What is UVP?

At some stage or another you might have heard of the phrase 'elevator pitch'. It's basically a short 30 second pitch about your business idea or proposition. This typically includes who your target market is, what benefit you offer your customers, a description of your products or services and most importantly what makes you unique – what's different about you compared to everyone else in the market.

Unique Value Proposition (or UVP) is exactly that. It is a clear statement that communicates to your website visitors exactly what you are offering and why you are the only business making this offer. It's not the same as having a 'tag-line' which is usually something short and memorable.

A UVP doesn't have to be memorable but it needs to be a strong, clear and concise statement about your business so that every time someone lands on your website it should be immediately obvious to them why they should be doing business with you and not with someone else. For example, Amazon's UVP is 'Low price, wide selection with added convenience anytime, anywhere.' In one sentence they have summarised what sets them apart from everyone else.

Identifying your UVP should be one of the most important aspects of your marketing strategy but surprisingly, many businesses struggle with this and often ignore this key area of their business and website.

UVP success story

The team at Future Now, like most other marketers, are passionate about establishing a strong UVP for every website. To prove the importance and effectiveness of a UVP, they used one of their clients Accepted.com as a case study. They ran a test where they drafted three different versions of UVP and tested them against the original website.

They trialed UVPs that communicated how long Accepted.com has been helping customers, how much success they have had and the kind of customer problems they can solve.

The result was a whopping 30% increase in conversion, resulting in tens of thousands of dollars in extra sales!

As you can see, by just identifying your point of difference and communicating that with your customers, you can actually impact your conversion rate.

So how can you go about establishing a UVP?

UVPs are the best way to spark the interest of someone that has landed on your website within that 3 second time frame we often talk about. A big part of establishing a clear UVP is putting yourself in the customer's shoes – what does he/she have to gain by specifically doing business with you?

Here's a few tips to get you started:

• Get input from your employees. Get a group of people in your company together – and ideally someone from every department so you get input from every area in your company. Even better if you can involve each and every one in your company through an email. You want them to answer the simple question 'what do you think we do best?' This will give you a range of answers from every part of your company.

• Ask your most faithful customers. Find out from a few of your most faithful customers why they chose you. Clearly they think you offer something that no one else does, so find out what it is and get as much detail as possible – remember, if it's a great quote you can even use this as a testimonial on your website!

• Think about why you decided to go online with your business. What made you think you needed to be online – maybe you saw an opening for a product or service that no one else is offering or maybe you can do it better, quicker or cheaper?

• Create first draft of UVP list. Once you have the list from all the three exercises above, look for points that have a common thread and separate them out as your UVP list.

• This list should be the foundation of your UVP. Now you just need someone that is a good writer within your company or someone you can hire for a few hours to write around five versions of the UVP.

• Test each of the versions compared to your website as it stands. You need to place this UVP on your homepage and any other important landing pages (if you have any PPC advertising set up, all your landing pages from these campaigns should have your UVP). Test each one of the UVPs against your website and check for conversion rate - remember not to change anything else on your website during this period because you want this test to give you the best possible indication of what the right UVP can do for your results.

• Pick the one that gives you the best conversion rate.

Once you have set up your UVP, remember that this will distinguish you from the rest of the market place and help you become a leader but to stay on top it's always good re-visit your UVP, tweak and adjust it as your business develops over time.