What's your offers USP (unique selling proposition)?
Posted: March 28th, 2021, 9:36 am
When it comes to effective copywriting you often hear me talking about how important it is to understand your market.
And in my mind that's always the most important thing to know, because nobody's going to buy our product unless they believe we have what they want.
And the best way to do that is to first understand what they want, and why they want it.
But that's not the only important element to creating copy that gets people to buy what we're selling...
Another thing we need for highly effective sales copy is a unique selling proposition, or unique sales position (USP) for our offer.
One reason (probably the biggest reason) is because there's other copywriters out there who are also trying to understand, and sell to, the same market as us.
And that's why we need to figure out what makes our offer stand apart from all the rest. Because we don't want to end up as just another "me too" product or we run the risk of becoming a commodity.
This is something a lot of copywriters don't really take the time to figure out. They just write about features and benefits, which is all fine and dandy, but a lot of copy ends up sounding and looking the same as everyone else's.
And if your offer looks the same as the competition then people don't have much incentive to buy from us over our competition. And what usually happens is you end up competing on price, which is not a great place to be, because competing on price can quickly turn into a race to the bottom where even the winner doesn't make much profit.
So the big question here is "what makes your product or offer different from all the rest?"
Do you have something that nobody else has? Better features, better guarantee, better return policy?
Whatever we have that makes us unique, or at least far better than the competition, needs to be highlighted in our copy.
In our headline would be the best place to highlight it so we can catch people right away with our USP. But if that's not possible we at least want our USP near the beginning (in our opening lede or first few sentences).
How do we go about finding our USP?
One of the easiest ways I've found is to grab a dozen or so of our competitors ads and look at them side-by-side.
Then you can see what others are doing and it's easier to come up with a way that separates our offer from all the white noise of advertising clutter.
So when you're writing your next piece of sales copy, remember...
First, understand your market
Second, research the competition so you can make sure your offer stands above the crowd.
Here's to writing better copy, that gets a bigger response, more often...
And in my mind that's always the most important thing to know, because nobody's going to buy our product unless they believe we have what they want.
And the best way to do that is to first understand what they want, and why they want it.
But that's not the only important element to creating copy that gets people to buy what we're selling...
Another thing we need for highly effective sales copy is a unique selling proposition, or unique sales position (USP) for our offer.
One reason (probably the biggest reason) is because there's other copywriters out there who are also trying to understand, and sell to, the same market as us.
And that's why we need to figure out what makes our offer stand apart from all the rest. Because we don't want to end up as just another "me too" product or we run the risk of becoming a commodity.
This is something a lot of copywriters don't really take the time to figure out. They just write about features and benefits, which is all fine and dandy, but a lot of copy ends up sounding and looking the same as everyone else's.
And if your offer looks the same as the competition then people don't have much incentive to buy from us over our competition. And what usually happens is you end up competing on price, which is not a great place to be, because competing on price can quickly turn into a race to the bottom where even the winner doesn't make much profit.
So the big question here is "what makes your product or offer different from all the rest?"
Do you have something that nobody else has? Better features, better guarantee, better return policy?
Whatever we have that makes us unique, or at least far better than the competition, needs to be highlighted in our copy.
In our headline would be the best place to highlight it so we can catch people right away with our USP. But if that's not possible we at least want our USP near the beginning (in our opening lede or first few sentences).
How do we go about finding our USP?
One of the easiest ways I've found is to grab a dozen or so of our competitors ads and look at them side-by-side.
Then you can see what others are doing and it's easier to come up with a way that separates our offer from all the white noise of advertising clutter.
So when you're writing your next piece of sales copy, remember...
First, understand your market
Second, research the competition so you can make sure your offer stands above the crowd.
Here's to writing better copy, that gets a bigger response, more often...