Creating value-propositions for a product or a service can sometimes be a tedious task that takes a lot of time and back-and-forth effort while understanding what messages resonate your customers is paramount to successful marketing.
In this article, I’ll show you a technique that I developed in order to construct value propositions and cut time when preparing different messaging content like advertising, landing page copy and other.
Let’s start,
How is a unique value proposition formed?
In order to construct a unique value proposition that resonates with potential customers, we must first start with understanding the customers themselves.
For the purpose, it’s absolutely paramount that you have a well-constructed buyer persona prior to that. ( coming soon - my Buyer Persona Creation Guide )
However, for the sake of you understanding the takeaways let’s start with some basic defaults.
Here’s our customer, we’ll call him Bob.
Bob The Customer
• Unfamiliar with how a website is made, or how a website works.
• Can’t, but need to make a website for his business.
• Is looking to satisfy a business necessity - company blog, business website, informational website.
These are really basic details, but as with most things in marketing the fundamentals are what’s important.
From here we can use this information to create a construct about what’s important for Bob.
I personally use a lot of intuition when doing that while prioritizing the most important details coming out of my buyer persona.
This is my line of thought when doing this, here’s what I mean,
Initial Construct
• Bob needs a website for his business but doesn’t know how to make one.
• He understands that creating one will unlock a lot of opportunities for his business and help it grow.
• He’s most likely not familiar with WordPress or any other CMS that needs anything more than Drag and Drop building.
As you can see we now have a general understanding of what motivates Bob and what he considers important. What’s a problem for him could be an opportunity for us and our product.
Most of the time your buyer persona won’t be as simple as this and will involve a whole lot more details,
Whether it’s demographics, behavioral differentiations or anything else, it’s extremely important for you to decide what should go into the final value proposition. A/B testing things is key.
Before we start constructing the main construct we need to take into consideration what our product does and how it does that. At this point you should be very much aware of why you built this ; )
Here’s how we can fundamentally look at products, or at least one way.
• What is our product? ( We’re building a spaceship! )
• What it does. ( ...that can fly to the moon… )
• How it does it. ( ...in one day! )
• and ideally Why, or your mission ( ...to conquer the stars…)
Great, now that we know how to look at products and how to look at customers, we can start piecing all the important components of our product and combine them in a way that would express value to our customers.
Main Construct
Let’s take a look at a real-life example.
Let’s say we have a product called WordMess. (LOL)
WordMess is a simple website builder that is focused on business, has ready payment modules, a drag and drop builder, and doesn’t require technical configuration.
We begin constructing,
• WordMess - The easiest way to create a business website.
Pretty basic, let’s continue working from here and build on-top of it.
• Grow your business online with WordMess, the fastest way to create a business website.
As you can see in each instance there’s particular value being expressed aimed at the audience we’re trying to reach - in this case, Bob the customer.
Keep polishing until you are satisfied with the result. Test your final constructs with real people and see which ones perform better and measure concrete data points to draw conclusions.
Take Aways
• When creating a value proposition always think about what is that you want to communicate and to who.
• Always keep in mind the length of your value proposition, stuffing too many details in there is not good, focus on what’s important and keep it short, memorable and easy to understand.
• The tone of voice and writing style is up to you to decide, it should ideally be aligned with the brand you’re building.
• In general, the wider the audience you’re trying to reach the vaguer your messages will get, the narrow the audience, the more focused and specific you can be.
• With the previous in mind, the words, slang, or the subject-specific terminology you pick should be understandable by the audience you’re trying to target.
Example:
• Website ( general ) vs Web Application ( specific to development )
• Car ( general ) vs Old-Timer ( specific to car restoration )
• Computer Engineer vs Full-Stack Back-End Developer
Contextual Variations
Messaging should and can evolve differently in different occasions and context. For example:
• In Advertising:
Tired of complex drag and drop builders? Try the new WordMess app, it’s the easiest way to build a fully functional business website. No installs, just sign-up with your email and you’re ready to create...
Wrapping-up
Hope this made sense for you as much it does for me, happy writing!
Thanks for reading,
- Lubo Fotev
