What’s a value proposition (more commonly referred to as value prop)? It’s the thing that sets your business apart. It can be killer customer service, a high end product, low prices, or anything else, really. Knowing what sets you apart helps your business because:
It allows you to target customers who identify with your value prop
It narrows your marketing focus – what are you highlighting?
You can work towards making it even more attractive to potential customers
Let’s dive deeper, starting with reason #1. Say your business’s value lies within a feature of your product. Take oVertone for example. Their value prop is that people can change their hair color by using a colored mask. It changes the color and moisturizes hair at the same time. From this, we know that one of our broadest target markets is people who want to color their hair without going to the salon. Now that we know who to target, we can come up with a marketing strategy that will appeal to those people. This goes along with reason #2. Because we have figured out a broad target market, we can categorize the value prop into 2 sections. 1) The user wants a dye that is easy to use 2) The user wants soft, shiny, undamaged hair. Now we can highlight these 2 attributes in our marketing communications. After establishing what our customers want, reason #3 comes into play. We can focus on R&D to make our product easier to use (if possible) and focus more on the conditioners that go into the product so that our customers can have the healthiest hair possible after using the product.
Not only is knowing your value proposition valuable for your marketing plan, but it is also valuable in many other parts of the business, such as R&D. Knowing what the customer wants is just as important as communicating those features to them.