How are your business offerings different from your competition?
*crickets*
If you’re not sure, don’t feel bad.
You’re definitely not the only one.
Although a lot of businesses look for ways to find differentiating factors between their business strategy or offerings, you’d be surprised to learn how many of them struggle to communicate it.
For you to stand out in your market, you need to be able to explain how you and your business are unique.
To do this, you need to develop a USP or a unique selling proposition.
When you better understand your market, you’ll have an easier time speaking to your audience, understanding what your potential customers value and what your competitors are offering.
When you conduct competitor research, it’s likely you’ll notice similarities in what they offer vs. what you offer.
Perhaps you post similar content. Maybe you have similar services. You might even offer these services at similar rates!
With all of these similarities in your industry, how exactly are you able to differentiate yourself from other businesses in your market?
Your USP statement.
Short for Unique Selling Proposition, your USP statement tells your audience they should choose you and why. It tells your audience what makes you different from your competitors.
Now, we can imagine what some of you may be thinking:
“Noel & Co., this is SIMPLE stuff. What business wouldn’t have a USP?”
We often talk about how “simple does not mean easy,” when it comes to marketing. It takes time, thoughtfulness, and effort to determine how to position your organization. If you’re not careful, you can end up with a long, convoluted message that gets people lost and confused.
Take us for example. We’re a marketing strategy and research agency, and even we didn’t currently have a strong USP statement in place despite being in business for more than three years.
While a USP isn’t required, it can definitely help your organization grow and scale. But if you’re going to develop one, you need it to be short, sweet, and to the point.
It should not only showcase your business, but also the features and benefits you provide that are unique.
Let’s use our newly form USP as an example:
Noel & Co. helps mission-driven organizations working to scale their positive impact achieve sustainable growth by developing a grounded marketing strategy that allows businesses to “cut through the clutter” and connect with their ideal customers.
Notice how we highlighted our business, our audience, their problem, and the benefits and solutions we provide all in one sentence?
We also wanted to emphasize the fact we have a specialty in serving mission-driven organizations and our competitive advantage is our focus on developing what we refer to as a “grounded marketing strategy” for our clients – i.e., a strategy that’s going to work for them, in their market, to help them cut through the clutter so they can grow and scale their positive impact.
If developing your USP takes you hours or days to craft, don’t feel bad about it.
Crafting this statement took us a few days as well, as we went through multiple revisions to get it right and fully capture Noel & Co. and the people we serve.
If you haven’t done so already, take some time to think about your USP statement and how exactly you position your organization in a unique way in your market.
Think about the audience you’re serving, the problems they have, and how they can benefit from your unique business, product, or service.
It’ll help customers understand your “why” and see what makes you different from other brands.
And that can definitely lead to good things.