A unique selling proposition is something new business start-ups often stress about. What is my point of difference? Some unique selling points are easy to see, if your business is launched off the back of an original concept or from a gap or inadequacy in a current market, your point of difference is the whole reason you are here, so it’s already your motivation and theme as you roll out your services.
In most new business cases what you do already exists, it’s out there somewhere, being done by someone else. So, what makes YOURS, yours?
You have unique skills, gifts, values and beliefs that will make some part of your product different. It’s that part that’s deeply ‘you’ that will be highly beneficial to any other ‘you’s out there. When you know who those people are, you can target your message directly to them, give them a highly valued experience and rapidly build momentum for your business.
Find Your Unique Selling Proposition (H3 Heading)
One of my coaching clients, Becky Shaw, started her business doing personal training in the park. Group personal training, personal trainers and gyms are all over the place, it’s not even close to being new. Becky decided her unique angle was having fun. She wanted variety, results, and serious challenges. Her impacting marketing line: Zero mediocrity.
Once her niche was identified she could tailor her workouts and attract the ideal customers. Ideas for how to strengthen her unique selling proposition came thick and fast. When she started marketing to her niche the park was too small to keep up with demand and too limited to incorporate the activities she wanted. She needed a gym. The Enliven Coaching gym in Sydney’s Northern Beaches became such a storming success they had to expand to a bigger venue almost immediately.
Visit https://enlivencoaching.com.au/about/ to see how her point of difference makes her business really stand out in their about page.
If your Unique Selling Proposition is not jumping off the page at you, here are some techniques you can use to help dig into your business concepts and find it’s unique centre.
Copy
Before you tell me how ironic that is, (finding your unique edge means copying someone else’s), think about it. It actually makes sense when you consider that the business you research will have already achieved success. They know what they are doing and, (hopefully, if you research right) they do it well.
I don’t mean copy their point of difference, you are looking under that and getting curious about how they’ve identified their niche and used targeted marketing campaigns.
I’ve already given you the Enliven Coaching details so you can see how they stand out from other gyms and fitness programs, so the more you look the more you will understand how you can tease the jelly out of your jam doughnut. You can search any product in a saturated market. Markets that are overrun is the easiest way to find business and companies that use their brand values, personal histories, and logos to differentiate themselves and thrive. Google airlines, sliced bread, hatchback cars, hotels, childcare centres, banks, computers.
Put on a private investigator’s hat and figure out what qualities each brand uses for emphasis and strength. You will see their point of difference uniformly presented in the pictures they use, in their slogans, even in their font. Once you start noticing unique selling points and how they are used to highlight a product in the market, you’ll be amazed at how deep and frequently they’re presented.
Apply the same multi-layered messages that consistently identify your unique selling proposition to quickly build and grow your fan base. The other part of this is knowing your avatar.
Use your WHY
The fastest way to market your unique selling proposition is to lean on your why:
- Why are you supplying this?
- Why do people need it?
- Why is it important?
Why gets through to people so much faster because it registers in a much more central point in the brain than how.
You want to make a healthy and tasty bread, WHY: Because healthy bodies are important to you and healthy should taste good.
Second to this is how you source your ingredients and lastly, what ingredients go in your healthy bread.
It’s a clearer message, this is who we are, and this is how we achieve that. It’s also more engaging, more authentic and is easier to identify with.
It’s about putting the benefits to your customers up the top. How they will feel or what they will experience from your products or services is your number one priority and your overall WHY. You are all about getting their needs met.
Get disruptive
It’s not just your product that can have a unique selling proposition, how you market can be outstanding as well. Finding examples of this will take more work because big companies prefer to go elbow to elbow and fight for who can get the biggest advertising spaces and biggest names on board. This is really expensive. Companies can allocate millions of dollars in advertising each year to maintain their position ‘up the top’. Small businesses do not have that kind of spending allowance, especially if they are starting up. To find disruptive influences to model you need to read back into the history of people who are now massively successful and see how they made their break. Reading biographies of entrepreneurs will get you into the mindset of how to shake up the competition without mortgaging your home for a one-month billboard display.
It’s time to get incredibly creative (possibly naughty) about how you insert your brand in the market with massive impact, just like Troublemaker Julain Moss!
Think about how you can deliver your products or services in an unusual way. Do you dare to go where no one else has gone before or flashback to a forgotten era? Make sure what you choose doesn’t clash with your personal or business values, usually if you continue to follow your passion it will naturally think of appropriate steps for you to follow. Push these boundaries to the limits to make a high impact.
The most disruptive thing you can do is take your new product directly to the public. Let them experience what you have, ask their opinion and look like a pro when you do it. Nothing will get a big company more upset than someone raining on their parade. Find places where your product will have a big audience and infiltrate with style and confidence.
Be Real
There is an old rule that business isn’t emotional, it’s detached and professional. There is a line though. Business is not personal to you, but it does need to be personal to your customers. You need to create an emotional response (preferably a positive one). For your business to be successful your client needs to have a strong feeling when they use your services. To understand this feeling you need to invest something more than time and money into your business. You need to care about the response of your customers and clients. Be happy that they are happy, be proud that they are proud, get excited about their change or their experience. If you find yourself slipping into a grey zone, where you don’t care if they have a life-changing epiphany, as long as they pay you, you need to check in and figure out what’s up with that. If you get out of touch with your product and customer you are in danger of selling something inauthentic and you can quickly earn a bad reputation. In business, word spreads fast if you fail to deliver and it can be really hard to come back from. Stay connected to your clients, and ride the emotional wave with them.
Get feedback
This is essential, even if you are successful and doing well. You need to keep your finger on the pulse. Industries, people’s needs, and the environment we live in is constantly changing. If you can keep up to date with how your product or service is performing you can manage small changes as they occur, instead of playing catch up, or completely overhauling in two years time. It also allows you to quickly identify when there is a new opportunity for an additional product, meaning you can start launching before your competitors have even realised a new need is there.
Remember, as your customers use your business they get better. You helping them out gets them stronger or faster at what they do. You need to keep up with them in order to secure long-term business relationships. That means you need to keep changing, strengthening and growing as well, so that you have something appropriate to offer them when they reach the next level. Stay on top of training, learn new skills and always improve on yourself, which is where a life coach, business coach or mentor really counts.
Find the best way to contact your customers for feedback. There is a stack of great online survey programs out there. What’s best for reaching your customers? Do you have feedback forms at your events, enclosed in your product package, emailed afterwards, an open forum on social media? Pay attention to feedback and frequently asked questions or comments. If you are starting out and finding a lot of your initial customers are not getting their needs met, it could be your product is not targeted to the right niche. Go back to the top and re-evaluate your unique selling proposition and target market.
You can directly ask people what makes your product different/better and get their views on your unique selling proposition.
Ways you can get feedback
- Ask directly in person after a session or event (it can be good to explain at the start that you would like their feedback afterwards).
- Online survey
- Online poll
- Email comments
- Social media comments
- Reviews
- Q&A
- Calls to action (what are people really interested in, what are people ignoring)
Gaps
One of the best ways to identify your unique selling proposition is to know your market extremely well. Know your competitors and know what products are available. When you have that knowledge you can identify any gaps left open. There will be a group of people who are not getting their needs met by big companies. This is a massive advantage to small business owners. Corporations do not have the flexibility to cater to everyone. They go for the biggest common denominator when they pitch to a mass market. Inside this range will be people who use the services but are not happy about it, and people who refuse the service because it doesn’t appeal to them or meet their needs. Find these people, figure out what they want and how to deliver it to them. You will quickly attract those customers who are not happy away from the big market and develop a loyal following from the group that has been completely ignored.
Keep your unique selling proposition flexible to allow for shifts in the market, especially since once you cause a disruption and gain success others will follow your lead, creating like business products or even tangents that will compete with yours. Never worry about someone coming up behind you, if they have copied your idea, they haven’t had to do the hard yards and apply the skill, which means they are never going to reach your level. Your only concern is that you continue to meet your customer’s needs and give them the satisfaction of a positive experience.
Matt Catling
