A lot of organisations don’t have a clearly defined value proposition. It’s generally because they don't appreciate how important and valuable it is to have one. We recommend that every organisation has a well defined value proposition to communicates the value you provide to your ideal customers. This post gives you an easy to use method to create a powerful value proposition for your organisation, products and services.
Here's a quick summary of what we'll be covering in this post:
How to write a value proposition
- Create your ideal customer profile and give a name to this group of customers or buyers
- Define the job that your product or service provides to this customer
- Define the pain or problem that your customers are looking to eliminate or alleviate
- Define the gain that they are looking to accomplish
- Identify the benefits that your product or service provides
- Identify the significant rival value propositions that your customers are likely to consider
- Differentiate your proposition, so that it has the greatest appeal to your ideal customers
Why it’s important to have a value proposition
A powerful, clear and well communicated value proposition is an important step when building a customer obsessed organisation.
It’s ideal to summarise your value proposition in one sentence, as it defines who your customers are and why they should buy from you.
Defining it in one sentence also makes it easy to remember and gives you a core value statement to build your marketing and sales messages around.
Creating a powerful value proposition that helps you stand out in the crowd
If your organisation offers different products and services you may need to produce different value propositions for each. This is especially important if the products and services have different audiences.
The approach and template that we’ve outlined below work equally well for your organisation and at the product and service level.
If you haven't already created one, it's time to get started and a sensible place to begin is to create one for your organisation.
In the process of creating their value proposition, numerous organisations become self obsessed. They forget that the purpose is to create value for their customers, that why you need to start with the customer.
Where to start when creating your value proposition
To build a value proposition it’s important to start with a clear mental picture of your ideal customer. So the first thing you need to do is to build a profile that illustrates the important features of your perfect customer.
Creating your ideal customer profile
Your ideal customer profile is based on the attributes that your best customers possess. In combination these attributes describe your perfect customer.
It’s important that you are clear on following when describing your perfect customer:
- Who they are
- Their problem that you fix
- Why they buy from you
- What is stopping them buying from you
- What else they are considering to solve their problem
- Who else they involve or ask for advice from when buying
- Where they get their information from
The perfect customer is a fictional representation and actual customers won’t absolutely fit the description you’ve created. It will nevertheless create a valuable structure that you can use to understand how well the customers you are attracting, align with your perfect customer description.
If they meet it well you’ll have a clear sign that your marketing is working and if they’re not you’ll know that you have work to do.
Now that you’ve clearly defined your Ideal Customer Profile, you are in a good place to build your value proposition.
What you need to include in your value proposition
When you're creating your value proposition work through the list below and produce alternatives for each of the items. By developing a few options for each, you can build different combinations to understand which version is the most compelling.
- Your product or service
- The customer segment you are targeting
- The job that your product or service does
- The pain your customers are looking to eliminate or alleviate
- The gain they are looking to accomplish
- The significant rival value propositions, your customers are likely to consider
When you’ve created your options for each, it's time to incorporate them to create your outline value proposition using the following structure.
Produce the first draft of your value proposition
Our [product or service] help(s) [customer segment] who want to [job that needs to be done] by [reducing verb] [customer pain] and [increasing verb] [customer gain], unlike [competing value proposition]
Our Value Proposition Template, helps busy business owners, who want to stand out from their competition, avoid sounding the same as their competitors and attract more loyal customers, without spending a fortune on a marketing agency.
Refining your value proposition
When you’ve done this, share it with your team to obtain feedback, before working on refining and simplifying it.
As an example, we’ve refined our example to:
Our Value Proposition Template, helps busy business owners create a unique and compelling message that attracts loyal customers in record time.
Testing your value proposition
When you’ve refined your message it’s time to get it in front of potential customers.
One of the most effective and efficient ways to achieve this is by using digital advertising channels.
Google Adwords and Facebook are both perfect for this, because you can examine how different versions of your message perform by creating competing adverts, known as split tests.
You can target these messages to very defined audiences using keywords or audience demographics and in some instances a combination of both.
If you have time we recommend you build a landing page on your website that is tailored to your new value proposition. If building a new landing page is complicated on your website, there are plenty of tools available that will help you build a landing page quickly and efficiently.
If you don’t have time, don't worry, you’ll still get plenty of insights from running a showdown of your message with split tests of your adverts.
By targeting different versions of the message to the same audience, you can understand which version of the message performs better.
Look at the click-through rates and conversion rates that each version of the message receives. You should see that one outperforms the competition, this is your winner. You can choose to attempt and beat the winner if you want to test and refine your message any further. Otherwise, it’s time to celebrate as you’ve just developed your new value proposition.
In this post we’ve shared a quick and simple way to create, test and refine a unique value proposition for your organisation. By doing this you’ll already have taken a step that many of your competitors won’t have - an important step in building your customer obsessed organisation.
We hope you’ve found this post fascinating. Don't forget to subscribe to Customer Obsessed Monday - our weekly newsletter that will kick start your week with inspiration on how to make your organisation even more customer obsessed.
