If your USP is that you offer great service, you have good products, you really care, or my personal favourite, you’re a family business, then I’m afraid you don’t have a USP.
Your USP is meant to make it easy for your customers to choose you over your competitors. The trouble is, if you’re saying the same thing as everybody else, that doesn’t make you stand out. It doesn’t make you unique, and it’s certainly not persuasive. The result is that your customers are likely to choose your competitors as much as they are likely to choose you.
Saying that you have a good product or service is not unique. It’s not special. To be honest with you, that’s exactly what I expect. Saying that you really care, well, I expect to do business with people who really care. Nothing unique or special about that. Saying that you have the best customer service, well, no s***.
Saying that you are a family business. Honestly, honestly, nobody cares except you and your family. It’s not something that I am willing to spend money on. I don’t care if you’re a family business. I just care that you look after me, give me what I need, and make sure that I get the results that I’m paying for.
Ultimately, your USP needs to be special. It needs to be specific. It needs to be highly relevant to your ideal customer. It needs to be something that your competitors can’t easily replicate. It needs to be persuasive and interesting, and that helps me choose you over everybody else.
What Are The Signs That You Need a Proper USP in Your Business?
The first sign is that you are under price competition all the time. That is a sign that the only differentiator is price. If you look the same as all of your competitors, the only thing that I can use to help me make a decision, to help distinguish between everyone that I can see in front of me, is price. And as we know, customers are likely to choose the lowest price when there are no other factors involved in the decision-making process. Your USP is designed to help make the value clear, not just the price.
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And the second thing is that your team members aren’t consistent and aren’t aligned on what your USP is. You have different people saying different things. You have different messages going out to your market, and it confuses your customers. That is not a great position to be in. So your USP is really, really important. If you get it right, it will help you improve your marketing effectiveness. It will help you improve your conversion rate.
How Do You Go About Determining What Your USP Should Be?
Well, what you don’t do is have a meeting about it and try to brainstorm the USP. You need to do this with some research. You need to do this with your customers. Don’t do it in a boardroom. It’s not going to work.
So, the first thing you need to do is understand your ideal customer. Now, hopefully, you have an ideal customer profile. If you don’t, you need to put one together. And what you need to do is go and speak to your customers. Find out what frustrates them. What are the things that keep them up at night? What’s really, really important to them. What are their goals? What are their desires? The better you understand your customers, the better placed you will be to determine what is important to them, and this will help you potentially unpick some of the key things that you can do to position yourself as a better choice for them.
The second thing you need to do is look at your market from your customer’s perspective. What’s it like trying to find someone like you? What are the things that are really hard or really confusing? How easy is it to find what you need when you need it in the format that you need it, when you’re a customer, when you don’t have the technical knowledge? Look at it from your customer’s perspective. There might be some really interesting opportunities and insights that will help you position yourself as someone who is easier to do business with, or something that you can do to reduce the friction.
Those are the two things that you need to look at. What is important to your customer, and what’s it like doing business with people like you? That should give you plenty of really useful information to help shape your USP.
Once you’ve decided what your USP needs to be, then the next thing you need to do is make sure that you are able to back it up operationally. In other words, make sure that you put the right processes and policies in place, and the right training in place, to be able to consistently deliver on that USP. So many businesses out there make all of the promises, but they break them. That is not what we’re trying to do here.
We want to give people a compelling reason to choose us. We want to make sure that it’s really clear, really relevant and really specific. And then we need to make sure that we can back it up. Back it up close. Yeah. I just back it up and back it up consistently, and make sure that everybody in the business understands that this is our USP, so that they can make sure they do their bit to manage customers’ expectations and follow through on their commitments.
What does a Really Good USP Sound Like?
Well, something like this. We respond to every single enquiry within 60 minutes. Or fixed price, no hidden extras ever. Or 99% of orders are delivered the next day guaranteed. Those are very specific things. They are very unique. And I think you can see that there’s a big difference between that and saying we’re a family business or we really care.
Having a proper, powerful, relevant USP will give you more traction on your marketing and help you with a better conversion rate. This is important stuff. It is a foundational piece to make sure you can grow your business and achieve your revenue goals. Make sure you put the time and effort into getting it right. It is really powerful.
So, it’s a time for you to rethink your USP. It’s time for you to get really clear on what truly makes you stand out as a business. What are you going to do to make sure that it is an absolute no-brainer to choose you over your competitors, even if you cost a little bit more?
If you want to go deeper into this kind of thinking, you can explore more insights on MarcoSoares.co.uk and watch more episodes of Mind Your Own Business.
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