Creating a great Unique Selling Point or USP is much like making a love letter.  You must, through words, create an image of yourself that the object of your affection will love in return.  Unlike love letters though, you’ll have fewer words with which to accomplish your goal.

Daunting as it may seem, making a USP for your business is actually quite easy if you follow the steps outlined below.  By breaking the task down into manageable items, you will be able to trim down your message to include only the most pertinent, compelling and effective words in your USP.

1.  List down the Unmet Wants or Needs. 

To make an effective USP, know what your customers want and need.  Next, determine which among them are not being met by your competitors’ USPs.  For instance, due to the rising popularity of health products and healthy lifestyle, a restaurant that has a USP of “all ingredients are 100% organic, guaranteed!” can effectively compel a significant portion of the market to dine in the said restaurant.  Gift shops can also take advantage of the market’s growing need for more personalised gifts; they can offer a range of customised or made-to-order products as well as free hand courier service.  To gain some insight on your customers’ unmet needs, talk to your customers; conduct a baseline market study.

2.  Determine Which among Possible USPs You Can Deliver. 

A powerful USP is only half of the equation.  For your USP to be really effective, you should actually be able to deliver its promise.  Offering a 30-minute delivery guarantee to customers, for example, entails that you make a study of the routes, traffic flow, production process, and the many factors involved in making and delivering your product to your customers.  This can cost money.  You may have to invest in new equipment (e.g. automatic ovens, GPS-capable gadgets), a traffic update service subscription, personnel training, etc.  Choose from among your possible USPs one that not only packs a powerful message but is also affordable, manageable and deliverable.

3.  Keep it Short, Effective and Unique: 

Now, trim down your USP to its most effective length.  Keep it below 10 words.  Include powerful ad words such as YOU (to directly communicate with the customer) and highly visual adjectives.  Furthermore, the benefit must be couched in tangible and measurable terms (delivery within 30 minutes, $xx dollars less, uses 300 Watts less power, etc) so that the readers will immediately realise its value to them.  Naturally, your final USP must be unique.
 

Having a business without a Unique Selling Point (USP) is like running for office without a defining slogan.  The result can be similarly devastating:  you’ll lose.

Your business needs a USP.  It’s your business’ unique promise to customers.  It cuts through miles of marketing red tape and categorically tells your customers that “this is who we are and this is what we can do for you that any other company cannot”.

Not having a USP will hurt your business in more ways than one:

1.  Lower Conversion Rate: 

Having no USP almost certainly means a lower conversion rate for your ads.  Your Unique Selling Point is the central marketing message upon which the customers you are targeting will focus; it will be the pivotal factor in converting potential customers into buying customers.  To illustrate, imagine that you are a typical customer who has become tired of pizza delivery delays.  Wouldn’t an ad for a pizza place that says “delivered within 30 minutes or your money back” compel you to try out the company that made this claim?

2.  Less Memorable: 

People tend to think of businesses and brands the way they think of other people.  Some are hard to remember and yet others (the noisiest, the most trustworthy, the most artistic, etc) are very easy to remember because of their defining characteristic.  In the same way, businesses that are able to invoke emotional responses from customers through a defining characteristic are usually remembered and get referred to others.  Loreal’s “because you are worth it” manages to cut through the price issue by addressing its customers’ need for quality and their desire to pamper themselves and to feel good.

3.  Less Focused: 

Not having a USP also decreases the focus for your business and leads you to try covering all the bases – to try satisfying all of the implicit and explicit promises you make to your customers.  This stretches out your resources for less the market share.  Consider Head & Shoulders’ USP “you get rid of dandruff”.  By focusing on the dandruff issue, Head & Shoulders is able to concentrate all of its resources in delivering this single promise.  It is also able to corner a specific niche or portion of the shampoo-buying market.

Indeed, being generic hurts your business.  Stand out from the crowd through your unique selling point.  Start by reading about how you can formulate a USP for your business.  Resources abound online; marketing newsletters are especially helpful in this regard.  If you are finding it exceedingly hard to create your own USP, seek professional marketing help.

An important aspect in any strategic marketing plan is solid market research or analysis.  Others may call it competitive research/analysis/intelligence, but they all boil down to one thing:  knowing what goes on in your industry from trending to movement in your competitors’ businesses and such before laying down your marketing campaign.

The data you have gathered will help you analyse each critical part of your business and, accordingly, conceptualise your next steps taking into consideration the information you’ve learned about the activities of your competitors, including their physical presence in strategic locations, their advertising campaigns, newest launches or re-launches and even their soon-to-be releases.

Hence, your market analyses (and who does them) are very important in the creation of your counter-attack plan, so to speak, which will be instrumental to capturing your share (and a larger share at that) of the market that you have in common with your competitors.

Down on All Fours
When doing your research, it is important to remember that your job is not only to find out EVERYTHING there is to know about what your competitors are doing but also to protect your company or brand in the process. 

The last thing you need is to be accused of spying, although in the competitive business industry, market analysis is an accepted part of any company’s research and development sector; it is acceptable as long as it is accomplished without doing anything illegal. Nevertheless, your research should be as thorough as possible. 

You may be required to go down “on all fours”, figuratively speaking, just to get relevant information on your competitors’ movements and activities.  Not to make it sound like a dirty business, the point here is that your chosen researcher/analyst should be able to gather relevant information by exhausting every legal means possible. 

Otherwise, your efforts will be in vain.

What They’re Doing
Based on what you’ve learned, you can make a few sound assumptions on what works and what needs improvements.  From here, you can conceptualise strategies that will have better results than your competitors’ and you can learn from their mistakes.

Be careful not to copy whatever successful formula they have already concocted, though, since you could also be sued for infringement.  You may however, base your campaign on what they’ve done.  Repetition and copying is not only devious but also pointless.  What would be the point of offering exactly the same services that your competitors are already providing the market? 

Your services should be distinct enough to make a difference and to generate interest. Instead of copying your competitors systems, products or services, what you should do is veer away from strategies that have failed; you’ll learn what these strategies are through a thorough competitive research. 

You can also find a way to improve your services, products or systems so that they exceed that of your competitors. In any business, knowing what your competition is doing is an integral part of success.  This will help you avoid any accusations of being a mere copycat, help you develop your products or services in a way that your niche market will be happier about and basically become the natural choice among everyone in the same field.

Do you set your prices according to what you believe your market can afford? If you’re a professional, do you offer a sliding scale for payment? When anyone requests a price break, do you automatically agree? All of the above practices carry a danger that can needlessly keep your revenues down.
 
When you’re tempted to set low prices, remember these points:
 
1. What someone can afford and what they will pay aren’t necessarily related in any logical or predictable way. I’ve had clients hire me who had next to no income or savings, while someone earning a six figure turnover or salary decides the same offering costs too much.
 
2. Someone may ask for or expect a bargain, but end up paying the original fee.
 
3. What you say about your products and services, and how you present your company and conduct yourself, influence what folks will pay.
 
4. Those willing to pay more may be the most loyal, trouble-free clients to work with.
 
Test your prices, instead of making assumptions about what your customers can afford!  You may be pleasantly surprised!
 

Every customer is different, so why treat them all the same?

To start treating customers as individuals, look at how and when they buy. This will help to start putting them into groups and understanding the needs of each group. For example:

1.  High volume / high value buyers…who place frequent large orders
2.  High volume / low value buyers…who place frequent small orders
3.  Low volume / high value buyers…who place occasional large orders
4.  Low volume / low value buyers…who place occasional small orders

Groups of customers who have similar needs or who behave in a similar way are known in marketing as ’segments’. You will probably need to use different marketing techniques and approaches to reach different types of customer. 
 
Now you can identify why each customer segment buys your products and services and what ‘benefits’ they are seeking.  This in turn will help you to target existing and new customers more effectively with specific products and services. As a result you can make better profits. For example, low volume/high value buyers may be more profitable for you than high volume/high value buyers who may continually squeeze you on price. 
 
You deliver benefits through what marketing people call the ‘”marketing mix”. These are essentially the tools of the marketing trade. Your goal here is to define your “unique selling proposition” (USP) - something that truly sets you apart from your competitors.

The basic marketing mix consists of:

1.  Product - the goods and services you are offering, including packaging and service content, such as warranty, after sales.
2.  Price - what the customer pays. Remember that there are different types of prices, such as list prices, discounted prices, and many different ways to arrive at prices. Price may be used to communicate the position and values of the product/service.
3.  Place - how and where the customer obtains the product/service. For example, a catalogue company may allow customers to buy through the catalogue itself, on the company’s web page or through off-the-page advertising.
4.  Promotion - the means and mix of activities used to promote the product or service, for example, advertising, direct marketing, PR, exhibitions and trade shows.

So, take some time to review your current marketing mix and identify if its giving you the best results.

How much do you know about marketing?

I come across so many business owners who simply confuse marketing with sales and focus solely on “selling”.  Yes, I know that the end result is to make a sale but there’s more to selling your product or service than making a sale.

Let’s start with a definition of marketing that I have used for more years than I can remember:

Marketing is “A management activity that identifies, anticipates and satisfies customer requirements, efficiently and profitably”. 

>>> Note the words:  “identifies” “anticipates”; “satisfies”; “efficiently”; and “profitably”. <<<

Customers’ needs are anticipated and identified by undertaking marketing research and segmentation and then a marketing mix is developed to satisfy customers - efficiently and profitably.

Businesses that adopt this marketing concept, centre its activities on the needs of its potential customers.  Its financial success will depend on satisfying those needs.

A marketing orientated business will develop a structure designed to identify and interpret customer needs; to create goods and services appropriate to those needs; and to persuade potential customers to purchase those goods and services.

This involves integrated marketing, i.e., using different marketing variables in a balanced and co-ordinated manner.

Additionally, all parts of the business will need to appreciate that they have an impact on the customer, and are therefore an essential part of a marketing process.

Are you ready to focus on your customers?  I hope so.