Marketing School, Day Two: DIY USP
Welcome back to Marketing School, and Holy Acronyms, Batman! Yesterday we learned about your unique selling proposition, unique sales proposition, or USP. If you’re like most home business owners, though, you also learned that you might not have one.
If you don’t already have a Unique Selling Proposition, you have to make one.
How To Build Your Own USP
When your USP isn’t already blindingly obvious (Koopa the Painting Turtle comes to mind) you can make your own by thinking about three things.
1.) What pisses people off about your industry?
Every industry has its negative stereotypes. Take programmers, for example. While I’m sure programmers are very nice people, nobody understands a damn word they say except other programmers. The thing is, unless you’re marketing yourself as a subcontractor, you can’t sell programming to a programmer. You sell programming to non-programmers.
What about: “Programming. In English, or your money back.”
Maybe you’re an interior decorator. Interior decorators have a bad reputation. They are known for buying ugly, weird, and overpriced shit and convincing you to put it in your house. What about being the interior decorator who’s not a bully?
Be the lawyer who doesn’t gouge. The car salesman who isn’t sleazy. The writer who’s not a drama queen.
2.) What is your goal?
When I started out working for myself, I was exclusively a freelance writer. I just wanted to keep myself from taking up drugs from the boredom and tedium of early motherhood. Generally I wrote short lifestyle pieces about parenting or marriage.
Then I wanted more money, so I moved into editing. It seemed like a logical leap, since I happen to be a far better editor than I am a writer.
Then I moved into writing and editing for businesses. (Hint to writers: this is called “copywriting” and “copyediting” and pays about five times more than garden variety “writing” or “editing”. Same work, not the same rates. Change your marketing copy accordingly.)
If your goal is small, your USP can be very, very focused. If you only need a few thousand dollars a month to supplement your spouse’s income, you can say “I’m a blog writer and I only write blogs” or “I’m a website designer and I only do custom CSS themes.” You can then become THE person to go to for blog writing or CSS themes and you can keep yourself busy for a very long time.
If your goal is larger and you’re trying to become the next Microsoft (hint: don’t do that) you need to think bigger. Can you create a network of blog writers? A CSS theme temp agency? If you make the vestal virgin candles, can you get a group of people to sell them, Avon-style, to their unsuspecting friends and loved ones?
3.) What are you good at?
Seems obvious, but it isn’t. Most artists say they’re good at art. Writers say they’re good at writing. Accountants are good at accounting.
This isn’t good enough. You need to find out what you’re really good at. There are a few ways you can do this.
One, you sit down and think about what part of your work doesn’t feel like work. If you’re an accountant, do you get off on finding creative ways to write off a client’s boob job? It seems like no big deal to you – just a perk of being an accountant – but to other people, that’s a real and marketable skill. If you make creative write-offs your USP, then people can talk about you at dinner parties.
“Oh my God, you HAVE to meet my accountant. This guy can write off anything.”
Then you’re not a boring ass accountant any more. You’re a specialist, a go-to guy.
In my case, I happen to be pretty good at writing reviews. I did a set of blog posts for a client and wrote reviews of online TV sites and they were a lot of fun. It didn’t feel like work, it felt like chatting to my friends about what I liked and didn’t like. If I didn’t already have a USP, writing vicious reviews would be a good one.
If you can’t think of something and you find yourself saying, “I don’t know, I just really like to write” or design websites or drink gin from a sippy cup or whatever, ask someone else, preferably someone who likes you but is not trying to have sex with you. Ask them not only what you’re good at but also what you seem to have the most fun doing.
Go. Make a USP.
Come back Monday and we’ll talk about finding the poor unsuspecting people to buy from you.
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I’m really enjoying this series, entertaining and educational! Now I just have to get over my geeky background. My brain keeps reading USP as UPS (Universal Power Supply) and then doing a double take. :)
Naomi,
Can you try and finish this sentence for me? I’ll begin with your quote…
“Be the lawyer who doesn’t gouge. The car salesman who isn’t sleazy. The writer who’s not a drama queen.” The mortgage lender who…”
I just re-did the about page on my blog: “Inside the Industry Report”
What do you think? It’s ok, you can be blatantly honest…I won’t get hurt :)
Thanks for the email the other day! Talk to you soon!
I love the way you think Naomi! In all of the things I have ever read about creating a USP, NOTHING has ever made more sense and been as entertaining as this.
Seriously though… do you know that accountant? I need him or her badly. I WISH some accountant would get right down to brass tacks and use that slogan. I would hire that accountant today.
And thus, Christine proves Naomi’s point: A good USP sells.
Naomi: Special thanks to you. If these two posts are any indication of what’s to come (no pressure, none at all…), then anyone in small business needs to pay attention.
@ Rose - You’re right. That is geeky. Mind you, I wake up in the middle of the night to write down my dreams about marketing campaigns. I’m hardly one to talk. :)
@ Ricardo - Having never been remotely close to buying a home in my life, two things come to mind. Be the mortgage broker who… makes it easy? Does the thinking for you?
However, having looked at your website, you might be better off taking the family values angle or the Mexican one. Maybe ditch the picture of the skinny white chick and replace her with a sexy Latina with kiddies. In your situation, you want some Mexican-American mom who doesn’t trust sleazy blonde guys any further than she can throw them to say to her husband, “See? Ricardo understands us.”
@ Christine - If I meet that accountant, I’ll let you know. Accountants, pay attention! I would really like a boob job and I need to know how to call it a business expense. My email address is on the Contact Us page. :)
@ James - No worries. It’s not pressure, it’s challenge. I love this shit.
cheers to the comments above that say this is fun to read/learn!! (loud swig of gin from sippy cup. ‘ahhhh’).
i concur; this is awesome. my usp? i am great at coming up with lame street signs. i love it; i spend hours doing it. not all of them are home runs, but it is by far my favorite part of durtbagz. (who doesn’t want to see a street sign with pedestrians putting their hands in the air and waving them like they just don’t care?)
i’m going to start with that and see where it takes me. can our USP’s change as we evolve/grow?
thanking you again.
@Rose: That’s okay, I see “USP” and think “UPS” too - only it’s that big brown truck that brings me stuff.
@Naomi: This is a great series and you have no idea how much I’m enjoying it. When I grow up, I want to be just like you.
@ Harry - I did not need the mental image you just gave me…
Still thinking on the USP. Drat.
Writers? Drama queens?
YOU BITCH.
Loving this series, although I wish I’d written it. YOU BITCH.
Sonia’s such a nice lady, isn’t she?
Loving that you’re loving it. :)
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Thanks very much for this excellent post. It’s so common sense that it’s like “Of course, why didn’t I think of that!”. I’ve been wondering how to do this for my husband’s and my business for awhile because we are kind of stuck. Our business is going pretty well, but we’d like it to go better.
What do you think could be a USP for a web site design and development business? My husband and I seem to attract several clients because we are honest and pretty down to earth, which is great and we have some really excellent clients, but more than that, we’d like to attract more clients based upon the creative level of our work and get more higher-end projects.
My husband does really nice illustration work and we are capable of handling lots of different types of projects, but the problem is that what a person considers to be good design/art is subjective. We almost never have clients want custom illustration work because; 1: it’s more expensive and they don’t see it as necessary and 2: I think they don’t realize the quality of work we are capable of. Ideally, we’d like to find clients that need a professional website with custom illustration and come to us because we are one of the few web design companies that can offer both services integrally.
So, what do you think would be a nice USP for a web design business that would gain it higher-end work? Trying to project that we have a high level of creativity doesn’t seem to cut it.
@ Naomi - Creative sites for creative people? Designs done by designers, not coders? I’ll admit, my creativity is not at it’s best right now as football is on and I get really dumb when that happens. It’s kinda like I mentally revert to being a cheerleader.
(The above is not entirely true. In order to revert to something, you have to have actually been that thing in the first place. The very idea of me being a cheerleader is… well, we won’t go there.)
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