Continued from Step 3

Identifying and evaluating your USP at the start of the process will speed up your time to becoming profitable.

The uniqueness of your product should be used as a branding tool and you'll be able to take advantage of the uniqueness in all of your marketing effort's.

Having some unique element to your product is critical to gaining exposure. There has to be some component of your product on which you can focus your marketing effort to give you an advantage over your competitor's. Remember in the previous section I talked about competitor analysis and looking at your competitor's product packaging, customer service, delivery times etc. Well all of that was good information but it all came after the sale was made. If you can't make that first sale because you can't entice people to switch brands, then the rest is irrelevant.

It's hard to get traffic to your website and you're going to find that out. Make sure you have something that sets you aside from others and the task will be that much easier to accomplish.

A USP is required ahead of all else to make people switch brands. The proposition must be something that your competition either cannot, or does not offer - a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising.

Whatever approach you take will need to be sufficiently enticing to get people to move away from what they're currently using. It should meet the needs of your customer's and actually be something that they want. Using the Google research tool as I described above will lock you into “actual” needs and not hypothetical ones.

Ideally it should also be something that is difficult for your competitor's to offer, it least in a short time. (consider a Federal Trademark if you believe this might help you protect your idea, or a Patent if it might qualify in that direction).

Generally speaking when you identify your unique selling prospect it should be something which you can describe in a clear and concise manner and not something which is overly complicated to understand.

Let's look at a few examples to give you some ideas -

In the real estate market (before the 2008 decline), several realtors came up with the USP - “If we can't sell your house in 90 days, we'll buy it from you ourselves!”. Of course they protected themselves in the small print, perhaps by guaranteeing less than appraised value, but what a catchy way to attract peoples interests'.

I've been involved in the web design and marketing industry for many years. I started my business in 1998 focusing on Search Engine Optimization, alongside as few as 2 or 3 other companies offering the same services. After 5 years in the business it was becoming extremely competitive. I switched my service message by saying “Let us optimize your website and you pay us nothing until we achieve your desired rankings”. I was flooded with new work and new clients overnight. I showed them my commitment to helping them and I made it a no-risk situation. I was able to lift my pricing by over 10% to cover the eventuality of a non-result, but that didn't deter people. They didn't want to risk paying for a service that yielded poor results, as many were experiencing from the SEO industry. So they moved to using my services essentially as a no-risk, no-brainer.

There are many more examples; think about FedEx offering next day delivery ahead of all their competition. Think about video retail stores and the USP's that they develop on a weekly basis to stay ahead of their competition, then think about NetFlix coming along and turning the industry on its head with their online rental service!

If you need more ideas, simply go to Google and search on “examples of a unique selling proposition” and you'll gain some insights and inspiration from what many other businesses have been able to do.

If you are scratching your head right now and thinking “well, I really don't have anything unique”, then it might be wise to reconsider your position. I don't want to put you off, but it's going to be an uphill struggle and you're going to need time and money to make any headway.

I hope you were able to successfully conclude this section on Market Research and that you have new found confidence in your conceptual ideas and product. Don't be afraid to walk away at this point, you've lost very little. If you decide to move forward, take a firm grasp of the nettle and get ready to give it your all.

In Summer 1998 I was a few months into my new business venture and things were looking quite bad, from a financial perspective. I'd made a decision six months earlier to leave the Industry in which I'd spent the last 17 years of my life. My well-paying Executive job, car, pension, medical plans were all gone and following a very expensive relocation, my savings were pretty much gone too.

I'd been working extremely hard honing my 'new' skills in the Design and SEO industry and focusing on trying to attract new clients to keep the wheels of industry turning. Though I was relatively new to the game I could see what I thought was an opportunity. Most of my inquiries' were coming from people who had a website but were receiving little or no web traffic. They weren't generally receptive to my telling them that they needed to spend more on the design of their website to bring it up to scratch. The general consensus was “show me the traffic then we'll think about spending more on design”. People were disillusioned. The Internet was quite new, it was being touted as the next great thing for commerce, but people couldn't figure out how to get a piece of the pie. And to some extent, neither could I.

I decided that what was needed was a low-cost service to basically analyze a persons website, show them where it stood presently in search rankings and give them a clear and concise path forward, with emphasis on gaining more traffic. If the “Plan” were sufficiently detailed it would give the website owner the option to try to implement the plan themselves, hence not having to throw good money after bad. I could see that this was a good plan, what was missing from the formula was that I didn't have the perceived credibility to be the one to create the plan - being new, I didn't have a proven track-record of success in the industry. My only reference was to show people my own website listings' for “Search Engine Ranking”, which were generally impressive - in the top third of the page on the majority of the important search engines of the time. So I needed some way to stamp some credibility on my message and convince people that a plan coming from me would be a sound investment. Also, I needed a crystal-clear plan for people, and a powerful “format”, one laid out in a way that was easy for them to understand and convinced them to take action.

So I set about writing an article on “Search Engine Ranking”. It was still a relatively new concept, people didn't understand that there were things which could be done to a website to influence its rankings. The article was written in laypersons terms and it basically gave away information for free, but not too much information. So I gained people's trust to some extent - “here's a guy who clearly knows his stuff and he's passing the information along to me without asking for anything in return. I like this guy!”.

Then to support the Article I worked on the format of the plan, so that the mechanics would steer people towards what I wanted them to do. I built a section of my website which was basically a library of information for people. Notes on building Meta tags, researching keywords, how and where to submit your website to search engines, etc etc. I decided that by providing information which was quite exhaustive, people would be too exhausted to do it themselves! Then if I gave them a couple of clear service options where they could assign the work to the 'expert', and made the price attractive, they would come on board as customers. To cover all bases, I included a “report service” where I took a very detailed analysis of a website and provided a custom, personalized report on what the problems where and what was needed to fix them. I offered two options of the report, one for $99 and one for $199 to try to cover a range of budgets. With two clear service options I was able to create an on-line order form so people could take immediate action and place an order without the need for additional information or personal interaction.

With the mechanics in place I submitted my article to a website called “WebProNews”. They had a mailing list of 500,000 business owners and were looking for cutting edge trade articles to share with their follower's. Remember, this was 1998, there weren't any “article databases” and the industry was new, so people weren't writing much about search engine optimization.

A few weeks went by and in late August my family and I had to leave for a family reunion in Colorado. It really could not have come at a worse time. We were financially drained, with practically no income from the business. The trip to Colorado was going to drain our bank account pretty much down to nothing.

To the chagrin of my wife, I hauled the computer system out to Colorado and setup base in the hotel room. It's a fact that the less work you have to do, the harder it is that you have to work. I didn't have any clients which made me want to work 20 hours a day to try to acquire some.

As we were getting ready to leave for home, towards the end of our week long stay, something incredible happened. My email suddenly became flooded with inquiries and questions about my service. Not only that, I started to receive many, many online orders! Buried away within the many inquiry emails was an email from the administrator at WebProNews saying “thanks for the article, we really enjoyed it, and we've included it in our latest member newsletter along with a link back to your website”.

Wow. In 24 hours I received just over $10,000 in new orders, direct from the order form on my website. These were bought and paid for, the money was on its way to our bank account! That one article launched my business and gave me clients, many of whom I still service to this day.

Oftentimes it's just a matter of thinking a little out of the box. It didn't cost me a penny to write the article and come up with a plan to support it, I just had to conceive the idea then implement it.