Improve Your Value Proposition

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.

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







Inbound Marketing – Guest Blogging and Article Writing

Inbound marketing makes it easy for your website to be found and a decent tactic to achieve this is through correct link building is guest blogging and article writing one of many channels of Inbound Marketing

Guest Blogging and Article Writing

Since Panda and Penguin algorithm updates the search engine optimisation of on page factors are still very important but must be part of a wider content distribution and inbound marketing strategy – more off page optimisation is needed.

Search engines after Panda and Penguin are better at distinguishing tricks like keyword stuffing and punish you for them. Poor and poorly written content, imperfect site optimisation and improper linking are degradable offences in Google eyes. This has been true for a long time and the SEO business has reacted favourably and most reputable companies follow the on page recommendations well.

Off Page Factors Have Gained Prominence

Many webmasters having optimised their websites for on page factors turn their attention to off-page factors to gain relevant links – many choose guest blogging as a means to acquiring relevant links to their websites.

Link Building

There are as many ways to get links but in the aftermath of Panda and Penguin submitting guest articles or guest blogging is slowly becoming best practice. The trend is driven by a desire to follow the pack. Guest blog posts, all by themselves, do increase rankings.

Guest Blogging – writing blogs or articles for other sites

The strength in guest blogging to blogs or websites that have a decent following is that the posts are read immediately and it can be launched without delay avoiding the embarrassment of blog posts that no one comments on. However, the guest-blog-only strategy has two fatal weaknesses:

• There is an obviously fixed ratio of one linking domain per article placed,
• You reach rapidly diminishing returns.

 Furthermore, using the ideal blog to post is difficult to find. They are a scarce resource. You can post to lesser blogs but expect lesser returns.

Content Strategy

A pure content strategy can be frustrating simply because the results and rewards are slow to be recognised. The best strategy is to create great content and to distribute it using all the marketing channels available: that means using inbound marketing as depicted in this info graphic – courtesy of Hubspot:

  

With great content, your guest posts will be more effective. So will your email marketing campaigns, paid search traffic, and referral traffic. We can think of content as a multiplier that adds to almost any other marketing tactic.

The advantages of unique content happen with guest posting or article writing are:

• Bloggers will be more likely to accept posts and talk about/to you if your target site has its own credible content.  
• Users from the host blog will share and re-share your content if your site offers something they can be excited about. 
• People will want to link to you.

 Make Content a Pre-Requisite 

Where are we headed, and what should we do next?

You should not publish and wait. Building relevant links through blogging and guest blogging matters. You must engage in other channels to distribute your unique content. Use all the channels in the info graphic that’s appropriate to your business and raise your precious content out of obscurity.

SEO is growing, link building is essential and inbound marketing is thriving. The Search engine optimisation industry is moving towards sustainability growth and capable of providing solutions, recommendations and results that are going to have a far bigger impact than raising the rankings for a couple tracked keywords.

It seems highly unlikely that Google will penalize guest posts or articles writing or for that matter any form of distributing good relevant content. After all distributing good content does increase users experience.

About the Author

Minke Oving is an Online Reputation expert at SEO Synovation and guest blogger for a number of clients.

She is a regular contributor to this blog and can be contact at m.oving@kpnmail.nl

Deliverables of Online Reputation Management?

Managing your reputation online is critical to business.  It takes many good deeds to build your reputation and only a slight indiscretion to destroy it. The services of SEO Synovation are typically geared for all types of businesses from the self employed one man operation to the multi-national company with packages to suite all budgets.  Read here the deliverables of an Online Reputation Management Project.

What are the deliverables of Online Reputation Management?

 Wikipedia describes online reputation management as:

“Reputation management is the practice of monitoring the reputation of an individual or brand, addressing contents which are damaging to it, and using customer feedback to gain insight or get early warning signals to reputation problems. Most of reputation management is focused on pushing down negative search results. Reputation management may attempt to bridge the gap between how a company perceives itself and how others view it.”

SEO Synovation helps clients identify the keywords or keyword phrases that are returning negative comments to search engine result pages. We freeze the search engine results at a date in order to focus our attention on the results to hide.

Requirements from Clients

To initiate and complete the project successfully SEO Synovation experts need the following data:
Keyword List - Keyword or keyword phrases that highlight negative comments
Company List - Company or organisation of related companies that may be affected by negative comments
Organisation Chart - List of all members, officers and employees of the company or organisation
Website List - Up to date of all websites related to the company or organisation that may or may not be affected by negative comment
Social Media List - Update to date list of social media profiles across all proforms
Content Marketing List - List of press releases or articles publish on the web
Directory List - List of directories carrying the company or organisations name.

Typical Online Reputation Timetable

Our Experience in Online Reputation

SEO Synovation experience in SEO, search engine optimisation, search engine marketing, Social Media, experts and Pay Per Click (PPC SEM) campaigns experts, creators of websites and defenders of reputations online, in five European countries (Italy, England, Holland, France and Germany make us a truly full service agency.

Usual project Objectives are to hide/push down (only method used) negative comments on the major search engines (Google, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo)for the determined keword or keyword phrases.

What Do You Get? Our Deliverables

Seo Synovation will deliver the following:

• Analysis of results in search engine result pages for the chosen keywords.
• Produce a detailed analysis of your situation and a strategy to overcme it. This is a document handout handed to the client for euro 750 plus tax
• Monitoring the results of search engines weekly basis, for each keyword phrase and search engine.
• Optimise existing websites and create other websites to rank above offending websites carrying negatives.
• Creation of blogs, Press Releases and Article to promote positive comments to rank above negative ranking comments.
• Engage in blogging, link building and video marketing to promote brand, company and products

Reputation Management Costs

Each project is unique and deserves the proper, full and expert analysis. It is important to tailor the costs to the gravity, extent and importance of the negativity. Our services are at three levels and costs vary.

1. We will submit a Strategic and Tactical Analysis.
2. We will execute the Strategic and Tactical Analysis.
3. We will maintain your online reputation in positive terms.

Our Reputation Management Approach

 Keyword rich organic seo development - As part of the project SEO Synovation will create relevant keyword rich websites, for example as:

www.yourcompanyname.com  or dot NL, DE, IT etc or whichever domain name can be applied
www.yourcompanyname.net
www.yourcompanyname.org
www.yourcompanynameblog.com
www.yourcompanynamenews.com
www.yourcompanynamereviews.com

Create 100% Original Content for All your keyword rich sites for improved ranking

 Seosynovation.com copywriters will create relevant content about your company and industry and then optimize your content to create relevancy and linking schemes for the best performance.

Seosynovation.com will deliver your newly created original content writing daily, weekly or monthly to your websites or blogs, depending on the package you select! Google loves new content so the more the better!

Press Release Distribution - Press Release Syndication
Seosynovation.com will use PR Powerblast press release distribution to keep your brand in the news all the time! There are many high ranking news sites and we make it easy for you to get exposure on all the top PR networks that can help with your reputation management program.

Online Reputation Management through social network marketing
Social networking sites especially the highly popular Facebook and the so-called micro-blogging platform Twitter form a significant part in a typical online reputation management plan. Both small and medium scale enterprises and large multinational companies are now reaping the benefits of effective social networking.

Link Building - Link Baiting - Directory Submissions - Local Profile Placements

Online reputation management can also be done through gathering feedback directly to consumers, suppliers, clients and even employees. Some of the best tools in gathering feedback include online survey forms, live web conferences and email contact forms.

Proactive Reviews Development

Improve Your Star Ratings on Google Places, Citysearch, Superpages, Yellowpages, Local Yahoo and many more! Building buyer confidence for your products and services are directly related to a health online reputation management program. We also provide Reviews Monitoring so you can know what consumers are saying about you or your company.

For further information contact SEO Synovation the Web Marketing and Online Reputation Management Company.