When you run a coaching, consulting or training business, you face tough competition. There are literally thousands of other people out there, doing something similar to you, going after the same potential clients as you. While I firmly believe that there is plenty of work to go around, there is also something that you can do, to make it easier for prospects to see why they should work with you, rather than one of your competitors. You need to show them what makes you truly unique and different to everyone else.

Traditional marketing says that your USP – unique selling point – is something like being able to do it cheaper, quicker or more efficiently than your competitors. The problem with this is that people most people actually buy on emotion. A client will buy because they want something – not necessarily because they need it. They will engage your services because they WANT to work with you, making an emotional decision, rather than a rational one. This means that you need to understand your emotional USP and how to use it.

What is an emotional USP?

There are six human emotional needs first articulated by Tony Robbins. These have been further developed by Nikki Burns, Entrepreneur and Business Advisor, into a structure for formulating the emotional USP for your business. This helps you to establish and articulate the key reason why people will buy from you.

Here are the six emotional needs, along with a description of an associated business USP driven by emotion:

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

At Appletree Marketing, 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.

Another way to look at this is to think about what sort of car your business would be, if you described it as a car. Appletree Marketing is a Volvo – safe, reliable and guaranteed. If we tried to promote the business as a fast, fun sports car, we would fail. But when we use ‘Volvo’ language we easily find the sort of clients who we love working with, who are looking for a safe pair of hands.

What is your emotional USP?

Take some time to identify your emotional USP and then use the most appropriate language in your marketing to make your business really stand out.