Crafting your business’s unique value proposition is critical for the success of your business. It’s what defines the company’s value and is the source of differentiation in a competitor and saturated market. But maybe we need to take a step back first…
A unique value proposition is a clear statement that describes the benefits your company offers, how you can solve a potential customers’ needs, and how your services are differentiated from those of your competitors. Without a well-crafted UVP you’re just selling a commodity.
Your UVP needs to be clear, concise, written in the same vernacular your potential customers use (so if you’re in a heavy jargon niche where everyone uses that language, then it’s OK). It’s what you do, who you serve, and how you can help. What your UVP is not is a tagline, a catchphrase, or a slogan.
Why should a potential customer want to do business with you? What makes your business special and unique? How is the mission of your business tied up in your unique value proposition?
Here is Lift Digital Marketing’s Unique Value Proposition:
“Lift Digital Marketing provides digital marketing services to Service-Based businesses with annual revenues of $1 million – $20 million in order to generate more leads, opportunities, and ultimately revenue. We partner with our clients, taking a consultative approach to determine the best fit for strategy, resources, investment, timeline, tactics, and campaign. Our digital marketing agency in Austin shines light on all aspects of the process so that nothing is hidden, everyone is on the same page, and there are no surprises.”
We clearly spell out who our potential customers are, what they care about, who we are, what we do, how we can help, and why we do what we do. There’s no one out there like us, to be certain.
The biggest thing for Lift Digital Marketing when we went through the UVP crafting process was narrowing our target marketing of people who we really wanted to work with and make an impact for. Retail and ecommerce businesses are great, but we’re just not as interested in that kind of work. Solving the puzzle of marketing for businesses that need to generate leads is what we enjoy. Service-based businesses keep clients over long periods of time (hopefully) and develop much deeper relationships with clients rather than one-time transaction style businesses.
Another big thing for us in this process was narrowing the scope of the services we were going to offer. We’re here to generate leads for businesses. We’ll provide marketing services like web design and web development so long as the end goal is generating leads. We don’t do social media marketing from a “gaining followers and generating content” standpoint even though it’s an important part of marketing and something we do for ourselves. We have expertise and we’re playing where we can provide the most value.
Our unique value proposition also reaffirms our Mission: “Help every client grow their business so that they can better support their customers, employees, and communities.” We’re very serious about this; when businesses are thriving, supporting their employees with a living wage, and providing value to the community things are great for everyone including those not directly involved.
Importance of Your Unique Value Proposition
Crafting your UVP may also generate some other things for your business: some focus, something to come back to when things become unclear, a way to motivate your employees, an elevator pitch or an easy way to describe your business, a way to introduce yourself and your business at networking functions and cocktail parties, and hopefully a way to make your business stand out among your competitors and win more customers.
