by Venchito Tampon | Last Updated on October 31, 2024
Determining your value proposition and unique selling proposition (USP) is critical to launching your offerings (products/services) in the market.
Considering different brands are being launched daily, your VP and USP could be your leverage in penetrating specific markets in your industry.
A value proposition is a concise statement that outlines the results and benefits your company provides to its customers.
A unique selling proposition (USP) differentiates your business from its competitors by highlighting a unique method, feature, or benefit.
USP is narrow and specific, and the value proposition summarizes what your business offers.
These essential marketing elements, value propositions, and unique selling propositions are mostly taught in sales and marketing training programs.
So, in this post, let’s dive into the actionable ways to utilize and maximize value proposition in developing your brand.
How Will You Apply The Concept Of Value Proposition And Unique Selling Proposition?
Craft Strong Value Proposition Using Value Proposition Canvas
The value proposition canvas is one powerful tool for determining your brand’s VP and USP. Through brainstorming, testing, market research, and evaluation, you’ll have a solid foundational element of value prop using past data and the current perceived value of your offerings.
Actionable Measures:
- Identify your audience segments based on their needs and characteristics. Start with creating a buyer persona with both demographics and psychographics (more on this later).
- List down the demographics of your target buyers (age, location, status, gender, etc..). This approach would enable you to see exactly who your target audience is. Do this effectively with your team so you can collect input from different minds.
Map Customer Jobs, Pains, and Gains
One of the essential activities of using a value proposition canvas is mapping out customer jobs, pains, and gains.
By detailing all these elements, you can see exactly how your current benefits and features tap into your customers’ desires, challenges, and needs. No more second-guessing how you can best serve them; rather, improve more of what matters to your market segments.
Actionable Measures:
- For desires, consider the person your target buyers aspire to be or the things they want to acquire or achieve.
- For challenges, put yourself in your buyers’ shoes (empathy) and draw the entire buyer journey (from awareness to actual purchasing decision). We do this activity as part of our design thinking training.
- Create pain relievers and gain creators by matching what your products have already served (in terms of what they relieve pains and how their benefits help your audience gain even more) with the specific list of customers’ pains and gains.
Leverage USP in Your Social Media Marketing Campaigns
With all the noise on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram, it is becoming more difficult to tell your brand stories.
One key to social media success is differentiating your content assets from others. You can do that by leveraging your USP.
Actionable Measures:
- Collaborate with your industry’s niche influencers, thought leaders, and content creators. Incentivize them using free products (Xdeals) or monetary value in exchange for their native content (photos, videos, etc..). This approach helps attract new followers and potential customers to your brand. We’ve done it a couple of times in our coffee shop and saw a significant boost in the number of customers visiting our stores.
- Contextualize content assets based on the audience’s interests in a social media platform. For example, you can search for the trending interests/hashtags in TikTok and see if you can make similar content pieces that are both relevant to your audience and still bring the uniqueness of your brand.
- Enlighten your brand’s aura using your company’s color themes—the more you associate specific colors with your brand, the more people will remember it (“brand recall”).
- Publish organic content assets and assess which one has the highest engagement rate. Then, use those assets to promote your offers. By uniquely creating this type of social strategy, you’ll have higher conversion performance and drive sales or customers to your physical store.
- Tell your USP using various content formats and styles in hundreds of different ways. With creative content marketing, you can develop a solid content promotion strategy for your company.
- Stay updated with the latest trends and tools to promote your brand in social media campaigns. By contextualizing your USP to targeted users’ needs, challenges, and interests, you can make content relevant to your audience.
Discuss Methods to Test Your Analysis
You have used the value proposition canvas with the given analysis. The next step is to discuss methods for testing your current findings.
It’s not enough to have them on paper. You want to see if your offer’s features match your customers’ desired value proposition.
Effective market testing includes surveys, interviews, and data analysis. You can do so by providing an exact questionnaire—one that’s easy to fill out or answer, and it would be best if it were aided by digital tools. This approach will yield answers to see if your products or services actually relieve pain and/or help customers gain.
Utilize Value Proposition to Improve Branding Strategy
The most substantial application of value proposition is when it is tied to the company’s branding strategy. The approach would have a more significant impact on the perception of customers toward the brand through its products or services.
Actionable Measures:
- Create a content marketing strategy on your website that includes your value proposition. Let it show in every content asset published on your brand’s social profiles, website, or physical marketing collaterals. Learn more about this in our content marketing training.
- Increase your website’s conversion rate by including your brand’s value proposition. State it in text, blog posts, landing pages, and images. By doing so, you’ll have more brand recall about its differentiation over its competitors.
- Test one core theme of content assets toward your USP. For example, you can schedule the publishing of content assets for a month to purely discuss your USP – either you’re doing it for entertainment or education. Once you’ve established brand recall with your customers, you’ll increase stickiness with your offers – and as they make their future purchasing decisions, your products will be the top-of-mind.
Bring Value Proposition to Life
Value and unique selling proposition are strong components of a robust marketing campaign that can help any brand boost sales and conversions.
With the correct assessment, analysis, and testing of these components, this unique value will become more prevalent in your day-to-day operations and marketing approaches.
If you’re looking for a comprehensive framework for marketing, learn more about our digital marketing training and customer-centric training at Rainmakers.
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