How to write your agency's value proposition so it wows and wins clients
Writing a value proposition that wows and wins clients is rooted in a few simple steps.
Step One - Understand your audience
Step Two - Understand your agency’s most valuable benefit
Step Three - Understand the link between the service you provide and the challenge your clients are facing
Simple, right? No? Okay, let’s move backwards.
The ideal result of a good value proposition is to give clients a genuine (and impossibly tempting) taste of what you can do for them. I know this is stating the obvious, but when you’re busy defining exactly what your brand has to offer, it can be pretty easy to lose sight of your client.
So, holding this outcome in mind, let’s see how a great value proposition looks.
To connect with your clients, we need to pin down the relationship between the service you’re providing and the challenge your clients are looking to solve.
Smashbrand’s value proposition is concise, clear, and relevant. Their value proposition makes it clear that they don’t just produce packaging, but that they take the time to build a branding strategy to ensure their clients are as successful as possible. They outline a tangible advantage for their clients and demonstrate the clearest benefit their agency offers. At the same time, they’re presenting the powerful pull of well-placed alliteration, giving clients information in a satisfying triplet, and ending on a memorable half-rhyme.
Using simple poetic tools like rhyme, alliteration, and repetition can help to give your copy attention-grabbing flow. Once you’ve caught your client’s eye, use alliteration to make phrases memorable.
Incorporating these linguistic features into your value proposition can be worthwhile, but it should never be at the expense of clarity. Use them unwisely and you’ll create a poetic, but meaningless, piece of writing. Use them well, and you’ll create a value proposition that gets you noticed.
Bright and Bold’s value proposition demonstrates exactly what they can do for a brand. Again, the focus is on the client. By dangling the threat of being forgotten as soon as the transaction’s closed front and centre, they gently tap into the client’s anxiety over potential failure. They harness the client’s emotional triggers and drive home their message with pleasing repetitions of keywords and rhymes.
Ogilvy uses simple, highly emotive language to frame a relatable attack of near dystopian anxiety. They paint a vivid picture of the chaotic world brands are desperately trying to stand out in. Whilst they’re at it, their message hits all three points on the Client side of the Value Proposition Canvas shown below.
The Value Proposition Canvas
The Value Proposition Canvas is a tool I use to find how your clients’ desires overlap with the service your agency provides. Used properly, it’ll help define your agency voice’s sweet spot - which is generally hiding somewhere between business and brand strategy.
The Client side of the Value Proposition Canvas clarifies three things.
One. The positive emotional drivers that motivate clients to hire you (their wants)
This describes what it is your client desires, and can be functional, utilitarian, or a mix of both. Often, they are presented aspirationally. Smashbrand has hit on their clients’ ambitious longing in their parting words. A brand design service so effective that my product ‘sells before it hits shelves’? Yes, please.
Two. The challenges clients are facing that make hiring you a great idea (their needs)
This section of the Value Proposition Canvas taps into the rational part of the client’s brain. Bright and Bold confidently assure clients they can turn big ideas into effective brands. Every brand needs to turn heads to succeed, and Bright and Bold will help you accomplish that goal.
Three. The risks clients face by not hiring you (their fears)
All clients fear finding more work lying in wait just down the road. Finding a way to capitalise on that fear is pretty much guaranteed to be fruitful. Ogilvy’s value proposition opens with a barrage of negativity, and then soothes; peppering the positive closing lines with the word ‘we’ often enough to make their voice feel trustworthy and familiar.
Bright and Bold chose to capitalise on a different kind of fear: the ever-potent FOMO. The primary benefit of the agency lies hidden beneath a gentle threat: hire us, or you’ll only ever be looking in from the outside.
The Service side of the Value Proposition Canvas above, designed by Peter Thompson, goes beyond the standard version that just explores an agency’s benefits and features. It also explores the service experience you provide. We need to look at all three sections in conjunction with one another to see the reasoning behind this.
One. What are the clearest benefits of working with your agency?
Do you, like Smashbrand, have provable success stories from existing clients? Or, like Bright and Bold, is your strongest benefit your single-minded dedication to doing what you do perfectly? Perhaps, like Ogilvy, you have the talent required to make a client genuinely successful. You need to take some time to pin down the key selling point of your service. Ideally, this is unique to your agency alone.
Two. What are the key features of your agency?
A value proposition should include a factual description of what it is you’re going to do for your clients. Without this, your prospects won’t have a true expectation of what your agency is going to do for them. If clients aren’t able to envisage a picture of what it will be like to work with you, they’re unlikely to respond to your CTA.
Understand how you make your clients feel - what is the client experience like?
This section of the Value Proposition Canvas helps define the emotional rationale behind a client who decides to employ you. Explore why people use your services, and then think about how it makes them feel. Combining the ideas of everyone in your agency to define what an ideal client experience should look like drives the essence of your voice.
How not to write a value proposition
Three great examples of how to do a value proposition give you an idea of what rules to follow. For those of you who are contrary thinkers, I know trying to follow a set of rules can rub you up the wrong way. Luckily, there’s FakeAgency! FakeAgency is a pretend agency. I have made it up. It does not exist, so I can be as mean as I like.
Unfortunately for FakeAgency, but fortunately for this article, they’ve made a real hash of their value proposition. Poor chaps.
Avoid weak adjectives
FakeAgency is having to tell prospective clients they’re unique and honest. I haven’t entirely made this up - those words are really in some agency taglines. Using weak adjectives in a value proposition is a red flag. With FakeAgency, we’re one line in and already know their service will be fuelled by tired clichés. If your copy depends on subjective, meaningless adjectives, scrap it and start again.
Get to the point
FakeAgency has chosen to use a hefty chunk of uninspired copy to explain who they are. They’ve filled their primary landing page with more than 100 words that, ultimately, mean very little. I wrote this example, but even I’m too bored to read it all the way through.
You should be aiming to cover all the points of the Value Proposition Canvas in as few words as possible. This isn’t the place to show off your extensive vocabulary, no matter how impressive it may be. For a successful value proposition, you need to: keep it succinct, dial up the clarity of your messaging, use rhythm and rhyme to make it memorable.
Look through the client’s eyes
All great value propositions focus on the way your clients define your agency’s value, rather than the value as your agency sees it. FakeAgency has missed the memo, using this most crucial client interaction to talk only about themselves.
Every value proposition is a tool that should highlight the challenge your prospective client is facing. Then, once you’ve found the challenge, bring your agency’s message home and demonstrate how you are going to solve it. If you’re using your value proposition to boast about your achievements, and not forging an emotional connection with your client, that copy is just clogging up your landing pages.
So, we know what we’re looking for, and what to avoid. We want tidy copy, clear messaging, and for people to feel like we understand their challenges and have the solutions ready to go.
Some tips to get you started.
Clarify your message, and who it is you want to hear it
The first step in creating compelling copy is to understand exactly what it is that you’re trying to say.
Because your agency’s value proposition is arguably the most important element of your messaging, it’s crucial that this messaging is spot on. A value proposition outlines the promise you’re making to your clients and sets the bar for interactions moving forward. Take your time, and use the Value Proposition Canvas to:
Work out your ideal client and the challenges they’re facing
Better your understanding of your client’s wants, needs, and fears
Break down the primary benefit of the service you’re selling
Learn the best features of your agency’s service
Become intimately familiar with the ideal client’s ideal experience
Find out how you want your ideal clients to see your agency’s best features to understand how to present your agency.
Get to know your ideal client
Your clients are taking less than a minute to assess the information presented on your landing pages. They’re likely to be double-screening as they scroll down your home page, responding to WhatsApp messages and checking Twitter as they cast an appraising eye over your website. Pair this with the fact that our attention spans have been ruined by the constant bombardment of information we get when we’re online, and you’ve got very little time to grab your client’s attention.
Take the time to research your target audience to better understand your angle of attack. Create an ideal buyer framework, talk to your existing clients, maybe roleplay to understand the customer perspective of what it is you’re offering. Here are some questions you can ask yourself, and your colleagues, to get you started:
What makes your clients unique?
What is the challenge your ideal client wants a solution to?
How does this challenge make them feel?
Do they fit into a demographic you can utilise?
What do you think drives them to commit to a service?
Are they driven more by emotion or rationality?
Do you need to amend your value proposition depending on which country your users are logging in from?
What tone does your ideal client respond to best? (This will alter how formal or informal you can be, and perhaps whether you are qualitatively or quantitatively driven.)
If you become familiar with what drives your clients, you can tap into the psyche of all your prospects.
Final points
Your value proposition is meant to be an engaging introduction to your agency that is easy to scan, easy to understand, and easy to remember.
To make it memorable, give your copy clarity. Avoid cliché. Don’t hamper the power and precision of your voice by choosing value propositions that prioritise poetic style over meaningful substance. Pay attention to rhyme and rhythm, but meaning should come first.
Define your internal vision, values, and story before you begin. These foundations should resonate across your whole team, from sales and marketing through to accounts. If your message feels obtuse to any member of your team, there’s more work to do.
I know that the words you say, and how you use them, are the key to landing bigger and better clients. A good value proposition does more than announcing what it is you do, it tells your clients what benefit hiring you is going to bring. If you take the time to understand what your client needs from you before you start crafting straplines, the right words might suddenly seem obvious.
If you’re struggling with any of our recommendations, you can get some help from people like me. I can (compassionately) rip apart your messaging until I uncover exactly what it is that makes your agency voice unique. Once I’ve pinned that down, I’ll help you by crafting copy that wins you clients. Exciting stuff.
