Lessons From Edmund, Roger and Neil
When the school holidays come around in a month or so, how long do you think it will be before you get bombarded with ‘Back to School’ adverts?
Every year I seem to get them with at least a month still to run, and my youngest is in her mid-thirties!
So I thought, if you can’t beat them, join them.
No, I’ll not be offering you Minions lunchboxes or a SpongeBob SquarePants pen and pencil set!
What’s Going To Make Your Ideal Clients Choose You?
Just for you, I want to go right back to the beginning. What’s going to make clients and customers choose you? What’s going to get you noticed, to make you stand out from the crowd - ideally like a neon-lit sore thumb?
The simple truth is that if you don’t, you’ll have few choices other than to compete on price and believe me, there’ll always be someone willing to undercut you. Even if you offer people ￡100 to take it away, someone else will offer them ￡110!
Whether you like or loathe the abbreviation or the phrase, whatever you think the initials should represent, for simplicity as I go through creating one of the cores of your Marketing efforts, I’ll call it “Your USP.”
How To Arrive At Your USP
Your USP is what will set you apart from other suppliers of similar goods and services, and apart from other solutions to the same problems you help solve. It is what will give prospects good reasons to do business with you rather than anyone else.
Can I please remind you, right at the start, of the three forms of message that will do you no good at all - ‘Bullshit’, ‘So blooming what’, and ‘Take for granted’.
Nobody’s fooled by offers like “A complete paradigm shift in the multi-structural cortex of your business environment.” Neither are they impressed, at least in the early stages, by information such as “My Grandfather started this business in 1951 with a screwdriver and a ten-shilling postal order.”
It’s too easy to say that “our service is better” or “our prices are competitive.” Apart from being far too vague, none of your competitors would ever say the opposite. Logically this means that every supplier will be saying the same things, and all the prospective clients and customers will be expecting to be able to take those things for granted.
The USP Building Blocks
Your USP must be built around benefits and value-outcomes, tailored to your chosen niche market. People will choose to buy from you because they’re getting value for money, and because you’re offering better value for money than your competitors.
Don’t be tempted by the mathematical nature of this ratio into thinking that lowering your price is as good a strategy as increasing the value derived by your clients.
Don’t neglect the word ‘Unique’. Derived from the Latin for the number one, it essentially means ‘the one and only’. Putting it this way emphasises the folly of thinking there are degrees of uniqueness. You need to find a space in which you can be ‘the one and only’.
“I Am The One And Only”
Being first is one way of being ‘the one and only’. Don’t bother with Chesney Hawkes! Instead, while they were still alive, you might have asked Edmund Hilary, Roger Bannister, Yuri Gagarin or Neil Armstrong about being first. And there are several wise marketing sayings to do with achieving this position.
- It’s better to be first than to be better
- If you can’t be first, find a different space to be first in
- First in the mind of the customer is better than first in the market
Here are five practical steps I hope will help you check, re-evaluate, or even re-invent your USP.
The Practical Solution
First off, list all the features of your product or service, and the way it’s made, sold, delivered and supported. Look at each of them and turn each one into a value-outcome, using ‘true value’* language.
Next, do the same for your competitors’ offerings.
Now go back to your list and strike out all the value-outcomes that your competitors also provide. The items that are left are the things that will set you apart; the things that are unique to you.
If everything on your list has been struck out, you’ll need to do some serious thinking about how you can tweak your offering, or add to it, so that you can be providing something that is valuable to your clients; something they can’t get from anyone else.
You’re Nearly There
Now take that small number of value-outcomes that you and only you provide and decide which of them to make the focus of your USP. It can be helpful to think about which are most important to your ideal clients? Which are most easily understood by them? Which are most difficult for your competitors to replicate?
Finally, you now have the material you need to craft a USP that positions you as ‘the one and only’. Keep it short and simple; one short sentence that is clear, unambiguous, easy to understand and, ideally, memorable. Naturally it will include value-outcomes that only you can provide.
Equipped with a USP like this, you can confidently justify your claim to be ‘the one and only’ and your promotional material will be more effective as a result. Clients and prospects will have a crystal clear answer to their “What’s in it for me?” question and be willing to pay you more as a result of the increased value they know they will derive.