No matter what you do and what sort of business you run – whether you’re a Coach, Consultant or Trainer – you will always face stiff competition. This is something I wrote about in last week’s blog. There will dozens (if not hundreds or thousands) of other businesses offering similar services to the ones that you offer. They may be slightly different, but you are still competing against them for business. For example, if you Google ‘Marketing Consultants in Berkshire’ you’ll be presented with about 630,000 results.* So how do you stand out from the crowd? How do you help you prospective clients choose to buy from you, instead of your competitors?

For many years, businesses have used USPs – unique selling propositions – to show potential clients what makes them different to and better than their competitors. “We’re cheaper,” “We’re faster,” or “We tailor our solutions to our clients’ needs,” they will say. Unfortunately, nearly every business can use one of these statements. They don’t really differentiate you from the thousands of other businesses, who all claim to be different in the same way.

So how can you really stand out from the crowd? The answer is to find out what your Emotional USP is and to use that to show how your business is different.

What is your Emotional USP?

We buy because we want something, not necessarily because we need it. “I want to attend that training course because I like the speaker,” rather than because I really need to go on the course. We buy on emotions. Every business has an Emotional USP – the reason that people really buy from you. There are six emotional needs listed below with a description of the associated business USP driven by emotion:

• Certainty – because they know you’ll get the job done. You provide security and consistency
• Contribution – because they know you’ll help them make a significant contribution through their business
• Connection – because they know you’ll be able to connect them with the people they need
• Growth – because they know you’ll help their business to grow. They want continual personal and business development
• Significance – because they know you’ll help them feel valued. They want to feel important and needed
• Variety – because they know you’ll bring them the variety they want. They prefer uncertainty.

At Appletree, our emotional USP is certainty. Our clients work with us because they know we’ll get their marketing done for them, on time, on budget and without them having to worry about it. We use this in our marketing messages, to tell prospective clients that they can trust us to do their marketing and get them new clients.

What is your emotional USP? Spend some time thinking about this and how you can use it in your marketing materials.

In next week’s blog I’ll show you how to use your marketing content to show your clients, your prospects and your competitors how your emotional USP makes you different, why your clients and prospects should buy from you and why your competitors should be worried!

*I’m delighted to say that when you search for ‘Marketing Consultants in Berkshire’ in Google, Appletree appears on the first page of the natural listing. I’ll being writing more about how to get your website working for your business in this blog in June, so make sure you come back then.