What’s a UVP (Unique Value Proposition) and why is it helpful when building an app?

A Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is something that will come up sooner or later for every person looking for advice on starting a mobile app business and reaching success. Everyone will tell you that if you want to sell, you need to have an effective value proposition for your potential customers that will differentiate you from the competition. 

Yes, your target audience will need a good reason to choose your app above others and you shouldn’t make them search for it. Provide one or more different value propositions that will make them convinced. 

So what exactly encourages people? You’ll find out soon. Now, from the very beginning:

Unique Value Proposition – definition

A Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is a thing (a value, an offer, a characteristic feature, a statement) that makes you different from competitors. It’s something you can promise to deliver to your target customer and something that will be a benefit for them and will solve their problem. 

How is your product and/or service better than competitors’? What benefit does it bring? – These are two of the questions that help you find your Unique Value Proposition. In the next sections, you’ll find more information on creating the UVP for your business.

Why is creating a Unique Value Proposition important and beneficial for you? 

It’s very important to understand what are the purposes of creating a UVP. First of all, this statement is supposed to show the reason why potential customers and users should choose your offer and your app above the competitors. Nowadays there are so many products of similar purposes on the market that it might be really difficult to stand out. There are also millions of applications on mobile app stores. 

Customers see and hear thousands of offers every week. They don’t want to do a deep research of each every time they want to make a purchase. That’s why making a Unique Value Proposition visible to them is so important. Thanks to it, they can understand the value of your product fast and easily! 

This promise of value can be a game changer for the target market, making your business stand out. It gives customers an insight on why you are the right choice for their problems and pain points. 

How to create a Unique Value Proposition?

Now let’s find out what are the first steps in creating a Unique Value Proposition for your business:

Do the market research

The first step when finding the Unique Value Proposition for your business is researching the target market and analysing the competition. You need to dig deep into your competitors’ business activities, goals, marketing strategies and customers to be able to become better than them. And of course, their value propositions. 

When it comes to mobile apps, the market research should include listing the features of competing apps and also what these features lack, the characteristics of their users and the app goals.

Find your target customer

The next very important action to take is defining your target customers. The Unique Value Proposition will be targeted at them. Every business has a specific audience, and trying to reach people outside this target group often results in a lack of good results. There is too much competition in all industries to ignore this step. 

So the question to ask is: who is or should my customer be and how do I reach them? Where are the target users of my app?

Define your target audience’s problems and needs

The most important factor in creating an effective value proposition is to define the problem and the solution that the product offers. This is why, as soon as you 'find' your potential customers, you should consider why they are in your target group. They are probably looking for something that will solve their problem or, even if they are not looking, they will be happy when they find a solution. You are precisely the person to provide it to them. 

The ideal customer is described as a buyer persona, and an ideal type of your app user is called a user persona. Try to define your buyer persona and user persona, and think about what their pain points are and how to solve their problem.

Principles for creating an effective Value Proposition

So to create a new, strong value proposition, you need to gather and analyse the information about everything that makes your product or service unique, solves customers’ problems and simply makes your offer attractive to the target market. 

Although it might sometimes happen, don’t treat creating a UVP like something that will come up naturally. This usually shouldn’t be a spontaneous idea, it should rather result from a well-thought strategy. 

However, a UVP can also result from the app creator’s ideas and values. For example, it might seem like the app should have a minimalistic design and the competitive products are rather complicated in terms of looks. Another example would be if the founder feels like in their business, high-quality customer service is the most important and competitors didn’t take care of that. 

To sum up, the Unique Value Proposition can also be created based on the values or intuition of the founder, and when confronting this with market research it turns out that the competition is struggling in this, it’s probably a great way to go.

Here are a couple of hints on how to prepare that strategy and create your own Unique Value Proposition: 

Describe your product 

The potential customer doesn’t know your product and you have only a couple of seconds to draw their attention. Describe your product in the best and shortest words possible – it’s the first step.

Define the benefits 

Once you recognize the pain points of your target audience that your product solves, you know what benefits you should highlight. List your app's benefits and values and mention them when creating your value propositions. 

Present your competitive advantage

How are you different from your competition? How is your product unique? Answers to these questions are often included in value propositions and are often used when setting a new marketing strategy. 

Test the UVP

Test and optimise the value proposition you created. Do customers start to connect your business with your UVP and a recognisable brand emerges from this? Do the customers you work with confirm that these values are true?

Principles summary

Going through all the above steps, you might already come up with your value proposition or even a couple of them. Read all that you’ve written about your product and draw conclusions. Maybe when you mix things up, the best Unique Value Proposition will arise. 

Unique Value Proposition example

To bring you even closer to what a Unique Value Proposition might look like, here’s an example from one of our Partners – Squaddy: 

“Squaddy lets you create fitness groups to share and track training with your community, clients and training buddies”

The creators focused on the app features and overall product benefits that set it apart from others. To date, fitness apps mostly have focused on sharing training among friends or workout tracking. Squaddy mixes these features together and enables convenient client-trainer communication, which makes the app stand out on the market. 

Check out our case study with Squaddy app here. 

Where to put the Unique Value Proposition?

So how to use the Unique Value Proposition and Unique Selling Proposition in practice to attract a prospective customer? Let’s explore where they should be placed to make them efficient and attract loyal customers. 

Website

Your value proposition should definitely be the first thing that people see when they visit your website. The UVP needs to be there to enable new customers to identify your business and your app. 

Landing page 

Every new product, just like a mobile app, should have a landing page, or a couple of landing pages. It’s a place where the most important things are: your product value proposition, an easy way to get your product (links to mobile stores in case of mobile apps) and more information about the service you offer, along with lists of benefits. 

Mobile app stores 

When it comes to mobile apps, the Unique Value Proposition also should be visible in the foreground as soon as the customer finds your app. It’s often placed in the subtitles in the mobile app stores. 

Company promotional materials

Should we even mention this? The value proposition is made also to be visible in every advertisement and in other promotional materials. Every marketing strategy needs to include defining the UVP and all marketing campaigns should be based on it.

Meta title

When users put their question or keyword in the search bar, e.g. in Google, and browse the results, they also read meta titles of the websites occurring. Remember that no one spends too much time on this and that is why it is so important to include a concise UVP there.

Pitch deck

A pitch deck is a short form of presentation of your product, often used to attract investors. This is something that is supposed to convince them to invest in your product, so its value proposition is a must there.

Sales process

During the sales process it’s also important to remind your customers about the specific benefits of your product or service and present the UVP. May it be during the first interview with the client, in the presentation you show at the beginning of the intro meeting or even in the first email, your value proposition should be defined in a way that is easy to read and understand. 

Conclusion

Creating an effective Unique Value Proposition by yourself, by going through all the above steps will let you save money and attract ideal customers whose problems you can actually solve. You can also use the help of a marketing company and agency developing your app.

Remember to take customer insights into account when thinking about your product value proposition and your marketing efforts will pay off!