What makes your business unique?
Do the customers of your business know why they should buy from you?
Many businesses have fantastic and unique aspects to their products or service, but they don’t tell their customers or prospects about it.
The uniqueness of a business is what can separate that business in an otherwise overall competitive market. Until you know what makes your business unique and how to capitalize on it your business will be just another “fish in the sea”.
Write down what makes your business different from the competition and why your product or service is more valuable than the competitors. This is also known as your USP – your Unique Selling Proposition. Simply put, your USP is what makes your business different from everyone else in your market.
So what makes a strong USP?
It could be that you have faster response times, or a different way of approaching a problem, or specialized delivery, or the ability to provide small production numbers, or personalized service, unique software, manufacturing processes, ingredients or techniques, or perhaps your business perfectly solves a specific problem. It could even be just the story of how the business came to be that relates better with the market.
For example…
Let’s say there are two competing supermarkets. Both supermarkets sell produce but supermarket A sells only locally grown produce while supermarket B sells produce that has been shipped in. Now although both supermarkets sell the same product people may be inclined to buy their produce at supermarket A solely because of their USP of locally grown produce.
In many cases the USP alone can even be strong enough to pursue people to even pay higher prices for a product or service. For instance two carpet cleaning companies, one uses chemicals that aren’t pet friendly but the other does. If all things remain the same the company with the pet friendly chemicals can actually charge a higher price for the same amount of work because people are willing to pay more for the safety of their pets. USP’s such as “hand-made” as opposed to “factory made” are also a good example of USP’s that can help raise value.
Ideally you want to make your business so unique that you don’t have any direct competition, because nobody else does it like you do. You don’t have to be the “best” – being different is enough!
Once you know what your USP is, make sure you include it in all your advertising and marketing. Make sure all your existing customers know about it (use a promotion or a flyer-drop or mail out) – and spell it out really clearly to them!
Not only does this make it clear to the world what you do and how you do it, it also makes it clear to YOU – so you’ll have more confidence in your business too.
How do you find the USP in your business?
The key to finding a USP that will help your business is to find one that resonates well with your perfect customer and the marketplace. A USP that no one in your market place cares about is a useless one. So make sure you know almost everything about your perfect customer when creating your businesses USP. Make sure your USP is in line with how your customers think and feel. You need to know exactly who you want to sell to and why.
The power of exploiting the uniqueness of your business will help to separate your business from the overall marketplace and to make it stand out from the crowd. Remember A great USP should emphasize what individual quality separates a business from its competition while giving the marketplace a reason to do business with you instead of the others.
