If There is One Secret to Successful Marketing, It’s Your Unique Selling Proposition

Have you ever spent endless hours wondering how to get you marketing message across? Anyone who’s been involved in marketing for any length of time certainly has. So, if there is a secret to successful marketing, what might it be?

Getting your marketing message read is one of the most difficult things to achieve for any business owner and let’s face it, if potential clients don’t read your message, they’re certainly not going to take action.

Amongst the daily clutter of marketing, it’s critical that every business owner develops his or her Unique Selling Proposition. This will go a long way toward removing the clutter from your message.

So what is a Unique Selling Proposition AND how do we develop one?

A Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is the ‘thing’ that makes your business different and distinctive from all others in your market. While developing your USP is both difficult and time consuming, it’s essential that you devote the necessary time and energy. The following steps should help:

Step 1: If you haven’t done so already, spend time getting to know your market. You need to understand how your market thinks.

Step 2: Write down (in dot-point form), those issues that are of utmost concern to potential clients. In other words, identify the critical emotions of your market.

Step 3: Prioritise the emotions identified.

Step 4: Identify the most important emotional issue in your market.

Step 5: Specify the benefits (to your clients) in providing a solution.

Step 6: Describe the feelings associated with the most critical benefit.

Step 7: Write a short (one sentence), succinct statement of purpose for your business based around the feelings described in Step 6. This becomes your USP.

To demonstrate this process, let’s consider a practical example.

Imagine you have a carpet cleaning business.

Step 1: Understand how your market thinks – survey your existing clients by asking questions such as: (i) When having your carpets professionally cleaned, what are the five most important issues? AND (ii) How would you rate these issues in order of most important to least important?

Step 2: Write down your client’s concerns – use the responses to your survey in Step 1 in dot-point form.

Step 3: Prioritise – list the dot-points in order of importance identified by your survey.

Step 4: Identify the most important issue – this might be a combination of a few issues.

Step 5: Specify the benefits – this means identifying what’s in it for them (ie your clients). In other words, ask the question . . . so what?

Step 6: Describe the feelings – this step involves taking benefits to the next level. While a benefit identifies how the solution improves your client’s situation, feelings entrench outcomes into the imagination of your client. Feelings engender emotion.

Step 7: Write a short, succinct statement of purpose – while there could be any number of client concerns such as cleaners not turning up on time or not turning up at all, dangerous chemicals being used, carpets taking hour to dry, damage to valuable carpets, etc, an example of a USP using a ‘combination of issues’ approach might be: The Most Professional Clean You’ve Ever Seen OR It’s FREE.

There are many different types of USPs. Some you might like to consider include uniqueness of: technology, quality, product features, convenience, design, qualification, added value, people, systems and price. Whichever your focus, you need to embed your USP with feelings that generate emotion. After all, people buy on emotion and your ability to sell will likely depend on how well your USP differentiates your offerings from those of your competitors. The more unique you are, the better your opportunity to ‘cut through the clutter’ and get your message across.

There are many important parts to the marketing equation and we certainly do not wish to trivialise any of them. However developing your Unique Selling Proposition will go a long way toward overcoming the ‘clutter’ in your market place which in turn will enhance the likelihood of getting your message read. Once you have the market’s attention, it’s up to you to convince them that your product or service is worthy of further investigation AND that . . . sounds like the basis for another article.