Every Successful Business has a Unique Selling Proposition: What’s Yours?

Your unique selling proposition explains and highlights to your ideal customers what makes you different from other businesses like yours, and how you solve your customers' problem.

A clearly defined USP is a handy marketing tool to help you convert potential customers. It can help set your brand apart from your competition and stay memorable to consumers. You may know what differentiates you from your competition, but it's likely that your customers don’t. Just remember that it's not enough to simply be unique in your industry. You have to differentiate yourself around some aspect that your target customers care about.

Without a USP, you can’t target your marketing efforts effectively. This is why it is essential to clearly define your unique selling point and use it consistently in your branding.

Start by answering the following questions:

1. What makes your business different than the other business like yours?

2. What problem of your customers do you solve?

3. Why should prospective customers trust you?

Take the answers to those questions and use them to create your unique selling proposition. Your USP can be just a sentence or a full paragraph. The length doesn’t matter as long as you clearly define why a potential customer should buy your product or service from you and only you.

These companies have brilliant USPs that pinpoint what makes them unique and relevant to their ideal customers.

• M&Ms: “The milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand.”
• FedEx: "When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight."
• Domino’s Pizza: “You get fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less or it’s free.”
• Saddleback Leather: “They’ll Fight Over it When You’re Dead.”
• Ben & Jerry’s: “We make the best possible ice cream in the best possible way.”