What are the best practices for testing and validating your unique value proposition?

Be careful with the 'academic' side of personas. Angles like age, education, and tenure are far less important than gathering a deep understanding of what they're trying to do (Jobs To Be Done) and what keeps them up at night. You're looking for motivation to change what they're doing and adopt a new approach/solution. That's what you need to understand. You also need to think not just about Buyers, but about your Users and your Influencers too. For example if your power user is at the manager level who doesn't have signing authority, then yes, Buyer personas are key. But there are often influencers like Procurement, Finance, and others. Your UVP needs to have dimensions that allow you to craft messaging for these roles too.

In my experience, the best way to identify your customer segments and validate a UVP, is by talking to Customers. Customer Discovery helps us understand the pain points, the expected gains, and gives us so many insights into the problems, customer feelings and actions. The buyer personas can be better defined with Customer Discovery, and the UVP will be more refined.

As others have said, psychographics are incredibly important and generally outweigh demographics. Also consider behaviors in terms of the buyer journey (or purchase path), starting with the trigger event that would cause them to search for a business like yours in the first place. This will help build a value proposition that readily translates to your website (since this is most likely the place someone will end up early in their journey).

When thinking about our UVP, it's like setting up a dinner party. We have to know our guests to serve the right dish! 🍲 Demographics: It's like knowing if they're vegetarians or meat-lovers. Age, income, and such details guide our menu. Psychographics: Do they love spicy adventures or a cozy comfort dish? Behavioral: Are they frequent diners or occasional party-goers? Needs-Based: Some might be craving a specific dish or dietary need. Once we have this, we can think of Buyer Personas as our VIP guests. Knowing their favorite dishes (motivations) and food allergies (pain points) helps us cater perfectly. Let's make our marketing as delightful as a well-planned feast! 🥂

Testing your value proposition is like tuning a guitar: 1. Split Testing: A/B test different versions. What resonates with your audience? Tools like Optimizely or Unbounce can help. 2. Customer Feedback: Ask your audience. They're the ultimate judges. Surveys, interviews, or even social media polls can provide valuable insights. 3. Competitor Benchmarking: Compare against competitors. What makes you stand out? Analyze what works for them and differentiate. 4. Iterative Refinement: Value propositions are not set in stone. Refine based on continuous testing and feedback. A perpetual state of improvement is the key.

Don't forget to look beyond direct competitors to Alternatives in your space too; what are people using to plug the hole or if they don't have budget for a new purchase? You need to learn about Every Choice available in your space.

A great place to start understanding your competitors is by speaking to your sales force. They can help you define your swot against each competitor, and give you insights that you can’t find elsewhere. However, you will want to take it a few steps further too, by creating a battle card that describes each competitor and compares both companies. Next, you will want to write valuable insights for your sellers such as “quick dismisses” to statements that competitors bring up. You will also want to write “landmine” questions for them to bring up so they can talk about your company’s strengths while also giving the prospect something to consider if they hadn’t already. Finally, you should use this to make your content more differentiated.

I follow five steps when analyzing competitive brands: • Taglines • Visual imagery • Tone • Core messaging • Product promises

Tools like SWOT analysis are very important to analyse the competitors, but we can identify needs that aren't being solved by them and differentiate. This can be also done during Customer Discovery, by asking Customers, what products or services they use to solve their problems currently, what they are happy with, and what they think needs to be improved. What are other problems they have currently in that context for example will lead to the discovery of unmet needs that would help us differentiate from Competitors.

Competition is defined by customers, and it's not limited to direct competitors. Consider substitutes, even someone who might do it themselves or in B2B, keep it in-house. A quick way to see yourself like a customer is to do a search on Google for your type of product or service. What comes up on the first few pages will be a good starting point for your competitive matrix. Then evaluate along the criterion others have mentioned.

The best practice for creating a unique value proposition is to identify the needs of your target audience and then create a message that speaks to those needs. Start by researching your target audience and understanding their pain points, goals, and motivations. Then, craft a message that speaks to those needs and clearly communicates the value your product or service provides. Make sure to include a call to action that encourages your audience to take the next step. Finally, test and refine your message to ensure it resonates with your target audience.

A great UVP takes iterations in which you craft the message and continue to get feedback and refine it. Being able to write the UVP requires a deep understanding of your unique value in the market, which requires deep knowledge of your product and competitor’s products. Finally, you need to know what the buyer and user value, and what will compel them to purchase your product. Crafting the statement will therefore take input and validation from product, sales, competitive analysis, win-loss analysis, and buyer interviews. It is up to product marketing to put all the insights and inputs together into a clear, concise statement that boils all of those down to a single impactful sentence.

My experience tells me that one of the most challenging things is handling the confirmation bias of marketers. Marketing managers often differ from the actual users of the products and rely on data to evaluate the segment and their perspectives. Marketing managers may selectively focus on positive feedback from customers or stakeholders while ignoring or dismissing negative feedback that doesn't align with their preconceived ideas about their product or service. They should be open to positive and negative feedback from customers and other stakeholders. This can help ensure that the UVP is based on actual customer needs and preferences rather than personal assumptions and biases.

The best and easy UVP statement formula: "I help WHO, do WHAT, HOW" My example: "I help middle-class individuals transform their ideas into thriving businesses through cheap and effective content-driven sales strategies."

One of the best ways to craft a UVP statement, as well as most of the copy is to use some of the words, and expressions that the customers use to express the benefits (gains) they need. Using their expressions and words makes us relatable, and the messaging resonates better with the target personas.

The very best brands have fans, not customers - if your value proposition is truly unique it will make your audience feel something; inspiration, motivation, trust and more… It is those feelings that drive action and build loyalty over time. Don’t miss the chance to accurately measure that impact through the metrics that really matter - from early engagement signals, right through to sales conversions. Creating a value proposition is just the starting point - testing and refining is where the future success of the brand is won and lost.

Generate revenue by marketing your USP to the correct consumer group on the appropriate media platforms. You must take a holistic view of your advertising/marketing/branding campaigns.

Once you've translated the UVP to your website, you can also look at website traffic quality metrics — bounce rate, pages viewed, and session length — to see if visitors are viewing more than just your home page. These are especially useful, and perhaps predictive, when visitors may like what they see, but aren't ready to buy yet. I also look at what I call "money pages," which are closer to an actual purchase. For example "how to order" or "service packages or pricing" can indicate level of interest.