Value Proposition: What Is It & How to Create One

What is a Value Proposition Really?

Louis: Pretty good. So thank you so much for your time. Let’s dive into the nitty gritty. Let’s dive into the practical thing around value proposition. But first of all, let’s take a step back. What does it actually mean? Because value proposition is being thrown around quite a lot by marketers and not so called good marketers. So what does it actually mean to have a value proposition?

Momoko Price: Yeah, well, I mean, I actually threw this into the. There is the Conversion Excel Facebook group. And I found that the more that I was looking into the context of how the Webster’s Dictionary definition of value proposition, how that’s put forth when I was prepping to do my talk last year at Conversion XL Live and I asked the group because I was like, is it just me or is the word value proposition just needlessly confusing and abstract? Isn’t really the only thing that you’re trying to do when you’re coming up with a value proposition is having a clear statement for why you should choose me and not the myriad of other options out there. Whether it’s like an actual like product competitor or just some other existing solution, you know, that will get the job done, but isn’t necessarily like a competing product. And that’s like the end. Like, I feel like that’s actually the only thing you should be focused on when you’re thinking about what your value proposition is, is just like accept the fact that like people are skeptical and when you are first trying to pitch them to like give up money, they’re gonna err on the side of no. Right? Because people don’t want to give up money for no reason. So you have to give them a really clear reason. You know, like, this is the benefit that I provide you and this is why I do it better than the other options that are out there. So that’s the only thing you should be really focused on. I think the thing that’s really interesting that I kind of noticed, like psychologically with myself, but also because I do so much customer research for my clients and is that we’re actually like, we’re super good at coming up with value propositions in our heads when we are the customer, we are terrible at it when we are the salesperson or the marketer. Unless you’re a good salesperson and like those guys are. And women are amazing. But when you’re a customer, you’re doing that all the time because you’re on the Internet, you’re shopping around you’re buying stuff. Like, you know, in this day and age, we buy stuff every day. It’s like basically part of our daily routine. And, and so we’re always making choices and there’s always a bazillion choices. Right. And so when we’re going about in our daily routine and buying stuff, we are constantly asking ourselves that question, why should I buy X and not Y? What’s the pros? What are the cons? And we’re going over that question. And we make these choices all the time. We’re always coming up with a value proposition that works for us and we deduce it ourselves. And I feel like good marketers and good, like, I guess. Well, I guess marketers, they’re the ones who provide that answer for you. You know what I mean? Like, you’re doing that question in your head already all the time. And if you can just like fill in that slot and just like give that to the person so that it matches, like their state of mind and where they’re at in their life and the right scenario and you just like make that overlap work, then you’re golden. Then there’s no thinking involved. They’ll just be like, yeah, okay, I’m going to buy. Obviously I would buy you. But nobody thinks like that when they’re coming up with it.

Why We’re Terrible at Our Own Value Props

Louis: So this is a very good point. And let’s take a step back. So your value proposition is the message that really convince people to buy from you, right?

Momoko Price: Yeah, that’s it. That’s all it is.

Louis: So that’s the definition, and that sounds simple, but it’s actually as you nailed, it’s really difficult for marketers to do in particular, because. And not only marketers, people who are trying to launch their new product or people involved in it who are not necessarily marketers, salespeople. So it is difficult for everyone, particularly because it’s so tough to see the forest from the tree. It’s so tough to get out of your own business and your own things you’re doing day to day, you start to forget the actual truth, the actual reasons why people buy from you. Right?

Momoko Price: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like that’s the other thing too, is that especially if you’re kind of like the de facto market these days, I mean, if you can code up a digital product, like you can just put the marketing hat on, like, you can build the product and then you can like, straddle both roles. So you build the product and then you also are trying to sell the product. Right. Like, it doesn’t have to be divided anymore. And there’s so many people who, like, my husband is one of them. Like, he just launched a product online for like Rails themes. And so you can, you can end up being super close to the product and then get. Because you’re so excited about the things that you’re building and the things that you can make work, which is exciting in itself, you forget that whether or not it was really cool the way you implemented this feature and made it work, and it’s something that nobody else has, you lose sight of the fact that people can still live without it. You know what I mean? Just because you made it and just because it’s technically really admirable what you did and how much elbow grease and thought and it’s just smart in terms of how you made it, it doesn’t mean that that in itself will convince someone apart with their money. Like they’re going off in their own world, they have their own priorities, right? And it’s just like, have you made your case for them putting their money on your product as opposed to something else they might want to buy? You know, like, there’s always that decision that’s going on in their head. And I think that when you’re, especially when you’re building the product and you’re so close to it, it can be really hard. I mean, I think everybody struggles with that. I even struggle with that. Like, it’s no problem for me to take on a client’s challenge because I get to be objective and I have a blank slate and I can just be like, well, based on what you have on your homepage right now, X, Y and Z is totally not clear to me. And so it’s probably not clear to other people.

Louis: And it’s easy as a consultant because you can really take a distance. But I think we’ve nailed the problem pretty well. And a lot of listeners probably are nodding their heads when they hear you talking because this is exactly, this is the key problem. We really struggle to come up with our own value proposition, regardless of the size of the business and regardless of the role that we’re involved in. So let’s get started into a step by step practical approach to it. How to create a fantastic value proposition. How do you actually go about it? And let’s start with step one. Let’s say you are actually starting out with a new client of yours, or maybe you’re planning to promote your own thing. What is step one?

Step One: Customer Surveys with Two Critical Questions

Momoko Price: So step one is making sure that we actually do some surveys. I like to build the value proposition based on empirical research as opposed to just blue skying it and coming up with some catchy tagline or whatever that people can do when they get too insular. What I’ll do is as soon as we get started, the first things I do, I’m like, I need you to set up a customer survey that’s going to go out to all your paying customers who like your product. We’re going to set up an on site visitor survey for your web for like to actually get some insight from your prospects who are hitting the site to find out more about your product, like what their expectations are. And then like I do a battery of other like research, but that’s secondary. The main things is like the on site visitor survey and then a customer survey.

Louis: Okay, so, so customer surveys. Let’s start with customer survey as step one. Yeah, you said paying customer who like your product. Do you mean that you really need to focus on sending a survey to people who like your product only?

Momoko Price: No, no, no. But like, it doesn’t have to be that at all. It can be, but it should be. Paying customers, assuming that you have them. Okay, right. Like assuming that you have them, then you send that out. And the number one thing that there’s like, like my, my surveys tend to be about like, you know, like eight questions or so. But there are two questions that are super, super important in terms of value propositions specifically. And the first question digs into finding out like, what is the top benefit that they get from using? You can say top benefit. You can say like best result, but you want to have them think about like the question should be framed in a way where you’re asking the customer, like, how has your life improved? Like, think of before you use product X and after, what would you say is the top benefit that you’ve gotten from using X product?

Louis: Right, so that’s a very first question.

Momoko Price: Yeah, so, and I’ll get into why that’s so important in a second. But and then the second question, and this is the one that people usually always do include and they forget the first one, which I would say is almost more important. But the second question focuses on differentiation. Right. So at the moment of purchase, ultimately why did you decide to go with us as opposed to somebody else? Right, so that’s that trying to figure out what is that competitive edge that stood out to them, that made them tip the scales in your favor. Right. So those two questions are really important because they get into a, you know, what is the desired outcome? Like, what’s the motivation for why someone would even want to use your product. Right. And then B, how you can deliver that outcome to the person in a way that on some level is exclusively better than other options out there.

Louis: And I’m right to say that those questions should really be open ended.

Momoko Price: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. However, however I do, that’s why I do like to include the, the visitor survey that goes out. Let’s like you know, like a pop up survey that goes out on the actual website because you can get like you can get away with asking open ended questions I think to paying customers and they, you know, especially if they like their product and like your brand, they’ll be very generous with their responses and they tend to be pretty great about, you know, you can give them like six to eight open ended questions and they’ll answer them. Visitors, not so much. Like, I don’t think I would ever put up a pop up survey that asks a bunch of open ended questions because they don’t have the time and they have no loyalty to you.

Louis: That’s a good point. That’s a good point. But before going to this website survey thing, let’s finish the survey. No problem. That’s my job. So the survey, you ask those two critical questions and then I assume you also ask questions about who they are potentially. I know we are really nailing the value proposition. So if you think those are the two questions that are really critical for value proposition, then I’m going to ask you the question. What tools do you recommend to send surveys? What do you usually use yourself in your stack?

On-Site Visitor Surveys and Tools

Momoko Price: Well, you’re going to love this. I actually use hotjar all the time. So I mean I use a combination of like the thing. Okay, this, I just want to be clear. I have no affiliation to hotjar. They do not pay me. But the thing that I really like about the hotjar surveys and a lot of people don’t realize you can do this is that they’re the visitor survey pop ups. Like if you, if you want to try to get people’s attention to fill out a survey on a website, I find that the invite is really unobtrusive. Like it’s, it’s, you know, it’s just like a gentle modal that just like pops up and asks like can we get your feedback? It’s not, it’s not very disruptive and it’s easy to get rid of. So I like that because I feel like it’s designed in a way that respects the customer journey on the website. But I usually use that in Conjunction. So the survey is created in Hotjar and then whatever email marketing platform the client is using is how we will send out like specifically to the paying customers. That’s how we would send it out. Right. And then, and the thing that’s really important is like that survey needs to only be sent to a list of paying customers and ideally you know, have like a two week window or you know about that in terms of like from now to two weeks ago. Exclude anyone who’s bought in that time because it’s been, you know. Well that’s not true. I mean you do want to give them time to use the product before they give you their feedback. But you can always have another question that goes immediately like right after somebody buys that kind of digs into like why did you, you know.

Louis: Yes.

Momoko Price: Why did you decide to choose us? But that’s a whole other thing that’s, I mean it’s supporting intel for the

Louis: sake of simplification I guess those two questions and sending that over email selecting paying customer is probably a good first step. So step two and you started mentioning the tool obviously as you guys know, maybe you don’t. I do work for hodjar and everyone hatesmarketers.com is a side project and as Momoko mentioned, she’s not affiliated with Hodjar at all. I’m not trying to, I’m not trying to promote Hodja whatsoever. It just sometimes happens naturally that people use it. We will mention other alternatives but let’s focus on the mechanism behind it instead of the tool because at the end of the day this is what matters. Things can change in 10 years or 20 years, but the methods will remain the same. So you actually advise to change way to ask questions for those people because as you said, they don’t really care. In all honesty, they don’t give a shit about you. What they are looking for is just something and that may be looking for information, maybe looking for something else, looking for prices. And obviously they’re not going to spend the time to answer eight open ended questions.

Momoko Price: Oh yeah. And I mean if you try to really if you. They only have so much attention when they’re on your site anyway. And if you’re wasting that time trying to get information for them, you know, for value proposition messaging, you may be interrupting their ability to go and like actually buy something. Right. So that’s like you gotta pick your battle. So like, you know, for visitor surveys, you know, I only ask maybe about five questions and almost all of them are, you know, choose, you know, choose an Answer or fill in other, you know, like they’ll. So just to be clear, like one of the things that’s really important when you send out your customer survey to your paying customers, it’s great cause they can tell you what’s so great about your product, but they might not actually recall their state of mind all that accurately from before they had your product and what they were really looking for. Like what was on mind, top of mind, most important priority when they were originally buying the product. Right. Especially for like a long term customer, their memory might be not, you know, it might have blurred since then. So that’s why I think it’s important to also send out the visitor survey and get. And then the one question that’s really important on top of the two questions that you send out to your customers is for the visitor survey. Just get a sense what, ask them when looking like what is the number one thing you’re looking for in a blank like product, whatever your product category is. Right. So if it’s some, let’s see, like if it’s accounting software, I don’t know. Right. And you’re selling accounting software, then you would, the question would be, you know, what are you looking for most when shopping for accounting software? And then you give them a list of like five options. Ideally you have some sense of what these options might be like what are important to people when they’re buying. And then obviously you include other so that they can, if in case the choices you made are totally off the mark like for them, they can put in their own answer. So that’s really important.

Louis: But let me cut you right there because this is important. You say obviously, but I don’t think it’s that obvious at all actually. No, no, no, but that’s fine. As I said before, it’s my job. So the on site survey, I think one good tip here, when you select the type of choices that people can choose from is to really use potentially initial research you’ve done with paying customers to really kind of pinpoint maybe the biggest reasons why people have bought from you or the key things they’re looking for. And then as you said, adding your own stuff that you think and mixing those two will probably give you a good snapshot from visitors or what they’re actually looking for.

Momoko Price: Yeah. And I mean one of the things you can do also to zero in on what that short list of priorities are is you can like depending on your product, you can go to competitor product especially for like if you’re in a saturated marketplace or Whatever, you can go to your own product reviews or you can go to competitor product reviews and read those and see what actual people who buy or who are looking and talking with other people about their choices, what they’re prioritizing. And you can kind of get a sense of what people really care about because it’s surprising the amount of product review open ended content you can read. So that’s a good starting point if you just need some initial research to inform your further research outreach methods.

Mining Competitor Reviews for Insights

Louis: Okay. So that’s very important and that’s something that Joanna Wiebe mentioned in this podcast. Her episode just went out, I think a week or two before yours actually. And she did mention mining third party reviews in your category.

Momoko Price: I learned that from her. Right, I totally learned that from her.

Louis: So she’s a clever cookie. Right. And so you. I don’t want to go into too much details on this particular step because as I said, we did talk about it before, but your take on it is interesting as well because you would use that to inform the choices that people will make on the on site survey and even the customer survey. Right. So you would ideally pick competitors and your own product and look at reviews and identify once again the same type of things, the biggest reasons why people bought this one instead of something else. Right?

Momoko Price: Yeah, and I mean I actually like, I use one to inform the other. Right. Because like what I put out, I think I go over this in my course. But like one of the things about message mining, it’s so good for finding really good like proto material for like headlines and like and subheads and just like awesome copy, it’s so helpful. But at the same time, because user reviews are so unstandard and open ended and even when you can, even when a review format says like, what’s the number one? What do you like about Product X? And some respondent puts in a bunch of answers, they can name five things, right. So I often recommend, especially if you’re an early stage startup and you don’t have the luxury of asking a bunch of paying customers, you know, to give their input on what’s your, you know, what the best benefit is in terms of using your product or why they chose you or whatever, if you’re super early stage, you don’t even have that luxury because you have no one to ask. Right? Like no one’s paying for your product yet you’re trying to get it out the door. So a really common tactic among conversion copywriters, which has been like super popularized from Joanna, is message mining. Right. Like go to your competitor product reviews and read those and check them out. But there’s no way to quantify the weight of one message over another in a really accurate way. Right. Like when you’re message mining, you could take five bits of copy from one review, one bit of copy from another review, who’s not a sample size of 2, but one’s weighted 5 times more than the other. If you’re just tallying up which statement was said most often, does that make sense? Like it does, yeah. So that can be an issue. Like sample size gets really messed up. So you can use a pay per response survey to sort of like, you look at the message and you’re like, well, reading all these reviews, I’m getting the sense that the number one thing people are looking for is X. And then you can take that, which is kind of like, it’s a bit messy, but you have an impression of what’s important and then go to like pollfish or something and then just send out a paper response review that targets your prospects and then see, you know, from a very clear survey question that’s like, which do you prioritize most? You know, A, B or C. You can see which one’s the front runner and you get a way more objective and like properly quantified understanding of which thing is most important.

Louis: Right, so let me, let me, let me stop you right here because I think that the two steps you mentioned actually come before the survey and the on patch survey. So I think in the way you explain things, it seems like message mining, like review mining is probably step one and step two is probably what you just mentioned.

Momoko Price: Yeah. So step one, message mining takes a much bigger role in the process if you don’t have customers to ask and if you have a very low traffic website, if you don’t have. Yeah. So it depends for early stage. Yeah. Message mining first, then survey and then like go back to message mining to find actual pieces of copy, like, because that’s the best way to be able to get some really sticky copy, as Joanna says. But if you are a, an established company and you have lots of traffic, you, you know, and you have a long list of paying customers, start with that first. Right. Like, start with that first and just get a sense of like what people care. If you can get input on your product specifically, I mean, go for that first.

Louis: So that’s a great point and that’s a good differentiation. So I think we have a good base to work from and ideally at this stage you should have enough answers and you should basically have an Excel spreadsheet of all of those answers. Is that typically what you have at the end of those steps? Okay.

Momoko Price: Oh, yeah.

Louis: What do we do?

Categorizing and Quantifying Survey Data

Momoko Price: Oh. So then this basically comes down to categorizing and quantifying the message themes. Right. So you have a bunch of survey responses from visitors, you have a bunch of survey responses from customers where you say either. So for the first question for the customer survey was what’s the top benefit?

Louis: Yes.

Momoko Price: What’s the number one thing that you get out of using a product? You would go through and you would look over those and you would categorize the over because people are going to say it in their own words. Right. So what I do is I’ll go through and just categorize generally what each. Like you make an extra column in your spreadsheet and then beside the response, you basically create tags that group everything, all the responses into overall themes. Right, right. And you can come up with those as you see fit. There is a bit of an art to it. Like you don’t them to be too fine, you don’t want them to be too general. It’s just the overall topic, the overall takeaway. And when you strip away whatever idiosyncratic language someone is using because of how they speak or whatever. So that’s what I’ll do. And that is the most laborious part of the process. You go through and you tag all those. And then especially in Excel or Google spreadsheets or whatever, you can create a pivot table that will just take that and then give you a count tally of which theme came up most often.

Louis: Let me stop you right there because I’ve actually done this exercise with some of my listeners recently and this is it. So you basically have open ended answers in one column, you add a second column and you read the answer and you try to understand what is the theme, what is the category of this answer. And for example, for me, I got a lot of answers such as, I like how your guest go through practical steps in the podcast that dives deeper than most. So in this instance, practical is the tag I would use. But also I would save that as an interesting quote that I could use in the future. So I would tag that as quote as well. Right.

Momoko Price: And as you said, it’s got the same processing evolution.

Louis: It’s not magic though, it’s just hard work as you said. And it’s a bit of an art. I agree with you. It takes a bit of time. If you’ve never done that before, it’s going to take a bit of time to really get to the bottom of how to tag stuff and categorize. But please do not try to use AI or anything like this to do that for you. You need a human to review it somehow. It just.

Momoko Price: Yeah, I’ve been trying to write. I’m doing a data science like one of those Coursera John Hopkins data science courses because I think understanding statistics and stuff is really important if you’re going to be in conversion optimization even if you’re a copywriter. And so I bet one of the projects is like, you know, to come up with your own machine learning based thing. And I’m trying. This is the thing that I’ve been, that’s been driving me crazy is that like I’m trying to figure out if you can use you know like natural language processing to be able to like text mine and like pull out themes and it just doesn’t like I can’t get it to. It never compares with what a human can do.

Louis: Yes.

Momoko Price: And it drives me crazy because it’s just like I’m trying. It would make my life so much easier. It make all of our lives so much easier if this thing just works. Like if you could just put in a bunch of survey responses like some machine could just tell you like yes, the number one thing people care about is this. But it’s just like.

Louis: So there’s an idea.

Momoko Price: Terrible.

Louis: Yes. The results are usually terrible but there is an idea if somebody is clever enough to pull that off. This is definitely.

Momoko Price: I want to try to make it.

Louis: Well, you have a competitor? Yeah, no, a tip actually that something I’ve used recently to save a bit of time is usually when I have a lot of open ended answer in front of me I would plug that into an N gram analyzer. If you Google N gram analyzer you have a free tool. You just paste the text in it and it’s going to tell you how many times specific words or two words together have been mentioned. And usually that helps you perhaps categorize things a bit better and a little bit faster.

Momoko Price: Yes, that’s true. Definitely. I also, I mean there’s also the option of especially if you. Well I live in Canada so Mechanical Turk doesn’t even like we can’t even use it which is really unfortunate. But there’s also no reason why you can’t just like give it to like go on task army. You know if you can find someone who’s good at data entry and has a good grasp and you like explain like how how to do it and you sort of get it started for them. You can do it and do like the first 20 questions so they can see how you fill it out and be like, go do the rest, please. Thank you.

Louis: Yeah, but that’s a good point. You can definitely do that. But I would advise not to do it. I would advise not to delegate if you haven’t done it before.

Momoko Price: Oh, yes. If you haven’t done it before, don’t do that. Yeah, because you need to actually go over the results and make sure that they’re doing them right.

Louis: Right.

Momoko Price: But if you’ve done it a million times, then. And you are willing to, you want to find someone to take it off your plate. That is an option.

Louis: Right. So we have now an Excel spreadsheet. We have tags next to each thing. And then you mentioned this weird thing called pivot tables. So for people who don’t know what a pivot table is, a nice way that Excel has to summarize data into tables that are actually easy to digest. So if you don’t know how to use it, you should definitely Google pivot table Excel and you will find tutorials to help you with it. So you would advise then to create a pivot table that neatly summarize the data into account that says, well, this thing has been mentioned 20 times, this one has been mentioned five times, this one has been mentioned three times, etc.

Momoko Price: Right, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then, and so once you have that, then you can get a sense of like, if you have your, if your top benefit is, you know, I don’t know, whatever it is, like, or go back and going back to the example of like accounting software or something. Right. Like, and then they say the top benefit of, of using your product is that, you know, it frees me out to focus on other things. Maybe that’s like the top. And that people bring up like, you know, frees up time. So, yeah, so your tag would be. It frees up like freeze up time, basically. Then you can go, you can do that. You can grab all of the customer survey responses that were tagged as freeze up time. And as you mentioned before, you’ve probably also, as you’ve been going along tagging which ones are specifically very colorful, memorable, vivid descriptions that you think would be good for headlines. You can go back over those entries and start finding turns of phrase and stuff that are particularly eye catching for being able to communicate that value proposition

Louis: later on the actual copy. That’s almost two steps. So we had step one, depending on the size of your business to actually mine data. Step two, survey from paying customers. Step three, on site survey. Step four, collecting the data in Excel. Step five, tagging those data. Step six, creating a pivot table and count tally. And step seven is actually to also identify the key quotes. So when you tag, really be sure to tag those quotes that are, as you said, vivid, colorful, that they just sound. Right. They are like, oh, my God, I’ve never thought about it this way, but it makes so much sense.

Momoko Price: Yes, yes.

Finding Sticky Copy That Triggers Emotions

Louis: Right.

Momoko Price: And that’s, I mean, that’s what Joanna probably mentioned is they call it. She calls it sticky copy. Right? Like, it’s the copy that just like it evokes an image in your mind or a set or a sensory perception in your mind. And it’s just, it just really drives home a firsthand account feeling of whatever that benefit is. You know, it hits that emotional trigger.

Louis: Yes.

Momoko Price: And then that’s what you would go with for part of your headline.

Louis: Yeah, exactly. It should trigger the visual spectrum in your brain. You should feel like there’s something different about this quote and it’s difficult for us maybe to tell you. Perhaps I can go quickly into my Excel spreadsheet and select one. Actually, I’m going to do that right now because it’s so interesting. It’s difficult without looking at the actual answers that people gave to you. It’s difficult to explain. But I think if I can find an example right now, which I’m doing, we’re doing it live. Just like

Momoko Price: improvising live.

Louis: Oh, my God.

Momoko Price: Well, I have an example. I mean, I have a good example that came up recently when I was doing sort of a beta version of like a course that I’m running right now, or. Well, I just wrapped it and the. It was for a very specific type. I can’t say it was for a very specific type of like B2B software. Right. But it was kind of that vendor type software where it’s the software that you buy so that you can just meet a particular client’s requirements to work with you. You know what I mean? Like, so a lot of people. So that’s really like. This was a very interesting example because it was like, oh, we’re not even talking about, like a consumer product. This is like a crazy, weirdly obscure corporate product that like, actually everybody uses, you know, in back channels of supply chain stuff. But, you know, nobody actually in the real world like, knows it exists. But it was this. So, so that. So when we actually ended up surveying people and serving customers and saying like, well, why did you buy this? Like, why did you start with us? You know, what’s the number one benefit that you got? And, like, a lot of the responses that we got were like, like, the top thing was like, well, I had. Because I had to, like, because the, you know, I couldn’t do business with this person. It was a requirement. Like, it was. It was the. It was the supplier’s requirement or there’s the vendor’s requirement. So, like, that’s like, you’re like, well, that’s kind of hard to make a good headline. You know what I mean? It’s like, well, like, what’s the headline gonna be? Like, well, buy this because you have to.

Louis: That sounds good.

Momoko Price: Yeah. So that’s not the best one. So that was a really interesting challenge to have as a course guinea pig. But we ended up finding out that we went over some more testimonial content, some more voice of customer feedback, and one person responded. One guy said, he’s like, I love this. Like, the thing I love about this product is that it allows me to say yes to every vendor, like, to every client, like, every person who wants to do business with me. If I have this already, we can do business, you know, I mean, so I can say yes to every retailer. And that was like, oh, that is a great headline. Because that really drives home vividly, like, the freedom, like that. That emotional freedom and, like, power that you have, right? You’re triggering that where you can say, like, say yes to every retailer. You know what I mean? Like, just boom. Like, and it’s not about, well, I do it because I have to, like, or because, you know, it was a requirement or whatever. So that completely changed the feeling around it. And, you know, and I saw it, like, as soon as I saw it, like, I was going through all these responses and I was just like, oh, these are, you know, some of these are okay, but I don’t know if I’d use any of these as a headline. And then I saw that and I was like, well, that’s taken care of. That’s my headline. It stands out. You just see it and you’re like, oh, yeah,

Louis: I found two examples, actually, to share with you. So listeners like, the fact that it’s really based. This podcast is based on the truth and the fundamentals behind marketing, the things that won’t change tomorrow. So one person said it teaches you to run the marathon and not the 100 meter sprint, which is quite interesting. Another one, when a lot of people also said that it changed the way they Thought about marketing and somebody, a listener in particular told me I like to come back to my boss after lunch and tell him have you heard of this? And he’s impressed and wonders how I came up with that. This particular listener would actually go for lunch, listen to the podcast, go back after lunch or a boss and shows off and showed off, basically saying I’ve learned so many things so there aren’t probably the best example I could find because I have a lot of data in front of me. But it goes to show you that I would have never explained this podcast this way ever. It’s just I had to talk to people and this is how I came up with the data. So right, we have these categories, we have those key quotes. Now how do we come up with a value proposition?

Crafting the Value Proposition Headline

Momoko Price: So the value proposition. So what I would usually do like I like to think of value propositions in terms of headlines because like your headline is kind of that value prop. A value proposition based headline is basically like you know, ten word max pitch. So you might as well just go right from there and try to try to state your case as a headline, as a, you know. And what I would normally do is for a value proposition based headline, try to think of. And this is where the bits and pieces of the survey kind of come together. It usually follows some kind of. And this is ideally like a great place to put it is on your homepage, for example, when someone is just like all kinds of different traffic or just coming to figure out like what, what you’re all about and you want to just straight off the bat in no, not being clever about it or cute or coy or coming up with weird turns of phrase or whatever. Just a straight shot sentence of like, you know, the. We’re the, we’re the only product. We’re the biggest product. We’re the, you know, some superlative adjective. And then you bring up the like the product category that you’re in because you need to make sure you make that actually clear. Like if you’re accounting software, you better tell them that what you’re offering is accounting software because you have a lot of people who are coming who want to just be re oriented about like what is this? Am I in the right place? So you need to make sure you include that keyword in there of like what you’re actually selling and not try to, you know, obscure it by being clever. And then basically that lets you do that lets you. And then like the rest of the headline is where you fill in the. That best desired outcome that top desired outcome or top benefit. Right. So your headline is like the only accounting software that lets you blah, you know, and then that’s where you fill in that survey response. And like you don’t necessarily need to be, you know, it doesn’t have to be the only thing. I mean depending on what people said that they’re, what your visitors say that they’re looking for or what, however you can differentiate yourself, you can say like some other, like the biggest or the best. Don’t say the best. The best is not a good adjective to use because it means nothing.

Louis: Yeah, don’t lie essentially.

Momoko Price: Yeah, but the focus is basically just to straight shot say that you’re the product X that lets you achieve the thing that most people are looking for.

Louis: Great. You said something very quickly that I think is absolutely critical. You said that your homepage is usually the place where many different types of traffic comes in with different intent. And I think this is something that we need to nail. This is why a strong value proposition is so powerful. This is why instead of saying we are revolutionizing accounting, blah, blah, blah. That doesn’t make any sense. You need to really make it very clear because some people from search might come from just looking for accounting information. People coming from paid might come from brand in search. So they might actually look for your particular brand. Social media type of traffic might come from a completely different perspective again and again. So the only thing in a sense that really would work for anyone is a value proposition that is as you said, simple. That makes sense that people actually agree with that basically people came up with.

Momoko Price: Yeah, that’s the thing I think that people try. Where people go wrong with value propositions is they focus way too much on how to differentiate themselves. Like they look at the competitors and say like, well, how can we say something different than, or make ourselves sound different than X, Y or Zed competitors instead of like focusing on the actual people who are landing on your website and your customers and what the customers want and making your messaging just fit that requirement. Right. And like just to add on to that, the other thing that people I feel do, where they go wrong with their value proposition headlines on their homepage is that they want to be overly unique in establishing their brand identity and what they’re all about. And that tends to compromise the clarity of what you’re offering. So yes, sometimes a value proposition headline is not like the sexiest headline because it needs to be super clear. Like you can’t risk implying something about what you know, what you offer. You just need to be straight about it, like we provide this product that gives you this benefit and like if you can add on to that in some way that lets people know the exclusive option, like, like the exclusive differentiator benefit to add on to that to make you different, then you know that’s a bonus. But sometimes you can’t always get that in there. But it’s a good thing to have. I’m trying to think of like the pet doors example, like I did petdoors.com as an example in my conversion Excel course and I can’t remember the headline that we came up with but I know it’s still on their website like a year later.

Pet Doors Case Study: 145% Revenue Increase

Louis: I let you take a look and I’m going to just maybe summarize a little bit what you said. This is critical and amen to that because you will be able to stand out and differentiate yourself by being clear. Because 99% and this is just a random number I’m saying, so don’t quote me that. But 99% of companies and headlines and value propositions online don’t make any sense, are not clear, are not talking to the right person. So your opportunity to stand out is just by, as Moko said, making it clear, making it effective, making it honest and transparent and you will improve your conversions. If you had a value proposition that was average or below.

Momoko Price: Yeah, it’s just a clear value proposition, a clear motivation aligned value proposition. Like, like a value proposition that’s aligned with what your customers want. That is an exceptional value proposition. Like that’s way ahead of the curve for most people when they’re, when it comes to their websites. Right. So yeah, like most of the time when I’m working with clients like that’s the, that’s the objective, right? Like they’ve gone so far off the rails trying to be exceptional in all these overly subtle ways that they’ve, they’ve just missed the entire point of just like letting like making it clear to customers that you have what they’re looking for, what they would like to use.

Louis: Yes.

Momoko Price: You know, so like for example, the. I just wanted to give a headline, I just looked it up now like the petdoors.com headline that we ended up going with is shop the world’s largest selection of built to last weather tight pet doors. Right. So in that headline I’ve included a. I mean it’s petdoors.com so you better be looking for pet doors if you’re there. But like obviously, but obviously like have the word pet doors in there because you’re selling pet doors, right? And then it says shop. Like we found out through our survey responses that the number one differentiator that people for why they ended up choosing from petdoors.com as opposed to somewhere else was that they had the largest and more comprehensive selection. Right? So shop the world’s largest selection, which is actually true of built to last weather type pet doors. Because when we asked around with the visitor surveys, what’s the number one thing you’re looking for? The two things that came up were like being weathertight and being durable. So quality and durability. And then when we talked to the customer survey, like we surveyed the customers, they said the number one benefit that they got from buying from petdoors.com is that it was the resilience, like it was the how durable and how like what good quality it was and all that stuff. So there was like this very clear overlap between like what people wanted and what people got, but they didn’t. But the website copy was getting in the way of that flow. Right. So all we had to do was just come up with a value proposition that like opened that up and showed, you know, that yes, you will get exactly what you’re looking. The number one thing you’re looking for is like durable weather type pet doors. And you need an obscure part that not everyone has. You can get it here. So it was very easy in that respect and it worked really well. They still have it up there.

Louis: Now this is a fantastic example, really fantastic. Because pet doors are not necessarily the sexiest product to sell. And you didn’t try to get crazy smart about it. You just said as it is based on people’s research and they still have it today, meaning that it probably worked. Do you have any numbers to share potentially between the headline that was there prior and the new headline you came up with?

Momoko Price: Yeah, well, we ran the full page. It was a redesign of the full page. And then since then they’ve gotten like a. I can’t remember, I have the case study. Hold on. I know that when we ran the tests, we ran a couple of tests back to back and we ended up getting like a 51% increase in transaction rate and like a 92% increase in like revenue per visitor or something like that. So yeah, it was very good. It was a huge bonus. But then since then they’ve had it. I went back six months later to just because I like to double check and see how are things going with these people I’ve worked with. And I think it was, can you give me just two seconds and I’ll find the case study, because I have it.

Louis: Sure, go on. This is the beauty of this podcast, as you can hear, is that we are not staging any of it. And this is another thing, by the way, that people like about this podcast is the convers, the conversations, not the overly stage questions and answer that everybody will hear typically in a podcast.

Momoko Price: So, yeah, we increased the revenue per visitor from the. By doing an overhaul, like a value proposition based overhaul of the homepage, we increased the revenue per visitor by like 145%.

Louis: Wow.

Momoko Price: So, yeah, I mean, to be fair, I do need to make sure that it’s understood that like, they had like a pretty standard E commerce homepage to begin with. Like, it’s not like, like we got. I think you can get a lot done. You can get a lot of wins just on like following these basic principles. But like, obviously, if it’s. If you know, you have a highly optimized homepage and you’ve been iterating for ages and you’re really getting down, like, you might not be able to get those types of results. Like, that’s very. I just want to make that clear because I always want to make sure that people understand that, like, yes, it’s great to get wins like that, but it also really depends on the context. If it’s a completely unoptimized page, yeah, you can definitely get a lot of wins out of it.

Louis: So perhaps I can ask you a trick question, something that might put you out of your comfort zone. But can you share a case study that actually went bad? Can you share a point where you tried to work with a client? It just didn’t work.

When Value Props Go Wrong: Heat Maps Save the Day

Momoko Price: So one thing that I think is interesting, if you look at the. The one thing that comes off the top of my head, if you look at this homepage, well, obviously we’re on audio only, but if you go to petdoz.com, the original homepage that we had, we had a section and I didn’t get to talk about this in my. When I went over it in my talk, but we had a question or so we had a homepage that if you scroll down on it, it went from like the top of the page was very value proposition focused, Right? Like value proposition benefit call to action go. Right? And then once you go down, when you scroll further, it started to have a section that I like to usually include that really agitates, like pain points. Right? So that’s part of including that narrative of agitating that pain Point so people feel and remember why they would want to get a pet door in the first place, right? Then it gets into demonstrating the solution and what’s so great and all those great details about product related benefits. And then you go into reassurances and then you go into call to action. That’s the general flow that I like to follow, that I like to call the why try buy flow. But when we ran it the first time, we were getting an increase in clicks in the value proposition or the call to action at the top of the page. But then I found that like we weren’t get, like we’re, we’re getting okay results with the first test, but I, but it wasn’t great. I can’t remember what it was. It was definitely an improvement, but it wasn’t like, like it wasn’t something I was happy with. So then I was trying to, I was scratching my head as to like why this might be happening, but thankfully, and I strongly recommend everybody do this, I had run a heat map on the new test page as well as the control page, right. So that I could get a sense of engagement of what people were doing when they hit the page. Right. And as I scroll down, I noticed that when they got to the part that started trying to introduce the pain related narrative, you know, like, oh, it’s so tough not having a pet door or whatever. Like, you know, you have to get up all the time and like let the dog out and blah, blah, blah, blah. And when it got to that section, there was a drop off, right? Like I could see that, like people were not, they were getting that point and then it was kind of like losing people. And so my hypothesis from that was, and I suspected this just looking at the page that we came up with because the CEO of the company told me, he’s like, well, people who come to our site, they’re pretty, like they know what they want. Like they know they’re here to get a pet door. They have a pretty good sense of what they’re looking for and all that stuff. So their product awareness is very high. So my suspicion was, are people gonna have the patience to like bother going through this sort of like, you know, story related narrative that kind of walks them through like, oh, recounts the experience of not having a pet door. Or is that just gonna, People do not have enough patience for that. They just want to get to the product and buy it. So once I saw that, I was like, I think that we need to cut that part out. The part that tries to introduce Recounting the story, the pain, the before, and then bringing in the after. Let’s just get rid of the before. Let’s just take it out and we’ll rerun the test. So we took that part out and then we reran the test where it was just, it went straight from value proposition to, as you scroll down, just more details about how awesome the products are and what you get out of it. None of the stuff about how crappy it is, not having a pet door. And, and once we did that, then we got like significant improvements in results. And I was like, that was where something went wrong. So that was one of the things. And this is something that I’ve been encouraging in my core. Like my subsequent, like, beta course that I did recently is that like, don’t stop at the makeover, you know, or, sorry, don’t stop at the first iteration. Right. You do the first one. Make sure you have a heat map on that page so you can see how people are engaging with it. And you can do that with hotjar. And then, then if you, if something goes a little off about it, you have something to work with to further optimize. Right. And people don’t do that. Like they’ll just blindly run a test and then they don’t know. Like, if something’s not really working, they don’t have no idea why. Right, Right. So that’s example. That’s. That’s an example that always comes to mind. I always, I love that result because it’s like, it’s not, it’s sort of like a, you know, it’s not win or lose, it’s win or learn and, you know, something out of it.

Louis: It’s a, it’s a, it’s a pretty good way to end this step by step and value proposition. I think we went into a lot of details, which is great. So what do you think marketers in general, and not only marketers now, but marketers, tech people and founders should learn today that will help them in the next 10 years, 20 years, or 50 years?

Future of Marketing: Machine Learning and Customer Service

Momoko Price: Oh, in 10 years, 20 years or 50 years. I was thinking about this. Honestly, I know that we’re kind of saying don’t use AI to read your, your survey responses, but I do think that as a marketer, getting more familiar with machine learning in general doesn’t mean that you have to know how to run the stuff, But I do think that machine learning has a lot of potential to anticipate need and to anticipate desire. And that’s something that marketers that’s kind of your wheelhouse. So I think that’s a good thing to understand because I think over time it’s going to get to a point where it’s not really about, like, you’re going to have to be literate enough to talk about the machine learning algorithms that you have running and figure out when they go sideways, how you may want to tweak and optimize and stuff as you go. Because it’s going to be part of the process. I think if we’re talking about 10 years, 20 years, definitely you’re not going to be doing that part manually anymore. You’re going to run machine learning algorithms that will go and optimize themselves based on factors that you have chosen, like predictor variables that you have chosen as being important and optimized according to that. So you have to be able to be literate enough to go in there and say, like, maybe we should incorporate these other variables or take these out or, this one’s gone haywire, whatever. So I think that’s really important. I think another one is, and this is on the complete other end of the spectrum, but at the same time as being more familiar with machine learning and automating that kind of intel, incorporating really good customer service and really good customer compassion at the same time, because that’s the thing that keeps the customer right. You can use all kinds of crazy tactics to capture the interest or find out where the interest is and funnel it into your business. But at the end of the day, the more and more I talk to customers of my clients and stuff, it really is like, if you treat the customer well, then they stay, you know, and then you keep making money off of them, which is really important. And it’s a part of the marketing, like, life cycle that I think is highly neglected and overemphasized. And it’s left to these like, you know, unknown soldiers, you know, or unsung heroes who are in the customer service department who happen to be, you know, if they’re very good at what they do, they keep the customer for you, you know. So I think that’s the other side of it that I think is really important.

Louis: What are the top three resources you would recommend to people in particular? So that could be podcast, book, conferences, whatever it is. You have to pick three, though.

Momoko Price: Okay, so for me, in terms of, like, messaging and copy, I always say that copy hackers is just the best one to go to. I’ve been saying that for years. So I would go there if you need messaging and copy help. If you need analytics help, I find that Lunametrics is a really good blog. I can’t pick a runner up for that because I have like three blogs that I like to go to for. I’ll just leave it at Lunametrics. I find that they’re great and then I guess, yeah, for like high level. Not necessarily high level, but like broad spectrum conversion optimization strategy, conversion, Excel and the Facebook group is a really good one to say.

Louis: So Momoko, you’ve been a pleasure. I learned a lot from you today and I hope that listeners will as well actually know that they will. You shared a lot of nuggets. So where can listeners connect with you and learn more from you?

Momoko Price: Well, if you want to connect with me, I think I actually killed my Facebook and I killed my Twitter. I’m on Instagram for momocoprice if you want to just. But it’s basically pictures of me with like bruises and like cauliflower air from going to the MMA gym. So that might not be the best way to connect with me. LinkedIn is still there, but if you really want to like talk to me then or just like keep in touch with what I’m doing and get a dialogue going, you just like, you can go on my website and there’s the option to download my value proposition book and through there I actually send out letters to my list of people that I’m engaging with and we just go back and forth and I give updates about what I’m doing and stuff. So there’s that too. PriceAntan IO is also my email. I love email.

Louis: So your website, you mentioned your website, but you haven’t.

Momoko Price: Sorry, it’s Kantan. K A N T A N I O.

Louis: Great. So Momoko, once again, thank you so much for your time.

Momoko Price: All right, man, it’s good to talk to you.

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