This is the part of your business that you, as a founder and CEO, will have to spend the most time on. Your business is built around answering one question: How do we solve this problem? How do we make this easier for people? It’s not enough to know that it can be solved and there’s demand for your product or service. Your company will succeed or fail based on its ability to answer this question in a way that resonates with potential customers, investors, partners, and employees. The answer varies from company to company, but it generally involves identifying your business’s main value proposition — what makes it unique and valuable to different types of people — and communicating it clearly and consistently to everyone who encounters your brand.
Identify Key Customer Types by Value Received: In order to best identify the value proposition of your business, you should first identify the types of people who are most likely to buy, use, and invest in your product or service. This will help you better understand what kind of value each customer receives. Below is an example of this process:
- Identify different customer types by value received
- Define the keywords that represent what these customers want
- List the benefits that these keywords provide
- Determine the language needed to communicate with these groups properly
- Create a value proposition map for each type of customer
- Make sure that everyone in your company knows how to communicate with all customers based on their value proposition.
Define Current Value for Each Customer Type: Your business has different value propositions for other customers. In the early stages of your company, it can be helpful to consider who your target customer is and what value proposition you are trying to deliver. For example, if your business is a restaurant, you might think about how your value is provided through food and drink quality, service, and atmosphere (the restaurant’s brand). You might also want to think about how you’re delivering value through cost-effectiveness — that the price you charge is worth it. This thinking helps identify what makes your business valuable compared to other restaurants in the area. As a result, these insights can help determine which marketing channels are right for each customer type.
Identify Emerging Threats and Opportunities and Prioritize: This is one of the most important aspects of your business, and you should take time to identify emerging threats and opportunities. You need to know what’s going on in the industry, be aware of your competitors, think about what’s new in the space, and keep up with technological changes. If you don’t pay attention to these things, it could be detrimental to your company.
- Identify the main value proposition of your business. Your main value proposition — what makes your product or service special — sets you apart from other companies in your industry. For example, if you run a dog-walking service, your value proposition could include having a reliable network of walkers who can accommodate last-minute requests.
- Develop consistent messaging around this value proposition. To make customers feel like they get something out of using your product or service, you need to communicate their benefit throughout all forms of marketing consistently: website copy, social media posts, emails, storefront signage, etc. This consistency helps create trust and ease customer uncertainty about whether they are getting their money’s worth from their purchase.
Assess the Strength of Current Value Elements: Investing time and resources into your business’s value proposition is critical to your company’s long-term success. Every dollar invested in developing a strong value proposition will pay for itself ten times over as you close more deals, increase revenue, and attract more partners. But before you start throwing money at this endeavor, it’s important to assess the strength of current value elements already in place. You must identify what is working currently, what needs improvement, and what might be superfluous. For example, let’s say your company creates innovative products that people find useful and attractive. This is a great starting point because it aligns with a key customer need — usefulness. However, suppose you want to go further and create a distinct emotional connection with customers by creating highly desirable products with compelling design elements. In that case, this is an area where you could invest resources and develop an even stronger value proposition for your brand.
Generate New Potential Value Elements: Your value proposition is the core of your business. It’s what makes your company unique and keeps current customers returning for more, but it will ultimately only be as good as the company that delivers it. You need to ask yourself: what are we missing constantly? What can we do to make our value proposition stronger? The idea is to identify new ways your product or service provides value to your customer and then find ways to offer those new elements for free, if possible, to build awareness and demand for them. This process will strengthen your value proposition and provide a framework for testing new things outside the core of your business model.
Synthesize a New Forward-Looking Value Proposition: To help you think about what your company’s value proposition is, it might be helpful to ask yourself this question: What do we do that no one else does? If you can answer this question and describe your business in a clear and concise way, then you’re well on your way to creating a compelling value proposition. For example, suppose your company makes mobile phone accessories such as chargers, cases, and external batteries for Apple products. Your value proposition could be summarized as follows: “We make the best phone accessories for Apple devices.” This is just one example, but it should give you an idea of creating a concise statement describing your business. Once you have an answer to this question, it’s time to take it from there. You’ll need time and resources to create the full-scale value proposition document. The purpose of this document is to show the customer what they’ll get if they choose X Company over Y Company. It will include all of the benefits that go with being associated with X Company versus Y Company in terms of convenience, style, or brand perception. Ideally, the document will also include detailed cost-saving information that leads customers to choose X Company over Y Company. When people hear about a product or service as good as yours, they want more information to figure out why they want it. There are two ways people learn about companies, and while many marketing strategies are effective at informing people about a company