Online Value Proposition

The Online Value Proposition (OVP) is a single statement that describes your uniqueness within your online presence.

Too often we see organsiations just try and pick up existing business values and place them on the internet. This results in a lack of focus as to what the internet actually means to the business. The internet offers most businesses extra oportunities but at the same face stiffer competition challenges as information is all too readily available.

If you imagine opening a shop on a high street where all shops are the same size and offer exactly the same products or services. You can see this is a bigger challenge than being the lone provider on a high street. Well the internet is like this, you need to be able to convince your target audience to enter your shop and not the others, but the challenge is you only have a few seconds to convince them.

So what do we need to consider whilst formulating our OVP?

• target audience
• uniqueness of product and services
• challenges that the internet brings to your products and services
• differentiation over similar offerings by online competitors
• how does this differ from the offline value proposition
• how will we demonstrate this proposition
• how does it tie into the company brand

It maybe the case where diverse or larger organistions have multiple OVPs to support product ranges or different target audiences.

In everycase the OVP becomes a central pin to all online planning and strategy and needs to be reflected along with the brand in all comunications. Each OVP needs to be defined and expanded on, at Praeparo we like to think of 30-3-30 – can you explain the OVP to a new person in 30 seconds (the elevator pitch), 3 minutes (the coffee machine pitch) and 30 minutes (the formal pitch).

Once you have scripted these pitches you need to test them out on individuals from your target markets. Often we become too close to the business and take certain concepts for granted that need to be explained to our target audience. Once we are satisfied then these pitches get translated to:

• 30 seconds – tag line summary and images
• 3 minutes – main content of relevant pages
• 30 minutes – about us pages

Everyone in the organisation needs to understand these 3 pitches so that like the brand the OVP is consistently communicated.