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How to Craft a Winning Value Proposition

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The business landscape is perpetually shifting, but the basic fundamentals of business rarely change.

Whether your company is a scrappy startup or an international juggernaut, it needs to find a way to consistently provide value to customers – and just as important, it needs to communicate that message succinctly and effortlessly.

At the foundation of these efforts exists the value proposition, a deceptively simple set of key messages that serve as an anchor for all sales and communications efforts for an overall brand or a specific offering.

Crafting the Value Proposition

Today’s infographic comes to us from Quick Sprout, and it covers the steps in establishing and communicating an effective value proposition that can help differentiate you from your competitors.

How to Craft a Winning Value Proposition

A quality value proposition is clear, easy to understand, and communicates the specific results a customer will get. It also must explain how the product or brand is different and better than competing ways to solve the same problem (i.e. competitors, legacy processes).

Nailing these criteria helps to create an effective foundation for all sales and marketing efforts, and it can also provide a useful compass for guiding any future messaging.

Discovering Value

While the concept behind a value proposition is pretty simple, that doesn’t make coming up with one a simple task.

There are literally millions of companies in the world, and likely tens of thousands that do something similar to your company. How do you stand apart from these competitors? How do you clearly articulate the value that you can provide?

One suggestion is to look at the customer experience methodically, and to fill out an exercise similar to this one created by digital brand strategist Peter Thomson:

Value proposition canvas

As Peter skillfully articulates, a value proposition is the intersection between what you make and why people buy it. This intersection is what connects business strategy and brand strategy.

Articulating Value

What good is discovering value if it can’t be articulated clearly and concisely?

After you’ve explored the customer experience, here’s a way to put it into words:

1. Identify customer benefits
Make a list of all benefits you offer to your customers

2. Link benefits to value offering
Identify what value your products bring to your customer

3. Differentiate and position yourself
Make it clear who the target customer is, what you offer to them, and how you are different

Using these points, a winning value proposition can be crafted – and if it’s something that is being shown online (i.e. landing page, product page) it may make sense to include the following elements: a headline, a subheadline or paragraph, three bullet points, and a visual element.

The Tactics

Finally, here are some tactics that are relied on to further the effectiveness of the value prop:

Tactics for developing effective value props% Use
Clearly explain the value of products and services71%
Clearly explain why the ideal customer should choose your solution56%
Develop unique value props for separate products or services52%
Target specific value props for specific buyer personas45%
Competitive research40%
Testing value props through various media20%

What other tactics do you use to craft a compelling message about your company or product?

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Charting Revenue: How The New York Times Makes Money

This graphic tracks the New York Times’ revenue streams over the past two decades, identifying its transition from advertising to subscription-reliant.

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NYTimes advertisement to subscription

When it comes to quality and accessible content, whether it be entertainment or news, consumers are often willing to pay for it.

Similar to the the precedent set by the music industry, many news outlets have also been figuring out how to transition into a paid digital monetization model. Over the past decade or so, The New York Times (NY Times)—one of the world’s most iconic and widely read news organizations—has been transforming its revenue model to fit this trend.

This chart from creator Trendline uses annual reports from the The New York Times Company to visualize how this seemingly simple transition helped the organization adapt to the digital era.

New York Times revenue in a bar chart

The New York Times’ Revenue Transition

The NY Times has always been one of the world’s most-widely circulated papers. Before the launch of its digital subscription model, it earned half its revenue from print and online advertisements.

The rest of its income came in through circulation and other avenues including licensing, referrals, commercial printing, events, and so on. But after annual revenues dropped by more than $500 million from 2006 to 2010, something had to change.

NY Revenue By YearPrint CirculationDigital SubscriptionAdvertisingOtherTotal
2003$623M$1,196M$168M$1,987M
2004$616M$1,222M$165M$2,003M
2005$616M$1,262M$157M$2,035M
2006$637M$1,269M$172M$2,078M
2007$646M$1,223M$183M$2,052M
2008$668M$1,068M$181M$1,917M
2009$683M$797M$101M$1,581M
2010$684M$780M$93M$1,557M
2011$659M$47M$756M$93M$1,555M
2012$681M$114M$712M$88M$1,595M
2013$673M$151M$667M$86M$1,577M
2014$668M$172M$662M$86M$1,588M
2015$653M$199M$639M$89M$1,580M
2016$647M$232M$581M$94M$1,554M
2017$668M$340M$559M$109M$1,676M
2018$642M$400M$558M$148M$1,748M
2019$624M$460M$531M$198M$1,813M
2020$597M$598M$392M$196M$1,783M
2021$588M$774M$498M$215M$2,075M
2022$574M$979M$523M$233M$2,308M

In 2011, the NY Times launched its new digital subscription model and put some of its online articles behind a paywall. It bet that consumers would be willing to pay for quality content.

And while it faced a rocky start, with revenue through print circulation and advertising slowly dwindling and some consumers frustrated that once-available content was now paywalled, its income through digital subscriptions began to climb.

After digital subscription revenues first launched in 2011, they totaled to $47 million of revenue in their first year. By 2022 they had climbed to $979 million and accounted for 42% of total revenue.

Why Are Readers Paying for News?

More than half of U.S. adults subscribe to the news in some format. That (perhaps surprisingly) includes around four out of 10 adults under the age of 35.

One of the main reasons cited for this was the consistency of publications in covering a variety of news topics.

And given the NY Times’ popularity, it’s no surprise that it recently ranked as the most popular news subscription.

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