Have you got a brilliant business or idea but you’re struggling to communicate it?
Has your strategic growth planning not working as well as it did before?
A value proposition is one of the most important things your business will ever have to work on. It’s the basic principle of what it is that makes your business special and why a customer or investor should go to you.
This article covers 3 tips on how to grow and improve your business by addressing the potential issues you might be facing with regards to your value proposition.
Step 1: Find your value proposition
Being a business founder means you’ll already have a deep understanding of your business and what it does. However, this can sometimes make creating a successful value proposition tricky, because you need to imagine someone not knowing anything about your business.
While understanding your business in-depth is obviously essential to running it, this level of understanding needs to reach your customers and investors as well. If they don’t know what your business actually does, success could be limited. You need to approach this as if you’re explaining your business to someone who has no idea about it.
When developing your value proposition, it’s best to strip everything back and look at the core of what your business has to offer. Maybe you’re a yoga instructor offering affordable sessions or a tech company helping businesses with automation of processes. Whatever it is that you do, you certainly have something you do uniquely.
Thinking about what your business has to offer is a brainstorming exercise that can be done with everyone on the Board or, if you’re a sole trader, is just as easy to do by yourself. Just jot down everything it, as a business, does and why you think your business is valuable.
This is not a time for modesty or for exaggeration. For this to work best, you need to be honest about your business.
It’s useful to try and backtrack your thought process and reasoning for starting the business in the first place. List all the key benefits and features your business was intended to offer and see how many it really does.
This is a hugely important stage of your business’s life. If you can’t explain what it is, then you need to keep trying. And maybe it’s the case that your business simply isn’t clear enough, which means you have to evaluate how to grow into something unique and clear.
This process can be deceptively difficult so an option to make it easier, if you’re stuck, is to hire an outside expert to help with the value proposition creation. Explaining it to someone in the know is a great middle step and they can provide advice.
Step 2: Create your headline
Once you’ve had this discussion and clarified generally what it is your business does, see if you can get it down to a single short sentence. What is the end benefit of what your business is offering written as a single sentence statement?
Now look at that sentence and see whether you can make it punchier. This sentence needs to grab the attention of anyone reading or hearing it. This sentence is now the headline for your business – your value proposition in a single catchy item.
It’s sometimes good to mention either the customer or product in this sentence. as this will engage those interacting with your headline. If both are mentioned, then fantastic.
Also, think about the SEO of your headline. This may make it easy to find your business online. A great way of doing this is thinking of a question someone might search on the internet, and use the keywords from that question.
For example, someone might search “Where can I find a cheap yoga instructor in Bristol?” And your headline could be “Affordable yoga sessions led by an experienced Bristol based instructor.”
The keywords “affordable,” “experienced,” and “Bristol” could help boost your SEO and make your business more likely to be seen.
Step 3: Communicate your value proposition and headline
This third and final tip is potentially the most important, because it’s how you’ll get results from the work you’ve done. This is how you’ll be able to enact growth within your business.
To do this, it’s useful to think about your target audience. You will have done this to an extent when creating your headline, but now’s the time to really execute a good strategy analysis. The reason for this is once you know your target audience, then you can work out the best way to reach them directly.
Ideally your headline is accessible to all, but you will know who is likely to be a consumer or investor for your business, so it’s valuable to create a plan tailored to each of them.
Here are some ways to reach people (and it’s always worth remembering you’re trying to get your message across to both internal and external audiences):
- Website: A strong website with a clear marketing growth strategy and message can be extremely helpful in drawing people towards your business.
- Social Media: We all know the power of social media. It’s a great tool to spread your value proposition to an audience you may not already be reaching.
- SEO & paid search: As previously mentioned, SEO is an important part of findability on the internet. The same goes for paid searches, however, that is a decision you would have to make as a business.
- Trade shows: These can be great ways to develop contacts and spread your value proposition. Especially if you are looking to work with other companies and develop relationships in order to grow your business.
- Advertising: Similar to the paid search, this is a business decision as to where the best places to advertise are. There may be cheaper ways that could get similar results that you don’t know about.
An important piece of advice is to not try and exhaust all of these avenues to get your value proposition “out there.” You are likely to spread yourself and business too thin and not achieve the results you desire if you go in blindly with your approach.
To sum it up
Developing your value proposition, specifying your headline, and deciding how to communicate both is essential for all businesses of any size.
It’s a great part of your business’s development, as you’ve already come up with a brilliant idea, and now it’s natural that you’d want to show it off. You want as many people as possible to understand your business and then interact with it as a consumer or an investor.
To help with assessing your business’s growth you can take this FREE Growth Diagnostic. This can help inform the decisions you make going forward including when deciding on your value proposition.
Laila Azzahra is a professional writer and blogger that loves to write about technology, business, entertainment, science, and health.