Creating Your Unique Selling Proposition
Unique Selling Position or the acronym USP is a commonly used marketing term. What exactly is USP? It is making your product or service offer different, valuable and unique from your competitors’, and targeting a specific group of customers. Your USP gives you a positive and unique identity for your business. It is important to distinguish your product or service offer. It gives you an advantage over your competitors.
More products and services are added everyday, and consumers are overloaded with advertisements. Understand the psyche of customers. They buy into a notion and continue to stick with it until a message breaks through and persuades them to change.
Most business owners do not have a USP. There’s nothing unique or distinct in their product/service. Their message is simply buy from us. They don’t offer anything unique, of great value and benefit. Thus they only get a small share of the market.
For your business to succeed, you need to make it special in the eyes of your potential customers by creating a USP. This ought to be first and foremost in your business planning.
Here are some tips to creating your USP...
1. Create your ideal customer. Brainstorm and get feedback from family members friends, and clients. Then create an ideal customer and develop a proposition that would meet his/her unique needs.
2. Study your competition. Do what they are doing right but even better. Fill up the void in the marketplace that your competitors have overlooked.
3. Communication. To create your USP, you must clearly communicate…
- The purpose for your business existence? What does it do?
- For whom does your business exist to serve? Who is your targeted group of customers? You may have to turn away some people. Anyways, you cannot be all things to all people but you can be vendor of choice for a particular group thus creating a loyalty base.
- How would your product or service benefit your targeted group of customers? Prove your claim. c. How would your product or service benefit your targeted group of customers? Prove your claim.
- You will not be able to differentiate between your product/service from your competitors if you cannot effectively communicate your uniqueness and connect with your targeted group of consumers.
Creating a USP gives you a clear position for your business. This is in turn gives you the most of your advertising budget. Your message will be focused attracting the targeted group of customers and resulting in good conversion rates.
A clearly defined USP gives visibility to your business. It ‘brands’ your business in the minds of prospects. When some one wants to buy a product/service that you sell, your USP brings your business to mind. For example, Nike has captured the imagination of millions of customers all over the world with their famous slogan: Just Do It. And it has become Nike’s USP.
Everything that you do, from packaging, product design, advertising, and public relations must reinforce your USP, which makes you stand out from the rest. A USP is crucial to the success of your business, though, I want give to give you a parting word of caution. It is counterproductive to adopt a USP if you cannot honestly fulfill your promise. Be sure you are able to fulfill what you have promised. Otherwise, your message is nothing more than marketing hype.