Crafting a Unique Value Proposition
There’s been a lot of fuss about what unique value propositions are, and how they affect the business; unfortunately, a lot of landing pages are not optimized to reflect these. So, why don’t we talk about how to sharpen our understanding of what unique value propositions really are and why they’re critical to any sales narrative — online and offline; recognize the way value propositions fundamentally change with the product type and audience awareness; and finally, devise strong value propositions for virtually any product — even niche/new products — using a logical, repeatable framework.
Remember the Heuristic Formula for conversion we talked about in one of my last articles? Well, we pretty much need it here, if we’re going to make good on explaining unique value propositions. So. C = 4M + 3V + 2(I-F) — 2A has been our conversion formula, while we have control over some elements here, “motivation (M)” is one we don’t have control over, as we can’t influence it. That said, let’s move on to the next one we can influence V. As expressed earlier, there’s usually a lot of fuss about value proposition, with folks either underestimating its importance, overthinking it, because they think it’s simply one of those fancy concepts that should be ticked off on a checklist. But if you strip the concept “value proposition” to its bone, you’d realize that it actually means “reason to buy.” So, when next you see the phrase “value proposition,” do replace it with “reason to buy” and you’ll see that it actually gives it a deeper meaning. In other words, Unique Value Propositions can be explained with the following questions: “Reason to buy?” “What’s in it for me?” “Why should I choose you (over X)” “What’s your differentiator?” “What’s your unique advantage?” So, when someone takes a look at your landing page and says there’s no unique value proposition; best believe that he/she is saying “there’s no reason to buy.” Therefore, try to keep it simple, when you think about value propositions. What you’re really trying to get to is, what’s in it for me, and why should I choose you over other options, right? That’s what your summarizing value proposition statement should really come down to.
Now, when curating your unique value proposition, there’s a mindset you should avoid, infact, to some extent, avoid interviewing certain people about it (if you can) — your team members, spouse, close friends, people who are personally engaged with you generally, their views are most times biased, always having an enthusiastic outlook. What you should be on the lookout for is the person with a skeptical outlook, the person who’s not easily convinced. If you can stress test your value proposition with “so what? And prove it” over and over and over again, that you can actually get virtually anyone excited, about the promise that you’re giving them, then you are starting to make progress towards making a value proposition that is really going to do the heavy lifting for you.
Now that we’ve established what a unique value proposition is, and the mindset to have while curating it, you might be asking, how does it come together? What makes the building blocks of a UVP? There exist the pain points/desires of your customer, what they want on one hand, and the things your product can do for them, on the other hand, and the intersection between what your customers want, and how your product can fill such need; that sweet spot, the overlapping, intersection between these two, is where your value proposition is. But it doesn’t end there, because it’s not yet your “unique” value proposition. The spot in the intersection/overlap between all three of those things: what your customers want, what your product does that helps customers get what they want, and then what, within that overlap, is unique about your product that kind of helps strengthen that offer. If you can get all three of those, sometimes you can’t get a differentiator that really can overlap in that perfect way, but if you an, you are golden.
When creating a value proposition, there are usually two scenarios. Number one, you have your niche/new products — that’s companies that have few or no customers yet, they have low or no traffic — and very often, if they’re new (not necessarily niche), they have an unproven business model which is something. On the other side of things, you have your more broad or established products.
For established products, the customer awareness level is higher, you don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of time or focus your value proposition on justifying using the solution. Oftentimes, if it’s an established product, people know about it and you’re getting a lot of comparison shoppers, you don’t need to waste their time on that. So you’ve got to focus your value proposition a lot more strongly on differentiating from other options. But for niche products, where you’re either first to the market, or don’t have customers already, you might be trying to solve a problem they (customers) are not even really aware of, therefore you have to really drive home the problem that they’re facing, hence the value proposition can change a little bit because it needs to focus a little bit more on the problem space itself as opposed to differentiating your solution from other options. This is because there’s a lack of customers to get message guidance from, and this determines when and how they get to product and market fit.
While it’s good to brainstorm the unique value propositions, it’s also important that you validate them with external research early.
How to Brainstorm the “Best” UVP
1. List Your Product’s Key Features
2. Pinpoint Those That Are Unique
3. List Customer Pain Points for Each Feature
4. Define Desirable Outcomes for Each Pain
5. Score Pains/Outcomes by Severity & Frequency
6. Edit Top-Scored pain/Outcomes Into UVPs
7. Score the UVPs (and go with the best one!)
As part of my course requirement, I’ll keep sharing more thoughts on Growth Marketing going forward, and hopefully much after that. But in the meantime, these lessons have been made possible by the good people at CXL Institute. If you like what you’ve read so far and think you want to have more of such knowledge, do either wait for my next post (which is a continuation of this article) or visit the link provided.
PS: Use this link to access the framework for building the best Unique Value Propositions (Unique Value Proposition Framework)
