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Increasing Your Leads With a Unique Buying Proposition
In many areas of business we can often get stuck in our ways of thinking, leading to us doing things the way we’ve naturally become accustomed to. This is even more commonplace within SME’s where there might be an individual running the business who lacks the opportunity to bounce ideas off anyone or get a new perspective on things. With this in mind – try and apply this new marketing philosophy within your business. Rather than trying to focus on communicating your Unique Selling Points (which is what most businesses do), flip it on its head and establish what your UBP’s are (Unique Buying Proposition).
The main problem with a USP is that the whole communication is coming from the sales person’s perspective – the business. It is what makes them unique from a sales perspective. However as a prospective customer I don’t really want to know what is unique about you (if there really is anything unique at all – and “excellent service” isn’t unique). What I want to know is what’s unique about what you can do for me, from my perspective. What is it about your offering that I am going to buy into?
Switching the focus from your USP to your UBP will instantly mean you’ll be taking on a more consumer orientated approach. This will require you to fully understand your target audience along with their key purchasing drivers and benefits which ultimately influence their choice of whether to buy or not to buy. Once these elements have been distinguished you can move onto attempting to make their buying decision easier – thus improving your own conversion rates and sales cycle.
Look at providing them with the key benefits of your specific offering and why they want it /need it. However, be careful not to be sucked into focussing too much on your product or service features. For example if you are selling a gadget of some sort – your consumer may not be concerned about the size of the memory or if it’s the first on the market to feature a certain piece of technology, instead they want to know how that extra memory space or piece of technology will actually benefit them (save them time, longevity of product, response speeds etc).
No-one likes to be sold to, we have an inbuilt resistance to slick sales patter and the possibility of being sucked in to buying something we don’t really need or want. So instead of focusing on your business and your product which is what a USP centred approach does, put yourself in your prospective customer’s shoes and understand what exactly they want to know which will sway them to make the purchase. Outline the direct benefits that they will experience in your messaging from choosing your product /service and you’ll soon find that they are more open to making the purchase.
To sum up, your UBP should be short, sharp and to the point. Get across how it will benefit the buyer in a way which the competition maybe isn’t and you will soon find a greater number of enquiries coming in and, arguably more importantly, a much higher conversion rate.
Ian Kirk
Founder at Opportunity Marketing
Ian is the founder of Opportunity Marketing marketing, with over 18 years of experience in successfully setting up marketing departments, creating marketing strategies and implementing these strategies across a wide number of SME companies in both the B2B and B2C sectors through a variety of channels.