A unique selling proposition is only going to get you so far if you don’t have a great product behind it. Your product needs to live up to the promise of your USP, surpassing other products on the market in your own unique way and providing the customer with unique benefits. Simply written, not as easily done.

Review Your Research

By this time, you’ve researched your market and your competitors, and you should have a stack of data. It’s time to analyze this data to discover exactly what your customers want and how your competition is meeting their needs. Make a chart and do a side-by-side comparison of your products with those of the competition. You should also examine your sales data and customer feedback.

When looking at this data, there are a few important questions to ask yourself:

1. Do your current products and services uniquely address your customers’ needs?
2. What exactly is unique about your products and sets them apart from other products available to your customers?
3. Where do your products and services fall short? Wherever there’s a weakness, this is an area you can focus your energies on improving.
4. How can you offer a solution to your customers that your competition isn’t offering?

New and Improved

At this point, you’ll need to ask yourself whether you can make improvements in your product or whether you need to develop something entirely new. Your analysis of your products’ weaknesses along with customer feedback and sales figures will help you decide this. Sometimes, your current products can simply be repackaged and sold with the new USP.

If you need to develop something new, you can use your old product’s weak points as the basis of the new product’s USP. For example, you have a software program that a number of your customers complain is complex and counter-intuitive. After you rebuild the program so that it’s more user friendly, create a USP that says something along the lines of, ‘You don’t have to pull out your hair figuring it out.’

Laser-Target Your Market

One good way to differentiate your business is to choose a more specific sub-set of the market. Take a certain demographic of your market and laser-target it. For example, if your products appeal to an age group that stretches from twenty-somethings to over fifty, focus on one small part of that spectrum, such as customers in their early twenties. You can focus on a demographic subset based on anything in geographical location, language, economic status, occupation, family structure, etc.

Get Ideas from Established Brands

Another simple bit of research that can help you generate ideas is to look at other brands and their products and figure out what makes them unique. Pay attention to how they tailor their message to their target market.

Let the market tell you what they want then deliver it to them!