Lesson 2: Create Offers Your Clients Want

Welcome to part 2 of How to launch your online brand. 

Having difficulty finding what services or products to offer to your audience? 

Let’s make sure you launch a profitable brand, helping your ideal clients solve a problem they care about. 

We will use the Value Proposition Canvas, developed by Strategyzer. 

The Canvas helps ensure there is a fit between what your customers want and the values you create with your offers. 

Take time to discuss with your audience and learn what they want to accomplish. 

Use empathy to understand your audience’s pains and desires at a deeper level. 

If you overlook that part, you will spend your energy writing random articles for months or years, without knowing how to monetize your work. 

There are two parts in the Canvas: The Customer Profile and The Value Map. 

• Customer Gains: Describe the benefits your customer wants 
• Customer Jobs: What are the tasks your customer wants to accomplish? 
• Customer Pains: What are your customers’ challenges? What do they fear? 
• Products and Services: Describe your offers 
• Gain Creators: How do your products or services produce outcomes and benefits that your customers desire? 
• Pain Relievers: How do you reduce or eliminate your customer pains? 

The best way to clarify your customer profile is to discuss with potential clients; this does not mean your friends or family.

If interviewing people scares you, focus on how much you want to help them instead.  

I know you truly care about serving your tribe, so don’t let fear stop you from doing work you love.  

Let your interviewees know in advance how much time you will need with them, and make sure you respect their time.  

Example

As mentioned in the previous lesson, I’m building a side project to illustrate this mini-series.

I have decided to use a topic that matters to me as a working mother: helping parents teach critical and creative thinking to children.

My audience will be working parents who want to help their children thrive and think by themselves.

Solving a problem that I care about gives me some first ideas of pains and desires that my audience may have. I still have to interview other parents to verify my assumptions and learn more about their main struggle in terms of education for their children.

Your next action steps

Your mission for the coming days is to contact people who fit your ideal clients to set up a call or a face to face meeting. 

Ask open-ended questions and listen to what your audience has to say about: 

• Their biggest challenge regarding the problem you want to solve 
• What they do to achieve the result they want 

Write down the words your audience use to describe their pains and desires. 

Once finished with your interviews, summarize what you learned using the Value Proposition Canvas: 

1. Fill the customer profile document.
2. Use the Value Map to describe your offers and list how they address your customer pains and gains.

Let me know in the comments below how the Value Proposition Canvas helped you create products and services your customers want. 

Lessons:

• Lesson 1: How to launch your brand
• Lesson 2: Create offers your clients want
• Lesson 3: Get visible before you feel ready