UVP Step #3: Crafting Your Unique Value Proposition

So hopefully by now you’ve spent some time thinking about:

2 — The top use case you solve for your ideal customer profile

Now: the fun stuff! Time to get your creative juices flowing and think about the WORDS while crafting your UVP!

STEP ONE: SWOT IT OUT

Before you get everybody together to start doing your brainstorm, I highly encourage you to do a competitive SWOT. I don’t mean go and look at all of your competitors and write down a laundry list of all the features and products and services and technology that they offer. I do mean go look at your competitors and figure out exactly what they’re saying.

What are they saying in their PR? We often find that companies are saying different things in their PR materials than they are on their website — that’s intentional. Write it down.
Look at what they say on their website. How do they talk about their hook? What are they leading with on their homepage? How is that content different from what’s on their “about” page?
What are they saying on social media? Is that different from what’s on their website and in their PR materials?

Write it all down —we use a good old-fashioned Excel sheet to do this and organize it all.

AVOID THE SEA OF SAMENESS

The competitive SWOT is critical in avoiding the dreaded Sea of Sameness. It’s where everyone in your market is saying pretty much the same thing. You might be using different words than your competitors, but at the end of the day, if the meaning is the same, your customers don’t know who to choose. They need you to spoon feed it to them. Customers want you to be crisp and clear about answering the questions “why you?” and “how are you better than everybody else?” so that they can make an easy choice.

COLLABORATING TO CREATE

Once you have all the pieces together, it’s time to collaborate and create. Who are the right people to do this work? It really depends.

We do brainstorms in workshop formats with executive teams all the time, but we also do it with broader teams across functions — marketing, customer experience, sales, you name it. Be careful not to overload your team with too many people, or you could end up with too many competing voices, which hinders progress.

WORDS MATTER — SKIP THE KOOL-AID

Speaking of words, I highly encourage you NOT to drink your own Kool-Aid. If you are in a very buzzword-y market, which many of our clients are, resist the urge to use those buzzwords. Believe it or not, your clients don’t know what they mean! They might understand the buzzwords from a technology standpoint, but you’re selling value in your unique value proposition, you’re not selling features.

Avoid jargon. It trips up your customers and forces them to assume — and we all know what happens when that happens!