What Is Value Proposition?

By definition, a value proposition is a brief yet compelling statement that describes the core benefit or value people will get by doing business with you. The purpose of this concise description is to capture your target audience’s interest and get them to learn more about your product or services. In the modern business landscape where online traffic is surging, businesses need to tweak their website design, digital marketing, and social media strategy to remain relevant. Here, your business’s value proposition plays an important part by sending a consistent message via all your channels.

Fail to include a powerful value proposition, and your audience probably won’t even notice your brand or products/services. Or even if they do come across offerings, it might not incentivize them enough to take further action. Thus, brands must ensure their value propositions are more than meaningless slogans and are highlighted consistently across all channels, including website and social media channels. 

2 Great Value Proposition Examples of Popular Brands

Before we get into what makes a great value proposition, let’s check out the examples of some of the world’s leading brands and why their propositions work. Using these examples, you can develop or refine your brand’s value proposition into your website design, local SEO, packaging, merchandise, and social media posts:

1. Uber – The Smartest Way to Get Around

Regardless of how you feel about ridesharing, you cannot deny that Uber’s value proposition works like a charm. It perfectly highlights the drawbacks of taking a traditional taxi without saying so while bragging about its superior service. Their service justifies Uber’s claim to be the smartest way to get around. How? Well, you have a car available at one tap, the captain already knows where to go, and you don’t have to pay cash. 

2. Apple – The Experience is the Product

The modern smartphone and electronics market is an oversaturated place, with hundreds of brands competing for more shares. Apple is known for making sleek, elegant smartphones, watches, and laptops. The brand stands out from the rest because it doesn’t highlight its products’ features but its customers’ experiences using them. It understands that it can’t distinguish itself in a crowded market by talking about features.

What Makes a Great Value Proposition?

A great value proposition can give you the edge over competitors and even help potential customers evaluate your brand. For many customers, it’s often the first thing they come across on websites, packages, or other channels. However, it takes time to craft an effective statement that piques the readers’ interest and sways their decision. Here’s what makes a killer value proposition:

Solve a Problem

The primary purpose of developing and establishing a value proposition is to solve a problem that’s been itching your target audience for a long time. If your product can change their lives or make it easier or better, let them know about it. 

Highlight the Main Benefit

You might think that your product or service has several benefits to offer, which might make this tricky. The trick is to capture a single core benefit that makes the product/service stands out from others in the same domain. For example, Coke’s proposition, “The Coke Side of Life,” doesn’t highlight how Coke tastes or looks. Instead, it explains that Coke is enjoyable and evokes memories and experiences of happiness. 

Make Your Product Stand Out 

Like all your physical or digital marketing campaigns, your value proposition needs to make your offerings stand out from the rest. However, you must ensure that your product or service lives up to its promise, just like Uber. 

How to Create a Powerful Value Proposition

Now that you understand what makes a killer proposition, it’s time to put what you have learned into practice. Here’s our ultimate guide to creating a value proposition for your brand:

1.    Determine What You’re Promoting

A value proposition for your overall brand will be different from the proposition on a product/service page on your website. So, you need to understand what you’re promoting on all your channels and pages and ensure they’re all consistent with your vision and mission.

2.    Outline the Major Benefits of Your Value Offerings

Once you’ve determined what you’ll be promoting, you need to outline the key benefits of the value of your offer. As mentioned earlier, your value proposition must contain your core benefit and won’t always be directly related to your product. 

3.    Highlight User Pain Points

After outlining the key benefits of your offer, list your target audiences’ pain points that your product or service can solve. Remember, you must keep your value offering in mind so you can distinguish them accordingly in terms of their role in solving a problem. Secondly, try to ensure that you prioritize the main pain points. If your competitors target the same problems as your brand, you can present more problems to find an edge. 

4.    Combine Your List of Benefits into Value Propositions

Once you have a list of benefits related to your audience’s pain points, combine them to form value propositions. If you cannot include them all, try forming one using the most important points. You can even create different value propositions to highlight every benefit individually and connect it with your main proposition. Either way, you should have plenty to work with. 

5.    Time to Experiment

Most marketers stop at a single proposition and stick with it without even testing it. This is a rookie mistake that you must avoid if you plan to take your branding seriously. Test your value propositions on different market segments to see which one works where. You might be surprised how effective diversifying your propositions across several audiences can be. Once you have the winners, place them on your website, product pages, social media channels, and even include them in your local SEO strategy.

Conclusion

Developing a compelling value proposition is not as easy as writing a sales copy or blog. Compressing all your value offerings into a single statement requires time, creativity, and planning. After all, you need a good reason to convince people to buy what you have to offer and not from others.

If you’re looking to improve or refine your business’s branding, we recommend you try out the social media, messenger marketing, and web design services by Antares Systems. To create killer value propositions and more, you can contact us right away for more information.