7 Seven seconds, that’s all you get.

Seven seconds, that’s how long you have to impress first-time visitors to your website. If your site does not live up to expectations, your potential customers will leave, likely never to return.

So how do you create a message that works? And how can you be sure it’s working? You start off with a well-formulated Unique Value Proposition  – the foundation of an any proper business strategy – which underlines how you will communicate with your ‘potential´ clients.

 

The Unique Value Proposition (UVP) – also known as Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – is a distinctive, clear statement that describes what you offer. It’s an explanation about how your company solves your customer’s problems, highlights the benefits of using your product and distinguishes your product from your competition.

 

Before you start designing a UVP it’s important to understand that your customer does not represent the entire world, nor should you be trying to sell to everyone. The purpose of a good UVP is to strongly connect with your targeted audience. Only when you focus do you stand a good chance of reaching your intended audience. After all, you want to make sure you connect in those 7 short seconds.

And here is the thing… until you are sure it actually doing its job, your UVPis nothing more than a hypothesis you need to test. How? Growth Hacking. And you start off by creating a growth proposition.

 

 

Strap my line, no pun intended.

Value Proposition, Tagline, Slogan and a High Concept Pitch !

 

Before we talk more about growth hacking, let’s take a look at the difference between a value proposition and a tagline. It’s a question I have been asked many times and many people – industry professionals included – get mixed up with.

 

The value proposition is the statement that clearly explains why someone should choose your product or service over the competition. It highlights benefits and the problems your product or service solves. This is done at a business or product level. Use it to create a strong first impression, explain how your product or service solves a problem, shows what benefits customers can expect, and to argues why customers should buy from you over your competitors.

 

There is so much information online on how to create your proposition that I will skip explaining that part. What I will focus on is the copy. So how do you turn your UVP into something you can use in marketing and sales? Part of the process of defining your value proposition is to be uniquely different in a way that allows people to connect with you and love you for it.

 

‘Moore’ or less an Elevator Pitch template. In my experience, one of the most effective ways to write down your proposition is by using the Elevator Pitch template by Geoffrey Moore from his book Crossing the Chasm.

 

1. For (target customers)
2. Who are dissatisfied with (the current market alternative)
3. Our product is a (new product category)
4. That provides (key problem-solving capability).
5. Unlike (the product alternative),
6. Our product (describe the key product features).

 

This template forms the stepping stone towards writing your real elevator pitch; one that flows and is less structured so you can pitch your company in a conversational manner. It works perfectly to turn your value proposition into something more user-friendly.

 

Wowzers.io that is what I call an Example. The growth hacker framework we are working on is called wowzers.io. This is what our value proposition looks like:

 

1. Who is it for?   For agencies/consultants, entrepreneurs and investors,
2. What are they dissatisfied with?   that are dissatisfied with traditional marketing approaches to business growth.
3. What is it you offer?   Wowzers offers a Growth Hacking methodology,
4. Your key problem-solving capacity?   Our solution is a data-driven framework for developing, measuring & validating business assumptions.
5. Who are your competitors?   Unlike the existing project management tools,
6. What is your product?   we have assembled a smart growth-experimentation software for engineering sustainable perpetual growth.

 

 

Tagging the line.

A tagline is a company statement. It expresses your vision and is aligned with the brand. They are eternal, like Nike’s “Just Do It.” and are used in marketing long term. Everyone also knows Nokia’s tagline “Connecting People”. That is their grand vision; the idea behind the company and what they stand for. A Tagline expresses the essence of the Value Proposition in just a few words.

 

Slogan or shibboleth.

A slogan is used for a one-off marketing strategy like a product campaign. You could say that a slogan is a mini mission statement. The word slogan actually comes from an old Scottish word that means “battle cry”, or in other words, your slogan goes before the current battle.

 

Slogans are quite similar to taglines but they are not the same. The difference is that slogans are used for one campaign or one product. Slogans change over time, aligned to trends. You use them if you want to advertise a specific aspect of a product/service. You can also think of them as “product-taglines”.

 

Did you ask about the big boys?

Disneylands tagline is “The Happiest Place on Earth”. However, their current slogan is “Where the magic begins”. The slogan changed over time. Some of Disneylands historic slogans include“Where dreams come true” and “I’m going to Disneyland”.

 

Apple’s tagline is “Think Different.” Their slogan for the MacBook is  “Light. Years Ahead.” And their value proposition is: “Learn, play, surf, create. iPad gives you the incredible display, performance, and apps to do what you love to do. Anywhere. Easily. Magically”.

 

As you can see, their value proposition consists of 23 words, it highlights benefits instead of features. It explains why you should buy the iPod, instead of a competitors tablet.

 

 

Let’s “abstract”

• A slogan is a one-term marketing phrase used for advertising your current product/service/campaign.
• A tagline is a long-term phrase used to express the essence of your Value Proposition.
• Value Proposition is a clear, compelling statement that describes what offer by highlighting the benefits.

 

 

You need a high concept pitch, period.

The high concept pitch is an underutilized marketing tool. It distils a startup’s vision into a single sentence for the purpose of allowing your customers to easily spread the word. (Essential when you are trying to engineer virality) and providing investors something easy to pitch you to their partners.

 

The high concept pitch is a great way to describe your product and vision in a short sentence that your customers immediately can interpret into something they understand.

 

A high concept pitch usually builds on something similar that people – within your target audience  – are already familiar with. It is typically combined with the elevator pitch to put things into context. For example, a high concept pitch for the movie Aliens is “Jaws in space”. YouTube’s tagline was “Broadcast Yourself” and their high concept pitch once was “Flickr for video”.

 

You can get to your high concept pitch by first performing a thorough study of your relevant competition and by looking at their UVPs. Check what the big brands are doing because this will give you some inspiration and ideas you can apply. Visit their landing pages and deconstruct why and how their messaging works. A very smart example of a pitch that also works great as a tagline is Cisco’s ‘We network networks’. But such examples are rare.

 

 

 

Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho, It’s home from work we go.

7 tips to get the job done.

 

 

1. Be different: drink milk from the Purple Cow.

The key is to unlock what makes your product genuinely different. As Seth Godin says: turn yourself into that purple cow…  Imagine sitting on a train watching the landscape. You see a herd of cows in a field and they are all the same. So what would happen if one of them was purple? Exactly. Now imagine yourself being that purple cow among your competition. The questions you should be asking yourself is what can you do to stand out from the herd?

 

The famous chocolate brand Milka has taken the purple cow concept quite literally. For branding purposes, they use a purple cow in all their imagery. Of course, their objective is to send the message that their chocolate is special and different from the rest.

 

You have to base your UVP on the most important problem that you are solving. What might help is using what is called the Value Proposition Canvas. It’s essentially a graph that visualizes how you compete.  If the problem you focus on is worth solving, you are on the right track. If it’s not, your proposition will remain vague. It’s not always possible to determine in advance; that is why growth hackers start off with a hypothesis to test first. Sometimes you think the problem is worth solving but it turns out your clients actually couldn’t care less. That is a harsh reality, but it happens more often than you might think. Get over it, pivot and move on.

 

2. Are you some AI bot or actually a real person?

People typically do not like marketing, sales, and technical jargon. To be willing to give you their 7 seconds of attention, things must be simple and clear. When designing your communication strategy make sure you talk to your customers like a real person. Don’t sound like a brilliant professor – which you probably are – explaining why his/her product is the best in the world. I know that is hard and I speak from experience; our natural tendency is attempt explain everything in great detail, and show off how fantastic everything we created is. But it is too much information and too complicated for your target audience to take digest quickly.

 

Make sure your message is simple, easy to remember and compelling. Remember you only have seven seconds to impress.

 

3. Tell me why it’s good for me.

Make sure to highlight benefits over features. People are interested in what’s in it for them if they acquire your product or service. This is called the Customer Value Proposition.

 

A good value proposition focuses on the benefits for its potential user. For example, Uber’s Value Proposition is “Uber is the smartest way to get around. One touch of the button and a car is on its way to pick you up. Your driver already knows where you are and where you want to go. And payment is completely cashless.”

 

You can see how Uber managed to offset all the things unpleasant about using a traditional taxi by pointing out how their service is superior? They highlight the benefits for their potential customers; No phone calls – “One tap and the car is on its way to you.”, no need to explain where you want to go – “Your driver already knows exactly where to take you.”, no fumbling for change or worrying whether you have enough- “Payment is completely cashless.”. Their tagline is “Your day belongs to you.” As we described earlier, a tagline expresses the essence of the Value Proposition.

 

4. Ouch, that hurts. How to cure the pain.

The main objective of most businesses is to acquire customers. To be successful, everything you do should be about the end user, their stories, what are they looking for and what are they willing to accept as a solution. Common mistake companies make is driving a business based on the product offering. Marketing based on features, assuming that their real strength lies in their products features. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying it can not work, it certainly can and there are numerous examples out there. But for a brief moment, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What would you want from your product or service if you were them? Is it really true that your offering is perfect for them? is it what they really want in life?

 

There are more startups today than ever before. Technology has made it easier to create innovations, some even with the potential to disrupt whole industries. If you start with the user in mind –  their pains, problems, challenges and struggles –  it will become much easier to engineer your growth.

 

5. They are your words, not theirs!

It is important to pick the right words. The words that not only describe who you are but also why you are different and therefore worthwhile paying attention too. This is how you can carefully go about this process:

 

• Write a couple of drafts of your UVP,
• When you brainstorm, involve your team and extend invitations to other people you think can add value,
• Think about your target market and customer. Is it local, national, international?  If international, make sure you localize. This is a bit more complicated than simply translating. When translated to Chinese KFC’s “finger-lickin’ good” turned into “eat your fingers off”,
• What are the things that you are providing to your customers (product, service, uniqueness, innovation, etc.)? Take a high-level view of your business,
• Get input using surveys and polls (e.g. using the FB feature in your groups) to find out what your followers think,
• Host a slogan contest on Twitter (use a designated hashtag to track entries),
• Try free slogan generators such as slogangenerator.co to get inspiration,
• Use SEO tool to research what the market is doing,
• Create a mind map by associating words.

 

Once you are done, the word picking begins:

• Create words lists from all the of the above,
• Lookup synonyms to give you more choice,
• Focus on what makes you different,
• Keep it short and simple.

Once you picked your words, you have to own them. That means you must live up to what you claim to offer. Let’s take a concrete example from the car industry to see how this works. BMW picked ˆperformanceˆ as their keyword, Audi picked ˆdesignˆ and Mercedes has ˆprestigeˆ as their keyword. Three top car brands, three different keywords and they are all at the top of their game. But these keywords set them apart by adding a very different emotion to the brand.

 

6. What’s in it for me, oops I mean for them of course.

The main problem with a UVP is that everyone has one. It’s not enough to just have a good UVP because your competition has good propositions too. To differentiate yourself you need to create a “What’s In It For Me?”, a WIIFM. The WIIFM is the single most important question to answer because it’s what each and every one of your potential customers will ask themselves. They are looking for the unique benefits. For starters, just put yourself in your customer’s shoes and then ask yourself “What’s In It For Me?” If you can’t answer that question using your UVP it needs rewriting.

 

You must remember that you can’t approach sales based on what’s in it for you – a commision check. Those days are long gone. The sales process starts the very moment your customer lands on your landing page. You must remember that your goal with a UVP is to demonstrate to clients what is in it for them.   

 

7. Being unique is better than being the best.

Having a great product/service is not enough to make your business stand out from the crowd.  What does this mean? Well, think of Apple. They are not the only tech firm in Silicon Valley (Samsung, Google, Android, etc.), but they distinguished themselves from the competition with a product range of desirable  It’s important to create a way to describe your company as the only answer for users problems. Instead of competing with a million other companies, just make your own groove.

 

Your challenge is to figure out the one argument that puts you centre stage. All you have to do next is to present it in a simple and clear way.  By the way, if you struggle to get it right, feel free to reach out! We have our fair share of experience in ‘engineering’ uniqueness here at Wowzers.

 

 

3, 2, 1… OK, time’s up. Are you ready?!

 

 

• Elevator Pitch
• Growth Proposition
• High Concept Pitch
• Slogan
• Tagline
• Unique Value Proposition
• UVP
• Value Proposition