One of the things that you need to identify in order to better serve your audience is to determine what makes your products and/or services different from others. What makes yours so special? How will your products or services solve the consumer’s issues better than someone else’s? If you can answer these questions, you’ll be more likely to create marketing materials that stand out from the crowd.
In business this is called your unique selling proposition, or USP. It’s just one statement that describes how your offering is different from your competitions’ offerings. In order to figure out what your USP is, you can answer the following questions:
* What are you selling?
* Who is your target audience?
* How do you do it?
* What do you do better?
* What’s in it for the consumer?
* How is your offering different?
* What’s your one big promise?
Figuring out how you’re different can take a lot of thought. But, once you identify how you’re different you’ll have a clearer idea of how to market your offerings. There may actually be very little difference between what you’re offering and what your closest competition is offering. It may boil down to the main difference being you.
What you bring to your products and/or services is a unique thing that no one else has. Sit down and write down why this makes the products or services better. Are you faster? Are you an expert in some way? Do you have a lot of successful results to share? Do you have an inside on the market that no one else has?
By identifying these differences, you’ll come closer to discovering your USP. Once you discover it, write it down. Often times a USP becomes the business’s tag line. People want to know why they should buy your product and how you stand out. Look at your USP as one sentence that states what your product is and why the audience should buy it. The reason should be the differentiating factor that causes people to want your product over another one.
You may want to focus on price, or experience, or something else entirely in your USP. It’s totally up to you, but whatever it is, you’ll need to show that it’s different from the others. Some people call the USP a positioning statement. It’s the statement that puts into the consumer’s mind how you are different from your competitors.
When you make your positioning statement, you need to be able to back it up with proof. If you’re the cost leader, prove it. If you have the most experience, prove it. Whatever you say must be provable and factual.
To create a USP for your brand, fill in the blanks:
[Target Market] [product name] is the one [category] that [benefit] because [product name] is [reason to believe.]
By filling in the blanks, you can create the start of a realistic and working USP or positioning statement that clearly tells not only the public but also yourself and the other people who help you in your business what you stand for. Everything you do should pass through the standard set in the USP.