How to Develop a Compelling UVP for Competitive Displacement

Build on your competitor analysis by benchmarking your own marketing and sales efforts with competitor comparisons. This can identify points of improvement, which will then inform your UVP and overall marketing strategies for engaging the buying group at target accounts.

Start by gauging your audience's perception of your brand and offerings. You can collect this data from multiple sources, including social listening, reviews, and testimonials. This will reveal how your audience and clients view your brand against your competition, and also guide UVP optimisations.

Another powerful strategy is combining these insights with feedback that sales and Client Success (CS) teams have collected directly from clients and prospects.

Implementing this process will unveil any issues that can be resolved quickly, in order to improve your overall user and client experience (UX and CX) and reinforce your UVP with existing clients.

Interviewing loyal clients is also another effective strategy for evaluating the market perception of your brand—particularly when collecting information from clients that have switched over from other providers.

Be sure to ask questions to uncover the motivation for the switch: what improved when changing providers, and what factors they believe should be optimised in your services. These interviews can also be leveraged to build powerful testimonials to support lead nurturing strategies across the entire buying journey.

Next, identify the main pain points your clients seek to resolve with your solutions. This will enable you to implement a client-centric approach to align with these needs and effectively address them with a robust UVP.

Moving forward, combine these insights with your competitor analysis to cement your key differentiators. Be sure to regularly assess these differentiators in line with the latest client feedback and competitor developments to ensure your core values are in line with the latest market shifts.

This process will result in an interesting approach to developing and positioning the core value that differentiate your services from the competition.

UVP messaging should be transparent and direct.

Be sure to craft UVP messaging with vocabulary that resonates with your audiences and, if possible, each buyer persona (within your buying groups).

One technique for enabling this tactic is to create data sets listing the common language of different personas (ideally industry-specific) and organise them in word clouds. These can highlight their frequency of use to guide teams building messaging and outreach.

As your solutions, industry, and market conditions evolve over time, it is crucial to stay agile and pivot your messaging as necessary to meet the changing needs of your buyers—and tailor strategies to drive their progression through the buying journey.

Perform A/B testing and measure marketing performance against outcomes achieved in previous campaign iterations. These data insights can then be combined to inform updates to your messaging and UVP.

Once you have conducted your analysis, compare your performance to competitors (even if qualitative is only possible), to determine the competitive positioning and efficiency of your new messaging.

By adopting this process, you will ensure that your UVP is relevant for your audience (and buying groups) as the market shifts and their demands inevitably diversify.

Your UVP can play a key role in activating competitive displacement campaigns to drive performance throughout the buying journey and win more market share.

Demand generation plays a crucial role in competitive displacement.

The focus of demand generation strategies is on developing long-term brand awareness and interest by driving engagement with the entirety of the buying group at target accounts—and continuing this process to generate and capture demand for your products or solutions.

Furthermore, effective demand generation programs are built on ensuring a cohesive client experience (CX) for the entire buying group throughout the buying journey. These elements of demand are essential for fostering client loyalty and proactively shielding your strategies from similar tactics employed by competitors.

To support this process, ensure that your demand generation tactics are aligned with your competitive displacement campaign and UVP, to promote messaging that positions your offerings in a way that resonates with your audience.

An important element of this is driving sales and marketing alignment and implementing interdepartmental processes to ensure that all teams receive the support they need.

For example, sales teams should be provided with sales enablement resources that leverage new messaging and emphasise your UVP (e.g. short-form checklists, tools, templates). These should be primed for use in outreach to speak directly to common pain points and establish trust.

In order to yield the best results from this strategy, sales teams ought to share intelligence with marketing teams on the performance of marketing materials. This feedback will help to shape how materials evolve in line with prospect behaviour and needs, as well as serve as an indicator of brand perception.

Amplifying targeted marketing efforts toward competitor client accounts, especially in critical moments such as contract renewals, is also key to encourage prospects to shift from their current options to your services. This should include showcasing your brand and UVP to decision makers at these accounts to inform them on your services and guide the evaluation process.

Finally, it is essential to establish overall goals and KPIs for measuring the performance of your demand strategies. While these should be adjusted as necessary, defining metrics beforehand enables teams to assess progress and align strategies accordingly to achieve goals.