What makes your business special?
What is it that you are doing that no one else is doing?
What can you offer that people can’t get from, say, Amazon, Walmart or some other shop five miles over?
More to the point: why should anyone care whether you succeed or fail?
These are challenging questions, but you shouldn’t hide from them. Because every customer that looks your way is already asking them, usually in a split-second without even realizing it. And when you don’t have the answers, it shows.
Know Thine Enemy
While it can be easy to become engrossed in the work right in front of you, you must never forget that you’re almost never “the only game in town.” Someone out there is doing what you’re doing and they want your customers’ money. And if you don’t know who they are or what they’re doing, they might end up drawing a target on your back without you even realizing it.
If you poke your head outside your own business, what you might find is that one of your competitors has set up a business model suspiciously similar to your own, only 2% cheaper.
Or you might find that someone out there is doing what you’re doing with far greater success, giving you a model to emulate and an wider audience to reach out to.
Whatever you find, knowing about it can only help, as you will now be able to place yourself in the shoes of your customers and ask what decisions they might make.
Know Thyself
Once you know how your competitors stack up, you will be empowered with the ability to look at your own offerings (more) objectively and ask: if it were you, which option would you choose?
This is where you will hopefully find your USP: your Unique Selling Proposition. The difference could be clear-cut: maybe your competitor is using cheap crap or cheap labor. Or maybe what you’re offering has some subtle benefits that you haven’t been touting thus far.
This process could require some serious reflection.
- Is your offering more reliable?
- Is your service more personable?
- Is your product more eco-friendly?
- Do you have a stronger track record?
- Does your location offer some considerable advantage?
Whatever you come up with, it should ideally be substantial. “Lowest prices” can be an effective selling point, but it requires a lot of upkeep and runs the risk of being undercut by someone with deeper pockets. Amazon shut down countless competitors for years by operating at a loss so it could offer prices no one else could afford.
And in the end, if you can’t find anything that you would feel confident propping up as sales pitch to your customers, it might be time to make some changes.
Sell It!
Once you’ve got your USP, you come to the most important part: making sure your customers know it. Fit it into your tagline, lace it into your copy, add it to your mission statement, put it in the headlines of your search listings.
Whatever you do, just make sure you’re not keeping it to yourself. Too often, awareness is all that stands between obscurity and success.
