Connect with your audience on their real-world problems to gain opportunities
Demonstrate your value with key principles that enhance your headline message and set you apart. Your principles should directly address the main challenges for your ideal client or customer, from your perspective. Well-chosen principles will make you more relevant to the right people and elevate your credibility.
In the last step, you crafted your headline message (your proposition) to get the attention of your ideal client. In this step, you’ll expand on your message with value principles that retain and engage readers, and support it with more context. These will be your pillars for the next step of expanding again into your unique framework of component elements to fill out your service envelope and help you respond to diverse client needs.
With your position calculated in the previous step, you know who to target on which problem and how you help solve it. In this step, you’ll use this information to craft your headline message to get their attention. In the next step, you’ll expand on this message with value principles that retain their attention and engage them further.
If you’re not sure what to decide for this step, use your best guess and move on. Your perspective will develop and you can always update previous answers as you go, so don’t feel too constrained by what you’ve already written either.
Your value principles are the next logical step for those people interested enough in your headline message that they want to continue reading.
Be sure to refine your headline message, value principles, and unique methodology elements to work well together.
First off, consider your headline message (or proposition) and the three main challenges, tasks, or pain points your ideal client faces in achieving it, or that will be resolved by achieving it.
People are wiling to commit to solving problems more readily, so – at every stage – it’s worth knowing which problems your expertise can help solve.
Brainstorm the key problems your methodology solves, in line with your headline message and the major problem that it solves.
Brainstorm your repertoire of expertise for high level solutions you deliver. Consider how they organize under a hierarchy structure, framework, or methodology, and how they match against your longlist of tier two problems.
Your value principles are the next logical step for those people interested enough in your headline message that they want to continue reading.
They should meet many of the the same criteria as your headline message, in that their job is to entice your reader to keep reading with relevant value. But, as their job is to retain their attention rather than win it in a crowded environment, value principles can afford to be more helpfully descriptive than attention-grabbing. In fact, you’ll need to start demonstrating some expertise to retain readers evaluating you against other candidates.
Delegating descriptive duties to your value principles frees your headline message up to focus on gaining attention than explaining your expertise. In turn, your unique framework elements, organized under these value principles, will free your principles to be more high-level in nature. Be sure to refine your headline message, value principles, and unique methodology elements to work well together.
Your value principles should work together as a set to begin demonstrating a cohesive approach. There’s lots of types of sets available, including:
Top-level process steps
Key benefits, outcomes, or characteristics of success
Key features
Three is the magic number
Aim for three value principles. Three is the optimal balance of simplicity and comprehensiveness; easy to understand at a glance, and sufficient to suggest a framework or methodology.
While it can be a challenge to refine your expertise down to three key takeaway points, consider them as a cohesive suite of abstractions of your comprehensive methodology that engages your ideal client to delve further into the one that resonates for them and explore the finer points of your expertise further.
Challenging as it might feel to organize your expertise under three key pillars, the goal is to provide sufficient information at the right time to entice your audience to seek greater detail in the area that suits them. Presenting more detail at this time creates more work for the reader to understand and choose from, and can lose them to competition that does a better job of simplifying their expertise. This commonly referred to as analysis paralysis, where a person is overwhelmed with choice and opts for the status quo: in this case, not taking action with you.
You’ll also gain a greater understanding of how your expertise is perceived by others, and the huge gap between yours and others’ understanding of the subject.
Actions
Demonstrate your value with key principles that enhance your headline message and set you apart. Your principles should directly address the main challenges for your ideal client or customer, from your perspective. Well-chosen principles will make you more relevant to the right people and elevate your credibility.
Your unique framework organizes and illustrates your comprehensive expertise, by expanding on your principles with supporting elements. Your framework should cohesively convey your service model, and help you respond to diverse problems by introducing its most relevant element. A unified, responsive framework will demonstrate your authority, build credibility, and provide flexibility.
Publishing content puts you and your unique perspective in front of your target audience. Your content should convey your headline message, its supporting principles, and their elements, in formats tailored for the publication platform. Well-written content enables your network to engage with your perspective, share your expertise with their networks, and open new channels for insight and opportunities.
Greg Harbour
Simplify your expertise to connect with more people and make a bigger difference. Greg utilises decades of creative communication experience to help leaders resolve their innovate, meaningful, comprehensive vision into a clear, compelling, and actionable proposition to reach the right people, motivate action, and create momentum.