Your ultimate guide to creating a value proposition

How can you make your brand stand out from the competition with a compelling value proposition? Writing a great value proposition makes all the difference in whether a potential customer chooses your product or your competitor’s.

In this article, we’ll cover the basics and also five into the nitty-gritty of creating a strong message. We’ll focus on:

What is a value proposition?

Do you know what a value proposition is? Essentially, it’s a way of explaining how your product or service can make someone’s life easier.

It highlights:

Why your product is important to your target market (in this case, developer personas),
How it can solve their problems (i.e., developer pain points), and
What makes your product better than other options out there.

You must keep in mind that people’s attention spans are pretty short when it comes to browsing websites, so you only have a few seconds to make a good impression and convince them to stick around. Research suggests you have between 5 to 30 seconds to grab their attention and show them why they should pick your product.

Formatting your value proposition

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to creating a value proposition. What works for a company might not work for another – however, there’s still a basic formula you can follow to format your proposition, which is used by many orgs:

A headline
A sub-headline
The main benefits of the product
An image

A powerful headline is crucial, as 8 out of 10 people will only read the headline! Make sure it’s short, concise, and snappy, in order to entice readers to read more, including your sub-heading, where you can add more details about your product.

Then, talk about how your product can benefit your buyer personas, ensuring the copy connects with them. For that, you must pique their interest and deliver a great message.

In regards to your image, make sure it’s not just relevant to your value proposition, but also ties everything together and actually adds value to the proposition.

Crafting a strong value proposition

Okay, so you know you have to create a powerful value proposition – but how exactly can you do that? Here are four steps to help you write a compelling proposition!

Research your target audience

If you don’t know your developer audience (including where they hang out, their pain points, etc.), how can you create a message that resonates with devs and makes them want to buy your product?

Research the market by asking questions that tell you about the tone of voice you should use, and your audience’s problems and needs. You can also gather feedback from developers to solidify your grasp on the market.

Doing this will help you pinpoint your unique value proposition and craft a powerful message!

Create buyer personas

This will help you better understand your developer audience, the features they value most, and what drives them to make a purchase.

The TL;DR version is that creating developer personas means using a variety of sources, including sales team feedback, face-to-face interviews, surveys, and customer intel. Your goal is to fully understand the problems developers face and want to solve, since this will enable you to tailor your value proposition to their specific needs.

Here’s a more detailed explanation to help you create developer buyer personas:

Step 1: perform thorough research

To create accurate developer buyer personas, start by looking through your existing customer information. This won’t give you everything you need but it’s a good place to start. Other sources of intel are:

Adding relevant fields to website forms so you can collect info,
Talk to the sales team, as they know the customers well,
Ask questions during the onboarding process, and
Conduct face-to-face or phone interviews with existing customers.

Tip: if you’re having trouble getting people to participate in interviews or fill out forms, try emphasizing that it’s not a sales pitch, offer flexible scheduling that works for them, and consider offering incentives.

Step 2: understand your goals

To create an effective marketing strategy, you must understand two things: the problems your customers are trying to solve, and what they want to achieve.

This information is critical because it helps you connect with developers’ desires and customize your offer to suit their needs.

But, don’t stop there! It’s also wise to gather your team and brainstorm additional insights that are unique to the business.

Step 3: ask the right questions

Questions to ask existing and potential customers vary depending on your goals, but here are a few ideas to help you kickstart the process:

Key questions to ask when creating a value proposition

Step 4: collate everything you’ve learned

By now, you should have plenty of information to work with. To make it useful, the first step is to group similar characteristics together. Take your time and don’t jump to conclusions just yet!

Make sure to cover these key areas when creating your developer buyer personas:

Job title and level of responsibility (and decision-making)
Location
Communication preferences
Challenges
Goals

Demographics like age and gender don’t actually play a huge role – in fact, many people recommend you don’t even take them into consideration, as they believe demographics don’t really provide useful information. In their opinion, it’s much better to focus on the target audience’s pain points, interests, needs, job role, challenges, etc.

Consider how your product will help developers and how you should position your product and marketing message as well.

Consider competitive intelligence

This helps you understand what other businesses are offering and how you can differentiate yourself from the competition.

What’s more, competitive intelligence involves identifying gaps in the market so you can improve your product. If you’re offering something unique or innovative, this research can help you stand out and attract customers who might have chosen a competitor instead.

So, performing competitive intel research can lead to increased revenue and customer loyalty, while reducing the likelihood of losing customers.

If you’re not sure how to even start, you can also look into hiring a competitive intelligence analyst. But what does this role entail?

A competitive intelligence analyst knows how to help companies boost their sales and improve their business strategies. They dive deep into research and analysis to figure out what’s going on in the market, spot new chances for growth, and stay on top of what the competition is up to.

In short, a competitive intelligence analyst can help you to make smart decisions that keep you ahead of the game. They also free up your time to focus on your business, since they’re taking on the tough challenge of research head on.

Identify your product’s main benefit

Once you have a clear understanding of your developer buyer persona and competitor, you should determine the main benefit of your product. There may be several reasons why a customer should use your product, but it’s crucial you focus on the one that stands out the most.

For instance, Uber offers features like direct pick-up, GPS navigation, and cashless payment, but the main benefit is the convenience of ordering a ride with just the tap of a button.

To make your value proposition more compelling, include statistics that showcase the concrete benefits of your product. For example, instead of Uber saying they reduced commuting time in 2020, they can say they helped over 93 million users per month reduce their journey time by an average of 15 minutes, which carries a lot more weight.

Testing your value proposition

This is also important because it helps you understand whether your value proposition resonates with your target developer audience – and motivates them to take action.

Here are a few methods to test your value proposition:

Define your audience and the benefits you provide to them.
Perform A/B testing, where you split your audience into two groups and present each group with a slightly different version of your value proposition, which can help you figure out the one that resonates better.
Build a landing page that reflects your value proposition.
Listen to customer feedback.
Set up a cold email or LinkedIn outreach campaign.

Real-life examples of value propositions that work

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