The importance of a clear, compelling and relatable Customer Value Proposition for Fintechs

Ensuring you are clearly orientated to grow your business is a focus for all of the companies we work with. With pressure on costs creating laser focus on growth, amidst a constantly changing market - putting yourself in a strong position to win and retain more business is critical.

Why should you invest time and effort into defining a CVP?

Let’s start with why having a clear, well considered and worked through CVP is important. We see that setting up a basis to work from, setting out your approach, and fuelling your go to market activity are key parts that result from having a considered CVP in place.

Breaking down each element further:

Set a consistent baseline. Ensure your business has the correct footing to deliver value for your customers, which will attract them and make them stay with you. You should be able to achieve the following:

- Provide clarity for employees - what is the problem you solve, and how do customers see this

- Investors - what makes you unique, interesting, reliable and a solid partner for them

- Suppliers, how can they play a part in your success - what is the function that you do, and help them understand their part in this

- Partners, influencers and spokespeople -, a critical part and often underestimated is the ability to share what makes you stand out, allowing people to relate back to this as dialogue allows

Define an approach. Clearly understand your target market, and your approach to deliver your message, service, technology to market:

- Target market - territories, markets, audiences. Who are the people involved in the engagement, decision making and appointment of your products?

- Language and attitude - being clear and articulate is always critical, but the colour of you and your business is often best portrayed throughout the way that you talk and the communications you produce. This should reflect and align clearly to the audience and your proposition, bringing it to life and providing a platform to engage

- Differentiation - critical to the success of your engagement with prospects and customers is giving them reasons to believe why they have selected you. This is a link between the problems that they have, and how you solve them. Often called customer satisfaction, it is more than that - it is the satisfying elements, but critical to call out are the aspects which you deliver better than anyone else - they make you different and unique.

Focusing and fuelling your Go to Market - delivering solid growth and retention:

- Channel and media selection

- PR strategy

- Customer acquisition effectiveness

- Customer retention

How do I go about shaping and delivering a CVP?

It is best to start with a collective exercise. Map out a Customer Value Proposition Canvas. Useful to get someone with experience to moderate and guide you - if you feel adventurous then Miro has some useful templates.

We recommend the following process:

Make sure your vision and mission are written down, and agreed for the business/product set. Ideally, include values too if possible.

Create a customer value proposition canvas. Ensure you have people close to the customers here - and give them a voice. Often the quietest people have the best ideas - create an environment where their voice is equal.

Put the customer value proposition out to test. Get someone to do this with independence and experience in open questioning and moderating. Find the stress points - areas where customers do not align with what you have written down, and adjust for it. Equally, points that resonate - make sure they feature well.

Conduct a clear and again independent review of the competitive marketplace. Where do you sit - what makes you different, and what features do you want to play on? Who do you want to clearly differentiate from, and who do you respect and want to align to in some fashion?

Clearly define your target market, and ensure that your proposition adjusts suitably, within your CVP, for each audience cohort.

Create a clear and articulate way of bringing your CVP to life. An experienced agency will be your best port of call for this. This will be in copy and imagery - either at a business or product group level. Create clear guidelines on the approach, and elements to use for employees, suppliers and partners to use.

Plan out your go to market strategy and tactics. This should be metrics and objectives based, and focus on your commercial goals, with the CVP underpinning it - including insight around who you want to recruit and retain, how you are different, and most critically, what the problem you solve is, and why you are the best company to do this for them.

Take insights and adjust. Evolve your strategies to learn and develop your marketing mix. Keep the CVP close to hand - and refer back to this regularly. Are you focusing on your stated differentiating customer proposition? Are your marketing activities empowering this and driving business growth?