USP is a marketing acronym which is thrown about often these days. A USP is a Unique Selling Proposition or Unique Selling Point; it is the service or feature that makes your business stand out.
At Click Convert we always ask our clients – why on earth should we buy from you? The answer to this question is more often than not your businesses Unique Selling Point.
What a lot of people seem to get wrong is that this should be established much before you even start your business. In fact this should be the reason why you get into business in the first place.
A lot of businesses don’t have this established and it may sound like this isn’t necessary but in the customers eyes it is.
Your USP is what will make you stand out from the crowd and tell your customers why they should come to you instead. It could mean the difference between you having a profitable business or no business at all. So it is vital to get this right.
Unless you can pin down what makes your product/service unique in the world of same old competitors, you cannot target your sales efforts successfully.
It’s safe to say that you find yourself in the shoes of customers every day, maybe not in the same industry, but when you go food shopping or clothes shopping, you can see and experience how cluttered the advertising space is and how many options a customer has for everything.
Very few businesses are one-of-a-kind therefore having a unique product/service is very difficult.
But that’s not to say that you shouldn’t go to business. You should, but an established USP will only help you and your potential customers.
Because customers have so many things to chose from, they just simply don’t have the time to evaluate every product and service every day. That’s why you need to do it for them.
There’s 3 categories of Unique Selling Points that no matter the business you’re in, you will always fall into. And these are the categories that you need to select in order to attract your target audience:
-
Price
-
Quality
-
Service
But before we get into that, first you need to know who is your target audience.
Understanding your Audience:
In our own case, we were an online business that as the recession kicked in we really started to suffer and having been through all that pain and understanding it from that perspective we’re now on a mission ourselves to educate and help other business owners to not become the same victims that we were.
It isn’t all about making money, we have a valuable message and we’re trying to spread that message out. Service and Quality.
We are paid advertising and turnaround experts with a business mindset and the right owner perspective that will get you and your business exactly where you are trying to get to.
What is your Competitive Advantage?
Find out what is missing and how relevant it is in a scale of 1-10. If the market isn’t meeting those needs then that’s where you come in. This is a very strong basis to enter any market if you can provide something that the market is lacking on.
Years and years ago, like we said on our last blog post, organic traffic was easy to come by and nobody really had to do anything to get sales.
But if you are selling online nowadays and hoping to get a lead or a sale from the results the page without doing any work then you’re an imbecile.
Those days on the internet are gone. There’s still room for organic traffic but that is only achieved with very good quality SEO which takes a lot of time to achieve.
You have to engage with your customers, give them value, build trust with them . You have built that trust and connect with them enough times that when they are ready to buy they will remember you and feel comfortable enough to buy from you.
Testing, perfecting and conveying your Unique Selling Point.
The most important thing here is that you convey your USP clearly, but remember that an USP doesn’t have to be blindly obvious at first glance.
Take Screw fix as an example, their USP is based on the fact that you can order something online on a Saturday night and collect it from the shop as soon as they open on Sunday and do the job you want to do, quick and hassle free.
So in effect, their ordering system, their stock and price check and their distribution network are their Unique Selling Points. The categories being Price and Service, as I mentioned above. It always falls within two of the three categories.
Therefore the most important thing that you need to do is to step away from your business and look at it with an impartial mindset and think why should anyone buy from you instead. Look at your business as a customer would.
Whether you’re creating your website, logo or online advertising campaign, you need to make sure that not only everything flows but that the message is being spread collaterally and equally throughout.
Below us a list of things to do when thinking about your Unique Selling Point(s):
-
Conduct market research; you in effect need to put your customers into groups of audiences and groups of interests – ex: if they are senior surgeons interested in yachts, your audience is professional people in the medical sector with interest in sailing.
-
Make a list of everything you know about your target Audience/Interests.
-
Know what steps your potential customer needs to take on the path to purchase – is it an instant/impulse purchase or is it a purchase where you need to nurture and build a relationship/rapport for it to happen.
-
Make a list of the needs that your products/services will meet – what hot buttons does this purchase walk hand-in-hand with; Is it the desire for control, or desire to be the best or is it a wish fulfilment, find that out and play with that.
-
Know what motivates your customers buying behaviours and buying decisions – someone passed away and they’re left thinking well it could be them so they decided to buy that Lamborghini they have always want to buy.
-
Screen your USP against trends and competitors – but focus on selling benefits and not features. Tell them what benefits your customers will reap from purchasing your products.
-
Match your USP against what you and your business are good at.
-
Make sure you are communicating your USPs clearly to customers.
If you are reading this with your business up and running and panicking because you don’t know what your Unique Selling Point is, that’s fine!
There are plenty of ways to find out what your Unique Selling Point is, but the best one is probably the simplest – just ask your customers.
If someone has signed up to your service or bought something from you, ask them why they chose you.
Once you know what people like about your business – you can use this to bring in more people like them.
Ask yourself these two key questions:
-
Do you know what your Unique Selling Point is?
-
Are you utilising it?
