How to Create a Powerful Unique Selling Proposition

Your Unique Selling Proposition (or USP) is kind of like your mascot. It is a way to easily communicate what specific, unique benefit (differentiating you from your competitors) you offer your customers.

In many ways it can also be your first impression, so choose wisely. Like much of marketing, part of what makes the USP successful is the subconscious persuasion involved. Brand a good impression if you want to stand out. Your USP must present a real and perceivable advantage in your prospect's mind.

Remember that in business you don't have to be the best; you just have to be different.

BMW's USP is "Ultimate Driving Machine." Mercedes' USP is "Engineering" For the new Ford Focus, the USP is "Life in Drive." For Ford's pickup trucks, the USP is "Built Ford Tough."

All of these USPs inspire an image to the customer. Even though they are only a few words, the image can be extremely powerful and extremely persuasive.

Be specific. If your USP is "The Best Buy Around" you won't get far. This is because not only does it paint a clichéd picture, but it's clichéd because a thousand other people have used it, are using it, and will continue to use it. Give your audience a chance to make an emotional connection with your product or service's benefits. If your USP is ordinary that just won't happen.

Don't rush. You could easily be spending a lot of money promoting your USP. It is not usually smart to change your USP midstream. Doing this usually happens when a business does a major renovation or goes through a significant change. In other words, you would have to market how and why your marketing message changed.

Even if you've found your hungry crowd your bait will get lost if you don't create a unique approach that sets you apart. Otherwise you and your great product or service will get lost in the crowd of competition.

Highlight Advantage in your USP

Make sure people know what specific benefit they receive from buying your product or service that they wouldn't receive from their competition. This is the first and most important consideration when designing your USP.

Again, sit down and write all the benefits you think your customers would have if they chose you. Be as honest as possible, for if you are having problems finding unique benefits, then you should reevaluate your offer. Once you do this, isolate the most important advantage and highlight this in everything you do. Just make sure it's unique.

Highlight How Amazing your Offer Is In Your USP

There are little things that you can do to make it easy for people to perceive the value of your offer. If you have many different benefits in your offer, choose which one is the most attractive.

Some examples of a great offer are to offer a substantial discount on future purchases. This is smart because it encourages repeat buyers.

If your product or service has many dimensions that could potentially be individually packaged, highlight this.

For example, you are selling a complete gardening starter kit. This includes, a hand shovel, seeds, fertilizer, plant food, a weeder, etc. If you were to point out that purchasing all of this individually would cost 50 dollars, and you are only charging 20, you will catch people's attention.

You can offer a sensational guarantee. This could be offering a 100% money back guarantee for the life of the product. If you are extremely confident about what you offer, you could promote a 200% guarantee. Just don't make it super easy to do this. Make sure there are conditions.

You can offer a free special report. For example, if you are selling this gardening starter kit, you could give your customers a small book on the biggest mistakes new gardeners make. People appreciate information and if you look at a lot of the infomercials out there, you will see that they usually capitalize on the persuasive power of offering bonuses.

You can offer something that another company or business has created as a bonus. This is great if you don't have anything of your own to give. If you can partner with a non-competitive business, most would be more than willing to offer something small that helps brand and promote their business.

The ultimate goal of creating an amazing offer is that you are rewarding your customers for buying your product or service. Not only can this make buying a pleasant experience for your customer, it also helps to create loyalty and a sense of reciprocation in the future.

Incorporating this into your USP requires a certain degree of creativity. Your USP can't be a paragraph long. You want it to be as short and compact as possible, so when you incorporate your amazing offer, figure out a clever way to represent it that not only highlights the offer appropriately, but grabs your viewer's attention.

About The Author-- Discover over 200 Internet marketing secrets from over 50 of the Internet's most successful marketers: www.magarigroup.com. Just one of these secrets can mean thousands of dollars for your business.

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