What motivates your customers to buy from you? Why should they buy from you when there are hundreds and thousands of supplementary products available in the market? What makes your product and brand better than the rest? Well, the answer is the value proposition.
A value proposition is a value that your customers get from the product and the company. If your value proposition is perfect, your conversion rate increases. You can also improve your marketing strategies across different channels. In order to reach a wider audience, you need to learn to present your product and company’s value compellingly.
In this blog, we shall discuss what the value proposition is, its benefits, and how you can create it for your eCommerce business.
What is the Value Proposition?
The value proposition is the value that you promise to provide to your audience from the product after they purchase it. Essentially, it is what makes your product and company ideal for them.
The value proposition must have the following things:
- Relevancy: tell your customer how your product addresses and solves their problems. Focusing on their pain is the best strategy to attract customers.
- Specific: be specific in telling them the benefits they will get from the products.
- Exclusive: tell your customers why they should make a purchase only from you and not from your competitors. Highlight competitive advantage and what sets you apart from the competitors.
Don’t confuse a positioning statement, brand slogans, or a catchphrase with the value proposition. They all are different things.
Even if you have created a compelling value proposition, it won’t get you any users or buyers if it is not easily visible to the customers. The value proposition must be on your website homepage and other important pages like a landing page, product page, category pages, and blog posts. Ideally, it should be on the first fold of the homepage – it should be easily visible.
Essentially, your value proposition must answer the following questions:
- The products and services you sell.
- The target consumers for the products you are selling.
- The benefits end users will get out of your product.
- The points that make your company and products better than the competitors.
Components of Value Proposition
A value proposition is a group of words including a headline, subhead, and a paragraph of text. It can also consist of visual – photos and graphics. While there is no hard and fast rule as to what must be included in a value proposition, the following are its components:
Headline
The headline must tell the benefit that your product will provide to the customers in a single and short sentence. You can mention your product or customers in it. But remember to make it an attention grabber.
Like the heading of a blog or article, many people will read the heading first and then move on. So, ensure that your heading is attention-grabbing. If the audience likes it, they will read the brief description. There’s a lot of pressure on the headline, so make sure it is right!
Sub Headline
Subheadline can be a 2-3 sentence long paragraph. It offers a specific explanation of the headline, what you have on offer (product), and how it can be useful for the customers.
Bullet Points
You can list the features and benefits of your products and discuss them in length. Bullets points are easy to read and thus, they are a better option for discussing the benefits in length.
Visual Images
A visual graphic is worth a thousand words. You can show the product image in the graphic, a model using it, or reinforce your message through it.
Benefits of Strong Value Proposition
Provides Direction
A value proposition provides you direction by identifying your target audience. Then identify their needs and wants that they wish to satisfy with the solution, i.e., your product. Thus, with the help of a value proposition, you can save time, money, and effort by only offering products and services that your customers want. You also save by not marketing and trying to sell to customers who don’t need or wish to buy from you.
Creates Focus
A value proposition provides a focus by identifying your business’ initiatives, activities, and aspects that will have an impact on meeting the needs of your target audience. The value proposition focuses on who you are delivering the values, why you are delivering, and how you are delivering.
A value proposition outlines what must be delivered to your audience and how to create a remarkable experience for them. If your activity or initiative is not consistent with the value proposition that you have created, you need to ask yourself – why are you even doing it?
Feature creep, or scope creep, is the result of a bad value proposition. You must stick to the core needs of your audiences and not add unnecessarily a lot of features that make it complicated. Thereby, there must be a filter for what you must include as your features and whatnot.
Boosts Confidence
A strong value proposition can boost confidence in you, your team, and stakeholders. You can move on with your strategy without any questions or guessing. By knowing where you are adding value to your audiences’ life, you can be assured of your decisions. Confidence comes when you know that you are making a difference in your audiences’ life with what you are serving.
How to Create a Value Proposition?
Identify Product Benefits
The first step towards creating a value proposition is identifying the benefits that your product has on offer. You need to make a list of all the benefits that your products provide to your customer and the values that they can add to their life.
To identify these benefits, you can first enlist the problems of your customers. Then identify how your products will help your customers solve them.
Identify How Benefits are Valuable
Just identifying the benefits of your products won’t be sufficient. You need to identify how they are valuable for your customers.
A phone charges fully in 20 minutes. It is the mobile phone’s benefit.
A fast-charging phone will make the users less dependable on charging cables and sockets. It is the value that the mobile phone will provide to its customers.
Connect Value to Customers’ Pain Point
This is a critical step as you need to connect the pain points of your customers with the value proposition of the product. You have to tell your customers how their pain points will be resolved with your product.
Suppose your customers travel a lot and for long hours. You can tell them that your product (fast-charging mobile phone) charges within just 20 minutes. Thus, it can be their best option – their worry-less travel buddy. This way you connect your product’s USP with their pain point.
The Final Words
The value proposition is what can attract your customers to the product and persuade them to make a purchase. So, ensure that you create a well-defined and focused value proposition that not only attracts the audience but also informs them appropriately.
