Your Value Explained in Less Than 140 Characters

explain value

The value that your small business is shipping to the customers is the heart of your company. The success and the future of your company will depend exactly on the value you are creating and shipping to your customers.

Often, when I am asking entrepreneurs to explain to me the value that they deliver, they start to talk, and talk, and talk until I stop them. It’s boring for me to listen to philosophies like that. They are thinking too much theoretically, and not with the brain of their customers.

Because of that one of the first proposals from my side is to think about the real description of their value. Value description not from the company’s perspective, but from the customer’s perspective.

Thinking about the value from the customer’s perspective you will create a better value description. Then, you can communicate it in a better way with your customers. Customer’s perspective will need short, understandable, and clear value description from your company.

Questions You Need to Answer to Create Value Description

If you want to create the value description that can be easily explained to your customers, you will need to use the following questions. They will lead you through the process of exercise to create better value description.

1. Who are your target customers and what they want and do?

Start with your target customers and who they are and what they want and do, to learn as much as possible about them. What you will learn answering this question will draft possible look and feel of your value description.

2. What type of problems you are solving, needs and desires satisfying?

Continue with the problems, desires, and needs that your products and services will solve or meet. They will need to be part of your value description. They are something that will make a difference between your value and competitor’s value.

3. How you will communicate your value description with your customers or your partners?

This question will need to answer about the communication techniques that you will use. It is important to define every possible technique because it will how description will look and feel.

4. What are the simplest and understandable words for customer’s problems, needs, and desire?

Often, when conducting this exercise, entrepreneurs use technical words. These words are understandable only for them and the experts in the field. This question will need a brainstorming session to find as much as possible description words. You will have only one word that can be clear and understandable not for you and your team, but for your customers.

5. How you will compose the sentence that will describe your value?

Now, when you have everything that you need, you can start composing the sentence or sentences if they are more than one. But, limit yourself on good old Twitter’s 140 characters. You know, nobody has time to read, look, or listen to something that will need more than several seconds to understand. You can start with more than one description and more than 140 character description. But, then you will work to short them and define several with 140 characters or less.

value in 140 characters

Test Your Value Descriptions to Improve Them

When you finish with the exercise explained above, you can start testing your value descriptions to find the best of them. Here are some possible ways you can use.

  • Put one of the descriptions on your website and analyze how many people see it, and how many of them click the call to action button. After one week, put other description, and again test and record the data. When you finish with all the descriptions, you can analyze the data and select the best one.
  • Give the descriptions to your sales team to communicate with customers. Ask from them to record the data about generated sales and some nonverbal communication of the customers. You will need these data to check how each of the value descriptions works with customers.
  • Create presentations that will have the value description and present them to customers. You can publish them online and analyze how many people will see the presentation. Also, you can find how many of them will click call to action button.
  • Create the blog post on your business blog and ask your customers what they think about the value. You can also ask is this value something that will solve their problems. You can receive comments and different answers that can help you to improve your value description.
  • Create an open question survey for your customers to describe their problems, needs or desires. You can collect many ideas from your customers.

When you test your value descriptions and collect ideas from customers you can change them and choose the best one. Finally, you will need to test again their effect on your small business performance.

Photo courtesy of Sergey Nivens/Bigstock.com