Do you know why your clients buy from you, rather than from one of your competitors? Do you know what keeps them coming back to you?

You’ve probably worked out your USP – your Unique Selling Point. Every business has one, and when you know what yours is, you can use it to drive your marketing messages and make your business stand out. If you’ve not yet worked out what makes you different, it can be difficult to do. You might think that you provide the best service, or the cheapest price, or the fastest delivery … but chances are that most of your competitors will claim the same thing!

So what is it that really makes you different? Here’s an easier way to work it out.

Whatever you sell, people will buy from you based on emotion. They buy because your product or service fulfils a need they have. This means that your business has an ’emotional USP’ that you can use. There are six emotional USPs – reasons that people buy. They are:

1. Certainty
2. Connection
3. Contribution
4. Growth
5. Significance
6. Variety

When I first looked at this list, I thought that my clients buy from me because I help them grow (#4) and because I help them connect with others (#2) and because of the wonderful variety of the work I could do for them (#6). But that’s not actually the case. They don’t buy because of any of that exciting stuff – they buy because of certainty (#1). They know that I’m a safe pair of hands for their marketing and that I’ll give them the best, most appropriate advice. They trust me to support them in getting them great results. They know that I can help them with their marketing, without them needing to know a huge amount about marketing. I know this because it’s what they tell me when I ask them; it’s what they tell other people when they recommend me.

At first, though, I was rather disappointed. I wanted my clients to buy for a more exciting reason than just ‘certainty’. However, I’ve since realised that certainty is a really strong emotional USP to have. In my industry I have thousands of competitors. Many of them have not been providing marketing services for very long (they’ve branched out from a more specialised service like web design or graphic design); or they’ve decided that marketing is easy to do, so they’ve set up as a social media ‘expert’. But if you don’t have much experience in something and you don’t have the tools and the team to get stuff done on a regular basis, to get great results, then you can’t meet your customers’ need of certainty. They won’t trust you to look after them, while they’re off doing their jobs.

So I’ve decided that I like the fact that my clients buy from me and keep coming back, because of certainty. And I like being able to promote my business on that emotional USP, because it really is what makes me different.

What’s your emotional USP? Why do your clients buy from you? This is what I’ll be covering in the first week of my new course – Clients4Coaches. I’ll show you how to really stand out. The course is one afternoon per week for 4 weeks, for 4 coaches, starting on 4 August. Places are filling fast, so if you would like to learn how to tell clients what makes your business different, join now!