Developing a Unique Selling Proposition for Digital Marketing
Marketing your business through a website, social media or local advertising is a central leverage point to increase clients and sales.
The question is “what is your unique selling proposition (USP)”
Success in any business or professional endeavor is creating your brand in a way that resonates with your potential customers. Working with many businesses over a number of years taught me that everyone thinks their product or service is the best. If a business owner, professional or entrepreneaur does not believe that why would they be in business.
The problem lies with the customer. Why would a potential customer chose your products or services over the competition. Often time, the business sees the value as price or features. What the customer really wants is benefits and a relationship they can trust.
The key here is to really think about what makes you, your products and services truly unique…what is your USP?
Lets define our term here…
- Your unique selling proposition (USP) is something fundamental to your business that you offer customers or clients that your competitors do not offer or at least not nearly as well as you do.
- This is sometimes referred to as an “epic” or “remarkable benefit.”
- Here are several examples of very successful selling propositions:
AVIS “We’re number two. We try harder.” The USP for Avis was a classic example of turning their competitive drawback into a real benefit that customers can identify with…the under dog.
Domino’s Pizza “You get fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less or it’s free.” Now there’s a unique and powerful competitive statement.
Enterprise Rental Car: “Pick Enterprise. We’ll Pick You Up.”
You get the picture here. As soon as you are able to really identify that unique element for your business or profession, you’ll be in the best position to know how to develop your brand’s USP, develop content for website and social media promotion and always have that elevator speech that clearly tells the big and unique story about your business.
Most Businesses Have a belief in why they are unique
I really believe that most business and professional people have a passion or belief in the value of what they offer. The issue is how to craft your story, your unique selling proposition. It starts with your ideal customers.
Developing your Unique Customer Centric Selling Proposition
In a great article published by Entrepreneur Magazine, they outline the simple steps any business can take to develop their brand’s unique proposition.
Here’s how to uncover your USP and use it to power up your sales:
- Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Too often, entrepreneurs fall in love with their product or service and forget that it is the customer’s needs, not their own, that they must satisfy. Step back from your daily operations and carefully scrutinize what your customers really want. Suppose you own a pizza parlor. Sure, customers come into your pizza place for food. But is food all they want? What could make them come back again and again and ignore your competition? The answer might be quality, convenience, reliability, friendliness, cleanliness, courtesy or customer service.
- Remember, price is never the only reason people buy. If your competition is beating you on pricing because they are larger, you have to find another sales feature that addresses the customer’s needs and then build your sales and promotional efforts around that feature.
- Know what motivates your customers’ behavior and buying decisions. Effective marketing requires you to be an amateur psychologist. You need to know what drives and motivates customers. Go beyond the traditional customer demographics, such as age, gender, race, income and geographic location, that most businesses collect to analyze their sales trends. For our pizza shop example, it is not enough to know that 75 percent of your customers are in the 18-to-25 age range. You need to look at their motives for buying pizza-taste, peer pressure, convenience and so on.
- Cosmetics and liquor companies are great examples of industries that know the value of psychologically oriented promotion. People buy these products based on their desires (for pretty women, luxury, glamour and so on), not on their needs.
- Uncover the real reasons customers buy your product instead of a competitor’s. As your business grows, you’ll be able to ask your best source of information: your customers. For example, the pizza entrepreneur could ask them why they like his pizza over others, plus ask them to rate the importance of the features he offers, such as taste, size, ingredients, atmosphere and service. You will be surprised how honest people are when you ask how you can improve your service.
Read the full article here Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Questions to Define Your Unique Selling Proposition
- Why should a potential customer chose you over your competition?
- What unique benefit(s) do you offer the customer…really unique?
- What are the specific values or end results the customer gain from doing business with your that the competition finds hard to match?
- Do you have product or service guarantees that set you apart?
- Why should a potential customer trust your products or services over the competition?
Our organization works to help the local business or professional service business grow their business through digital marketing. It is true that a striving business owner or professional, trying to grow their business with website marketing or social media promotion, want to “be the best”. That said, being the best is not something you attain by saying so.
How to develop a real brand selling proposition for website and social media promotion
Becoming the “best” starts with differentiation. Find ways to become truly unique in what you do and learn how to articulate and deliver on your unique services at the customer level.
One of our customers is a highly motivated and talented Salon offering manicures, pedicures, makeup and skin care. We asked the client how to define their goal in terms of the customers perspective. We proposed that…”given the high number of competitors in your market, being the “Best Manicurist” in town would be a far less valuable proposition than, say, becoming the best Salon to go to for obtaining a versatile one stop shop that offers many services on your wish list in a health and hygienically safe environment.”
Start with this question. “What would make our business the place you must go to for ________? This is practical. The answer is customer driven. You must provide real benefits that are perceived as unique and special.
If you are interested in more information on how to develop your unique selling proposition and promote it through your brand advertising, particularly with Digital marketing, take a look at this fun and enlightening video at Unique Selling Proposition (USP) Defined in 60 Seconds [Animated Video]
Featured Image Source By Pixabay
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