Your Value Proposition
By Vincent Sandford, Francesca Marchetti and Minke Oving of Seo Synovation 22 October 2012
If you had just ten words with which to describe why people should buy your company’s products or service, what would you say? Crafting a value proposition will improve your SEO and conversions. Read on ....
In a recent Google video Maile Ohye in Five Common Mistakes in SEO said that a clearly stated value proposition will help you optimise your website. What is your value proposition? This critical question is challenging to answer, but doing so strengthens your marketing efforts.
Your value proposition whether spoken or written is one of the key indicators of your business that must be articulated simply, clearly, and very briefly.
But what is a value proposition?
Why is it important to your business?
How can you find the right one for your business?
And can an existing company find a new value proposition?
Value propositions tell your prospective client or referral source in a clear and concise way what value you will deliver—how they will be better off after going through your "black box."
Your value proposition must articulate clearly, simply and forcefully key elements of exclusivity, appeal and credibility and minimise the negative impact of material cost.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of those marketing professional services cannot succinctly describe the value their service provides. They can describe what they do but not what the essential value is of their services. Most professionals will tell you they know what value they bring, but when asked to articulate its worth they need three paragraphs to describe it. By then, however, the listener has long lost interest.
Not only does a strong statement help you capture the attention of prospective buyers, but it also goes a long way toward differentiating you from your competition. The advantage will be yours if you can clearly communicate how the client will be better off because of you, as opposed to simply describing a transaction. In this post I will share with you my personal thoughts on what I believe are the essential elements of a value proposition.
What is Internet Marketing?
The essence of marketing is the message, and the essence of the message is the value proposition. Unless you understand how to form a clear and forceful value proposition you will be shouting nonsense in a crowded marketplace in order to achieve some semblance of an objective.
Your Value Proposition
The articulation of the value proposition emphasises the elements that most motivates your audience and emphasises with quantifiable data what matters most to your audience. These are critical issues designed to touch what matters to your audience. The value you give to your audience must be laden with specifics. The value proposition is about getting people to say YES, in reality it’s a series of micro YESes, to whatever you offer and the key to that is the force of value proposition.
I cannot address or give answers to specific audiences: there are too many. What I can share with you are the common denominators that increase conversions through a forceful value proposition and, more importantly how to weigh the value proposition more forcefully.
Stress the Values and Lessen the Costs
An essential factor in creasing conversions is to “stand in the mind” of your customers. That’s an important issue, and it can be expressed in this manner: you will increase conversions if the perceived value of your offer outweighs the perceive cost. In other words there must be more advantages, benefits and value in the offer that there are associated costs. When you meet your prospects expectations when landing on your website, when reading an email or browsing through an article, you will without doubt get a positive response.
The essential elements of value are: appeal, exclusivity and credibility. The elements of cost are: the mental factor of motivation and the materiality of the offer.
Meeting your prospects expectations must be done within seven seconds of landing on your page. The first phase of one to two seconds is a moment of disorientation. The prospects lands on a page and scans it to find what he/she is looking for and its vital here to visually connect with the prospect immediately with a compelling headline and sub headline. This does two important things: 1. Halts unsupervised thinking and 2. It will grab your prospects attention. The second phase of two to three seconds involves moments of conversation. The prospect reads your headline and or sub headline and is interested to read on. You must further engage the prospect with a compelling opening paragraph that emphasises how you solve issues and the benefits you provide. This leads to the third and final phase of two or three seconds called exchange of value. In the content that follows in this phases you must emphasis the elements of value: appeal, exclusivity and credibility.
Each piece of content, whether it’s an email, a web page or a printed advertisement, must answer these questions:
i. Where am I?
ii. What should I do here?
iii. Why should I do?
Value propositions are fundamental to success. When constructing a value proposition you must first find the understanding of this question:
If I am your ideal customer why should I buy from you rather your competitor?
This is fundamental because using the first person “I” puts you in the minds of your prospects and gets you to think about your prospects solutions. Using the word “why” is always followed by a “what”. This promotes expressions of value that must be stated clearly and simply.
Your company or product cannot be all things to all solutions. A true value proposition is cognitive and accepting of trade offs. You can’t serve everyone and you can’t be the best solution to everyone. In fact choosing your customer set by market or customer segmentation is the surest way to develop your best solution.
A value proposition must be framed within the challenge of a competitive environment. If you are not unique in one dimension of value (appeal, exclusivity and credibility) then you don’t have the potential to be the best solution as the internet has positioned itself for many of us to be one click away into cyber space never to be found again.
About the Authors.
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| The Staff at SEO Synovation's office in Italy |
Francesca Marchetti, Minke Oving and Vincent Sandford are Search Engine, Search Marketing, Link Building and Online reputation Experts at SEO Synovation a European based web marketing Agency based in The Netherlands, the UK and Italy.
SEO Synovation helps small and medium sized organisations drive more traffic to their websites to increase their conversions. They can be contacted by telephone +31 592 269 804 or +31 6 428 73 480 or +39 334 990 3867. Or email thebest web marketing agency in Europe
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