What makes your company different? Why should customers come to you?
These are the questions you need to ask yourself regularly as these both have to do with your business’s value proposition. This article will give you advice on why your value proposition is so important and how you can better use it to grow your audience.
Why is your value proposition so important?
Simply put, your business’s value proposition is what makes your company different. It’s a similar concept to having a Unique Selling Point (USP) but with a stronger emphasis on being clear and concise to stand out in today’s noisy attention-grabbing marketplace.
When you started your business, you filled a gap in the market. As your company develops and the trends in the market change, you’ll need to constantly ask yourself the question — what is the gap in the market that only my business can fill?
This is crucial because you need to be the first to understand why your company is different and better than your competitors in order for potential customers to see it too.
Your value proposition is the promise you make to your customers of what you offer and why it can only be done by you — or at least why it can be only done best by you.
This is how you stand out from the crowd. It’s essential to highlight the value proposition of your company as it will drive more buying traffic your way facilitating business growth and progress.
How do you find and create your value proposition?
This process can work best as a brainstorming session with the key members of your business. If you’re a one-person business, then this could be between you and your business advisors; or if you have a senior management team or a board of directors, they would be good to brainstorm with you as well.
What you need to do is write down as many things as possible about the things you think your company does. It’s important to get every suggestion down because then later you can whittle them down.
The next step is to write down everything that makes your company different. This means all the key benefits, features of your company, and other things that could potentially attract your audience.
Now you should have two lists of everything your company does and everything that makes your company different. Now see whether you can get what your company does and what makes it unique into one short sentence. This sentence you’ve just created is called your Headline. It’s your quickest and best pitch to a new potential customer.
Developing a single-sentence headline is an important process for your business because if you can’t clearly define what your company does, then it shows that you may not know your business as well as you should; and if this is the case, then you may have to reevaluate what you offer in order to clarify it.
At the same time, If you can’t define clearly what your business is all about in a single, simple sentence, then it is unlikely a customer will take the time to figure it out. After all, there are likely other offers in the marketplace to choose from.
So you need to work on not giving opportunities away to your competitors simply because you’re unable to clearly express what your business’s value proposition is.
Make sure your headline is attention-grabbing. Use strong verbs and adjectives in order to hook a customer when they first read or hear your headline.
How do you market your value proposition?
Once you have got your value proposition headline, it is important to always stay on that message. Marketing is about the clarity and consistency of your message. Successfully marketing your value proposition headline through strategic marketing improves the image of your brand and helps your audience remember who you are and what you do.
In doing so, you must remember to approach marketing in full-circle.
Consistently talk to your audience
Look at your target audience — both those you intend to keep and those you have yet to reach. Who are the customers you think are likely to be interested in your product or service? And how can you reach them?
You have gone this far to develop your value proposition headline, so now you need to make sure you are properly able to communicate it to your audience.
Your company website is the most common way of highlighting your marketing efforts. With a clear, attractive logo that reflects the brand image of your company and the repetition of your value proposition message in various other sections of the website will help your customers remember what you have to offer. As your audience grows familiarity with your value proposition, they are more likely to engage with your company.
People want to know who you are, what you do, and why they should come to you — in the shortest, least complicated ways possible. And if you keep those questions (or rather answers) at the heart of all of your marketing, the message will come across.
Use social media and advertising to raise awareness
Using your value proposition in your marketing messaging is a good way to ensure that your awareness-level marketing is packing a punch.
If you consider that a person’s ‘intent’ is different when using social media this means that at that moment they are not looking for the problem you solve. However, if you present the value that you offer and contextualise it within an example that they can identify with then you are raising awareness and could attract traffic and sales that way.
With advertising, depending on the channel you are using, there may be more intent present at that moment to find a solution that you offer. Using messaging from your value proposition would help to get your solution across quickly and stand out from the crowd.
“Don’t make them think” is a principle that is well known in website usability, the principle being that you don’t want to put obstacles in the way of people navigating to where you want them to go.
The same principle applies to the use of your value proposition in your marketing efforts. You don’t want people to have to stop and think “what exactly are you offering”, “how can this help me”,or, “how does this service work”. If this happens then you have lost the attention of most people instantly.
Use your value proposition in your marketing to facilitate that moment of instant understanding which is ideally then followed by sufficient curiosity to find out more. That is your value proposition in action.
Rounding up
If your business has plateaued and your audience is not growing, it may be because of your unclear value proposition or an inconsistent way of communicating it. There’s never a bad time to go back and really analyse what it is your company offers that others don’t.
Clarity of message and branding within your marketing will help you reach and attract new audiences that will, in turn, grow your business.
If you are looking for ways to further grow your scale-up business or SME you could use these free tools to complete a Scale-up growth Diagnostic to identify some actionable areas to focus on. Or use the Business Strategy Toolkit to revise or create an actionable business strategy.
