Let me ask you something — what is the very first question somebody asks themselves when they visit a new website? I suspect that in almost all cases it is the same — can this site help me?
It is such a fundamental question that we often overlook it and yet if the user cannot answer that question in the first few seconds, they will abandon the site.
Unfortunately, to help the user answer that, we need to be crystal clear about two things ourselves:
- Who do we help?
- How do we help them?
Together these make up what is often known as a value proposition.
You would think that these are such fundamental questions that every business can quickly answer them. However, take a moment and ask yourself those two questions.
I’ll wait.
It’s harder than you thought, isn’t it!
If you were a fashion retailer, you might have been able to come up with something woolly like:
We sell the latest fashion to millennials.
But, that is too vague, leading to more questions like, what type of millennials and what kind of fashion? The more specific your value proposition, the more confident people will be that the particular website they are visiting will be able to help them individually.
Also, the other problem with the example above is that it focuses on deliverables (selling fashion) and not how we are helping people (the value).
By itself, fashion is not helpful. It is how fashion makes somebody feel or what image it projects to others. These are the reasons people buy.
If we want people to stay on our websites and ultimately take action, we need to be able to demonstrate that whatever it is we offer, creates value and helps people.
To give you a bit more of a concrete example, let’s look at my business. I have a value proposition, which is:
To help savvy marketers, product owners and user experience advocates make the case that creating a useable, accessible and people-first experience is the best path to long term business success.
Now, I don’t use those exact words on my website (although I could), but that is the essence of my business, and everything I say online supports that statement.
Notice that I don’t say I want to reach all “marketers, product owners and user experience advocates”. I am only interested in the savvy ones — the people who already understand the value of what I do. I am specific.
Being that specific is useful for two reasons. First, the more specific I am, the more people will feel like I am an expert in helping them overcome their challenges. Second, if I am specific, it helps me better find my audience. For example, I know that savvy digital professionals read certain publications and attend certain events.
Notice too that I don’t include a list of deliverables. Instead, I focus on how I am helping, which is to support them in persuading internal stakeholders about the value of digital best practice.
Now, I achieve that aim through training, mentorship, prototyping and strategy. However, these are deliverables, not the value itself.
Do you see how my value statement addresses a real problem that people face? The people I am trying to reach, struggle to convince clients and stakeholders to allow them to do their jobs properly. I offer to help persuade those stakeholders to adopt best practice.
Crafting a value statement like this can be scary because nobody likes to turn away customers. If you narrow the audience and what you provide, how can you remain in business?
Previously, this would have been a fair comment because access to the entirety of a smaller audience was hard. Even though there may be thousands of potential people in your audience, they would be spread all over the world and not particularly well connected.
Of course, today, that is no longer true. The web has given us unprecedented access that allows us to build a business around the smallest of audiences.
So ask yourself, what is the minimal viable audience that you need to maintain your business? How many active customers do you require? As long as your defined audience comfortably exceeds that, you have a viable business. And remember, the smaller the audience, the more relevant you will seem to them.
Unfortunately, although this might sound good in principle, you might well work in an organisation where you feel you have little control over what value you provide or who you offer it too. However, that doesn’t mean you need to abandon the idea of a focused value proposition.
Even though you might not be in a position to define a company-wide value proposition, it will probably be worth creating an unofficial one that you apply to your scope of work.
For example, just because your organisation endeavours to sell a wide range of products and services to an even wider audience, doesn’t mean that the website needs to lack such focus. Neither do you need to spread your marketing spend so thinly in an attempt to reach everybody.
Instead, focus on your most profitable or fastest-growing audiences and favour better-performing products.
We all have to work within constraints, but doing something is better than doing nothing and ultimately getting the blame when your website and other digital channels do not perform.
