Refining your value proposition

In the past I’ve written about encapsulating your business plan for potential investors in an executive summary, or even more succinctly as a high concept startup pitch. This is helpful for communicating to angel investors and VCs, but it doesn’t help you communicate to new and potential users of your product why they should try your site.

Whether you plan on acquiring new users through viral growth, SEO, SEM or banner advertising, the basic principles of marketing apply. You need a Value Proposition and a Call to Action. It helps a lot if your value proposition is unique so that it stands out from its competitors

I sometimes ask entrepreneurs “What would a banner ad look like for your site?”. This isn’t because I expect startups to be buying banner advertising, but because the discipline of condensing your consumer value proposition to fit into a 728 x 90 banner forces you to crystalize what is unique about your site. It forces you to focus on your value proposition in absolute terms, not relative to a competitor (”Higher quality video sharing than Youtube” doesn’t fly for example), without using any buzz words (”File class agnostic media sharing” would not make a good banner ad). Often it surfaces a key issue for startups going up against an incumbent - if your banner ad could equally apply to the leader in the space as it could to you, then you likely have a hard hill to climb to drive traffic to your new site.

Some examples might include, for Youtube “All your online video”, for Streetfire (a Lightspeed portfolio company), “Car videos for car guys”, for Hulu, “Watch your favorite TV shows online”, for Wonder how to, “Every how to video that exists”.

Mike Spieser recently gave startup marketing advice of a similar nature, focused on optimizing the vale proposition and call to action in your Google Ad Sense copy. Although he focuses more on the A:B testing aspect that Google offers to refine your value proposition (improving copy is an easy way to increase user interaction), the constraints imposed by the marketing medium still serve to distill your sites value proposition.

I’d like to hear from readers some examples of banner ad copy, whether for their own site or for various well known websites.

(Read more from Jeremy's blog here.)