Why Understanding Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is Crucial for Business Success

All businesses understand what their company offers and the features of their products and services, but many find it difficult to pinpoint and verbalise their unique selling proposition. Also, how their USP solves their clients’ pain points and the invaluable benefits it provides to them.

Focus on Pain Points to Strengthen Your USP

When thinking about a company’s USP it’s important to understand the buyer’s profile and to take a customer first approach. What are the real pain points or challenges our customers face? How do we solve these pain points? What are the benefits we offer that our audience really needs? and how does this far outweigh what our competitors can offer?

We can produce a product or service, but if it doesn’t benefit our audience or fulfils their need by providing a solution to their paint point, it’s not going to sell very well.

The purchasing journey

Very much like our own purchasing journey, our customers go through the following steps:

Awareness – Realising they have a problem or need (the pain point).
Consideration – They research to find a solution.
Decision – They choose the best solution that provides benefits that fulfils their needs.

Using your USP in marketing

If we look at the diagram above, it really helps to understand how a business can market itself differently to its competitors by really identifying that point of difference, “the winning zone”.

Avoiding the “losing zone” where we are trying to compete in the same zone as our competitors, as they may already have the advantage.

Also avoid the “who cares zone”, where no one wins as we are pushing something that doesn’t resolve a need, something our audience doesn’t actually want.

Final thoughts

You don’t just need to understand your company or brands’ USP, its important to identify a USP for every product or service.

As the industry and your audiences needs change, it’s important to constantly re-evaluate your USP to make sure it stays relevant.

Your USP is your competitive edge. By aligning it with your audience’s pain points and the buying process, you can turn ‘window shoppers’ into loyal customers.