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How to develop a bulletproof Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – Part 4
Convinced You Need A USP?
Part Four of Four
Here’s something I hear fairly often from clients.
“I don’t want a USP because I’m afraid to limit myself.”
I understand. When I started my online lead generation company, I stated that I offered a wide range of services including copywriting, offline marketing services, web design, graphic design, and other marketing and advertising services. Marketing Results can provide all these services today but several years ago, I simplified my USP and focused my website and my marketing on one service that’s vital to small businesses: online lead generation. Two things happened:
- 110% increase in enquiries.
- Much higher quality of lead…fewer tyre-kickers.
You would think that making potential clients aware of all the services you offer would increase the number of leads but precisely the opposite is true, as I discovered. One reason? Potential clients focus on the one service we provide that solves a specific problem: not enough qualified leads. Adjunctive services are not a distraction. This focus makes our marketing significantly easier and it makes the message easier to understand.
To develop this focus, identify a gap in your industry and choose the service you provide that fills this gap. Start by asking these questions.
- What do people currently dislike about our industry?
- What are our competitors’ weaknesses?
- What specific needs are being unmet in the market?
Another client is Loans Approved, a mortgage broker specializing in serving the needs of property investors. The mortgage business is extremely competitive. We worked with the managing director to achieve marketing focus (and a much better USP). Every mortgage broker can handle a simple first home loan application but very few understand how to structure multiple loans for long-term success. Banks will structure loans on their terms unless and it turns out this can handcuff property investors and keep them from buying as many homes as they could.
The tagline for Loans Approved is…
The Property Investor’s Mortgage Broker.
Loans Approved goes well beyond this tagline. The company also provides prospects with the latest education and advice—specifically special reports and newsletters; the information reinforces their place in the market as THE experts in this highly specialized field. Prospects know precisely why it makes more sense for property investors to deal with Loans Approved than a bank or ‘one stop shop.’
Expertise in a specific niche can be a very powerful USP, especially on the Internet. Becoming more focused in a specific niche means you dominate a playing field which is always more successful than trying to secure some turf in a market that’s commoditized.
Sometimes, when I consult with a business to help them improve their online results, the company has a USP. But it’s a “faux USP” or a USP that’s not appealing to the target market. The classic faux USP is the One Stop Shop. For example:
“We’re a one stop shop for anyone interested in building wealth. I’m an accountant and I have a mortgage broker and a financial planner and a conveyancer to whom I can refer clients.”
The one stop shop sounds extremely convenient. Unfortunately, this strategy rarely works for small businesses. Why? There’s no focus and the prospect gets no sense you’re an expert. People will pay for expertise or specialization; in fact, they’ll pay MORE. There’s a reason heart surgeons and brain surgeons are paid much, much more than general doctors. If you went to see a knee specialist, I’m confident you would find it weird if the doctor said,
“I also perform open heart surgery.”
On the Internet, especially with search, prospective clients are looking for specific answers to specific problems. If you’re a small business, trying to solve too many problems is a mistake. Yes, the patient looking for a knee operation might need a new heart; the knee specialist refers the patient to the cardiologist. Yes, the knee doctor can help patients with a variety of ailments but he promotes himself as a specialist with a narrow focus.
Even big companies that offer a wide range of services stick to advertising they offer one solution. Again, take the example of FedEx. They sell themselves as offering just one solution (overnight package delivery) but they offer full logistics services.
Don’t tell anyone, but, at Marketing Results, we’re a one stop shop for lead generation and marketing. But our focus is providing a single solution: online lead generation. We don’t emphasize all the services we offer: AdWords management, conversion rate optimization, and search engine optimization—plus design, copywriting, and more. But the marketing center of gravity in the eyes of the prospect is getting leads through the Internet.
Here’s the real beauty of focus. Once you’ve solved the client’s problem the client trusts you, you can ask for additional business in related fields. Our USP helps us find clients because it’s extremely focused. Here’s the full version.
As Australia’s leading internet lead generation experts,
Marketing Results uses sophisticated web analytics to
precisely understand how visitors are interacting with your
website, then leverage proven traffic and conversion
strategies to cut marketing waste, expand your reach and
effectiveness and boost website profits by 2 to 21 times
(based on over 5 years of documented client results).
Again, we provide all the competencies necessary to help our clients. But the focus is lead generation. Clients don’t care that we offer all the services—all they want is qualified leads!
Final USP Thoughts
Online, a well-built USP plays a vital role keeping visitors on your website and letting prospects know you can solve a problem. When I’m working with clients, the first step is to write a compelling USP then base all the marketing around the USP. And remember, positioning is 50 times more important, and profitable, than branding.
How to develop a bulletproof Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – Part 3
A USP is not a slogan and a slogan is Not a USP…Crafting a Powerful USP and the Qualities of a Successful USP
Part Three of Four
A tagline is a short sentence or phrase that’s often part of, or next to, a logo. Here are some examples of taglines.
- Built Ford Tough
- USAirways: Fly with US
- YouTube: Broadcast Yourself
- Papa John’s: Papa’s in the House
A tagline is NOT the same as a USP. Your tagline is usually too short to communicate your entire USP. However, a great tagline quickly summarizes the full USP and communicates the key selling proposition in one or two seconds. A USP can be a few words or it can be full paragraph. Defining then encapsulating into what makes you different, unique, and desirable is more important than word county.
Remember, the successful USP answers this question: why should a potential client or customer buy from you? When answering this question, promise something special your competitors cannot deliver. Before we create your UPS, take a look at these excellent examples.
- SpeedFedEx: When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.
- Quality/SelectionWoolworth’s: The Fresh Food People
- GuaranteeCraftsman Tools: If any Craftsman hand tool fails to provide complete
satisfaction, return it for free repair or replacement. Period. The first
Craftsman hand tool we sold back in 1927 is still under warranty today.
Just as some taglines are poor, many USPs are awful. These approaches are too vague plus they are not unique.
- “Good Quality and Low Prices.”
- “Affordable Quality Since 1984.”
- “Service With A Smile.”
- “Excellence In Quality And Service.”
These USPs are commonplace and they scream, THESE COMPANIES KNOW NOTHING ABOUT MARKETING AND ARE DOOMED TO FAIL.
Four steps to creating a bulletproof USP.
STEP ONE. Choose your category. USPs are grouped into one of these:
Price. Quality. Service. Speed. Selection. Convenience. Guarantee. Customisation. Originality. Specialisation.
STEP TWO. Crystallise and communicate your unique strengths by asking yourself these four questions:
- What do you offer your competitors don’t?
- Is #1 important to your customers?
- How easy is it for competitors to copy?
- Can it be communicated easily?
Ask your current clients and customers what they like about your products and services.
STEP THREE. Flesh out the concepts. These concepts are broad. For example, if you choose ‘Service’ as your category, you have to say more and be more specific than “We Give GREAT Service.” This type of cliché will not convince someone to stay on your website.
STEP FOUR. Lay on the proof.
We use these steps with our clients before we take any of the steps necessary to generate leads.
How Would You Like an 800% Increase in Sales?
We built a USP for a client who sells stickers, primarily customized bumper stickers: CustomizedStickers.com; we proved that even a product as seemingly simple as a sticker can benefit from a USP. Here’s how we answered the USP formation questions.
What they offer: Customized Stickers only offers low prices on full colour stickers, but they also include added benefits at no extra charge: a free artwork service, unlimited colours, plus UV-resistant coatings.
Is it important to the customer? Yes. Stickers are a “commodity” item and customers are typically price-sensitive. Many potential customers resent the extra cost and inconvenience of getting artwork designed separately. All-in-one pricing is simpler and more transparent; customers like the ‘no hidden charges’ benefit.
Is it easy for competitors to copy? Competitors could copy these advantages but with great difficulty. Customized Stickers is the first to claim this space and can back up the promise through their unique production process. They can cost-effectively offer the added value of not injecting hidden charges.
Can it be communicated? Yes. The tagline? Full Colour Stickers at a 1-Colour Price. The content on the website augments, enhances, and buttresses the promise.
The result?
Customized Stickers clearly defined their USP and built their traffic generation and conversion around their USP. In 18 months, we helped Customized Stickers boost their online sales by over 800% to more than $2 million.
… to be continued.
How to develop a bulletproof Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – Part 2
A Strong USP is Much More Important (and Profitable) than Branding
Part Two of Four
If you’ve read marketing books, been to conferences, or sat down with a marketing or advertising consultant, you may have heard the word ‘branding.’ For small business owners, it’s an extremely dangerous word: you can quickly waste tens of thousands of dollars on branding at the recommendation of a branding consultant or advertising agency that uses words like ‘brand-centric’ or similar nonsense. Ask a branding agency or a branding consultant about results. Ask them to show the actual revenue their latest ‘branding’ campaign produced. If you’re an owner or a marketing manager at a small or mid-sized business, be extremely wary when you hear amorphous marketing chatter about “building your online brand” and “leveraging brand equity.”
It’s tempting to listen to the branding experts and hand them money. After all, big companies spend money on branding so it must produce an ROI, right? Let’s take a quick look at branding and what it really means. To “brand” a product or service is to imprint your mark on it. Branding started to differentiate items that look similar…like horses and cattle.
The goal of branding is to increase awareness. Companies pour money into branding campaigns because they want to imprint the brand into the mind of the consumer, increase awareness, and create a certain feeling. The hope: when it’s time to make a buying decision, the consumer will recognize the brand, like its associations, remember the funny ad he or she saw on TV last night, remember the ‘certain feeling’ and buy ‘Brand X’ over all the other brands. Although it’s difficult to measure, branding can be effective for large companies that sell a mass-market service or product. And you must have deep, deep pockets to buy TV time and radio spots plus big ads in newspapers and magazines.
In one of his blogs, Dan Kennedy, widely regarded as one the top small business marketing experts (and an excellent marketer himself), writes:
“I do counsel AGAINST investing directly into brand-building, especially with large-company style ‘image’ advertising that cannot be accurately and ruthlessly held accountable.”
Kennedy has a brand called “No B.S. Marketing” but it’s not where Kennedy spends his marketing money. And Dan Kennedy’s brand is Dan Kennedy. Kennedy has a logo with him standing behind a bull. That’s about it for Kennedy’s branding.
Highly successful direct response copywriter and marketing consultant Bob Bly, who is no great fan of branding, wrote a blog titled “Is Madison Avenue a Big Fraud?” In the blog he talks about an advertisement for Six Flags, a chain of American amusement parks. The ad is set in a town where everyone is so busy working they have no time to have fun. Up rolls a Six Flags bus and out pops an old man who starts dancing wildly. All the people in the town get on the bus, go to Six Flags and have a big time. Bly said the ad world acclaimed the ad for its “humor, energy, and cleverness.”
According to Bly, who cites Parade magazine, the ad campaign cost $72 million yet generated no increase in attendance and “not a drop of added revenue.” Look up Six Flags on Wikipedia and you’ll discover the New York Stock Exchange delisted the company in April 2009 and it filed for bankruptcy on June 13 the same year.
If you’re still in doubt about branding, watch a YouTube video comparing direct response (measurable) advertising to general (branding) advertising. The star of the video? David Ogilvy, one of the most famous and successful advertisers in the history of advertising. From the video…
General advertisers know almost nothing for sure because they cannot measure the results of their advertising.
Yes, a branding agency may win awards at advertising awards dinners and a campaign may temporarily (and expensively) build awareness, but it won’t produce what every small business needs: a daily torrent of qualified leads. Branding will not help you get these leads. We spend, and our successful clients spend, every marketing dollar and every ounce of psychic bandwidth generating qualified sales leads instead of building awareness.
Do You Want Customers to “Be Aware” or Do You Want them to Buy?
Instead of branding, start by positioning your product or service in the mind of potential customers.
Positioning begins by answering this question:
Why should I give my business to you, when with one click of a mouse button, or by flipping open the Yellow Pages. I can find 10 other providers who offer the same service?
When my clients answer this question in a compelling way, they start to generate top-quality enquiries and sales leads. And you can achieve this whether you’re a household name on the Internet or your website went live only last week. And when it comes to claiming prime USP real estate, it’s first-come, first-served. Think about the golf course: there may be other courses in the area with excellent greens but Rolling Lakes Country Club claimed the space first.
One of My Favorite USPs
Dilmah Tea is an example of a well-positioned business. I enjoy the tea and also admire the positioning. Founder Merill J. Fernando clearly differentiated his tea by focusing around a single, unique, and appealing idea. Here’s the tagline…The Single Origin Tea. (As I will detail in a minute, a tagline is not a USP and a USP is not a tagline.)
The company fleshes out the tagline in several places.
Each box of Dilmah tea contains a folded insert explaining the care the company takes sourcing, packing, and delivering each cup of their tea. There’s some excellent copy on their website. Here’s an excerpt.
Dilmah is the product of a lifetime devoted to tea. Founder of Dilmah, Merrill J. Fernando embarked on a quest to bring quality back to tea when in the 1950s, he witnessed the concentration of ownership in the tea industry into the hands of a few large corporations and as a result, the ‘commoditisation’ of tea. As one of the first Ceylonese to have the opportunity to be trained in tea, Merrill harboured a dream since his initiation in the world of tea, to launch his own brand of tea, and to offer consumers the choice of something truly different. His dream took over three decades to come true, and in 1988 he launched his own brand – Dilmah, coined from the names of his two sons Dilhan and Malik. Dilmah introduced lovers of fine tea to the concept of tea ‘picked, perfected and packed’ at origin. Being owned and managed by a tea producer, Dilmah is also a role model for producing countries. Merrill pioneered the concept of ‘Single Origin Tea,’ choosing to remain faithful to Ceylon Tea, acknowledged the finest tea on earth.
It’s “About Us” copy but notice how the copywriter wove these strands into a compelling story.
- A lifetime devoted to tea
- Struggling against the corporate hegemony to fulfil a dream
- The family story behind the name
- A model for developing countries
- Remaining faithful to Ceylon Tea
Combined, these elements of the story create a Unique Selling Proposition. And it’s a USP oozing with authenticity so often missing from most marketing.
… to be continued.
How to develop a bulletproof Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – Part 1
How a Bumper Sticker Company Increased Online Sales by over 800%, Starting with a New USP
Part One Of Four
Pizza aficionados might disagree but, when it comes to delivery and ‘mass market’ pizza, there’s not a big difference in quality between the major players. I’m confident a blind taste test would prove my point.
To be successful, a pizza company must differentiate itself from the other pizza companies by positioning themselves as better and different. A small company in the United States faced this differentiation challenge in the 1960s. Tom Monaghan had bought his brother’s share of Domino’s Pizza (for a used Volkswagen Beetle) and was sleeping on a cot in the store. At the time, Domino’s was just another pizza restaurant in Michigan. Monaghan needed to increase revenue and he wanted to grow a franchise. To make Domino’s stand out from the competition, Domino’s came up with a promise:
Pizza delivered in 30 minutes or it’s free.
In 2009, Domino’s reported $1.4 billion in revenue.
People in the shipping and logistics business might disagree but what’s the difference between the major shipping companies to the average person in the street who wants a package or letter delivered overnight? FedEx recognized this and, like Dominos, came up with a promise.
When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.
FedEx went from being a small courier service based in Tennessee to one of the largest companies in the world; its airplanes travel nearly 500,000 miles a day.
When a potential customer decides to order a pizza, they’ve already decided to buy a pizza. The question becomes, “which pizza company?” When somebody needs to ship a package across the country and it has to be there tomorrow, they’ve already decided to ship the package. The question becomes, “which shipping company?”
Domino’s and FedEx succeeded and grew rapidly in part because they made a promise to their customers and kept the promise. In marketing, we call this promise a Unique Selling Proposition (USP).
In the mind of a potential client or customer, a USP defines the company’s position in the market. The USP positions a product or service as unique and desirable in the eyes of prospects and customers. The USP is the foundation of a marketing strategy for any company and every company that wants to be successful MUST have a clear USP.
Almost every day, I’m reminded of the importance of how vital a USP is to the success of every marketing project. A great USP with average execution can succeed but a weak USP with superb execution usually fails.
When I ask a prospective client, “what’s your USP?” I usually get this reply.
“What does USP stand for?”
I recently spoke to 165 business owners at an online marketing seminar; fewer than 10 of the attendees were able to state their USP. That’s the bad news. The good news is that each of these 165 business owners could quickly answer these questions:
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors?
- Why do repeat clients and customers like you?
- What makes you better than your competitors?
If you can answer these questions, you can develop a USP. You know what makes your company different and better but you must communicate this to prospects. It takes a little time to develop a USP but there’s no cost; the USP is especially important for digital marketing.
Visitors to your website usually arrive through a search engine. Let’s say a man has decided to buy his loved one a diamond necklace. He’s already decided to buy so now the decision becomes, “which jewelry store is going to get my business?” If you’re in the diamond necklace business and you’re one of the sites the man is visiting, your competitors’ sites are just a click away. So it’s vital to differentiate your jewelry store quickly so they choose you and click around your site and ultimately click ‘buy now’ on your website instead of clicking to another site.
Leave Price Wars Behind
One of the major benefits of a strong USP is that it can help you get out of price war. Yes, some people shop purely for price and ‘the absolute lowest prices’ can be a USP but let’s take a look at Domino’s and FedEx. These companies stress a benefit, not price. Yes, price is important but it’s not the only factor in a buying decision.
When you position yourself correctly, you can charge more. For example, let’s say you’re in the public golf course business, which can be extremely competitive. Let’s say you’re in a suburb and there are five golf courses near yours and there’s a brutal price war going on and you’d like to get out of the battle. Golfers always comment on the quality of the greens at your course. A strong USP could be: Rolling Lakes Country Club has The Best Greens in the South Ridgewood area. Golfers value great putting surfaces and would be willing to pay for a course with excellent greens. In the New York City area, where golf can be funereally slow, especially on weekends, a course guarantees “a round of golf in four hours or less or your next greens fee is on us.” It’s a highly successful USP.
… to be continued
AdWords, steak knives and late-night TV
“Infomercials” exploded after 1984, when US government regulators lifted the 18-minute-per-hour cap on commercial TV content.
At first, TV networks didn’t know how to price these new 30 or 60-minute timeslots. Previously, they had simply closed stations down at night until the next morning. But the networks were happy because every dollar in new advertising was “found money”.
Advertisers liked it too. They quickly worked out how to sell via direct-response TV, and the advertising cost was next to nothing. Those in the know were predicting a new age of easy money and runaway business expansion.
Then, almost overnight, everything changed…
The TV stations started to realise they were undercharging. New advertisers arrived with their cheque books open. The price of media rose, fast.
Mediocre products and mediocre marketing folded and fewer advertisers starting making more of the wealth.
The Internet started out the same way – especially when Pay Per Click advertising started and clicks were 5 cents.
It was easy to make money, even with a terrible website and lame copy. “Early adopters” thought they had it made. But sure enough, over the last 5 or 6 years, we’ve seen the “Infomercial Effect” take over…
New competitors have arrived…
Click prices have risen by 800 to 1500 percent in many markets…
A few years ago 1 or 2 companies in each market were doing SEO… now there might be a dozen or more…
When I founded MR in 2003, I really thought the Internet was the “secret sauce” for making marketing more profitable.
I was wrong. That’s because…
ALL emerging media started out cheap.
Just like infomercials, the days of cheap traffic are over. To dominate your market online, you need to return to fundamental direct marketing principles:
- Make sure there’s a market for your product or service
- Craft a compelling USP that differentiates you from your competition in a meaningful way
- Track everything so you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t
- Use proven direct response marketing principles to attract and keep customers
- Treat your web strategy like the important business unit it is
- Deliver what you promise
The good news is, most people in business today either don’t understand this, or they don’t have the team or infrastructure to make it happen.
That’s why I invite you to plug into our proven team and infrastructure for putting your online marketing and lead generation on autopilot – so you can generate more leads and sales with less marketing cost.
How To Sell High-Priced Products And Services Online
Got an email last week from a subscriber who asks how to sell high-priced products and services online.
Here’s a little background on his situation:
- There is a ‘screaming need’ for the products…
- And the products work very well…
- But they are very expensive…
- And current lead generation activities aren’t working…
Here’s the email I received below, with my responses in bold.
Hi Will,
Firstly, many thanks for your excellent 7 Steps to Doubling Your Website Leads e-mail education series. They were concise, informative & thought provoking to anyone serious about website marketing.
<Why, thank you!>
Before I get to my queries & the main purpose of my correspondence, I possibly need to give you some background information to ‘paint a picture’…
- I commenced a Sales Rep position some 4 weeks ago marketing a range of top shelf therapy products.
- My company’s target market is a ‘screaming audience’ of people in massive (medical) physical pain! Some have been in physical pain for over 27 years!
- I have witnessed first hand, by way of in-home therapy demonstrations, what these therapy products can do for these people, and there is a 100% ‘screaming need’ for our products.
- However, under the company’s current marketing regime, there are two problems:
- Our appointment leads are Telemarketer driven to an at-home (captive) audience, who are not on the ‘Do-Not-Call Register’, and who are predominantly in the 50+ Age Group. Whilst this group is being qualified by the Telemarketers to the extent of their physical pain and medical concerns, these leads are not being Financially Qualified, hence…
- This at-home audience does not have any money! Predominantly aged, disability & invalid pensioners. This ‘Aged’ audience is only the ‘finger-tip’ of a massive population in significant physical pain.
These therapy products can help ‘anyone’ in any age group in physical pain. It is drug free, and easy to use. And from my own humble research, The Market Audience is huge!
<This is your first problem. When ‘anyone’ is qualified, no-one is qualified.
Part of your problem is that your prospecting approach is ‘shotgun’. You need to laser in on the core customer with the highest propensity to buy your products.
- Age may be one factor
- Certain ‘high-pain’ medical conditions may be another
- Key demographic information (net worth, residential postcode)
- Use or non-use of other products/services/treatments/subscriptions
- Etc.
You need to develop a much clearer idea of who is really the customer – clearly, it’s not ‘anyone’.
There are some other fundamental problems with the way prospecting is being done (and I think you’ve answered most of your own questions in this department):
- The audience you’re targeting doesn’t have any money!
- You’re not financially qualifying them anyway, so by the time you find out they can’t afford your product, it’s already too late.>
However, The Retail value of these products range from $1,200 to $22,000!!! and yes, people are buying these products once they’ve have the benefit of first hand experience of what our products can do for them.
<That’s encouraging: there may be potential to test offers — perhaps a ‘try before you buy’. You might also try creating a DVD or similar of the in-home demonstration and making the first step in the sales process a DVD request.>
It’s all about restoring their mobility, regaining their independence and achieving a quality of life without physical pain. These products are not going to cure the myriad of medical conditions which plague the human race, but it will alleviate their physical pain & discomfort, without doubt.
So the questions are…., In your website marketing experience…
- Can products with such a high Retail Value be marketed via the web, without an in-home demonstration?
<No. The role of your website would be to attract, educate and qualify potential customers for your products. The in-home demonstration will still be required to close the sale. The difference is, if you do this right, you’ll be having more appointments with pre-educated, pre-qualified prospects and sales closing percentages will rise dramatically as a result. - Can the leads be ‘Financially Qualified’ before an Opt-in lead is followed-up and an appointment set?
<Absolutely, and it’s critical that you do this — otherwise you’ll have the same problem. There are a few ways to do this, including some or all of the following:– position the products as the ‘Rolls-Royce’ solution in the market
– provide an indication of price or price range in advance (e.g in the Free Demo DVD or other literature)
– Insert more intermediate steps (e.g. Special Reports / Videos etc.) which address pricing and cost/benefit
– Use pre-appointment surveys that correlate some known factor (e.g. level of pain experienced) with propensity to buy
I would appreciate your feedback on these questions in the first instant before I go on to strategizing any further…
Many thanks & regards,
David
<I trust this sheds some light. Your problem is very common and it has a number of root causes. You may need to address each of the causes before your marketing really starts to take off. Buy hey, the rewards that come from successfully marketing a premium-priced pain relief product into an affluent market are huge, so the rewards are there too. Best of luck with your marketing! Will>
About Marketing Results
Marketing Results specialises in helping growing entrepreneurial companies generate more enquiries and sales online, while eliminating marketing waste.
Our unique Sales Funnel Optimisation™ methodology is credited with producing 100%-plus ROI gains for dozens of entrepreneurial and corporate clients (see case studies).
Marketing Results can be contacted on 1300 799 737 or online.
The Myth Of The “One Stop Shop”
I frequently consult with business owners who are achieving some success via the web and are looking for insights and strategies for improving their results.
After establishing where they are now and where they want to be, I come up with a plan of action to connect the two.
First part of that process is to consider my client’s Unique Selling Proposition – this is the bedrock upon which all other marketing tactics stand.
More often than not, a struggling or semi-successful company has NO Unique Selling Proposition at all.
Typically, the clearer a business owner is about their USP, the better their business seems to be performing (Coincidence? Unlikely.)
Then there are those businesses who have what I call a “faux USP” – the type of USP that is not actually appealing to their target market.
One type of “faux USP” that crops up frequently is the “One Stop Shop”.
e.g. “We’re a one stop shop for anyone interested in building wealth. I’m an accountant and I have a mortgage broker and a financial planner and a conveyancer to whom I can refer clients”.
It sounds so great in theory — what could be more convenient?
Trouble is, it seldom works.
This is because One Stop Shops dilute the Power of Focus to convey your expertise to the market.
Whom would you rather entrust your life to: a heart surgeon who is also a brain surgeon and an orthopedic surgeon — or a heart surgeon who specialises in heart surgery alone?
So too with the Internet – searchers tend to be looking for specific answers to specific problems.
Trying to solve too many problems at once can be a mistake when you’re creating and nurturing relationships with prospects.
But don’t your customers want a more complete solution?
But hang on, you say. If I’m getting my tax returns done, mightn’t I have a need for a good mortgage broker or financial planner?
Sure you might. And if that’s the case, the accountant could and should refer you on to his colleagues in those areas.
But that’s different from promoting those auxilliary services ahead of time.
Of course, there are some apparent exceptions to this rule that aren’t actually exceptions upon further analysis.
If you promote an overall “solution” which requires the involvement of multiple product or service elements, it’s typically better to sell the whole solution, then package in the components as part of your delivery. The client doesn’t actually care that you do X, Y and Z to create their financial plan — they just want to see the result.
This approach is the one we take at Marketing Results – the core solution we offer is online lead generation. While individual delivery components might come into play (e.g. AdWords management, conversion optimisation, search engine optimisation), those services are subordinated to achieving the overall result.
It’s also worth noting that these individual delivery components are situated in a fairly tight thematic cluster around the core solution – in a sense, they are different facets of the same diamond.
While we could offer a broader range of marketing services such as copywriting, graphic design, logo development, marketing plan development etc., these would tend to dilute our “centre of gravity” in the eyes of the prospect and over time, result in less sales effectiveness, not more.
Something to think about…if you’re currently a One Stop Shop, take a quick reality check to confirm you’re not perceived by your market as a “jack of all trades but master of none”.
Is Blogging Worth It For SMEs?
Is blogging “worth it” for SME owners/marketing managers whose primary goal is generate sales leads and sales online?
By this I mean: how does blogging stack up against other online marketing methods available to business owners in terms of Return On Investment, Return On Time and Return On Effort?
There’s no one-size-fits all answer to this question, but let me share a few insights after working with many SME clients from multiple industries on their web marketing strategy, which has often included a blogging component.
Blogging for “offline” businesses
In this post, I’m mainly considering how a typical “offline” business selling products or services can use blogging to enhance the performance of their website.
There are two broad scenarios I’ll consider:
- Scenario 1: “Necessity-based” businesses - when your prospects and clients don’t have a particular interest in what you do beyond the result or outcome you can produce for them. This would apply to many strong “Yellow Pages” categories such as pest control, landscaping, rubbish removal etc.
- Scenario 2: “Interest-based” businesses – when your prospects and clients can identify more strongly with the “subject matter” behind the products and services you provide, especially in “information-rich” industries (e.g. model aeroplanes, financial services, Ultimate Fighting Championship subscriptions, coaching clubs etc).
In other words, some businesses and industries tend to easily spawn a wealth of information that your prospects and clients will eagerly lap up. In others, prospects will have little personal interest in drilling deeper into what you offer (e.g. latest techniques in rubbish removal).
There may also be cases where different customer segments may fall into the first category (e.g. a home computer shopper searching for the lowest price desktop PC) and others the second category (e.g. an avid computer geek following the launch of the latest must-have graphics card).
What this means for your blogging strategy
Where your customers don’t care deeply for your subject matter and are simply looking for a result (Scenario 1 above), the main benefit blogging can offer your business is that of increased search engine visibility.
Briefly:
- Search engines like “fresh” content. Blogs offer a convenient way to add fresh content without interfering with key conversion pages.
- Regular blog updates allow you to add posts which target long-tail search terms. It is difficult to rank the same website for multiple competitive terms, especially when you have a limited number of pages on your website. Blogging effectively allows you to add more search-engine optimised pages, which target less competitive key phrases. Good rankings for many specific long-tail or multi-word key phrases can add up quickly.
- With this strategy, it’s important to quickly convert the search into a conversion. Because users are not necessarily interested in your content, clear calls to action and/or seasonal offers are vital to ensure you do something with the traffic you generate.
Then there’s Scenario 2 - in which the user is potentially highly interested in what you have to say.
Here you have the option to use your blog to gain a position of Thought Leadership in your market. You’re not as focused on the quick conversion as you are in building a reputation with prospects, clients and even colleagues and competitors in your market.
There may be the same SEO benefits as with Scenario 1, but the principal benefit of this strategy are the long term conversion and loyalty benefits.
Bottom line: this strategy takes longer to gain traction and requires a higher standard of content writing to demonstrate the Thought Leadership which fuels outsized results.
What will be the investment of time, money and effort?
With Scenario 1, the investment of time, money and effort can be fairly modest.
Design and setup of a blog may cost anywhere from $0 if you DIY to a few thousand dollars (sure, you can spend more if you go for a super-premium design which is overkill in 99.9% of cases).
Then there’s content production. As the aim is not to demonstrate Thought Leadership with cutting edge content, it is easier in this scenario to outsource the content production function to a writer with very little effect on results.
Having one blog post a week written and published might cost you a couple of hundred dollars a month – a fairly modest investment. (This is also one of the deliverables we often roll into our Gold Client Internet Marketing Program for SMEs).
Blog content usually gets picked up by search engines fairly quickly and it doesn’t take long to build up a base of posts to feed the search engines. Within 3 to 6 months of regular posting, you can expect to get a comparatively large proportion of your organic search traffic via your blog.
However, you should recognise that this can be a bit of a “brute force” strategy – a large proportion of the traffic you generate via your blog will NOT convert – so it’s also important to ensure your offers and conversion strategy is sufficient to squeeze some conversions out of the traffic you do get.
Now let’s look at Scenario 2. Setup costs will be similar to Scenario 1, but the content generation task tends to be much more labour and time intensive for the Thought Leader (who is often the business owner).
For example, if you’re an expert in cutting-edge loan structuring approaches for property investors, it’s hard to employ a low-cost writer to produce content that does your strategies justice and engages your audience.
My friend and blogging expert Yaro Starak talks about building a successful blog in 2 hours a day. The problem for business owners is that most don’t have that amount of time to devote to a strategy that may take 6 to 12 months to gain sufficient traction to generate a payoff.
Many business owners under-estimate the ongoing work required to keep a Thought Leadership blog going. It’s common to see business owners write a few good articles before getting distracted by other things and it doesn’t take long for a blog to get “stale” and lose traction.
There are ways for business owners to leverage their time with a Thought Leadership blog (e.g. dictating post ideas to a good writer and proofreading the draft before posting), but there is still a substantial investment of time involved to ensure both post quality and frequency.
How long will it take to see results?
As mentioned above, in Scenario 1 you may see search engine benefits in 3 to 6 months sufficient to justify the ongoing investment.
In Scenario 2, the payoff tends to be slower (although it can be large if you manage to achieve a position of true Thought Leadership).
I’ve been writing this blog for 6 years now and although the payoff is sufficient to keep writing, by no means has blogging been one of my highest-return marketing activities. However, I do see blogging as one component of the pre-eminence building process.
How does blogging stack up against alternative promotional approaches?
I am no doubt revealing my bias toward targeteded traffic+ conversion here, but I see blogging primarily as a supplementary promotional strategy for “offline” businesses rather than a primary one.
My advice is always to get your conversion funnel right first so that you know you can convert a visitor into a client. You should test and tweak your funnel to ensure maximum throughput and maximum velocity from first-time visitor to loyal client.
Only once your conversion funnel is in place would I recommend looking at blogging as the “cream” on top of your strong foundations.
The final verdict
Blogging can be a very useful traffic generation and pre-eminence building strategy for SMEs – but you need to go in with your eyes open and be clear on your objectives, what the resourcing requirements will be and whether or not you’re prepared to pay the price.
It may also be prudent to think about what support is available to leverage your time and efforts to ensure you get the highest net return.
How To Get Your Customers To Pay For Proposals and Quotes
Are you frustrated by tyre-kickers and free-advice seekers who waste your time, reduce the efficiency of your sales and marketing efforts and cut into your ability to service paying clients?
Many business owners and marketers are. Especially if you’re in a service-based or professional service business, the time and money it takes to simply attract and convert a paying customer can significantly eat into your billable hours and therefore income.
This is probably the number one reason why many otherwise highly-skilled independent professionals and businesspeople find themselves eking out a relatively modest living (certainly well below their abilities and expectations) and wondering why they got into business in the first place.
Or maybe you’re doing pretty well, yet mindful of the fact that 10 or 20% of your productive time is being wasted on filtering out the tyre-kickers.
I was once there too. Here’s the story of how I broke out of this particular cell of the entrepreneurial prison…
It all started back in 1928… (oops, wrong story. Reset.)
3 or 4 years ago I found that my ability to do productive work for clients (mainly developing high-ROI lead generation websites on a project basis) was being constrained by the volume of prospects who weren’t converting into paying clients.
Just 1 in 4 proposals were converting into a client engagement. Suppose that every proposal took an hour on the phone, plus 2 hours of writing to prepare – that meant that each new project was taking 12 hours of sales time to close. Owch.
What’s more, many prospects would soak up my time for free, take our intellectual property in the form of the proposal, then either:
- Do nothing
- Take our ideas and (try to) implement them in-house
- Take our ideas and give them to someone else to implement
- Proceed with the proposed project
Only Outcome #4 was what I wanted (and only that outcome would typically produce the result the client was looking for too).
What to do?
I put a stop to all free proposals. Instead, I held a 15 minute chat on the phone to pre-qualify the client, then explained that I would prepare an Online Marketing Action Plan [note the syntax: "Proposal" is such a weak word] for them for a nominal fee of $200 + GST. I also explained:
- an outline of the value that the Action Plan would contain
- that we would present some implementation options for them to consider
- that because they had purchased the Action Plan, they would be free to implement the plan in-house or take it to someone else to implement if they chose to do so
- that the cost of the Action Plan would be attributed to the cost of any future project
Then I asked them to go ahead.
Here’s what happened:
- “Tyre kickers” went no further – great!
- Serious prospects proceeded with the Action Plan, and I was happy to deliver it, putting extra effort into its preparation (although you should note that the Action Plan itself was essentially just a renamed version of the “Proposal” from before).
- The conversion rate to full projects went from 1 in 4 (25%) to 2 in 3 (67%) – an increase of over 2 1/2 times.
- I spent less time selling and got better sales results, while delivering more value to the prospects and clients whom I really wanted to help.
To successfully institute a fee-based proposal system, here are a few pointers:
- Warm leads are important. The warmer the lead, the less resistance you will have to your initial fee. One of the best ways to warm up leads is via a well-orchestrated information-and-education campaign (which can be completely automated via your website).
- A well-defined USP that addresses the key problem your prospects are facing. You need to know the problem you’re solving for the client and the benefits you can render, and express that in a client-centric way. (If you can’t recite you USP by heart, you probably don’t have one.)
- You need to prepare a “mini-pitch” to sell the proposal. I purposely designed my Action Plan content and pricing, not as a revenue generator, but as a “filter” for non-clients. Nevertheless, I did need a mini-pitch explain the value and sell the plan.
- A delivery mechanism that is as systematised as possible. (Although the more customised you want to make the proposal, the more you can charge. I now perform a more advanced Workshop and Action Plan that costs $3,000 + GST)
- A seamless process to convert proposals into clients. You don’t want to wind up writing tonnes of proposals and lose site of your outcome.
“But my industry is different” / “All my competitors do free quotes so I have to as well” / “This won’t work in my business”
It’s true that certain industries may be a more “logical” fit for paid proposals or quotes, but that doesn’t mean you should dismiss paid proposals out-of-hand.
We are working with one client in a finance-related niche where EVERY OTHER COMPETITOR does everything “Free”, yet we are putting together a series of fee-based offers that are successful because they are based around additional value to the client.
Another option is to have multiple lead “streams” – a “free” stream and a “paid” stream. Within a short time you will work out where the buyers are and how to attract and service them better.
Give paid proposals a try, or contact us and we can help you optimise your lead generation funnel by orders of magnitude.
But you should know, it’ll cost you 
We work with a number of clients in finance and professional services industries.
Here’s the story of how a few years ago I increased my conversion rate of prospects to customers from 20% to 66%, and completely eliminated tyre-kickers and free-advice-seekers from my sales funnel and got PAID to do so…
“Blue Ocean Strategy” Book Summary
Blue Ocean Strategy is all about creating UNCONTESTED market space in which you dominate the competition because there IS no competition! It is just as viable (and profitable) on the web as it is offline, and I believe it will become more so.
Right now, many companies (especially small businesses) are “surviving” on the web because of moderate traffic costs (particularly PPC) and competitors who, by and large, don’t really know what they’re doing.
As the competition heats up, “me-too” companies will be eaten alive, leaving only those with a well-executed internet strategy and tight conversion funnel will really prosper.
Click here for a useful Blue Ocean Strategy Summary in Slideshare format.
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