In today’s world of short attention spans and strong competition, you don’t have much time to capture your customer’s attention, much less make a great first impression. Paradoxically, this is precisely what you must do in order to maintain a successful presence and a thriving business.
To effectively engage and make use of the short amount of time any marketing has to make that first impression, many businesses make use of a tactic known as the value proposition. Essentially, a value proposition is a one-sentence (at most) explanation of what your company can do for your customer. If you can master this technique, it goes a long way towards leaving a lasting impression with the very same people you want to come back over and over again.
But value propositions often become a centerpiece for your marketing—it’s the headline on your website, the call to action on your advertisements, it’s placed prominently on your business cards. So getting it right is an important step. If you get it wrong, you could be in for an expensive rebranding exercise that could reach into every facet of your marketing plan.
To avoid this fate, it’s important to be assured that your value proposition will hit the right notes and resonate with the right audiences. In this regard, social media has become an excellent laboratory in which to test your value propositions.
Value Proposition Feedback on Facebook
Facebook has the advantage of offering instant and immediate feedback to any value propositions you may post. If you’re paying for Facebook ads, you can simply insert various value propositions into those ads—the one sentence of space you’re afforded will give you a testing ground. The more an audience responds to an ad, the more it’s resonating. Ideally, you can A/B test with various value propositions or various formulations of the same value proposition. It’s worth noting that you can also crowd source ideas for those value propositions, simply by leaving interactive comments on your wall, such as, “What does our company mean to you?” The responses might give an indication of what people really look for in your business.
Retweeting the Value of Twitter
The real strength of testing your value propositions on Twitter is that you’re very limited in your word count. You cannot exceed 140 characters on Twitter, so that means you need to make any permutations of your value proposition concise. In the end, this is a good thing, as the more efficiently you can convey your message, the more likely your customers are to absorb the entirety. If you’re using Twitter ads, you can follow a recipe similar to Facebook ads, testing out various calls to action or mission statements, until you find one that resonates with your target audience.
Pinterest, Where Every Picture is Worth 1000 Words
Sometimes, a value proposition is best conveyed visually or as part of an entire graphic design treatment. If you’re past the point of words and you’re starting to think about typography, design, and so on, Pinterest is a great place to trot out your options. By tracking how many of your options are repinned, you’re really testing engagement: what resonates, what draws the eye, what communicates the value proposition most effectively?
Analyze the Analytics and Let the Data Direct You
Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter all offer relatively sophisticated analytics for business accounts. This means that you’ll be able to collect data not only on how engaging your value proposition is, but also who it’s engaging. Does your value proposition engage women more than men? Is that the desired result? Social media, then, offers you a marketing laboratory where experimenting with these questions of engagement and audience can save you money on rebranding and make your value proposition more effective in reaching your desired audience. If you aren’t a social media expert yourself, it might be wise to let a CRM firm handle some of the technical aspects for you, so you can focus on the big picture and improving your sales.
