A Unique Selling Proposition, commonly referred to as USP, is the one thing that makes your business distinct and better than your competition. Its most significant benefit is that it makes your business stand out when compared to other businesses in your market or niche.
Before you can begin selling your product or service to anyone else, you need to have to sell yourself on it first. This is particularly important when what you are offering is similar to those around you. It is very seldom you see a truly one-of-a-kind business.
The key to effective selling in this situation is what marketing experts and professionals call a Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Accentuate Web Design and Marketing can help you pinpoint what makes your business unique in a world filled with homogenous competitors. Without clarity of actions, which our marketing experts can help you with through our digital marketing sessions, it would be a challenge to realise your business goals.
Accentuate’s marketing experts can help you do a quick competitor analysis, to get a good picture of your industry. We can then work with you to inspect your specific business goals and match them to a strategy to attain results online.
What is a Unique Selling Proposition?
Customers are constantly bombarded with options daily. In simple terms, a unique selling proposition is a statement that differentiates your brand and products from your competitors. Your aim with your USP is to help your customers quickly understand what makes a product or service different.
Successful brands find the right way to position themselves and their products to stand out instead of just blending in. If you analyse what your competitors say when they sell, and how they sell their products or services, you can learn a great deal about how your competitors distinguish themselves from competitors.
A unique selling proposition helps keep your marketing strategy in focus and influences your messaging, branding, and copywriting, including other essential marketing decisions. A USP at its core aims to answer a potential customer’s immediate question when they encounter your brand: What makes you different?
To immediately answer this pertinent question, your USP should play on your strengths and effectively relay what makes your brand or product of extreme value to your customers. Simply stating you are “unique” is not a strong selling proposition in itself.
Marketing statements/offers such as 50% off, free shipping, and 24/7 customer service, are not USPs. Yes, they can potentially bring in product sales, and even attract customers, but they do not reflect your product’s relevance.
You must be able to differentiate yourself from your competition with aspects that your target audience cares about for your messaging to be effective.
Why is a Unique Selling Proposition important?
If done right, your brand, or product’s unique selling proposition sets the foundation for the creation of a solid and effective marketing strategy. The main importance of creating a unique USP is that it’s an effective way to divert business from your competitors and gain a sustainable competitive advantage.
Note that a unique selling proposition concisely states what you sell, to whom you sell it, and why it’s better or different from what else is out there. When your target audience reads your USP, they should be informed immediately why you are the best choice.
What a Unique Selling Proposition does:
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- Defines the position of your brand in the market, which involves the value you offer and the problem you solve.
- Helps your prospective customers find the right solution and helps them navigate through a variety of options available.
- It guides your customer-facing team to focus on your company’s mission and what they should align to.
- It is a critical part of your marketing strategies as it forms the core of your messaging, ads, social media, etc.
Even if you know what makes your products and business different from your competitors, if you don’t convey that clearly to your prospects through your marketing materials, it won’t matter. Writing a USP helps with branding and marketing your business, also becoming the cornerstone of how your business brand is recognised. More importantly, it’s a key to winning new business and retaining loyal customers.
Writing your unique selling proposition might seem like a daunting task, but you may engage our expertise to help you out.
Tips to Create a Successful Unique Selling Proposition.
Even though every USP is, well, unique, that doesn’t automatically mean there isn’t a process you can follow to put your effort on the right track. Note that it is not just a persuasive line of copy on your home page, a USP is ultimately how you position your products or even your entire business to the rest of the world.
Here’s a Hot Tip: Your Unique Selling Proposition should be one to two sentences, tops. It should include the following:
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- Your business name.
- Your type of business.
- Who do you help/train/teach/support?
- Problem your business solves.
- And your end purpose.
A great example of a unique selling proposition is Slack. It has propelled itself to the top of its industry partly due to the pandemic when remote work was a necessity. Its USP is strong: Slack is your Digital HQ. It isn’t just a team chat tool, but it also provides a central place to work, store documents and set tasks.
Slack’s USP capitalised on what consumers need, and further down its page, it reiterates this with its slogan: Slack is where the future works.
Another great example is Canva, which is Empowering the world to design. It is an online design and publishing platform that makes it easy for novices to design professional vector graphic assets and share it in minutes. Its simplicity separates it from its competitors, whose products require a steeper learning curve, and are aimed towards experienced artists.
By understanding its place in the market, they’ve uncovered their competitive advantage and turned what could be construed as a weakness into their unique strength.
Pro Tip: Don’t force yourself to be unique for the sake of it. Your USP has to tie into what people want and the type of people you’d want to be your ideal customers.
Conclusion:
Creating a unique selling proposition isn’t a walk in the park, but it’s worth all the effort. When done properly, it will help you attract new customers, make your business distinct from your competition, and convey what value you can offer your customers.
Remember that consistency is the key when it comes to branding. If you’re in a quandary on how to write your USP, keeping it front and centre, and making your business name a winner, we recommend getting the services of experts.
Your products and/or services may not be all that unique in your market niche. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a strong unique selling proposition to divert customers from your competition to your brand.
By booking in a digital marketing session with Accentuate Web Design and Marketing, we can help you uncover what’s unique about your products and/or services. Let’s work together and find that spot in the market where you can plant your flag that’s relatively untouched by your competition. Book a digital marketing session with Accentuate, today!
