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Finding Your USP

Finding your USP isn't a strategy. It's a necessity. It's also a prerequisite for everything else you'll do. Every bit of promotion will depend on isolating your USP.

The USP is your unique selling point. It's that special something that makes your product stands out among competitors. It's the one thing that really defines what makes your product or service so special.

No matter what you're doing, someone else is probably doing it, too.

Even if your product or service is incredibly unique, there is probably something in place that will serve as a form of competition. That might be the old way of solving the product your product handles. It could be a different system of approaching the matter altogether. Your USP is what makes your option different, and more importantly, better.

If you happen to be a genuine trailblazer, offering something no one else does in any way shape or form, the product itself might be the USP. That's rarely the case, though.

Thus, you will need to go to the proverbial drawing board and take a long look at your business in order to find out exactly what is better about your option--and how to neatly encapsulate it so that prospective customers can understand it easily.

Finding your USP is absolutely essential. It is going to form the basis for much of your subsequent marketing. It's what makes you memorable and valuable--which is just what you want to be later marketing.

If nothing stands out about your project, one of a few things is happening. You might just have an uninteresting and dull product, in which case you might want to start looking in a different direction.

More often than not, you are simply overlooking your USP. In other cases, a careful review of your offer will demonstrate that the only way you can actually distinguish yourself is by offering a better price.

In most cases, fortunately, one is simply overlooking their USP. There's no foolproof way to peg it, but you might have some luck by doing some simple fast brainstorming with a pen and a piece of paper.

• First, partition the paper into four columns.
• Second, list your product in the left-most column.
• Third, fill in the name of your top three competitors for the other columns.
• Fourth, start writing about what's good about each possibility. Don't worry, this paper won't be leaving your hands so it's okay to say nice things about the "enemy" in order to eventually find your USP.
• Fifth, take a very hard look at each of those counters and how often the stuff you put in your section applied to others, too. Those common beneficial traits are great, but they don't make a USP. After you start eliminating those common traits, you will begin to see what unique features of benefits your product offers.
• Sixth, look at those characteristics carefully. Odds are that your USP is in there somewhere!

Once you have determined your USP (you may have known right off the top of you head the second the topic was mentioned), you need to commit to an overall marketing strategy that will focus on that USP instead of wasting time trying to sell your product based on the same things everyone else offers.

Distinguishing yourself in the marketplace is essential, and a good USP serves that function. It allows you to demarcate a certain space in the marketplace that belongs to you and you alone.

It gives you a chance to highlight the things that make you special and valuable relative to the competition.

Seriously. Find your USP. If you search, search and search some more without finding it, you need to reconsider your product or service. Or, you just need to keep searching with both eyes open for what separates you from the pack.