Why Do Your Customers Buy From You?
Do you know why your customers 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. I recently learnt this from the brilliant Nikki Burns when I attended one of her workshops. She asked us to think about the need that our product or service meets for our clients. Nikki says that there are six emotional USPs – reasons that people buy. They are:
- Certainty
- Variety
- Connection
- Significance
- Growth
- Contribution
When I first looked at this list, I thought our clients buy from us because we help them grow (#5) and because we help them connect with others (#3) and because of the wonderful variety of the work we do for them (#2). 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 we’re a safe pair of hands for their marketing, that we’ll get things done for them, no matter what. They trust us to get on and do their marketing for them and that we’ll achieve great results for them. They know that we will get their marketing done without them having to worry about it and without them needing to know a huge amount about marketing. I know this because it’s what they tell us when we ask them; it’s what they tell other people when they recommend us.
On realising this, I was rather disappointed – I wanted our 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 our industry we have hundreds 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 our clients buy from us, and keep coming back, because of certainty. And I like being able to promote our business on that emotional USP, because it really is what makes us different.
What’s your emotional USP? Why do your clients buy from you?
