How to differentiate your business from your competitors…

Using a unique selling proposition (USP) in your promotion and sales activities that highlights your unique benefits will greatly improve its effectiveness.

USPs help your customers to save time when considering buying a product or service by helping them to differentiate between you and your competition and focus on your key benefits.

But differentiation is not just about finding your USP, it is about aligning your business with your passion and ensuring your primary motive is geared to deliver value and results to your customers.

Once you have achieved this, you will be able to posture your business to reflect your passion and your motives. Your business will be the only one that will have these qualities because they are unique to you. With this uniqueness, you will now be able to present much more powerful marketing strategies that will differentiate your whole business and not just your products and services from all your competitors.

How to Posture Your Business to Reflect the Value and Results you give…

In order to visibly reflect the value and results you give, your posture must start by defining the core of your company ethics. This will be the foundations from how you build what want out of your business, how you want to be seen and how you want to behave.

By making your company ethics clear to your customers in everything you do and everything you say, you will be creating an environment that reflects the value and results you give.

For each product or service you currently provide, consider what you freely give to make that product or service valuable to your customers. What could you give more that would truly reflect your differentiation and deliver more value and results?

Consider what you currently share with your customers. How could you share more to reflect your differentiation and deliver more value and results?

Consider how you currently serve your customers. How could you serve your customers better to reflect your differentiation and deliver more value and results?

How to give, share and serve more…

1. List the products or services you offer to your customers, starting with the product or service that you want to succeed and has the greatest potential.
2. list the main features that deliver value and results and describe what it does with reference to:
   Quality
   Service
   Delivery
   Price
   Functional characteristics
   Technical characteristics
3. Convert each feature into one or more benefits to target your customer. Ask yourself why these key features are important to the customer. List the problems each feature or key fact solves. How does the customer feel about the lack of this benefit?

   Another way to convert features into benefits is to add the phrase “which means that…” to the feature and consider how the customer benefits.

4. Check if each benefit is standard and found in all competing products, or if different and unique to you (these are candidate USPs)
5. Take a new piece of paper and draw three columns titled: GIVE, SHARE and SERVE
6. For each benefit you see as something you give to your customer, put this in the GIVE column. For example, BusinessWebFactory offers business websites with passionate support to ensure success. The feature is the business website. The benefit is the support to make it work. Support goes in the GIVE column.
7. For each benefit you see as something you share with your customer, put this in the SHARE column. For example, BusinessWebFactory shares its experience in the design of websites and marketing strategies to help you succeed with your design.
8. For each benefit you see as something you serve your customer, put this in the SERVE column. For example, BusinessWebFactory serves by providing online support through its ticketing system.
9. Now review each column and consider any additional benefits you could add that significantly improves your offering and is aligned with your posture.
10. Review how you GIVE, SHARE and SERVE and consider how you score against your competition after these additional benefits. With the new found strength in your posture, highlight those areas where you score significantly higher. You can then use this differentiation in your headlines in all your marketinging for any product and service.

Note: USPs don’t last forever and you need to watch the competition regularly.

Summary

By finding those little extras to give, share or serve which significantly add value to your products or services, you can define your position in the marketplace by your posture, not just the benefits of your products or services.

Further Info

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