Having a strong value proposition is essential for any new startup. It tells the target market why that product is best for them, what it can do, and why it beats competitors. Nobody knows this better than Amielle Lake, CTO and founder of Tagga, who is speaking this month at TechVancouver on July 26. BetaKit spoke with her about the importance of value proposition, and the lessons she learned along the way.
Tagga is a digital marketing intelligence platform designed to fill the gap between marketers and their audiences. Providing a 360 view of each customer, the platform allows marketers to dive deeper and provide more in-depth marketing solutions that suit their audience’s needs. This allows them to optimize on marketing spend, something Lake found was needed when she worked in marketing for the financial industry with high net worth clients.
“It’s really important to get the value proposition right when creating a startup, because that is what attracts and keeps customers,” Lake said. “You only have a small period of time to hold the audience’s attention, so it is so important to be able to grab that attention in that fraction of time.”
While creating the value proposition is important, getting the target audience wrong is a quick way to making the wrong decisions and losing out on long term success. “You need to figure out if the group saying yes early on represents the early majority, not the early adopters,” she added.
“When we launched with Tagga, we launched the app for free and as soon as we wanted to start charging for our services the only people who wanted to pay were advertising agencies,” said Lake. “So we reworked the platform so the agencies could offer the service to their clients. We soon found that agencies were not the consumer, they did not have the final say, and that the brands were our target, so we had to rework our value proposition to reach the brands.”
That wasn’t the end of their journey of discovery about who would appreciate their value proposition. “We soon found that agencies were not the consumer, they did not have the final say, and that the brands were our target, so we had to rework our value proposition to reach the brands.”
In addition to finding the right audience, testing the product to make adjustments to ensure the value proposition is met, is essential. “It’s important to apply a method to test the product on as many customers as you can, adjusting as necessary, to really find out where you can provide value.”
Continuously evolving to meet the needs of the target audience, and adjusting the value proposition as new needs become apparent is what makes a value proposition strong. “Tagga evolved to using e-mail/social media to engage consumers and provide that missing piece to give the 360 view and help target the right consumer at the right time. It’s only when you are able to find that hole in the current market that you can really provide the value the customer is looking for.”
