We’re capping off a four-week introduction to Blue Zenith’s newest venture, Go Ahead. Dream Big., and we couldn’t be more excited to begin hosting this innovative new business development course!
Your Value Proposition Is Valuable
The ultimate goal of Go Ahead. Dream Big. is to bring your offline business online, but doing so in a way that maximizes the effectiveness of your brand, allowing you to capture an online audience of new and existing customers and compete with larger competitors and internet-savvy upstarts. In the course, we cover an important element of your online branding and marketing: the value proposition you will be presenting to prospective clients. You may not be familiar with value propositions, or believe that these short statements are the same as a branding tagline or marketing copy. Although brief, your value proposition lies at the center of your business, and in fact attempts to define the very reasons why your business should exist!
Defining Your Value
The very nature of the Internet, which facilitates the almost instantaneous sharing of information, has made the value proposition of businesses arguably even more important than they we were before the Internet became ubiquitous. The vast majority of your customers have access to the Internet, and 94% of buyers do research online before choosing to purchase a product or service. With this almost instantaneous access to information, it is absolutely imperative that you present a clear, concise reason or reasons why your company presents the best overall value to prospective customers. However, before you can present your case in this manner, you first have to clearly identify and define those values, and that is where your value proposition comes into play.
How Do You Want Your Business To Be Remembered?
The easiest way to help define what your value proposition should be is to think of how you want your business to be remembered. This doesn’t mean we’re asking you to envision going out of business – instead, think of a hypothetical customer that purchases your product or service once, receives stellar customer service and, for reasons outside of their or your control, ends the business relationship. If you were to ask this customer how they remember and would describe your business, what would they say? Would you be flattered or disappointed by their account? Although this is a hypothetical, every one of your customers has some memory or perception of your business, and the majority of those perceptions will be defined by the value those customers both perceived beforehand and ultimately received from your product or service. How well you fulfilled your value proposition to your clients is the defining factor that will decide whether or not these customers leave positive reviews, return to your business in the future, or even become a brand advocate.
Maximizing The Effectiveness Of Your Value Proposition
The above exercise is a good initial step towards creating and refining your value proposition, and we have developed additional, more advanced methods for taking your value proposition to the next level. In 2016, bringing your offline business online is simply too important an undertaking to take on yourself, as failing to properly prepare your business for its new online component can lead to underwhelming results and may even jeopardize the long-term viability of your business.
In our next post, we will discuss how mastering a customer-centric approach to bringing your offline business online lies at the heart of Go Ahead. Dream Big!