A great Unique Selling Proposition (USP) will cause the market to pull your business along.
You’ll have trouble keeping up. A mediocre one makes you just like everyone else.
Your USP, is the simple idea that explains to someone in very few words what your business does for them that they won’t get from someone else.
A well crafted USP can have an incredible impact on a company’s success. When you really get your USP down (which is more than JUST marketing), the market pulls you.
A well crafted USP will even boost your SEO efforts, and you can (and should) run experiments online as you hone in on right USP for your business.
The philosophy behind well crafted USPs seem to be:
Keep it short
Keep it simple
Explain your difference
Don’t make people think
The USP ties into other important marketing concepts. I completed more research on this topic this article got longer and longer. I realized it would be necessary to break it up into a series of shorter articles to have any hope of keeping your attention.
I hope I’ve succeeded.
It feels the need to confess that I did create sub-post titles that are, to some extent, clickbait. Having said that, none are misleading. I simply choose words that the headline analyzer tool I use indicated people are more likely to search for.
Below is a list of the sub-posts with a very brief description of the topic of each sub-post.
Why a Great Unique Selling Proposition Creates Massive Growth
As the title implies, this articles provides an overview of the power of a well crafted USP and sets the tone for the rest of the articles.
How Your Unique Selling Proposition Fuels Massive Growth
This article describes how your USP relates to other important business concepts, specifically: Unique Value Proposition (UVP), Product-Marketing Fit, Positioning, Brand Strategy, Distribution Strategy, and Website Landing Pages.
This article demonstrates how your USP touches every other aspect of your business AND how all those other ideas help your craft your USP.
How The Customer Factory Helps You Achieve Massive Growth
The Customer Factory is an excellent concept which, when properly measured,l gives you the ultimate ability to determine if your USP is on target or needs adjustment.
Very Important Ideas About High Growth Unique Selling Propositions
This article describes two critically important concepts taken from the book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, by Al Ries and Jack Trout.
While this book does show it’s age (it was first published in 1981), the concepts described are timeless.
This post discusses the idea of Dispelling Myths and why Being Different is MUCH more important than Being The Best.
Examples of Fantastic and Terrible Unique Selling Propositions
This article, as the title implies, provides examples of really great, and really terrible USPs.
How to Figure Out a High Growth Unique Selling Proposition
This article provides an overview or outline of how you craft your USP. It sets expectations that USPs must be evidence-based, and what that means in practical terms.
How to Craft a High Growth Unique Selling Proposition
This article continues where a prior one left off. It gets into the nuts and bolts of turning beliefs into a testable hypothesis, and running experiments to see if your beliefs are true.
How to Test Your High Growth Unique Selling Proposition
This article continues where the prior one left one. Once you’ve created a USP that you THINK will be effective, how do you test it?
How to Communicate Your High Growth Unique Selling Proposition
Once you’ve got one that you’ve demonstrated is effective, your communication of it is NOT a matter of simply plastering it everywhere. Additionally, your communications of it must include additional testing of its effectiveness, possibly with variants that are very slightly different. Sometimes a change of a single word can make a difference.
In Closing: Your High Growth Unique Selling Proposition
This article wraps up the series and concludes with setting an expectation of how much work this takes, and why it’s totally worth it.
