You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. The lesser-known your company, the sharper your Value Proposition needs to be. A crisp value proposition is essential for any business seeking to clearly communicate to customers, why they are different, better, and worth purchasing from.
The value proposition should be able to be read and understood in about five seconds by customers in your target market. Your value proposition should be as unique as your fingerprint.
What is a Value Proposition?
In its most basic form, a value proposition is a summary of how your product or service benefits your customers. Typically, it answers the question, “What do you do?”
It is not a slogan. It is a promise of value that would potentially be delivered to customers. But beyond that, it presents the most compelling reasons why a prospective buyer should become a customer and highlights a benefit or feature that sets you apart from every other company in the market.
A value proposition is a short statement that has:
- Relevance: Explains how your product/offering solves customers’ problems or improves their situations.
- Value: Delivers specific benefits against their needs.
- Difference: Informs the customer why they should choose you over the competition.
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Hence, you need to capture your:
- Target audience: Be as specific as possible so you attract the interest of the prospects that matter. If you’re targeting digital marketers, be specific about that.
- Target objective: The objective is revealed when you’re determining your customers’ immediate needs. If your target audience’s goal is to improve their SEO strategy, speak to that need.
- Unique selling proposition: Explain what value you can provide through your products/services. This is the unique solution that you’re selling to your audience.
Why Is It Important to Have a Clear Value Proposition?
The value proposition is the first thing that people on your website direct their attention towards when deciding if they need what you are selling. If your target audience does not fully understand the value that you can provide for them, there is no reason for them to stay on your site. “If your audience doesn’t clearly understand the value of your product or service offering, your conversion rate is going to suffer.”
Done correctly, a value proposition can give your business a huge advantage over your competitors. But here is the problem: Very few businesses have effective value propositions. As a matter of fact, recent studies confirm that, “only 2.2% of businesses have useful value propositions.”
This is a huge problem because an ineffective value proposition can make your ideal customers turn to your competitors simply because they don’t immediately understand that you offer what they need. Furthermore, it’s extremely challenging to distill your company’s services down into one concise sentence. That’s why in this article, we’ll cover what you need to know to develop a highly effective value proposition.
Some of the benefits you can expect when you create a clear, compelling value proposition for your brand are:
- Potential customers can quickly understand what your company has to offer: Most customers already know what they’re looking for when they research online. So, if it’s not immediately clear that your company can meet their needs, they will likely look elsewhere.
- Creates a strong differential between you and your competitors: Almost regardless of what you do, you have competitors. An effective value proposition tells the ideal customer why they should buy from you and not from the competition. In other words, it provides your company with a unique differentiation.
- Attracts the right prospects and increases not only the quantity, but the quality of prospective leads: A company’s value proposition targets your company’s ideal customer and explains why your solution is the best option. This increases your chances of attracting the right prospects for your business and finding higher quality leads that are more likely to convert to customers.
- Improves customer understanding and engagement: A powerful value proposition helps your customers truly understand the value of your company’s products and services. It also helps your ideal customers to see how your service benefits them and is their best available option. With this increased understanding, customers are more likely to become engaged with the services or products you offer.
- Provides clarity of messaging: A strong value proposition makes it immediately clear to your customers what you offer. Additionally, it makes sure to communicate your message clearly on all the main entry pages. These include your home page, product pages, and category pages.
So, what you need to do to figure out your unique value proposition is to determine the most valuable outcomes/benefits people will receive from buying from your business. Every value proposition has 3 components:
- Centered on a business objective that can be measured.
- Has movement. Nobody wants to simply switch vendors. They do it because efficiency improves, sales increase or costs decrease–they receive a strong benefit from buying from you.
- The best value propositions have metrics. For instance, I can easily tell my potential customers that one of my clients was able to increase their sales by 83% after using my advertising services. Showing results like that is impressive.
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Final Thoughts
A crisp value proposition statement should enable you to own and dominate your chosen niche. In its absence, you risk trying to be all things to everyone – diluting and sending mixed messages on what you do well. This causes your prospective customers to either hesitate in choosing you or worse, bypass you completely.
Now, it is your turn. Take a good hard look at your current value proposition and ask yourself the following questions: Is your value proposition clear? Do you even have one? Does it keep the customer in focus? The answers to these questions will tell you what directions and actions to take.