailing and perfecting your client process is one of the best ways to ensure your offer is valuable to clients and is usually the biggest catalyst for referrals from previous clients.
Cost
Having set pricing for your offerings is extremely beneficial. Whether it’s value-based or factored a different way, your price for each offering is something you need to know.
Deliverables
What value are customers receiving in return?
Audience
Understand who each of your offerings are for. Often times, certain offers are best suited for sub-audiences within your target audience. Understanding each offering’s audience is significant because when you do you can market these offers to their proper audience in the best way possible.
Expenses
If you’re creating a product or service and it costs you money to provide it your audience consider documenting this too. Think about what materials and resources are required to complete your offer, then write it down. This way, you’ll never run into anything unexpected.
Profit
This is how much money you have left after your customer has purchased your offering and you have paid for your expenses.
Having an accurate understanding of these details will allow you to expertly manage your brand’s offer ecosystem.
I would have saved myself so much frustration and confusion with new offerings if I would have understood these essential factors, so trust me, I’m speaking from experience when I say this is important stuff.
Processes & Systems
Having documented systems and processes in place before taking your offerings public will save you time, worry, and frantic rushing. Contrarily, if your offerings are already public and you don’t have documented systems and processes, consider utilizing your next project as a way to do this.
What do I mean by systems and processes? Well, that looks different from business to business but here are some general items that you should try to make templates for and automate in order to minimize time, worry, and frantic rushing:
contracts (for each offering)
invoices (for each offering)
deliverables (especially if you utilize digital downloads, courses, workbooks, etc.)
email templates & scripts (for communication with clients, vendors, etc.)
My favorite automation is tool is Honeybook - with it, I can do everything I need to as an online service provider. 2nd place goes to Zapier- it’s less specific to me but has more robust automation integrations.
Refining Your Offerings
Your offerings will change over time, your brand will change over time, your business model might even change over time. That’s how it’s supposed to be. Time, mistakes, wins, and ideas act as a crucible that mold our business into something better.
As a retired D3 football player, (😏), I’ve always had an affinity for and belief in refinement through repetition, or reps as we call them.
As you and your brand get more reps, you’ll be equipped to make better, more strategic decisions.
Incorporating Feedback Into Your Offerings
As you get these reps, you’ll also have opportunities to get feedback from your clients and your peers on your offerings. The feedback you get from clients or other established players in your industry is valuable currency.
Allow this feedback to help you change processes, timelines, pricing, and any other logistic involved in each of your offerings to better serve your audience.
You can incorporate feedback to refine your offerings through customer feedback, how the offer is performing, and what the current state of your industry looks like.
Conclusion
Understanding and strategically crafting your offer suite is essential for your brand’s success. By viewing your offerings as an interconnected ecosystem, you can provide value to your audience at various stages of their journey, meet diverse needs, and ultimately drive profitability.
Creating a well-thought-out offer ecosystem requires time, effort, and a deep understanding of your target audience. But the rewards—enhanced customer experience, efficient marketing, and increased revenue—make it all worthwhile. Remember, the goal is to create a holistic and interconnected system where each offering plays a crucial role in the overall success of your brand.
