Part 2 of 3: It’s Midnight. Do You Know Your Value Proposition?
[Note: Though you can dive right in and learn a lot here, this post is a direct follow-up on what we learned in last week’s post.]
A woman I know has a colleague who had the opportunity to sit with the Dalai Lama as he sorted through his mail; most requests for his time. It was a large stack and he went through it very quickly, sorting into YES, NO and MAYBE piles. She asked him how he could get through it all so fast.
The Dalai Lama’s reply?
“I have a clear agenda and everything either fits or it doesn’t. I decide once so I don’t have to expend the same mental energy over and over again with each request.”
Makes perfect sense and applies brilliantly to your business.
If your company is clear on your:
- Unique Value Proposition (UVP),
- Unique Selling Proposition(s) (USPs) and
- Target audience,
…it becomes much easier to craft online marketing messages without having to rethink your strategy each time. If you’re not clear exactly how you define the concepts above for your business, you can either use the tool we share with you below, or speak with experts who can help.
The midnight marketer
You should be so clear on your messaging that if I shook you awake at midnight and asked about your UVP, you could practically recite it in your sleep.
And, if it’s not that clear to you, creating a mind map helps you clarify your thinking so your online marketing messaging (and purpose) snap into clear focus.
Begin by identifying these 6 elements:
- Your UVP
- The problems/challenges you solve for your clients and prospects
- Profile(s) of your prospect(s)
- Your business proposition
- Your promise
- Proof of that promise
Here’s a mind map we created for a Denver technical consulting client recently that depicts these elements nicely:
Do you see how the mind map helped define our client’s direction and becomes a resource you can refer back to and build on?
Once you start building mind maps, you’ll wonder how you ever wrote, planned, or thought about your company’s online marketing without them.
In next week’s post we’ll break down each of the pieces of the map and give you ideas how to brainstorm on your own the details for each of the six elements.
By the way, this mind map was created with Simple Mind – a Mac app. There are some great windows-based programs, like MindJet. Both are easy to use and fairly intuitive.